And at once, shaking off the dream's deception, he jumped down from the bunk, leaned against the board of the hidden door, went out into the night, and saw the horizon on fire. Now the successive waves of bombing assaults could be heard more distinctly, settling into a regular rhythm. Very low, skimming over the roofs of the village, came one airplane after another. It was like an aerobatic display. But already the road was filling with people making their escape. Alexe'i hastened to slip back into his hiding place. His field of vision, between two planks, let him snatch a glimpse of a mother stumbling as she dragged two sleepy children behind her, an old woman whipping a cow. Then, more quickly, traveling in the opposite direction, soldiers colliding with the waves of fugitives. And less than an hour later the smoke and the drumming of bullets, chipping the loam off the walls, and then suddenly there was this roaring hulk that grazed the barn in passing, hacking to pieces with its tracks the vegetable patch his aunt had been watering only the day before.

He remained lying on the ground for a long while. The walls of his hiding place had been pierced with bullets here and there. Gradually the gamut of sounds became simpler, less varied. Still a few cries, the grinding of tank tracks, a burst of gunfire, already distant. And in the end just the hissing of the fire. Alexe'i peered through one of the peepholes drilled by the shooting. Near the fence, at the exact spot where two weeks earlier he had seen a sleeping drunkard, sprawled the body of a soldier, his bloodied face turned directly toward the sunrise, as if sunbathing.

It took him two days to find his man, his identity donor. His searches in the village devastated by fire had been fruitless. He had come upon several survivors and had had to make himself scarce. On the road he found mainly the bodies of women and children or of men who were too old.