He worked on improving his lot, looking for employment, worked out and religiously attended get-togethers with his fellow nationalist hotheads at the local chapter of the Right Sector. A sense of frustration flared up within him. The feeling that he was doing nothing while artillery rumbled and people died only one hundred and seventy kilometres away diluted his thoughts of domesticity. Heroes. And here he was taking another man’s son to his grandmother’s.

Deep down, Andrei felt he couldn’t hold anything against Maria. If she harboured disappointment, he was at fault. Her frostiness infuriated him, but it excited his thoughts, motivated him to press forward. Maybe she made him more a man than weapons could. Life is so tricky, so tricky.

In the morning, Andrei went into the kitchen and warmed up the breakfast Maria had cooked the night before. He ate and drank his tea, watching a street-sweeper clearing dead leaves from the walnut tree in their empty courtyard. There was an old seesaw out there: a wide metal pipe with seats attached and balanced on a trestle. One of the seats was broken. From afar, it looked like a mortar on a tripod, primed for long-range firing. Looking at it every day, he reflected on how wars ended not when weapons were laid down, but when ordinary objects reacquired their normal quality: a pipe is a pipe, not a cannon; a combination of colours is an artist’s choice, not a flag; the verses of anthems that had become so stark—with their “freedoms’’ and “foes”—once again became simple words.

A sleepy Tykhon in rabbit slippers shuffled in followed by an equally sleepy cat. Andrei lifted the boy into his high chair, boiled him an egg and poured out a glass of milk. Tykhon clasped it with both hands and swigged it down in one go, leaving a little behind for the cat, which he poured into its bowl. The cat gratefully rubbed against his chair. After breakfast, they got dressed in the hallway, quietly so as not to wake Maria. Through an open door, they saw Maria wrapped in the sheets, lying with her back to them. Andrei didn’t know if her eyes were open or shut, whether she was lost in dreams or studying the reflection of the morning sun in the windows opposite. He didn’t want to rouse her. These moments always seemed to him filled with a light and fragile beauty. Like the day he asked her to marry him.

Chapter 23

When Maria woke up, she felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness. She didn’t want to get up. The alarm had interrupted a dream she had not wanted to end. Turning onto her side, she watched the white rippling of the pillow fabric under the sluggish movement of her hand. She blinked at the annoyingly bright light outside. Andrei had parted the curtains as always. He gets up so easily. Clumps his bare feet down on the parquet floor and dashes into the shower. Noise, singing. He had as usual probably left a large puddle of water and not bothered to clean it up.