Yevtushenko was one of her mother’s favourites. He was a great defender of Russian Jews, she said, and his ‘Babi Yar’ was one of the most important poems ever written. She said that even if Yevtushenko wrote doggerel — which, she added, he’d been known to do — she would still buy his books, and she would still wait in line, for hours if necessary, to hear him read his poems. Lidiya was a woman of strong passions, or rather had been a woman of strong passions — not that Galina was ready to relegate her mother to the past just yet. She doubted she ever would be.

It was six years ago that news came of her father. He had died in Tbilisi, Georgia, where he’d been living since leaving Leningrad. A small box addressed to Lidiya had been found by his new wife (although not so new, given there was a half-sister only a couple of years Galina’s junior), and she had sent it to their new flat. Lidiya wondered why Osip had bothered. The box contained the tie-pin she had given him as a wedding gift, an English pipe she had bought on the black market that had cost a small fortune, an envelope addressed to her in Osip’s handwriting containing a bundle of roubles so small it would not cover food for a week, and Lidiya’s well-read copy of The Twelve Chairs, inherited from her own father and inscribed with his name — the only item, apart from the money, that she kept. There was a scarf that Lidiya could not remember seeing before, and neither apology nor explanation.

There was, however, one positive outcome of Osip’s certified death. If he’d been alive, or, more particularly, if they’d been unable to prove his death, they would have needed his written permission as husband and father for their exit papers from the USSR. With his death now official, the only permission required was from the sole surviving grandparent, Osip’s mother. She’d had no contact with them for years and, as a stubbornly loyal Soviet citizen, they guessed she’d want nothing to do with two would-be deserters of the Motherland. In the end they took a calculated risk: Lidiya had not changed her name when she married, and Galina was a Kogan too, so any connection with Osip’s family should be impossible to trace.

‘What about your brother,’ Galina asked her mother. ‘What about Mikhail?’

‘He’s been gone a lifetime,’ Lidiya said. ‘And unlikely to turn up now.’