In the long days and weeks of decision-making, Galina weighed up each object, and she bartered: this of my grandfather’s, but not that of my grandmother’s; this of my grandmother’s, not that of my grandfather’s. It was hard, it was stressful: these things that survived when their owners had not had acquired an odd sort of power — like relics. And with her mother now gone, the choices became even weightier. What to do with Lidiya’s clothes, her mementos, her trinkets? And what about the books she had translated and the books she had loved? All these things emerged from her mother’s life, were evidence of that life. How could any of them be left behind?

As the days and weeks passed, Galina was making herself sick with choice. In the end, practicality and limited funds forced her to be tough. She decided to restrict herself only to what could be fitted in the trunk that she and her mother had used to store their winter clothes and bedding. She packed the Dahl dictionary, together with the Italian and English books Lidiya had translated; she included two settings of the crockery Lidiya had herself kept of her own parents’ possessions, two sets of cutlery, and Lidiya’s stained and tatty copy of The Book of Tasty and Nutritious Food; she added four photograph albums, including one belonging to the maternal grandparents she had never known; and she packed her mother’s best gloves, her ring and pendant, her favourite shawl, and her embroidered tapochki — the prospect of wearing her mother’s indoor slippers in far-off Australia appealed to her. She wavered over Lidiya’s typewriter and in the end settled for her fountain pen, but it was the bulky Cyrillic typewriter she really wanted. To prevent herself from changing her mind, she gave it to Ivan, an engineer by day and a poet by night. She packed eight English novels, including The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, both long-time favourites of her own; among the French books, she chose The Count of Monte Cristo, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Zola’s The Masterpiece — another enduring favourite, and she also included Lidiya’s precious Dante. The Russian books presented her with the hardest task: she wanted to keep them all. When she could delay no longer, she took all those with her mother’s signature inscribed on the inside cover, a good selection of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Yevtushenko and, of course, Pushkin. She slept only fitfully in those weeks of choosing; plagued by future regrets, she must have changed her mind a hundred times.