Kostekino is a scattered settlement on the Dnieper whose near-emptiness conceals a violent history: after wounded Hans Reiter is sent there to convalesce, he learns that a German killing unit murdered the village’s Jewish inhabitants. In a farmhouse near the spring, he finds the papers of Boris Abramovich Ansky, who was born in that same house. The place’s decisive significance lies in this convergence of recovery, absence, and discovery: Reiter’s provisional refuge becomes the threshold to another life interrupted by persecution.

Setting and Wartime Emptiness

Kostekino is scarcely a village. A few houses lie scattered among hills, with half-collapsed wooden fences, two rotting granaries, and a dirt road linking the settlement to a town on the rail line. Winter snow and mud make that road impassable. At the outskirts stands an abandoned collective farm that five Germans have tried to restart. Most of the houses are empty, and at first the absence has competing explanations: some say the villagers fled the German advance, while others believe the Red Army conscripted them.

The settlement is also known by two other names, Budienny Model Farm and Sweet Spring. The latter refers to a spring that feeds a tributary of the Dnieper, notable for water unusually sweet and pure for the region. This small natural feature offers a counterpoint to Kostekino’s abandonment, but the landscape is not presented as a pastoral refuge: the village’s apparent quiet has been produced by forced displacement and mass killing.

Reiter’s Arrival and the Hidden History

Unable to remain at the hospital, Reiter is sent with three other wounded men from the 79th to Kostekino. For his first few days, he sleeps in what may once have been an agronomy office or Communist Party headquarters, the only brick-and-cement building in town. Life among the few German engineers and convalescents grows unbearable, so he chooses one of the many vacant farmhouses. They look alike at first, offering little indication of who once lived in them.

One night, while drinking coffee in the brick building, Reiter hears a different account of the village’s disappearance. The inhabitants were neither conscripted nor simply driven away by the advancing army: a detachment of Einsatzgruppe C passed through and killed Kostekino’s Jewish population. Reiter cannot ask questions because he cannot speak. Instead, he spends the next day inspecting the houses, turning the silence around the village into a practical investigation. He finds no object in them that identifies the former residents’ origins or religion.

At last he settles in a farmhouse near Sweet Spring. His first nights there are disturbed by nightmares he cannot remember. The house has a narrow, soft bed beside the fireplace on the first floor; above it is an attic with another bed and a tiny round window. In a large chest he finds books, most in Russian and some, to his surprise, in German. Knowing that many Eastern European Jews spoke German, he infers that the house may have belonged to a Jewish family. The inference is tentative, but it gives the emptied rooms a human history that their remaining contents had not disclosed.

Ansky’s House and Reiter’s Discovery

Reiter’s own physical recovery leads to the farmhouse’s most consequential discovery. Looking in a mirror in a corner, he barely recognizes his reflection: his blond beard is tangled, his hair long and dirty, and his eyes vacant and dry. He removes the bandage from his throat; the wound appears to have healed, but the bandage is dirty and stiff with dried blood. When he throws it into the fire and searches the house for a replacement, he finds papers belonging to Boris Abramovich Ansky and a hiding place behind the hearth.

The location makes the papers more than an archival find. Ansky was born in 1909 in Kostekino, in the very house Reiter occupies after the village has been emptied. His parents were Jewish, like almost all of the villagers. His father bought shirts wholesale in Dnepropetrovsk and sometimes Odessa, then sold them in neighboring villages; his mother raised chickens, sold eggs, and tended a small, well-kept garden. They had one son, Boris, born when they were already approaching old age, a circumstance associated with the biblical Abraham and Sarah and a source of happiness for them.

Narrative Significance

Kostekino’s history emerges through a sequence of partial explanations and material clues: first the deserted settlement, then rumors of flight or conscription, then the account of the killing, and finally the books and hidden papers in a former resident’s home. The narrative delays full recognition rather than making the violence immediately visible in the landscape. Reiter’s wordlessness sharpens that delay; unable to question the people around him, he turns to looking, and the house’s small details become the means by which the past is recovered.

The farmhouse joins two lives without making their circumstances interchangeable. Reiter is a wounded German soldier seeking a place to recover; Ansky is the Jewish child born there, whose family’s life is reconstructed from the papers Reiter uncovers. Kostekino therefore functions both as a concrete wartime location and as a structure of belated recognition: its emptiness first appears ambiguous, but the discovery behind the hearth shows that absence has a specific history and that traces of an erased community remain embedded in domestic space.