*

‘I was born in the town of Kerch, on the northern shore of the Black Sea …’

THERE IS A SHOP. It is already familiar to you. You have glimpsed it in another life, in Leonard’s. Smells contend with one another in the darkness: the sharp aromas of paraffin, pitch and coffee; the oaky scent of hemp ropes; venereal hints of dried fish, musky tobacco; the camphor tang of liniments and cough remedies. Listen carefully and you are aware of a faint sound, like the hoarse breath of a sleeping giant: the steady motion of a gentle inland sea.

It is evening. A boy of seventeen is standing behind a barrel, studying a medical textbook by an oil lamp’s yellow flame. He reminds us of Leonard, but he is not Leonard. He is a young version of the man we have just met: Nicolas, or more accurately Nikolai, but here we’ll know him by an affectionate diminutive, Kolya: sallow, grey-eyed, height five feet five and a half inches, weight 110 pounds, with a silky, incipient moustache of which he is inordinately proud.

The town of Kerch sits on the eastern tip of the Crimean peninsula; it closes off the Sea of Azov to the north, and looks across the water to the Cossack lands of the Kuban. Sometimes, when the wind blows from the east, Kolya fancies it is carrying the scent of wormwood and incense across the steppe from the caliphates and emirates of Central Asia.

From childhood, he has dreamed of visiting the Silk Road cities, of tasting the wild apples of the Tian Shan mountains, and seeing the blue-eyed Muslims of the Kashgar oasis whose ancestors travelled east with Alexander’s conquering armies.

At the Greek Gymnasium, founded for the children of émigré traders, Kolya has worked industriously, winning his teachers’ approval, but is occasionally chided for sprinkling his compositions with bulbuls and minarets and harems and splendid thrones.

Since the age of eight, he has assisted in this shop, weighing, packing, keeping accounts with a neat hand in the ledger; making deliveries to customers who are favoured, or old, or sick.

The Kerch of the 1870s is small, but all varieties of life blow in from the sea: Turk, Armenian, Georgian, German, Greek, Italian and even English. A frequent visitor to the stores is a man named Horace Meakins, a Mancunian and the skipper of a packet ship. He comes in for supplies and to fill his pouch with pipe tobacco; he is married to a fierce Bessarabian woman who has borne him a family in Odessa.

Wait for a second in the warm darkness of this shop. Be careful what you touch. This place is as fragile as any enchantment. There is a feeling that a strong wind might ruffle its backdrop, expose the jars on its shelves as clever sketches. The ring of a mobile phone could intrude at any minute. Still, look at the child beside the barrel: pensive, hard-working, standing at the threshold of a long life of seemingly inexhaustible promise, but which will be reduced in conclusion to an inventory of disappointments and consolations. He is you, reader; he is me.