Cuddling him close, I plant a kiss on his forehead and drag my eyes away to look out of the window. It is a glorious view. Higher than most of the surrounding buildings, I look eastward out over rooftops, trees and squares. The sun has not yet appeared over the horizon and the clouds, drifting away from the pool of yellow light are lit red, then pink; fading to deep purple and charcoal where the rays have not yet reached.

The light in the sky grows quickly, becoming ever more intense and changing the colour of the clouds as I watch. They become paler, pink and fluffy, then white where the light is strongest. Suddenly, the top of the sun appears, a brilliant curve of shimmering gold, its rays finally penetrating the very edges of darkness in the sky. It grows above the horizon with incredible speed until the whole sky is lit for a moment, like a pool of yellow fire.

The birth of a new day.

Epilogue

June 1994

My Dear Walter

I realise that this letter will come quite out of the blue, so I hope you are sitting down. It has taken me almost five years to trace your whereabouts. Well, and two years of thinking about it and not really knowing where to start, if I’m completely honest. It’s been a long story of false starts and dead ends, but I’m persistent, if nothing else, and with the aid of – can you believe it – a Jewish charity in America, I’ve found you at last.

I thought long and hard whether to send this. Whether to risk trying to find out what happened to you, my first love and, of course, to my son, who I knew only for the first three weeks of his life. Suffice to say, not an hour of any day in the last fifty-five years have gone by without thought of him. I have lived the bulk of my life with a piece of my heart severed and, hopefully, living a happy life in England. After the war, life under the Soviets was indescribably hard. Every day, a battle for survival. I wanted to try to find you, but as time went on, it became impossible and I also came to believe it would be for the best for you and Stanley, if I stayed out of your lives. But I am getting older every day and I do not want to go to my grave not knowing what happened to my son, and of course to you, dear Walter. And so, here I am.

There is no quick or easy way to sum up the last fifty years. For the most part, I suppose, one just gets on with the day-to-day business of living and working. I try not to think of the war years, full as they were, of terror and hardships and the communication restrictions. I try not to think of the horrific years that followed, and the trauma rendered by our Russian occupiers – a conversation for another time – but once that passed and life became tolerable again, I did, you will be pleased to know, go back to finish my education. Unlike the Hitler years, the communists allowed us women some modicum of equality of opportunity, even though it was more a question of necessity, than a true vision or openness of spirit.