But it’s impossible to run. There are corpses everywhere, frozen in piles covered by the recent snow. Some are still fighting a fight that has now become eternal. A Russian soldier is clutching at the throat of a German whose hand still holds a knife dug into his enemy’s back. A sailor who was struck as he was throwing a grenade, frozen, like a monument to himself, towering with his raised arm, rooted into the ice, the copper buttons on his black jacket sparkling in the sun. An infantryman, already wounded, started bandaging his leg and froze forever, struck by a bullet he never saw. It won’t be until April when the snow melts and reveals what is below these winter corpses—more dead. Layers of the dead: at the bottom are soldiers in summer uniforms; on top of them are sailors in black jackets and flared pants; then lie Siberians in sheepskin jackets and felt valenki boots who died in the December attacks of 1941. On top of them are fighters in cotton-filled jackets and cloth hats that had been distributed in the besieged Leningrad. Layer upon layer of corpses: a monstrous, bottomless layer cake of death.

“Let’s go, move,” yells Seryoga and pulls me over the tracks, over the mountains of frozen bodies that keep rising before us. As I stumble into the woods on the other side, I think of Borodino, of Tolstoy’s Volume III of War and Peace we had to read in art school. Imagine this picture, the professor said: tens of thousands of bodies strewn across the battlefield, the ground soaked with blood, half the Russian Army killed in one day. And the most surreal thing of all is that we claimed victory. I still remember the image: the vast field under the murk of dampness and smoke, dark clouds spitting drizzle at the dead, the wounded, the frightened and exhausted survivors, as though nature were warning people to look around, take inventory of the carnage, and think of what they had done.

How many have been murdered here, on the Leningrad Front? Could this be half of our present army Seryoga and I are walking on right now, stumbling on its soldiers’ frozen heads and arms? But even if it were, our army has always been bottomless, like a magic lake in a Russian fairy tale. It is promptly replenished with fresh arms and legs and newly shaved heads mobilized from republic capitals and small villages, from factory towns and collective farms, dressed in new uniforms and thrown into the foul cauldron of new battles.