Her mother looked to be in shock. The man, however, seemed entirely at ease. He turned to Galina and walked towards her; she automatically stood up. A book fell to the floor with a loud slap.

‘Say hello to your Uncle Misha,’ he said to her.

Lidiya quickly collected herself. She grabbed Galina by the arm, and held her close.

‘No uncle of hers. And no brother of mine.’

She told the man to leave, she told him never to return. He did not move. Her mother then ordered him to leave. Galina thought she sounded ferocious, but the man wasn’t at all scared. He appraised the room, his gaze settling on grandfather’s old armchair. Lidiya said she could feel her father’s presence whenever she sat in it.

‘Some things,’ the smelly man said as he made himself comfortable, ‘some things don’t change.’ He stroked the armrest with his pudgy hand. His fingers were fat like sausages, and there was grime beneath the nails.

A moment later, Lidiya half-pushed, half-carried Galina to the door and hurried her up the passageway to where her friend Natalya lived. Lidiya whispered that everything would be all right, that Galina was not to worry; when the man was gone, she would come back and fetch her.

The hours dragged like days. Galina didn’t want to play with Natalya, not while her mother was shut in with the fat, smelly man; she didn’t want to eat the food Natalya’s mother prepared, not when her mother might be in danger. Every time she heard footsteps in the passage she ran to the door, and each time the footsteps did not stop. It was after supper when her mother finally collected her. She looked tired and very sad.

Their own room was freezing. ‘I needed to clear the air,’ Lidiya said as she closed the window. There were changes which Galina saw immediately. The leather satchel that had belonged to her grandfather was gone; so too his pipe and clock. Other items from her mother’s childhood — a small painting, an enamelled dish, a silver cruet set — all things that Lidiya had said were precious, had disappeared. And so had the man.

‘And he won’t return,’ Lidiya said. ‘He took what he wanted.’

He seemed to have taken something of Lidiya as well. Months were to pass before she grew the missing parts back again.

The man did not take the children’s books. That night, her mother did not come to bed until late. In the morning, she saw that the name Mikhail had been blackened out in every single book.

Galina had brought the picture books to Australia. She now took them off the shelf and spread them out on her work table. She was an illustrator of children’s books, so why was she spending her time drawing houses and frocks? She owed it to herself, to her mother too, to pursue her ambitions. She would accept Leonard Morrow’s job if he offered it to her, but at the same time she would start sending samples of her work to publishers. She’d been in Australia long enough to stop treating it as a temporary stopover to somewhere else. This flitting between the abandoned past and a fragile present might well define the state of exile, but she had to struggle against it; she had to try harder.