Sofka began writing in the diary in Paris. Perhaps she sensed that 1940 would be a turning point in her life; it’s the kind of book you’d wait to use at the right time, for the right purpose. She was thirty-two. Photographs show a lovely, expressive face set on a strong, sculpted neck. High Slavic cheekbones, a finely chiselled nose, and a slightly pouting upper lip which can’t help appearing flirtatious. Her long black hair has a neat centre parting, and is pulled into a sleek bun or coiled into ‘earphones’. Large, dark eyes look out boldly, as if challenging someone: ‘I am not afraid!’ But there is also a feminine softness tinged with sadness in her beauty. Sometimes, her eyes seem to say, ‘I have been afraid.’

Sofka was in France visiting her mother. It was utterly characteristic that she should have overcome the practical difficulties of being a lone female civilian travelling abroad during wartime; a friend in the Foreign Office helped with the paperwork and she managed to cross the English Channel on a British troopship. It was still the ‘phoney war’ and nobody knew what was going to happen. Sofka hoped to slip across (and then back again), to take some money to help her mother and stepfather. Like many of the older White Russian refugees, they were finding it hard to establish a new life, and their Parisian exile was grimly restricted and filled with regrets. They had come to rely on Sofka for financial support, and although she was far from flush with funds, she’d learned to get by. Sofka had intended to take what money she had in England and then stay in Paris for a couple of months – long enough to find a temporary job, translating or as a secretary – and pay off six months’ advance rent for her mother’s apartment.

I already knew the story from Sofka’s 1968 autobiography. Her adored second husband, Grey Skipwith, had recently joined the RAF. They had only been married for three years, and their eighteen-month-old son, Patrick, was staying temporarily in England with ‘the milkman’s mother-in-law’. Sofka’s two older sons, Peter (my father) and Ian, from her first marriage to Leo Zinovieff, were living in London with their paternal grandparents.

I also knew what was to come: how Sofka’s existence would be violently dislocated by world events for the second time in her life; how she wouldn’t see her children for another four years; and how this war would bring her tragedy and leave her changed in ways she couldn’t imagine. She always spoke about the war as being the greatest catalyst in her life: it seared her soul, she confessed. But reading this diary, it was different. I could watch events unfold as they happened, before she could analyse them or apply the irony which came later, with the benefit of hindsight. As an old woman, she could be cynical and self-mocking and her own writing tends towards a wry detachment. Here, on the other hand, I was meeting her as an emotional, contradictory, troubled young woman, whose responses were immediate. She wasn’t my grandmother then. Nothing was inevitable about how her life would work out.

