No Country for Love

by Yaroslav Trofimov

Genres: World War II; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

'A beautiful, important and timely rendering of Jewish life in Ukraine through the travails of the 20th century. Both historical and page-turning' Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends and Super Sad True Love Story

'An expansive novel reminiscent of the literary breadth, humanity, and historical depth found in Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate' Christophe Boltanski, winner of the 2015 Prix Femina for The Safe House

Seventeen-year-old Debora Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv, to make her own fate as a modern woman. The stale and forbidding ways of the past are out; 1930 is a new dawn, the Soviet era, where skyscrapers go up overnight. Debora finds work and meets a dashing young officer named Samuel who is training to become a fighter pilot. They fall in love, and begin to mix with Ukraine's new cultural elite.

But Debora's prospects - and Ukraine's - soon dim. State-induced famine rolls through the over-harvested countryside, and any deviation from Moscow-dictated ideology is punished by disappearance. When Samuel is sentenced to ten years' hard labour, Deborah is left on her own with a baby. And this is only the beginning. As advancing Nazi armies move through Ukraine during World War II, its yellow fields of wheat run red with blood. Forced to renounce the man she loves, her identity and even her name, Debora also learns to endure, manipulate and resist.

No Country for Love follows the hard choices Debora makes as Ukraine, caught between two totalitarian ideologies, turns into the deadliest place in the world - while she tries to protect those she loves most.

A sweeping, stunningly ambitious novel about a young Ukrainian girl arriving in Kharkiv in 1930, determined to contribute to the future of her country, and her struggle to survive the devastation and trauma that ravage Ukraine.

Release date: July 4, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 80000

Sample

Stirring a slice of lemon into a cup of weak tea, Darya peered through the window at the snowfall. It was well past midnight, but she couldn’t sleep. Her husband, a colonel in the Ministry of State Security, was late once again. Although not so late as for it to be unusual.

In the bedroom, Darya had tried to read, a tattered old novel with the superfluous letters of pre-revolutionary Russian spelling portraying a quaint world of leisure. But she kept raising her eyes from the page, tormented by the same poisonous thoughts that had kept her awake for months. Cradling the warm cup in her hands, she pressed her forehead against the window’s icy, comforting pane, hoping that her headache would go away. The night was moonless, the lights in other apartments long ago turned down. Darya strained, trying to see through the gauze of snowflakes swirling in the wind.

That was when she noticed a portly, familiar shape trudging uphill, struggling to keep his balance on the slippery cobblestones of St Andrew’s Descent. The colonel was navigating the obstacles with surprising success considering the degree of his inebriation. Then another familiar figure stepped out of the shadows. Darya felt light-headed. She had imagined this moment, in vivid detail, night after night, but never allowed herself to believe that it would happen.

The colonel seemed surprised, opening his arms in giddy recognition. Then, pressing his hands to his chest, he crumpled to the ground. Soaking his grey uniform, blood spread like an ink blot through a pile of fresh snow.

Darya couldn’t hear the gunshot or see the muzzle flash because the pistol had been equipped with a silencer. But she made out the weapon in the killer’s hand as he extended it to dispatch a final shot into the colonel’s skull, calmly following proper procedure. He kneeled for a couple of seconds, frisking the colonel’s pockets, then strolled away, down the street and into Podil, the downtown area that had been the city’s riverside Jewish quarter before the Germans came in and murdered the Jews.

On the way, he couldn’t resist raising his eyes to glance at Darya’s window, on the third floor. He didn’t see how she recoiled and stepped behind the heavy red velvet curtain.

The tea, boiled when Darya wasn’t yet a widow, was still hot in her cup. She closed the curtains, trying not to look at her husband’s sprawled corpse being coated by a layer of fresh snow. She tiptoed into the children’s bedroom, kissing her daughter and son on their foreheads, envious of their untroubled sleep. Then she slid under her sheets, sheets still smelling of the colonel’s sweat, a sweat revolting to her, and tried to force her mind into numbness.

It didn’t last long. The bulky black phone, a treasured perk of the State Security job that also gave access to uncommon delicacies like fresh citrus fruit and smoked sturgeon, started to ring, an ear-splitting, urgent rattle. The colonel’s aide was on the line.

‘May I speak to your husband?’ he said in a formal, bland voice. ‘It is urgent business.’

‘I’m afraid he isn’t home yet. Wasn’t he supposed to be with you at the party?’

