The blast came at dawn. Smoke curled against the sky. When it cleared, Dmitri discovered he was still breathing. He stretched out his hand to touch Mira. She took it and squeezed it.
‘Phew! That one was close,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’
He opened one eye. The first rays of the sun illuminated his sister’s ash-smeared face and hair. Smoke swirled around her head. She looked like the angel of death as she raised herself from the rubble and crouched over him.
‘Well? Are you?’
He groaned, clutching his stomach melodramatically.
‘Bastard! Come on. Let’s get out of here.’
He followed her laughter down the rubble-strewn street. Half-crouched as they ran, they were like shadows in a puppet theatre. Twins. Two teenagers whose hearts beat as one. They spoke in glances and whispers, sharing everything — scraps of food, a blanket against the cold, and the grief buried deep in their gut.
Without Mira, he was nothing. She wasn’t just his sister; she was the flame that fanned his embers. Quick to joke, quicker to fight, she had once chased off a soldier with a handful of stones and a curse in their mother tongue. He never knew where she learned such bravery, but he understood the rage. They lived as best they could in this place whose buildings had been reduced to debris and dust. What one lacked, the other carried. What one feared, the other defied.
At the end of the street, Mira pulled him into a shop doorway and pointed. Smoke from evil-smelling cigarettes lingered in the air. Not thirty metres away, three soldiers stood talking. Their weapons leant haphazardly against the railings, and they had the look of men who had been through hell and come out alive. Gaunt faces, hollow eyes, and laughter a touch too loud to conceal their frayed nerves. She had seen that type before. In her experience, they were harmless.
Dmitri had barely caught his breath when she was off again. Signalling with the flat of her hand for him to stay out of sight, she strode confidently into the street towards them. A burly, red-headed corporal glanced up. He spat and ground his cigarette into the dust, and winked at his companions.
‘Here comes a bit of sport.’
They waited until she was a dozen paces away.
‘Well, well, what have we here? You’re a brazen young hussy if ever there was one.’
She held out her hands in supplication. ‘Got any food, mister?’ she whined.
‘Whatcha got in exchange then, my pretty?’
She looked at him coyly and hitched her dress above the knee.
Meanwhile, Dmitri edged out from the doorway, and like a wraith, he skirted round behind them.
Mira brushed a strand of hair from her face and pouted.
‘Right, you little minx, you’ve asked for it.’ The corporal lunged forward to grab her.
She stepped sideways with the grace of a ballet dancer and stuck her foot out. He went sprawling across the pavement and landed in the gutter with an oath. His companions roared with laughter but were brought up short by a click behind them.
They spun around to find Dmitri facing them with a gun at his shoulder and his eye lined up with the sight.
They froze.
Dmitri's hands were steady.
‘Don’t move,’ he said.
The corporal had already pushed himself up and was brushing gravel from his elbows. His eyes narrowed. ‘You little tyke!’
‘Bend down slowly and leave any food you have on the pavement,’ Dmitri said. ‘Now.’
The youngest of the three, maybe no older than twenty, slowly reached into his satchel and withdrew a dented tin and two cracked biscuits. He laid them on the ground like offerings at a shrine. His companion followed suit.
‘That’s right,’ Dmitri said. ‘No sudden movements. Now, back away slowly.’
The corporal didn’t move. ‘You’ve got no idea who you’re messing with, you snivelling little bog rat.’
Mira stuck her pert nubs out defiantly. ‘Who cares?’
She was already at Dmitri’s side and had the corporal’s rifle in her hands. She aimed the barrel just below his belt. ‘So? How about your offering, bigshot?’
The corporal sneered. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, girly. See if you don’t.’
‘Oh, yes? Then let’s see what you’re made of. Drop your pants, soldier.’
He took a couple of steps forward. She lowered the rifle a fraction. There was a sharp crack as she fired, and a flurry of dust by his foot.
‘I mean it.’
He scrabbled for his belt and pushed his trousers down to his ankles. Dmitri scooped up the food offerings and backed away to the railings.
