The Swamp

Having made their way out of the gloomy, damp woodland thickets where they had wandered for half the night, Gusakov breathed a sigh of relief: the forest had ended, and a field lay spread out before them. Above the wall of the neighboring forest veiled in the morning haze rose the bright red disk of the summer sun. Its rays had not yet appeared in the clear, fine sky, widely flooded with crimson, though the redness was quickly fading, yielding to the onslaught of light and blue. It was growing lighter in the field, and now one could see strips of rye alternating with plots of barley, wheat, and potatoes of varying widths—just as once in pre-collective-farm Western Belorussia, where Gusakov had served for more than a year. But this was not the West—this was supposed to be the East, and these strip-fields should long since have been plowed over by tractors, the land collectivized into kolkhozes. For the second time that night, anxiety gripped Gusakov: where on earth had they ended up? The first time he had been alarmed was when, on the huge mown meadow where they had landed, no one met them; there was no partisan patrol there. True, there had been no German ambush either.