That long-ago afternoon now ceases to conform to the constraints of sober time; it lurches forward with the sudden disjunctions of inebriation: another drink; MacGahan drunkenly recites a prayer in Spanish and demonstrates a balestra lunge with her swordstick; Kolya falls off the bed and crushes his own hat; MacGahan challenges him to arm-wrestle. Kolya sings a Ukrainian folksong in a reedy voice; suddenly, MacGahan is dressed. Despite the heat, she’s wearing a Bulgarian sheepskin jacket, riding boots, a straw hat and a taffeta frock. Kolya stumbles after her, down an alley, pressing himself into a doorway to allow a donkey loaded with copper pots to struggle past. The touch of its warm flank lingers where it brushes his hand, innocently alive.

Everything is available in this raucous city; it’s just a matter of looking. It doesn’t take long for MacGahan to find what she’s after. A succession of middlemen, all working on the speculative hope of a final tip, lead them to a blue door in a quiet backstreet. It has the inconspicuousness of real iniquity.

MacGahan requests a private room. Drunk, unable to speak a word of Turkish, Kolya ‘translates’ by repeating her words verbatim. From this pantomime and MacGahan’s remarkable appearance, their hosts deduce the patronage of rich eccentrics.

They are shown to a shady boudoir, lit with yellow lamps, where musky perfumes conceal the smell of sweat. Two oiled boys, naked from the waist up, carry in a water pipe. MacGahan waves a hand. ‘I don’t know about you, Nick, but my tastes don’t run that way.’

Kolya clarifies the situation to a grateful proprietor, who sends in girls this time, three of them. They are ebony-haired, brown-eyed, painfully young. Kolya thinks of his sisters, back in Kerch. It is a thought melancholy enough to kill off any prospect of tumescence.

MacGahan has settled on a pile of cushions and gestures to one of the girls to join her. ‘I ain’t going to hurt you, little one. I just want to daddy with you for a while. Come here, you pretty thing.’ There is something both tender and flirtatious about MacGahan here. She’s enacting something Kolya doesn’t understand, some gentle, mutual version of ecstasy. It’s not like the busy Kerch brothel, where sailors go in and come out five minutes later, carrying the boots they’re too drunk to put back on.

Kolya is not blind to the effect MacGahan has on these village girls with their cheap bracelets. Whatever she may be, she is all they have eyes for. He might as well not exist. They take off MacGahan’s hat and play with her long copper-tinted hair, cooing over it in the liquid and guttural sounds of their language.

‘What are they saying, Nick? You’re supposed to be my translator.’

The girls turn their uncomprehending smiles towards him.

Kolya’s drunkenness seems to have sharpened his eyesight. He sees with an extraordinary clarity: the black hairs along the pale arms of the young girl refilling his glass; MacGahan’s weathered face; the bottle-green thorax of a fly against some orange peel as it catches the lamplight. ‘They want to wash your hair,’ he says.