‘No.’ Aliya looked as shocked as I did. ‘Really?’ You could hear the crowd on the radio, chanting. When would he appear? The protesters weren’t going anywhere. Now even more people would join them. Maybe it was a stroke of genius. If anyone could pull it off, it was Nazarbayev.

‘The President knows this is it,’ I said. ‘This is how things start.’

‘Yes.’

‘Think it will work?’

‘I hope so.’

‘He’d better have something good to say.’

‘It is Nazarbayev. He just needs to appear.’

We crossed the city’s ring road. A minute later Aliya directed me left, into a cluster of low, plain houses. Her home was set back from the road, lights on. I stopped the car.

‘Have a good night,’ I said.

‘You should come in,’ Aliya said. ‘They’ll be amused.’

‘Wonderful.’

‘In a nice way.’

The entrance was set back, no windows overlooking. No cars parked up.

‘I won’t stay long.’

Aliya’s mother answered the door. She looked like her daughter: tall, dark-eyed. Her father appeared behind her with a grey moustache and two days’ stubble.

‘This is Toby,’ Aliya said. ‘He is English. He gave me a lift home.’

‘A guest!’ The father shook my hand and pulled me in. The living room was low-ceilinged, warm. Filling one end was a dresser whose shelves held Soviet china. The grandmother lay on a couch to the side, face folded towards her toothless mouth and small dark eyes.

We sat on cushions around a low, lace-covered table. The mother produced a loaf of home-baked shelpek, Kazakh flatbread. The father opened a bottle of vodka and found two glasses. I looked around. A rare thing, access to ordinary homes. The people who are not bad or powerful and so rarely worth spying on but can sometimes change history. Cable TV box, television tuned to Europa Plus, the non-state news station, showing reports from Semey, the crowd outraged in the snow, waiting.

The mother switched it off, as if this were a private concern. I had a quick look at the local wi-fi connections on my phone, preparing to email malware to Aliya’s mobile. That was the goal I’d set myself, although it was feeling more uncouth by the minute. They had KazakhTelecom broadband, connection speed 5 Mpbs. Decent enough.

The father offered me vodka. His right arm was artificial, the hand prosthetic.

‘To the friendship of our countries – two great empires, once upon a time.’ He had the Russian habit of smiling with the eyes alone. I imagined him forty years ago, arriving in this part of the world, in the southern reaches of the Soviet Union, full of wonder about the life ahead of him. Astana was an administrative base for the agricultural project. A land of travellers soon to be extinguished by Soviet wheat farming.