They had one more evening together, the last one. Warm, filled with the rustling and chattering of swifts. They had gone down toward the river, had stayed stock-still for a long while, not knowing what to say to each other; then, clumsily, they had kissed for the first time.

"Tomorrow, that's it, Tanya… I'm returning to my unit… I'm going back to the front," he said in somewhat somber tones, this time without screwing up his eyes. "So, listen carefully to what I say. Once the war's over we'll get married and we'll go to my village. There's good land there. But for now you must just…"

He had fallen silent. With lowered eyes she was studying the footprints made by their boots in the soft clay of the bank. Sighing like a child breathless from long weeping, she had said in a subdued voice: "It doesn't matter about me… but you…"

In the summer of 1941, when he escaped from the burned-out village to join the partisans, he was just seventeen. He could still picture the face of the German who had killed little Kolka. It had stayed with him, the way the pitching of a staircase collapsing beneath your feet in the pallid terror of a vivid nightmare stays with you. This face stuck in his memory because of the scar on one cheek, as if bitten from inside, and the sharp stare of the blue eyes. For a long time the notion of an appalling vengeance obsessed him, a personal settling of accounts, the desire to see this man, who had posed for the photograph with the child's body impaled on his bayonet, writhing in terrible torment. He was absolutely convinced he would encounter him again.

Their detachment of partisans had been wiped out. Miraculously, by spending a whole night in the reeds up to his neck in water, he had managed to escape with his life.