She settled on an East-meets-West combination: mushroom kasha, leftover barbecue chicken, with a few beans each. She reached for her copy of The Book of Tasty and Nutritious Food, and opened it to the kasha recipe.

There had been no question of leaving this tattered old book behind. It had been her mother’s, a gift when Lidiya joined the Komsomol. Slipped inside the front cover was a photo cut from Komsomolskaya Pravda, depicting the new Komsomol members, with Lidiya, a small grainy figure at the front, marked with an X.

Although Galina knew the kasha recipe by heart, she placed the open book on the bench; she liked having this staple of the Russian home in view while she cooked in her Australian kitchen. She dry-roasted the buckwheat in a pan, chopped an onion, and while it was browning, sliced the mushrooms — three different types bought from a stall in the market because she simply had not been able to choose between them.

Her ability to choose remained at a fledgling stage. If faced with three different types of mushroom, and she had sufficient money, she bought all three. There were two bread shops within walking distance, each crammed with multiple varieties; sometimes it was all too much, and she left without buying anything. While the situation had mellowed in the past two years, she doubted if choice, so attractive in theory, would ever be easy for her.

For a long time she had worried about the quality of Australian food. Food at home might well have been basic and in short supply, but Soviet food was the purest in the world. Here, additives were actually written on the packages. It was Sylvie who set her straight about Australian food labelling, while Leonard questioned whether anyone really could trust the Soviet authorities on food purity. ‘They deceived you about so many things,’ he said, ‘so why not the food?’

The Australian love affair with Gorbachev was continuing. Most of the news items came out of Moscow, but every now and then there were reports from Leningrad, and she would catch a glimpse of a familiar building, or the Neva, or a gathering of people in a square where she herself had once lingered. (Look, she once said, look, Mamochka, only to realise she was speaking aloud in her empty Australian home.) She wanted to prolong these segments, and she wanted to silence the TV translator who was blocking out the Russian speech.

It had been a madness cutting herself off from other Russian émigrés, yet, like an alcoholic who cannot risk even a taste of alcohol, so it was for her with Russian: she had deprived herself totally, and locked herself inside English. It was that common state of the émigré, she realised, that when everything is uncertain, you establish rules and rigid coordinates to guide you, even though they might inadvertently undermine your very identity.