Living with Zara and Arnold, she acquired the basics of being Jewish; it was not so difficult. Becoming Australian, however, presented a far greater challenge. She walked Australian streets, she shopped at Australian stores, she ate at Australian cafés, she worked alongside Australian workers. And all the while, trespassing on her emerging Australianness was a residual suspicion of other people (would she ever become trusting like the Australians?), a continuing tendency to hoard food and clothes (would she ever develop their easy materialism?), and a fear of authority coupled with the compulsion to determine the power hierarchy wherever she found herself (would she ever acquire their casual anti-authoritarianism?). Even her habit of overdressing intruded on her Australianisation program. Soviet ways, she was realising, were her blood and marrow, her heart thumped to a Soviet tune; permanently removed from the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union had travelled with her. In Melbourne, Australia, despite all her efforts, she was still in large part a Soviet Jew.

She grappled with the arcana of Australian customs and the mysteries of Australian Jewishness, and if Zara and Arnold ever found her behaviour odd or incomprehensible, they never revealed it. They welcomed her into their home, they treated her like family, she owed both her jobs to them. She had no doubt that Arnold and Zara liked her, even loved her; she suspected they would have been happy if she had stayed on with them permanently. But she had decided on Carlton as the place to live, so despite many good reasons to remain exactly where she was, Carlton it was going to be. Although it would not be easy, she realised, when she came to explore the area. There were plenty of Italians and students, as the film she’d seen in Rome had shown, but the students were vying for the same cheap accommodation as was she. The irony did not escape her: half her week was spent working in real estate, but when it came to her own housing, after two months she was no closer to moving from Zara and Arnold’s than when she first started her search.

And then luck intervened. Luck: such a delightful concept to one far more accustomed to sistema, that Soviet staple of knowing who to contact and how much to pay when there was something you needed. She had been studying the advertisements for vacant rooms posted on the noticeboard of Readings, a big bookstore in Carlton. These were rooms in shared houses, kommunalki Australian-style, and while not her preference, it was all she could afford. She was noting down possibilities when she became aware of a man also perusing the advertisements. She stepped aside to allow him a better view.

‘What are you looking for?’

It was the man who had spoken, and with no one else nearby, he was clearly addressing her.

She swung around, immediately on her guard.

‘I’ve a place to rent,’ he quickly explained. ‘A great place.’