‘We’re in the middle of a disaster,’ he says bluntly. ‘And there doesn’t seem to have been any point. At all. I suppose I believe that if I paint what I’ve seen, draw it, make a record … it’ll make sense somehow.’

Zoë thinks of Vangeli’s fingers curled around the neck of the baglamas. ‘Did you know people who were killed?’

He sighs and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Yes.’

‘Can I see?’ Zoë says suddenly.

‘What? Yes, certainly,’ he says, and shifts his legs back under the steering wheel, wincing as raw skin scrapes against the gear stick. ‘Here,’ he says. He holds the pad out to her. She opens it carefully.

The first painting is a rough collection of blots and lines, but in a moment these resolve into a scene: a stone wall, a ditch and a pile of earth, a large tyre, a hunched shape that is a man in a tin helmet, turned away from her, a blanket around his shoulders, smoke drifting around his head. She turns the page. Here is a truck with a contraption on its flat bed – a gun. Men are sitting behind its shield, and another man, bare-chested, is handing up a crate to one of them.

‘These are all Vevi,’ he says quietly.

‘What is Vevi?’

‘A place right up under the Yugoslavian border, near Florina. We tried to hold up an SS brigade. Obviously we didn’t succeed,’ he adds, not quite smiling. ‘I did these while we were waiting for it all to start.’ She turns the page. ‘This is afterwards.’ Two trucks with guns on their backs, blackened by fire. Men lying next to them, wrapped in blankets. Zoë thinks they are dead but no, they are only sleeping. One man, propped against a tyre, is smoking a pipe. She turns the page again. A road, winding through a steep-sided gorge. A river, men stripped to the waist, pushing trucks through the water. Landscapes. Soldiers, studies of soldiers, several to a page. A tank, upside down by the side of a road. A man’s face, close-up, tense with effort. A truck on fire, in the foreground a thing she realises is a boot and a leg with no owner. The colours, she sees, are changing. At first they had been pale, watery, which had made the paintings seem, in a way, innocent. But as the pages turn there is less water, more paint, and the colours are heavy, muddy. The drawings are more confident. She turns another page. Three men lie in a row. One is missing a leg. They are all very plainly dead. On the opposite page, a woman cries over the body of an old man. Then a stretcher inside a lorry, a pale, wide-eyed face.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been thoughtless. These aren’t …’ he says, reaching for the pad, but she holds it away from him.