NANA’S DACHA AT BARVIKHA had always been my home, in as much as I’ve ever had a real home and, once our affair began, it became the symbol of home for Finn and me. At any rate, Barvikha was the home of my heart and it became so for Finn too. I now see this symbol we had as part of the spirit that joined us.

In the seventies, when I was a child, I spent more time at Barvikha than anywhere else. Or is it just the happy memories that have expanded those times in my head? My parents lived abroad and Nana brought me up at Barvikha, taking me out of Moscow to the dacha as often as my schooling would allow.

My mother was the daughter of a career diplomat who later became the most favoured economic adviser to the Politburo in the now forgotten days of the Soviet Union. He had one of only a thousand or so personal passes to the Kremlin. But whatever economic advice he gave I don’t think he could ever have told his masters the truth; truth consisted of what they, the Politburo, wanted to hear, and my mother’s father, Viktor, was their well-trained, patriotic parrot.

My father served in the Foreign Intelligence Service; he was in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, to be exact. This exclusive and privileged organisation, whose agents pursued their intelligence activities abroad, is called the SVR. My father speaks Arabic fluently and he and my mother lived for several years at the embassy in the Soviet compound in Damascus.

We were very privileged but, like most privileged people, we didn’t realise it. My mother’s family, through Grandfather Viktor, had access to every foreign product available in the Soviet Union and my father’s position ensured a comparatively spacious apartment in Moscow, in a well-guarded, well-heated, modern housing block on Leninsky Avenue. The KGB and Military Intelligence had a quota of good apartments there, but our block contained a deliberate mixture of people from other ministries, from the Soviet news service TASS, and so on, so that no one could identify it as an SVR foreign intelligence residence, not even its own occupants.