“Up on the fifth floor, third entrance, Katerina Ilyinishna.”

“Oh, my poor dear. You poor dear.”

“Did you see the war, Katerina Ilyinishna? Do you remember the Great Patriotic War?”

“Oh, yes, we’d climb onto the roof and cover ourselves with blankets and watch our planes shooting down the Germans. It was beautiful, so beautiful. And after the war we were brought here by train from Lviv. Mummy, the children. And now what? Where do we run to now? Are we supposed to go back there?”

A crash outside. It was close. She shuddered and clutched my hand. The empty jars on the shelves clinked.

“Katerina Ilyinishna, I’ll bring you some food right now, you must be hungry.”

She nodded.

“Mitya and I ran out of food.”

I patted her shoulder.

“Don’t worry, I’ll bring some down now.”

I raced upstairs for the rations I had hidden in the cupboard for a rainy day. I itemised it all in my mind. Buckwheat with meat, goulash, the dry strips of bacon, no, I had eaten the bacon, the stewed vegetable conserve, I had eaten that too. There was the cheese spread, the meat paste, tea, sugar, that little piece of chocolate, no, that was definitely gone, the vitamin supplement, the alcohol heating pad, the matches—oh, oh, oh—I dashed out into the street smiling and dove back into the entrance to our block. Something crashed behind me, but I wasn’t afraid.

I reached our floor jumping up several steps at a time. In the flat, I turned into my father’s room—that stupid habit—and back out into the kitchen. I climbed onto a chair and pulled out the box marked with a red star and placed a pair of candles in my pocket. I considered the best way to carry down the water and suddenly . . .

“Oh, you wretched pig!” I exclaimed, remembering Mitya’s mongrel drinking from a bucket by the bed. “So you were the one that stole my bucket, you filthy animal!” Seized with rage, I ran out into the corridor.

Please hold my hand, darling, I’m scared.

Right then, something struck deafeningly with a flash. The door to Dad’s room was ripped to splinters. The flat shook as if crumbling under its own weight. The whole world was collapsing. The floor turned over and became the ceiling. I was thrown back against the wall. In a moment of fading consciousness in the blood-soaked darkness, I became entangled and paralysed by the sticky web of my father’s novel. I couldn’t breathe. And then I closed my eyes and saw.

Third Wall

THIRD WALL

Chapter 1

It was chilly and quiet in the winter garden of the old clinic, which had been converted into a rehabilitation facility for returning soldiers. A glum light trickled through three-metre square windows and over the palm trees, ferns and aloes in the beds and large concrete pots, and the pink flowers in hanging plastic vases.