Suddenly, Tykhon woke up sobbing. Maria gently pushed Andrei away and went to get Tykhon, effortlessly carrying him, as if not feeling his weight. She swayed with him around the room, soothing him with a comforting nursery rhyme. When he finally went back to sleep, she placed him in his bed and looked at Andrei with embarrassment: “I should put on a T-shirt.”

Andrei was intoxicated by her beauty and warmth. He did not yet suspect the coldness underneath, how quickly they would grow apart. After the move, she threw herself energetically into rejigging the furniture, arranging crockery and ornaments, painting the walls in her preferred shade of white, assembling a new IKEA chest of drawers, but she never fell head over heels in love, never hung from his neck with gratitude, never shared in his fanatical patriotism. She never asked if he had had to kill. After the wedding, she seemed ever more tense and glum, growing quieter by the week. She took on another night shift and spent the other nights in the kitchen.

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.