The second part of the dilogy (a continuation of “Spring on the Oder”). The main autobiographical hero is Major Lubentsov: in the first novel he is the head of divisional intelligence, and in the second he is the commandant of a German town—the one in which the story of the everyday life of a Soviet command after the war in provincial Germany, the confusion and uncertain hopes of an ordinary German, is interwoven with sharp and angry chapters that, in the spirit of the exposé prose of the “Khrushchev Thaw,” deal with the mass psychosis of suspicion and mutual denunciation.