Forty years after that bitterly cold day Ivan will find himself seated in the humid dullness of a dimly lit bar chatting amid the hubbub from neighboring tables with two newly encountered comrades. They will already have slipped the contents of a bottle of vodka into their three tankards of beer on the q.t. and embarked on a second, and will be in such good spirits that they don't even feel like arguing. Just listening to the other guy and agreeing with whatever he has to say.

"So what about them, those men of the Panfilova Division? Were they heroes? Throwing themselves under tanks? What choice did they have, for God's sake: 'What stands behind us is Moscow,' says the political commissar. 'No further retreat is possible!' Except that what stood behind us wasn't Moscow. It was a line of machine guns blocking the way, those NKVD bastards. I started there, too, Vanya, the same as you. Only I was in the signal corps…"

Ivan Dmitrevich will nod his head, embracing the speaker with a vague and almost tender gaze. What's the use of talking about it? And who knows what really happened? "And yet," the words form silently in his mind, "at that moment the thought of a line blocking the way never occurred to me. The lieutenant shouted: 'Advance! For Stalin! For our Country!' And in a flash it all went. No more cold. No more fear. We believed in it…"

It was at the battle of Stalingrad that he won the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.

And yet he had never seen Stalingrad. Just a streak of black smoke on the horizon, above a dry steppe so boiling hot you could feel the crunch of sand in your mouth. He never saw the Volga, either, only a grayish void in the distance, as if poised above the abyss at the end of the world. Sergeant Mikhalych gestured in the direction of the black smoke on the horizon.

"That's Stalingrad burning. If the Germans cross the Volga the city's a goner. We'll never be able to hold it."