On other days, when I was done messing around in the kitchen, I would find him motionless by the window in his room. His gaze was fixed somewhere beyond the horizon and he paid me no heed—or pretended not to. Maybe a memory had returned, or he had come up with a new twist for his grandiose novel, which he could never muster the nerve to write.

“Yes.” You hear how I said that with a sigh. He was a writer once. But he’s been a drinker for the past twenty years.

“How was your day, Evochka? How was it?” His hoarse voice is still with me.

“As usual, Dad,” I said. “Brought you your food and medicine.”

Then he told me about his nightmares and went to have breakfast. When I was small, he often beat my mother and me—he wanted us to be afraid. He didn’t intimidate Mum, but I was another story. Again that sighed “yes.” In the evening, as the home began slumbering, he returned from the rum joint and slumped into the flat with a crash. Shutting my eyes and turning into a motionless lump, I lay in bed and listened to the loud wheezing as he stood on the threshold and considered what to cling to next. Mum would be standing, back against the wall or at the window. Grandmother lay in the next room and listened with bated breath. Alcohol fumes wafted off him. I squeezed my eyes shut with all my might and tried to sleep.

Now that he’s not around anymore, I smile bitterly at those memories. Some say women like watching men get angry. (Do you think it’s possible, psychologically? Anger is flexing muscles? I think it’s bullshit). For him anger was how he fought loneliness. Only years later did it dawn on me that he was just masking his impotence, trying to show he was a real man. Grandma loomed over his life, a life that passed him by. He never became a great writer or even at least a decent man, and he knew that we knew it. He’d always say so, even Grandma could hear it from her room: we three women had ruined his life. As had Yekaterina-fucking-Furtseva and her Culture Ministry of the Soviet fucking Union, she stifled so many thousands of talents with her tyranny. She even hounded Vysotsky. Vysotsky! The letters would never have got through to her anyway. Otherwise he might have written them. Oh, those letters, they would have brought bleeding tears to her eyes. And they would have immediately admitted him to the Union of Soviet Writers.

After breakfast, he shuffled into his slippers, smoking a Parliament cigarette, and watching the neighbours head to work. He didn’t skimp when it came to vices. If there was any hair of the dog around, he would start drinking before breakfast and get in a temper by the time I arrived. He skipped the euphoric stage of boozing. I hurried to leave not to have to see him drink and submit to the hail of accusations of selfishness and of my inability to love. Everybody had abandoned him, and I had abandoned him. And so on.