No longer brown, but winter white. Heavy with antlers, their scrotums nearly doubled in size. One bull crashes through fallen leaves after his mate, no farther than ten feet in front of us, bellowing. Night and dawn we hear them from our flat. Only now we're in the Slavonic woods.
Wind picks up.
Blue-black mottled clouds, the Neva seized with ice. From lzmaylovsky Park, faintly, a Chopin mazurka, while trains move men westward to the front. In anemic light he waits for the future. The samovar is piping hot, windows coated with fine traceries of frost. With each inhalation his cigarette a diminutive amber moon.