At eleven fifty, Liudmyla puts the water for tea in a pot she had cleaned with lemon back in March, because Ivan, in a three-minute phone call from the front, had told her that limescale in pots was one of those things nobody at home knew how to deal with, and that he, in the trenches, had learned to deal with it using lemon, and Liudmyla, after hanging up, had gone to the pantry and taken the lemon she kept for tea and cut it in half and cleaned all three pots, one after the other, while Saltivka down below emptied out for yet another alarm; tonight the pot is still clean, and the water boils the way it did before the phone calls, before the war, before Ivan. The radio says the ceasefire begins at midnight. Liudmyla turns it off.

She sits at the kitchen table. In front of her: the landline. It is a red Vef from 1989, her mother's, which had sat unplugged for twenty-two years in the pantry, behind the good tablecloth, and which she had put back into service in March, after Ivan, in another of those brief calls that were now her life, had told her that in Saltivka the Russian jamming wiped out the mobile signal for hours at a time and that the landline, even if old, always got through; the technician had come on a Saturday morning, a Belarusian man of thirty who had asked no questions, had looked at the copper wire, had cleaned a connection, had said the line was still there, and had left without asking for payment, saying only that it rang now, and indeed it had rung, once, on the first of April, and it had been a teleshopping call from Minsk. On the fridge, held up by an apple-shaped magnet, there is the slip of paper with Ivan's mobile number. She knows it by heart. She has read it two thousand times. Tonight she reads it the way one reads prayers, not to remember it, but to have it in front of her.

At midnight and zero seconds she dials the number.

It rings. It rings. It rings. Liudmyla looks at her hand on the table. It is still. Her hand does not shake. A month ago, when the commanding officer had called to tell her Ivan had been moved to a position near Kupiansk, her hand had shaken. Tonight, no. Tonight it is her mother's hand, the hands her mother would lay on the table before speaking of things that were not to be said. It rings. It rings. On the fifth ring, someone answers.

"Yes?"

It is a woman's voice, young, saying "yes" in Russian, not in Ukrainian. Liudmyla, for one second, one second only, thinks she must have dialled wrong. Then she understands she hasn't — it is someone from the front, a comrade who speaks Russian like half of Saltivka. The voice is young, around twenty, not drowsy, not frightened, simply a voice answering the telephone. Liudmyla has not prepared what to say if someone else answered, because Liudmyla for three weeks had not called at all. Not out of indifference. She had understood in mid-April, one morning like any other while she was ironing a shirt that belonged to no one, that she wanted to know without being able to call, that she wanted the privilege of being the one who holds back, not the one who receives the call. Tonight she called, and now she says nothing.

She hangs up. The 1989 Vef has a weight Liudmyla had forgotten; the receiver returns to the cradle with the thud of something that has mass, and Liudmyla stays with her palm open on the receiver, the way one stays with an open palm on a forehead that is no longer warm.

The telephone rings.

It rings loud, because the 1989 Vef has a mechanical bell, metal striking metal, a ring that Saltivka had not heard in decades and which now, in the first minute of the ceasefire, fills the kitchen like a toll of a bell. Liudmyla picks up on the first ring. She says "yes" with no breath behind it.

"Mama, it was Sasha. She had the phone just then. She saw an unknown number, thought it might be the commanding officer, and answered. Sorry."

Liudmyla does not speak. She hears Ivan's breath, and beneath Ivan's breath the rustle of something that could be wind, or a drone, or nothing. Ivan says "Ma?" She does not speak. She thinks that since he had told her about the lemon they had not spoken again about things so small. She thinks that the ceasefire was not for him, it was for her, to give her three minutes of line, and now that she has them she does not know what to do with them. Ivan says "Ma, are you there?" She tightens her grip on the receiver.

Through the kitchen window, on the sixth floor, to the east — from the east everything comes — there is nothing to see. The city is dark. Ivan breathes. Liudmyla does not speak. She stays with the 1989 Vef pressed against her ear. She stays. She stays.

"Ma, are you there?"

Liudmyla looks at the slip of paper on the fridge. She reads it for the two-thousand-and-first time.