‘He was strictly a melting-pot man,’ Alicja said while attacking a large helping of tsimmis. ‘When he changed our name I told him, Otto, it isn't required, this isn't America, it's London W-two; but he wanted to wipe the slate clean, even his Jewishness, excuse me but I know. The fights with the Board of Deputies! All very civilized, parliamentary language throughout, but bareknuckle stuff none the less.’ After his death she went straight back to Cohen, the synagogue, Chanukah and Bloom's. ‘No more imitation of life,’ she munched, and waved a sudden, distracted fork. ‘That picture. I was crazy for it. Lana Turner, am I right? And Mahalia Jackson singing in a church.’

Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus jumped into an empty lift-shaft and died. Now there was a subject which Alicja, who would readily discuss most taboo matters, refused to touch upon: why does a survivor of the camps live forty years and then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph, no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood, working its way through until it hits the heart? Or, worse: can a man's death be incompatible with his life? Allie, whose first response on learning of her father's death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother. Who, stonefaced beneath a wide black hat, said only: ‘You have inherited his lack of restraint, my dear.’

After Otto's death Alicja ditched the elegant high style of dress and gesture which had been her offering on the altar of his lust for integration, her attempt to be his Cecil Beaton grande dame. ‘Phoo,’ she confided in Allie, ‘what a relief, my dear, to be shapeless for a change.’ She now wore her grey hair in a straggly bun, put on a succession of identical floral-print supermarket dresses, abandoned make-up, got herself a painful set of false teeth, planted vegetables in what Otto had insisted should be an English floral garden (neat flowerbeds around the central, symbolic tree, a ‘chimeran graft’ of laburnum and broom) and gave, instead of dinners full of cerebral chat, a series of lunches – heavy stews and a minimum of three outrageous puddings – at which dissident Hungarian poets told convoluted jokes to Gurdjieffian mystics, or (if things didn't quite work out) the guests sat on cushions on the floor, staring gloomily at their loaded plates, and something very like total silence reigned for what felt like weeks. Allie eventually turned away from these Sunday afternoon rituals, sulking in her room until she was old enough to move out, with Alicja's ready assent, and from the path chosen for her by the father whose betrayal of his own act of survival had angered her so much. She turned towards action; and found she had mountains to climb.

Alicja Cohen, who had found Allie's change of course perfectly comprehensible, even laudable, and rooted for her all the way, could not (she admitted over coffee) quite see her daughter's point in the matter of Gibreel Farishta, the revenant Indian movie star. ‘To hear you talk, dear, the man's not in your league,’ she said, using a phrase she believed to be synonymous with not your type, and which she would have been horrified to hear described as a racial, or religious, slur: which was inevitably the sense in which her daughter understood it. ‘That's just fine by me,’ Allie riposted with spirit, and rose. ‘The fact is, I don't even like my league.’

Her feet ached, obliging her to limp, rather than storm, from the restaurant. ‘Grand passion,’ she could hear her mother behind her back announcing loudly to the room at large. ‘The gift of tongues; means a girl can babble out any blasted thing.’

Certain aspects of her education had been unaccountably neglected. One Sunday not long after her father's death she was buying the Sunday papers from the corner kiosk when the vendor announced: ‘It's the last week this week. Twenty-three years I've been on this corner and the Pakis have finally driven me out of business.’ She heard the word p-a-c-h-y, and had a bizarre vision of elephants lumbering down the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday news vendors. ‘What's a pachy?’ she foolishly asked and the reply was stinging: ‘A brown Jew.’ She went on thinking of the proprietors of the local ‘CTN’ (confectioner-tobacconist-newsagent) as pachyderms for quite a while: as people set apart – rendered objectionable – by the nature of their skin. She told Gibreel this story, too. ‘Oh,’ he responded, crushingly, ‘an elephant joke.’ He wasn't an easy man.

But there he was in her bed, this big vulgar fellow for whom she could open as she had never opened before; he could reach right into her chest and caress her heart. Not for many years had she entered the sexual arena with such celerity, and never before had so swift a liaison remained wholly untainted by regret or self-disgust. His extended silence (she took it for that until she learned that his name was on the Boston's passenger list) had been sharply painful, suggesting a difference in his estimation of their encounter; but to have been mistaken about his desire, about such an abandoned, hurtling thing, was surely impossible? The news of his death accordingly provoked a double response: on the one hand, there was a kind of grateful, relieved joy to be had from the knowledge that he had been racing across the world to surprise her, that he had given up his entire life in order to construct a new one with her; while, on the other, there was the hollow grief of being deprived of him in the very moment of knowing that she truly had been loved. Later, she became aware of a further, less generous, reaction. What had he thought he was doing, planning to arrive without a word of warning on her doorstep, assuming that she'd be waiting with open arms, an unencumbered life, and no doubt a large enough apartment for them both? It was the kind of behaviour one would expect of a spoiled movie actor who expects his desires simply to fall like ripe fruits into his lap ... in short, she had felt invaded, or potentially invaded. But then she had rebuked herself, pushing such notions back down into the pit where they belonged, because after all Gibreel had paid heavily for his presumption, if presumption it was. A dead lover deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Then there he lay at her feet, unconscious in the snow, taking her breath away with the impossibility of his being there at all, leading her momentarily to wonder if he might not be another in the series of visual aberrations – she preferred the neutral phrase to the more loaded visions– by which she'd been plagued ever since her decision to scorn oxygen cylinders and conquer Chomolungma on lung power alone. The effort of raising him, slinging his arm around her shoulders and half-carrying him to her flat – more than half, if the truth be told – fully persuaded her that he was no chimera, but heavy flesh and blood. Her feet stung her all the way home, and the pain reawakened all the resentments she'd stifled when she thought him dead. What was she supposed to do with him now, the lummox, sprawled out across her bed? God, but she'd forgotten what a sprawler the man was, how during the night he colonized your side of the bed and denuded you entirely of bedclothes. But other sentiments, too, had re-emerged, and these won the day; for here he was, sleeping beneath her protection, the abandoned hope: at long last, love.

He slept almost round the clock for a week, waking up only to satisfy the minimum requirements of hunger and hygiene, saying almost nothing. His sleep was tormented: he thrashed about the bed, and words occasionally escaped his lips: Jahilia, Al-Lat, Hind. In his waking moments he appeared to wish to resist sleep, but it claimed him, waves of it rolling over him and drowning him while he, almost piteously, waved a feeble arm. She was unable to guess what traumatic events might have given rise to such behaviour, and, feeling a little alarmed, telephoned her mother. Alicja arrived to inspect the sleeping Gibreel, pursed her lips, and pronounced: ‘He's a man possessed.’ She had receded more and more into a kind of Singer Brothers dybbukery, and her mysticism never failed to exasperate her pragmatic, mountain-climbing daughter. ‘Use maybe a suction pump on his ear,’ Alicja recommended. ‘That's the exit these creatures prefer.’ Allie shepherded her mother out of the door. ‘Thanks a lot,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know.’