There was mayhem in central Melbourne. Witnesses to the tragedy spoke in staccato gasps, a relay of shock, horror, and incomprehension.

‘We’re turning into America,’ Andrew said, manoeuvring the car for a right-hand turn into Hoddle Street. His words seemed squeezed through a too-small throat. ‘And just a few months ago a young guy, younger than me, pulled out a gun and killed several people, just up the road from here.’ Andrew jerked his head to the left.

‘What motivates someone to act like this? Such senseless violence. Although does any violence make sense?’ He paused as a driver cut in front of them. ‘What makes these guys think it’s okay to kill? Kill randomly. What is it? A sense of power? Uncontrollable anger? Insanity?’

At which point, Galina had to interrupt. ‘Do not use the insane excuse.’

She spoke more sharply than she intended, and immediately saw his confusion, his hurt, too — his was such a transparent face. Quickly, she explained how in Soviet Russia labelling someone insane was a method of silencing and removing dissenters. ‘There was a time,’ she shrugged, ‘I expect it still continues, when mental asylums in the Soviet Union were full of dissidents, all of them as sane as you and I.’

‘All right then, not the insane excuse —’

But she hadn’t finished. ‘Tyrants from Caligula to Hitler, and Stalin too, are often described as insane. When you label someone mad, you release them from responsibility. But these men know exactly what they are doing. Brutality, it seems to me, is a distressingly common human attribute.’

It was a conversation stopper, and whatever Andrew had planned to say was left stranded. The radio station was still covering the massacre; more onlookers were being interviewed, and specialist commentators consulted. After a while, Andrew turned the volume down.

‘What makes a sane person,’ he paused, ‘or rather what makes a sane man — it’s always a man — think he has a right to kill a whole bunch of strangers who’ve never done him any harm?’

Andrew seemed so upset that Galina wondered if he’d known someone killed at the post office. She was about to ask when he spoke again.

‘Do these appalling acts, these lone-men massacres, happen in your country?’

The irony did not escape her: she might wait weeks for someone to ask her about Russia, and when finally a question is pitched her way, it lands in territory she’d prefer not to enter. She was framing an answer that would shift the conversation to more neutral ground, some sort of disinfected version of Soviet killings, when he turned towards her and she saw a man struggling to understand what was to him utterly incomprehensible. She wanted to comfort him, to lay a gentle hand upon his arm; instead, she clasped her hands together and attempted an explanation.

‘Our massacres are different,’ she began. ‘Our massacres tend to be committed by our political leaders, not rogue gunmen. And the deaths are likely to be in the thousands, even millions.’