“How come?”

“The ambulance is too valuable. And, you know, it was orderly in the city to begin with, streets clean, flowers planted everywhere, kerbs painted, hedges trimmed. When the Russian NONAs and the tanks arrived for the first time, they kept to the road, drove right down the middle, and if they knocked over a tree or trampled a flowerbed, they’d get a telling off. Citizens cared about flowers. They don’t any longer.”

“Maybe if the tanks had never arrived, the flowers would still be in one piece?”

“What are you talking about? Whose side are you on anyway?”

“On their side.” K. nodded in the direction of the line of shoppers now curling round the corner. “Why aren’t we going to the front any longer? Why aren’t you going?”

“Why are you in such a hurry to get there? The soldiers get taught first aid for six days, I studied for six years. That’s why. I don’t want to croak.”

“You seem to think some people have less value than others.”

“You seem to be looking for trouble.”

K. had no answer for that.

Ten minutes later, the ambulance slowly pulled into a driveway strewn with stones and felled branches. The morning sun flooded the block of flats and courtyard. Nikolai swore, stopped the ambulance, got out, punted the branches and debris aside with his feet, got back behind the wheel and drove on. The smell of explosive residues was in the air.

“This one isn’t our callout,” Anton said. “You smell that? This explosion was only about five minutes ago. The strike happened while we were on our way.”

“Go that way. There’s the hole in the wall, I can already see where the shell hit,” K. answered.

He took a seat in the front and studied the grounds of the stricken building for mortar fragments.

“For fuck’s sake, do you have any idea of the kind of danger you’re putting us in? Let’s go back and wait.”

“Go.”

“Look, I don’t give a fuck, but one of you make a decision,” Nikolai said. “The only thing I care about is that we don’t get a puncture. Five times I’ve had to change tires this month. I’m fucked off with patching.”

They drove up to the block, got out and entered the first entrance. The asphalt in front of it was sprinkled with the rubble of a collapsed third-floor balcony.

An unkempt woman in a caretaker’s outfit stood on the steps. Her hands pressed to her chest, she keened: “Oh, dear God, oh, dear God.” An elderly man was lying on the ground by an open metal door. He had been swept out by a blast wave and bashed against the railing. His clothes, hands, face, and chest were covered in dust and blood. His body and face had been twisted by the shrapnel into something unrecognisable and non-human.

K. went up to the woman and clasped her wrist.

“Oh, dear God, oh, dear God.”

“Do you know him?”