She pleads with him. There’s not enough time. She wants to keep this seat. The officer’s not listening, he orders her to move.

She collects her luggage and steps down from the train. There are eight minutes till departure. The carriages are long, the platform is icy, the bags are monstrous. She is running on the slippery surface. The luggage grows heavier and heavier, the train grows longer and longer, the seconds tick faster and faster. She can’t see the numbers on the carriages. She’s still running when the train starts to move. Hands reach down, they grab her, the suitcases have disappeared, she wakes up.

It takes a moment to orient herself. Not Leningrad, but Melbourne. Not Finland Station, but her saddlery. Her breath draws quickly. Her neck and shoulders ache. The pillow has fallen to the floor. Dawn is not far off and the sky is lightening. She can hear birds and the distant rattle of a tram. She leans the pillow against the wall and props herself against it. How many borders must she cross? How many bloody borders?

Galina was homesick. Here in her own place, with a cupboard full of food, a rack of bright clothes, a kitchen and bathroom all to herself, she was lamentably and ineluctably homesick. She supposed she had been aware of it for some time, like grit underfoot as she negotiated the roads of her new existence, but now it was demanding her full attention. She, Galina Kogan, was sickening for home.

The mood had crystallised after her visit to the Morrow home. Sleep had turned traitor, and concentration had deserted her. And there was a throbbing in her left temple which threatened a migraine that never came, the persistent threat more wearisome than the full-blown pain. Why such homesickness should strike her now, two years after leaving Leningrad, was difficult to explain. Although the possibility occurred to her that as she’d become more settled in Australia, she may have relaxed her guard; and with reduced defences, the pangs that had long been contained romped in. She was grateful to her new country, profoundly so, but this did not lighten the loss of the old.

Osip Mandelstam wrote of an ‘inch of blue sea’; Galina longed for an inch of Russia. She shuffled through various colours in search of the best to portray the Russia of her yearnings. Soviet Russia would never possess the freedom she associated with blueness, and whiteness was far too pure for the country she had left behind. Purple? Lilac? Yellow? Green? None was right. What word, what image could describe her abandoned, yet longed-for sweet Russia?