‘The party ended a while ago.’

‘Oh. Did something happen?’ The pitch of her voice edged up a bit, just the way a slightly worried spouse would be expected to speak so late at night. The phone probably wasn’t monitored, but you could never know for sure.

‘Have a good night. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,’ the aide said evenly. ‘Nothing at all.’

Debora strode into the hairdresser’s salon filled with impatient determination and pulled a precious American magazine from her tattered cloth bag. ‘I want my hair cut the way she has it, short, just like that,’ she said, opening the magazine at the picture of actress Louise Brooks. ‘Can you do it?’

The hairdresser, a stout woman in her forties with heavy make-up, held up the foreign publication, sliding her thick finger over the unusually glossy paper. Taking her time, she leafed through the photos of unimaginable American plenty, advertisements of pink-cheeked housewives serving oversize steaks to their solemn, sober husbands.

‘Can I keep it afterwards?’ she asked, knowing that the answer would likely be no.

‘Of course you can keep it.’ Debora surprised her. ‘But you’ll cut my hair for free, now and next year.’

‘Until the summer,’ the hairdresser bargained. She pointed to the chair by the sink. ‘Now, sit down.’

‘Until the end of the summer,’ Debora shot back, and sank into the chair, proud of her negotiating skills.

‘Fine, fine. But why you would want your hair so short, like a boy, I don’t know.’ The woman sighed as she reluctantly levelled her scissors. ‘Such a shame.’

A small ventilation window was open and the cacophony of industrial Kharkiv, the new capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, wafted through it. Hammers beating at construction sites, trains, car horns, sirens, piped radio music, the yelling and shouting of the busy streets.

Debora had been living in Kharkiv for more than two months, and yet she still found pleasure in the perpetual energy of the big city. She felt a knot of excitement in her stomach every time the tram rolled past the cabbage fields and whitewashed village homes into the capital’s humming heart. Kharkiv was nothing like Uman, Debora’s sleepy hometown, set on gentle green hills that wrapped around an overgrown park full of ponds, waterfalls and statues of Greek gods and goddesses. This was the metropolis of the future, a place where everything changed before your eyes, where every day brought something unexpected.

In Kharkiv, new buses plied the broad avenues, competing for space with horse-drawn carriages and an occasional American- or German-made car. The pavements swelled with crowds of elegant old-timers who looked with disdain at the rural newcomers, so bewildered by the hustle around them, so hesitant to even cross the street. Pedlars hawked their goods on the corners, anything from miracle potions against venereal disease to partially mended shoes. Cinemas advertised the latest releases in big, glittering letters. New buildings were mushrooming everywhere, surrounded by construction cranes lifting blocks of concrete. Soaring above it all were the nearly finished futuristic skyscrapers of Derzhprom that would house the Ukrainian government, their bold straight lines defying the pastel-coloured embellishments of pre-revolutionary architecture.

And bookshops! Unlike Uman, the bookshops in Kharkiv’s glass-topped Old Passage sold the latest novels, Russian and Ukrainian, and recent translations from Germany, France and America. Unconstrained by capitalist copyright laws that the Soviet Union did not recognise, publishing houses shipped a new batch of these translated bestsellers every few weeks.

Just an hour earlier, Debora had jumped out of the tram and walked past the towering Dormition Cathedral, which, shorn of its crosses and bells, now housed Ukraine’s national broadcaster, a symbol of obsolete religion displaced by scientific progress. Entering the art nouveau walkway of the passage, she had headed through the arcade to her favourite bookshop. She was a regular, buying two or three novels every month, and the assistant, as usual, had put aside the latest arrival for her. It had a promising title, Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, with a drawing of Monte Carlo’s casino on the cover.

As she paid for the slim volume, she inhaled the smell of fresh newsprint that filled the shop, a smell she had grown to love. She wished she had time to linger and browse. Not today. Only twelve hours remained until the end of the year. It would take her at least an hour to return to her dorm at the construction site of the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, one of the great ventures of the First Five-Year Plan. And after getting her hair done, she needed to prepare for the evening’s big party, a party to which she had managed to score a coveted invitation because of her recent promotion into the comforts of the Political Section. A promotion that carried perks for those ready to take initiative.

