Nevertheless, she was the ‘Messalina’ of the neighbourhood, and rare were the nights when there wasn’t a pair of boots belonging to one of the local soldiers standing in the kitchen, just in front of the dirty, torn curtain that screened off her bed.

Ada’s maternal grandfather lived with his son-in-law. He was a handsome elderly man, his face adorned with a white beard; he had a long thin nose and a receding hairline. His life had been strange: when he’d been a very young man, he’d escaped from the ghetto and travelled in Russia and Europe. He hadn’t been motivated by a desire for wealth, but rather a thirst for knowledge. He’d come home as poor as when he’d left, but with a trunk full of books. His father had died and he had to support his mother and find husbands for his sisters. He had never spoken a word to anyone about his travels, his experiences or his dreams. He had taken over his father’s jewellery business: he sold moderately priced silver, along with rings and brooches decorated with gemstones from the Urals which newlyweds from the lower town liked to buy. But even though he spent his days behind a counter, when night fell, he padlocked and chained his door closed and opened the trunk of books. He would take out a wad of paper and the old quill pen that made a scratching sound and work on his book, a book that Ada would never see completed; all she would ever know was its incomprehensible title: ‘The Character and Defence of Shylock’.

The shop was on the ground floor of the Sinners’ house. After evening tea, it was her grandfather’s habit to go down into the shop, the manuscript under his arm and carrying a small pot of ink and his pen. An oil lamp burned on the table, while the stove, filled with logs, roared, spreading warmth and casting a reddish glow throughout the room. Ada, whose father had gone back to town, would leave Nastasia in the arms of her soldier, and go downstairs to sit beside her grandfather, rubbing her heavy, tired eyes. She would slide silently on to a chair next to the wall. Her grandfather would read or write. An icy draught slipped through the crack in the door and made the end of his long beard flutter. These winter nights, full of tranquil melancholy, were the sweetest moments of Ada’s life. But they were about to be lost because of the arrival of Aunt Raissa and her children.

Aunt Raissa was a thin, energetic, dry woman with a pointy nose and chin, a scathing tongue and eyes as sharp and shining as the point of a needle. She was rather vain about her slim figure, which she made look even slimmer by wearing a narrow buckled belt and the full corset popular at the time. She was a redhead; the contrast between her flamboyant hair and her thin, aging body was strange and painful to behold. She wore her hair like the French cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert, with thousands of tiny red curls falling on to her forehead and temples. She stood up very straight, her small bosom thrust slightly back in her effort to stand tall. She had thin, tight lips, darting eyes beneath half-closed lids, and a piercing, frightening expression that missed nothing. When she was in a good mood, she had a peculiar way of puffing herself up and slightly moving her shoulders that made her look like a long, thin insect flapping its wings. Because of her slimness, her vivacity and jaunty maliciousness, she resembled a wasp.

In the days of her youth, Aunt Raissa had had many admirers – at least, that was what she implied with her little sighs. She was an ambitious creature; her husband had been the owner of a printing works, and she felt that her widowhood had forced her down into a lower social class. She, who had met intellectuals, she would say with a proud little scornful smile hovering about her lips, she was now no more than a poor relation! She’d been taken in out of charity. She had to live, supreme indignity, in the Jewish quarter, above a miserable shop.

‘But really, Isa,’ she would say to her brother-in-law, ‘don’t you owe it to your good name to raise your children somewhere cleaner, with a better reputation? You seem to have forgotten, but as long as I live, I will never forget that my poor husband’s name, and yours as well, is Sinner.’

Ada listened to her, sitting in her usual place, on the old settee, between her cousins, Lilla and Ben. It must have been shortly after Aunt Raissa’s arrival. It was one of Ada’s earliest memories.