Chapter 13

The next day we had to use a railway bridge again at Alba Iulia. Granny Persie said she couldn’t quite work out how the road used to cross the river – it just disappeared one side and reappeared the other, with no sign of a bridge or the remains of one, and no sign of any ramps for a ferry or anything.

Some days I used to write a lot in my diary; other days just a word or two. Sometimes I look at what I wrote, and wonder why I bothered to write it at all, or what on Earth the words meant; other times a single word brings the memories flooding back. Sometimes Ivan’s map, or the atlas, or one of the other maps brings memories flooding back.

I know we stopped that night just after Hateg, but I don’t remember a thing about the place, nor about Reşiţa that we went through just before we stopped the following day.

I do remember something about the day after that though. We passed Ciudanoviţa, the uranium mine. ‘Passed’ is the right word, though – we were never closer than about five kilometres from the mine, and we never saw it, nor did any of our frequent radiation measurements reveal it. We were in the next valley. Granny said she was glad the road didn’t go down the valley where the mine was.

We did go right through Anina, and saw the remains of industry there. Huge rusting steel structures and a tall chimney kept appearing and then disappearing behind the trees again.

The road went steeply up and down and wiggled back and forth like crazy all that day. There were lots of places where it was covered in debris where streams ran across it, quite a few where it had washed away, and there were lots of small trees growing through its surface. Granny, Laima, and I were a long way ahead in the tanker most of the time, because we were never sure whether we were going to have to turn back and there was often nowhere to turn.

In one place we needed to move some big stones to fill a hole, and Nikolai and Uncle Sid walked about two kilometres to come and help – better a long walk than risk having to do a long reverse with a truck and trailer on that difficult road. After that, Nikolai and Uncle Sid rode with us in the tanker in case there was another big hole or a rock or tree trunk in the road, and Laima waited by the roadside for Grandad to pick her up. But we didn’t actually find anywhere that was completely impassable.

With a lot of steep climbing, the engines all got very hot, and Suonjar insisted that no-one else should be in the Bandvagn. Jake wanted to stay with her, but she wouldn’t let him.

‘I know you’re wearing reindeer skins now. Everybody is. But even so, if this thing catches fire, the fewer of us there are in it the better. I can get out damn quick if I have to, and all the quicker if I’m not thinking about anyone else.’

Happily, it didn’t catch fire.

We did have to change two truck wheels though, because reinforcing rods in the broken concrete of a bridge went right through the tyres. Grandad didn’t see the rods, probably because they were buried in debris.

That meant we only had two good spares left, for four trucks and three trailers. We kept the wheels, in case we ever found a tyre store with the right size of tyres.

That night we stopped near a place called Oraviţa. We’d only done about seventy kilometres, because the road had been so difficult.

The next day was very memorable – a turning point in our expotition. Literally.

Not long after breakfast, we reached Bela Crkva, having passed the border between Romania and Yugoslavia without even noticing it. From Bela Crkva, the plan was to go on to Kovin, then over a bridge over the Danube to Smederevo. Granny was hoping to find more maps there, because from Smederevo onwards the only one we’d got was the big atlas. But just after Bela Crkva we reached the end of the road. A vast lake stretched in front of us. We’d caught sight of expanses of water through gaps in the trees for a while, and thought it was probably just flooded marshes, but it proved to be much more than that. We couldn’t see the other side!

Far out in the water there were dead trees standing, but closer to the shore there were live trees. Granny said that meant that the trees further out had drowned, because the water had been up around them for a long time, but that the live trees showed that the water had only recently reached its present level.

Granny and Laima studied the atlas carefully. The only explanation they could come up with was that there was a large, well-organized outfit somewhere around who’d constructed a new dam on the Danube, or enlarged an existing one.

‘Flooding a huge area of good farmland doesn’t bother them an iota, there’s no shortage of that now. But they presumably want more electricity, without using fossil fuels or nuclear power. If we’re right, they’ve got the capability to build huge dams, and construct huge turbines and generators. They must be fantastically much better organized than our old camp – or for that matter the other two or three we’ve seen evidence of. With a much bigger population, and industrial capabilities.’

Bela Crkva was close to the one hundred metre contour, so they reckoned the water level probably wasn’t very much below that, which implied an absolutely enormous lake. Exactly how big would depend on the exact level of the water, since the huge plain it was flooding had very little relief. The atlas simply didn’t have enough information for them to be able to guess the limits of the lake, but they were pretty sure it would be an awful long way to go round it – and almost certainly take us close to several abandoned nuclear reactors.

