The Chief Medical Officer was already steering her into his office in the teachers' room. She went on jerkily: "Tolya tried to drive across the field. It was packed with mines… It was such a blaze you couldn't get near it… Manya… Manya was burned as well…"

There was a rapid commotion in the corridor. The nurses came running, their first-aid kits in their hands. The Hero of the Soviet Union leaned out of the window. The Chief Medical Officer rushed across the school yard, dragging his leg that had been injured in a bombardment. You could hear the throbbing sound from the engine of the van, with its slatted sides reinforced by planks of green wood.

They only became acquainted later. They talked and listened to each other with feelings of joy they had never experienced before. Yet what did they have to talk about? Their two villages, one near Smolensk in the west, the other far away to the north in the marshlands of Pskov. A year of famine lived through in their childhood, something that now, in the midst of the war, seemed quite ordinary. A summer long ago spent in a Pioneer camp, fixed forever in a yellowed photograph – thirty little urchins with close-cropped heads, caught in a tense, somewhat wary pose, beneath a red banner: "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!" He was seated to the right of a robust Pioneer who was frowning behind his drum and, like all his comrades, stared spellbound at the camera…

One evening they walked out of the school, strolled slowly through the half-burned village, talking all the time, and stopped beside the very last izba. All that was left of it was a blackened carcass, a charred tracery in the cold spring air. Discernible within it was the gray shape of a great stove, covered with half-burned timbers. But all around it on the ground you could already see the blue gleam of new grass. Above a smashed-in fence the pale branch of an apple tree in bloom glowed timidly in the dusk.