Anna Grenko crawled back into the craterand waited until darkness fell. There was a terrible rage in her heart, a needfor revenge, a livid urge to kill the men for what they had done to her. Itoverwhelmed her and went beyond any instinct for survival. When she crawled outagain that night she found the Tokarev machine-pistol and the stick grenades onthe body of a fallen comrade.

She crawled back up the crater and overtoward the soldiers.

One of the men turned and saw her butalready it was too late. She saw the horror on the man's face as she unpinnedthe grenades and lobbed them into the group, firing the Tokarev at the sametime, seeing the bodies dance in the light of the exploding flashes and hearingthe screams until all was silence again.

When the lines were overrun the next day,she was found by her own troops lying in the crater, a pool of blood betweenher legs. She spent three weeks in a field hospital in Stalingrad before beingcalled before a military tribunal and questioned ' not about the ordeal of herrape, but about her capture by the Ukrainians and how she had allowed it tohappen.

For that indignity, and despite herbravery, she received a month's sentence in a military prison.

It was to be the fifth year after the warbefore Anna Grenko was to find any sort of personal happiness. Within two yearsof the war's end Moscow's citizens had for life. The city seemed to awakenafter a long hibernation and took on an atmosphere of gaiety and abandon.Apartment blocks and cafes, dance halls and beer halls sprang up in everysuburb, people wore fashionable clothes and bright colors, and in summer theydanced on hotel terraces to the latest popular music.

Anna Grenko found secretarial work in aMoscow factory and with time on her hands she went to night school, and twoyears later she began to take evening lectures in the Moscow LanguageInstitute. Although often asked out by men, she rarely accepted, and neveragreed to their invitations to their homes. Only once did Anna Grenko make anexception.

One of the young lecturers she met wasIvan Khorev.

He was only twenty-four and a slim, pale,sensitive young man, but he was already an admired and popular poet and hiswork had been published in several respected literary magazines.

One night after class he had asked Annaout for a drink.

They went to a small open-air cafe on thebanks of the Moscow River. They ate zakuski and drank strong Georgian wine andIvan Khorev talked about poetry. When he recited her a poem by Pasternak shethought it the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. He listened quietly andattentively to her opinions and didn't try to dismiss them. He had the abilityto poke fun at himself and he certainly didn't take his own literary reputationunduly seriously. And he liked to laugh.

There was a band playing on the terrace,a soft, sad waltz from before the war, and when he asked her to dance he didn'ttry to touch or kiss her. Afterwards he walked her home, but instead of agoodnight peck he formally shook her hand.

A week later he asked her to his parents'home for dinner. After the meal they all sat up until the early hours, and whenshe laughed at a joke his father made, Ivan Khorev smiled and said it was thefirst time he had seen her happy.

She had lain in bed afterwards thinkingabout him. His quiet assurance and his gentleness and his humor. His ability tospeak with authority on almost any topic, his sharp intelligence and hissensitivity. His willingness to listen to her views and take them seriously. Hewas a loner, too, like her, but a different kind of loner. His independencecame from a quiet selfconfidence, from a loving family background.

She fell in love and they married a monthafter she graduated.

For their honeymoon they spent a weektogether in a big wooden villa on the beach near Odessa, and every morning theywent swimming in the warm Black Sea and then ran back to the dacha to makelove.

At night he read her the poetry he hadwritten and told her endlessly that he loved her, that he had loved her fromthe first day he saw her on campus, and when he saw the tears in the corners ofher eyes he pulled her close and held her tightly, When their first child wasborn a year later, Anna Khorev found her life complete. It was a daughter andthey called her Sasha. They were allotted a small apartment off Lenin Prospectwhere she and Ivan often took their baby for walks in nearby Gorky Park.

She never forgot the first walk they hadtaken together as a family. She and Ivan and little Sasha. And the look ofpride on Ivan's face as he held their daughter in his arms. A man with a camerahad taken their photograph by a bandstand for fifty kopecks; the three of themtogether, she and Ivan smiling, Sasha wrapped in a woolen cap and a whiteblanket, her face fat and pink and healthy and her tiny lips hungry for milk.She had kept the photograph on the mantelpiece in a silver frame and every dayshe looked at it, as if to remind herself that her marriage and her happinesswere real.

But in that first warm summer of completejoy she could never have imagined the pain that was to come.

The pounding on the apartment door cameone Sunday morning at 2 A.M. Three men burst into the room and Ivan was draggedoutside to a waiting car. He had been accused of writing and publishing a poemin a dissident magazine. For that crime he was banished to a penal colony inNorylsk in northern Siberia for twenty-five years. Anna Khorev never saw herhusband again. A week later the men from the secret police came back.

She cried and screamed and kicked andwhen they took her child she almost killed the men who dragged her to the carwaiting to take her to Lefortovo prison, but it did no good.

For her association with Ivan Khorev shewas sentenced to twenty years in Nicochka Penal Camp. Her child was to beremoved to a state orphanage where she would be brought up like a goodcommunist. She was never to see her daughter again and her right to parenthoodwas revoked by the state.

She was taken straight to Moscow's LeningradStation and put on board a cattle truck with dozens of other prisoners. Therain wound northward for five hundred miles. When it finally pulled into asiding she and the other prisoners were driven farther west to a prison camp inthe middle of nowhere.

There was a blizzard blowing that nightand the icy gusts slashed at her face like a thousand razors. She was put in adrafty, squalid wooden hut with five other special-category prisoners. Two wereblind and the others were prostitutes with syphilis. The remaining campprisoners were drunks and political offenders, destined to live out the rest oftheir lives in the frozen wastes near the Arctic Circle. In the hundreds ofpenal camps that dotted the Soviet Union, millions of men, women and children laboredin mines and rock quarries and makeshift factories. They worked from dawn untildusk for nothing, until malnutrition, the freezing cold, disease or suicideclaimed their lives. When they died, a mechanical digger gouged out a pit inthe frozen ground and their bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave. Noheadstone or marker to acknowledge they ever existed.

By the second month of her imprisonmentAnna Khorev felt she couldn't go on.

She was allowed no mail, except officialstate correspondence, and no visitors. She worked from daylight to darkness,and in the first weeks the despair and loneliness almost killed her. If sheslackened she was beaten mercilessly by the camp guards. Every day and nighther grief seemed overwhelming.

Sasha's face kept coming into her mindand she thought she was going mad. In the sixth month she received a letterfrom the penal camp information service in Moscow. It informed her that herhusband Ivan Khorev had died of natural causes and had been buried in Noryisk.His personal belongings had been confiscated by the state and no furthercommunication on the matter was permitted.