‘If they’re abandoned. If there are still organizations capable of building huge dams, maybe there are still organizations capable of running nuclear power stations.’

‘Maybe, but I doubt it. I don’t think it would have been feasible to maintain them for the duration of the cull.’

Everyone was just calling it ‘the cull’ by then.

The grown-ups had a big conference. It was clear that we weren’t going to be able to follow the route we’d planned, and that this wasn’t just going to be a minor diversion. Everyone was pretty sure that they wanted to avoid the Big Outfit, if at all possible – they were fairly sure it would be organized on autocratic lines, and very likely didn’t speak English or Swedish. Laima thought that they very possibly did speak Russian, but she and Nikolai definitely preferred to be with our little group than any big, organized outfit.

‘It’s very possible that they’re Romanian, Yugoslav or Bulgarian. If so, the older ones would probably speak Russian, but the younger ones probably wouldn’t, and the older ones might not like to.’

‘They could be from anywhere, though. An outfit with that kind of capability could take their pick of where to be, in today’s world.’

‘So how do we avoid them? And where are we heading, now?’

‘Wherever we decide we’re heading, we’ll have to be ready to change our minds again if we encounter them – and we’ll have to be ready to negotiate with them if they see us and don’t just let us turn away.’

‘That’s always been the case. But we’d never before suspected that a group with this kind of capability might exist.’

‘I wonder if the various groups are in touch with each other?’

‘I don’t think so. You’d expect long wave radio would be their method of communication, and there was never any of that kind of activity on long wave when we used to listen. We don’t even have a working receiver any longer, but if they weren’t doing it from the beginning, I don’t suppose they’ve ever started.’

‘They could have been using telephones.’

‘No. The system relied on far too much infrastructure. It simply wouldn’t have survived the cull.’

It was decided that we were still trying to get to Greece, to find somewhere on the Mediterranean coast if possible. The big question was how and where to cross the Danube. Granny was sure there must be some crossings downstream of Smederevo, but it wasn’t at all obvious where they might be. The roads on the north side of the river didn’t seem to match up with the roads on the south side in most places, probably meaning there weren’t any bridges.

There was a dam marked near Turnu Severin and Kladovo. Portile de Fier (Iron Gate) was marked at roughly the same spot, all a bit tangled and confused on the map in the atlas. Everyone assumed there’d be a crossing there, but that there was most likely a hydroelectric power station.

‘And if someone’s either made that dam bigger, or built another one, the odds are very high that that power station is working. We’re pretty certainly better off not going anywhere near it.’

But where the next crossing was, we really couldn’t tell. It looked as though there might be one between Bechet and Orekhovo, but that was very close to the nuclear reactor at Kozloduy.

‘I wonder whether there are any bridges downriver of here at all. It’s a big river. It might be all ferries.’

‘Well, if it comes to it, we could cross in the Bandvagn. If we can find a suitable small ferry, we might be able to tow a ferry with the Bandvagn, to get the trucks across.’

‘Sounds like a dicey procedure to me. Anything big enough for the trucks to drive onto safely is going to be a bit big to tow with the Bandvagn, I reckon.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. As long as the river’s pretty slow moving at the point we try to cross, you could tow something quite big. It’d just be slow, that’s all.’

‘I think there’s probably a bridge at Giurgiu, look. The railway is marked as crossing the river there. Surely they’d have a bridge not a ferry for the railway?’

‘It’s an awful long way east. I wonder whether we can find out what’s there without actually going there?’

‘We can take a look at Bechet first, if the radiation levels aren’t too high.’

‘Look at the route to Bechet, though. It goes right past that dam. Do we want to go that way? It’s an awful lot further to avoid it, and right up through the mountains. Who knows what the roads will be like up there?’

‘You can’t tell exactly how high the passes are from the atlas. As far as you can see, it’s no higher than we’ve been in a few places before. But is it worth such a long detour to avoid the dam anyway? How likely are we to be noticed? There’s a town on the north side, so I don’t suppose we have to go right past the dam anyway. There quite likely won’t be many people there – it’s very likely a remote outpost from their point of view, and they won’t see any need to guard it or anything.’

Going back through Anina was easier than it had been coming. The places where Nikolai and Uncle Sid had had to repair the road were still good, and since we knew it was passable everywhere we all stayed close together and kept moving, so it didn’t take nearly as long as it had going the other way.

