He liked to say: “Write down your dreams and burn the paper, and the dream will be dreamed by the one you love. That way you can share your feelings with people far away.” It’s just as well that nobody can see his dream any longer.

Don’t get angry, you say? You want me to tell you how it went down? The emotions, the terror, the wounds? You say it’ll make me feel better. I don’t think remembering is going to make it any better. But I’ll obey. I like obeying you.

I can see it like it was happening right now, that first blast of senselessness. Like a splinter lodged in my memory: they brought Dad home with his leg in plaster and a metal splint taped into place, so the joint wouldn’t move.

The war had started a few months earlier and it had got to a point when it felt like something remarkable if anybody got hurt or suffered for any other reason. Dad moaned and complained about the pain, giving orders about which way and where to position the mattress. It had to be bang in the centre of the room, so he had a perfect view of the walls: the squares, the circles, the shape of his grand outline. I put down next to him a contraption fashioned out of a plastic bottle in which he could pee unaided and a ceramic teapot painted with blue flowers from which he drank water. He barked at me for that, demanding I not treat him like a cripple. He wanted a normal bottle. And then suddenly he froze, stared at his leg, pointed and said: “Take a look, something’s not right.”

His leg lay motionless on the mattress. “Fix it,” he said. I didn’t understand. He stared at it intently. “It’s broken, but it looks fine,” I said. He nodded and slumped back into the pillows: “Fine.”

He was seventy-seven. I was twenty-five.

My memories are muddled with the fears and rumours that percolated in the city. It was hard to tell one from the other. We were afraid to even say the word “war.” It would mean admitting we were wrong and short-sighted when we laughed at the drunks who barricaded the roads and stormed the mayor’s office and police precincts. Surely they’d be run out of town, we said. But nobody came.

That was when the separatist “rrrepublic”—the men would roll their r’s when they said that word, like you might say “rrrevolution”—was just a courtyard folly on a 200-square-metre plot. Two buildings and a square. Its only citizens were local hotheads and guys who had come from Russia in camouflage, sweatpants, and balaclavas, with their sticks and pneumatic guns; hysterical biddies with their sandwiches and icons; wheeler-dealers and turncoat civil servants. The future ministers of a fictitious state. Why did they pick us? Was there a secret plan, or was it just fate? At the start of spring, when they stormed the administration building, there were only about two hundred of them.