The White Guard
From the album “Illustrations by Andrey Nikolaev”
The man walked methodically, with his bayonet lowered, and thought only of one thing: when the hour of frosty torture would finally expire and he would go inside from the maddened earth, where pipes giving off a divine heat warmed the troop trains, where in a cramped doghouse he could collapse onto a narrow bunk, press himself against it, and lie sprawled out. The man and his shadow walked from the fiery splash of the armored belly to the dark wall of the first combat car, to the place where the inscription was black: “Armored Train ‘Proletary’.”