Oleg Volkov

Summer 1944. Moldovan forests, scented with gunpowder and honey. Sergeant Oleg Volkov, a scout from near Smolensk, was returning from a mission. His tunic was wet, his face was covered in soot. At the edge of the forest, by a stream where wild grapes twined around an old oak tree, he saw a girl. She was sorting dark bunches of grapes into a basket and quietly humming something lingering, a local tune.

Oleg froze. The girl looked up—gray, clear, like dawn over the Dnieper. "Whose are you, beauty?" he asked hoarsely, sitting down on a hummock. She replied that he was a local, that the Germans had burned her house last year, and now she was a liaison for the partisans.

He grinned: "And I, you see, a gloomy warrior, have marched across Europe. I long for home, for the Russian wilderness." The girl plucked a branch of green grapes and entwined it around his machine gun. "You will return, Oleg. And then... you will accompany me to our river." She smiled, but fear trembled in the depths of her eyes. He stood up and touched her fingers: "My beloved dark-skinned girl. We will retake Moldova, and I will come to you, even to the ends of the earth." She waited even after the Victory. She waited for the storms to subside, for train cars with soldiers to begin rolling through Moldova. And she believed: one day, at dawn, he would return for her. And he did return in the summer of 1945. He waited for her by the oak tree. Covered in bandages and bruises, but he waited for her, his "dark-skinned girl."