I looped around the other painted wooden cabins neighbouring Polina Yurievna’s. There couldn’t have been more than ten houses in total – smallholdings, mainly, and all separated from each other by fields and trees. At the front of the third plot along stood a snow-covered Lada Niva, tyres unworn, snow around it undisturbed: Aleksandr Denisovich’s new car, in which he’d brought Polina the logs for her Christmas fire. I watched the house. The silhouette of a man passed in front of the downstairs window and then vanished behind the woodpile. Five-eleven, maybe, and wrapped up against the cold. I heard a door shut, and then the lights went out. I listened carefully, but the night was silent again, all sound muffled by the snow: no wolves, no planes, no car engines. I crept around the offside of the four-by-four and pulled gently at the door handle. It was unlocked, keys in the ignition.

I crossed the road at a crouch. The church itself was a dilapidated nineteenth-century two-storey white box – topped by a short spire and onion dome supporting a silver Orthodox cross. At the west end there was a lower extension – where the congregation would have entered and bought candles. It had been a long time since I’d been inside an Orthodox church. In Ireland my mother had taken communion with my father in the Roman Catholic church of Sts Mary and Peter in Arklow – although there were parts of the service she always refused to say out loud.

I wished I’d paid more attention.

Snow worked its way into my pockets, boots. The wind picked up a little and cut through my jeans, stinging my ears. I was chilled and getting colder. Whatever the risks it was time to get back inside. The church itself, Polina Yurievna had told me, had been closed for years – another victim of the Soviet era which had never recovered. The St Michael that hung on her wall had been rescued three days before the doors had been shut for good. More recently, by the looks of it, a large metal grille had been bolted over the north entrance – though who, or what, it was meant to deter out here was anyone’s guess.

The priest’s house was set in the south-west corner of the churchyard – a ramshackle wood cabin that looked as if it might have been used more recently for livestock than clergy. I slipped through the remains of an old picket fence, the tops of which crested the drifting snow like the masts of a sunken clipper, and threaded my way between the frosted branches of ancient apple trees to the back of the house.