He went back into the hospital and started climbing the stairs.

"Did you forget something?" the caretaker called out to him in a friendly way.

"Yes. That's right. I forgot something."

Tatyana was not in the ward, nor in the canteen, either. He was about to go back downstairs and ask the caretaker. But at that moment he spotted her dressing gown tucked away in a corner behind a pillar.

She was weeping silently, for fear of the echo between the floors. Behind the pillar a narrow window looked out over the tiny garden and the hospital gates. He went up to her, took her by the shoulders, and said to her in muted tones: "What's going on, Tanya? Look, here's my address, so you can write to me…"

She shook her head and murmured with a gulp through her tears: "No, no, Vanya. There's no point. You don't want me around your neck… What use can I be to you?"

She sobbed still more bitterly, just like a child, turned toward him and pressed her brow against the cold metal of his medals. This frailty, these childish tears, suddenly stirred something within him and prompted a surge of joyous gallantry.

"Listen, Tanya," he said, shaking her gently by the shoulders, "when are they going to sign your discharge note?"

"Tomorrow," she murmured, drunk with tears and misery.

"Good! Well, tomorrow I'm taking you away. We'll go to my home and we'll get married there."

Again she shook her head. "What use can I be to you?" But without asking himself whether it was his head or his heart ruling him, he happily barked out a laughing order: "Silence in the ranks! To your duties, dismissed!"

Then, leaning forward, he whispered in her ear: "You know, Tanya, I'll love you all the more with your wound!"

His native village, Goritsy was almost deserted. He saw the charred ruins of the izbas standing there and the useless wooden uprights beside abandoned wells. The head of the kolkhoz, who had the emaciated face of a saint on an icon, welcomed them like his own kin. They walked together to the place where the Demidovs had lived before the war.