The Promise

Author: Yana Amis

The story was awarded the Richelieu Prize.

“Vasily, Vasily, wake up!”

Vasily Petrovich Potapov opened his eyes. Nurse Katya stood before him, holding a small measuring glass.

“Happy birthday, Vasily,” she said with a smile, handing him the medicine.

With difficulty, he lifted his head, took the glass, and swallowed the foul-tasting liquid. The doctor appeared. Vasily already knew that his leg had been amputated, and he knew that the operation had been successful. The man who had operated on him was the military surgeon Sergey Yakovlevich Maslyukov, and now he stood beside Katya.

Vasily’s expression did not change. His arms, stretched along his thin body, looked like the arms of a dead man. With the fingers of his right hand, he slowly rubbed a piece of sheet clenched in his fist. He said nothing and did not look at the doctor.

He closed his eyes again and began to sink back into sleep. The “leg” that was no longer there still hurt, though this morning the pain was bearable. In his mind, he still called the bandaged stump his “leg.”

“Congratulations, Vasily, on this milestone,” Maslyukov said warmly. “You are twenty today.”

“What do I need those years for?” Potapov asked almost inaudibly, his eyes still closed.

Maslyukov cast a quick glance at the nurse, and they left the room that was called the postoperative ward. On the freshly knocked-together wooden tables nearby lay other wounded men with amputated limbs. The groans of newly disabled soldiers could be heard, while two nurses did whatever they could to ease their suffering. Maslyukov had no more room for the wounded who kept arriving in an endless stream, but he tried not to think about the lack of beds, medicine, and staff. He saved his strength, and that of his people, for the unbearable work that went on day and night. Many died; tables were freed; new bleeding soldiers were placed on them.

Maslyukov hated death. He had seen too much of it during this vile war and fought for the lives of young soldiers until their final breath. He had pulled Potapov too from the hands of death, stabilized him after an extremely difficult and lengthy operation, and, most importantly, they had managed to properly sterilize the wound — no easy task in a field hospital — and prevent infection.

But the doctor was worried about the soldier’s dark state of mind. The young lieutenant had no desire to live. At night he raved in delirium, sobbed in his sleep, and begged someone to forgive him and forget him. Sometimes, at dawn, Vasily would wake and lie motionless, staring with his blue eyes at a single point. From a distance, he could have been mistaken for a corpse, although his body was still young and resilient, and his strong heart beat fiercely and loudly, rejoicing in life, as if promising a quick recovery.

Potapov had been called up to the active army in early August 1944. By the middle of the month he was in a training artillery regiment; after completing his term there, he was transferred to the active army, to a division of a cannon-artillery brigade.

In October 1944, he was already on the approaches to East Prussia. Then, almost all at once, they found themselves in the trenches, and the heavy battle for Königsberg began. They were shelled continuously by mortars. Potapov and a couple of other boys were sent to the infantry. He dug a trench, climbed into it, and left his rifle on the parapet. For a while there was silence.

In the trench, he took Nina’s photograph from the breast pocket of his tunic. Her deep brown eyes were the best-preserved part of the worn picture, stained with dirt and sweat. He pressed his lips to her eyes.

“That’s how things are, Ninok,” Potapov said, carefully putting the photograph back into his tunic pocket. “I’ll try to come back, as I promised, though not much here depends on me.”

Once again, he remembered their last meeting before he was sent to the front. They had wandered into an unusually quiet small wood, and there, in a sunny clearing among the oaks, their farewell took place.

“Don’t forget me, Vasenka,” Nina had asked. “Whatever happens there… don’t forget me.”

“I won’t forget you. Never. Don’t be afraid. I’ll come back from the war, and you’ll no longer be Nina Babeshkina — you’ll be Nina Potapova. You can start calling yourself that everywhere already.”

She had promised to wait, and he had promised to return. Those memories never left him for a moment, and Nina’s image stood before his eyes as if she were right there beside him, on the front line: a small, fair-haired, slender girl, almost like a schoolgirl, held in his arms. Her brown eyes looked at him without blinking, and in them he read both her first true love and his own.

Then came deafening, merciless explosions. One of the mines burst right on the parapet, and a cloud of fragments fell upon him. Everything went dark before his eyes, and he felt something sharp and unbearably hot pierce his leg — but darkness descended on him before the crushing, all-consuming pain could take hold.

Potapov was lucky: he was eventually found and brought to a military field hospital. In the morning, while sorting through the bodies, an orderly discovered signs of life in the exhausted, blood-covered body and immediately dragged him to the operating room. He remained in the hospital until the end of the war. There he learned to walk on crutches and to care for the slowly healing stump. Although the war ended in the summer, wounded men still kept arriving at the hospital, and many continued to die. Because of those deaths, the recovering men were not discharged early; they were allowed to stay and continue treatment.

