Then it was Christmas, her second with the Morrows, but far more enjoyable than last year’s. It was not just the festival itself that had been strange that first time; there were the Morrows, whom she had met only once before, and even the food had been problematic. They had all applauded the roasted turkey, but to her palate it was bland. She had thought the seafood would be to her taste, but, with the exception of some smoked salmon, it was not her type of seafood at all; as for the crayfish they all raved about, it was a tasteless, rubbery, sea-smelling stuff that, she suspected, she would never grow to like. For her second Morrow Christmas, she had contributed to the feast with her own seafood platter of sprats, smoked salmon, a variety of herrings, and pickled vegetables. And there were the new guests this year, newer strangers than she was: a business acquaintance of Leonard’s who, together with his wife, was visiting from Japan, and Mikhail.

Mikhail had chosen to come with her to the Morrows rather than accept Alexei’s invitation to his family Christmas. She had worried how he would cope, and had kept a watchful eye on him. But despite the language barrier he seemed to manage; more than that, he actually seemed to enjoy himself. In the early evening when the party broke up, she and Andrew had driven him back to Alexei’s house. He thanked Andrew, not simply for the lift but for the whole day. And he thanked her. ‘I had very good time,’ he said. And wished her a happy new year in the Russian custom.

There had been so many changes these past few months, but then change seemed to be endemic to Australian life. Big changes like where you lived and worked, and small changes like when her usual brand of honey disappeared off the supermarket shelves due to a company takeover, and she was forced to choose from seven other varieties. And the time her sandals went missing, and when she returned to the shop to replace them, they were no longer available, but a dozen other styles were.

Such small changes, but they could trip her up, she who had negotiated one of the largest changes imaginable. She doubted she would now have the courage to cross the world alone. Although was it courage? At the time, she’d had no idea what was ahead of her. Her mother’s death had deprived her of the only future she knew, so in a sense she was already plunged into the unknown before she left Leningrad. Courage surely requires an understanding of the difficulties ahead, but in those dark days she had acted with little thought and even less knowledge.

The cello tape had finished, and she swapped it for ABBA. ABBA was familiar, ABBA was big in Russia. On their concert tour of the Soviet Union it was rumoured that, due to restrictions on the rouble, they had to be paid in oil commodities. She laughed quietly to herself: there was always a solution in Soviet Russia.