Once or twice since then he had glimpsed those eyes… And the head of the little girl – thrown right back like the head of a rag-doll.

He could remember everything that had happened before the war.

Those memories came back to him all the time. He had become like an old man – living on his past, loving it and cherishing it.

On David's birthday, 12 December, his mother had bought him a picture book.

A small grey goat was standing in a clearing; the darkness of the forest seemed particularly sinister. Among the dark-brown tree-trunks, the toadstools and the fly-agarics, you could see the wolf's green eyes and his red jaw with its bared teeth.

Only David knew about the now inevitable murder. He banged his fist on the table, he screened the goat with the palm of his hand – but he knew there was no way he could save it.

During the night he shouted out: 'Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!'

His mother woke up. As she came towards him, she was like a white cloud in the darkness. He yawned blissfully, knowing that the strongest power in the whole world was now defending him from the darkness of the forest.

When he was older, it was the red dogs in The Jungle Book that most frightened him. One night his room had become filled with wild red beasts; he had made his way barefoot, past the sticking-out chest of drawers, to his mother's bed.

When he was feverish and delirious, he always had the same nightmare. He was lying on a sandy beach and tiny waves, no bigger than the smallest of little fingers, were tickling his body. Suddenly, on the horizon, appeared a blue mountain of water; it got bigger and bigger as it rushed silently towards him. David lay there on the warm sand; the dark blue mountain loomed over him. This was something even more terrible than the wolf and the red dogs.

In the morning his mother would leave for work. He would go down the back stairs and pour a cup of milk into an empty crab-meat can – this was for a thin stray cat with a pale nose, weepy eyes and a long fine tail. And then one day a woman who lived next door had said that some people had come in the early morning, put that disgusting animal in a box and taken it away to the Institute, thank God…!

'Where on earth is this Institute? How can you expect me to go there? It's quite impossible. You'll just have to forget that unfortunate cat,' his mother had said as she looked into his pleading eyes. 'How are you going to survive in the world? You mustn't let yourself be so vulnerable.'

His mother had wanted to send him to a children's summer-camp. He had cried and pleaded with her, throwing up his hands in despair and shouting: 'I promise I'll go to my grandmother's, but please not that camp!'

His mother had taken him to his grandmother's by train. On the way he refused to eat; the idea of eating a hard-boiled egg, of taking a meat-rissole from a piece of greasy paper, made him feel ashamed.

His mother stayed there with him for the first five days and then had to go back to work. He said goodbye to her without a single tear, but he put his arms round her neck and hugged her so fiercely that she said: 'You'll strangle me like that, you silly. There are lots and lots of cheap strawberries here, and in two months time I'll come back and fetch you.'

There was a bus-stop next to his grandmother's house. The bus went from the town to the tannery. The Ukrainian word for bus-stop was zupynka.

His late grandfather had been a member of the Jewish Bund; he had been very famous and had once lived in Paris. As a result, his grandmother was greatly respected – and frequently given the sack from her work.

He could hear radios blaring out through the open windows. 'Attention, attention, this is Radio Kiev speaking…'

In the daytime the street was quite deserted; it only came to life when the apprentices at the tannery came past, calling out across the street: 'Bella, did you pass? Yashka, come and help me go over Marxism again!'

In the evenings everyone came home – the tannery workers, the shop assistants, and Sorok, an electrician at the local radio-station. His grandmother worked for the trade-union committee at the surgery.

David never got bored, even when his grandmother was out.

Not far from the house was an old orchard that didn't belong to anyone. Chickens marked with paint wandered about between decrépit apple trees that no longer bore fruit; an elderly goat grazed quietly; ants appeared silently on the tall blades of grass. The town-dwellers – the blackbirds and sparrows – behaved with noisy self-assurance, while the birds from the fields outside, birds whose names David didn't know, were like timid village maidens.

He heard many words that were quite new to him: gletchik… dikt ... kalyuzha… ryazhenka… ryaska… puzhalo. .. lyadache … koshenya … [25] He could recognize in these words echoes and reflections of his own mother-tongue. He heard Yiddish. He felt quite astonished when his mother and grandmother began speaking it together; never before had he heard his mother speak a language he couldn't understand.

His grandmother took David to visit her niece, stout Rebekka Bukhman. David was struck by the number of white wicker blinds in her room. Edward Isaakovich Bukhman came in, wearing a soldier's tunic and a pair of boots. He was the head accountant at the State Bank.

'Chaim,' said Rebekka, 'this is our guest from Moscow, Raya's son.'

'Go on then,' she urged David. 'Say hello to Uncle Edward.'

'Uncle Edward, why does Aunt Rebekka call you Chaim?' David asked.

'That's a very difficult question,' said Edward Bukhman. 'Don't you know that in England all Chaims are called Edward?'

Then the cat began scratching at the door. Finally she managed to open it with her claws and everyone saw an anxious-looking little girl sitting on a pot in the middle of the room.

One Sunday David went with his grandmother to market. There were other women going in the same direction: old women in black dresses; peasant women in heavy boots; sullen, sleepy-looking women who worked as guards on the railways; haughty-looking women with red and blue handbags who were married to important local officials.

Jewish beggars kept shouting at them in rude, angry voices – people seemed to give alms out of fear rather than compassion. Big trucks from the collective farms drove along the cobbled roadway, carrying sacks of potatoes and wickerwork cages full of hens that squawked at each pot-hole like a group of sickly old Jews. David saw a dead calf being dragged off a cart; its pale mouth was hanging half-open and the curly white hairs on its neck were stained with blood.

His grandmother bought a speckled hen; she carried it by its legs, which had been tied together with a white rag. David was walking beside her. He wanted to reach out and help the hen lift up its powerless head; he wondered how his grandmother could be so inhumanly cruel.

David remembered some incomprehensible words of his mother's: she had said that his grandfather's relatives were members of the intelligentsia, while his grandmother's relatives were all shopkeepers and tradesmen. That must be why his grandmother didn't feel sorry for the hen.

They went into a yard; an old man in a skull-cap came out to meet them. His grandmother said something in Yiddish. The old man picked the hen up in his hands and began mumbling; the hen cackled unsuspectingly. Then the old man did something very quick – something barely perceptible but obviously terrible – and threw the hen over his shoulder. It ran off, feebly flapping its wings. David saw that it had no head. The body was running all by itself. The old man had killed it. After a few steps it fell to the earth, scratching with its young, powerful claws, and died.