I remembered her vaguely from my childhood as some sort of dissident who’d escaped from the Eastern bloc to freedom in the West. At the time she must’ve been about fifteen or sixteen, a stocky and cheerful teenager on the news. All I understood about it at the time was that she’d done something to annoy them over there, and she was being welcomed over here, as the one that got away.

She was the sort of person you might recall from the flow of half a life-time’s news, but I didn’t remember what she’d done to be famous. Not until after we’d met at the Russian Embassy. She was a small, large-breasted woman of about sixty, still stocky, still youthful, but with an abstracted look about her, as though she couldn’t care less if she lived or died.

I was there with my friend Arkady, a poetry enthusiast; but, to tell the truth, I’d only come along out of politeness. He was an old friend. I liked the idea of drinking some free wine with him. I knew a bit about Russian literature, but nothing much about poetry or poets or embassy cultural events, and for that reason I felt it wise to hang back at the edge of the group of which this once-famous refugee was clearly an important member. It was all a bit odd, because whatever mental snapshot I’d taken back then had obviously fixed her in my mind as somebody of world importance. I suppose she must’ve been famous for a while to have made an impression, but one thing was certain, she was famous no longer: she was a husk, made of a light, exhausted substance that should have blown away on the breeze, but hadn’t. Not yet, anyway.

“Mr …” She gave me a coy look, raised her wine glass. “You must find all this a bit boring. I can’t say I blame you, my dear. Poetry in an unfamiliar language is always something of a trial, particularly when translated by somebody whose talents would have been better employed designing forms for the social security.”

I laughed politely at her witticism.

“You don’t look like a poetry-type, or an alcoholic,” she persisted. “What is it that brings you here?”

I explained quickly that I was a friend of Arkady, hoping to quell her curiosity. I was already feeling a little out of my depth.

“I wasn’t aware Arkady had friends,” she continued. “At least, none that know him professionally.”

She slurred the last word with a sort of contemptuous irony and I realised with a slight shock she was quite drunk. I felt disappointed somehow, although I scarcely knew who she was, and leaned forward to say, perhaps too emphatically: “I’ve known Arkady for many years. We were at college together .”

“Ahh.” She nodded then, fell silent for a moment, said quietly: “You are old friends.”

That was true enough, but Arkady and myself didn’t exactly live in one another’s pockets. We met up for a drink every couple of months or so, near to where he worked, at London Bridge, for a small typesetting firm. Perhaps because of his literary ambitions, he had found nothing better to do in London than inputting copy on a nine to five basis, real shit most of it, about products he would never use, services he would never require. He never told me in much detail about what he’d been working on that day, and from this I’d surmised that he tried to take in as little of it as possible. He just kept up his interest in poetry, insofar as he could, particularly stuff from his mother’s part of the world, the kind of thing he tried to write himself and published occasionally in some little magazine he’d stopped showing me some time ago.

I’d come to feel rather sorry for Arkady. I didn’t pay that much attention to anything he said anymore, just picked up the bill in whichever Italian restaurant we ended up in and put in on my expenses. It was the least I could do for someone I’d known for so long, and genuinely liked a lot, because, well, because I had always been on top, I suppose. Arkady was a nice bloke who had fallen into a middle-aged rut. I didn’t have that many friends that went back a long way. Arkady was sensitive about all that. He wanted to show me something from what he thought of as his own life, something I might find interesting.

“Forgive me,” the drunken woman said. “Please excuse me.” She teetered around to the far side of the circle, soon managing to inaugurate a more fruitful conversation with an alert-looking young woman from the Embassy. It was she who’d introduced the translator, a lecturer at the University of Walminster, praising his effort and that of his publisher in bringing the work of a little known but important poet to the attention of English readers, of which I was the only one in attendance.

Ten minutes later Arkady and I were walking around the long Kensington crescent on our way to a final drink and the nearest tube station. “I know that woman,” I said. “At least, I don’t know her exactly, but – wasn’t she famous once? A dissident or something?”

“She still is,” Arkady replied. “Famous as fuck. At least, to me. Back in the sixties they smuggled her across the Berlin wall in the back of an ice cream van. It was the most daring and unlikely escape of the cold war. She was the darling of the Western media at the time.”

“Didn’t they try to stop her and buy one?” I asked.

“Apparently,” he said, “all the East German ice cream vans played the Harry Lime theme.”

“I didn’t know they had ice cream vans in East Germany.”

He laughed. “I quite fancied her, to be honest. That’s how I first got interested in poetry.” He laughed again, but not bitterly. Arkady didn’t do bitter. “And look at where it got me!”

I laughed along with him. What else could I do? His mother had been a displaced young woman plucked from the ruins of Europe by a British serviceman, later on a widow bringing up her son alone, scrimping and saving to send him to university. Something had clicked when he saw that young poet on the news and the ice cream van in which she had ridden to freedom. Something had filled him up completely and determined the course of his life. Now she seemed to hold him in amused contempt, but it wasn’t an irony I tried to share with him. Instead we popped into a pub for a nightcap or two and made our separate ways home, me to the family, Arkady to his lodgings.

Anna Tarkovsky was no relation to Andrei, the famous film director, or none that he’d ever admitted to. In fact Tarkovsky wasn’t her real name at all, but a pseudonym she’d adopted after the director’s father, a considerable poet, as those who have seen his son’s films will know. Anna stole the name, published under it in the samizdat magazines that had carried her beautiful teenage poems, and fled with it when she got the chance, first to East Germany, then to the West, passed with infinite care along a shadowy but seemingly secure underground network. It was as though she carried within her young, brilliant head some secrets more precious to the Western allies than her undoubted abilities as a ‘seditious’ love poet.

Arkady told me some of this the next time we met. He couldn’t stop talking about Anna Tarkovsky once he had a few drinks inside him and primed by a few sympathetic questions from me, but most of what he told me was itself poetry of a sort. It was all about what Anna Tarkovsky had meant to him as a child and an adolescent.

