She kept staring through the dirty window of the bus.

It was raining hard, so the windows should have been clean, but instead of washing away the dust, the raindrops whipped up a spray of brown mud that made it more and more difficult to see anything. The road was better now: no potholes, no jolting and no more jabs under her ribs.

She was actually holding the grenade when the police broke the door down and burst into the big room.

Dad and the other men shouted to each other but they were too slow off the mark, and just a few minutes later they’d been pushed up against the walls, handcuffed and beaten. She couldn’t remember how many police had come into the room, maybe ten or even twenty. All she remembered was that they kept screaming zatknis again and again and that they carried the same kind of gun that Dad sold, and that they won before they even started.

Their shouts had mixed with the sound of gunshots and breaking bottles.

All the noise had hurt her ears and then, suddenly, when Dad and his friends had been pinned to the floor, a strange silence fell.

Perhaps that silence had stayed in her memory more clearly than anything else; it had been a silence that had seemed to take over everything.

Mum’s hand. She grabbed it and pulled it closer, making it rest on the seat next to her, and she held on until the skin went white and she couldn’t squeeze it any harder. She had clung to her Mum’s hand just as hard when they sat outside the courtroom in Klaipeda, during the trial against her dad and his friends. She and Mum had sat there holding hands, and Mum cried for a long time when the court official in a grey suit came and told them that all of the accused had been sentenced to twenty-one years in prison.