Mikhas Matskevich
This is you. In your early twenties, a local, born in Olshany. A veterinary feldsher: you treat people and livestock alike. The Germans took old Doctor Zaremba away, so you are the only healer for miles around, and every side knows it. The bag came to you from your father. You want to remain simply a healer, but in war that is not possible: every choice lands on someone's scale, and no one keeps clean hands. Two stats decide the rare checks: Composure (not flinching, lying to someone's face) and Healer's skill (steady hands, diagnosis, surgery in the field).
Alena
Your wife. Conscience and support, the reason to look after yourself. She keeps you human when a stranger is hidden in the hut and every knock at the door may be the last. She does not only wait: she decides, takes risks, hides people, argues, and knows how to say “no”. Hunger, cold and fear hit her harder than they hit you, and her trust can be lost. Alena is expecting a child, and from that day every decision of yours carries one more price.
Mikitka
A shepherd boy, grandson of Granny Augustina. Nobody notices him: who looks twice at a boy with cows? That is why he is the village's secret link to the forest: he carries notes, overhears strangers' talk, knows paths that are on no map. He grew up in the marsh and walks it like a floor. Childhood innocence in wartime: he may be frightened, may lie, may take offence, but he cannot be broken. You can rely on him, and that is exactly why you fear for him.
Granny Augustina
Herb-woman, healer and midwife, Mikitka's grandmother. She lives on a homestead beyond the quagmire, where it smells of dried herbs and smoke. Your ally: she teaches what brings down a fever and how to stop blood, and turns misfortune aside with a single word. Her folk medicine stands beside your feldsher's craft, not against it. Both our own and strangers come to her, and she behaves as though she knows nothing. But age and winter spare no one, and your decisions echo on her too.
Rezo
Revaz Mikeladze, a downed Soviet pilot, a Georgian, wounded. The story begins with hiding him: one night he is carried into your hut. Doubly a stranger: his speech and his face give him away from the first word, and passing him off as a local is almost impossible. To save him is to put the whole village at risk, because the punishment for sheltering him is death by shooting. He jokes even when he has nothing to joke about, and he promises: “We'll meet again, Korzun has his own paths.” This line is not closed within a single chapter.
Old Korzun
Commander of the partisan detachment. Elderly, local, cunning and hard. He knows the marsh better than the Germans and uses it. The detachment is already active, and he comes to the feldsher himself: first through messengers, then directly. He calls you to the forest but does not persuade: he simply puts before you the fact that people are sick and dying. He knows how to borrow and how to demand payment. For some he is salvation, for others a new power that also takes its due.
Yazep
A headman against his will. One of our own, from the village, but appointed by the Germans and forced to carry out their orders: quotas, lists, hostages. Not a villain: crushed between a village that hates him and an authority that does not trust him. When the village asks him to intercede, he looks for a crack in the order. When the Germans demand names, he holds his word to the last. You have known him since childhood, which makes it all the more painful when you have to choose which of the two of you he will remember.
Stas
A policeman from among the locals, a former acquaintance. Zealous, currying favour, settling old scores. The bitter face of collaboration: he is no stranger, he grew up on the next street, and that is exactly why he knows where to strike. He presses on suspicions, gathers denunciations, demands names. But he has his own things too: a mother, a grievance, a fear of ending up on the wrong side. He can be feared, hated, understood. He is no friend of yours, but he is no caricature either.
Weber
The commandant. His headquarters and the German infirmary are in the former school. Dry, bespectacled, he jogs around the church in the mornings as if there were no war. He loves order to the point of trembling and believes in paperwork. The banality of evil: neither a monster nor a sadist, but an executor who considers himself a reasonable man. He needs a doctor, and he knows how to offer what you cannot refuse: medicine, a pass, protection. But every favour has its price, and he records it as neatly as everything else.
Koss
A Sturmführer, a punisher from the Sonderkommando. Naked evil, unlike Weber: he wants neither order nor paperwork, but a purge. He arrives when strength must be shown, and reads reports as if looking for a pretext. The direct opposite of the commandant, and at some point you find yourselves on the same side, because neither of you wants everything to burn. But Koss has a weakness he never speaks of: he is afraid of contagion.
Sych
A young, wiry partisan messenger with the eyes of a wounded animal. He meets you in a dugout in the Black Pinewood. Distrustful: first he checks whether you are truly one of them. He speaks quietly and plainly, cleans a captured submachine gun, and dislikes wasted words. His world comes down to “ours” and “theirs”. He brings news from the forest, leads you to the wounded, and shows you what it means not to “treat” but to “fight”. In time something like respect grows between you.
Grandfather Todar
An old man, a former hostage: he saw how the Germans make an example of a person, and stayed alive. After Yazep, the headman in Olshany. He neither complains nor forgives, but he knows the price of a word. People go to him for advice and for a truth others do not have. His saying: “It is the place that is cursed, not the man.” When his time comes, whether he manages to leave depends on how you treated him.
Ales
A lad from the next street. In the autumn he put on a policeman's armband: from hunger, from fear, like many. Then he tore it off, ran, and turned up on your doorstep with a battered face and the eyes of a hunted animal. Neither a hero nor a scoundrel, but a man who made a choice he regrets. The forest may take him in, the village may turn away, you may drive him off or hide him. What becomes of him depends on you. Atonement is never quick, but it can be made in deeds.
The German boy
A wounded Wehrmacht soldier, almost your own age. Rezo's mirror: wounded, a stranger, in a strange house, with letters from his mother and a longing for home. To treat an enemy or leave him to die? The healer's oath against hatred. Whatever you decide, you will learn his name, and it will stay with you. For Weber he is not merely a “loss”, and at the right moment this will come in useful.
The little one
Your child, who will be born in the summer. News of the child comes almost at once, and the whole story moves toward that day. The birth takes place in hard circumstances, and it is delivered by the one you have chosen through your actions: the women of the detachment, Augustina, you yourself, or a stranger doctor. A boy is named Andrey or Rygor; if a girl is born, Alena names her Augustina. For this child Mikhas learns to choose, and for the same child he lives to see the morning: dawn, the baby in his arms, his father's bag open.