Persistent thumping and early morning glare woke Anton. As he opened his eyes, through a torn and flimsy curtain, he saw the sunflower outside the window. It swayed in the breeze and repetitively bumped up against the pollen-specked glass.

The annoying thumping matched the pulsing ache of his head. He propped himself up. There was a nearly-empty litre bottle of Nemiroff and a grimy jam jar on the cow-milking stool that passed for his table, nightstand, and bookshelf in his dormitory cubicle.

It was his choice, Anton knew, however small. To wake up to this – the seediness and regret of another hangover. Or, to wake up to the low drumming of dread.

The war took away the big choices. He pulled the green-and-gold FC Metalist football t-shirt off the dirty linoleum floor and over his head. It was the least smelly of the three shirts he had managed to grab when he got out of Saltivka, his suburb of Kharkiv, and his ‘normal life’ as fast as he could some six months ago.

The hangover: that was his preferred option. With the hangover, there was an explanation. A cause – the booze – and an effect – the tortured body and the tarnished mind. That was something he could understand and even compare and measure. Better or worse than yesterday’s.

And, he could medicate a hangover. Like other days, Anton could pour the remaining ‘two fingers’ at the bottom of last night’s vodka into a plastic Coke bottle and nip at it across the working day. He could numb himself from the guilt of not being at the front with his friends; the military recruiters cited his bad knees as a reason to reject him.

No one here at the former collective farm cared if he did or if he didn’t drink through the day. The other two dozen refugees – or ‘internally displaced people’, as they were clinically called by officialdom – were in the same sinking boat as him. And, the 300 or so permanent villagers were mostly elderly masters of the cultural craft of selective sight.

Altogether, he thought, the cost/benefit analysis for being hungover was better than for the dread that came with sobriety. To sober Anton, who had lost his Euro-renovated apartment, his Ford Mondeo, his career, and his pride to the invasion and then occupation, the daily despair felt alternately woolly and sharp.

On the one hand, it clouded everything and made his experiences now feel dreamy and dull. But when, after a tractor backfired on the wheat field or a harsh word was delivered by the stout woman serving lunch in the company canteen, it stung him and made him as angry as a wasp. The dread’s core logic, or illogic rather, it seemed to Anton, was to be disproportionate in one direction or the other.

He looked at his mobile for the first time of thousands of times to come today. His Telegram feed spoke of literally meters of territory gained in the south and enemy artillery barrages still raining down near his former apartment on the outskirts of the country’s ‘second city’ in the east. It was a place of mostly rubble now, but the enemy wanted it to further demolish it into the dust of an urban desert. Reading the channels, Anton thought, was like listening to a chorus of the mad that only knew one song and kept repeating it over and over. But maybe, he supposed, he was the mad one for expecting some new tune.

Anton saw from the phone’s clock that he had missed breakfast. He needed to get to his ‘job’ at what was nowadays an agri-business with a slick name.

A local boy who had become rich as a media lawyer in Moscow in the 90s, had basically stolen the farm for himself when it was de-collectivised. Instead of the hammer-and-sickle, its inhabitants and workers, including his grandparents when they were alive, now paid homage to their mini-oligarch who they solely relied on for work and housing. Whenever he had called her on the landline he had installed, his grandmother, Baba Olena, told him to say a prayer for his boss’ well-being.

It infuriated him, but he would never say a harsh word to the old woman who always wore a maroon and floral-patterned scarf on her head. Anton knew she had seen two younger sisters slowly starve to death during the communists’ forced famine in the 30s, and three male cousins instantly die from Nazi bullets for their beliefs during the Great War. In the post-war years, when their old songs could only be sung in whispers, she had also buried a husband and a daughter in the village cemetery at the edge of town.

The old woman did not speak of the sisters’ deaths, but always left extra flowers – cut from her own garden – at her husband’s and daughter’s grave. There were metallised black-and-white portrait photos of them on the shared tombstone. As a boy, in a time when the village didn’t invoke the memory of his boss, he had once asked her if her sisters – his aunts – were buried there too, but received only a warm hand through his blonde hair in reply. It was a gentle silence that he knew not to break.

Being angry at his work was part of Anton’s larger anger too. How the country had moved ahead after independence, including him as the now 42-year-old general manager of a prospering plumbing supply company, while other parts of the country saw little change but for the colours. From red to blue and gold. From collective farm bosses with gold teeth who otherwise hid their stolen wealth to today’s local oligarchs who boastfully drove their Bentleys down still-unpaved roads.

Now, Anton was back in Velyka Bereza, the village of his grandparents’ lives and his father’s beginnings. He’d spent childhood summers there, fishing and missing the computer he was teaching himself to program. His new reality was that he was being fed by the company in exchange for a make-believe job. ‘My patriotic duty’ the parasitic bugger called giving shelter to the refugees who had fled from the frontlines to the village of their ancestors. ‘At least it’s safe,’ Anton would say to himself whenever the resentment threatened to fully sink him like the stones he used to throw into the muddy river that ran through the paddocks.

He poured the vodka into the plastic Coke bottle and took it with him to one of the farm’s ramshackle works sheds. There, he loaded the tools he needed into a green wheelbarrow with a wonky wheel: a posthole digger, a long scythe, and a shorter shovel. The shed was where farm management kept the equipment for the tasks that multi-million dollar tractors and combine harvesters didn’t do.

