My life was haunted by madness and horror. The books I had written spoke of nothing else. After "The Adversary," I could no longer continue. I wanted to escape this compulsion. I thought I could do so through love for a woman and by researching my family. The research focused on my maternal grandfather, who disappeared in 1944 after a tragic life and was most likely shot as a collaborator. His story is the secret of my mother, the ghost that haunts our family. To banish this ghost, I took risky paths. They led me to a lost provincial town in Russia, where I stayed for a long time, waiting for something to happen. And something did happen: a cruel crime. Madness and horror caught up with me again. They also caught up with me in my own life.