“Look who has soup on his face,” Maria said to Stepan in English over the dinner table.

He glanced at his father and chuckled to see a thin moustache of soup on his top lip.

“What is it? What are you looking at?” Peter asked, and pulled a comic face, making them laugh even harder.

Stepan was still a serious boy, but Maria’s second-eldest, Irina, was a chatty, fun-loving girl who seemed immensely popular with her peers. She was forever meeting groups of friends to walk along Nevsky Prospekt, peering at the goods for sale in luxury shops, or to sit by the canals chatting. She did not yet have a boyfriend but seemed very interested in the opposite sex and acted with girlish coyness if one of Stepan’s friends came to collect him on the way to the Institute.

Eleven-year-old Katya reminded Maria of herself. She was stuck between the elder two and the younger two and spent a lot of time on her own, until she struck up a friendship with Raisa’s daughter Galina, who was the same age. Maria was wary of Galina coming to their apartment, since she knew that every last detail of life in their household would be reported back to Raisa, and there was no question in her mind that Raisa was an NKVD informer. She was exactly the type they would target because she would love the self-importance.

Mikhail and Yelena were still young, aged nine and five respectively, and they were bonded at the hip, spending all their time outside school hours in each other’s company, endlessly able to invent new games to amuse themselves. They had been the easiest to raise, Maria mused. Perhaps it was because she had become relaxed as a parent.

She often wondered what Pavel would have been like had he lived. His character would have been shaped by the suffering brought by his hemophilia, just as Alexei’s had been. Her little brother had developed a stoicism that belied his young years. Maria knew that if she had been nursing Pavel, she would not have been able to work. In fact, she doubted she would have had any more children. Her life would have taken an entirely different path.

* * *

In the autumn of 1937, workmen arrived to redecorate the apartment block. Walls were to be replastered and painted, creaking floorboards nailed down, and the plumbing and electrics overhauled. At last they would have a bathtub with hot running water; no more staggering to the bathroom with a pot of water boiled on the stove.

Only one thing worried Maria: the workmen were to be allowed access to their apartment while they were at work. She didn’t like the thought of strangers poking through her possessions, and she was particularly nervous that the bag of jewels she had sewn into her clothing and brought with her from Ekaterinburg might be discovered in its hiding place beneath the floorboards.