I drew in a lungful of air.

And then there was hugging. “What are you doing here?” His breath smelled of booze and his stubble scratched my cheek. He wiped a smile from his face, because this was no time for smiling. Should be mourning, right? Then to the shop. No Kagor sweet wine? “Make it a Jack Daniels then.” “But Dad, it’s too expensive.” “We’re mourning! Let me at least splash out on a normal drink!” And razors. It had to be Gillette, with the three blades. Socks, because there wasn’t a single pair left without holes in them. Then a salami, and dumplings, and another Jack. “Come on, they have a sale on. I can’t bear to go back to an empty house.” A familiar pattern. It took no time at all to resume the normal routine, with him manipulating me or screaming furiously, knowing that I would succumb to either one or the other.

At home, I locked myself into the bathroom, pressed my cheek against the hot towel rail and cried about Mum. The tear-stained face looking back at me from the mirror looked like my mother’s. That’s what I liked to think. She used to shut herself in there to cry. I shut my eyes and clamped my hands over my mouth so he wouldn’t hear the sobbing. He was too busy watching the news.

In the evening I cooked dinner, and he tried to get me drunk, telling me about how Grandma went. He couldn’t get to sleep, so he recalled his childhood transgressions. The time he stole a toy from a boy and buried it in the sand. During the war, he stole bread that his mother had hidden to string out the ration a few days longer. He thought he had stopped loving her even when he was a child. He carefully enunciated these words and turned away to look out of the window. I observed him intently. I wanted him to understand this stare of mine, but he understood nothing.

It was amazing to watch how quickly his expression kept changing as he spoke about her, from tender fondness to disgust and back again. He recalled how, when he was in tenth grade, he stole the eleven volumes of Turgenev’s collected works from the school library, and sold them. He got caught, and his mother had to leave work every day to take flowers and presents to the headmistress. She cried and pleaded for fear he’d be expelled from the Komsomol. He felt the humiliation still. But he enjoyed seeing her tears. Look at my meaningful stare, Dad, look at it.

He didn’t ask how my life was going. No interest at all. When he finally fell silent, I tried to tell him about my bachelor’s degree in international relations, my campaigning for women’s rights, how I might be doing work experience in Iceland, about the amazing mood in the capital, the protests, the pro-European fervour, how the country might be taking a turn for the better. He stopped listening almost immediately and resumed talking about himself.