He was respected. To his friends and family, he was simultaneously an object of envy and the very symbol of hope: proof that it was indeed possible to attain such heights. Hunger meant nothing; being cold, living in filth meant nothing given such prospects. And from the lowest, poorest part of town, many eyes looked upwards, towards the cool hills where the rich men lived.

Between these two extremes was a middle ground, a drab land where neither great poverty nor great wealth existed, where the Russian, Polish and Jewish middle classes lived together, more or less in peace.

Yet even here, halfway up the hill, the community was divided into little groups who were envious and despised each other. At the top were the doctors, the lawyers, the managers of large estates; at the bottom were the common rabble: shopkeepers, tailors, pharmacists and the like.

But there was one section of society that served as a link between all the different districts, and whose members scraped a living by running from one house to the other, from the lower end of town to the top. Ada’s father, Israel Sinner, was one of this brotherhood of maklers or go-betweens. Their profession consisted of buying and selling on behalf of other people – beet, sugar, wheat, agricultural machinery, all the usual merchandise of the Ukraine – but they could also get hold of silk and tea, Turkish Delight and coal, caviar from the Volga and fruit from Asia, depending on their clients’ needs. They begged, they pleaded, they belittled their rivals’ goods; they moaned, they lied, they used every ounce of imagination, all the subtle arts of persuasion to win a commission. You could tell who they were by their rapid speech, their gestures, the way they hurried (at a time and in a country where no one hurried), by their humility, their tenacity, and by the many other qualities unique to them.

Ada, who was still little more than a baby, sometimes went with her father to do his buying. He was a short, thin man with sad eyes who loved her and found comfort simply in holding her hand. For her, he walked more slowly; he bent towards her anxiously, made sure the heavy grey wool shawl she wore over her old coat and little brown velvet hat with ear flaps were properly arranged, cupped his hand over her mouth in winter: on the street corners, the bitter wind seemed to lie in wait for the passers-by and slap their faces with joyful ferocity.

‘Be careful. Are you cold?’ her father would ask.

And he told her to breathe through her shawl so that the freezing air would warm up a bit as it passed through the wool. But it was impossible: she felt she was suffocating. As soon as he looked away, she used her fingernail to make the little hole in the shawl a bit bigger and tried to catch snowflakes on the end of her tongue. She was so thoroughly wrapped up that all you could see of her was a small square bundle on top of thin legs, and, from close up, two large black eyes peering out between the dark cap and the grey shawl; her eyes looked even bigger because of the dark circles beneath them, and their expression was as intense and fearful as a wild young animal’s.

She had just turned five and was beginning to take in everything around her. Until now, she had wandered about in a world so out of proportion to her scrawny body that she barely realised it existed; it dwarfed her. She gave it no more thought than an insect hidden in the grass might. But she was older now and determined to know life: those motionless giants standing in the doorways, icicles hanging from their moustaches, who breathed out the fetid odour of alcohol (curiously, their breath seemed to transform into a spurt of steam, then into little needles of snow), were in fact ordinary men, dvorniks, caretakers who looked after the houses. And those other men whose heads seemed to disappear into the clouds and who dragged shining sabres behind them, they were called ‘officers’. They were frightening because whenever her father saw them he clung to the walls and seemed to try to make himself even smaller. But, despite this, she believed they belonged to the human race. For a while now, she’d dared look at them: a few of them wore grey greatcoats lined in red (you could see the scarlet fabric, symbol of their rank of General, when they climbed into the sleighs), and some of them had long white beards, like her grandfather.

At the town square, she stopped for a moment to admire the horses. In winter, they wore green or red blankets decorated with pom-poms, so that the snow they kicked up didn’t fly on to their backs. The square was the heart of the town – there were beautiful hotels, shops, restaurants, lights and bustle – but soon she and her father descended once more down the narrow, steep streets that sloped towards the river, had gaps in the paving stones, and were poorly lit by lanterns, until finally they stopped in front of the home of some potential client.

In a smoke-filled, half-lit room with a low ceiling, five or six men were screaming, like chickens whose throats were being slit. Their faces were all red; their veins throbbed on their foreheads. They raised their arms and pointed to the heavens or beat their chests.

‘May God strike me dead on the spot if I’m lying!’ they said.

Sometimes, they pointed to Ada. ‘I swear to God on the life of this innocent child that the silk wasn’t torn when I bought it! Is it my fault, me, a poor Jew with a family to feed, if the mice got at some of it while it was in transit?’

They argued, they walked out, they slammed the doors; on the doorstep, they stopped, they came back. The buyers drank tea from large glasses in silver holders, feigning an air of indifference. The go-betweens (there were always five or six of them who showed up at the same time once they’d caught wind of a deal) accused each other of cheating, theft, fraud or worse; they looked as if they might tear each other to pieces. Then everything calmed down: a deal had been struck.

Ada’s father took her hand and they left.