The troops had orders to loot the city, but the apartments he wandered into had already been ransacked. Sideboards emptied of silver dishes, walls with ghostly rectangles where paintings had hung, drawers pulled from dressers, and everything—jewellery, furnishings, bedding—carried away. Even the dinner plates, even the lightbulbs, all taken or else smashed on the floorboards where rugs had lain.

Through an open window—the curtains gone, of course—he’d watched a soldier lugging away an armchair; another, a lamp; a third, a cooking pot worn like a helmet so his hands could clutch a hatstand. Others had smaller prizes: a ladle, an umbrella, a pair of woman’s shoes. What they could not take they’d been instructed to break, and he had, shattering windows, ripping cupboards from walls, and how satisfying it was after months of being shot at.

But now he sways with the rocking of the train and stares out at the countryside as he’s carried away east. He thinks of his village—the small station, the cart ride along the dusty road, how his parents and sisters will run in from the fields when they catch sight of him. At the kitchen table, he will pull a small bundle from his kitbag and everyone will lean close to see what he’s unwrapping, will draw in their breath at the sight of it: a gleaming brass thing nestling in his hand, its lobed arms elegant as dragonfly wings, and on its top an enamel button with a delicate H. He will explain—a tap, the H for the hot water that gushed into a kitchen sink, and there will be gasps that such a thing is even possible.

Afterwards, sipping a glass of tea, he will tell his stories of the war: the near misses, the wounds, the triumphant march into the city, the friends he made, some of whom are still alive. Before long evening will come down, and his mother and sisters will prepare supper: his mother peeling vegetables, one sister feeding wood into the stove, another hauling in a bucket from the well. And though he’s finally home, that night he will turn restlessly in bed because it’s all pressing in on him: The bloated bodies in the streets. The screams echoing through ruined buildings. The women with frantic eyes and torn dresses. The old woman who’d crawled toward him across her kitchen floor, teeth broken and one eye swollen shut, crying for water, and how he’d kicked her away because he was busy with her tap.

Before dawn, still groggy with sleeplessness, he will creep out of the house into the cool air and walk through a meadow thick with dew. Beyond, the river will be silently rushing past, and he’ll take that tap from his pocket and fling it into the current, and though he’ll dunk his hands into the water, and though he’ll rub them against his shirt, the feel of that tap, warm with his own body’s heat, will linger.