The Color of Your Blood

A hot June of 1941. With hardly any resistance, the fascist military armada rapidly pushes deeper into our country, to the east. Senior Lieutenant Kosti Bagryakov, a border guard, was caught by the war while on leave, and he was forced to make his way alone after the retreating units of the Red Army and catch up with them.

In an inconspicuous Belarusian village—not yet occupied by the Germans—Oksana, a young teacher, sheltered him for the night. Right from the first minute, in her house, Kostya felt something was wrong here. She lit the bathhouse without firewood and an oven. And she cooked lunch—somehow on a fire that you can’t make sense of. And her candies were strange, resembling chocolate shrapnel…

But what happened next truly shocked the young officer. Maybe Oksana was a witch? Then why, at the mere gesture of her hand, did a long corridor open in the wall of an ordinary rural house, its sides lined with flickering purple lights? And there stood a person dressed in some strange clothes…

Unusual military stories—stories that should clearly be filed under pure fiction and fantasy—told in the incomparable retelling of Alexander Bushkov, are taken as pure truth. The author himself claims that for most of his novellas he took the plots from his father’s memories, a participant in the Great Patriotic War. As they say, believe it or not.