In October 1945, Potapov was discharged from the army. With a knapsack on his back and crutches under his arms, he stood on the platform of a hastily repaired railway station, waiting for his train. Before his release, the other fellows had given him a farewell gathering and even treated him to real alcohol, hoping it would cheer him up. But the alcohol did not help; on the contrary, the next morning Vasily felt even worse. His head was splitting, his stump hurt terribly, and his soul felt foul, bitter, wounded — and for some reason ashamed.

“It would have been better if I had died,” he repeated inwardly, taking no joy in the blue peaceful sky or in the yellowed grass that had barely forced its way through the burned, blood-soaked earth scarred by explosions.

Vasily had fallen into despair the moment he discovered that instead of his right leg there was something deformed, constantly aching, huge and strange, something that did not feel like part of him at all — something called a stump. He could not understand what connection he was supposed to have to it.

While still in the hospital, rumors began reaching him about how the local postwar authorities treated disabled veterans when they returned home: no home, no land, no work; clinics for the disabled were located kilometers away from settlements, and there was no way to get there. Later, when he began therapy, learned to walk on crutches, and changed the dressings on the stump, his despair only deepened. The surgeon and nurse Katya often spoke to him, and although he silently nodded in agreement when they advised him to be glad he was alive and to make plans for the future — after all, the war was over — deep inside he had not reconciled himself to disability. He waited only for the right moment and place to leave the battle as a victor, not as the defeated. That was how he explained his decision to himself.

There was one more thing: he decided to go to his native settlement, visit the factory where his late mother had worked — or whatever remained of it — and, if he was lucky, see Nina. But only in such a way that she would not notice him, one-legged as he was. Perhaps she already had someone else. He would find that out too. Perhaps she was no longer Babeshkina, but someone else’s wife, and no longer his Potapova at all. Or perhaps she was no longer alive, or had moved somewhere far away; and to travel through all of war-ravaged Russia without a kopeck, on one leg, in search of Nina, seemed impossible. Vasily was prepared for the possibility that he would not find his beloved, and strangely, that made things easier: without Nina, his forever-maimed life would surely lose its meaning completely.

With these unhappy thoughts, he continued his journey, sitting by the window of a packed carriage. The seat had been given to him by a completely distraught old woman who cried silently, crossed herself, and kept muttering without pause:

“See how lucky you are — one leg, yes, but alive,” she murmured, placing a dirty, worn sack under his outstretched stump. “I’ve got food in that sack. Maybe I’ll still find my Styopka. Maybe they mixed up the death notices. Maybe I’ll find Vanya, and Grisha, and my Timofey Ivanovich too. Why shouldn’t I? We lived together, peaceful and good, until the war came. We had three sons, and now they’ve sent me death notices for all of them.”

She pulled out a rag and unfolded it, holding four death notices up to the light.

“They mixed them up, the devils, of course they did. Everything’s chaos there, smoke everywhere, not enough people to do the work, so they made a mistake. They couldn’t have killed all of mine! At least one of them, young like you, my youngest one, must surely be alive somewhere, lying in a hospital. When I find him, I’ll feed him. I’ve gathered everything for him here. I’ve been collecting it for months. Everything. I even traded a piece of soap for the ring Timofey Ivanovich gave me. And maybe Timofey Ivanovich himself is there with him… with them. Who are they to write to me that all my men have been killed? They scattered about too quickly, didn’t they…”

She would fall silent, cross herself, smack her lips, sigh, and then begin all over again. The passengers crammed around them ignored her muttering. Some dozed; some simply stared silently through the window at the terrible landscape of wartime ruin rushing past, each sunk in his own thoughts, his own grief. The old train, patched with rusted sheets of iron, shook mercilessly, and at times it seemed the carriages would sway off the rails and tumble down the embankment, though they were moving quite slowly — nothing like before the war, when trains sped along with open windows, crowds of noisy pioneers in white shirts and red neckerchiefs, and hot tea with sandwiches.

“Wide is my native land…” Vasily suddenly remembered the voices of pioneer detachments singing.

Before the war, Vasily had gone to town with his mother several times. They had gone to the flea market to buy shoes for school, to visit his mother’s acquaintances, and the last time — to the hospital, when his mother fell ill. That trip turned out to be the last: his mother soon died.