The diary begins about a month after her arrival in Paris. The Nazis had already invaded France and the French Army had scattered in a quick, humiliating retreat. Many people panicked and some (including her fellow émigré, Vladimir Nabokov) managed to leave. Sofka imagined that her planned return to England would probably be delayed, but at first she sounds quite chirpy. Evacuation of Paris continues – banks, businesses etc all moving although the Germans have apparently announced that Paris is not to be bombed . . .
Today newspapers are one sheet only on account of paper shortage. All music has ceased on all French wireless transmissions . . . dancing is forbidden.
There is hardly anyone in the streets of the residential quarters and one has the impression of a new Pompeii, undamaged but uninhabited. Today Paris was bombed for the first time . . . Alarm ignored . . . within a few minutes, however, the shooting became frantic, the roar of engines deafening and we began to hear the whistle of falling bombs and violent explosions. The air was making the windows rattle, and we decided to go down into the cellar. The town to-day is empty and void. There is not a taxi to be found anywhere – either they are all mobilized or busy evacuating. Streams of cars with mattresses on the roofs pelting out of Paris . . . and the whole town loading its bedding onto cars and handcarts . . .
Children, dropping to sleep on the pavements where their families with bundles are gathered on street corners waiting for tram or car. Intermittent and fierce firing and drone of aeroplanes – and blazing hot sun. The British Consulate, whom I phoned this morning, says that there are no orders about evacuation and that British Subjects will be informed through the medium of the press. Presume we will be told how and when to get out if we so wish. Everyone says they’ll probably heave us all out on lorries when it’s necessary and that any individual attempt at leaving is sheer madness . . .
Montparnasse – people of all ages sitting on streets, backs against walls of houses, filling doorways. Round the station itself they are about 10–15 rows thick, all with their bundles and suitcases. A soldier was handing out wafers from a huge basket. The station is closed with iron gates and police cordons to keep the crowd from storming them.
People fainting, people ill, children screaming, women sobbing, girls giggling, others reading, sleeping, eating, just staring. People, people, people . . . the stench defies description . . .
Here again there is no one to tell them where to go, how long they will have to wait, to see about any food for them. Nothing. The Red Cross left yesterday. . . . The evacuation in a state of fever, rushing from one station to another, making off on foot . . . The road of evacuation is now called La Route du Sang. The cars and lorries rush headlong not caring who or what is in their way – handcarts, bicycles, prams – all are upset into the ditch or run over and the bodies left to be run over by the cars that follow. Bodies lie on the side of the road . . . There is no food to be found and a glass of water costs ten francs. Panic is terrible . . .
Apparently a terrifying quantity of children has perished during the evacuations. Corpses mingle with rifles, equipment, machine guns etc . . .
When at 1 o clock, I opened the window and shutters, the silence was deeper than any in the country. There was no street lighting at all in Paris tonight, not a footfall could be heard, not a car was moving. Absolute silence and darkness . . .
At about 4.30 a heavy, pitch black ‘thunder-cloud’ covered the sky from the north, growing more and more ominous.
Shortly after, it began to rain soot. One felt it falling on hands and face like rain drops – all became covered – pavements, skin, clothes . . . it is the oil supplies all round Paris being burned. The fire was terrific – a huge column of smoke some 300 yards wide going up into the sky . . . the base of the column torn by great flashes of flame. As it grew dark the red glow illuminated the whole sky. Hitler promised to be in Paris on the 15th. This morning at 7.30 the German officers were on the Concorde. At about 10 I went out to buy potatoes and heard it from the épicière . . .
The German soldiers are young and strong and stern. Dirty but not despondent or worn out as our men. Some people smiled at them (they were throwing kisses) but most of the people stood watching them, silent and unsmiling. Here and there a woman was in tears . . .
In the Champs Elysées they are already walking up and down as though the place belonged to them, sitting in the two or three open cafes, picking up girls . . . The red flag with a swastika is on the Eiffel Tower, on the Arc de Triomphe, on the admiralty and the Crillon.
Yesterday’s ‘black rain’ has left its mark on the town. Every flat space is covered with a thin layer of ‘soot’, like black snow in which footmarks are seen.

As Nazi rule strengthened, Sofka became increasingly panicstricken by the realization that she might be trapped. Her pessimism was undoubtedly exacerbated by reading Kafka’s The Trial, with its forebodings of a dark world where innocent people can be arrested and swallowed by dehumanizing bureaucracy. A rash of blisters erupted on her chin – a nervous reaction she dubbed ‘leprosy’, which later recurred in other times of crisis. At this point, Sofka’s writing becomes more personal and revealing; the bewilderment and suffering of her daily life are channelled into what becomes a series of letters, addressed to Grey, or Puppa as she calls him.

At first sight, Grey was not an obvious choice for the great love of her life. A slim, delicately built man, four years her junior, his springy hair was neatly oiled and parted, and a small moustache over his full lips added dash to a sensitive, boyish face.

The eldest son of a baronet, Grey’s background was solidly establishment: Harrow, Cambridge and hopes of entering the Foreign Office. Few could have predicted that he would fall in love with an older, married Russian émigrée and then plunge even deeper into scandal by acting as co-respondent in her divorce and marrying her.

Sofka was staying with her mother and stepfather in their apartment at 2 Boulevard de la République – a tired old building in a street running down to the river near Porte de St Cloud. Many of the thousands of Russians who flooded into Paris after the 1917 Revolution lived dreary, demeaned lives in these peripheral districts. Sofka’s mother, Princess Sophy Volkonsky, had been among the exceptional Russian women of her generation – a surgeon and one of the first female pilots. In France, she was reduced to working as a night taxi driver, and at piecemeal secretarial jobs. Her once brilliant, polyglot diplomat husband, Prince Pierre Volkonsky, had become a gloomy, diminished figure, whose genealogical expertise and oldfashioned finesse were now practically redundant. In the 1920s and ’30s, it seemed that every other waiter surviving on tips had some glorious past in imperial Russia. A joke did the rounds at the time:

Two men sit in a Parisian restaurant.
‘You see that waiter over there? He was a count in St Petersburg. And you know the chef in the kitchens? He was a Grand Duke back in Russia.’
‘Well,’ replies the other, ‘you see that little poodle sitting by the door? In Russia he used to be a Great Dane.’

