Over each rooftop in the village lay a cradle of smoke, which did not rise in such cold, still weather, but which gathered and bunched, as if jealous of the life below it.

If you stayed still long enough, you could tell it wasn’t exactly quiet. Branches creaked. Piles of snow fell from great heights into the snow below. And there was music.

There was a party within one low house. It was a squat bunker with outer walls made of felled pine trees, insulated with horse manure, then inner walls of fine spruce paneling on which hung medallions for St. Nicholas and St. George, and small bits of felt to keep the restless and invisible domovoi spirit from knocking over the stewpot in the middle of the night. Festive reels from the accordion and balalaika and domra were now echoing across the walls, and there was stomping and dancing, which made the medallions jump.

The center of the house was a mammoth, steaming iron stove on which huge kettles were kept boiling day and night. Over the stove was a large bed. In the bed was Grandma, covers drawn up to her ears, a bonnet over her head, her tooth exposed in a grin, and a jar of peevo in her gnarled hand, which she was now swinging back and forth with the music, not spilling a drop.

The peasants were dancing with Americans of the 339th. That afternoon, a soused Lieutenant Gordon had had men drop Mills grenades onto the ice, and then dash across the river after the resulting explosion to catch the stunned trout in buckets. There had been fish for dinner.

There were lanterns hanging high on the walls and others on the pine tables, which together cast a lukewarm yellow light that tended to emphasize the sweat and dirt on the celebrants’ skin. It smelled of a local ponderous incense that was not unlike a wet stack of moldering Bibles. The incense was used because the livestock had been living in the house since January.

There was one man not dancing, a man who no longer danced, and this was Pfc. Hugo Black.

Since returning from the monastery, he had been a changed man. Wodziczko was assumed to have been picked off by Bolos, and so he wasn’t questioned about this. While on guard duty, he no longer quizzed himself about the rules of debutante engagement. Instead, he read furtively the propaganda nailed to trees, and he recalled things the voice had murmured to him from the woods outside the candy warehouse. Here was an interesting question, one he considered cautiously: what if the workers of the world did unite?