What he does know for certain is she’s scared and she’s shaken. He offers to stay with her. ‘I can sleep on the couch.’

She accepts immediately. ‘But come into my bed,’ she says. ‘Then I will know you are here.’

They both lie between the sheets fully clothed. He wraps his arms around her, she rests her head on his shoulder, and soon she is asleep.

It is morning when he awakes — he’d thought he wouldn’t sleep at all. He’s lying on his side and she is curved against his back, her arm flung across his waist. For the next hour, he holds her hand to his chest, firm to his beating heart. This is definitely not the time to tell her how he feels.

Two days later, Mikhail Kogan moved into the saddlery.

His arrival wrought an immediate change in Galina. Entombed in a weird sort of numbness, she lost all sense of inhabiting her own body. She did not think; she could not think.

And she was as efficient as a robot.

First she made space for him. It wasn’t difficult: the Kogan home at the kommunalka had accommodated both her and her mother, and there’d been four people living there when her mother was a child. Now she pushed her bed from the centre of the back wall to one corner, and moved her work table alongside. There was insufficient room for her chair, but she could sit on her bed while drawing — although work was no more possible at the moment than a trip to the moon. She returned to the second-hand shop where she had bought her couch. There she found a sofa bed and a free-standing wardrobe; the sofa was an ugly brown and an impeccable match for her state of mind, the wardrobe was a scuffed and scarred white; a fresh coat of paint would have improved it, but she didn’t have the heart for improvements. Her old work space became Mikhail’s alcove. She positioned the wardrobe so it acted as a screen between his section and the rest of the room. The sofa bed, her desk chair, and a side-table were installed in the alcove, and any of Mikhail’s possessions that were not immediately needed were stacked on top of the wardrobe. The back of the wardrobe was brown masonite; she could have invigorated it with posters, but she didn’t.

Detached from all this activity, she was reduced to a puppet. She saw her hands doing the work, they might have been anyone’s hands. She lifted, she pushed, she dragged, she stacked, she reconfigured her minimalist Australian space with Russian ingenuity. Not a square centimetre was wasted.