Despite my lack of interest in his second-hand thoughts, I waited for Charles to continue, but then I realized that his attention had moved elsewhere, and I followed the direction of his gaze to the doorway I had come through a minute before. There, under its lintel, stood a tall, slim woman with bright red hair twisted up in the French style. She was in a scarlet dress that flared slightly at the bottom, exposing equally red high heels. Such heels were officially scorned nowadays as a bourgeois affectation, and yet she seemed to have gone for the reddest pair she could find. Although in her late thirties or early forties, she was still striking – by far the most striking woman in the room. A waiter offered her a gilded box of long, thin cigarettes, and she took one and held it to the flame on his lighter. For a moment it seemed like everything around her face had darkened. The flame flickered down as she let a stream of smoke drift from her mouth. When it had all gone, there was a smile left on her lips like an aftertaste.

‘She’s … very beautiful,’ I said. It was all that I could say.

The apparatchik nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, yes. Yes, sometimes I used to watch her films three times over.’

I realized then who she was.

‘Is that Lorelei?’ I said.

‘You didn’t recognize her?’

I looked at Charles. He appeared surprised. ‘No,’ I replied, self-consciously.

It was strange that I hadn’t. Victory 1945. It was shown on a loop all day long on Liberation Day. Lorelei had stolen the film as the resistance fighter with a pistol and untold courage who, upon discovering her soldier boyfriend had been killed by the Germans, had roused her cell, and then the crowds in the streets, to throw off the Nazis and welcome our Soviet liberators. But it had been more than a film: it had been the declaration of our statehood, the way we told each other that we were a new country. Lorelei was the image of everything that we were going to be: beauty and courage personified. It had affected me just as much as the other young men and women of my generation, because after the disaster that had engulfed the entire world for a decade – the Nazis, the War – it was up to us to change it for the better.

‘I suppose you have never been introduced – your husband is hardly likely to do that, is he?’ said the apparatchik. He gave out a hearty little chuckle. ‘I wish I could do the honours. She did so much for our nation.’

‘She did,’ said Charles wistfully.

Yes, it was strange that I hadn’t recognized her. From the film’s release in 1946 and throughout the following years, her face had rarely been absent from newspaper pages and posters, but where had she been for the past few years? I hadn’t seen her in anything.