Time bends like a river around men like Arkady Stepanov—now a century old, yet still sharp as the bayonet he once carried. His hands, gnarled by age and war, tell stories no history book could capture. In the quiet streets of Volodarsky, a village in Astrakhan, he wasn’t just a neighbor; he was a living monument.
War stole his youth in 1943, replacing schoolbooks with a rifle and the hum of factory machines with the thunder of artillery. "The front doesn’t care about birthdays," he’d say, recalling how boys became men in the mud of Kursk, where the earth itself seemed to bleed. His best friend fell like a shattered vase—one moment whole, the next scattered in pieces. "You don’t bury a person that day," he murmured. "You bury a part of yourself."
A bullet carved its way through his left arm later that year, a cruel sculptor leaving paralysis in its wake. The hospital smelled of antiseptic and resignation. Yet when they sent him home, broken but breathing, he spat in fate’s eye. "A one-armed man can still salt fish," he laughed, decades later, teaching grandchildren the art of survival.
Post-war life was its own battlefield. He climbed from weighmaster to deputy director at the local fish plant, turning grit into gold. Then came the day Brezhnev himself pressed a watch into his palm—a token from a nation that never forgot. The timepiece became family gospel, passed down like DNA.
Last May, harmonica music spilled into his courtyard as dancers twirled like young birch trees. He joined them, stiff limbs be damned, singing off-key anthems of resilience. "We’ll keep fighting," he grinned, eyes on the horizon. But time, undefeated, called its final charge. Two days shy of Victory Day 2024, the old soldier fell—leaving behind a silence louder than any cannonade.
They buried him under a sky so blue it hurt. Somewhere, a pocket watch ticks on.
