The first, lying on the floor under one of the beds, was a crumpled rubber sac full of whitish sticky fluid. I stared at it in horror. This most intimate outpouring. This shameless evidence that my parents had performed the sex act on more than the two occasions on which Vera and I had been conceived. My father’s semen!

The second was a report from a psychiatrist at the Infirmary dated 1961. It was among some papers hidden in a drawer in the dressing-table. The report noted that my father had asked to see a psychiatrist because he believed he was suffering from a pathological hatred of his daughter (me, not Vera!). So obsessive and all-consuming was this hatred that he feared it was a sign of mental illness. The psychiatrist had talked to my father at length, and had concluded that in view of my father’s experience of communism it was not at all surprising, natural in fact, that he should hate his daughter for her communist views.

I read it with growing astonishment, and then with rage, both at my father and at this anonymous psychiatrist, who had taken the easy option, who hadn’t heard my father’s call for help. Stupid-both of them. My mother, whose family had suffered unspeakable wrongs, who had far more reason to hate me for being a communist, had somehow never stopped loving me even through my wildest years, even though the things I said must have hurt her to the quick.

I put the papers back in the drawer. I wrapped the used condom in some newspaper and put it in the bin, as though I could somehow protect my mother from its shameful contents.

Aunty Shura delivered my mother’s first baby. Vera was born in Luhansk (Voroshilovgrad) in March 1937. She was a miserable baby whose high-pitched gasping cries, as though she was about to stop breathing at any moment, drove Nikolai to distraction. Aunty Shura doted on Ludmilla, but she did not like Nikolai, and neither did her Communist-Party-member-friend-of-Marshal-Voroshilov husband. Life at Aunty Shura’s became tense. Tempers flared, doors were slammed, voices were raised, and the wooden house reverberated like a sound box. After a few weeks, Ludmilla, Nikolai and baby Vera decamped to live with Ludmilla’s mother (now she was a grandmother they called her Baba Sonia) in her new three-roomed concrete-built apartment on the other side of the city.

It was a tight squeeze in the apartment. Nikolai, Ludmilla and the baby occupied one room; in another room lived Baba Sonia; the third room was rented out to two students. The younger brother and sister were away at college, but when they came back, they shared with their mother. There was no hot water-sometimes no cold water, either-and although the famine had eased, food was still scarce. The new baby grizzled and whined constantly. She sucked fiercely at the breast, but Ludmilla, sick and anaemic, had little milk to give her.

Baba Sonia would take the whining baby on to her knee, bounce her up and down, and sing:

Beyond the Caucasus we stood up for our rights, stood up for our rights. Hey!

There the Magyars were advancing, were advancing. Hey!

Aunty Shura said: “Take an apple, push iron nails into it, leave it overnight, then take the nails out and eat it-that way you get both vitamin C and iron.”

Nikolai could not find a suitable job in Luhansk and mooched around the flat writing poems and getting under everyone’s feet. The constant crying of the baby got on his nerves, and he got on Ludmilla’s nerves. In the winter of 1937 he returned to Kiev.

That same year, Ludmilla was finally offered a place at the veterinary college in Kiev. Maybe the crane-operating job had done the trick, and turned her into a proletarian after all. But now it seemed like a cruel joke. With a new baby and her husband at work, it would be impossible.

“Go! Go!” said Aunty Shura. “I’ll look after Verochka.” Ludmilla had to choose: husband and veterinary college, or baby daughter. Aunty Shura bought her a new coat and a train ticket, and gave her an extravagant hat with silk flowers and a veil. Ludmilla kissed her mother and her aunt goodbye at the station. Little Verochka clung to her sobbing. They had to hold her back while Ludmilla boarded the train.

“So when did you see her again?”

“It was nearly two years,” says Vera. “She stayed in Kiev right up until the start of the war. Then she came to get me. Kharkiv was too dangerous. We went to Dashev, to stay with Baba Nadia. It would be safer in the village.”

“You must have been glad to see her.”

“I didn’t recognise her.”

One day a thin dishevelled-looking woman arrived on the doorstep, and grabbed Vera in her arms. The child started to scream and kick.

“Don’t you recognise your mother, Verochka?” said Aunty Shura.

“She’s not my mother!” cried Vera. “My mother wears a hat.”

We still have a picture of Mother in the hat, with the veil pulled back and a girlish smile on her face. My father must have taken it shortly after she arrived in Kiev. I found it in a bundle of old photographs and letters in that same drawer where I once found the letter from the psychiatrist. The letter has long since been lost, but the photographs are in an old shoe box in the sitting-room, along with the fragrant rotting apples, the freezer full of boil-in-the-bag dinners, the small portable photocopier and the civilised person’s Hoover, which being of a foreign make for which no dust bags are available in this country, now sits abandoned in the corner with its cover open and debris spilling from its civilised insides.

This room is still disputed territory. When Valentina is at home, she sits in here with the television on at full blast, and an electric bar fire (my father has fixed the radiator so that it doesn’t come on, in order to protect his apples). My father does not understand television; most of the content is completely meaningless to him. He sits in his bedroom and listens to classical music on the radio, or reads. But when she is out at work, he likes to sit in here with his apples and his photographs and the view over the ploughed fields.

We are sitting in here together this wet afternoon in May drinking tea, watching the rain stream down the windows and lash the lilac trees in the garden, while I try to work the conversation away from the development of jet propulsion in Ukraine in the 19305, and towards a discussion of divorce.

“I know you don’t like the idea, Pappa. But I think it’s the only way you will be free again.”

He stops and looks at me with a frown. “Why you are now talking about divorce, Nadia? That is Vera, who is such enthusiast for the divorce. Cigarettes and divorce. Pah!”

His jaw is set, his arthritic fingers knotted in his lap.

“Vera and I are both agreed about this, Pappa. We think Valentina will continue to abuse you, and we are worried about your safety.”

“Did you know, when Vera first discovered there was such thing as divorce, she immediately tried to convince Ludmilla to divorce me.”

“Really?” This is the first I have heard about this. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it. Children say all sorts of strange things.”

“She did mean it. Indeed she did. All her life she has tried to make divorce between Millochka and me. Now between Valentina and me. Now you too, Nadia.”

He fixes me with that stubborn look. I can see this conversation is going nowhere.

“But Pappa, you lived with Mother for sixty years. Surely you can see that Valentina is not the same as Mother.”

“Clearly this Valentina, she is of quite different generation. She knows nothing of history, even less about recent past. She is daughter of the Brezhnev era. In times of the Brezhnev, everyone’s idea was to bury all gone-by things and to become like in West. To build this economy, people must be buying something new all the time. New desires must be implanted as fast as old ideals must be buried. That is why she is always wanting to buy something modern. It is not her fault; it is the post-war mentality.”