At Anina we turned off the road we’d come on, to head towards the dam. We had to leave everyone quite a long way behind again, because the road was narrow and in pretty rough condition. Rather than waiting at each possible turning point for everyone to catch up, Nikolai suggested we should describe the latest spot over the intercom, and just keep moving. This did speed us up quite a lot, but it was lucky it didn’t end in disaster: after about the fourth turning point, Grandad caught us up in the Unimog while Nikolai and Uncle Sid were clearing a large tree that had fallen right across the road. He hadn’t recognized the turning point Uncle Sid had described, and had driven straight past it! Luckily the road wasn’t blocked, and before long we reached another place where it would have been possible to turn the trailers if we’d had to.

After that we reverted to our old procedure. We weren’t in any terrible hurry really. We were well south, and we had plenty of food and fuel. What difference would a few days extra on our journey make?

Wherever it was we were going. The oldies were talking about a place in Greece called Thessaloníki. I knew they weren’t particularly expecting to be exactly there – but maybe within reach of there for going raiding.

We reached a place called Mehadia late that afternoon. Fortunately, we were just on the maps that we’d found in Baia Mare, or we’d never have found our way in that area. It seemed such a long time ago that we’d been at Baia Mare, but we were forcefully reminded of it: Mehadia, like Baia Mare, had been devastated by a huge flood. This time the map showed no obvious big dam upstream that could have burst to cause the flood, and Granny thought that it must either have been a most terrible storm, or perhaps a dam had been built not long before the cull, after our maps had been made.

‘It could even have been a dam still under construction at the time of the cull, that wasn’t really finished and wasn’t supposed to have filled – but the channel got blocked somehow after the cull.’

‘Who knows? We won’t go looking, that’s for sure, so we’ll never know.’^*

The bridge or bridges had been destroyed in the flood, but it didn’t take long to find a gravelly place where we could ford the river easily. Just the other side, there was a large grassy area, ideal for the goats and chickens. Radiation levels were low, and we had a lovely evening by the river. Lieđđi and Gealbu wished they’d got a net to try their parents’ method of fishing, but we didn’t have one, and they fished with the rods and lines as usual. By nightfall they’d caught three very small fish, which little Liz and Emma and I had as a side dish with our supper.

We were visited by a bear during the night. This time Dad was prepared, and had a gun with him when he went out with the lantern. The bear obviously didn’t like the light and ran off, but Dad caught sight of its backside disappearing into the night.

‘He was a big fellow. Or she was. Most likely a bear last time, too, I guess.’

In the morning we saw the bear’s muddy paw marks even further up the side of the animals’ trailer than the last ones had been, so we knew Dad wasn’t exaggerating.

‘Much bigger than that and he’d be able to smash the trailer. That’d be the end of our goats and chickens.’

‘I reckon that one could have done if I’d not disturbed him. Maybe we should have taken that sturdier trailer when we had the chance.’

‘No point going back for it now! But we should keep our eyes out for another, anyway.’

‘Another trailer, or another bear?’

Laughter. ‘Both!’

‘There’d be a lot of meat on a bear.’

‘So far we’ve only come across them at night. Not so easy to shoot one in the dark. And we’d want to be sure of killing it with the first shot, if we do shoot one. Last thing we want is a really angry live bear. I reckon we should only shoot one if we can’t scare it away.’

‘Next time, it’d probably be better if two of us went out with a gun each if we think there’s a bear, then.’

‘And stick together. We don’t want to end up shooting each other in the dark.’

‘Hopefully the lanterns will always scare them away anyway.’

After breakfast, we set off down the valley towards the Danube. According to the map, the river was pretty wide at the point where our road met another one along the side of the river. Granny said it must be basically a reservoir, impounded by the dam at Portile de Fier. She was a bit nervous about what we were going to find when we reached the Danube. Had the existing dam been raised, and if it had, would the road be flooded?

And if it hadn’t been raised? Presumably there was a new dam further upstream somewhere. Probably both would have functioning hydroelectric power stations, and there’d probably be traffic on the road between the two. The map showed a road on each side of the river. Which one would be being used? Or would they both be in use?

‘How much traffic would you expect, though, Persie? I don’t suppose they need very many personnel to run a hydroelectric power station, and it’s very likely a long way away from the main centre of population. That could be almost anywhere. How often would people come and go? My guess is not often. There’s obviously no traffic at all up this road, anyway.’

‘If there’s no-one about, maybe we can even cross by the dam itself.’

‘We’ll see what it looks like when we get there. It’s very likely the crest of the dam is in full view of anyone working in the power station.’

