K. closed his eyes for a second to calm his nerves. He laid the case down on a stool, opened it and took out a crepe bandage.

“The girl needs air, not a basement. You need to leave the city. Come here, let me put on a bandage at least.”

He applied a haemostatic pad and wrapped the bandage around the woman’s forearm.

“Ok, that’s it.”

“That’s it?” The woman looked at her arm.

“That’s it. If you don’t come to hospital in the next couple of days to get the shrapnel removed and a round of antibiotics, the arm will have to be amputated. Is that clear?”

The woman blanched.

“Amputated?”

“That’s my word as a seasoned anaesthesiologist.”

K. again searched for the dead man’s wife. She was nowhere to be found.

He went outside and drew deeply on the warm, fresh summer air. The smell of explosives was replaced by the scent of greenery and flowers. Nikolai was smoking in the ambulance and reading a newspaper.

Looking up at the block, K. pointed to the hole in the wall and asked a woman pulling broken glass out of a window frame on the first floor: “Madam, which entrance to the flats is this one?”

“The one you were in.”

K. ran upstairs. The doors on the third floor were open. Voices and laughter came from the flat.

“Come on, come on, ha-ha-ha!”

He heard Anton. Entering the corridor and looking into the kitchen, he saw three men and Anton, who had settled his large posterior down on a small kitchen stool. They were drinking vodka.

“Those faggots won’t get us! Ha-ha-ha!” Shoulder-slapping ensued.

“To your health, doctor.” A glass was thrust into Anton’s hand.

Seeing K., Anton stood up.

“There you are. Give me the case, will you? There’s an old lady next door.”

He swigged his drink.

“Is she hurt?” asked K., turning away.

Anton sprang into the hallway.

“No, high blood pressure. When the shell hit, she was in the bog. That lot were boozing in the kitchen.”

The old woman was lying on a sofa in a room with a collapsed ceiling. “Oh, oh, oh, I’m dying.”

Somebody in the kitchen said: “Come on Vadya, what’s the holdup? Have you had a stroke? Pour! If we don’t have a drink, we’ll lose our mind.”

K. leaned over the woman and took her blood pressure. One sixty over ninety. He checked her pupils and gave her a shot of magnesium sulphate.

“Grandma, you need to go to hospital. You’ve got a concussion.”

She looked at the broken window.

“My mosquito nets!”

K. snapped the case shut.

“Grandma, never mind the nets. You don’t even have any windows left!”

The woman jumped up and walked to the window. The shot had worked quickly.

“Oh, heavens, my mosquito nets, there they are!”

“For God’s sake, what is with these people?” K. was unable to bite his tongue.

Anton stood in the doorway, grinning.

The woman was already limping downstairs.