If you didn’t know better, it would sound tempting and I still find myself liking the idea of open space and plentiful food. What could be wrong? Maybe Emee is right and the Director really does want the best for everybody, even Cerels. Jorzy, however, his face closed, sits back and takes out his pipe.

Moustache stabs the sheet with a grimy finger. “They’ve only just appeared, but already there’s a buzz on the street.”

The third man, who’d been sitting there silently, looks up darkly. “Surely people wouldn’t be so gullible–”

Another man leans over our table, trying to read the bulletin. Soon a small group has gathered. “There’s a story in the Travester newspaper about that,” one of them says.

“Gods bless the Director,” says another.

There’s a laugh. “You won’t catch me going,” says a short man wearing a porkpie hat.

The bartender pulls out a dog-eared newspaper and slaps it on the bar. “It says here we’ll be given land. We can become farmers and grow our own food.”

Jorzy is looking from one face to the next in despair. “Come on,” he shouts, waving the handbill, “you don’t really believe this shit, do you? They’re wanting to get rid of us. It’s the Caucasas, for godsake–”

Nobody is listening. Everybody is talking at once. A round of beer is called for and toasts are made. The bartender is plonking tankards of beer onto the wooden counter. This is the effect the Director must have hoped for, I reckon, for people to get caught up in the excitement, the possibility of a fine future.

Moustache is shaking his head in disbelief.

Jorzy gets up and pushes his way out of the pub. Without thinking, I hurry after him.

My brother is marching along the street. “They’ll never learn,” says Jorzy under his breath. “You’d think, with the men in the wild camps, with the disappearances, with all the humiliations we have to put up with, what they did to our mother, what’s happening with Marina …” He makes a gulping noise that means he’s very upset. “You’d think that people would learn.” Jorzy brushes away furious tears. “And what will be waiting for them there in the Caucasas?”

He stops and glares at me as if it’s my fault. A gas lamp casts a puddle of sickly light onto the pavement around us. His expression is pained, his voice breaking with raw emotion. “There’ll be nothing. Stone and ice. And they won’t even be able to get back again. Leho,” he says, his gaze like a searchlight, “it’s a death sentence.”