By then he remembered his father only vaguely. He remembered only that men came for him at night. He remembered how Polka, their dog, howled. He remembered a gunshot. In the morning his mother was in tears, and the dead Polka, with a bloody hole where her eye had been, he buried behind their hut. Then papers arrived, and his mother read the letter with trembling hands.

“Your father is gone, Vasenka,” was all she said. Her eyes remained dry, but at night he woke to the sound of her sobbing.

After that, he and his mother traveled somewhere for a long time. By trains and then by carts. For several months they lived in some House of Culture, in a room with a sign on the door that read “Drama Circle.” From there they were moved into a basement room attached to a factory, where his mother received permission to work for pennies. In the tiny little room with one small window, where light barely penetrated even by day, it was dark, and in winter as cold as outside. But they learned to be grateful for the pitiful little they had.

In spring, Nina came to their school. Her father had also been exiled, and apparently was still alive somewhere in the endless camps of the Gulag. Vasily did not know the details, and did not ask; he did not want to intrude into her soul. Once he walked her home. On the way they recited Mayakovsky’s poems and played cities. Nina knew geography perfectly; he did not.

They became friends, and after school Vasily often walked her home. Sometimes they stopped by his little basement room. Nina would bring some food, he would boil water on an old kerosene stove, and they would drink tea. People began whispering about them at school. But they paid no attention to gossip and continued meeting every day. For the first time in his life, Vasily felt happy. His childhood and youth had been darkened by his father’s arrest and execution, and then by his mother’s early death.

After his mother died, he had no one left but Nina, and nothing but her friendship. Rumors of their relationship eventually reached Nina’s mother as well, but after meeting the shy and handsome Potapov, she stopped troubling Nina and accepted their friendship. Deep down, she did not want to hurt an orphan, and Vasily’s feelings for her daughter were sincere. After all, she herself was the wife of a repressed man and knew well what Vasily had endured, left an orphan at such a young age.

Vasily still lived in his mother’s basement, but everyone had simply forgotten about him, and that suited him and Nina well. More important things were happening in the country: the factory leadership changed every month; people were transferred, replaced, arrested, and imprisoned. No one cared about a basement room.

There, they would quietly sit out the bustle of the school day: listen to the radio Vasily had assembled from wires and old plastic parts, and do their homework. There too they prepared for their final exams. During that time, Vasily quickly grew up, stretched taller, and like many children of the repressed, became independent far beyond his years. He devoted all his free time to studying and to Nina, hoping to “make something of himself,” as his departed parents would have wished. He kept their memory sacred in his soul. Nina dreamed of becoming a geography teacher and paid special attention to that subject. Vasily managed to obtain several old geography atlases, and for hours they studied straits, deserts, and exotic islands.

Vasily also decided to become a teacher, though he had not yet chosen which subject. They had even agreed to enter the same pedagogical institute and, after graduation, go together wherever they were assigned. Being young, they believed they could do anything. At night Vasily worked as a watchman, a job found for him by one of his mother’s friends. His wages were enough for bread and books. Everything was going on as usual, and he and Nina considered themselves truly lucky — and then the war began.

The wheels of the carriage screeched, cutting off his memories. But the train did not stop; it only slowed down. They dragged past an empty platform, where Vasily immediately noticed another one-legged disabled soldier, with suffering written on his unshaven face.

He stood like a lonely tree, leaning on crutches, holding his cap upside down in his hand. The sight plunged Vasily into even deeper sadness.

The old woman began speaking again, but this time in a clear and loud voice. The passengers stared at her in surprise, but she paid them no attention and continued her sorrowful tale. A child began screaming, then another; in the crowd someone coughed, and the sound rolled through the carriage like a chain: children crying, adults coughing, the sick groaning.

“Open the window!” a woman shouted. A young woman in a colored scarf rose, lost her balance, and sank onto the knees of her companion. The child in her arms cried even louder.

“Open it yourself if you need it,” a man stretched out on the dirty floor beneath the corridor window barked rudely.

“Is it so hard for you? You’re probably a deserter — look at that round face. Tell us where you got so fat,” the young woman’s companion snapped.

“With the Fritzes, where else,” mumbled an old grandfather sitting in the corner on the floor. “Call SMERSH on that fat mug.”

The man raised himself with a malicious expression. An ugly scuffle was about to break out. At the end of the carriage, two armed soldiers appeared. Beside them stood the conductor in an old railway cap, his hand resting on his holster.

“Enough talk,” he said quietly, but everyone heard him.

After that, “order” slowly returned to the carriage.

Vasily could no longer endure the old woman’s muttering, which resumed as soon as things grew quieter. She sat closest to him. He tried to get up and move to another place, but seeing the carriage packed with people, he realized the idea was impossible.

