In the beginning of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel Hard to Be a God, the protagonist, Anton, goes down a country road, disobeying a "wrong way" sign, and finds a skeleton of a fascist chained to his machine gun - a remnant of The Great Patriotic War.

"Toshka, what did you find behind the one-way street sign?"

"A collapsed bridge," answered Anton. "And the skeleton of a German, chained to a machine gun." He thought a while, then he added: "the machine gun was halfway sunk into the ground already."

In the epilogue Anton's life-long friend Pasha wonders about the significance of this childhood experience:

"The anisotropic road. With the one-way street sign. Don't you remember? We were there, the three of us ..."

"Oh, yes. Now I remember. Anton used that word."

"Yes, and then he entered the one-way road the wrong way and walked its whole length; and when he returned he said he'd found a collapsed bridge and the skeleton of a German chained to a machine gun."

"I don't remember that part," said Anka. "What about it?"

"Nowadays I often think back to that road," said Pashka. "Maybe there's some connection somewhere... the road was anisotropic - just as history is. There is no way back. And he went right ahead anyway. And met up with a chained skeleton."

What is the meaning of the skeleton? And the anisotropic road with the one-way sign?