It was the enduring hope of her childhood that her father would return, for he truly had disappeared. One day, around the time of her third birthday, he simply did not return home after work, nor the next day did he turn up at the Ministry of Education where he was employed as an overseer of resources. Later, she would concede her father was not qualified for any of the secret work she gave him in her fantasies, but as a young girl the fantasies were essential, particularly in their old home in the kommunalka. Here she and her mother had two rooms, and fortunately were allowed to keep both after her father disappeared. (It was Soviet bureaucratic specificity that had intervened, and the only time it had worked to their advantage: because the partition between their rooms did not reach the ceiling, it was officially designated as a single room.) They shared a bathroom and kitchen with seven other families, twice the number who had lived here when the rooms were first allocated to Lidiya’s parents. It was crowded and it was noisy, and everyone knew everyone else’s business. Galina learned at a young age that fantasies, make-believe of all sorts, provided the space and other luxuries absent in your real life.

Her father disappeared and no one knew what had become of him, neither friends nor colleagues, not even his own parents — or so she and her mother believed at the time. Later, when the story of his absence emerged, they guessed his parents had known his whereabouts all along, for within months of his disappearance they obtained permission to move — to Georgia, of all places.

With her father gone, there were just the two of them in the communal apartment. In a strange way, the crowd and bustle that surrounded them seemed to connect them ever more tightly. She and her mother often joked that their home of two rooms — between themselves, they always referred to their two rooms — three storeys above the street, with their own south-facing window, was like their own floating island.

In the kommunalka they used to share a bed, but by the time they were allocated their own flat, two divans were more practical. Hours would pass with her mother sitting on her divan, typewriter firmly arranged on a square of wood, dictionaries to one side and the book she was translating perched on a stand. And on the divan closest to the window, her back supported by the wall, Galina would do her schoolwork, and when that was finished she’d draw and paint, paper clipped to a board, paints and pencils on the windowsill. Sometimes her mother would read aloud from the novel she was translating — it cultivated Galina’s own interest in both English and Italian — or she might recite Russian poetry.