“I know, me too. It’ll pass. Get some rest. There will be a lot of work tomorrow.”

“A lot of the patients we picked up today, they were raving about how the war had started because of them. Never heard anything like it.”

Lena smiled. It was only then that K. saw the exhaustion in her eyes.

“Paranoid delusions keep pace with the times. The day before yesterday it was elections. Yesterday it was revolution. Today, war.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“All I know about tomorrow is that there’s going to be heaps of work.”

At the end of the corridor, Lena opened a narrow door opposite the toilet.

“You can go sleep on the second floor if you want. We have the civilians up there, and there are some free beds. But it’s safer here.”

She was pointing to a janitor’s closet, two metres by two. The space was almost entirely occupied by an old sofa. There was no sheet and the pillow was without a cover. Mops and rags stood in the corner. A calendar on the wall had a picture of a white horse walking through a misty wood. An electric kettle, a cup, and a saucer of raisins stood on a small, wobbly wooden table.

Lena looked at K.

“Will this do?”

“Thank you, it’s great.”

“No, thank you. And don’t mind Kabul. He’s a good man. You are the first doctor to arrive. Everyone else is leaving. And they take what they can with them.”

“I saw you giving yourself an insulin shot. Have you got enough?”

She shook her head.

“Everything is running dry. People, medicine.”

“Everything?”

“Well, no. The bullets and shells never run out. And there were eight boxes of Viagra among the humanitarian aid that arrived last week.”

She turned to leave, but stopped. She didn’t want the day to end either.

“I had this alcoholic patient. He had this raving fantasy about the end of the world in flames. No angels or demons, just fire. The whole world sizzling ‘like the sun,’ that’s what he said. He sticks in the memory for some reason. Anyway, good night to you.”

She disappeared into the yellow light of the corridor.

K. grabbed a handful of raisins and put them in his mouth. They were dry and dirty. “Kabul held onto the passport,” he thought to himself. “That’s bad. I’ll have to ask Lena how to get it back. It’s strange, I really don’t feel like sleeping.”

He flicked on the kettle. Without undressing, he lay down, closed his eyes and summoned the image of a bus packed with groaning mad people driving along country roads, lighting the way with its feeble low beams. Faces frozen by apathy stars with their empty eyes into the uncleared fields and windblown verges, while the cowardly killers and rapists he had let loose squeezed into the nooks of an abandoned hospital, dreaming of the paltry dinner nobody would bring them and of the sunrise to come.

The boiling kettle gurgled and clicked off, but K. was already asleep.