Then, he pushed the wheelbarrow through the ‘civic’ part of the village. He went past the cultural centre which still had a fading-red cement star above its doorway. Then past the blue-walled schoolhouse his father had attended. His old man got out of the village through Red Army conscription and then trained as a civil engineer who dedicated his life to building bus shelters and town libraries.

The village’s old church was where Anton was to do his ‘busy work’. One of the company’s foremen had assigned him the job of repairing the wooden perimeter fence of the church’s territory including the little square at its front. Five new cupolas – one large one in the centre and four reaching out to form a crucifix configuration – made of shiny blue tin rested atop the old wooden structure. They were a ‘gift’ in honour of his peasant worker ancestors from the company to the village.

Somehow, the church had survived long enough to now witness its third war; under the communists, it had been used to store spare parts for farm machinery; the oil stains were still visible on its floor.

The church fence was missing palings in many places. ‘Like a drunken ice hockey player’s mouth,’ Anton thought. In other places, the cross-rails had sagged and sunk parts of the fence into the overgrown grass around it.

Or, what was left of the grass after Anton had spent yesterday slowly and lazily slicing it away using the old-fashioned scythe, with its steam-bent, S-shaped wooden shaft and an improbably pointy toe, or ending, to its metal blade. The swooshing of the blade through swathes of the early summer’s grass had been good, though, as was sharpening it with a whetting stone he carried in his pants’ pocket. Part of Anton wanted to admit it had been satisfying work, but that would require a pause to the despair and cynicism he felt was his right.

Today, the goal, such as it was when there was no deadline, was to dig holes to then set and cement new fence posts where they were needed. About half of the original ones – perhaps installed more than one hundred years ago, Anton calculated – were rotted out or missing.

He set himself up to dig the first hole. With both hands, he lifted the post-hole digger and then slammed it down into the rich, black earth that made the country sought after for centuries by its neighbours. It sunk about a third of a meter into the loam and Anton changed his grip to spread out its two shafts and scoop the dirt out. He struck down and scooped out three more times to get to the right depth for the fence posts.

It was overcast but sticky like the banks of the river, and sweat started to seep onto his forehead and forearms. The familiar creak of his knees started; the precursor to pain and its limitations.

Anton moved three meters down the old fence line and repeated the process. And, once more. He was on his fourth hole. The post-hole digger slid into the peaty soil, but struck something. To Anton, it sounded like something had cracked underneath its downward force. Maybe, a buried stick or an old paling, he thought. He spread the shafts and the two spade-like ends of the digger grabbed at the earth.

As he deposited the dirt to his side, Anton saw what he knew right away to be part of a bone. The dirt had fallen away where he realised he had just broken it. He crouched down and turned the bone over in his hand. It felt lighter than it looked. Delicate but solid. Perhaps, a femur from a dog or a goat, Anton considered.

He rose and brought down the digger again. Again, there was the sound and the discovery of more bone.

For the next half-hour, as Anton sunk holes in a rough radius from the original hole, he struck on bone. But not from any farm animal. He brought up crumbly parts of fingers, the curve of ribs, the solidity of femurs, and more bones. Anton noticed they were all largely at the same depth.

He stopped and looked at the inventory of death that he was uncovering. The Coke bottle with vodka was in the wheelbarrow. He decided not to swallow from it.

Instead, taking in the scatter of remains he was now surrounded by, Anton decided to more systematically approach the task. He imagined a box under the ground and along the fence line. Using the shovel, he began to carefully dig out an imaginary box of three meters in length, two meters in width and half a meter in depth. Rather than bringing the discovered bones up and out, he began to clear the dirt around what he found, but leave them in place.

A larger skeleton, bent at the elbows with rib bones and hand bones merged into each other and on its back, emerged from the dirt. It had a bullet hole bursting through the back of its skull. Next to the man’s remains, there was the skeleton of a small child curled up as if to sleep. He found two other adult skeletons, one on its side and the other face down. Finally, further down the fence line, two skulls with their foreheads delicately touching.

‘Who were these people,’ he thought to himself. Was it the ‘starosta’ or village elder whom he knew the Bolsheviks often executed as they destroyed the landowning farmers or ‘kulaks’? Was it a young daughter of his at his side? Why were the two skulls so close and had animals removed the rest of their bodies?

He lifted his t-shirt and wiped the sweat and grime from his forehead. By laying down the shovel, he measured out meter-long quadrants of the site. He’d forgotten his knees.

Anton took out his phone and photographed each quadrant. With dirt-covered fingers, he tapped in the details of what was uncovered in each quadrant, while assigning each a reference number. He began to think about how to secure the site with tarpaulins and where he could find the blue plastic sheets on the farm.

‘There’s the famine memorial in Kyiv by the river, and a research centre too. And, no doubt, academics,’ he thought to himself.

Anton stood at the site on the church’s deteriorated fence line and considered what to punch into Google first. ‘I need a plan,’ he said to himself.

Sun snuck through cloud and glinted off the device’s cracked screen. He looked up. A stork – with its huge black-and-white wings extended – soared across the village sky.

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