What happened next was even worse. When I had completed the paperwork for leaving university and was just about to buy the train ticket to go home, I suddenly – and it was that sudden – got the news that my wife had died in a car crash. The car in which she was a passenger had crashed into a truck on a mountain road and gone over the edge of the cliff; the car was completely wrecked and everyone inside was dead. The fact that she was dead was one thing, but I wasn’t even able to see her body. They told me that when the car went over the edge it caught fire and everyone inside was burnt to a crisp. When they found them it was impossible to tell who was who, and in the end they were only identified by the autopsy. When I next saw Xiaoyu she had turned into a little black box.

A box of ashes.

I took Xiaoyu’s ashes with me away from Moscow. I remember that the day I left it was snowing heavily in Moscow, and the train station was covered in a thick blanket of white snow, and I felt as cold as the icy sky and snowy ground. There was a goods train carrying Chinese apples and live pigs standing at the platform, and officials from China and Russia were unloading the goods and checking them. China was repaying its loans in kind. It was exactly as people said: the Russians had really strict vetting procedures – a whole load of conveyer belts had been rigged up around the platform, and the apples were tipped out onto them for testing according to strict criteria. Those apples that were too big were rejected, as were those that were too small. Russian officials were also checking out the pigs, and any that had scars or bruises were sent back.