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person? Who is not haunted by the silences, the missed chances for truth that slip between father and son, mother and daughter, the chances that slip finally into the grave? I do not want to miss my chance.
    I have done my best to disentangle history from myth, fact from fancy, but in the end I cannot be sure of the truth, either of what happened or what is remembered. I wasn’t there. I can only register the impact of their struggle to remember: I can tell them the wave did reach the shore. Because Paul and Natasha managed to remember what they did and passed it on, I owe to them the conviction that my own life did not begin with my birth, but with hers and with his, a hundred years ago in a foreign land, and that now as the last of the generation who knew what life was like behind the red curtain of the revolution begins to depart, it is up to me to pass on their remembering to whoever comes after.
    After all these years spent searching for their traces, I can hear their voices at last as if they were in the room. This is how Natasha began her memoirs, her first sentence:
    â€˜I decide while I am still in my fresh mind to put down all dates and years of main episodes of our lives, my dear husband’s and mine, so that when we pass into eternity our sons and their families may have a picture more or less of interesting episodes of our lives, colourful lives, thanks to so many striking events and in the middle age of our lives tremendous upheavals we had to pass through and which left a totally different side of our further existence.’

TWO
    MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
    Summer mornings at the Mestchersky country estate in the 1880s began with the same ritual. Natasha and her sister Vera, already washed, combed and dressed by their nurse, would file into their mother’s bedroom and kiss her good morning. Their mother would then sit up in bed and swallow a raw egg. The maid brought it in a glass on a silver tray and her mother would down it with a brisk, convulsive snort. The maid would then pour warm water from a ewer into a silver basin and Natasha’s mother would wash her hands. Natasha and her sister Vera sat on the end of the bed and watched.
    The silver ewer and basin are just about the only things that have survived from those mornings at Doughino, the family estate in the western Russian province of Smolensk. They are plain, unadorned rectangular shapes, embossed with the family coat of arms. They used to stand on the dining-room table in our house in Ottawa and my mother used the jug for flowers. I have a memory from my early childhood of curling red petals, musty and fragrant, collecting in the silver of that basin.
    After the egg and the washing of the hands, the maid brought Natasha, Vera and their mother cups of Ceylon tea, with scalded cream from the estate dairy. While their mother’s jet-black hair was being braided, piled in two tight buns above her ears, she fired questions at Natasha and Vera: had they said their prayers? Were they washed? Were they ready for their lessons? The two little girls in their pinafores held hands and replied in unison. It was a family joke that when spoken to they always chimed in together with voices like mice. Their mother beckoned them closer, straightened their pinafores, took Natasha’s hair between her fingers: why did it never curl? Natasha must have another session with Miss Saunders’s curling iron.
    When the butler appeared with the morning’s post on a tray, the two girls were dismissed with a peck on the forehead. From her bed their mother dictated her correspondence to a secretary and the girls went off to the schoolroom for their lessons with Miss Saunders and later with Mr Sharples, the English tutor. They kept up English ways in the nursery – bread pudding with Lyle’s Golden Syrup, Huntley & Palmer biscuits in square red tins from the English shops in Moscow.
    Natasha was born Princess Mestchersky in August 1877, into a family