Genia wore a Goya veil in the funeral cortege. She walked in the third row of mourners. Ernesto, leading the band, conducted at a smart pace and she had some difficulty keeping up with the shiny black coffin. She followed it into the Virgin of Africa, where after a short prayer for Lieutenant Zamora’s soul, she turned to the matter of her own. Clasping her fingers, she bothered the Virgin to be a dear and keep Ernesto from touching her.

Ernesto Ortiz and Evgenia Nikolaevna Polotseva were married under the same roof six weeks later. In the evening, she floated on the bed while Ernesto undressed. Her husband sat down awkwardly beside her. She was her dead mother on the lake. “Genia,” he whispered, crawling on top of her. She felt a carp swimming inside her legs and became hysterical.

Ernesto was too terrifed to ask what the matter was, but he could see she was living through a horror he didn’t dare experience at second hand. The carp swam away, and in the morning when they looked at each other, each saw the stranger to whom they would be married for the rest of their lives.

Genia Ortiz remained a virgin until she was forty. She satisfied herself with thinking of the old days. The old days were always good. No other part of the world had the power to replace Balnasharki in her heart. The memories trembled through her head like feet across the slats of the old bridge. She saw the house like a slice of christening cake, the storks bouncing from the toothpick reeds, the walnut avenue with its pothole which caused her body to clench every time they drove over it, the spires of the town through the trees, her father fanning away the midges from his mournful face with the cigar he only smoked on the lake.

In Abyla such clamorous images grew and bred. She only had to pass her nose over an empty perfume bottle to be circled by moths of nostaglia. The fabric belonging to the rest of her life had been consumed by these moths until it seemed her entire existence might have been squeezed or buttoned into her first eleven years.

Just as early photographs blurred moving objects, so few other people existed for her. In the stopped clocks of her imagination she referred not to General Franco nor La Pasionara nor King Juan Carlos, but to a grandmother who had argued with Pavlova or a twelfth-century Boyar or an ancestor, an insane cossack – the nearest she ever came to a black sheep – who had fled Kiev to become a stargazer in Rudolfine Prague.

In her lonely exile, Genia Ortiz dropped names – Golitsyn, Meyershensky, Oblomov – which stayed where they fell because no one knew who on earth she was talking about.

After more than sixty years, Genia Ortiz had talked herself out of a large percentage of the presidio’s goodwill. She was conscious of her effect on people, and minded, regretting it in the way a smoker regrets the taste in his mouth, but she was powerless to prevent herself from advising anyone with two good ears of her father’s descent from Grand Duke Polotsev, of the eighteen servants who infested the house, the paquet floor in the principal bedroom – where no less a person than X had stayed on his way back from the siege of Vienna, and the occasion, as an eight-year-old child attending the Kiev School for Young Ladies of the Nobility, when she had very nearly been bitten by one of Anna Pavlova’s bulldogs.