She turned off the grinder.

“Maybe you need to look for a job?”

“I’ve got a job.”

“You are an activist, you go around harassing middle-aged separatist women, lesbians, and Roma. That’s not a job.”

“Gipsies!”

“Whatever. Not a job.”

“Well since it’s not a job, I guess it’s time I enlisted again, now my leg’s better.”

“Do you want to go back?” Maria laughed to hide the bitterness in her voice. He sensed mockery.

“Yes, the war’s not over.”

“The war will never be over.”

“Not if we stand around talking about it in the kitchen it won’t. It’s only going to get worse, if we don’t stop the Russians. What do you think I should do? You’re the one who doesn’t want me sitting around. What’s your solution?”

“You’re just looking for any solution that suits you.”

“Do you really think I’m enjoying this carnage? This death? You idiot! I love my country. I’d rip my heart out for this country. And you? What do you know about love like that? You don’t love anyone or anything.”

Andrei got up and left the kitchen. Tykhon raced after him. That hurt more than the “idiot” remark.

I fall for you, as one falls into an enchanted slumber.

The bunk is right by the window. I had to fight the nurses for it. I lay back and look outside. The moon slowly drifts past from behind the frame. I’m awake. Or so it seems. (I hope so anyway, otherwise I’m going to have to rewrite all this.) A sense of reality is returning. The paint oozing out of the pores of the wall is like a Polaroid developing into sharpness. The brighter the moonlight, the starker the loneliness. The more her pale face reveals itself, the heavier and stickier the fear. It seeps in from the street and settles like cold sweat on my skin.

The moonlight glows brighter, filling the room with pallid feverish air. Everything around dissolves in it—the ward, the hospital, the whole world drowns in its slicing rays. I lift my hand to write on the ceiling in inky shadows. I write words. Dream. Fear. Passion. A world of images and sounds is born of them. I hear your voice, footsteps, the noise of the road outside. The centre of the ceiling sags and the walls recede, the windows collapse into a milky void. I retreat, plunging into the sheet’s lustre. The hospital is a single organism, a mixture of living cells and machines, a system of moving points in space. They multiply—the hydra biting off its own head only to grow larger. I hold a tape measure against reality and try to measure the distance between you and me. From point to point, from edge to edge, the visible, growing chaos bars my way to you. I only plunge deeper and resurface to trace sinusoids in the space of the ward with dreams.

I was in awe when they told us at university about how we find the Fibonacci numbers in biology, anatomy, and the Universe. The lecturer slyly winked with his hints about how God is but a set of numbers, a mathematical rule, and the universe a structure built on those principles. Every well-built home contains a fragment of God, everybody too. But human consciousness is a variable, an anomaly that destroys precision and harmony, human passion is the irrational grain of sand in the machine of the Universe.