“Does that not mean you will be the Germans’ first target?” Maria fretted.

“They’re not going to waste a bomb on a few of us when they can target the docks or the warehouses. Don’t worry, Mama,” he assured her, with calm rationality.

“But I hear firing during the day. Will their soldiers not try to shoot you?”

“We are well camouflaged,” he promised. “I’ll make sure no German bullets have my name on them.”

At the end of September, just as freezing gusts of rain brought the first sign of winter, the oil and gas supplies to the city were cut. Maria turned on her stove and struck a match but no gas hissed out. She would have to burn wood in the burzhuika to heat food. That meant foraging for firewood after she finished work, when she was bone-weary from the day’s toil.

The factory switched to production of shell cartridges. They were heavy to carry and the steel shavings cut into the palms of her hands, but she was grateful for the job because it meant her ration was bigger than it would otherwise have been and she got canteen meals at lunchtime. When a vacancy arose, Irina came to work there too, and between them they were able to smuggle home jugs of soup to supplement the family’s evening meal and some porridge to heat for their breakfast. It was just as well, because the bread ration was reduced to two slices a day. How could anyone live on that? Especially when you could tell it was made of flour substitute, with an odd texture so that it fell apart when you tried to cut it, and a taste that was bitter and unpleasant.

Meat was a distant memory, and stories circulated of pets being stolen and killed for their flesh. One evening there was a knock on their door and Maria opened it to find a stricken Raisa.

“Have you seen my cat?” she pleaded. “It’s been two days. I didn’t let him out of the courtyard so I wondered if someone here might . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence.

For the first time since Peter was arrested, Maria felt a twinge of fellow feeling for Raisa. “I’m sorry, I haven’t seen him. But I will look out for him, I promise.”

She could understand why someone might take a cat. Hunger made otherwise moral people desperate. She had heard of ration cards stolen in the street, of people trading fur coats for a sack of potatoes. Her family were lucky that so far they had not had to resort to desperate measures, but life got tougher as the days passed and the temperature dropped.