She’d been nervous of asking too many questions, but now, anxious to learn as much as possible before the couple left her, she did not hold back.

‘No,’ they said in answer to her question as to whether they had relatives in the US. ‘We’ve arranged to have relatives.’

Through a friend of a friend who had already emigrated, an American had been found with the same surname as theirs, an American who was willing to be a sponsoring cousin.

‘At the moment you don’t actually need a sponsor, but we were told it speeds things up.’

No sponsor was required for Australia either, but now that she’d learned she could be accepted into the US without a sponsor, Galina was again tempted to change her destination just to stay with these people.

By the time they arrived in Vienna, she was more confused than ever. Torn between her choice of Australia and her overwhelming desire not to be alone, the situation had become impossible. She couldn’t manage it by herself. All she wanted was to be looked after.

And the couple did exactly that. They took her with them to speak with the man from the Jewish Agency for Israel. It was as they had foretold, for when he heard their destinations — their loudly stated America, and her mumbled Australia — he referred them to the HIAS representative. Both she and the couple would be going to Rome, the HIAS man said, where all the requirements for emigration and immigration would occur, including the issuing of a special document, a passport substitute for stateless people, without which they would be going nowhere.

And suddenly it hit her. What she had done. She was stateless. She was alone and she was stateless. She was no longer a Soviet citizen, she was no longer Russian. She was Jewish, that’s all she was. But being reduced to Jewishness was like the crippled boy in her block of flats, the boy with three thoroughly good limbs being reduced to his withered leg. She was Jewish and stateless and terrified.

And what would happen if she were refused this passport substitute? Would she be condemned to a foreign no man’s land for the rest of her days? And what would she do for money? Stateless, alone, penniless: it was hard to conceive of a more wretched prospect.

She managed to collect herself sufficiently to ask the representative how long all this might take. He said the US immigrants were being processed very quickly, a matter of weeks, but the Australian ones were taking a good deal longer, as much as several months.

So go to America, she told herself. After all, what did it matter where she ended up? It wasn’t Leningrad, and it was without her mother. Mindless superstition was no way to select where she was to spend the rest of her life.