Winter had powered in during the last weeks of her mother’s illness, weeks stretched by death’s determined assault against her mother’s steadfast grip on life. Fully occupied by the struggle playing out before her, Galina had given no thought to the weather. But now as she entered the street, she slammed into the cold. Her winter coat was still packed away in the trunk — the rest of life so callously undisturbed while her mother lay dying — and her jacket, the one she had worn every day since her mother’s stroke, was no match for the weather. Yet, despite the chill, and despite there being a trolley bus in sight, she needed time to think, to collect herself, to pull together a life that had just lost its centre.

She wrapped her scarf about her head and knotted it at the neck, thrust her hands deep in her pockets, and set off through the sombre streets. The smell of the hospital lingered, and she wondered if she’d ever be rid of it. She quickened her pace, but her legs resisted; she tried to order her thoughts, but her brain had turned to slush.

She was heading home, although her mother’s death had already stripped it of homeliness. There’d be relatives and friends waiting, and food and drink and an explosion of memories. But Lidiya had provided a sense of home that went beyond their flat, beyond the old books and the new TV, beyond the table where they ate and worked, beyond the sallow green stairwell with its human reek, beyond the building itself, only twenty years old and already frayed and weary. Lidiya had been sanctuary.

And what now for the future — their future, which had just shrunk to her future? What now for emigration? They knew when they submitted their papers they were signing over the right to change their minds — not that it mattered then, as they had no intention of doing so. And in the months since, despite Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, despite his heralding new freedoms and greater prosperity, they’d not wavered. Her mother had scoffed at Gorbachev’s promises. The trouble with Russia, she’d said, was that nothing fundamentally changed. Thaws were followed by crackdowns, crackdowns were followed by thaws, so why should it be any different on Gorbachev’s watch?

‘We’ve an opportunity to leave. Best to go when we can.’