‘I wish I were able to reassure the boy Menelik that memories of his nineteen brothers, the wind-swept plateaus and gorges of Abyssinia, injera – the bread his mother made every day – the aroma of her musk, how he walked in the maize and millet fields behind his father’s three legs, the third being a knobbly walking stick, will not fade completely but with each year become less painful. I wish I could tell him that he will become the favourite of Tsar Peter the Great; that he will pick up the Russian and French tongues as if they were his own; that the Tsar will send him to military school in Paris to study mathematics and engineering, at which he excels; that the Tsar will write asking him to come home to Russia soon, because he misses him; that the boy will outlive six changes of throne and become an important man in the military and government; that he will be happy again.’

‘I’d tell my young self this too,’ said Stanley. ‘Because right now I am happy, here, now, with you guys. I never even knew there were black people in Russia. This journey has been a series of awakenings.’

‘We are everywhere,’ Ibrahim said. ‘You are learning. Be warned that when you die, you discover it is a new beginning, but also that in the netherworld one becomes obsessed with one’s past life. Yet not a single aspect of it can be altered: that is the tragedy of the afterlife. You are very privileged to know this before it is too late.’

‘Are you saying I should make the most of it, then?’

‘Indeed I am.’

‘Indeed I will. Indeed it has already begun.’

‘As for me,’ Pushkin said, sitting up, ‘I was married to one of the most beautiful, vain, fickle, empty-headed women in all of Russia, Natalia Ivanovna Goncharova. I think Oprah would say I was repeating the negative pattern of my relationship with my mother. One day I challenged her lover, a certain Baron D’Anthès, to a duel in an isolated spot near the Black River.

‘It was the dead of winter. The ground was thick with snow. I was determined to kill him. He shot me first. I was carried back home. I was in the most horrendous pain. I lay on my bed. My body could not hold up. I had so many more books to write. I did not want to leave. I was fading in and out. My last words were “Life is ended. It is hard to breathe. Something is weighing me down.”’

Pushkin lay on the cushion, and dissolved into it.

Outside could be heard the sound of noisy heels coming down the corridor. The Sultan wore slippers with silver soles to alert everyone that he was in the vicinity. The women stopped what they were doing and listened.

Ibrahim stood up, smoothed out his uniform and put an arm over Stanley’s shoulder.