The next day Tatyana was able to get up. She went out on the doorstep and saw Ivan driving nails into the little coffin's pine planks.

After burying their son and gathering together their meager luggage, they took the road to the station. Ivan had heard that in the small town of Borissov, some sixty miles from Moscow, they were recruiting drivers for the construction of a hydroelectric center and providing them with accommodation.

That was how they came to settle in the Moscow region. Ivan found himself behind the wheel of an old truck, whose side panels bore the inscription in flaking paint: "Next stop: Berlin!" Tatyana went to work at the furniture factory.

And the days, months, and years followed one another, calmly and uneventfully. Ivan and Tanya were content to see their lives following this ordinary, peaceful course. The same as everyone else, that of decent people. They had been given a room in a communal apartment. There were already two families living there, the Fedotovs and the Fyodorovs. And in the little room next to the kitchen lived Sofia Abramovna.

The Fedotovs, still a young couple, had three sons whom the father beat frequently and conscientiously. When their parents were out at work these rascals would take their father's heavy bicycle down from the wall. With a hellish din, running over the other tenants' shoes, they careered up and down the long, dark corridor, where there hovered a persistent and bitter smell of stale borscht.

The Fyodorovs were almost twice as old as the Fedotovs. Their son had been killed just before the end of the war and the mother lived in the hope that the death notice had been sent by mistake: there were so many Fyodorovs in Russia! Secretly she hoped he had been taken prisoner and that some day or other he would return.