She recalled a startling moment in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground when the narrator, in describing his bullying of a work colleague, said he was scaring sparrows for his own amusement. A lot of Soviet officials scared sparrows for their own amusement; it was a way of flaunting their power while proving their loyalty to the Soviet state and its leaders. It wasn’t only what Mikhail had done as a boy to his family; as a member of the Soviet elite he would have scared plenty of sparrows. But he wasn’t in the Soviet Union anymore, he wasn’t in the power elite. He had no power. But for all her reasoning, the fear remained.

One evening, after a pleasant day spent with Alexei, Mikhail had tried to explain to her how it had been — not to make amends, and certainly not to seek forgiveness or excuse himself. ‘I have no need to make excuses,’ were his opening words. He just wanted her to understand the situation from his point of view.

He was fifteen when he informed on his father. ‘When you are young, the world is simple. You believe what you are told.’

Most of all, he believed in Stalin. Stalin could do no wrong. Stalin was truly ‘the best friend to all children’.

‘Stalin never met me,’ he said. ‘But I thought he knew me better than my own father.’

‘But surely you loved your parents?’ Her tone of voice was anything but neutral.

He shrugged. ‘I suppose I did, but my allegiance to my country and my leader was stronger. That’s how we were taught it should be. That’s how I believed it should be.’

He wasn’t sorry for what he did, and he felt no guilt. ‘I was doing the right thing.’

He explained that once you are inside the system, an insider committed to the system, you don’t see it, you don’t question it. ‘It’s your world, your normal world, and it looks after you. I did not need to analyse, I did not need to think.’ He lit a cigarette and inhaled thoughtfully. ‘It’s easy to forget what is inconvenient to remember. Your faith makes you forget, and the rewards for being a good Soviet citizen make you forget. I remember nothing about the night my father was taken away.’

Lidiya, in contrast, had remembered every single moment — like a series of snapshots played in slow motion, she used to say.

Mikhail sucked on his cigarette, vigorously, as was his way. Between drags, he said that if circumstances had been even slightly changed, if this or that or something else had happened, he might have acted differently as a fifteen-year-old. ‘But I think it unlikely. Your mother and I were opposites. I loved Stalin, I loved the Soviet system. And the Soviet Union was very good to me. It’s not hard to love what treats you well.’