The man at the desk wasn't pleased with me.

It was only fair, since I couldn't say as was pleased with him as of that moment. I had only been in the office for a little over five minutes, and perhaps I was being hasty. First impressions and all that. People say they don't matter, but I've found that they can be very hard to get rid of once they're there.

The man at the desk glared at me again, as if it's my own fault that he'd lost the next box of files he needed. A's in one box. B's in another. And now it was me that was holding up the line. I let my bag slip the few inches to the floor, rubbing my suitcase-strap indented palm against my leg.

The boy in line behind me – and there was no other way to describe him other than a boy, it was foolish how young they conscripted people – cleared his throat. I ignored him, still staring at the desk and waiting for the man there to find the box of B-letter name files. His mouth was constantly twitching, as if he had a small piece of food stuck in his teeth that he was in a constant attempt to remove.

"Ah,' he said at last. The box was removed from under another desk and set down next to the other folders there. There was a plain sheet, marking the days, the boxes carefully crossed off until the twelfth of June.
"Name and patronymic?" the man at the desk asked.
I blinked, certain that by this time he would have lost something else. In front of him was a hand-printed page with blank spaces across it. The man's mustached face twitches again.

"Ivan Ivanovitch,' I said.
"Surname?"
"Braginsky."
"Right." The dry sound of the pen against the yellowed page.
"Current age?" The man doesn't look up from the sheet.
"Twenty-Eight."
"Hometown?"
"Orel."
"First door on the left."

His tone of voice didn't change, and it was a second before I process what he's said and picked up my suitcase, by which time the boy behind me was clearing his throat again. He has nothing to complain about. We were all the late ones, the short, gap-filled line stretching from the desk halfway into the middle of the room.

I found the first door on the left. It was a low-ceilinged room with several rows of metal chairs set up toward the back. Scattered people had already filled up about a half dozen of the chairs, always with spaces of one or two chairs between each person. I took a chair in the front row, for no other reason than to avoid having to push through the other rows to a less noticeable position. It was warm, and the window was open.
I took of the greatcoat that I had for some reason still been wearing, despite the weather, and laid it on the seat next to me, along with my bag. There were enough chairs, and the ones directly beside an occupied chair seemed to be unusable to the people in this room anyway. A few others from the line outside filed in, including the throat-clearing boy.

Nobody was looking at the other people, the noises from the street outside took up what would have otherwise been an uncomfortable silence. We knew why we were here. Don't make friends, we'd probably all been told. They'll be dead in a week anyway. Best not to think about it. Think about something else. The room was thick with the sound of people not thinking about the other occupants of the room being shot, bleeding, being left to die because the group couldn't afford to go back. The medics were all busy enough as it is. There's nothing more we can do for you, son. You fought your hardest. We'll tell your mother, your sweetheart. It's a good death, if there was such a thing.

By this point, most of the line from the front room had come in, I was sure. There weren't many of us late arrivals to begin with. I kept my gaze focused on my boots, thinking the same as all the others. Not blood. Not the trenches. Not wondering if maybe he wasn't dead after all, if maybe that moment was enough to go back and check, get him out of the line of fire, get him help. It's going to happen at some point. Always does.

The sound of our thinking was overwhelming.
I stole a quick glance at the other figures in their own chairs and thoughts. Some were doing the same thing looking at the others and not trying to be noticed doing the looking. I didn't stand out as any more noticeable than the rest. No thinner, no poorer, perhaps a bit taller, though not by much.
After a moment, I realized someone standing in front of the chair I had my coat and bag on, clearly wanting to sit down. His grey eyes glared at me, then at my things, then me.

There was room in the row just behind me. Just walk two meters. It's not hard.
The man sneered slightly, glancing at the people in the surrounding chairs as if thinking perhaps one of them would speak up and tell me I'm being stupid. All of us were silent. Even me and the sneering man.
Do you want to make a fuss out of this?
He didn't.

The door opened, and a uniformed officer walked in. He was short, though when he spoke, it was like his voice was trying to make up for the fact. It spread to every corner of the room, assaulting us after our long wait in silence.
"Not only are you the conscripted, not the volunteers, but you are the very latest of the conscripted. Not an eager group to be fighting, yes?"
Silence.

The man continued almost at once.
"Fighters or not fighters, it is not my job to chastise you for your actions or to call you cowards. You'll get enough of it from your fellow soldiers as it is."
Cowards again, is it? You were thinking it, surely. Cowards for putting your own country first? Serbia is not Russia. Let Serbia fend for itself.
The officer went on, but my mind had started to wander, back to where it had ended up all too often since I had gotten the letter.
We're fighting for this?

