Since Christmas Genia Ortiz had existed in a state of pathological expectation. To those few who knew her intimately, it seemed something miraculous might be occurring.

“Is it me?” Senator Zamora asked Asunción. “Or is her squint disappearing?”

On her window cushion in the Calle Zamora she swallowed in vodka gulps the latest progress of the tunnel. To her collection of photographs on the cushion, she had added her boat ticket to Odessa, a new passport (her Nansen passport having been rejected by the travel agent), and three polaroids sent by the Mayor of Balnasharki.

In his most recent letter, the Mayor explained that the house and stables had been used to quarter twenty-four families. What looked like small flying buttresses were outside latrines. Señora Ortiz would find the central structure unaltered – although the cupola had been reconstructed with roof tiles, not copper plate. If she wished to reclaim from the council the lake and the east side of the park where it adjoined the town, he would do his utmost to assist her.

This was the fourth such letter she had received from the Mayor, a former theatre director. Each time he grew more expansive. “How well I know your family home!” he had informed her in a reply to her first letter. He had received his ideology schooling in the ballroom. Once a month he had sat beneath the finial-capped cupola while a man gave a lecture about communism’s role in the modern world. “Everybody slept, including the communists. We looked at the dome. We looked at the lawn outside. We looked at the lake. Everwhere but at the lecturer. It was a comic dream.”

He welcomed the end of that dream in a footnote to his next letter.

The difference between communism and capitalism had not been a difference between systems, he explained, but between nature and anti-nature. Capitalism was cruel, but normal. “The sin of communism is that it is abnormal. You cannot imagine, Evgenia Nikolaevna, how many of my generation became alcoholics, complaining, feeling miserable, day after day. A huge part of the population drank itself unconscious. Most of them divorced at least once. It became such a run-down country. Everyone, including my predecessor, had moments when they wanted to leave. None of us found the energy. There was a universal lethargy.”

She detected a note of apprehension in his latest communication. “I was thirty-four years in the theatre and for thirty-four years my theatre was sold out. Our problem in a totalitarian régime was too much culture. People wept when they saw Chekhov. They needed him. Now they are free, they don’t need him any more. I’m very depressed, Evgenia Nikolaevna. We haven’t had jokes since the communists have gone. I tell you very cynically, the bad have come back and they think themselves better than anyone else because they happen to have acquired the manners of a Viennese concierge. People here assumed that BMWs would come with democracy. Quite a lot did, but quite a lot were driven by those who steered the previous régime.” He asked her forgiveness for writing so self-indulgently and at such length, but he wished to prepare her for what she might find. The longest journey was to return, he warned. “In the Ukraine today, perhaps there is no such thing as a return.”