Grumpy lunged at him again. But K. pushed his hand away and barely restrained the instinct to grab him by the collar and bundle him into the ambulance.

“Who gave you the command to come here?” asked K.

“Greek.”

“That’s right, Greek. So there’s no option of going back to Torez, or we’ll end up under his beady eye. Correct? We’re part of the medical battalion. Right?”

“So what?”

“Greek’s not your direct commander. What you’re going to do right now is grab your radio and tell them you’ve been summoned for urgent evacuation duties in Slovyansk. Take me there, and then you can go your own way, wherever you please.”

He couldn’t take this any longer. He took Grumpy’s elbow and shoved him into the ambulance. That smell pervading the whole village had become intolerable.

Chapter 4

Come on in, see how they crucify people in the twenty-first century: with tubes in their veins, wrists tied to the arms of a wooden chair, a gag in the mouth. Today’s the second day of chemotherapy.

Part of the long room on the first floor of the small village clinic on the outskirts of Bago is cordoned off by low partitions. The rest consists of wooden bunks and matting. The planks of the walls, the floor, the beams supporting the ceiling—all of these have been blackened by time and moisture. On the bunks, people lie motionless, alone or with family settled onto rugs near the beds. Looped ropes hang from the ceiling so that patients can grab them to get up. There are too many patients; the corridor is endless and leads further and further into the depths, to the beds along the walls—mothers with babies at their breasts, pregnant women, old women. The fan hums loudly. In the corner under the ceiling, a TV enclosed in a steel cage (to prevent it from being stolen) drones on. In a niche beneath the stairs, on a bed covered with a mosquito net, lies a girl, naked and thin as a skeleton. Her eyes are open, all whites without pupils. She stares at me. Her ribcage rises and falls. She has malaria. Or dengue. She’s locked in the prison of her withered body, just like me.

Mari, my love, every day I lose more and more control. I’m a candle burning down to the wick. No drug or medication can completely relieve the pain.

The tumour has squeezed out all the abilities of my mind, leaving only words—these empty husks, devoid of meaning. I forget my dreams, I forget reality. Consciousness hides the most important things from me in unconsciousness, and I stubbornly fight with it, just like I do with my own body. The fury in my blood lives on a par with the antibodies, painkillers, and carmustine. This is the medication they chose for me after the stereotactic biopsy back in Kyiv, in case you were wondering. I don’t know how he managed to get it here, in this shithole. The first few days it’s administered intravenously, then intrathecally into the space between the brain and the spinal cord.