It was not yet dusk, but with the low, swarthy clouds it might have been night. Street lights glowed with that frosted halo that hinted at snow; noises were smudged as if coming from a great distance. There was no wind. Galina felt weirdly disconnected from the world, a world that had moved into the future while she sat in limbo with her dying mother. And yet she’d made an attempt to keep up with events, had read Leningradskaya Pravda to her mother every day, and when her mother no longer responded, had read to pass the time. A volcano had erupted in Colombia, killing twenty-five thousand people — and why, she wondered, was her own single death so much more weighty than all those dead Colombians? She’d read about bomb attacks in Paris, and hijackings in the Mediterranean. Then, a week ago in Geneva, General Secretary Gorbachev and President Reagan of America had met for the very first time. It had been rumoured that the situation of Soviet Jews was on the agenda, along with arms control. There was no way of knowing whether Soviet Jews had, in fact, been discussed. As for arms control, it simply made no sense, not after years of being told of the necessity of a great Soviet arsenal as security against the war-mongering, untrustworthy Americans. But then so much in the Soviet Union made no sense. It gave traction to her mother’s joke that Soviet citizens, while starved of the comforts of life, were gourmands when it came to swallowing absurdities.

No more of her mother’s jokes now.

They had been told regularly of the Soviet Union’s superiority in nuclear weapons — it was anyone’s guess as to whether this was true or not — but what every Soviet citizen knew without a skerrick of doubt was that America was the land of plenty, the émigré’s El Dorado. They were told that poverty was endemic in America, that education and housing were in a parlous state, that only the very corrupt or the very rich could afford to be sick, that photographs of shops full of goods were not real shops, but rather staged sets for the cameras. Yet despite the official line, every Russian knew there was plenty of food in America, and huge stores filled with clothes and household goods. It was not just the American films they saw, the Soviet Union’s thriving black market was proof of the quality and range of American goods.