Upon moving in Leo had immediately unscrewed the four doors between the rooms, stacking them on the floor. With the doors removed, there was an area in the living room where he could see the entire apartment, could confirm that the rooms were empty, preventing his imagination from tormenting him with the memories of his family. Even so, this layout was far too close to the home he’d shared with Raisa and the girls, a duplication of a typical Soviet apartment, ready furnished with plywood bookcases and wardrobes. Leo had nothing to unpack. All his possessions were on the coffee table, the bundle of unfinished letters to his daughters and his opium pipe. He’d decided not to collect the letters he’d received from Elena and Zoya for the sole reason that he couldn’t stop reading them – he’d comb through the contents repeatedly until the words and sentences broke down, no longer making sense. With each reading his uncertainty regarding their true meaning grew, forcing him to read them once more, creating an obsessive cycle. He’d cross-reference letters, wondering why Zoya had only written eight hundred words this time when normally she wrote over a thousand, or wondering if Elena’s style had become colder towards him, whether her final remark – With love – was written sincerely or out of a sense of reluctant duty. It was impossible to be sure of the tone. On one hot summer’s night he’d read a single, one-page letter from Elena, with her neat small handwriting, several hundred times, and would have read it several hundred more times if the opium hadn’t sent him to sleep. After that, he’d taken to reading a letter no more than three times before burning it, but he had not received a new letter for several months now. The absence of communication might be down to the unreliable nature of delivery – a stack of three or four could arrive together – but more likely it was because he hadn’t responded to the last one. He found it increasingly difficult to compose his thoughts, frustratedcross-refeis attempts, starting a hundred times and hating everything he said.

Pacing the coarse synthetic fitted carpet, an aberration in this country since carpets filled with dirt and dust in days, Leo needed to smoke as a matter of urgency. As he prepared his stash, faint music could be heard from the adjacent apartment, coming from his new neighbour: Nara Mir.