I came home eleven months early without telling anyone and found my wife sitting against a wall with her head shaved and her face bruised, while my mother shouted at me to throw her out. I didn't argue. I looked at what had actually been broken in that room, and then I asked my wife for the notebook.

PART 1 — WHAT THEY BROKE

I got three days because a rotation finished early.

I did not tell anybody. I had a hair clip in the top of my pack that I had bought in a market for the equivalent of about four dollars, because Tova's hair came down past her waist and she was always losing the things she pinned it with.

I came up the path of my mother's house at about six in the evening and I could hear my mother before I had the door open.

"Get her out of this house, Marek. Your wife's been borrowing off those men, she's shamed this family, and she's had somebody here while you've been gone."

That is the first thing I heard after eleven months.

The front room looked like something had happened in it. A chair on its side. A thermos in pieces. Water across the floor.

Then I saw Tova.