The throat-clearing boy from the other room raised one hand. The officer ignored him for a few seconds, allowing him to look more and more like a ridiculous schoolboy. Finally, he nodded in his direction.
"I'm sorry to interrupt, comrade officer ah – "
"Arakidy."

"Officer Arakidy, but I was under the impression that those who did not wish to fight at the front would be sent to the workhouse in Petrograd to help make the rifles."
Not fight at the front. His choice of words only made it worse. As if manufacturing guns all day in a warehouse was anything like fighting. Needed, perhaps. Not fighting.
"You are right."
There was no elaboration.
"Sir – "
"You want to make guns, is that it?"
"I – ah, yes, officer."

"I would have preferred you had said this sooner. You were conscripted for a reason. All who wish to pick up a gun and fight and be spared from the further torment of the rest of the men, go with officer Radchenko."
There was an odd moment in which the entire room began looking around at the other seated men wondering where this supposed officer Radchenko was, whether this was some sort of bad joke, or whether we really would be given the choice to prepare ammunition instead of be sent to the front line.
I didn't move.

Men on both sides of me stood, glanced at Arakidy, sat halfway down, then got up again. After a few seconds, the door opened, and another man in uniform entered, which we all supposed was Radchenko. Arakidy motioned for the boys standing to go with him. More than half the room went, including the throat-clearing boy who would now be remembered by me as the boy with no resolve. You asked the question and now you don't even go through with it? Arakidy was playing with us, it's clear as anything. Anyone conscripted got the choice to fight or go to the workhouses, surely he knew as much.
The door shut, and Arakidy started pacing in front of us, his voice a little quieter than it had been previously.

'You heard me. There's a train to the other side of Petrograd that leave tonight. There's nothing I could tell you that they won't tell you once you've arrived, other than that you'd better get used to working."
As if we weren't already.
Nobody laughed.
Contrary to his words, Arakidy kept talking, describing where the train would arrive, what we were to do until then, what we should expect from the bosses at the workhouse. I stopped listening to him. He might have been fooling himself, but he wasn't fooling me, and I doubted he was fooling many of the other people left in the room. We were the smart ones, or at least, we had the potential to be smart, rather than agreeing to fight a war that was doomed from the start and even more doomed three years along. Petrograd was falling apart, not unlike the rest of the country, and now we were expected to fall apart along with it by agreeing to fight a nation of German bastards we had no business fighting anyway.
Again, it came back to that same thing.

The same word.
Unnecessary.

It had been bothering me constantly for years, and when I'd try to ignore it, it came back. All of this was unnecessary; the war, the politics, the lot of it. I don't know when exactly the thought finally came to me in this degree, but I think maybe it had been there all along.
I wasn't going.

Not to the eastern front, not to the workhouses. I wasn't a coward, and I would have liked to see some of the men who went with officer Radchenko who thought of themselves as heroes do what I was going to do. It takes a whole different sort of courage not to fight when everyone else is. Fighting with a gun – that anyone can do. Shoot, reload, duck, shoot again. Fall at the right time for your country. Try to fight the minds of hundreds of men who will think they know the reason you're not fighting. When they really have no idea.

I wasn't fighting because it was unnecessary.
For every one of me, there was bound to be ten others who also find this war unneeded, and lack the willpower not to fight. For all I knew, that was the boy who had asked the question to Arakidy, and done the exact opposite of what he had claimed. There were more of him, I was nearly positive.
And then there was me.
I wasn't going.

I waited until Arakidy finished talking, at which point he looked at the assembled men as if he had just said something deeply profound and was waiting for a reply. I had no idea what he had said.
"Excuse me, officer, would you mind terribly if I stepped outside for a moment to have a cigarette?" I asked, already standing and picking up my coat.
"Very well." Arakidy's words translated more or less to be quick about it.
Before he could ask me why I was taking my bag with me, I walked out the door. Once out of the room, I passed the man at the front desk without any questions. If you looked enough like you were supposed to be there, nobody asked questions. The gates of the station were open, unlocked. The temperature of the air had gone down, and from the clock outside, it was nearing seven in the evening.
The guard I pass nodded at me. Perhaps he thought I was being sent home, that I didn't fit the physical standards, perhaps I had some sort of illness, despite the fact that it had clearly been stated that examinations weren't to be held until nine, an hour before the train would come.

I started walking faster. I figured I had about three minutes, maybe less, before Arakidy realized I hadn't come back and sent someone to find out what the devil I was thought I was doing. At the railroad tracks, I took a turn, heading toward one of the Neva bridges that would take me further away from the center of Petrograd.

It was nearly an hour of walking later when it occurred to me that I was going south. It wasn't something I had been thinking about, and I had no conscious thought of where I was going, except the moment I took a right at one of the Neva bridges, I supposed I was going to Moscow.