Being decisive made her feel as if she were in control. She had decided to emigrate despite her mother’s death, so she had emigrated. She had decided on Australia because of a chance meeting with an Australian, so here she was in Australia. While in Italy, a film of the Carlton area of Melbourne had appealed, so now she was living in Carlton. The decisions acted as stakes in her new life, holding it in place; decisions, she would admit, that were often made impetuously. Indeed, with each major decision various adults, both in Leningrad and here in Australia, had cautioned her to wait and consider. But she believed that to waver even for a moment would cause her to stumble. Two factors pushed her forward: she was young, and her mother was gone. She could do nothing about her mother’s death, but if she had waited for maturity to shape wiser decisions, she probably would never have left Leningrad.

For her first eight months in Australia she had lived with a Jewish couple whose ancestors had migrated from Russia after the revolution. Although both Zara and Arnold managed a halting formal Russian, to Galina they seemed entirely Australian. Their house, the first Australian home she had entered, struck her as very grand. Their ‘living room’ was just for sitting in, and their three bedrooms were just for sleeping; they had a special room with a dining table that could seat ten people; their kitchen was fitted with every conceivable appliance, and there were two bathrooms, two toilets and a whole laundry room just for themselves. It came as a shock to discover that their house was considered a typical suburban dwelling. Zara and Arnold slept in one room; the other two bedrooms had belonged to their daughters, both of whom had moved to different houses when they married. One of these rooms was now used as a nursery for the visiting grandchildren, the other was given to Galina.

The house was surrounded on all sides by a private garden, with trees and bushes and flowers and not a square metre used for growing food. The beach was a five-minute walk away. This was Galina’s favourite place in those early months. She came to believe that the sea, or rather this Melbourne sea, had a mysterious power. She knew that if she were to travel across the water, sweep over the horizon and stay her course, the first land she would see would be Australia’s southern island of Tasmania; a few thousand kilometres further on and she would reach Antarctica. But, as she stood on the sand staring out at the horizon, the landmass she felt to be in front of her, although hidden by the curve of the earth, was Russia. There on the beach she would sit, in the burn of her first Australian January and the bluster of her first Australian July, and be transported over the sea to home.