One of the American engineers helping to build the tractor plant – mysterious creatures whom Debora occasionally sighted but never had the occasion or permission to speak with – had left behind a slightly creased copy of Vanity Fair. One of the cleaning women, afraid of being tainted by this ideological impurity, had brought the magazine to the Political Section, where Debora had effortlessly managed to intercept it and examine every detail. The American actress’s bob, framing her taunting smile, seemed so liberating. It was the look of the future. Debora wanted to be part of the future. Life, after all, was bound to get better and better. The future, as signboards all over the city predicted, was bright.

‘It won’t make me look like a boy,’ she replied to the hairdresser. ‘And if it does, so what?’

‘Up to you, up to you, though I am sure your mother wouldn’t approve,’ the woman said. ‘But I am not your mother.’

‘No, you’re not,’ Debora replied, perhaps too rudely given their age difference.

As the hairdresser washed Debora’s hair and brushed it for lice, Debora’s mind wandered to her mother and father, to her last day in Uman, the day she’d hauled her cardboard suitcase onto a Kharkiv-bound train.

Uman. She used to feel trapped among all that stuffy leather furniture in their family home. Cupboards displaying crystal vases and trinkets that had survived the pogroms and the violence of the civil war a decade earlier. The heavy curtains that kept the living room permanently darkened. Everything in the Rosenbaums’ home recalled the lost past, a life that was swept away by the Great October Revolution of 1917. A life for which, unlike her parents, Debora did not feel in the least nostalgic.

When she’d first mentioned that she planned to join the volunteers building the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, responding to a recruiter’s presentation at her school, her father, Gersh, had frowned. Pulling together his bushy eyebrows, he breathed out a sad, resigned sigh. ‘But why? What have we done that you want to leave us here? Now that your brother is gone, we thought that at least you would stay with us. Why are you in such a rush?’

‘Didn’t you tell me yourself, all these years, that I need to have broad horizons, to open my mind?’ Debora’s voice climbed. ‘That we shouldn’t be like those people?’

Those people, in Gersh Rosenbaum’s world, were the other, different Jews, of whom he was ashamed. Despite all the recent advances and opportunities of Soviet life, many of Uman’s Jews clung to the old ways. They insisted on speaking Yiddish, wearing anachronistic black coats and hats. The women still shaved their heads and wore wigs. ‘How could they do this, now, in the twentieth century?’ Gersh often muttered over dinner. ‘They make all of us look bad, uncivilised.’

Though Gersh Rosenbaum himself was descended from a famous Uman rabbi whose grave was still venerated by some of the shtetl’s townsfolk, he grew up in the big city of Kyiv and preferred to go by a Slavic variant of his name, Grigori. He and Debora’s mother, Rebecca, one of the few Jewish graduates of the now-defunct Kyiv Institute for Noble Maidens, never spoke Yiddish at home, and certainly didn’t teach the bastard tongue to their children.

‘Forget all this nonsense. We are not narrow-minded provincial Jews, we are educated Russian intellectuals,’ Gersh, who never read anything other than a newspaper or an illustrated weekly magazine, would often tell them. ‘We’re equal now. No more Pale of Settlement, no more anti-Semitism. The revolution has swept away all these distinctions for ever, one good thing it did.’

The 1917 revolution and the ensuing civil war also swept away much of the Rosenbaums’ wealth. The dairy processing plant near Odessa that Gersh had developed under the tsar, with an investment from Rebecca’s family, had once funded a French governess for their children and, before the world war made overland travel impossible, annual holidays in Capri or the Swiss Alps. The dairy plant had been nationalised by the Bolsheviks and the governess had fled back to France long ago. None of this was mentionable in Gersh’s new life. On official forms requiring him to disclose his class origin, he put down ‘industrial worker’ in confident letters. With this, and a few other less innocent ruses, Gersh Rosenbaum, now of impeccable proletarian origin, managed to do rather well in the new Soviet order. Unlike Rebecca, he never complained about the life they had lost, the life that by now he sometimes doubted ever existed.

Not that he believed in the rosy communist future, or in the virtues of the Soviet system. What Gersh believed in was not complaining. A glass that is quarter full is still better than an empty glass, and an empty glass is still better than no glass, he would tell his children.

‘Why do you need to go there? You think it’s going to be easy, building that plant in Kharkiv? Do you even know what you are getting into?’ He had tried to talk sense into Debora. ‘There is so much more opportunity for you here, with your family. I know people, we can arrange things, I can open all kinds of doors for you in Uman.’