There were many White Russians in Paris who were not displeased to see the Germans, hoping they might provide a route to finishing off the Bolsheviks’ twenty-three-year reign. Others were simply content to find work with the occupiers. When Sofka’s stepfather got a job as an interpreter in a German office, she realized that staying on in their apartment would compromise him as harbouring an ‘enemy alien’. Glad to move away from her coldly severe mother and dithering stepfather, she moved up to a room on the seventh floor of the same building – a dirty attic looking out over the dark roof slates. Days were spent disinfecting, delousing and decorating, and Russian friends helped her paint the walls ‘bright yellow and Nile green’. They’d stop for café national, the horrible mix of acorns and chickpeas which had replaced real coffee in France. Out on the landing was a Turkish-type lavatory, a cold tap and ‘landlord’s lights’, which turned off after thirty seconds. It sounded quite like George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London; the squalid yet prosaic and deeply boring nature of poverty. Orwell’s rooms, too, had walls ‘covered with layer after layer of pink paper which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry.’ Englishmen are being interned but women so far go free . . . Horror stories abound. The plight of many Russians is becoming desperate – ‘soupe populaire’ [soup kitchens] and German left-overs. English women have to go daily to the Commissariat to sign a book. Tiresome but inevitable. The war goes on and England is still un-invaded . . .
A series of Jewish shops on the Champs Elysées have had their windows broken . . . It is impossible to try and keep an objective and impersonal chronicle when every second of the day and night is brimful of personal feeling.
Puppa, my love, if you only could guess how lonely and miserable I am. Suddenly in the midst of anything I think of you or them [the children], and tears begin to pour.
Morning and evening I always speak to you darling – and I know that during the last 3 nights or so we’ve been together. I saw you very vividly last night . . . You came in dressed in a sort of leather short jacket and greyish trousers and tousled hair. You were very thin and sunburnt and grown up and you rushed in . . .
Good night my dearest love – all my thoughts are yours and yours only. Please to meet soon. To-day is our day, Littlest. I wonder where you are and have you realized it? My own, my little one . . .
God, if only I could get some news. But love, I do so believe that all will be well and that we’ll be together again. You’re so close to me all the time, my dearest. Oh, my Littles, things are no better . . . Downstairs [with her parents] tears my nerves to shreds . . .
Moppy [her name for her mother] seems to dislike the very sight of me. U.P. [her stepfather] is weak and dithery. There’s a new decree that anyone harbouring a British Subject must declare his presence by the 20th, or else be shot.
. . . Please, I love you so much and am in such agony of pain for you and Baba [Patrick, their son]. Darlingest, am in the 7th heaven since Monday, cos then I sent off a letter to my Puppadog. 25 words via Red Cross and hopes of an answer. Darling, do you understand!!! So am leaping about the world like a goat gone mad. . . . Have learned that for the sum of 15,000 [francs] can get across to you – will hope for some miracle – please, Little God!
A red-letter day, my precious – news from you through the Geneva Red Cross – letter here as historical document. It’s from 20th September, but of you, darling, of you. Rushed into the street and howled for joy.
The telegram, in French, is still inside a pale blue Red Cross envelope, stamped with a swastika on the back. It is hardly a love letter: THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS HAS RECEIVED A TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION CONCERNING YOU, FROM GREY SKIPWITH AND SONS, WHO SEND YOU THEIR AFFECTIONATE MESSAGES. WE HOPE THIS COMMUNICATION FINDS YOU AT YOUR OLD ADDRESS AND THAT YOU ARE IN EXCELLENT HEALTH. For the last 2 days have stayed in bed with a horrible chill and cough, not reporting to police or anything, so I’ll probably catch it when I do go . . .
. . . There can’t be another parent like mine in the world: I’ve just realised that she’s never yet been up to this room and although I’ve been laid up only U.P. has come to enquire. Wonder why she dislikes me and whether my inordinate feeling for Pips [Peter] and Crust [Patrick] isn’t a subconscious reaction.

