Now there is the sound of voices. The boy looks up, his eyes refocusing slowly on the door of the shop. (What a privilege it is to observe him unnoticed! Imagine if someone were watching over you in this kindly way.)

Meakins, the packet-boat skipper, enters. Beside him is an extraordinary creature. Kolya seems to see a tall man with a deeply tanned face, shoulder-length brown hair, and a dress. A man who is in fact a woman, but so tall, garrulous and swaggering that Kolya cannot, somehow, think of her as one. Her speaking voice is low, deeper than alto, a warm tenor like Kolya’s own, as she talks to Meakins in English, listing the items she requires.

In spite of his long residence in the Russian Empire, Meakins’s command of the language is shaky, but he seems keen to impress his guest with his local knowledge. He passes on the information hesitatingly. ‘A cooking pot, a case of biscuits, lamp oil, tobacco …’

Kolya jots down the items in his neat clerical handwriting. Now he interrupts in English, addressing the stranger directly in order to clarify something. ‘Tobacco to smoke?’

She holds his gaze for a second. ‘To chew,’ she says, and sends a gout of brown saliva onto the dust of the wooden floor.

Kolya fills her order as quickly as he can. She is no more than ten or fifteen years older than he, but already she has the air of someone whom the world can no longer surprise. Her face is as brown as a sailor’s and the corners of her eyes are ribbed with crows’ feet. She stands in a wide, unladylike stance and uses a silver-topped ebony stick to point out supplemental items from the shelves: dried fish, ink, wax candles, ten quires of paper.

‘You speak English,’ she remarks. ‘They teach you that at school?’

‘A little, but mostly I learn myself.’

Sixty years later, Notovitch will allow himself a smile as he parodies his rustic pronunciation. ‘I lyorn myself.’ But there’s a little dash of pride. In retrospect, it’s clear that this is his defining talent. It comprises a combination of gifts – a facile memory, a bent for mimicry, a good ear, but most of all a special confidence. He plunges into each new language like an expert swimmer who knows that each lake or river or sea presents a fresh set of challenges, but that they’re all water, an element he’s conquered. The trick is in a kind of surrender. Kolya can pick up the rudiments of a new language in a week, get close to mastery in a month. He’ll do it with an athlete’s unthinking grace, surprised that others can’t do the same. He’ll notice too the slight transformation that each language works on his persona: more direct in Russian, more sprightly in French and Italian, more heavy and scrupulous in English; and in the oriental languages he’s still barely dreamed of learning, he’ll astonish himself with his subtlety and resourcefulness.