Ivan had become afraid to look at his wife of late. She hardly got up anymore. Lying there with the baby, dipping her finger into a brew of orache and old crusts, she tried to feed him. Her face was marked with dry brown spots; dark rings burned around her eyes. Kolka hardly moved on her breast. He no longer even cried, simply uttering tiny moans, like an adult. Ivan himself had great difficulty in standing upright. At length he woke up one day at the crack of dawn and reflected with mortal clarity, "If I don't find anything to eat all three of us will die."

He kissed his wife, put two gold watches, the spoils of war, into his tunic pocket, hoping to be able to trade them for bread. And set out toward the main road.

The village was dead. The noontide furnace. Dry, dusty silence. Not a living soul. Nothing but music blaring from the black loudspeaker above the door of the soviet. The radio had been installed by the Secretary of the District Committee, who had ordered that it should be switched on as often as possible, "to raise the political consciousness of the kolkhozniks. " But now the radio was simply blaring because there was no one to turn it off.

And from dawn till dusk, delirious with hunger and hugging the tiny body of her child with his great head, Tatyana listened to rousing marches and the commentator's voice almost bursting with glee. He was reporting on the industrial achievements of the Soviets. Then the same voice, but now in harsh, metallic tones, began hitting home at those enemies who had perverted Marxism and lambasted the agents of imperialism.

That day, the last before her long collapse, in the stifling heat of noon Tatyana heard the song currently in vogue that was played every day The flies buzzed against the windowpanes, the village was mute, poleaxed by the sun, and this song rippled out, as sweet and tender as Turkish delight: