MacGahan glances at him. She’s seen her protégé change, not always for the better. Two years of steady progress, two years of having his own means and bossing servants, two years of reporting on the suffering of others – it has deadened his compassion a little. Like many people on a lucky streak, he’s rather too quick to give himself the credit for it. She stifles a cough. Kolya’s young liver makes short work of an evening’s drinking. Hers has grown less resilient with age. Last night, she was caught out in a rainstorm and got drenched. She’s not ready to slow down, but being a war correspondent is a young person’s game. Also, there’s someone, an English governess she met on a brief leave in Saint Petersburg. (English governesses have supplanted the French in the affections of the Russian elite.) MacGahan fancies a new life where the two of them could hide in plain sight: perhaps as a pair of retired schoolteachers in a New England village. She’s been promised a good price for her memoirs and knows she could sell out lecture tours for long enough to buy a nice parcel of land in upstate New York. She wonders idly how she would manage the winters now.

Kolya’s thinking of home, too, but for another reason. He wants his parents to see the success he’s made of himself. Even if they read the Russian papers – which they don’t – they’re unlikely to connect special correspondent Nicolas Notovitch with their absent son.

He says farewell to MacGahan, picks up a new suit of clothes from an Italian tailor and catches a steamer to Odessa, from where it’s an overnight train to Kiev. He spends the journey in third class, sitting uncomfortably in his stiff new suit, trying to avoid the malodorous rustics. Buried in a French novel, he starts at the sound of a conversation in Yiddish: a Jew from the shtetl is upbraiding another Jew, a stranger, for concealing the long braids of his tsitsit beneath an overcoat.

*

ON KHRESHCHATYK, Kiev’s main thoroughfare, Kolya stops at a bakery to add a cake to his other presents: a coffee pot, jewellery, Turkish sweets.

The address he’s got is for a ground-floor apartment in a stinking courtyard. Inside, of course, it’s spotless. His sisters – Rebecca, Feiga, Lera – coo over the gifts. His mother receives the cake box as though there’s an anarchist’s bomb inside it and glances at her husband. The prodigal son senses it’s not going to be eaten here.

Kolya doesn’t remember this: the menorah and the tin of polish on the table, his father’s fringed shawl. He thinks of the earnest Jew on the train. What’s happening here? Who’s changed? Him or them?

The answer’s both.