Debora didn’t know for sure, but she suspected that her father would open these doors by using his position in the People’s Commissariat of Trade to make sure that some grain, butter or sugar would be distributed in a slightly different way, to somewhat unintended recipients. This increasingly bothered her sense of justice, though not enough to confront her father.

‘Papa, you just don’t understand,’ she replied, exasperated. ‘I don’t want you to arrange anything. I want to open my own doors! By myself! And this thing in Kharkiv – all the best of the best young people of the whole country are going there, to make this miracle happen, to show that we can become the world’s leading industrial power, second to none. How can you ask me not to go, to give it all up and stay here, in Uman, when I can make history with my own hands! We’re so lucky to be living at this moment, this moment that people will be writing about centuries later.’

Gersh was about to counter this point, inhaling loudly as he gathered the appropriate words, when Rebecca interrupted him.

‘My sweetheart, you’re such an idealist, and that’s not a bad thing. All I will tell you is that you can come back here any time. The door of this home will always be open to you. If it’s too hard in Kharkiv, there is no shame in returning to the family. Nobody will think less of you.’

‘It won’t be too hard.’ Debora was impatient. ‘I can handle it.’

At the Uman train station, Gersh managed to suppress his emotions, cheerfully waving as the train pulled away. Rebecca, however, broke down in tears and ran the entire length of the platform after the carriage. Debora cried too, for a few minutes, but forgot all about it a half-hour later, once she encountered a couple of university students returning to Kharkiv and listened, enthralled, to their tales of big-city life.

Olena Tkach, a representative of the Kharkiv Tractor Plant trade union, met Debora and a handful of other new recruits at the city’s train station. Clutching their belongings, they all jumped into the back of a tarpaulin-covered truck and headed south-east on a bumpy dirt road. Broad-shouldered, Olena was taller than most of the new arrivals, moving with the self-confidence that came from physical strength. She examined with scorn Debora’s shoes, which, she knew, wouldn’t survive the encounter with the construction site’s mud for long. Her front teeth were crooked just a bit, an imperfection she revealed whenever she spoke. With ruddy cheeks, blonde hair parted in the middle and a straight nose, she reminded Debora of the statue of Venus under the waterfall in Uman, one of her favourite childhood hideaways.

‘Have you ever done this kind of work before?’ Olena asked.

‘No, but I’m sure I can manage,’ Debora replied.

‘Good. How old are you, anyway?’

‘Seventeen. You?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘She will manage, she will manage. And if she doesn’t, she won’t eat,’ interjected another recruit, and everyone laughed. Except for Olena.

‘Mind your own business, will you.’ She scowled at them. ‘You,’ she looked at Debora again. ‘There is space for you in my room if you want to join.’

‘I would love to,’ Debora responded, intimidated.

The room was shared with twelve other women, and Debora used the lower mattress of Olena’s bunk bed. A makeshift cotton screen gave them some privacy from the others. ‘Welcome home, I guess.’ Olena grinned. ‘You can put your things in this cupboard.’ She watched as Debora began to unpack, first her clothes and then a stack of books she intended to read and maybe share with her new friends.

‘Wow, that’s a regular library you’ve brought out here.’ Olena whistled incredulously. ‘You’re going to read them all?’

Debora just smiled shyly.

Once she had unpacked, Olena escorted her to pick up ration cards at the canteen. It was already time for dinner. Most of the women and men in the unheated dining hall were much older, their faces creased and sullen as they chewed with open mouths, wiping the grease from their lips with their sleeves. Food was served on scratched tin plates, with wooden forks and spoons. ‘You’re lucky, today is meat day. We only have it once a week,’ Olena said as they lined up to get their plates filled.

The meat’s stringy fibres stuck between Debora’s teeth and she felt too embarrassed to try to pick them out. Unlike the university students on the train to Kharkiv, the volunteers at the tractor plant site didn’t offer the intellectual conversation she had been expecting. Many, it turned out, didn’t know how to read and write, let alone wish to discuss movies and books. They were in Kharkiv for a simple reason: the construction site’s canteen provided enough reliable calories to survive the coming winter.

After dinner, the lights went off in Debora’s room and it was impossible to read, something she had always done before falling asleep. The women collapsed into bed after a day of hard work, snoring and coughing loudly. With the communal bath fired up once a week and the windows sealed shut for the winter, a cocktail of stale sweat and flatulence permeated everything.

