Zina looked up at him, and fear flashed through her eyes.

“Haven’t seen her,” Zina said. “I think she must be over there.” She waved her arm.

What’s she afraid of? wondered Alexander, breathing a relieved sigh. “So she is here. Over where?”

“I don’t know. We got separated after we got off the train.”

“Separated where?”

“Don’t know.” She was plainly nervous. She missed her basket completely, and the potatoes fell on the ground. Not picking them up, she continued to dig.

Alexander banged the ground twice with his rifle. “Comrade Atapova! Stop. Straighten up. Stand up, stop moving.” Zina quickly did. “Do you remember me?”

She shook her head.

“Aren’t you wondering how I know your name?”

“You have a way of finding these things out,” mumbled Zina.

“I’m Alexander Belov,” he said. “I used to come to Kirov to meet Tatiana. That’s how I know your name. Now do you remember?”

Relief showed on Zina’s dirt-covered, unfriendly face.

“Tatiana’s family is very worried about her. Do you know where she is?”

Relief mixed with defensiveness. “Listen,” Zina barked, “she wanted me to get off with her, but I said I couldn’t. I’m not a deserter.”

“Get off with her where? And you can’t be a deserter,” said Alexander. “You’re in the volunteer army.”

Zina didn’t seem to or want to understand. “Well, in any case I haven’t seen her for days. She didn’t come to Luga with us. She jumped off the train at Tolmachevo.”

Alexander paled. “When you say jumped off the train…”

“I mean, the train slowed down a bit at an intersection, and she stepped down the rung and jumped. I saw her rolling down the hill.”

Steeling his face, he said, “Why did you let her jump off the train?”

Raising her voice, Zina said, “Let her? Who let her? I said, don’t do it. She wanted me to come with her.” She laughed. “She wanted me to jump off a train! Why should I go with her? I’m not looking for my brother. I came to join the People’s Volunteer Army. For Mother Russia.”

As he stepped away from her, Alexander said, “So for Mother Russia you would jump off the train, comrade?”

Zina had no answer. She turned away from him and continued to dig the potatoes, mumbling, “I wasn’t jumping off any train. I wasn’t going to be a deserter.”

Alexander quickly went to find some of his men. He took Kashnikov and five volunteers and drove the truck, now emptied of munitions, north to Tolmachevo. The town itself was nearly deserted. They drove through the streets, finally finding a woman carrying a child and a satchel. The woman told them Dohotino was three kilometers west. “But you won’t find nobody there,” she said. “Nobody there at all.”

They drove there anyway. The woman was right. All the huts had been long abandoned and the village bombed. There had been a fire, which had burned a swath through half a dozen homes. Still Alexander called out for her. “Tania!” he called. “Tatiana!”

He looked inside every single hut, even the burned-down ones. His men called for her also. It sounded foreign to him, her name coming off strangers’ tongues. But Kashnikov was a good sergeant. He didn’t question Alexander. The men were glad to help, if only to get away from the monotony of trench digging.

“Tania! Tania!” Their voices echoed through the small farming village in the middle of fields and woods. They did not find a soul. They found bits and pieces on the ground, blankets, singed backpacks, toothbrushes.

On the outskirts of Dohotino there was a small sign with an arrow: Dohotino Boys Camp. The seven men walked two kilometers through a wooded path and came out at a small meadow where ten abandoned tents stood in a row near a large pond.

Alexander looked through the tents and discovered that there should have been eleven, not ten. One of the tents had been taken down and its stakes removed. The ground was still fresh where the stakes had been pulled out. Alexander thought that was a good idea and had the soldiers remove the other ten tents. The tents were big and made of thick canvas.

The fire that had been set up by the campers felt cold to his touch, as if it hadn’t been lit in weeks. There was not a trace of old food around, of trash left by young boys or by a young Tatiana.

It was late in the evening when they returned to Luga. He and his men pitched their newly found tents by the forest in the rear of the army camp. Covered in his trench coat, Alexander lay on the ground. He couldn’t sleep for a long time.

Back in America, in the Cub Scouts, they used to pitch tents and sleep in the woods and eat berries and fish they caught in the lake, and have fires at night. They opened up their cans of ham, they toasted marshmallows, they sang Cub Scout songs, and stayed up late, and during the day learned how to survive in the woods and how to make knots. It was an idyllic existence when Alexander was just a boy of eight, nine, ten. The summer months he spent at Cub Scout camp were by far the best months of his childhood.

He knew that if Tatiana hadn’t broken her neck jumping off the train, she must have found the empty camp. Maybe, if she were smart, she took the missing tent. But what would she do next? Would she come back to Leningrad?

Alexander couldn’t see that. If she had set out to find Pasha, he didn’t see how she could return without some answer as to his whereabouts. After Tolmachevo where would she go?

Luga. There was nowhere else. She would go to Luga, because that’s where she would think Pasha had gone—to help build the Luga line.

Invigorated and hopeful, he slept.

The next morning at sunup Alexander heard the distant roar of planes. He hoped they were Soviet planes.

No such luck. The black swastika was clearly apparent even from 300 meters below. Sixteen planes in two formations swooped, and he saw something drop from them. He heard screams of panic, but there were no bombs. In a few moments white and brown pieces of paper floated down like tiny parachutes. One landed in front of his tent. He picked it up. Soviet Man! the paper proclaimed. The end is here! Join the winning side—and live! Surrender—and live! Nazism is superior to Communism. You will have food, you will have jobs, you will have freedom! Now!

Another piece of paper was an actual pass to cross the front line. Shaking his head, Alexander dropped both to the ground and went to wash in the Luga tributary that ran through the woods.

By nine in the morning Alexander saw more planes, all of them with the Nazi insignia. They flew just a hundred meters above ground. The heavy machine guns inside the planes made popping sounds as they shot at workers in the fields.

Everyone ran for the trees, for cover. One of the tents caught fire. The Nazis weren’t throwing bombs, Alexander thought as he put on his helmet and jumped down into a trench. No, they were saving their precious bombs.

Then Alexander saw they might have been saving some bombs, but not the fragmentation bombs, which ultimately fell from the planes and burst overhead. Alexander heard screams muffled by the continued shelling.

He looked in the trenches for his men but couldn’t find anyone he knew. The bombing continued for another thirty minutes, after which the planes flew away, but not before they threw out new leaflets. Surrender or die! was all these said.

Surrender or die.

The black smoke floating overhead, the scattered fires, the groaning human beings looked apocalyptic to Alexander. Bodies floated in the Luga. On the banks of the river, right along the ditches and the concrete reinforced holes, injured people writhed on the ground. Alexander found Kashnikov, who was alive but missing part of his ear. The wound was bleeding freely onto his uniform. Shapkov was in working order. Alexander spent the rest of the morning helping to move the wounded into field tents and the rest of the day digging not trenches but mass graves. He and sixteen of his men dug a large hole by the forest, into which they put the bodies of twenty-three people who had died that morning. Eleven women, nine men, one old man, and two children under ten. None of them soldiers.