It was the man from HIAS who put her back on track. He had visited Australia a couple of years earlier. His brother had settled in Melbourne.

‘Beautiful city,’ he said in English, ‘and wonderful climate. I was there for a week in autumn, and every day the sun was shining. Good coffee, excellent cakes. This city is greatly cosmopolitan. And the southern coastline!’ She saw the wonder cross his face. ‘You have made a very good choice.’

‘But the long wait,’ she was thinking aloud. ‘How will I support myself?’

When he discovered she spoke a passable Italian, he said she’d have no trouble finding work as an interpreter.

She never knew his name. She would have written to him and thanked him, for if not for this man, she might have fastened herself to the couple all the way to America. She would discover in time that Australia was the right place for her.

In the years to come, those months spent in Italy were a fog. She interpreted, but couldn’t say for whom she interpreted; she translated, but could not remember what she translated. She lived in two different hostels, but she, who could draw her flat in Leningrad down to the light switches and doorknobs, could not describe either place. She was simultaneously immigrant, emigrant, and traveller-in-transit; and to new arrivals she was information and liaison officer as well. So many definitions, so many identities, but to herself she was a stranger: stateless, homeless, and alone.

The only clear memory from that time was the disaster at Chernobyl. Every day brought a new doomsday possibility, every day brought greater distress. And it was so disconcerting to learn about her own country via Western sources: her familiar Soviet Union suddenly seemed very foreign. Soviet officials were neither denying nor confirming a nuclear accident, they simply refused to be engaged on the issue. But according to the Western press, there could be no doubt: soaring radiation levels had been registered in neighbouring countries, and a satellite had photographed an explosion in Ukraine. The evidence seemed to be incontrovertible. The only other explanation — a Western conspiracy to undermine the great Soviet state — was not credible, not from this side of the East-West divide.

While the Soviet Union remained silent about Chernobyl, Western politicians, scientists and journalists hypothesised endlessly about the effect of a nuclear accident on human health and agriculture, both in the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe. Cut off from all those who were important to her, Galina felt squeezed between freedom and disaster. Far from feeling relief that she had escaped the danger, her own safety increased her fear for those who remained.