First of all there was her appearance and the way she dressed for the cameras. She was a small, dark, almost stocky girl with brilliantly flashing eyes and a wry, lopsided smile with which she parried reporters’ questions about her boyfriends. She appeared, in the clip that Arkady - and I - remembered most vividly, in a short, brilliant white mini-coat with matching boots, and a similar Russian hat perched on her bobbed black hair. Immediately upon arrival in England she had adopted the look of a modern Western girl, one of the chic, boyish models of those times. Secondly there was the way she spoke in interviews, in a perfect but slightly accented English, boldly, with a direct address to the camera rather than to the reporter, as though her words were intended for the people. This was something like the effect that the Beatles effortlessly achieved, and in Anna it produced an even more striking and natural charm. After all, she wasn’t a pop star groomed by a Svengali manager. She didn’t come from this country. She told us that she loved her own country more than anything else in the world - except the Beatles, and, of course, The Rolling Stones. Her poetry was rich, spiky and sonorous, very Russian. Unlikely to have been written by any normal teenage girl. Unfortunately for her it had proved impossible to translate into anything sounding remotely like pop songs.

Anna Akhmanova was her heroine. Akhamanova, he explained, had stayed in Moscow defying the regime while they disappeared her husbands to the Gulags. Stalin was afraid to touch her. She was simply too popular. Arkady recited a poem of hers about the non-existence of love. No-one would face up to the fact that love isn’t real but once you realised it you felt sick all the time. In other words she remained a romantic. She wrote a Requiem for Stalin’s prisoners and those who mourned their uncertain absence and their certain deaths in the Gulags. Anna Tarkovsky, I thought, had something powerful and intoxicating: an elemental feminine scariness and strength. But she herself hadn’t stayed, hadn’t fought the system from within. She’d hopped in an ice cream van, first stop swinging London.

Arkady had been smitten, so had his mother. Anna Tarkovsky had been a gift to Arkady’s mother. Young, beautiful, brilliant, she reminded her of her younger self perhaps, but most of all she reminded her of her homeland. Anna reminded Arkady’s mother of the genius of the Russian people, and as the mother of an English boy with a Russian name, helped persuade a child who seemed inclined to drift into an undistinguished future, doomed to be nothing more a poor replica of his English contemporaries, that it was after all something to be Russian. With this in mind she had bought him a copy of Anna Tarkovsky’s book of poems when it appeared in English translation. It had been called Red Chick and she had used it to teach him the language and to instill in him a sense of who he really was, or could be.

“You know,” Arkady said. “I’m so grateful to my mother for that. She didn’t have an easy life, interviewing people for temporary office work day in, day out, no real friends except a few other exiles at the social club she attended once a fortnight - and she gave me everything, everything. No sacrifice was too great. She herself existed on next to nothing - all for her precious son. I’m ashamed of myself when I think of how little I gave in return. Now she’s gone - and I’m a very bad poet who didn’t even give her any grandchildren.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, except to offer him another drink. He accepted of course, and when I returned from the bar we managed to turn the conversation to less painful matters.

My job isn’t exciting or glamorous, but if I say so myself it has been steady, well-paid, and my continuing to do it has supported my family in reasonable style as well as paying for holidays abroad and the school fees of my eldest, who has a real head on her shoulders and is definitely worth every penny. OK, I’ve done fairly well in PR. In terms of what I expected and hoped for when I was in my teens, I’ve achieved it all, and more besides, although life never seems to be quite what you made it out to be. But then, my dreams were never as lofty - or as nebulous - as those of my friend Arkady.

Arkady was the archetypal Russian dreamer. He was a latter day Underground Man, a nineteenth century Russian bohemian without a silk shirt, but he did have a steady, paying job. It might not have been one he liked very much, but he stuck at it for years and years and I saw no reason why he shouldn’t continue to be a photo-typesetter and a confirmed bachelor for years and years to come, publishing his poems, attending readings, and growing old, as we all must.

Late morning, I was sitting at my desk in the final stages of putting an important document to bed once and for all. I’d just asked Penny if she’d mind popping down to the canteen for a coffee and a sandwich. It was the sort of errand nobody minds running, since most people are usually feeling a bit peckish too, and while she was gone the phone rang on her desk. Not wishing to embarrass her boyfriend or whoever it was, I didn’t answer. Then the call was transferred to my phone and I picked it up straight away. An unfamiliar voice asked if I was who I am. I replied in the affirmative, and without much further ado, the policewoman at the other end of the line told me that Arkady had been found dead by his landlady.

The police wanted me to go to Arkady’s local station to be interviewed. Arkady hadn’t left a note, just washed a dozen barbiturates down with a bottle of Russian vodka and slipped relatively peacefully out of his life in the early hours of Tuesday morning. As usual with suicides they needed people who knew the dead person well to comment on their mental state and offer an opinion on the deed. His landlady, a Mrs Shaw, had apparently knocked him up mid-morning when she noticed his coat was still on the hook by the back door. Receiving no answer she’d entered his small room and found him dead. Arkady had told me a few stories about this woman, her belligerent husband and her irritating little dog, and somehow those details helped me picture the scene all too clearly. She deserved it, I thought none too clearly. But Arkady didn’t deserve to die this way. I was shaken and very much upset. He hadn’t been that depressed, had he? Arkady was the sort of person who soldiered on regardless, I told myself, but the grim truth of a lengthy depression, a sense of futility, a certain endlessness to his situation - and a final inspiration to release himself from it - these things added up all too tidily to what had in fact happened.

This was more or less what I told the police and would repeat at the coroner’s inquest. I wondered grimly about the funeral. Arkady had no living relatives, so far as I knew, just a few odd friends, none of whom I knew. I asked the police about this and was told that the arrangements, including the crematorium and a private memorial service, were being taken care of by the Russian Embassy. They said I should contact them directly for further details.

“But Arkady was a British subject,” I said pointlessly. “As far as I know he never even went to Russia.”

“He was half-Russian,” the policeman said. “And apart from you and a few workmates who didn’t seem to know anything about him, his friends were all Russians. As far as the Embassy’s concerned he’s one of their own and they’re taking care of everything.”

I arrived at the crematorium to find a little group of Russians waiting for Arkady’s allotted twenty minutes as a strand of dark smoke curled from the chimney, trailing up into the blue like the single hair of a drowned woman, and the stricken relatives of the previous occupant tottered out into the sunlight, a family all propped up on each other, a collapsing house of sticks, one or two laughing, examining the wreaths with their amusing, well-thought inscriptions.