‘If they’ve even got windows looking in that direction.’

‘Six big military vehicles is quite noticeable. And we make a fair bit of noise, so someone might come out to look even if they don’t have a window in the right direction.’

‘We make a lot less noise when the road’s dead level, like the crest of a dam. And there’ll be a lot of noise in the power station to cover it.’

‘What are you so scared of, anyway? There won’t be many people there. What will they do if they do see us? They’ll be more scared of us than we’ll be of them.’

‘But they’ll report our existence.’

‘Nothing we can do about that. That can happen anywhere, any time. Once we get the other side, we just take the road that looks unused. Like last time, we’ll be out of the area before anyone starts to follow us.’

‘Hmm. There are two differences. Firstly, someone seeing our vehicles is a lot more immediate than someone seeing our tracks, quite likely not until days or weeks later. Secondly, as far as I can see there’s only one road that goes anywhere the other side of the river around here. So if the organization is based that side, we don’t have a choice but to head further downstream on this side.’

We didn’t take long to reach the river. The road along the bank was clearly being well maintained, and presumably fairly regularly used, although there was nothing on it when we reached it. I’d never seen a road like it before. There wasn’t a pothole in it, there was no debris strewn across it anywhere, and there wasn’t so much as a weed growing through the surface, never mind the usual small saplings.

‘Most roads used to be like this in the old days, Mikey.’

What wasn’t obvious was whether the road was a completely new one, above a new, higher water level.

‘Well, that’s much as we expected.’

Taking our future in our hands and with our hearts athump, we headed downstream. It was about fifteen kilometres to the dam, and it took less than twenty minutes to reach it.

Looking at the atlas – we were off the edge of the road map at that point – Granny had expected to find a town by the dam, but it must have been a bit further downstream. The road continuing down the valley was as good as the road we’d just come along, which pleased Granny greatly.

‘That probably means two things. Firstly, that there is probably a new dam further upstream, and that this one is still its original size. Secondly, and more importantly from our point of view, the organization who’s running these two dams is most likely this side of the river, further to the east.’

‘Interesting that there have been no fences. Very different from our old camp.’

‘Dunno. The soldiers came and went outside the fenced area. It was only us serfs who were supposed to stay in the camp. There could be a fenced area full of serfs somewhere further east. I don’t intend to find out if I can help it!’

There was a road along the crest of the dam, and that was in good condition, too.

I was puzzled by one detail that we saw as we crossed. At each end of the dam, there was a long, narrow stretch of water between tall parallel concrete walls. The water was well below the level in the river above the dam, but well above the level further downstream. I asked Granny about them.

‘They’re locks, Mikey. It doesn’t look as though they’ve been used since the cull, but they used to use them to raise and lower ships between the upper and lower river. I’ve never seen such big ones before, but I’ve seen smaller ones often enough. Been in boats going up and down in them, in fact. Your grandad actually worked building some, before the cull. Much smaller ones than these, though.’

‘You’re right about the dam not having been raised, Persie. Even if they were still providing for shipping in the river, which I don’t think they are, they wouldn’t have bothered with one each side like that. Those were built in the days when this was a busy waterway.’

‘Oh, look. Now we really know the outfit is on the Romanian side. Pylons with cables on that side, and pylons with no cables this side.’

On the south side of the river we passed some big buildings, notable from my point of view for not having plant life lodged in every nook and cranny. Immediately after the buildings, the road became the kind of road I was used to: potholes, gravel, and small trees.

‘Well. I wonder if anyone saw or heard us? I didn’t see any sign of life. Did anyone?’

A chorus of ‘no’ from the intercom.

Without any road maps, we were completely dependent on the big atlas again. The road followed the river, either upstream or downstream, but the downstream one appeared to go to a small town about twenty kilometres away and then stop. It might have continued to the next town, but it was impossible to tell. If it existed, it was so tangled up with the river and the border between Yugoslavia and Romania that we couldn’t see it on the map. The topography was so rugged that Granny guessed that the upstream road was the only one that connected through.

‘Well, I hope the new dam is further up the river than where our road turns away from the river, that’s all. It’d be a sad shame to find our road disappearing under the dam.’

It was slow going, because the road was in particularly bad condition. In several places we had to fill huge holes in the road with rocks before we felt safe taking the vehicles across, and in several others we had to dig our way through landslides across the road. At least there were no bottomless mud holes. It was rocks and stones everywhere.

In many places we could see a line of white scars on the hills the other side of the river.

