No gift would help him here. He was passed to two customs officers who combed through his pack. They checked the toes of his shoes and turned out all his pockets; they leafed through notebooks and dismantled his ballpoint pens; they unscrewed the lid of his talcum powder and stirred the contents with a metal prong; his deodorant stick wasn’t worth keeping after they were finished with it. And they unwrapped every single mosaic piece he had packed so carefully. He was among the last to exit customs. Beyond the doors were his parents, Sylvie and Leonard, whose anxious faces burst into smiles when he appeared.

Andrew Morrow was home.

In contrast with Andrew, Galina Kogan was leaving home, heading towards a country that if the paucity of reference books in the library was a reliable guide, barely existed. Yet she had not wavered over her choice of destination. She had settled on Australia the day her mother died; it was an omen, and she was convinced that to change her mind would bring bad luck.

She carried a single suitcase, a small valise and, safe in her pocket, two train tickets. The first ticket would take her via Kiev to Lvov in western Ukraine; the other covered travel from Lvov through Czechoslovakia across the border into the West, terminating in Vienna. So many times had she and her mother imagined the moment of crossing from east to west — like moving from a dingy flat into a palace, or from black and white to full technicolour — but the excitement they’d anticipated together had now disappeared. Every aspect of this trip made her anxious.

She’d heard of other émigrés loading tables, chairs, divans, cupboards, beds, carpets, crockery, pianos and paintings into huge containers, packing up long-established Russian lives and shipping them to far-off destinations. She had dithered for weeks over the contents of the flat — full-time dithering, given that when permission to emigrate came through, she was, as forewarned, dismissed from her job. (Grief, she decided, must give irrationality a free ride, for she truly had believed that because of her loss, the authorities would show sympathy and waive the usual termination of employment.)

Like all sensible Russians, she and her mother were hoarders — with shortages a fact of life, you never knew when something might become useful — so their flat was choked with stuff, and not simply stuff for now or stuff for an uncertain future, but also stuff from a dangerous past. There was the collection of maths books belonging to her grandfather, a man arrested and shot more than forty-five years earlier, and the four volumes of Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary belonging to her grandmother, who died of neglect in a Siberian labour camp a year after her husband; there was a pre-revolutionary embroidered challah cloth with matching table napkins made by Lidiya’s grandmother, her own great-grandmother, and a lacquered cigar box, courtesy of her cigar-making great-grandfather.