"Kuzminichna, come in front of me. Maybe we can get some of this butter."

It was the old caretaker from their factory, Aunt Valya. Tatyana stood beside her and, so as to lull the vigilance of the people behind, they began chatting quietly together. After a moment Tatyana slipped into the throng without anyone noticing. Aunt Valya was halfway along.

"It's not too bad. This lot won't take more than an hour," she remarked. "We'll get there before they close. As long as there's still some butter left!"

Tatyana looked at her watch. It was six o'clock. "It's a shame, I'm going to miss the film about Ivan," she thought. "But it's on again tomorrow morning."

"That's odd," thought Ivan. "Tatyana's still not back. She must be traipsing around the shops. Never mind. She'll see it tomorrow."

On the screen a marshal was already talking in a solemn bass voice and a restless reporter with prying eyes was asking him questions. This was followed by the jerky sequence of documentary footage from the period: the buildings of Stalingrad gently collapsing amid black clouds, as if in a state of weightlessness, beneath silent explosions.

When these shots were shown Ivan could not hold back his tears. "I've become an old man," he thought, biting his lip. His chin trembled slightly. From time to time he made silent comments to the soldiers running across the screen: "Just look at that idiot running along without keeping his head down! Get down, get down for heaven's sake, imbecile… Pooh! And they call that an attack! They're rushing straight into the enemy machine gun fire without artillery support! By the look of it, there are so many people in Russia that soldiers don't matter!"

At length Ivan himself appeared on the screen. He froze, listening to every one of his own words, not recognizing himself. "And then, after that battle," he was saying, "I went into… there was this little wood there… I look and what I see's a spring.