“And where would I stand on one leg? There’s nowhere to put the crutches. Packed like herrings in a barrel, people lying all over the floor,” he thought.

Tears rose in his throat; he felt unbearably sorry for himself. He closed his eyes, pretending to sleep, hoping the old woman would stop loudly complaining and threatening to get through to “the Very Top.”

“He’ll put them where they belong, those who mix up other people’s death notices,” she threatened someone with her wrinkled finger.

The train rushed past villages and settlements ravaged and emptied by war. Bare fields were mottled with weeds, burdock, nettles, clusters of creeping buttercups, and gray brushwood that had spread along the edges of abandoned collective-farm fields. Flocks of crows lifted in fright as the train passed, then dove back into the bare fields. Vasily recognized nothing: everything had shifted, as if moved into another dimension. War had reached even here, and everywhere the eye could see lay torn-up roads with huge craters from enemy bombardments that even this place, far from the industrial center, had not escaped.

Yet he managed to catch sight of the black factory chimney looming on the horizon, sticking out against the gray sky like a beacon. Though damaged by air raids, it was still visible from the train window — a grotesque monument both to those who had built it and to those who had tried to erase it from the earth.

“Look at that — it stood its ground. Good for it,” Vasily thought with unexpected warmth, as though of a living person and not a factory chimney.

He stared out the window without looking away and suddenly began to recognize the familiar outlines of woods and roads, though war had reshaped them beyond recognition. He understood that he was approaching his native places.

“After that little hill there should be an oak,” he remembered.

And indeed, they flew past the oak and the grove, battered by raids, but still the same little grove on the hill where he had met Nina for the last time before leaving for the front.

He was given a ride to the settlement in a broken-down truck and was even seated in the cab. The truck was driven by a thin woman wrapped in a scarf, making it difficult to guess her age. She spoke loudly and clearly. Vasily stopped studying her face, hoping to recognize someone from before the war. She told him that there were no local men left in the settlement, only women, old men, and old women. The factory had been bombed, but the school had survived, though there were few children. Several former army men had been sent to help.

“They’re the ones giving orders here now,” she said. “But there’s no one left to command!”

She laughed sarcastically, as if protesting against the new Party authorities.

Potapov wanted to ask about Nina Babeshkina, but restrained himself. Suddenly an idea came to him.

“Is there a teacher at the school?”

“Yes, there’s one Nina here,” the woman answered at once.

“Then take me to the school,” Potapov asked.

“What, are you a teacher too?” she asked, looking at him suspiciously.

“Not yet, but I hope they’ll take me,” Potapov lied confidently.

“It may all be closed. It’s Sunday, after all,” the woman reminded him.

“Take me there anyway,” Potapov asked.

“Interesting,” he thought, looking at the school building. “Everything is torn to shreds, and the school stands as if nothing happened. The factory chimney is still sticking up, the school still stands — life goes on.”

Vasily leaned against an old birch that grew opposite the entrance to the low school building. He threw his backpack onto the ground and felt a pleasant sensation from touching the cool, rough bark of the tree. He and Nina had often sat there, hiding beneath the birch branches from the summer heat during school breaks. Holding a crutch under his arm, he breathed in the fresh scent of the tree with unexpected pleasure.

Suddenly, from the open door of the school building, a baby crawled out, wrapped in an incredible outfit — either an old scarf or a sweater, with sleeves tied behind his back. On the baby’s head sat a neat knitted cap with a red pom-pom, setting off his large blue eyes.

The baby crawled to the threshold, got onto all fours, and with some difficulty rose to his feet, but he lost his balance and plopped down onto the ground. He did not cry; surprise appeared on his rosy little face, and drool ran from his open mouth. He sat for a few seconds, then stubbornly tried to stand again, but again he failed and fell.

“Vasya, Vasya! Where have you crawled off to? What a restless little one!”

A woman’s silhouette appeared in the depths of the school, and Potapov had no doubt left that he had come home. He pushed himself away from the tree, adjusted his crutches, and moved toward the baby.

“Come on, come on, Vasily Vasilyevich, step toward Papa. Step… we’ll learn to walk together.”

“Vasya!” he heard a cry. “Vasya, my dearest!”

Nina was running toward him. Tears burst from her eyes. She ran up to Vasily, opened her arms, and covered him with kisses.

“You came back, just as you promised, my darling Vasenka!”

She lifted the child into her arms and held him out to Potapov. The soldier, stunned with happiness, leaned on one crutch and with his other arm embraced his long-awaited family.

© 2026 Yana Amis, Canada