She nodded but didn’t move except to tilt her head. I kissed her. She took hold of my wrists and kissed me back with raw, clumsy enthusiasm. When we drew apart she glanced at the stairs. The grandmother could be heard, complaining that I had not eaten. Aliya rolled her eyes. She moved closer so that I was against the wall and kissed me again, her fists against my stomach.

‘I’m trapped,’ I said.

‘You are not the one who is trapped,’ she said.

The family protested when I tried to leave. The father gripped my shoulder with his good hand. The mother gave me some shelpek to take home. At the door, Aliya said, ‘Thank you for the lift.’

‘No, thank you. For everything. It was an honour to meet your family. I hope to see you very soon.’

‘Send me a message.’

‘I will.’

‘You are a kind man.’

‘Not really.’

She smiled. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘This is nothing. Really.’

‘No, it is something.’ She glanced behind her, then came out to kiss me once more in the snow. ‘You are kind, whether you like it or not, Toby.’

THIRTY-NINE

I stopped at a workers’ café on the way back, heated by an oven in the centre of the room, the lighting mostly supplied by headlights coming and going in the car park. More lagman, Silk Road comfort food. You could measure where you were in Central Asia by the noodles, which thinned as you approached the Altai mountains and China. The clientele looked and sounded like rural migrants, kolkhozniki, on their way to night work at the construction sites.

Lights swept the room as a lorry pulled up outside. The driver came in: a fat man with a swaggering, loudmouth look on his face. He knew most of the people, saw I was out of place. I could feel him watching me, waiting for the opportunity to stir some entertainment out of a turgid night. In the end I turned and nodded. ‘Come far?’

‘You are Russian?’

‘English.’

He said a name. It took me a moment to realise he was saying Oliver Cromwell: ‘Oliver Cromwell, he was a man of the people.’ The revolutionary Cromwell loomed large in Soviet accounts of British history.

‘Some of the people,’ I said.

‘How much does a lorry driver earn in England?’ he asked.

‘Lots. You’re a driver?’

‘Thirty years.’

‘Where have you come from tonight?’

‘Balkhash.’

‘Via Karaganda?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are things there?’

‘There’s people out, you know—’ He mimed the waving of placards. ‘Angry.’

‘A lot of them?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Checkpoints?’

‘North and south, yes.’

‘What about Balkhash?’

‘Quiet. But always too quiet. No women.’ He laughed, turned to the other men and they laughed too.