Still no news.

It's been over three days already. Three unbearably hot days. Unbearable.

I'm with Marta all the time, and that's why mama does most of the searching: I don't even remember anymore all the places she's been to.

Petrovka book market - he used to go there often.

Baikovo Cemetery - where his family is buried, and also, people leave food and drink on the graves, and what if he's been surviving on that?

Talking to drunks and bums at Kontraktova Ploshcha - he could've gotten there by bus. Useless. A few of them, for example, claimed they'd known him for fifteen years.

Kyiv train station, for the second time yesterday.

I've been to the tennis courts where he worked for two decades or so, where I spent much of my childhood.

No trace of him anywhere.

The police told mama they'd been making inquiries at Kyiv morgues - and he's not there, either. Thank God.

I had the scariest phone conversation of my life tonight, with a very nice woman from the MVS's missing persons department (272-0672 is their number, they are located at 15 Vladymirska St.): she questioned me on my father's clothes, his teeth, his hair, his eyebrows, and his teeth again and again, comparing my answers to some description in front of her, and then we decided it wasn't my father that they had in their database. I didn't have the guts to ask her whether we were talking about a dead person or someone who's still alive. Unlike the previous "it's not him" situation, this one was such a relief.

Tomorrow, we hope, NTN TV channel will air his picture and description in their Svidok ("Witness") program.