When Larissa leaves the restaurant she decides to go to Gorki Park and place a red carnation on the spot where Yurii used sit in the sunshine. It seems like a light has gone out in her life and will never light up again. Time is a revolving wheel that never goes backwards, and she’ll never catch those enchanting moments again. There’s no past, no future, only the instant now, which keeps passing like an endless, non-stop motion picture, with the actors falling off when their performance ends. She hears the wail of air raid sirens and the noise of heavy gunfire, and realises that it’s the continuous rat-ta-ta of batteries of anti aircraft guns on the other side of the city. She sees tracers shooting into the sky and decides to stay in the park, as it might be safer than a building. Larissa turns her head to the left, as she thought she heard a humming sound coming from the direction of the bushes. Gradually the humming or droning sound envelops her. She’s unable to identify the direction, and then in the distance the sky seems to darken, as it fills up with enemy formations. She’s nervous and afraid. Her stomach aches and feels empty. They look like a swarm of bees with yellow noses that are heading for the city centre. As they get closer she notices that the humming invaders are adorned with black swastikas and crosses. The satanic invasion has begun. There’s a squadron of Stükas with yellow noses on her left and a formation of Heinkels heading in her direction. They keep descending, and – as their altitude drops – they grow bigger and bigger. When they level out she sees a shoal of glistening underbellies with spinning propellers sweeping across her city. /…/ A Soviet Yak-1 (Yakovlev) fighter – adorned with a large red star on its rudder tab and one on its side – peels away from its formation and starts to dive. When it descends to 150 metres it levels out and rolls, and disappears behind clouds of fiery red and black smoke bellowing from the area of Kiyevskij Vokzal (Kiev Railway Station). There’s at least 1 kilometre filled with black, grey and white smoke with sheets of angry flames shooting out of the clouds of the thick, murky haze. The next moment the Yak appears from nowhere – inverted – as in upside down, and almost touches a chimney of the buildings on the other side of Serpukhovskaya Square, and dives towards the ground almost sucking the tarmacadam, and accelerates flat out up into the sky, brushing the chimney by centimetres on its departure. It’s happened in split seconds and it’s now rocketing towards space. (L.Hellmann, When the lights went out, 2006)