I recognised Anna Tarkovsky immediately, a small lady in a little black dress, a black crocheted shawl flung around her somewhat beefy shoulders, standing in the shadow of a large man in a black suit who looked like nothing better than the villain’s henchman in an old James Bond film. His small, dark beard might have identified him as an Italian, but the unkempt thatch in a style reminiscent of my grandmother’s lop-sided pudding basins was that of an Embassy employee. He was probably a dissident poet too, I thought. They’d all come in from the cold, it seemed, the walls had come down and they’d scuttled into the Russian Embassy for warmth, company, free drinks and the odd plate of Borscht. But I’m not a very political person, and neither was Arkady. Despite knowing him, I knew little of the others. For me he was Russia.

There were enough of us to half-fill the two narrow rows of pews in the chapel. We entered to the strains of Moussourgsky orchestrated by Ravel - one of Arkady’s childhood favourites - sang Jerusalem in honour of his English side. I was the only mourner who knew the words, and hoarsely sang them out in accompaniment to the minister’s pleasing tenor. We listened to his cobbled together eulogy, which the poor man tried to deliver with a confident-sounding ring, his eyes darting around the chapel, half-fearing contradiction of his tale, which might have been the purest cock and bull for all he knew about the body in question. He got some things right - his birth, childhood, his education - spoke with a mixture of confidence and uncertainty of his devotion to Russian literature and his work as a poet and translator, closing with a tribute to the modesty of his life and a few well chosen words about the likelihood of God’s forgiveness for the sadness of its close.

Tears came to my eyes towards the end of the service. I wiped them away with a fresh white handkerchief my wife had slipped into my top pocket, and glanced across to see that Anna’s head was bowed. Then it was all over. The minister turned away and pressed play on his cassette recorder, the pale coffin slid back through the curtains to the sounds of a lullaby set by some Russian composer I didn’t recognise, and we walked slowly out into the sunshine of the living day. At the door I felt a hand on my elbow. It was Anna, her eyes reddened as though she’d just swum twenty lengths of a municipal swimming pool. She drew me aside and spoke softly, her closeness accompanied by an overpowering sweetness of breath. I tried not to react or pull away..

“So glad you could come,” she said, or something like that.

“It was a nice service,” I lied.

“I wanted to say something myself,” she continued. “But – there, I couldn’t find the right words. I lost courage at the crucial moment.”

“Never mind,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll all remember him in our own way.” I added, “Arkady would understand. As you know, your poetry meant a great deal to him. You inspired him as a boy.”

Anna smiled brilliantly.

We milled around outside, finally, slowly, reluctantly spilling across the gravel in a trickle and dutifully inspecting the wreaths. There was one from all at work, a large one from the Embassy, Anna Tarkovsky’s, mine, a bouquet from Mrs Shaw - that surprised me - and a couple with names I didn’t immediately know. For some reason all of the Embassy people wanted to shake my hand. I was the chief mourner, Arkady’s bereft friend, a good person who had stood by him, and, I thought later, they felt bad about what had happened to him: their reassurances were those they felt had been owed to Arkady himself, simple words of inclusion and encouragement.

It was a sad business alright, but his Russian friends seemed more human than I’d given them credit for, I had to give them that. Someone - the large man - asked me if I’d care to follow them back to the Embassy for a drink. I declined politely. I had to be back at the office. I should’ve gone, I thought as I drove away from them. I should’ve seen Arkady off properly, right to the very end of the night into which he had disappeared forever. But I didn’t. I scuttled unnecessarily back to the office for an hour or two, then home to my family in Fulham.

“How did it go?” Marjorie asked.

“Pretty terrible,” I said.

“Many people there?”

“Only a few from the Russian embassy. They were okay.”

“I should’ve come with you,” she said. “I’ve been feeling guilty about it - falling down on my wifely duties.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “There wasn’t the slightest reason for you to come. Anyway, it was just a funeral of someone I happened to like. It had to be done. ”

That seemed to close the subject. I didn’t really want to talk about it. When you’ve been married as long as us you don’t really want to be hashing through everything twice, and I was glad of an excuse to keep my thoughts to myself. I made a cup of tea and sat sipping it until I felt guilty enough about this exploitation of Arkady’s death to ask Marjorie how her day off had been. Soon enough Paul came downstairs, looking for his dinner. My youngest is twelve so had spent the two hours since coming in from school with his thumbs on the buttons of some dreary computer game. I tried to download a few details about the curriculum over our meal, gave up, and he scuttled upstairs to his room to commune with Lara Croft.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay there quietly with Marjorie breathing beside me, listening to the soft rustling of the pink-blossomed tree on the pavement outside our window and thanking whoever it is for the mercies of my life. That shabby little service had said everything about the alternatives, but it had been a strange affair. I thought of Anna Tarkovsky and her influence on Arkady’s life - and death? Death? A disquieting interruption to what might otherwise have been a mental process resolving itself and a winding down into sleep kept me awake for hours.

Anna obviously did feel responsible in some way, why else had she talked to me so - I tried to pin it down incriminatingly, but the way she had spoken to me had contained nothing but kindness and concern for me, his friend, over Arkady’s death. Her own grief had been both palpable and sincere. Then I felt terrible about thinking such thoughts. I tossed and turned suddenly, abruptly. Marjorie started, groaned, and resettled herself without fully waking. I lay still, uncomfortable in my forced immobility. It was his stupid mother’s fault, I found myself thinking. What hadn’t she just let him go, let him be an English boy? I had a strong sense that if she had, or if he’d managed to break away from her, he might have adapted better to his own country. He might have had a life of his own. He might be here today. Anna Tarkovsky, the sixth Beatle, hadn’t helped either. Maybe her non-existence might have tipped the scales in his favour. My radar found her sinister, clever and twisted and bitter. Arkady had been nothing to her.

Eventually I did drift off to sleep and a couple of hours later woke up again and dragged myself out to the car and off to work. On the way there I decided to put it all out of my mind. Life does go on, doesn’t it, I shrugged to myself. And with those profound and noble sentiments I mentally tried to wash my hands of Arkady.

I missed him a bit, not that much. His life had always been a little unreal to me and I hadn’t ever given him that much thought between our meetings. After all I had my own life to worry about. I wasn’t that I didn’t care. He was a fixture in my schedule, and the times we did spend in one another’s company were happy ones, a sort of holiday in the past where we could both be the same people we’d been at college for an evening every couple of months, and if I sometimes lost the thread of his preoccupations he could soon remind me. They didn’t change much. People don’t change much, in my experience.