In the morning, after waiting for her turn at the latrine, Debora drank lukewarm tea accompanied by a piece of dry bread and joined her work detail. Though the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, the pride of Soviet industrial might, would manufacture the machines of the future, the sprawling construction site didn’t quite match the enthusiastic descriptions proffered by the recruiter who’d visited Debora’s school in Uman. In fact, it wasn’t much more technologically advanced than the building of the Egyptian pyramids, Debora thought. Men, assembled in details of three and armed with giant hammers, crushed the rock, digging deeper and deeper into the hard earth of the frozen wasteland. Women removed the debris in rusty wheelbarrows and then shovelled it onto horse carts.

When Debora returned from her first shift, her hands were swollen and bleeding. Her back also hurt. Still fully dressed and splattered with dirt, she fell onto the bed and curled up in pain. Olena gave her a withering look.

‘You’re not really cut out for this, are you?’ she concluded. ‘Such delicate fingers. I can see that you’ve never held a shovel before.’

‘Not really,’ Debora admitted. ‘But don’t worry, I will manage.’

‘How can it be? Didn’t your parents ask you to help in the garden or around the house? To plant vegetables, maybe?’

‘My mother made me play the piano and take drawing classes.’

‘Piano?’ Olena snickered. ‘Piano? I didn’t know that people like you really existed.’

‘I don’t play that well.’ Debora blushed. ‘I draw much better.’

‘Draw? Show me,’ Olena demanded, handing her a newspaper and a pencil.

Debora took off her coat and straightened up. Making quick, confident lines on the newspaper’s margin, she sketched Olena’s face.

‘Not bad!’ Olena assessed the drawing.

‘I used to paint posters and banners for the high school,’ Debora said proudly.

Olena pulled out a jar of honey-based ointment. ‘Rub this into your hands, and you’ll feel better tomorrow,’ she said.

Debora didn’t feel better. She coughed and sneezed all night, and ran a fever in the morning, shivering under the threadbare blanket. For almost a week, Olena made her tea and brought her food from the canteen. When Debora had recovered enough to be able to walk, they plodded across the road to the two-storey brick building that housed the construction site’s Political Section and knocked on the door of the director, Comrade Lev Katz.

Short, skinny and slightly cross-eyed, Comrade Katz wore a pinstriped suit two sizes too large. ‘Olenochka, my dear, so nice to see you again,’ he said, hugging Olena. Debora had to try not to stare at the copious black hair that sprouted from his ears and nose.

‘This is the girl I’ve talked to you about, the artist,’ Olena said. ‘She is really good. I can vouch for it.’

‘I reckon we will have to test that proposition, my dear,’ Katz grunted in response, motioning at Debora to sit down. ‘We do need help in that department, we most certainly do. Everything changes so fast, and we need to keep up to date with the demands of the time. Every day, new slogans, new campaigns, new goals. Wonderful times we’re living in. Let’s start with the basics.’

He put in front of her a strip of red cloth, a can of white paint and a jar of brushes, and observed carefully as Debora, biting her lip in concentration, focused on making the straightest lines possible in the capital letters that, fifteen minutes later, grew into a full sentence: Death to the Clique of Traitors and Bourgeois Counter-Revolutionaries!

‘Very quick and steady,’ he muttered, examining the brushwork. ‘Most impressive, my dear. You can leave the shovel to others for now. The revolution needs you here more.’

They walked into a nearby room with a desk in the middle, a bright naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Rolls of red cloth and vats of paint occupied half the space. A tattered couch was squeezed in the corner.

‘Welcome to your new office,’ Katz said. ‘I don’t care about the hours, day or night, as long as what needs to be done gets done on time.’

Debora couldn’t look away from the couch. She imagined how she could curl up there to read once all the work was complete. She composed her first letter home that night, without mentioning her bout of sickness. This has been so much better than I expected. I love it here, everyone is so interesting and I am learning so much, she wrote. Coming to Kharkiv was the best decision I’ve made.

Clad in a revealing blue-and-white-striped dress completely unsuitable for the cold weather, Debora walked arm-in-arm with Olena into the New Year party at the Culture Hall of the Kharkiv Tractor Plant. Her bare back turned into a field of goosebumps and then, briefly, went completely numb. At least it was warm indoors. The space was already crowded, the air filled with loud music and drunken laughter.

