Because it’s impossible to believe there’s no shape to anything. It’s impossible to shed the habits of the haruspex. Peering at the entrails of Notovitch’s book, I read jésus, jésus, jésus and it makes a queer kind of sense to me. Qin Yu Lan gathering firewood by the railway track; Dass folding his napkins in the bowels of the Derby; Pierre Thibaut cut down by gunfire, his blood puddling on a Normandy beach; an overloaded donkey on a backstreet in Istanbul; a teenager from beside Lake Van pouring adulterated wine for two strangers in a brothel; Leonard winding his puttees round his ankles, waiting for the blast of an officer’s whistle: out of all their infinite arrangements, there must be one that makes perfect sense. There must be a best story.

2: THE SAVIOUR ON BLOOD

THE SLEEPING CAR ATTENDANT rouses us with a sharp voice and tells us to get a move on. We take our bags and stumble blearily through the station concourse, past the new statue of Peter the Great that’s supplanted the old one of Lenin.

I’ve always wanted to take you here, show you things that mean so much to me, astonish you with its history, impress you with my Russian. Taxicabs are waiting at the rank outside the station, but we’ll go by foot, the better to adjust to our new surroundings. Along Nevsky Prospekt, damp May Day tricolours are flapping in the breeze that blows across the Gulf of Finland. Overhead is a tangle of trolleybus wires.

This is a young city, but over its relatively brief life it has had almost as many names as Notovitch: Saint Petersburg, Petropol, Petrograd, Leningrad, Saint Petersburg again.

To locals, it’s sometimes just Piter, named for a Saint Peter but inescapably linked to the Tsar Peter who had it conjured from a swamp. It’s an unnatural place. It didn’t grow up over centuries organically – because of a harbour, say, or a confluence of rivers. It was built swiftly by fiat, like Astana, Pyongyang or Dubai. Like them, it’s a boast in architectural form, and as with all boasting, there’s a nucleus of insecurity that it can’t conceal from everyone. In the works of Pushkin, and Gogol, and Dostoevsky, it’s the background to nightmares. Flood-prone, status-obsessed, somehow heartless; it isn’t good for a person’s soul. It’s a place where clerks are driven mad by endless light and unrequited love.

But on a warm day like today, the northern sky feels wide and hopeful. The spire of the Admiralty gleams like a raised sword, like the gold spike on a Buddhist stupa. I visited in 1990 when the whole place seemed to be crumbling. It’s good to see it cared for again. I love these smells: diesel fumes, sunshine on old stone, garlic sausage, brackish canals.