By the time my father sent me an email with a macabre photograph of Jack on his deathbed – skeletal, skin like yellow parchment, lying open-mouthed and only just alive – I had already decided to write about Sofka. I’d often thought about it before, but now I was convinced. The diary had pulled me into her life and I wanted to go deeper: to see the places where she had lived, to meet people who knew her, but also to identify her legacies – the patterns, details and characteristics that filter down through the generations, whether by DNA, example or even by absence. She was never a family matriarch, but her influence went deep with her sons and grandchildren. Her incessant moving around until she was middle-aged and her struggles to feel at home were now far easier for me to understand. It didn’t seem like chance that with refugee grandparents, I should often have felt like an outsider growing up in England, or that I had ended up leaving the country of my birth and making my life elsewhere.

I flew to England from my home in Greece and travelled down to Cornwall for Jack’s funeral. On the way, I went for a last look at their cottage. Someone once said that Sofka lived ‘at the bottom of a God-forsaken lane on Bodmin Moor’, and she liked quoting that. But that day, it looked enticing; the high mossy walls edging the road were primrose-strewn and the granite cottage looked pretty beside the fast-running brook. Peering through the windows to the empty sitting room, I remembered evenings there by the fire. There had been books everywhere and cheap 1950s armchairs and sofas covered in rugs and sleeping dogs.

I’d begun my visits to Moppy (we used the same nickname for Sofka that she’d had for her mother) when I was old enough to take the train from London to Bodmin, aged about ten. At that time, Sofka was approaching seventy. She had put on weight, and would sit, huge, comfortable, overflowing, in her chair. Her eyes were hawkish and questioning, and her features still strong and attractive. She wore her hair in a loose, haphazard bun, though occasionally, early in the morning, I’d see it hanging down her back, shockingly long and grey, like a witch’s. She dressed with an exceptional lack of consideration for anything beyond practicality; thinking about clothes was a waste of time that could be spent reading, writing or talking.

On one trip, when I was eleven, Sofka asked me about my parents’ recent separation. I remember her initial look of bafflement as I burst into huge, heaving sobs; wailing children were not her speciality. It was the first time I had spoken to someone about my shattered world since my mother moved out, and I was shocked too. However, as hot tears gave way to conversation and eventually laughter, I realized for the first time that Sofka had lined up as my ally. She knew all about broken families; they ran like a fault-line through the generations. She was proof that you survive.

Sofka’s manner was a characteristic mix of knowing and curious, opinionated and open-minded, with a good dose of devil-may-care. Having seen so much and suffered so badly in her life, it was now time to be quiet, but her appreciation of independent thought and dark humour was revealed in the many commonplace books she filled with extracts from a lifetime’s favourite quotes and aphorisms. These were regularly copied into small notebooks and handed out as presents to favoured friends and relations. (All the epigraphs in this book are from her collections.) She gave advice readily; anything from reading-lists (long, varied, inspiring) and recipes (informal, Russian, delicious) to drugs (‘Never touch them; I’ve seen what they can do’) and adolescent love (‘It doesn’t matter how many lovers you have . . . Just don’t have more than one at the same time’). She was haughtily dismissive about death (‘I don’t care what happens to me when I die; you can bury me in a cardboard box’) and she still enjoyed surprising people. She recommended sitting down on the pavement in crowded streets for its persuasive powers on boyfriends who don’t agree on something. ‘I always found it an efficient method of getting my own way,’ she said wickedly.

As the years passed and I grew older, I’d be offered Jack’s smelly but potent elderflower or gorse wine, and maybe a stale Gitanes, long left over from some London party or previous visitor. We’d eat Russian food on trays. And then, if Sofka didn’t get out her photograph albums, I’d ask her to. It was part of the ritual of going to stay. ‘Here’s Grandfather Dolgorouky,’ she would say, pointing to a dauntingly severe, bearded man in a long brocade robe. Her deep, imperious voice was halfmocking, half-proud, swooping up to an unexpected soprano squeak and back down to a vibrato growl. Her speech betrayed her formative experiences: the richly rolled Rs of a Russian, the slightly nasal tones of the English upper class, and the perfect French interpolations of her generation of European exiles. ‘And here I am when I used to play with the Tsarevich,’ Sofka would say, grimacing at how ridiculous it all was, yet pleased at the name-dropping. A pretty, mischievous-looking child in white muslin, with long, dark plaits and large, shrewd, almond eyes gazed out. We’d pass through the Revolution, the escape to England, the marriages, working for Laurence Olivier and the Old Vic, the war, the Communist Party, right up to Jack and their gaggle of whippets out on the moor. A dash across the twentieth century and a life like a seismograph of its great events and political movements.

