Pavel was not surprised that the memory of these empty classrooms was more tenacious than that of the battle itself, although he received a medal for it and the date of it was marked by victorious gun salutes in Moscow. He knew only too well the unpredictable caprices of war and what the memory retained of it. And it was also by a caprice of ill humor that the commanding officer refused him a week's leave, time to go to Dolshanka, which was less than sixty miles from the reconquered town. It was now the third year of the war, a year made up, like the previous one, of a thousand troop movements, painful advances and chaotic withdrawals. Amid this tangle of trajectories there was one fixed point, unchanged since he had left: his family house, the plantain leaves around the wooden front steps, the familiar creaking of the door. Despite all the towns burned to a cinder, despite all the deaths, the calm of this house seemed to be intact, down to the smile of his parents on the photo in the dining room: his father with his head turned slightly toward his mother, as if waiting for her to say something. In this town, so close to Dolshanka, a town half flattened by shelling, he had been seized by doubt. He just wanted to reassure himself that the photo was still smiling on the wall. His commanding officer's refusal struck him as a bad omen, which was confirmed several days later. They walked onto a minefield like a troop of blind men, into a fountain of shrapnel, into the pain, but, before the pain, the sight of a body cut in half and still crawling: the soldier with whom he had been discussing different fishing tactics an hour earlier. At the hospital he brooded on his grudge against the commanding officer. On the day he was allowed to get up and go out into the corridor he learned that their whole division had meanwhile been wiped out by the German artillery in an ill-conceived offensive. He experienced neither joy at having escaped nor remorse. War made everything one could say or think about it simultaneously true and false, and there was too much evil and too much good mixed up in every moment for one to be able to judge. One could only hold one's peace and watch. Beside the window a young soldier was learning how to light a cigarette, clasping it between the remaining stumps of his hands.

Then came a day in March 1944 when, despite all the murderous caprices of chaos, Pavel thought he could discern a purpose, a great goal that could no longer be doubted. Some yards from their camp, in the middle of a gray plain, with no landmarks and no limits, some soldiers were digging in the ground and sticking a newly squared-off post into the hole. The smells of the freshly turned earth and the bark added a strange note to the inscription on a narrow horizontal panel that they nailed to the top of the post: "U.S.S.R." It was difficult to imagine that there, beneath their great muddy boots, between the stems of the dry plants, lay the frontier, that invisible dotted line he had seen only on maps at school. They had taken almost three years to get there from Moscow. Some of the soldiers were walking back and forth, amused at being able to travel abroad by taking a single step. That night the political commissar spoke to them about their country being "cleansed of Nazi defilement," and the "liberating mission" that was entrusted to them in enslaved Europe. Listening to him Pavel said to himself that the marker on the frontier was more eloquent than all the speeches in the world.

He did not understand why crossing the frontier aroused a fear of dying in him. Perhaps because, for the first time in long months, the end of the war and a return home were no longer unthinkable. And, like a gambler who has won a lot and is afraid of losing it all during the last minutes of the game, he became aware of his winnings, of this life, preserved up until now amid so many deaths, which, with every day of fighting, became more precious and more threatened. In an inadmissible thought, he recognized that, so as not to die, he would have been ready to employ cunning, to drag his feet during an assault, to hide behind someone else's back, to pretend to fall. But he knew the laws of death, which often targeted such sly foxes and spared the daredevils.

The hope that he might return home served only to sharpen his fear. He pictured himself marching down the street in Dolshanka, his chest covered with medals, and could imagine nothing more beautiful than that one moment. During hours of respite he found himself polishing his medals and the buckle on his belt while privately rehearsing a hundred times the same scene he dreamed of: the main street of his native village, the admiring looks of the villagers, himself making his way with blissful stateliness toward the house, whose silent, vibrant expectation he could imagine. During these preparations for his return, made between battles, he had the sensation of transporting a part of himself into the future, thus enabling it to escape from the war, to be living in the post-war era already.

That day the clay he had found on a riverbank was dissolving like soap. The tarnished silver of his two "For Gallantry" medals grew bright, the silhouette of the infantryman in the middle of the red star shone like a layer of mica. He put the decorations away, cleaned his fingers with a handful of sand. The water on that April evening seemed almost warm. And in the stillness of the dusk a bird hidden in the willow groves was repeating two notes with joyful insistence.

As he stood up he heard a brief guffaw. Soldiers from the company, he thought, taking advantage of the halt to bathe or wash their clothes. The guffaw rang out again but was too abrupt for it to be true laughter. Pavel made his way around the willow thicket, stepped over a thick, half-submerged tree trunk, pushed aside a cascade of branches, and saw them. A woman on her back on the beach by the river, her head toward the water, a man with his two hands clamped around her head to stop her crying out, another holding the woman's wrists, the third writhing on top of her.

He had taken rapists by surprise before and had fired shots in the air to make them run away. And been cursed as a stupid motherfucker by the woman who was doing it for two tins of food. This time he must act quickly. The guffaws were those of a half-suffocated mouth. The woman managed to free her head, to gasp a mouthful of air and at once her face was smothered by a broad palm. Pavel beat a path through the branches, overturned the man who was twisting the woman's hands, knocked down the one who was crushing her mouth. And just had time, in a fraction of a second, to catch sight of the woman's face and recognize it. That is to say not to recognize it but to tell himself that he had certainly seen it before, or dreamed it, or imagined it. The first soldier hurled himself at him. Pavel dodged him and grasped the tunic collar of the one who was still lying there, made him topple over to one side and, before he could make out his face in the gloom, recognized the voice cursing. It was one of the company's officers.

Afterward he came to understand that it was the close proximity of death that precipitated things. Had the rape been acknowledged the three men would have been court-martialed and shot. Had he not intervened the woman would have suffocated. The soldiers were drunk, they would have noticed nothing. Had they not been drunk they would in any case have killed her to silence her. Each one in his own way hurled back death, as in close combat you hurl back a hand grenade, a few seconds before it explodes, in a frenzied game of hot potato.

Later he thought about this game, this deadly counting-out rhyme in which the last word had fallen on him. It was weeks later, for at the time everything had happened too quickly. He was arrested, his stripes were torn off, his decorations (those medals burnished with clay) were confiscated. A truck picked him up with a load of men whose uniforms bore no distinctive insignia. He knew he had joined a penal company and this meant death in the very near future.