A couple of weeks later the coroner’s inquest came around. They sent me a letter with the time and date but no mention of what I had to do. I phoned up and was told that my evidence would be read out in court but the case was likely to be a formality, not much chance of an open verdict. I wouldn’t be required to testify in person, my presence wasn’t required, although I could attend the hearing if I wished.

I’d almost decided not to go along, but something persuaded me otherwise. Believe it or not, it was the white and pink blossoms clogging the pavement of our road at this time of year, and, when I looked up one spring afternoon, those that still clung to the budding trees. Another year was starting force itself into bloom. My daughter Victoria would soon be coming home for the holidays. A natural end and a beginning. It all set off a terrible ache in me and I decided I had to go and say goodbye to Arkady one last time.

The inquest was held at Hendon Crown Court, that being closest to Arkady’s lodgings in Cricklewood. I’d half-expected Anna Tarkovsky to be there. I looked around the courtroom for her, disappointed to see that I was the only member of the public present. Not even a ghoul reading a fat paperback on football form. Not even a tourist or two. Not … anyone, as I say, although it was an eerie feeling, as I sat down and the coroner and his assistants glanced up at me, to know that the entire proceedings would be addressed to me personally. I recognised the policeman I’d given my statement to, waiting patiently to give his evidence. He looked across the court at me in a manner that seemed friendly, even though no expression passed across his face. I realised that it must be unusual for anyone to give enough of a fuck to turn up at these dismal things. Not caring was the rule rather than the exception in suicide cases: a body swerve. It was only the state that took note of every falling sparrow, in order to ensure that they didn’t continue to claim benefits.

The proceedings proceeded in an orderly fashion, with little attention to dramatic imperatives unless those of Beckett. The action consisted largely of the man at the desk picking up and summarising various papers before him on his desk, accompanied at intervals by the policeman reading witness accounts from similar papers and his famous black notebook. My name came up and the garbled words I’d spoken about Arkady’s character were repeated aloud. I wanted to interrupt and modify them a little. The coroner looked at me. “Is that an accurate account of your statement?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes,” I said firmly. For a moment I wondered how he knew who I was. Then I realised he’d simply guessed from the statement that I would be the one to show up. They needed a bereaved, I thought, that’s why they were being so friendly. I provided a human rationale, a witness to their workaday humanity in getting these things right. I would walk away with a special glow of approval, as my mother did from a doctor who spared her, an old woman, a special word of sympathy and understanding.

The case built inexorably towards its preordained verdict of suicide, but I found myself hoping ridiculously that some conflicting evidence would crop up. Someone would burst in, as at a wedding, offering just cause and impediment, a previous engagement, bigamy in a parallel universe, children who had been waiting for daddy to come back from the shops. Best of all would be for Arkady himself to come strolling in with a hoaxer’s grin on his unworried face. That was true, I thought. Arkady had an unworried face. He was a largely unworried person. Which was why he’d managed to carry on with his unremunerative projects and hadn’t seemed to mind his straitened circumstances. Again I wanted to interrupt and point out these things, but I knew there was no point. My doubts were nothing but hopes.

Mrs Shaw’s evidence came up towards the end of the proceedings. It was she who’d found him in his room, and I found it interesting that it was these circumstantial details that, quite irrationally, carried most weight. They were the coroner’s QED, whereas in themselves they proved nothing but the existence of a corpse. I leaned forwards keenly to hear what she had said about her lodger.

Naturally she began with a little background about herself. Thursday was her dancing day. She and Mr Shaw went out to the Irish club, and didn’t get back home before about half past eleven. Arkady wasn’t up watching television in the extension, which was unusual, and there had been no light showing under his door. She thought he’d turned in early or maybe he was still out, and she hoped he wasn’t going to come in drunk and make a lot of noise. Mr Shaw and her had turned straight in for the night and gone to sleep. In the morning she woke up as usual and went downstairs to the bathroom, where she noticed the door of the bathroom cabinet was half slid back. She wondered what he’d been poking around in there for Later, when she tried to knock him up at 10.45, the first thing she’d noticed when she opened his door was the overturned plastic container of her sleeping capsules on his dressing table, next to the empty vodka bottle, Absolut.

There it was. Her statement may have talked about how Arkady had paid his rent on time for three years, how he was a lovely fellow who enjoyed sitting in the back garden and admired their array of stone squirrels, hedgehogs and badgers - Arkady had mentioned these to me - but these details were omitted from the record, along with any words he might have spoken to her in the days before he took his life - unremembered, irrelevant, gone forever - anything about the stench of death. Her last words: he was quiet, kept himself to himself. He was a gentle, harmless man, and she wished, if he had problems, which he obviously did, that he’d talked to her. Because she had always believed that’s what we were here in this life for - to help each another.

The coroner put down her statement and paused in appreciation. Everyone involved seemed to exhale in satisfaction. They were all connoisseurs of death, and of how various kinds of people dealt with it. They listened to these statements day after day. Mrs Shaw’s matter-of fact humanity hit the spot with the coroner. He’d heard a lot worse, his demeanor seemed to say. He trusted her and wouldn’t have minded being found by her himself.

When it was all over and they returned their verdict of suicide I walked out into the spring sunshine and drove in to work. But for me, nothing had been resolved by the inquest, and what had been a fading ache was now an egg of anguish that felt as if it had hatched and would like to tear itself out of my chest.

Anna Tarkovsky’s voice sounded different on the telephone, not so husky and imprecise. Clear and clipped and inexorable, and difficult, if not impossible, to turn down.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” she said in that pleased with herself way of foreigners who have mastered slightly antiquated English idioms, “I want to speak to you about our mutual friend Arkady.” She paused. “I have found it difficult to put him out of my head. I think it might help to discuss his death with you. I think and think about it, you know? And I can’t quite find a reason why he did such a terrible thing.” She paused again. “Perhaps it’s obvious to you, but to me … it’s perverse. People don’t kill themselves out of boredom and disappointment. Besides, he was an intelligent man, and intelligent people find solutions to their problems.”

Quite a rush of words. I slipped involuntarily into the helpful mode that goes with women in distress, and before long I’d arranged to meet her for a drink one night in the following week.

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing we arranged to meet in a corner pub in Soho. I knew it would be heaving, was just the opposite of the kind of place suitable for a quiet chat about a recent bereavement, but for some reason that didn’t seem to bother her. It was her suggestion in fact, and when I arrived to find the pavement cluttered with besuited Sohoites and the small bar apparently a site chosen for some sort of rehearsal for a record attempt to determine how many people could be fitted into a mini. Very sixties. I began to wonder, foolishly, if she would bother to show up.

