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shuttered windows of houses, ‘you have a choice. One way or another, you are about to become an exile, but which kind you become is up to you.’
    Bolotov promised to wait until sunrise, in order to give the young man a chance to make up his mind.
    ‘You will have your answer before then,’ Stefan assured him.
    As soon as he stepped back inside the house, he was confronted by his father. ‘Did you speak with him?’
    ‘Yes,’ replied the son.
    ‘Don’t believe a word he spoke,’ warned Viktor. ‘His people are a poison on this earth.’
    ‘What he said made sense to me,’ answered Stefan.
    ‘What?’ Viktor laughed angrily. ‘Then perhaps you should go with him when he leaves!’
    ‘Maybe I will,’ said Stefan.
    Viktor had only been trying to scare him, but now he paused as he realised that his son was serious. ‘I cannot stop you,’ he said. ‘You are old enough now to make your own decisions. Choose that beggar or choose your family, but know that you cannot have both.’
    At that moment, Stefan’s mother entered the room. She had been listening, as afraid of her husband’s anger as she was of her son’s unyielding temperament. ‘Why must you always be so cruel?’ she shouted at Viktor.
    The man stared at his wife, amazed that she would take any side but his.
    She made a fist and struck him on the chest. ‘You cannot abandon your son!’
    ‘It’s all right,’ Stefan told his mother. ‘He did that a long time ago.’
    ‘Stay,’ she begged him.
    But it was already too late. Until the moment when his father had laughed in his face, Stefan’s mind had still been clouded with doubt. But his father’s mockery brought back to him the memory of every insult he had endured at the school in Krasnoyar, and the echoing pain of the beatings which had accompanied them. The sound of that laughter clarified his mind. There are times in a person’s life when they cannot know if they have made the right decision until after that decision has already been made. And now he knew.
    ‘Remain with us,’ pleaded his mother, ‘here where you know you are safe.’
    Stefan shook his head. ‘No one is safe any more,’ he replied.
    The next day, just as Bolotov had predicted, Russian soldiers arrived from the barracks at Krasnoyar. With them came a rabble of self-appointed militia, armed with old shotguns, sledgehammers and kitchen knives.
    The inhabitants of Rosenheim were given an hour to pack one suitcase each. Then, clutching their bags, they were marched to a barge, which waited for them on the banks of the Volga at Pokrovsk. After being ferried across the Volga to the railhead at Saratov they were put aboard cattle cars and transported to the German border, a journey which lasted several days. At the border, the Kohl family were met by their eldest son, Emil. By Imperial decree, he had been dismissed from the University of Kiev, along with all the other students of German or Austro-Hungarian extraction.
    As the people of Rosenheim crossed over into a country they had never seen before, Stefan Kohl was not among them. Even before the soldiers had arrived in Rosenheim, Stefan had set out in the company of Bolotov on the long journey to Siberia.

1 June 1915
     
    Tsarskoye Selo, summer estate of the Imperial Family
     
     
    On the outskirts of the estate stood a small, flat-roofed cottage, flanked on either side by single-storey additions which gave to the structure the impression of a military bunker, with tall and narrow windows where gun slits might have been. The stonework of the house had been painted a warm orange yellow which, in the afternoon sun, glowed like the flesh of a ripe apricot.
    Inside the house, whose rooms were small and crammed with mismatched furniture, sat the Tsarina Alexandra and her closest friend, Anna Vyroubova, to whom this cottage had been given as a gift, in order that she might be always close at hand.
    For some minutes, there had been no other sound but the faint clink as their