The White Guard
From the album “Illustrations by Andrey Nikolaev”
On the black, deserted street, a tattered gray wolf-like figure silently climbed down from the branch of an acacia tree, where he had been sitting for half an hour, suffering in the frost but greedily observing the work of the engineer through a treacherous gap above the top edge of the sheet, an engineer who had brought trouble upon himself with the very sheet on his green-painted window.