Anna had commandeered a small window table, reserved the seat opposite by throwing her coat across it, and was sipping a glass of white wine. “John,” she called and waved, half-standing up. “What can I get you?”

I waved her down, pointed at her glass, which she covered with her hand, and made my own way through the crush to the bar. By the time I got back I could see the wisdom of her choice. If you were going to talk about death, where better than in the vibrant anonymity of a pub full of early evening office drinkers, yakking their cares away into the wrong ears probably, seeking denouements. I perched on my stool and raised my glass to her. “To Arkady,” I said.

“To Arkady.”

We clinked glasses. Anna sat back a little in her seat, appraising me for a bout of something I might have been interested in thirty years ago, to be unkind. But it made me wonder again at what hold she’d had on Arkady. Maybe her words, maybe just a sentimental idea of himself as a Russian, a persisting thought that his mother would have been impressed by his knowing her. Tonight she was dressed in filmy stuff, layers of it, swarming flecks of stars from a pastel rainbow universe somewhere or other where women like her used to exist in greater numbers. To me there was little mystery to her. She was still the reckless red chick. She had a fantastic youthful vitality about her, an intelligence of a kind I hadn’t come across before. Hers was an analytical mind, but a wandering point of view.

She talked about herself, not Arkady. She talked about her early days in Kiev and how intoxicating it had been, as a teenager, to walk those ancient streets in the footsteps of Isaac Babel. In those days it was still possible for a young poet to epater les bourgeois and imagine that one was safe. “I was a privileged being,” she said. “We felt we were under the wing of Akhnamatova, although she was remote, a fierce old lady in her Erie, then dead. She had done our suffering for us - and Pasternak had guaranteed our safe conduct. We were part of the new world and we were going to tell it our way, Yevgeny had proved it was possible.” She smiled at me. “Have you read Zima Junction?”

“Yes,” I said. “When I was about fifteen. There was a paperback here. A friend of my mother’s, Kit, bought it for me as a Christmas present. Actually— ” my gestures became as big as hers “—that was how I became friends with Arkady. He was a lost, funny-looking London boy. He was astonished to meet anyone who’d read any Russian writers.”

“What about his fellow students?” Anna remarked dryly.

“Yes, of course. But he wasn’t anything at all like them. Arkady had it in his blood. He wanted to crawl under Gorky’s overcoat and smell the lining.”

She gave me a wry, approving look.

I held my hands up. “Arkady passed a lot of things on to me.”

“I can see that,” she said. “What a pity that the last was a lot of pain and confusion - and destructiveness. But you mustn’t accept it, you mustn’t.”

“That’s hard on him. Who knows what he was going through?”

“Well, do you?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“John,” she breathed my name. “I am of the Russian Orthodox faith. I’m afraid we are a little more unforgiving of suicide than the priest at your crematorium.”

I said nothing to that. It wasn’t my crematorium, was it. I’d always considered the Catholic view of suicide - and hers was basically the same - to be pitiless, vindictive. They claimed too many rights for God or society or your mum and dad. I nodded, emptied my glass, but felt little except sourness towards her now. A glass-scraping tension was building between us, which I stepped away from by going to the bar.

The place had thinned out somewhat. I stood there fuming, waiting to be served. What got me about her attitude was its way of washing its hands, absolving itself of any responsibility while blaming the victim. And a suicide was a victim – of something, surely? I harboured the thought that Arkady was her victim, theirs at least. He hung around them, didn’t he, dedicated himself to their work? What had they given him in return for his life? Nothing except the opportunity to further admire them, it seemed, and that was the bitter irony of the sad life of my friend Arkady, the Russian poet.

When I sat down again, I looked her in the eye. “A suicide is a victim,” I said. “A social victim.” I added vaguely, “You always think you could have done more.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But at the moment of his death he ceases to be a victim, which you might think is good, but makes victims of others. Those who are left behind. It isn’t rare, you know, for others to follow suit.” She looked at me with those big, dark eyes. “That is one of the reasons I thought it would be good to meet you. We victims must stick together; it’s the only way.” She lifted her glass and drained a little of it delicately like communion wine. “Our lives are not given to us, they are lent.”

After that we ambled on through a lot of desultory chat about contemporary British politics, a subject which seemed to give her the dooms, and then she started asking me about my family and my job. I felt she was consciously trying to be reciprocal.. I obliged, told her about Marjorie and the kids, how proud I was of my daughter and how well the school said she was going to do in her A Levels. These were the blessings if my life, what I had made of myself. I counted them out for her like golden roubles in a fairy tale.

Anna wanted to know all about my job. What exactly PR involved. What were the kinds of information I had to present to the public and in what ways. What was regarded as sensitive by the press and what techniques did my department employ to head them off at the pass, as it were, on their oh-so liberal hobby-horses. I found her attitudes funny, I must confess, and I talked her through it all, nineteen to the dozen. It was only at the end of the evening, after we had embraced and tottered out to find cabs, after she’d gone and I was ensconced in an expensive ride back to Fulham, that it occurred to me she’d been milking me in a practiced way, like a spy.

On Saturday it was my turn to take my son Paul to the local library. I don’t mean it was a chore we alternated, like cooking or doing the washing, but it was an event we’d plotted into his life, to make sure he read properly and regularly things suitable to his age group and have it as part of a semi-pleasurable trip out with mum or dad where we could maybe talk to him about what he was reading, offer a little guidance here or there. But something about going to the library didn’t sit well with Paul, and the mere sight of the building often seemed to bring on tantrums and sulks. They never had what he wanted. We were too late. All the good books had gone. No, he wasn’t going to take just anything, let alone some ridiculous tale I’d read, about a boy who finds a gauntlet which transports him back to the times of knights in armour and falconry.

This week I was in luck. Paul scuttled into the children’s library. I ambled over there after him and saw through the parent portal that he had joined the scrummage around a new pile of glossy Japanese violence comics. He shot me a warning look, I raised a hand in a cheerful wave and wandered up to the gallery to have a look through the CDs. Folk - Russian. There wasn’t much and what there was pretty unappetising: a couple of albums whose covers were woodcuts of open-beaked wooden song thrushes, a few more showing smudgy fifties colour photos of women in peasant dresses, with titles in Cyrillic script. I decided to pass and walked down the shelves of videos, being phased out in favour of DVDs. Towards the end there was a small world cinema section, and to my surprise they had a number of Tarkovsky’s key films.

