‘Your grandmother, Maksimilian Ivanovich. Where she crossed into the next life. And where your mother came into this one.’ She stroked the table.

‘And how,’ I asked, ‘would you know that?’

‘Because I was here when it happened, Maksimilian Ivanovich. Right here.’ She turned to look at me, pale blue eyes lingering on mine in the lamplight. ‘I delivered your mother, on this very table.’

I scraped the last of the soup from the bowl.

Polina had helped to dress my wounds before we ate. While she’d wrapped my shoulder, I’d told her that my mother was dead, too – a fact that she had received with the sign of the cross.

‘Her first breath was your grandmother’s last,’ she’d said.

We’d broken bread after that. When Polina finished eating, she got up from the table and fetched two small glasses, which she filled to the brim with colourless liquid from an unlabelled glass bottle balanced on the stairs.

‘Let’s drink to Anastasia, may God rest her soul.’

We drank in silence, without touching glasses. Then she stood up again and shuffled off towards the bed. From under it she produced a scuffed tin box tied shut with a length of twine. She unpicked the knot and, back turned to me, riffled through what sounded like a stack of papers. Finally she returned the box to its place and turned around, a piece of card in one hand, and a knife in the other.

‘These are for you,’ she said.

The piece of card revealed itself to be a black and white photograph. The image showed a young girl, laughing, blonde hair wound up in the glowing crown of a tight basket-braid.

‘It’s Anastasia. Your mother.’

I looked on the reverse. There was nothing except the date: 1959. She would have been seven or eight years old. Decades of certainty crumbled on the lips of that bleached-white almost-smile. I’d thought, when I ran away aged sixteen, that her past had evaporated – and mine with it; I’d imagined that Doc beamed the last rays of light shed by a star that had died long ago. It wasn’t so. My mother had made me an orphan. But I had chosen exile.

I sat with my hands on the table, feet on the floor, trapped in the space between the competing stories of who I was.

‘And the knife?’

‘It was your grandfather’s,’ Polina said, sitting down again. ‘He said it killed many fascists in the Great Patriotic War.’ She winked at me. ‘But Olga said he just whittled wood with it.’

I drew it from its home-stitched leather sheath. It was an old Red Army scout’s knife – with a pitted six-inch blade and battered, black wooden handle. It had an inverted S-guard, designed for holding it with the cutting edge upwards, and a needle-sharp clip point. It was rudimentary, but oiled and well balanced.