We watched his rangy figure stalking through the bright sunshine towards the tomb.

Vera took my arm. ‘You need to be patient with him,’ she said to me. ‘This is very difficult for him too.’ She spoke to me directly and with warmth. There was none of that falsity or awkwardness that I felt when addressing Jack for the first time.

The two of us made our way to the rear of the structure where a smaller, more exquisite dome tiled in a ravishing shade of aquamarine stands over Yassawi’s tomb. I found the colours almost stupefyingly bright; the intricate swastikas in the walls drew my eyes into the brickwork. I recognised it from Soviet-era guidebooks, where it is pictured surrounded by Ladas and Eurasian men sitting on their haunches selling watermelons.

‘The selfish gene aspires to immortality,’ Vera said softly. ‘This is Timur’s – and Yassawi’s. But we live in more literal-minded times, Nikolasha.’

In the whitewashed interior of the mausoleum, right under the main dome, a newly married couple, the groom in a black suit and the bride in white veil and a meringue of a wedding dress, knelt in prayer with their ushers and bridesmaids. We found Yassawi’s tomb – green marble with a green velvet covering – towards the back of the complex behind a wooden screen. A Kazakh man in a white baseball cap was kneeling in front of it and praying in a soft monotone.

Outside, she showed me the underground cavern where she said Yassawi had spent the final years of his life in solitary prayer. We descended the steps to his tiny cell. It was barely large enough to contain a single body. She touched the rough plaster with her tiny hands. ‘“Though I am bounded in a nutshell, I count myself the King of infinite space,”’ she said. There was an eerie buzz as her voice bounced from wall to wall. I suddenly felt dizzy from the closeness of the tiny chamber, the heat, the physical strain of moving my carcass. I lurched forward as my legs began to buckle under me. She redirected my weight against the wall and then helped me back up the stairs. We rested on the grass in the shade of an apricot tree. A guide called Bulat approached us to ask if I was all right, then asked if he could practise his English. Vera told him I was from the Baltics and diverted him into a discussion about Yassawi’s works. They weren’t available in translation, Bulat said in heavily accented Russian, but it didn’t matter. ‘God has put a computer chip in your heart,’ he said, ‘with all knowledge, all languages. If you pray for forty days in that underground mosque, you will know everything.’

Vera helped me to my feet and we walked slowly together towards the car park.

Without the daily practice, my tongue was losing its hard-won facility. I could only make a gargling sound in my throat. Vera stopped and looked at me. ‘What is it?’

My eyes pricked with tears of misery and frustration.

‘Man,’ I said.

‘Which man?’ She looked around. ‘You mean Bulat?’

I shook my head. ‘Man … man …’ I clenched my fists with the effort of articulation.

She shushed me gently, took one of my hands and stroked the fist into a palm.

‘Man … Man … Mankurt,’ I said finally.

She raised my hand to her lips and kissed it.

This stranger’s salty tears plopped into the orange dust. I wanted to lay my clumsy, aching head in her tiny lap. Her hand touched my cheek like a feather. Vera spoke softly to me in Russian, as though only her own language could carry the freight of consolation she intended. ‘Ty ne mankurt, Nikolasha. U tebya est’ sobstvennaya dusha.’

You are not a mankurt, Nicky. You have a soul of your own.

She shushed me gently until I stopped sobbing.

Thinking about Vera Telauga now, I experience a warmth and affection that is only comparable to what I feel about my own mother. Who knows what percentage of me is in fact not Nicholas Slopen, but Vera herself? After all, the hand of a master betrays itself in every brushstroke of their creation.

29

On the morning of our flight out of Almaty, Vera checked in alone, while we loitered at a coffee shop where a neurasthenic Chekhovian ofitsiantka with hollow eyes served espresso and dried-out sandwiches. I had my back to the departures hall, but I could deduce the state of proceedings from the play of emotions on Nicholas’s face. His increasingly strained expression suggested that things weren’t going according to plan.

At first, it seemed as though Vera would breeze through. Her luggage was accepted without a hitch; her seat assigned; then the attendant called her back. It seemed to be a routine query, but as the minutes stretched out, it became clear that something out of the ordinary was taking place. When I finally turned to look, Vera was standing to one side of the desk, where she was tapping her boarding card on her hand in a show of impatience as the attendant checked in some other passengers. There was a ruffle of energy at the distant edge of the hall and the crowd parted for a phalanx of security men headed by a man in a grey suit. Vera threw her passport and boarding pass to the ground in what seemed like a gesture of frustration but was in fact a pre-arranged signal for us to abort the plan.

Nicholas stood up. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go.’

In my haste, I left behind my brand new suitcase, bought in the market that morning, not to hold my possessions – I had none – but to give me more plausibly the appearance of a business traveller.

Nicholas marched grimly towards the main entrance while I stumbled along a few steps behind him. Vera was standing at the check-in desk protesting as the man in the suit, who was holding a walkie-talkie, plucked at her elbow. As I watched, the uniformed security men swarmed around her and ushered her noiselessly away from the other travellers. An American oilman in chinos kicked his bag to the next spot in the line. His daughter swooped across the floor on the roller in the heel of her trainers. The attendant turned her look of infinite exasperation to the next customer. Vera’s face became visible again from the far side of the hall as she turned back to remonstrate with one of her handlers; pale and frantic, she looked almost ghostly against the dark suits that surrounded her. I was trying to read the nuances of her expression – beneath the defiance and the fear, was there a hint of resignation? – when the blade of the revolving door severed us completely.

With gruff tenderness, Nicholas took my arm and urged me to hurry. We walked quickly past the old terminal building, with its crumbly and baroque late Stalin-period plasterwork, towards the importuning taxi drivers at the far end of the car park.

*

Both of us were numb from the loss of Vera. It was an amputation, an incalculable disaster. But the urgency of our predicament prevented our dwelling on it then. In her thoroughness, Vera had prepared a contingency plan for precisely this eventuality. We had a pair of Swiss passports and train tickets for Simferopol, from where the tram service would connect us to Yalta, and a cruise ship called the Dimitrii Shostakovich which would drop us in the relatively free air of Trabzon on the Turkish coast.

Nicholas was silent as we made our way nervously through the gloomy marble ticket hall of the main station.

We had second-class tickets for the train but Nicholas bribed the conductor for an upgrade and we found ourselves alone in a first-class compartment with maroon vinyl seats and café au lait drapery. Pedlars moved along the corridor selling buckets of apples and foil bags of grilled chicken.

As soon as the train had lurched out of the station, Nicholas left the compartment. Outside the dirty window, the suburbs of Almaty slid by in the afternoon light; beyond them rose the jagged yellow peaks of the Tian Shan mountains.