“Don’t you doubt it, Evochka, we will dance on their graves yet.”

“On whose graves Dad?”

His father never returned from the front. The death wasn’t recorded. He just disappeared, as though he had never existed. Maybe he was lying in a field somewhere, or he had died in a prisoner camp, or perhaps he was living out his life in Austria or Germany. That last possibility was what the Soviet government must have had in mind when they evicted Dad and his mother after the Nazi occupation. There were many families like theirs, and they were all reviled. The restored Communist order had contempt for those who had remained in the occupied territories. They never listened to the explanations for why some families could not leave for the Far East or Central Asia, to build factories, produce children and read the bulletins sent from the front.

They had learned of the enemy’s approach too late. Radio news programs had stubbornly hushed up the retreat. Grandma was afraid to move Dad, who was by then sick with pneumonia. Doctors had been evacuated, but they left behind some medicine. After a brief lull, the city was blanketed with bombs from the air and artillery—there was no leaving now. The day the Germans came, Dad turned five. The Red Army soldiers, they were just little boys, fired their guns from the windows of their flat. They put pillows down on the sills and placed their machine guns in between. As if pillows could protect them. One got a bullet in the neck—it went right through, scattering feathers round the room and leaving a bloodstain on the ceiling. They carried him away as they retreated. Dad wanted him to make it, he didn’t want anyone to ever have to die. Or he wanted everybody to die so he’d finally have some peace and quiet. Cowering in the basement with his mother, he hugged a cushion to his chest and thought of those soldiers. Then a bomb dropped onto a neighbouring building. He and his mother went deaf for a week, their ears bleeding.

The city fell. The shooting stopped. Soldiers came to their flat, looking for something. His mother said nothing, so a man in uniform grabbed Dad by the hair and almost pulled him off the ground. The penny dropped—she grabbed the silverware, the valuables, and handed it to them on a tray. After the war, he learned that the soldiers weren’t Germans at all, they were Ukrainian nationalists. That’s what they told him anyway. Fast-forward to the present: the nationalists are back, encircling the city, hurling their bombs, wanting our silverware. That’s what we’ve been told anyway.

Grandma called what they went through “an occupation,” and she said that Stalin had abandoned them. Barking soldiers in smart uniforms walked the streets. Bodies with heads bent unnaturally dangled from balconies, signs were hung around their necks, and pedestrians passed beneath their swinging legs. There was a time when there were so many of them that they were scarier than the living Germans, whom one could on hungry days beg for scraps of food.