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And I grabbed his arm. I don’t remember the rest. Opened my eyes in the hospital. I grabbed Andrey’s arm so hard that the doctors could barely unclench my fingers. His arm was blue for ages after. Now, whenever we leave the house, he says, ‘Mummy, don’t grab me by the arm. ’ He is poorly too: does two weeks at school, then two at home seeing the doctor. That’s our life. We worry about each other. And in every corner, there’s Vasya. His photos. At night, I talk and talk to him. ’ I bring Andrey, and he leads our little daughter by the hand.

She never got married. So I was rushing from one ward to the other, from his bedside to hers. By then, he wasn’t in an ordinary ward, they’d put him in this special pressure chamber, behind a see-through plastic curtain, which you weren’t allowed past. It was specially equipped so you could give injections and insert catheters without having to go behind the plastic. It was all sealed off with locks and velcro, but I worked out how to open them up. I’d quietly move aside the plastic and sneak in to see him.

Arch Tait has translated thirty books, short stories and essays by most of today’s leading Russian writers. His translation of Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia (2004) was awarded the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010. Most recently, he has translated Mikhail Gorbachev’s The New Russia (2016). We are air: we are not earth Merab Mamardashvili Some historical background Belarus … To the outside world we remain terra incognita: an obscure and uncharted region. ‘White Russia’ is roughly how the name of our country translates into English.