Childhood, as childhood—hardly something you could call military—though Andryusha Surgeyev was already five by the fateful 1941. The front line, rumbling far in the west, never reached the town with the strange name Gorokhoveі. The Germans were afraid to send tanks over the rough off-road terrain cut by ravines; after the war, that fortunate location affected the well-being of the Gorokhoveі residents: because of the same off-road roads, some prohibitive circulars arrived there late. “On occupied territory no one lived…” the future hand of Andrei Nikolaevich would later write without flinching. Ask him how life was in the unoccupied territory, and he wouldn’t answer—some gaps in memory, often sick. “He has a head—” someone said over his cradle in the children’s hospital. His mother once brought an elderly doctor from the hospital; the doctor examined him for a long time with firm fingers and said, “Such a sensitive child. He’ll live…” In that trailing, intonational ellipsis there was an unspoken condition: the boy was granted life under strict behavioral rules that excluded the child’s and even the adult’s thoughts about the meaning of Gorokhoveі existence. And at the same time, his mother predetermined the future of that “odd” child: let the son become a teacher—straight onto the path of his parents! The father, who finally appeared before Andryusha, agreed—wearing a tunic and in squeaky boots, with a tablet at his side stuffed with educational plans.