Returning from work back to Dad’s I saw a crowd. A tan-coloured car and a green ambulance were parked in the driveway. I hastened my pace and took out my phone to make a call. There was no signal. I kept trying to make the call over and over again, battling to keep my composure and avoid running. An old lady in the yard shrank back when I got in her way. She crossed herself and said: “He was killed by a shell, look at the crater. And they took a body out of the flats next door too. That one over there has been lying out for three hours and nobody has come to take him away. Bastards!” With that she trotted off home. I ran and squeezed myself through the crowd. All the windows in the block up to the third floor were smashed.

A man covered with a stripy, red blanket lay face down on the ground in a widening pool of blood. Everybody just stared at the puddle like a herd of anxious elephants standing over a dead calf. There were doctors there too, waiting for something. I scanned the crowd: I didn’t want to look at the body—it was the first dead person I had ever seen. It didn’t look like Dad, but it was impossible to say for sure. Dead people all look alike. I looked around hoping to see his face in the crowd. Why had he not come out? He lives for this stuff. I saw a woman being held back by six male hands. She stood with her hands clamped over her face as her body convulsed mutely. Suddenly, she managed to break free, ran to the man and dropped to the ground, covering him with her body. She sobbed: “Get up! Get up! Stop playing around, son.” Another man rushed behind her. He bent forward in an odd position and wept loudly.

I entered the flats amid the sound of their lament and climbed up to the fifth floor, pushed open the front door and rushed to Dad’s room.

He was leaning out of the open window and holding onto the frame. The glass was intact. Good.

“Are you alright? Was your phone turned off?”

He reluctantly tore his gaze away from the scene on the street and answered: “There’s been no signal all day. It’ll probably always be like this during offensives.” He paused with a sudden thought. “Good God, it feels like this is the war I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

A chill ran down my spine.

“This is all so scary Dad.”

“Of course,” he said, moving away from the window and heading toward a still-vacant section of wall. “Did you see the body down there? Was he young?” He fished a black marker out of his pocket, drew a circle and wrote something inside. He then drew arrows to it from two other circles nearby and a long, dotted line across the wall from a circle in the other corner.