Once I had calmed down, I caught my breath and laid out the shopping on the table. Eggs, milk, black bread, buckwheat, bacon and—this was a real stroke of luck—a two-hundred-gram chunk of fresh cheese. I made myself a bacon and cheese sandwich and ate it with gusto. I hadn’t been able to eat properly for several days. The food situation in the city had worsened. Almost all the shops in our neighbourhood were shut, either because of a lack of food or shelling. The ones that stayed open doubled their prices. They said the city was totally surrounded and that food was arriving in small consignments in private cars. This arrangement had quickly become its own little racket: delivery men came to an arrangement with the surrounding Ukrainian troops, providing their always badly supplied checkpoints with rations of groceries and money in return for safe passage; then the food that got through would be sold at exorbitant prices. The word was that soldiers sometimes even traded their guns for food.

“Hey!” he shouted from his room. “Are they still not paying out pensions? It’s already the fifteenth!”

“No Dad,” I shouted back. “The Russians confiscated all the money in the safes. And they haven’t brought over any more.”

No answer. He was probably writing.

People were spouting all kinds of nonsense around that time. And it was all, apparently, ending up on his walls.

The driver of a food delivery truck was killed in crossfire right at the entrance to the city. The burnt-out truck stood for a long time next to those large letters marking its name. Snipers used them as a firing position and soon the metal letters had, like the truck, come to resemble a colander.