Maria looked up from the mirror and glowered at Andrei across the room. A cold, impervious stare, Andrei felt. But he couldn’t see that the hand holding the eyeliner was trembling. Andrei had thoughts in his head, but the words that came out didn’t match them.

“I’m sorry, this is just not on. Why don’t you take me seriously? Everything here is fake, artificial, unimportant. Don’t you get it? Every day over there, on the front, it’s like your last day. Everything there is important. A cup of hot tea is an occasion. Every morning you wake up alive is a miracle. Everything there feels real: friends, enemies, ambitions. None of this scrambling for needless stuff, no mortgages, no senseless rules about decency. Things really depend on you there. That’s why people keep going back. But here? Things, things, things. Buy, sell, eat, make money.”

“And sex?” Maria took out a palette and applied a dark shade to the corner of her eyelids. “All I get from you is ‘me, me, me.’ All people get from you is how much you’ve suffered, how angry you are. But you’re not doing anything to return to normality. You are a man, after all, a soldier. You all knew what to expect when you came back from the war. And I’m not even going to mention how little time you spent there.”

She put the eyeshadow to one side, took up a pencil, drew closer to the mirror and began applying lines. The mirror fogged up and cleared again.

He looked at her, enraged.

“You’re not listening to me. You’re not listening to me at all.”

“Not at all. I’m listening to you more than you listen to yourself. Go back, if that’s what you need to do. Go back, if everything there was so great. Go kill one another. Go cripple one another. And then come back and whinge. And then we’ll give birth to more husbands and sons, we’ll buy you more artificial limbs. Go on, go back, all your friends are there—all of them except for the ones running around after separatists and playing at tanks. Go, I’m not stopping you.”

Andrei leapt up and rushed towards her. Maria jolted and smudged the line below her eyelashes, but she did not turn to face him. She shook her head, grabbed a cotton wool bud, licked it and rubbed at the mark. She was hunched over by the window with Andrei looming over her, but she did not for a moment tear her gaze from the mirror. Her eyes were wet with tears. She traced the pencil across her damp eyelid trying to keep the line straight.

“Yes, cry why don’t you?” said Andrei, breathing heavily and spying her tears in the quivering reflection. “Always the easy way out. I’m the bad guy.”

He spun on his feet and exited the room, slamming the door so hard that a chunk of plaster fell to the ground. He stamped along the hallway and shouted: “You can go to your party on your own!”