I picked an old favourite from student days. Stalker, one of his two science fiction movies, took it to the desk, paid a pound and went downstairs to wait for my son. Paul had struck lucky for once, having secured one of the Jap Ninja comics and a new book on astronomy, the universe explained or something, a subject in which he was developing an unhealthy interest. Next thing he’d be wanting me to build the Hubble telescope in the back garden. I decided to let it go this time.

Much later when they were both tucked up in bed I put it on and sat through most of the night behind our closed flowery curtains, alone on the floor of my dark suburban living room, watching the film through twice into the early hours. It’s a mysterious, beautiful film. There’s a place called the Zone where some aliens are supposed to have landed years before, leaving behind one of their artifacts and a quadrant of ground that has been temporally and spatially distorted by their visit. In the novel it’s based on, by the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris, it’s a forbidden place that people go into to steal alien artefacts, such as ‘containers’ that consist of only a lid and a base with empty space between, to sell on the black market. In Tarkovsky’s film the place is still more mysterious.

A scientist and a novelist travel into the Zone guided by a ‘Stalker’, a working-class man whose brother had been killed in the Zone, his daughter crippled and granted psychic powers. The man has a childlike but violently beautiful, high cheek-boned face, as vivid as one of the descriptions of Mongol-types put down in a few strokes by Chekov in his journals as he waited in some inn in a remote region for a samovar of tea to be brought to alleviate his frostbite. He is uneducated but the travellers are reliant on his rule of thumb knowledge of the territory they must cross to reach a crumbling, waterlogged mansion where there is a room that grants what one secretly desires. The Stalker guides them by throwing metal nuts tied to long threads of string. They must follow the paths described by these to safely reach the house. I was reminded, second time through, of something Anna Tarkovsky had said: “Pasternak had guaranteed our safe conduct.” A Safe Conduct is the title of his memoir of the revolution and those he knew in the twenties, and it struck me that this is exactly the role of the Stalker in Tarkovsky’s film. To provide safe conduct for those seeking truth, or simply their fortunes, through a treacherous but beautiful region where anything is said to be possible.

The scientist and the writer have different agendas. The scientist is looking to write a paper on the Zone that will win him the Nobel prize and save his political hide. The writer feels his work has become meaningless, that his celebrity is empty, his audience uncomprehending and fickle. The Stalker cajoles them along through an unremarkable, waterlogged rural landscape whose puddles might be fatal mirrors or contain pieces strange industrial artifacts and the memory debris of lost people. I watched as the protagonists argued it out lying exhausted on flat rocks by an unnaturally still pool. Behind one of them a large, wolf-like dog trotted to and fro in the shallow water, watching them, perhaps hoping to make friends.
I woke up to the clunk of the auto-reverse as it rewound itself back to the beginning, rubbed my eyes. Went into the kitchen. Made myself a cup of coffee and opening the back door stood looking out at the dark, rustling end of the garden. I could hear something crashing about down there. A fox maybe. I listened for a while to its noisy scrabbling, then it was gone, gone next-door. The garden was almost silent, gently rustling, but as full of mystery and possibility as the Zone. I locked the back door, turned the lights off, went through to the dining room and turned on the computer.

When it booted up I typed Stalker into Google and sat there browsing through the results for half an hour. There was some interesting stuff to be read. The film had been seen by some to prophesy the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1985 -- seven years after it was made – and more widely was thought to refer not to the site of an alien visitation but that of an earlier accident, in 1959, which had been completely hushed up by the Soviets but had created just such a cordoned off, hazardous, irradiated Zone. Apparently the current caretakers at the Chernobyl site referred to themselves unofficially as Stalkers. There was also an on-line computer game called S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which had been tested by these workers and enthusiastically endorsed by the present general manager of the plant. The first version of the film itself had been destroyed by the processing labs upon completion, I learned, and it was remade from scratch with another cinematographer. Rumour had it that the first camerawoman had keep a set of the rushes of the first version of Stalker, but that these had been destroyed in a fire in which she also died. Perhaps that version had been more explicit about the nuclear accident theme. Tarkovsky’s original collaborator had been murdered by the authorities. It seemed possible.

I shut down and turned off the computer, exhausted. These were some of the political ramifications of a film I had thought no more than beautiful and perplexing and unbearably portentously poetic. I hadn’t known what I was getting into, I realised. No more than Arkady had known where his mother’s plans for him would lead. I went upstairs and rolled gently into bed. Dawn was fading up behind the closed curtains. Marjorie murmured in her sleep and snuggled down deeper.

A few days later Mrs Shaw telephoned. Marjorie held out the phone to me with that odd, barely discernible expression on her face which said that this call was out of the ordinary, to be treated with some caution. Mrs Shaw introduced herself. I blanked. She told she was Arkady’s landlady. I immediately hung on her every word, recognising her for what she was, a messenger from the dead. I wondered how she had got hold of my phone number.

“The police gave me your number,” she said threateningly. “I don’t like to bother you, it’s about your friend’s things. They told me he didn’t have anybody, but they thought you might be interested in them.”

What right did I have to Arkady’s possessions? It seemed extremely unorthodox of them to give my number to Mrs Shaw. I didn’t know what to say, but she had phoned, she was hanging on the end of the line. I half agreed to drive over the following evening to pick up whatever she had.

“I had to clear the room,” she explained. “I’ve had to redecorate it and now I’ve got a new student moved in. I gave away his clothes to Oxfam, but there’s still one or two bits and pieces. I’ve packed them up and put them in the garage - but my husband wants the space. They’re in his way and, you know, it’s sad. We want to get rid of it all.”

There was something nauseating about her, a taste such that no profession of goodwill, or even demonstration of it - which I suppose ringing up was - would take out of your mouth. I knew I’d said the wrong thing. There would be nothing much of Arkady in those boxes, I knew. Nothing left for me. “Look,” I said. “He was a friend of mine, but I don’t want any of his belongings. Just dispose of it all as you see fit. Give it to the dustmen. There’s nothing they’d want paying to take is there?”

“No,” she said. “I can just put it in a couple of bin liners.”

