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Group Centre launched its offensive against Moscow.
    Drive to the front . Two Red Army soldiers in a lush empty garden. A quiet clear morning. They are alone, they’re signallers. ‘Comrade officers, I am going to shake some apples off the tree for you, right now.’ Heavy soft thuds of apples falling. On the ground in the silent abandoned garden. The mournful white house of the landlord, it’s abandoned once again and its second master is gone, too. A new master will be here soon. Yet the soldier’s face is happy and dirty. He is holding a heap of apples in his hands.
    A old woman says: ‘Who knows whether God exists or not. I pray to Him. It’s not a difficult job. You give Him two or three nods, and who knows, perhaps He’ll accept you.’
    In empty izbas . Everything has been taken away, except for icons. It’s so unlike Nekrasov’s peasants, who would first of all save icons when there is a fire, leaving other pieces of property to burn. 1
    A boy keeps crying all night. He has an abscess on his leg. His mother keeps whispering to him quietly, calming him: ‘Darling, darling.’ And a night battle is thundering outside their window.
    Bad weather – gloom, rain, fog – everyone is wet and cold, yet everyone is happy. There is no German aviation. Everybody says in a pleased way: ‘It’s a nice day.’
    The approach of the Germans prompted the more foresighted peasants to turn livestock into hams and sausage which were easier to conceal.
    Slaughter of pigs. Terrible screams making one’s hair stand on end.
    The interrogation of a traitor in a little meadow on a quiet, clear autumn day with a gentle, pleasant sun. He has an overgrown beard and is wearing a torn brown russet coat, a big peasant hat. His feet are dirty and bare, his legs naked to the calf. He is a young peasant with bright blue eyes. One hand is swollen, the other one is small – it looks like a woman’s hand, with clean fingernails. He speaks, stretching words softly in Ukrainian. He is from Chernigov. He deserted several days ago and was captured last night on the front line when he was trying to get back to our rear wearing this almost opera-like peasant costume. By chance he was captured by his comrades, soldiers from his own company, who recognised him, and there he is in front of them now. The Germans had bought him for a hundred marks. He was going back to look for headquarters and airfields. ‘But it was only a hundred marks,’ he says dragging out the words. He thinks that the modesty of this sum might make them more forgiving. ‘But that makes me uncomfortable too, I see, I see.’ He isn’t a human being any more, all his movements, his grin, his glances, his noisy, greedy breathing – all that belongs to a creature that senses a close and imminent death. He has trouble with his memory.
    ‘And what’s your wife’s name?’
    ‘Wife’s name, I remember. Gorpyna.’
    ‘And your son’s?’
    ‘I remember his name, too. Pyotr.’ He reflects for a while and adds: ‘Dmitrievich. Five years old.’ ‘I’d like to have a shave,’ he continues. ‘The men are looking at me, and I feel embarrassed.’ He strokes his beard with his hand. He picks at grass, earth and chips of wood, in quick, frenzied movements, as if doing some work that will save him. When he looks at the soldiers and their rifles, there’s an animal fear in his eyes.
    Then the colonel slaps his face, shouting and crying at the sametime: ‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’ The guard, a Red Army soldier, then shouts at him, too: ‘You’ve disgraced your son! He won’t be able to live with this shame!’
    ‘Don’t you think I don’t know what I’ve done, comrades?’ the traitor says, addressing both the colonel and the sentry as if they might sympathise with him in his trouble. He was shot in front of the company where he had been a soldier only a short time before.
    Major Garan received a letter from his wife. As he was busy with work at that moment,