More from Mikhail Mikhailovich

I Go on Leave, from Before Sunrise . . .

I am holding a suitcase. I am standing on the platform at the Zalesye station. The train will be here in a minute, and then I will return to Petrograd via Minsk and Dno.

The cars roll up. They are all heated freight cars with one regular passenger car. Everyone dashes for the train.

Suddenly there are shots. They sound like anti-aircraft guns. German airplanes appear in the sky.

There are three of them. They circle above the station. Soldiers shoot haphazardly at them with their rifles.

Two bombs fall from a plane with an oppressive whine and explode near the station.

We all run out into a field. In the field are vegetable gardens, a hospital with a red cross on its roof, and further off some fences.

I lie down on the ground by a fence.

After circling over the station and dropping one more bomb, the planes turn their course toward the hospital. Three bombs fall near the fences almost simultaneously, hurling up earth. That's pure swinishness. There is an enormous cross on the roof. Impossible not to notice it.

Three more bombs. I see them break loose from the planes. I see the beginning of their fall. Then there is only the whine and the whistling in the air.

Our anti-aircraft guns are firing again. Now pieces of shrapnel and shell cases bestrew the field. I press close to the fence. And suddenly I see through a crack that on the other side of the fence there is an ammunition dump.

Hundreds of cases of artillery shells stand under the open sky.

A watchman is sitting on top of the cases and gaping at the airplanes.

I rise slowly and try to spot a place to go. But there's no place to go. If a single bomb hit those cases everything would be blown up for several kilometers around.

After dropping a few more bombs, the planes depart.

I walk slowly toward the train, inwardly blessing their bad aim. War will become an absurdity, I think, when technology achieves perfect aim. I would have been killed at least forty times this year.