“Do that then.” I hung up before she could reply. Marjorie looked at me sternly but I said nothing. I walked out into the garden and down to where I’d heard the fox scrabbling days earlier. There was no sign of it, of course, but I did find the gap under the fence where she had slipped through. I stood there for a long time in the small copse, looking down at the broken in spot. I gathered up an armful of rotting bracken and tried to stuff it down over the gap, to plug it, but I knew it was unlikely to stop a determined vixen and her cubs from gaining entry.

Against my better judgement I went indoors and called Mrs Shaw back. I apologised, I said I’d been upset. She agreed that it had been upsetting, she and her husband had found it so, particularly as Arkady had lived with them for three years and they hadn’t known him very well. I arranged to drive over after work the following day to pick up whatever she had left of his possessions.

The house was an ex-council semi with stuck-on stone facings just opposite Hendon football stadium, a crumbling edifice next to a similarly half-abandoned pub, both set on a wide strip of park tumbling with chip wrappers and pizza boxes. Mrs Shaw’s Mercedes was parked outside on the grass verge. She was a small, spry woman in her early sixties, with a very lined face and a Liverpudlian accent. To say she was hard as nails would be to exaggerate about the durability of those bendy, buttery fastenings of wood to itself and men to the result.

After a smile and an exchange of pleasantries she pulled up the garage door. “My husband’s cab goes in here,” she said, explaining the yawning emptiness. She darted into the shadowy interior, and came out a moment later with a small cardboard box held by its flaps between vice-like thumbs and forefingers. “Here it is,” she said, dumping it unceremoniously t my feet and reflexively dusting her thumbs in a single slapping gesture against the pleats of her skirt. “Just a few bits and pieces.”

I was looking down at an old Salt n Shake crisps carton. I wanted to say, “Is that all?” I wanted to look inside it straight away, but I didn’t do that either. Instead I picked it up under my arm and began to walk back to the car. When I turned around to say goodbye and thanks she’d already gone indoors. I put it carefully on the back seat and drove home with Arkady’s stuff, cursing myself for a fool and a ghoul, and wishing I’d stuck to my first decision.

Paul met me at the front door, not by design of course. He simply happened to be coming downstairs at that moment. I said hello and hurried past him upstairs with the box. “What’s that?” he called after me.

“None of your business.” I continued up to our bedroom and sat on the bed with the carton beside me. I opened it and saw a few books, a few coloured card folders roughly stuffed full of papers, a couple of knick-knacks from his dressing table - and a small wooden box. One by one I took the items out and arranged them neatly on the duvet. The box wasn’t locked, its lid loose and flapping. I opened it, found a small silver medallion, a St. Christopher, a worn out Parker pen, and, in another small box with a spring-loaded lid, there was a commemorative coin bearing Yuri Gagarin’s head in profile on one side and on the other, Vostok 1, his world-orbiting spacecraft.

Paul appeared at the bedroom door. “Mum says dinner’s ready,” he said. “It’s on the table.”

I went downstairs to eat with my family, remembering as I went that Arkady had had a computer, a radio-cassette player too, surely. I supposed that Mrs Shaw had found room for these in her house, but I wasn’t about to call her and debate about them. I sat down and picked up my knife and fork, forcing myself to go through the familiar routines of question and response with which we habitually digested our daily bread and each other’s company.

In a pause between dinner and pudding, I slipped my hand into my pocket, pulled out the Yuri Gagarin coin and slid it across the table to Paul. “Know who that is?”

“Yuri Gagarin,” he said immediately. “The first man to orbit the Earth, in 1961.” He picked it up and examined it closely. “Ten roubles,” he said. “How much is that in our money?”

“Not a lot,” I said. “But I expect it’s worth more than it was in 1961.”

“It was made in 1991,” he said. “The thirtieth anniversary, I suppose.”

“Let’s see.”

Paul passed the dulled but pristine slab of metal back to me and, sure enough, the date was inscribed on the back, under Vostok 1, which was no more than a riveted together metal cylinder with a few spiky aerials attached. On the front face, above the profile of the man in the open space helmet, was his legendary name: GAGARIN. I weighed it in my hand. It had the satisfying heft of a silver dollar. I slipped it back in my pocket, picked up by spoon and demolished whatever it was that Marjorie had just laid before us.
“That belonged to your friend, didn’t it?” Paul said.

“Yes,” I said. “He was half-Russian.”

“Did I know him?”

“No,” I said. “You never met him.”

“I thought not,” he said.

Seconds later he was off upstairs to finish his homework. I helped Marjorie load up the dishwasher. “I’m going up to look through Arkady’s stuff,” I said. “Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “Of course I don’t mind I wonder how you can stand it, that’s all.”

“Oh,” I said. “I just need to look through what there is. Hardly anything really. I won’t be too long.”

I left her to watch television and went back upstairs to the contents of Arkady’s Salt n Shake carton. I slid the coin out of my pocket and replaced it in its flat snap-lid box, then into the wooden box with the broken lock. He must’ve acquired the coin when it was minted, I thought. Fifteen years ago, when the Soviet Union was on the brink of its final dissolution. It was a lovely, haunting object, but I wondered why it he had it. Another token of identity, another reaching back to his childhood, to his mother. I didn’t know exactly what Arkady had been doing in 1991. We’d been out of touch for a number of years. But I supposed he must’ve been doing what he’d been doing since.

The knick-knacks were even more pathetic, especially if you thought of them as defining the person who’d possessed them. But they were just things he happened to own, a few bits of random rubbish that had blown up against his body. A Chinese soup bowl, empty except for the indecipherable ideogram; a section of a large bone with a whaling scene etched on it and coloured in with black ink; a small Etruscan blue vase with a crazed finish. I liked that, it was a neat little shape. Arkady had obviously kept it for its colour. I imagined him throwing himself back on his narrow bed at Mrs Shaw’s to gaze at a little patch of eternity. I threw myself back on the duvet. Looked at the ceiling. A couple of tears escaped my eyes, but I felt self-conscious about them, brushed them away. What if Marjorie were to come in, or Paul?

The files were stuffed with scribbled papers, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. What was I going to find out that I didn’t know? The books were in Russian. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a few familiar poets. There should have been a lot more of them. Where were all the books he’d discoursed about so freely for years and years, the things that had meant so much to him? Mrs Shaw had probably given them to Oxfam too. Probably there hadn’t been that many after all. Most of the foam came directly out of Arkady’s head. As I replaced the books in the carton on top of the files, I noticed that one, a plain cloth-covered hardback, was a diary.

