Tolik has just fulfilled the greatest dream of his life: he bought a house where everything would be just the way he wants it , and four thousand kilometers away from his maddening family. But war turned everything upside down, and suddenly his relatives descended upon him: his mother, a one-legged uncle, a distant cousin with her slobbering dog, a sister with a depressed friend, and even a feline mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.
While in Ukraine, explosions shatter windows and people die by the hundreds and thousands, the war in Tolik’s house is not fought in trenches — it’s a domestic one. It lives in the details of everyday life, in the routines of people trying to build a temporary home in a foreign land, one that smells faintly of tomatoes.
Here lies the unbearable simplicity of daily existence for those whose souls remain back home, in Ukraine. But the war is always with them. It’s like a ladder — with many rungs, heights, and dimensions.
