Leaving normal life turned out to be simpler than getting used to it again.

Thousands of wounded and traumatised veterans who had forgotten how to live had been thrown as if in an offensive back into everyday living. Grown men, adolescents, old people, cowards, heroes, criminals, ordinary people, the physically patched-up and the emotionally shredded, struggled to find their feet. War pushed their bodies through the meat grinder and sent them home, right back to where they’d come from. Those unable to process their experience staggered through the streets, looking for work and women, waiting for unpaid state benefits, and they drank. Some went back to the war.

Around the end of May, Andrei was aimlessly riding the tram from one end stop to the other. Gorky Park, Pushkin, Soviet—in the city centre and there’s still a stop with a Soviet name, for fuck’s sake—Poltava Way, Central Station. At the station, he changed route and kept going: Klochkov, Sumy, and again Gorky Park. Gorky, who was this Gorky anyway? Another commie? He enjoyed showing tram conductors his veteran ID, which showed he’d fought in the war. The refrain was: “You remember there’s a war going on? Do you remember? A war? One hundred seventy kilometres from here.” It seemed like nobody remembered. Kharkiv was frosty and indifferent even on a warm day in May. Andrei took the apathy, this desire people felt to shield themselves from war and revolution, as a personal affront. When he joined the first wave of mobilisation to defend against the invasion by a neighbouring country, acquaintances spoke about him like he was a hero. Only a few months later, they started to think of him as little more than a dolt exploited by politicians.

Through the window, he watched couples holding hands, female students in short skirts, lads drinking beer. The tram thundered along the old rails, buzzing the city into life. Mothers on benches tended to children in strollers, squinting into the sunlight. Ice cream, shopping malls, cinemas, fountains, people in parks—the horrible, unbearable discomfort of broken logic. It was half one. The guys had probably already had a swift lunch, the machine gunner is in his position shooting away and drawing fire to himself. The sniper takes note of where the return fire is arriving from. The SPG is blasting away its rockets. A response comes from the NONA, raining down its shells with a roar along the southern slope of Karachun Hill. Suddenly there was a loud crash. Andrei jerked, let go of the handrail and unthinkingly hugged the floor. The other passengers looked down at him grinning. He looked around, got up, and looked out the window: two cars had collided at the intersection. The only one not staring at him was a young woman sitting by a window. She was absorbed in her book. Tilting her head forward and frowning, she ran her fingers through short black hair. She had slight arms and large eyes. There was something immature about her, awkward, but special. She arrested his attention and didn’t let it go. Andrei straightened his collar and smoothed down his uniform in the hope that she would look at him. He tried to sneak a peek through her thin blouse. Before the war, he would never have dared to go up and talk to her, but now everything was different. He stepped forward: “Hi, what are you reading?”