Now, however, in front of the mother of the dead lieutenant, the commissar felt himself to blame for the fact that three patients had died the day before – while he himself had taken a shower, ordered his favourite dish of stewed sauerkraut from the cook and drunk a bottle of beer from the store in Saratov. And Sister Terentyevna felt guilty because her husband, a military engineer, served on the army staff and had never been to the front; while her son, who was a year older than Shaposhnikov, worked in the design office of an aviation factory. As for the commandant, a regular soldier, he was serving in a hospital back in the rear, sending home felt boots and good quality gabardine – while the uniform that had been passed on to the dead lieutenant's mother was made of the very cheapest material.

Even the thick-lipped sergeant-major with the fleshy ears, the man responsible for the burial of dead patients, felt guilty before the woman he was driving to the cemetery: the coffins were knocked together out of thin, poor-quality boards; the dead were laid out in their underclothes and buried in communal graves – extremely close together unless they were officers; the inscriptions over the graves were in an ugly script, on unpolished board and in paint that would not last. Of course, men who died in a field first-aid post were just heaped together in pits without individual coffins, and the inscriptions there were written in indelible pencil that would only last until it next rained. And men who died in combat, in forests, bogs, gullies and fields, often found no one at all to bury them – only wind, sand and snowstorms…

Nevertheless, the sergeant-major felt guilty about his poor-quality timber as the lieutenant's mother questioned him about the conduct of burials, asking how they dressed the corpses, whether they buried them together and whether a last word was spoken over the grave.

Another reason he felt awkward was that before the journey he had been to see a friend in the store; he had drunk a glass of diluted medical spirit and eaten some bread and onion. He was ashamed that his breath made the car stink of onions and alcohol – but he could hardly stop breathing.

He looked gloomily into the rectangular mirror in front of the driver: in it he could see the reflection of the man's bright, mocking eyes. 'Well, the sergeant-major's certainly had a good time,' they said mercilessly.

Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves.

The soldiers of a labour battalion, conscripts who were too old for active service, were unloading coffins from a truck. You could tell from their silence and lack of haste that they were used to this work. One man stood in the back of the truck and pushed a coffin to the rear; another man put his shoulder beneath it and took a few paces forward; a third walked silently up and took the other end of the coffin on his shoulder. Their boots squeaked on the frozen earth as they carried the coffins to the wide communal grave, laid them down beside it and returned to the truck. When the empty truck set off for the city, the soldiers sat down on the coffins and rolled cigarettes, using lots of paper and a very small amount of tobacco.

'There's not such a rush today,' said one of them, striking a light from a very good-quality steel: a thin cord of tinder running through a copper-casing where a flint had been set. The soldier pulled at the tinder and a puff of smoke rose into the air.

'The sergeant-major said there'd only be one lorry today,' said another soldier as he lit his cigarette, letting out clouds of smoke.

'In that case we can finish the grave.'

'That's right. It's best to do it straight away. Then he can come and check it against the list,' said a third soldier. He wasn't smoking; instead he took a piece of bread from his pocket, shook it, blew over it and began eating.

'Tell the sergeant-major to bring us a pickaxe. The earth's frozen solid almost quarter of the way down. Tomorrow we've got to do a new grave. We'll never be able to dig it just with spades.'

The soldier who had been striking a light clapped his hands, knocked the end of his cigarette out of a wooden holder and gently tapped the holder against the lid of the coffin.

All three fell silent, as though listening for something.

'Is it true we're being put on dry rations?' said the soldier eating the piece of bread. He spoke in a hushed voice so as not to disturb the men in the coffins with a conversation that didn't concern them.

The second of the two smokers blew his cigarette-end out of a long, smoke-blackened reed holder, held it up to the light and shook his head. Everything was quiet again…

'It's quite a good day, just a bit windy.'

'Listen. There's the truck. We'll be finished by lunchtime.'

'No. That's not our truck. It's a car.'

The sergeant-major got out of the car, followed by a woman in a shawl. They walked together towards the iron railings, to what had been the burial ground until they had run out of space the previous week.

'Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,' said one of the soldiers. 'In peacetime it's the other way round: one coffin and a hundred people carrying flowers.'

'People mourn for them all the same,' said the soldier, tapping gently on the board with a thick oval fingernail, 'even if we don't see the tears… Look, the sergeant-major's coming back on his own.'

This time all three of them lit up. The sergeant-major walked up and said good-naturedly: 'So you're having another smoke, are you? How do you think we're going to get the work finished?'

They quietly let out three clouds of smoke. Then one of them, the owner of the steel, said: 'You only have to stop for a smoke and the truck arrives. Listen, I can tell by the sound of the engine.'

Lyudmila walked up to the small mound of earth. On a plywood board she read her son's name and rank.

She felt her hair stirring beneath her shawl. Someone was running their cold fingers through it.

On either side, stretching right up to the railings, were rows and rows of the same small grey mounds. There were no flowers on them, not even grass, just a single wooden stem shooting straight up from the grave. At the top of each stem was a plywood board with a man's name on it. There were hundreds of these boards. Their density and uniformity made them seem like a field of grain…

Now she had found Tolya at last. She had tried so many times to imagine where he was, what he was thinking about and what he was doing: leaning against the side of a trench and dozing; walking down a path; sipping tea, holding his mug in one hand and a piece of sugar in the other; or perhaps running across a field under fire… She had wanted to be there beside him. After all, he needed her: she would top up his mug of tea; she would say, 'Have another slice of bread'; she would take off his shoes and wash his chafed feet; she would wrap a scarf round his neck… But he had always eluded her. And now she had found him, he no longer needed her.

Further away she could see graves from before the Revolution with crosses made out of granite. The gravestones stood there like a crowd of unloved, unwanted old men. Some of them were lying on their sides, others leant helplessly against tree-trunks.

The sky seemed somehow airless – as though all the air had been pumped out and there was nothing but dry dust over her head. And the pump was continuing its work: together with the air, faith and hope had now disappeared; nothing was left but a small mound of grey, frozen earth.

Everything living – her mother, Nadya, Viktor's eyes, the bulletins about the course of the war – had ceased to exist.