By the time Gorbachev officially acknowledged the disaster, a full two weeks after the explosion, the West had already guessed most of it. Gorbachev made his announcement in what, for a Soviet leader, were uncharacteristically sombre terms; that he requested foreign assistance and expertise was incontrovertible evidence that the situation was dire. Galina wanted to do something, anything. Russia was being poisoned under a nuclear cloud, and her friends were at risk of radiation sickness, cancer, and premature death. She wanted to write to them, warn them, tell them what she knew, what the West had told her. But she held herself in check: to receive letters from an émigré would only make things worse for them.

As she waited and worked and worried in the safety of Rome, her days were overlaid with the disaster at Chernobyl, while night after night her mother and Chernobyl clashed together in a stormy sleep. Bereaved both for mother and motherland, she felt the grief as a physical pain deep in her body. It was there every morning when she woke, and it worsened during the day. She was surrounded by food — how eagerly she had indulged when first she arrived, but now she struggled to eat. She lost weight as the nuclear cloud thickened over her country. Hadn’t the Russian people suffered enough? Hadn’t they had more than their share of disasters? Every day she read about the sufferings of the Soviet people, every day she read about the ineptitude of the Soviet leaders, every day was ringed with sorrow.

Chernobyl was front-page news for weeks, and then other, non-Russian disasters took precedence. She found it no less distressing not knowing what was happening in the aftermath of the meltdown as it had been knowing. She was making herself ill. Her joints ached, she had a continual headache, she wanted to stay in bed all day. Unidentified Russian girl found dead in Rome. She imagined the headline.