‘That’s the road the other side of the river, Mikey. Our side would have looked like that before the cull, too, but it’s all overgrown now and wouldn’t look so noticeable. But they’re maintaining that road. Every time there’s a new landslip, they come and tidy up the mess. They don’t just dig a bit away so they can crawl over the mess like we do, they remake the road properly.’

The biggest relief of all was that the new dam was somewhere further upstream than our turning, and that our turning was obvious. It was the first side turning of any significance that we’d seen, and it was in pretty much the right place according to the atlas. It was up a flooded side valley. There was a lovely grassy area between the road and the water. We decided to stop there for the night, because Granny guessed the road was going to head straight up into the hills from there, and there probably wouldn’t be another good place for the animals. Radiation levels were reassuringly low, too.

We could see a village just a little further up the road. Laima and Nikolai went to take a look, taking guns in case they saw deer or rabbits, and a bucket and spade in case there were any vegetables gone wild. Grandad and Dad and Lieđđi went down to the water and started fishing.

It wasn’t me who saw the man first this time, it was little Liz. He was watching us from amongst the trees near the road. Little Liz was very good. She didn’t jump and shout. She just very quietly told Granny, who was cooking with Aunty Anna. But she did point, and the man realized he’d been seen.

He came out into the open, with his hands spread wide. Granny told me later that he did that to show that he was unarmed, and not threatening us. He was wearing a one-piece suit, that Grandad later told me was called a boiler suit. I was a little confused by him at first, because I’d never seen a grown man without a beard before, but he didn’t look like a woman.

He offered his hand to Uncle Sid, who shook it, and then he shook hands with all the other adults who were by the trucks. Then he spoke in a language I didn’t recognize.

The only language I knew then was English, but I recognized Russian, Swedish and Sami. This didn’t sound like any of them.

He quickly realized that none of us knew his language. Then he tried Russian. Laima and Nikolai weren’t there, but at least we knew it was Russian he was speaking, and Granny had a few words. She explained, more by gestures than words, that two of our party spoke Russian and would be back soon.

‘Do you speak English at all?’

The man looked blank.

‘Chai?’

‘Spasiba.’

Well, that’s what it sounded like, anyway. And even I knew that much Russian. ‘Tea?’ ‘Thanks.’

Sharing a pot of tea is a good way to start a conversation if you don’t have much in the way of a common language, but the man seemed a bit anxious. He looked at his watch.

The man gestured in the direction we’d said Laima and Nikolai had gone, then pointed at his watch and make a questioning gesture. Not then knowing what a watch was, I didn’t understand, but Granny did.

‘Mikey, run and fetch Laima back. Quick as you can.’

I ran.

I didn’t know where in the village they’d be, and wanted to shout, but I didn’t have any breath left, so I just kept running up the road and eventually found them digging potatoes. As soon as she understood what I was saying between gasps, she left Nikolai to the work and came running back with me.

Considering that she was sixty-seven years old, she could fairly run!

The man was called Carol. He’d been working at the power station and had seen our convoy go over the dam, and wondered who on Earth we could possibly be. He’d followed us on his motorbike – another thing I’d known nothing about before then – far enough behind that he thought we probably wouldn’t notice him.

He was right about that.

When we stopped, he stopped his engine so we wouldn’t hear him, and crept up to take a closer look at us. He’d pretty much decided we were harmless, just a big family with old people and small children, and was just considering whether to introduce himself, when little Liz spotted him.

‘Do you have to get back soon? Will anyone notice you’re missing?’

‘No, the place runs itself mostly. I’m the only person working there at the moment, but I ought to get back before it gets dark. My bike’s got a reasonable headlight, but that’s a terrible road. Not as bad on a bike as in a truck, of course – I saw how much trouble you were having – but still not funny in the dark. I don’t think anyone’s used that road since the war.’

Laima had to translate for the rest of us, and we probably missed a few things. Granny suggested that Laima should invite him to stay the night with us and go back in the morning, ‘if he can stomach our food!’

‘It’d be good to learn as much as we can about the outfit he’s in. He seems relatively free. Maybe it’s even possible we might want to join them.’

‘And if he learns a bit more about us, that makes no difference now. He knows we exist. Either that matters or it doesn’t.’

Everyone approved of the suggestion he should be invited to dinner and to stay, and Laima made the offer.

‘Thank you very much! I’d be cooking for myself back at the power station. Something boring.’

