Iryna woke while it was still night, a night as thick as all the June nights in Chuhuiv since Sasha had learned to sleep in his mother's bed, and she woke not because she had heard the first blast (the first blast had been far away, over the Donets river, a kind of dull thud that had not even made the glass tremble), but because she had felt the child's hand searching for his mother's wrist in his sleep, as it did every time his sleep cracked by a grain, and that gesture, which by day she would have ignored as one ignores all the gestures children make without knowing they make them, by night got under her skin like a warning, and the warning was that they had to go down, because between the first blast and the second there passed seven minutes, and in seven minutes you can get down to the under-stairs if you take the child in your arms without waking him entirely, and in nine months Iryna had learned to do it the way one learns a poem, syllable by syllable.

The three families of the building were already in their corners, each in its own corner, the way children arrange themselves during a test at school, and Iryna recognized them in order: the Marchenkos on the Persian rug that for nine months had not gone back into the house, the Kozyrs with their thermal blankets and the kettle (they had never understood that the kettle was useless in the under-stairs, but they brought it all the same), the widow Petrenko with the dog Bessmertny, who was two and a half years old and had never barked a single time because he was deaf. Sasha breathed against his mother's arm. Iryna slid her arm under the child's nape and laid him on his side, with his cheek and one ear against the cloth of her own coat, and her free hand she laid open, palm down, over the other ear, like a soft head-covering the child had known for nine months, because that was how the blasts reached Sasha, extinguished, passed first through the wool and then through his mother's palm.

The strike came at four seventeen in the morning, she learned it again later from governor Syniehubov on Telegram, and it came down on the building opposite, the one with the even numbers, where on the third floor lived the Hrabovska family and on the fifth floor lived Olha Kozyr alone, and it was then that Iryna heard Olha's voice on the floor above her own building (because Olha had come down during the night from the fifth floor to the Kozyrs' building, the way one sometimes goes down among cousins, and the Kozyrs let everyone know it, but on the nights of the attacks the Kozyrs always went down in a hurry and never remembered who had been left at their table), and Olha's voice on the floor above was calling a name, one name only, repeated the way one repeats the names that cannot be found, Yarik where are you Yarik where are you. Sasha stirred under the palm, turned his head just enough to uncover one ear, and Iryna felt the child's chest widen to take in the breath one needs to answer a name, because children answer names called in the dark, even other people's names, and in that half breath Iryna's hand slid from the ear to the mouth, a few centimetres of cheek, and stopped, and held. It held for forty seconds, counted in the stomach and not on the wrist, because her wrist was trembling too much for counting. Olha's voice went on: Yarik where are you. And to the other silences of the under-stairs (the Marchenkos, the Kozyrs who did not go up to see who had been left at their table, the widow Petrenko, the deaf dog) was added Sasha's pressed silence, which was his mother's silence, because his mother had chosen in one second not to answer Olha, not to call out to Olha, not to move toward the stairs, not to do the right thing neighbours do, and to keep her hand instead where it was, and to keep it there until Olha's voice should stop, and Olha's voice stopped at the fortieth second, because everything in the world stops after a time.

At dawn they came out of the under-stairs in the order in which they had gone down. The Marchenkos first, the Kozyrs (all except Olha, who had stayed on the floor above behind the closed door), the widow Petrenko with the dog. Iryna came out last, Sasha in her arms. Above them the building opposite was no longer there: it had become a single mass of concrete and furniture and linen, and from that mass a neighbour was already telling someone on the phone that Olha had never been a mother, that Olha had no son called Yarik, and that Yarik had been her husband, who had died in twenty-four on the Bakhmut front. Iryna asked Sasha whether he had heard anything. Sasha said no, he had heard nothing, and touched his cheek, where his mother's hand had left a pale red mark, and said it had been the pillow.

Iryna took her hand from the child's cheek with the slowness with which one peels a plaster from a wound already healed. Beneath it the mark was still visible, a small red moon at the side of the mouth, and Iryna thought that it would show for the rest of the day and that at school Sasha would say it had been the pillow, and that she herself, at the pharmacy on the corner of number twenty-seven, would buy the right cream, and that Olha's husband had been called Yarik.