Certain moments in life carry a great influence through the entire formation of the psyche and adulthood: childhood psychic traumas are superimposed on adult traumas, intertwining with them into a tight knot. Oleg understood this more than anyone else: raised among similarly abandoned children and then lying among bullets in the sun.

Maybe that's why he understood the importance of parents' influence and upbringing: the importance of love, support, tenderness. Neither the scars on his body nor his junk-killed vocal cords broke his will; no wonder. Oleg is strong, his drive to live is strong, like a man who knows the value of life, very fragile and ephemerally fast.

People's lives are crumbled very easily, not to speak in metaphors, literally with a single movement of a finger, if you hold a gun in your hand. And sometimes with a word carelessly thrown. Your body is a fragile vessel when you're carrying a child, and his fingers twitch, involuntarily trying to find a method of emergency defence should fate interrupt the idyll.

Oleg's body, wiry and large, towers behind you as he peers out from behind one of your shoulders and then the other like a hen-hatchery. It's hilarious: he looks at the kitchen knife in your hands as if it could fly off on its own and stab you in the heart, which naturally doesn't happen in nature. But God knows he's so paranoid.

"You know, I think you need to sit down," he begins again, squinting suspiciously and arching an eyebrow.

His attempts to look serious and intimidating to convince you seem ridiculously absurd, because the minute you round your eyes, innocently looking at him that way, he immediately crumbles.

"At least a breather?" an attempt at compromise ends in his grand failure once again.

You're so foolish for not seeing the way his fingers twitch as they grip your shoulders, the way his jaw tenses as he rests his chin on the top of your head. His understanding towards your desire for independence borders on his own desire to lock you in a safe room.