The talking went on late into the night, and of course I went to sleep. But I caught quite a lot before I went to sleep, and more in the morning, and I know more or less what transpired, anyway.

Carol had been very, very surprised to see our convoy. Everyone he knew believed that the only other survivors were probably in communities similar to theirs, but a very long way away. The idea of a small group of independent survivors had never seemed possible to them at all.

Carol’s community consisted of about twenty-five thousand people in and around Craiova, and about fifteen thousand in and around Bucharest – a tiny fraction of the former populations. About half of them were Romanians. Most of the rest were Russians, plus a few Ukrainians and Bulgarians.

Initially, there had been several closed camps similar to the one Grandad and the Grannies had been in in Sweden, each associated with one or a few shelters, scattered over a large area of Romania, Bulgaria and the Ukraine. Then, a couple of years after the war, the authorities had moved everyone to Craiova or Bucharest, where some of the old industrial units were being resurrected, and skilled labour was needed.

War? That was what Carol called it. He didn’t know the details, but to him it was obvious that that was what had happened. None of us questioned that assumption that night.

Carol thought that for us to try to join the Craiova community wasn’t really practical.

‘The authorities say there aren’t any independent survivors, so your arrival would immediately be a problem for them to explain. Language would be a problem, too. Everybody speaks Russian. We Romanians speak Romanian amongst ourselves, but we all speak Russian too.’

‘That’s a pity. We live comfortably enough for the immediate future, while we can find the things we need just there for the taking. But in the long run we’ll need to trade with people with industrial facilities, or we’ll be reduced to a very primitive way of life. Or our descendants will, anyway.’

‘Certainly, in the long run – but at what cost in liberty in the short run? The regime here is pretty nasty. I’ve got to admit I’m very tempted to ask you to let me join you. I’d never before considered the possibility of living independently, it’s never seemed realistic. But here you are, proving it’s possible.’

‘Your community has no fences, like the one three of us escaped from so many years ago.’

‘But does it? Do you have to be approved to get a gate pass to come and work at the power station?’

‘It doesn’t need fences. Nobody even thinks of the possibility of an independent life.’

He said that if he told anyone he’d met us he’d just be making trouble for himself.

‘Apart from Nina, my girlfriend, of course. I can trust her not to tell anyone else.’

It didn’t take us long to decide to invite Carol to join us if he really was tempted. Nikolai was the only one who was a bit doubtful, and Laima reminded him that he was a recent addition himself.

‘But what about your girlfriend? Would you really want to leave her behind?’

‘I wouldn’t leave her behind. If I’m welcome to join you, surely she is too? We wouldn’t even need to slow you down. If you set off as planned tomorrow, I can go and pick her up on the motorbike and catch up with you very quickly. Your trail is easy enough to follow now you’re off the decent road by the dam!’

‘And what about the power station? We wouldn’t want to cause problems for the Craiova community, however nasty the regime. And if you went missing, would someone come looking for you, and end up following our tracks?’

‘Don’t worry about the power station. I’m not a vital cog in the machine. Our disappearance will be a bit of a mystery, but people do disappear sometimes. Maybe some of them have headed off to live independently, but that’s not what anybody would ever think. I wouldn’t have until today. The authorities generally say suicide, and everybody else thinks, yeah, right, we believe you.’

‘Will your girlfriend want to come?’

‘I think she probably will, but I can’t say for sure. Either we’ll catch up with you in a couple of days, or we won’t. Don’t worry about us. If the worst comes to the worst and we try to catch you and can’t find you, we won’t have any difficulty getting back. People will just think we’ve been away for a little break. We’d get into a bit of trouble, but it wouldn’t be serious. But anyway, your trail will be easy to follow. If we want to find you, we will.’

Nikolai wondered whether Carol and his girlfriend would learn English, or whether he and his mother would end up having to translate all the time.

‘Or we could all learn Russian, or we’ll all end up speaking a mixture of all our languages. Don’t worry. You’re learning English, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but I could read English already. It’s only the pronunciation I’m having to relearn, not the whole language.’

Carol didn’t understand any of that, but Laima told him what was going on, and he said that of course he and Nina would learn English. Laima told us that they knew two very different languages already, and that she thought people with more than one language from childhood usually learnt new languages fairly easily.

‘They’re still young, too. A good deal younger than you, Nikolai. It’s much easier to learn a new language when you’re young.’

I wondered about the rest of Carol’s and his girlfriend’s families, and I’m sure we all did. But I think everybody was reluctant to ask about them. It was only months later that we found out about their families – or the lack of them.

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