You have to be careful, my darling,’ she said, her voice changing completely as Ada’s father came into the room.

Ada wasn’t surprised at this sudden change in tone; she’d already learned that her aunt had two voices and two faces and could glide from abuse to sweetness with unbelievable ease and rapidity. She was doing it now: the anger that hissed from her lips had become as soft and plaintive as the sound of a flute.

‘Be sensible, my dear. Shouldn’t you have gone to bed ages ago? It’s ten o’clock. Come on, Adotchka, go to bed, my darling, but . . .’

She and her brother-in-law glanced furtively at each other.

‘Only take off your dress and your shoes.’

‘Why?’

The adults said nothing.

‘Nothing will happen tonight,’ her grandfather said as he too came into the room. ‘They’ll break a few windows and go home to bed. But when the soldiers come, then . . .’

He said no more. All three of them went cautiously over to the window. The room was lit only by a lamp in the adjoining room, but Ada’s father took it and lowered the wick until it was so low that it only gave off a dim, almost imperceptible light, reddish and smoky. Ada looked at them, puzzled. They huddled together in the shadows, whispering, taking turns blowing against the dark glass. But she was at an age when the need to sleep overcomes the body with a sudden, imperative force, like drunkenness. She yawned loudly several times, made her way upstairs to bed in the darkness. She took off only her dress and shoes, as they’d told her to. She slipped in between the sheets, smiling – it was lovely and warm in her old bed – and she fell asleep to the sound of the first stones breaking windows down in the lower town.

7

For a few days the damage was limited to shouting, curses, broken windows as night began to fall. Then everything would calm down. The days were quiet. Nevertheless, the children were no longer allowed to go out, and they spent hours sitting side by side on the old settee, playing the game they’d invented, but which became more embellished, a veritable epic with a cast of thousands, with wars, defeats, sieges, victories. Every evening, new stories emerged from their original invention, like branches sprouting from the trunk of an old tree. Their game left them breathless, excited, mouths dry, dark circles beneath their eyes. As soon as dusk fell, they had nothing else to do, for they were forbidden to light the lamps. No one in the lower town dared breathe, crouched behind closed windows and shutters, in narrow rooms that were dark and hot.

But the day finally came when the real world proved more powerful than their dreams. Ben and Ada had attained such a state of hallucination that neither of them was even listening to what the other was saying. They were both talking at the same time in quiet, steady voices, banging their feet against the wood of the settee, when suddenly the murmuring they had stopped listening to was replaced by a savage, unearthly clamour, so close by that they thought it was coming from their own house, from their walls and old floors. At that moment, the door flew open and someone – they didn’t recognise who it was because the face was so disfigured with fear – someone rushed in, grabbed them, pushed them and dragged them out. Ben had lost a shoe and was shouting that he wanted to go back and get it, but no one was listening to him. They were taken through the building, out through the kitchen door and thrown, pushed, pulled by their wrists, their hands, their legs, and finally hoisted up a ladder to an attic.

They fell on to the floor, felt the corner of a trunk and an old candelabra, as they fumbled in the darkness. They were in a junk room in the eaves. Ada’s father – they could now recognise his rasping, rapid breathing behind the door – sounded as if his heart was about to burst under the strain of his mad rush and terror.

‘Don’t move. Don’t cry. Hide,’ he whispered through the keyhole.

Then he added, even more quietly: ‘Don’t be afraid . . .’

‘But I don’t want to stay here!’ cried Ada.

‘Be quiet, my poor darling! Don’t move.