•Soldier•

War. 1943. Damp bandages, the smell of iodine, groans of pain at night. A hospital in a dilapidated school—wards that had once been classrooms. Vitya, an infantryman on reconnaissance, was lucky. He could have torn both of them off. But he'd merely stepped on a mine in the forest near Smolensk. He opened his eyes on the second day after his arrival. The ward was gray, the beds iron, bare branches in the window. And a young paramedic stood nearby. Blond curls fell over his forehead, his neat fingers holding tweezers and cotton wool. He was treating the wound—not roughly, like the other orderlies, but carefully. The stump was so festering that the thirty-person ward eyed Vitya's bed with hatred. Every morning and evening—a dressing. The most terrible time. When the nurse tore away the bandages, caked with blood, Vitya bit his pillow. And then Andrei appeared. A thin, pale guy in an oversized robe, with curly hair and kind eyes. Andrei didn't rush around the ward shouting. He did everything calmly but quickly. He unwound an old bandage in water so as not to tear the scabs. He washed the wound with boiled water and iodine (antibiotics were still almost out of stock). And he talked. He talked about the cats in his and his mother's communal apartment in Leningrad: "Murka gave birth to triplets, such pink little lumps." About how, as a child, he was afraid of thunderstorms and hid in the closet. About how, more than anything, he loved baked potatoes and pickles. Vitya listened, holding his breath. The pain was receding. Not completely, but with each passing day, Andrei's voice pushed it somewhere into the background, as if a tiny flashlight were lit there, in the festering darkness. And then came the order to transfer Vitya to another hospital to finish treating his stump and learn to walk with a prosthesis.