All around them, hanging from the ceiling, was Debora’s handiwork, neat block-letter slogans on wide strips of red cloth. WE COMMIT TO COMRADE STALIN: WE WILL COMPLETE THE FIVE-YEAR PLAN IN FOUR YEARS, pledged one. DOWN WITH ANGLO-AMERICAN IMPERIALISTS, LONG LIVE THE PROLETARIAT REVOLUTION, screamed another. The freshly painted banners floated above the decorated tree linking the portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Engels and Marx – an evolution of facial hair, from the German philosopher’s endless beard to the trimmed Georgian moustache of the Beloved Leader of Progressive Mankind.

Hardly anyone could read the banners tonight, however. The lights were off, except for a fine ray shining onto the dance floor.

‘Oh wow, I can’t believe it, they’re playing the two-step!’ An excited Olena tried to pull Debora into the scrum. ‘Come on in, let’s show them what we’ve got!’

Debora wasn’t much of a dancer and had never even heard of the two-step before. On the unfortunate occasions when she had ventured onto a dance floor in the past, she’d flailed her limbs randomly for a few minutes before realising that she had made a fool of herself and retreating to a quiet dark corner. She yanked her hand from Olena’s. ‘You’d better start by yourself. I’ll join you later.’

Picking up a glass of the fizzy sweet wine from Crimea that everyone called Soviet champagne, she sat down on a couch at the back of the hall. The clock just in front of her showed that more than an hour remained until midnight. When she had finished her wine and moved to get a refill, she spotted Katz dancing with Olena, his chin nestled between her breasts. He was whispering something, and Olena chortled, turning red. Inch by inch, his bony fingers moved lower, finally pausing as they firmly grasped her buttocks. Olena laughed again, and as she gyrated, she locked her eyes with Debora’s. Blushing, Debora turned away.

She had lived a life of innocence in Uman, except for a few furtive kisses with classmates in the last year of school. She definitely wasn’t used to drinking. With her intense green eyes that seemed to promise much more than she intended to offer, and a long, delicate neck, she had attracted her share of male attention in Kharkiv. Until now, she had been too timid to respond to anyone’s advances. Tonight, she resolved as she finished her second glass of wine, would be different.

Debora was pondering whether to get herself another drink when a man dropped onto the couch next to her. Sweat dripped from his forehead and his breath stank of garlic and moonshine. He wiped his face with his sleeve and then, unsteadily, turned towards her, his eyes running up and down her body. She pretended not to notice as he leaned closer, clicking his tongue. ‘Fancy,’ he blurted. Then he opened his palm and, slowly and deliberately, grabbed her thigh, at the hem of her dress. She recoiled, but he pressed harder, so hard that it started to hurt. I will have a bruise, she thought.

‘You’re new here, aren’t you,’ he slurred. ‘Come dance with me.’

She tried to move away, but he kept pressing, pinning her to the couch.

Her breathing accelerating, she attempted to push his hand off her thigh, but he just grinned, enjoying his strength and her powerlessness. The hall was dark, and amid the noise of the party, nobody else seemed to be paying attention.

‘Please let go of me,’ she implored. ‘You’re drunk. You should go home.’

‘Drunk?’ he protested. ‘Me? Drunk? It will take a lot more than this for me to get drunk, sweetie.’

‘Please!’

She didn’t notice at first how his eyes narrowed in pain.

Another man, tall, in a military uniform, had seized her tormentor’s forearm. The force of his grip was clear from the officer’s white knuckles, and from the instant relief that her thigh felt on its release. The man in the uniform murmured something into the drunkard’s ear. Within a few seconds, Debora’s offender stood up, smiling apologetically, and wove his way across the hall, trying to keep his balance.

‘Thank you.’ Debora exhaled.

‘Oh, anyone would do the same. Can’t let boors get away with that kind of behaviour. What happened to good manners, eh?’ After a brief pause, he introduced himself. ‘Samuel.’

‘Debora.’ She extended her palm, expecting a handshake. Instead, Samuel kneeled for an old-fashioned kiss on the hand. This had never happened to her before.

‘I must admit, with an officer’s honesty, that I am star-struck by your ravishing beauty, my dear Debora,’ he said.

She took in his pomaded black hair and thin, curled moustache. The man had clearly spent an hour or two in front of the mirror. His eyes were keen and cocky at the same time.

‘A seducer, are you? Do you say this to all the girls?’ she laughed.

‘Not at all. Only you.’ He clasped her hand. ‘Would . . .