There had been a photograph in the paper of Gorbachev and Reagan standing together surrounded by their advisors, the Soviet team clearly distinguishable from the American, and film of the meeting had been shown on the Vremya news, so that aspect of the report — that the leaders were meeting — was true. Gorbachev, stylish in his Italian suit, looked like a Westerner. As to what had been discussed, she’d learned from her mother always to be suspicious of reports in the official press.

A year ago, such a meeting between the two leaders would have been inconceivable, but then a year ago it was equally inconceivable that her mother would suffer a massive brain haemorrhage. Some changes, like having the bathroom tap fixed at the communal apartments or being allocated your own flat, seemed to take years. Other changes, like the gas explosion in the block near her old school, or the death of her fifty-seven-year-old mother, were shocking in their suddenness.

It wasn’t that she wanted her mother alive again, not in the dreadful state the stroke had rendered her. She wanted life as it had been before the stroke, their papers to emigrate submitted, the two of them sifting through their possessions trying to decide what to take, and both of them managing to save as much as possible because as soon as their request to emigrate was approved, they knew they’d be forced to leave their jobs (and if their application was refused, they’d lose their jobs anyway). In short, they were living for today while making preparations for tomorrow: a new life in America, where everyone was equal, where her mother, a translator and teacher of languages, would find work that matched her experience and abilities, and where Galina, herself, could draw what she liked, confined only by her own artistic limitations and not by the state. She was a Soviet Jew and a Russian illustrator. The irony had long struck her: both the Jew and the artist were censored here.

Galina pulled her hand from her pocket and brushed her face. Just when she thought things couldn’t get worse, it had begun to snow, only a few wet flakes at the moment, but gearing up for more. If she believed in a god, she’d think she was being punished. But for what? Nothing in her twenty-four years would warrant the illness and death of her still-young mother, nor the twenty-year absence of a father she couldn’t remember, nor an impending blizzard on a day when it already took all her energy just to remain upright and moving.

She tugged at her scarf, shoved both hands deeper into her coat and continued on her way. And suddenly she was on the ground, pitched forward on the uneven brick paving. A sickening pain filled her knee.

She needed to move, she couldn’t move.