Arkady’s handwriting sprawled across its pages, sometimes large, sometimes small, irregular to a degree that each word might have been a result of passing a pen amongst several party guests. It didn’t really want to be read, but did it want to be pored over and deciphered? No. It was a document that had preserved its intention to be private by making no effort to be anything else. I looked at it long enough to see an architecture of dates succeeding one another, day and month joined and severed by an impatient back slash, and pages that were scattered notations of this and that, for poems, maybe the ones in the folders. I dropped it back in the carton with the rest of his residual being. I closed the flaps, wanting to tape it up, seal it like a tomb.

Before I could change my mind again I took the box downstairs. I had an irresistible impulse to get it out of the house immediately. I didn’t resist it. I wasn’t any better than Mrs Shaw after all. I rummaged around in the back of the garage until I’d made a right-sized space for it, and stowed it under some camping gear where nobody would disturb it for a long time. I rejoined my family in front of the television.

Beware of the quiet men in the long beige coats. They get in touch with you discreetly, without warning, and you have no choice but to co-operate with them. Nothing really cloak and dagger about it. They simply send you a letter on headed notepaper summoning you to their place by the river for a chat over some contact you’ve had that has struck them as interesting. You go, of course, telling no-one about it, and you are naturally nervous of the outcome.

“This is nothing to worry about,” the young man said. “Your name has come up in relation to certain people about whom we have security concerns - and we wish to clear up the nature of your connections with them. That’s all.” He smiled at me in an open and frank way that might have been reassuring had it not indicated that nothing but open frankness was necessary to him. “Arkady ____, you were friends, as we know, you attended an event at the Russian embassy with him.”

“How do you know that?”

“You placed your name on a mailing list to be informed of future cultural events.”

“That’s right, I did. Arkady was a poet - it was to hear about that sort of thing. They waved it in front of me, I filled it in.”

He smiled his brilliant smile again. “As I said, there’s nothing to worry about here. We’re only pursuing a routine inquiry.”

I have to say, he wasn’t quite what I would have expected. “Arkady was a complete political innocent,” I said. “So am I, for that matter.”

He gave me a look that suggested he doubted my naïvity.

“We usually have a good reason for keeping an eye on the people we do,” he continued. “In matters of national security things that are spoken of here may not go further without severe consequences. Do you understand?”

I nodded, my mouth dry. I eyed the old-fashioned water cooler beside the old grey filing cabinet, but his eyes didn’t flinch from mine. “Yes, I understand.”

“Arkady _____ passed a number of sensitive documents to the Russians. At first they were things he happened to come across at work. Quite public stuff, most of it. obviously. But there were other jobs - for parliamentary departments, for example - and once we realised he was a conduit we were able to introduce other items with useful content, content that would create useful impressions.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought he was doing advertising stuff, typesetting in-house journals, that sort of thing.”

“You mean - you don’t know where he worked?”

“Well … I thought I did. A little company beside London Bridge.”

My interviewer shook his head incredulously. “No,” he said. “Your friend Arkady worked for the HMSO.”

“Arkady was a spy? Passing state secrets to the Russians?” I felt like laughing aloud, clapping my hands. Good on him. Who’d have thought he had it in him. But I thought it probably unwise to respond in this way.

“We’ve asked you here to take on an assignment for us,” he said. “It may not sound very glamorous, but we believe it to be important to our country’s security.”

“Of course,” I heard myself saying.

“Excellent,” the young man said. “You will befriend Anna Tarkovsky, in a natural way, of course, and await further instructions.”

“Instructions?”

“We will tell you what to tell her. We are preparing your story. Oh, and I want you to open a bank account.”

Routines take over, don’t they, if you let them? I let them do just that. Running a PR department is largely a matter of routines, certain tasks in an uncertain world where responses to events can nevertheless be predicted. That’s my job, to predict outcomes. A daily task has to be undertaken. That task is a number of tasks, really, which must run together in such a seamless way that they turn into one continuous, seamless gesture. If you’re taken by surprise you want it to be a nice surprise, but if you’re too surprised by it chances are it won’t be. Times stretches along, you make your moves, and after a while your moves make you. It pays off, attention. Attention to the detail of similar instants, that’s where you discover the differences between them. PR isn’t about being a genius. It’s about reacting in a measured way. Measuring the responses of others, and, if necessary, countering them with exactly the right amount of necessary force.

In early September I received an invitation to attend a poetry reading at the Russian Embassy. The envelope arrived at work, within it a printed card requesting my pleasure in a week’s time. I must be an afterthought. Anna Tarkovsky was the reader, celebrating the publication of her Selected Poems in translation, RSVP. I turned the cream-coloured card over in my hands, looking for some scribbled personal note. There was none. I propped it up on my desk, glanced at it occasionally throughout the day, wondering whether I would attend. By lunchtime I’d realised that, on balance, it wasn’t an invitation I was in any position to refuse.

There are people who consider various options presented to them, and having made a decision, stick to it and forget all about the path not chosen. This is necessary, of course, even if it is a position most people arrive at by the default of memory. If they do remember it is in a selective way, to justify their actions; the are post-facto rationalisers of what is, justifiers of the case, possessors of a magnificent and all-comprehending hindsight. The past has gone, after all, and the future that might have grown from it never kicked its way from the womb of the pre-present. Arkady was dead. But did he have to die so soon, so horribly? As time went by I could see no other option for him. For myself, I was married to Marjorie, I was the father of two children. But what if I’d chosen another woman? Had another, completely different life?

I arrived at the Russian Embassy at the appointed hour on the day of the reading, and putting these questions aside as I stepped through its magnificent frontage into a world I’d only glimpsed once or twice before. A small but not derisory crowd was sipping wine in the entrance hall. I looked helplessly around, filled already with nameless regret; a waiter approached me with a tray full of brimming glasses. I took one. Next there were canapes. I politely availed myself of a proffered item of puffy stodge, ate it, too quickly, and stood there like a proverbial spare part, waiting for something to happen.

A large man with a trimmed black beard gently touched my elbow, bowed slightly in greeting. “We are glad you could come,” he said.

Mikhail Gorbachev. I found myself thinking I knew very little about him, but that, somehow, without any conscious decision on my part, he had become something of a hero for me over the years. A doomed hero, of course, but one who would come to seem less doomed and less heroic as I came to understand more about Russia. And at that moment of setting out on my new life, I clearly remember thinking that his biggest mistake had been to call an election.

John Muckle