Mira edged towards him, her eyes never leaving the corporal. ’You're lucky we're not killers, soldier. C’mon, bro, time to split.’
They tossed the three rifles over the railings and took off down the street like a couple of kids on the lam. Mira gave a triumphant whoop as they rounded the corner and ducked down a side alley. They had grown up in the town and knew every twist and turn. They climbed relentlessly until, with chests heaving, they collapsed in the shadow of a bombed-out church.
‘You’re a damn fool,’ Dmitri said. ‘They could’ve killed you.’
‘They could’ve, but they didn’t. And now we eat.’
He grinned, holding up the spoils of war, and she laughed with that tinkling laugh he’d followed through alleyways, airstrikes, and months of deprivation. They gave each other a high five and tucked in ravenously. When they’d finished, they lay back in the grass and looked up at the sky. The day was bleak, with thin, high cloud and a feeling of snow in the air.
They drew close to one another for warmth. Weak sunlight filtered through the haze. The town was spread out below, like a corpse beneath a shroud. Above them, the chancel window had been blown out and was now a black hole in a scorched façade. Fragments of stained glass glittered at their feet. Silence filled the air, but it was not the silence of peace. It was the silence that comes after screaming. It was broken by the creak of a weakened beam. There was a deafening crash as it collapsed, taking with it a clatter of loose masonry.
‘Let’s go,’ Mira said. ‘This place is giving me the creeps.’
They clambered down the steps towards the church school at the bottom of the hill. The playground had mostly disappeared into a bomb crater, its equipment twisted and charred. A scorched tricycle rested upside-down beside a burnt-out car. Papers lay scattered like ghosts. There were pages from school textbooks and children’s drawings of flowers — and of aeroplanes. The twisted remains of a doll lying by the drinking fountain haunted the debris. Dmitri and Mira hurried past, averting their eyes and hardening their hearts.
Survival was all that mattered.
They kept a wary eye out for the soldiers as they headed back to the skeletal remains of their home. It still gave them shelter of a sort and the bitter-sweet scent of old memories. Their mother had vanished during the spring offensive, and it was Mira who now held him through the night, smothering his nightmares with her soft hands. That night, they slept fitfully. At least they had food in their stomachs, the first in two days.
***
When morning came, she was the first to get up. ‘Sleep on, brother,’ she whispered. ‘I’m going to get water. I shan’t be long.’
Half awake, he heard her bounding down the stairs. He hopped over to the window with one leg in his trousers, leaned out, and shouted her name.
She turned, smiled, and waved.
‘Wait! I’m coming with you.’ He seized his jacket and flew out of the door.
Mira stood on the other side of the street, bathed in morning sunlight.
Dmitri was about to cross when he heard the telltale whistle of an artillery shell flying overhead. Two streets away, there was a soundless flash followed by a cloud of smoke and a loud boom. The second shell fell shorter. There was an ear-splitting explosion, and debris flew in all directions. The walls of the building behind Mira shuddered, and its windows imploded. For a moment, she was airborne, light as ash — then came the fall with a sound he would hear for the rest of his life, like a sandbag slung on the sidewalk.
Dmitri was temporarily stunned by the blast, but when his eyes refocused, he could see her hand reaching out towards him. He launched himself forward, but the ground seemed to pull at his feet as if something unseen had already decided her fate. Before he was halfway, the building collapsed. Its façade crumbled, and the roof caved in.
He raced forward with an anguished scream and scrabbled frantically amongst the debris. His hands bled as he tossed rubble aside, but in his frenzy, he was scarcely aware of the lacerations and bruises inflicted by the broken ribs of the building and unyielding blocks of masonry.
‘Mira! I'm here, Mira.’ His words were choked with dust and emotion.
Others came to his aid with long-handled shovels, digging and shifting what they could before the excavators arrived. Someone pushed past him with a crowbar. Using almost superhuman strength, this newcomer shifted a massive beam, exposing a hollow like a sinkhole. Mira lay motionless at the bottom.
