The army had been there for three years now, while the local lads, together with the Russian military, had been drinking tea and vodka in their dugouts beyond Pashka’s street and its gardens, beyond the remnants of the apricot grove that had been planted back in Soviet times, and beyond another field that the war had stripped of its workers, as it had the field that lay between Sergeyich’s garden and Zhdanivka.
