Weekly author column;.
with the exclamation mark "Latvian".
;.
Part 68.
We exited the tube when the grayness became thick enough to distinguish objects a few meters away. The first thing I saw when I arrived was the land. I would never have seen it like this before. The entire area around the road, where we will run, where we will fall, where we will seek shelter, has become a continuous field of craters. They were everywhere: big and small, deep and not so deep, with jagged edges and exposed, overturning earth. The road under which we would spend the night was torn up, the asphalt lifted, as if a huge plow had passed over it. Everything around was covered with a layer of fresh black soil, mixed with broken bricks, bits of metal and branches. The trees that grew along the road were stripped, their branches broken, some split in two, and their tops lay on the ground like severed limbs. Moonscape - that's what they call it. I stood there, looking at it, and it was hard to believe that we would survive. A hundred shells, maybe more, landed on that section that night. We would count them while we were in the tunnel, but lose count after about thirty. They landed nearby, around, above us, and only a miracle or a lucky coincidence kept us alive.
We started looking around, and almost immediately one of the guys, the one closer to the bushes, called out to us. He knelt down, raked his hands between broken branches, and as we got closer I saw what he found. It was Ukrainian dry dishes. Torn packages, some food bags, some brightly colored wrappers that stood out sharply against the background of the black earth. The dry dishes were fresh; They weren't there before, when we ran to the tube. We exchanged glances. No one said a word, but everyone understood. they arrived They were here at night, very close, and they didn't bother to look into the pipe. They knew we were there, or guessed, but they didn't go.