Before anyone could stop him, Dmitri scrambled down and slid into the hole alongside her. When the ambulance eventually arrived, the paramedics found him rocking to and fro, cradling her broken body like a child cradling a dream. Her flaxen hair was strewn in unkempt strands across her face and partly concealed the crimson seep of blood. He was like one in a trance. His eyes were unfocused, and no words passed his lips. They gently separated him from his sister, and they wrapped her in a shroud.
He was whisked away to the nearest hospital in the ambulance and placed under observation. Days went by. He said nothing and initially needed to be tube-fed. A psychiatrist diagnosed catatonia and treated him first with Valium and then, a few days later, with electroconvulsive therapy. Neither did much good.
***
Eventually, he was transferred to a specialised psychiatric facility well away from the war zone, one with the necessary resources for managing his condition. Some of the contract nursing staff there called him ghost-boy, and the name stuck. Even though Dmitri appeared unresponsive, he was aware of his surroundings and could hear and see what was happening around him but, locked in his cage of grief, he could only smile inwardly. Ghost-boy. How close to the truth that was.
In the second week of his illness, the dreams began. A familiar figure stood before him, robed in silence and watching him. She spoke no words, but her gaze held a strange recognition — not of what he was, but of what he had been, and might yet become. In that moment, something opened, faint as a crack in stone. Something in his chest stirred like a seed remembering spring. Somewhere beyond sleep, a thread tugged at the centre of him — gentle, but insistent. He did not know what it was. Only that it led inward. By morning, the dream had dissolved, leaving a deep sense of something half-remembered. He strained to bring it back into focus, and the effort caused a transient animation to his face, a slight furrowing of the brow, a flicker of eyelids, but nothing more.
These signs of animation might have gone unnoticed but for Elena Prishtina, a volunteer visitor who had been helping out at the facility for more than a year. She took a particular interest in the boy, perhaps because he reminded her of Stanislav, her eighteen-year-old son, killed in an explosion during the same spring offensive that had taken Dmitri’s mother. Her husband had also been among the casualties.
To compensate for these grievous losses, she had developed a passionate desire to alleviate the suffering of broken survivors, and she had undertaken specific training to deal with cases such as Dmitri’s. She was one of the few people he allowed to spoon-feed him, and on that particular morning, she was at his side, about to feed him his breakfast. A strong bond had developed between them, for she treated him with gentleness and respect, and had no patience with the nickname circulating. Every time she heard someone use it, she called them out.
‘How dare you say that! His name is Dmitri. Ghost-child, indeed!’
She would take his hand and whisper, ‘You’re no ghost-child, sweetheart. A dream-child, more like.’ And that is what she continued to call him, each time she came to visit.
‘And how is my little dream-child today? You look so much better. We’ll have you up and about in no time.’
With endearments such as these, she had him eating, if not out of her hand, at least out of her spoon.
She was quick to notice the furrowing of his brow and the slight flicker of his eyelids. The doctors were encouraged by these positive signs, and at a meeting of the board a few days later, when the regular subject of beds arose, the administrator brought it up. Because of the ongoing war in the east, there was a steady influx of patients from the battlefront needing psychiatric care. Pragmatic decisions needed to be taken.
‘What about Dmitri Zahir? The one they call the ghost-child,’ he asked.
‘You’d better not let Mrs Prishtina hear you calling him that!’ one of the doctors said with a chuckle.
‘No, of course not. But now you bring her name up, could I make a suggestion? She has established an extraordinary connection with the boy, and although Dmitri is still catatonic, he is stable. She owns a hunting lodge in the mountains, and in the past, she has had other patients there for convalescent care. Less serious cases, but nonetheless...’
‘I’ll ask her. I feel sure she will agree.’ Dmitri’s psychiatrist was a young man, fresh out of training. He cupped his chin between his forefinger and thumb in a pose intended to imply professional wisdom. ‘The placement could be on a trial basis to start with. One can never be sure of the effect new surroundings may have, but she is in easy reach of the clinic if things don’t work out.’
Elena was duly approached and, as predicted, she eagerly accepted the challenge.
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Warning: The author has noted that this contains the highest level of violence.
