Maybe it was the toughness of that generation of women, whom the war had robbed of their men and their youth. The women that became the keystone of a new selfless world of Communism were bound to raise fateless sons. Grandma was just such a woman: stubborn and domineering. And he was her exemplary son: loving, caring, weak and, by some unhappy chance, talented.

With all her remaining strength, Grandma smothered and subdued him, raising him into a devoted and non-prodigal son. Little did she realise she was staunching a timid talent. On those rare evenings when he found the resolve to sit at his work, and his thoughts slowly coalesced, shaping prose, forming intricately detailed utopias that he would then resolve to ravage with demonic majesty, her voice would pierce through from the kitchen. “Poppet, won’t you eat your borsch?! Be a man. You eat like a little girl.” Utopias withered under the onslaught of reality. Maybe I’m overdoing it, but who’s to argue with me now that he’s gone.

When he was thirty-five, she announced: “It’s time to tie the knot,” and she married him off to her friend’s daughter. I have no idea what she looked like. There is not a single photograph of her left in the house.

A childless, loveless (“they didn’t try hard enough!”) marriage lasted five years and ended in a boozy blowout. But not before a brief, bright moment of creativity. Over two weeks, Dad began work on “Insomnia,” and wrote some stories and essays. By the way, we lit the stove with “Insomnia” yesterday. It was the essays the day before. He finished them in the rehab unit at the Slovyansk psychiatric hospital. I’m happy to say that that sickly green pre-revolutionary building burned down ages ago after a bout of shelling. It was fenced with barbed wire; not to keep the patients from escaping, but so the moonshine hawkers from Semyonovka couldn’t get in. That place left an indelible creative mark on Dad. He was always describing it and its patients, every other one of them was worthy of inclusion in the novel. Solitary and brittle, they gazed through the barred windows, over the ancient deciduous forest and at the city, harking for vodka and freedom.

Grandma blagged him out of rehab. It was all about blagging those days—everything from landing a juicy salami to a package holiday by the sea. Over the years, she repeatedly had to drop him off at the dispensary after he had reduced himself to a soused wreck. Each time, there was a short burst of feverish creativity. Nothing to do with the doctors. It was, rather, the life-giving properties of isolation and, more importantly, being cut off from Grandma.

Wait, where was I? Yes. So he came back home after his first four-week trip to the “sanatorium.” Sober, vacant and docile—just the way she loved him. With nothing to do at home, he went to work. He wrote more laudatory articles about the quota-busting miners of Abakumov and Zasyadko. A few days later, he noticed his wife had left him.