Jack’s funeral was at Bodmin Crematorium, where we’d all gathered for Sofka’s ten years previously. The humanist (brought in to respect Communist sensibilities) was friendly and sensible, but made me nostalgic for a little ‘opium of the people’, which can soothe these desolate moments so skilfully. Afterwards, in the car park, my Uncle Ian handed me two large cardboard boxes – there had finally been an agreement that I could take Sofka’s papers. But before I took my treasure back to Athens I contacted various people who had known Sofka. First call in London was my Great-uncle Kyril. Aged ninety-four, he is the younger brother of my Zinovieff grandfather, who died before I was born, and is friend, confidant and substitute grandfather to me all at once. Uncle Kyril is one of the few Russian émigrés still around who remember Russia before the Revolution (‘From Rasputin to Putin,’ as he quips), and who knew Sofka when she was young.

Tall, thin and still handsome, with a long face and aquiline nose, Uncle Kyril is always well dressed, favouring a jacket and tie even at home. With his many languages, daunting intellect and phenomenal memory, there are enough clues to suggest that he worked in intelligence for his adopted country. But he won’t talk about that, merely saying that he joined the Ministry of Defence after the war. Until recently, he resolutely ignored his advanced age, but his blue eyes have gradually lost their sight, and by the time I went to see him, he was only distinguishing between dark and light. I wanted to ask his advice on writing about Sofka, even though I knew that he didn’t have the best of opinions about his former sister-in-law. I was not prepared, however, for what emerged.

‘I liked her very much when I first met her,’ he began cautiously, trying to be fair. ‘We recited poetry to each other. I thought she had an original mind. But she should never have married my brother. She and Leo were completely unsuited.’ ‘Sofka liked to épater les bourgeois,’ he continued. ‘She enjoyed shocking people. And she was very promiscuous. When I say promiscuous, I mean the sleeping-with-the-windowcleaner- and-postman-sort-of-promiscuous.’ I laughed, but Kyril persisted, using words like ‘needs’ and ‘nymphomania’ with an ominous air.

‘Kinsey said the only definition of a nymphomaniac is someone who has more sex than you do,’ I retorted, trying to find some defence for Sofka, and Uncle Kyril laughed too. ‘Her mother also had many lovers,’ said Uncle Kyril. ‘And don’t forget, her family, the Bobrinskys, have a direct line right back to Catherine the Great. It was in the blood.’ I felt the uncomfortable implication of this biological determinism lurking, but I didn’t say anything.

‘I suppose I must have been very influenced by the aura surrounding your grandmother,’ Uncle Kyril admitted. ‘It was a very unfavourable one, I must say.’ I could sense Kyril’s generous nature losing the battle. He is one of the wittiest conversationalists I know, but that day he seemed tense. A seventy-year-old resentment against the person who made his brother unhappy and who broke ranks with her fellow Russians could not be suppressed. I had never seen him quite like this. ‘I was speaking with some Russians the other day,’ he went on. ‘And Sofka’s name cropped up. “Filth!” That’s what they said about her. You must understand what all the Russian refugees felt about Sofka’s Communism. She was at best extremely naïve to believe in Communism during the Stalinist period, or to think that there is any distinction between the two doctrines of Nazism and Communism. They are the same thing. Becoming a Communist when you are a Russian refugee is like a Jew from Germany becoming a Nazi. There’s no difference. And after the war, people said, “Look, she had no sense of morals anyway, and she’s just the kind of person who joins the Communist Party!’’

‘But my sister could never forgive her for what she did with the children,’ said Uncle Kyril. ‘She behaved monstrously. She just left Ian as a baby of three weeks with my parents and went off with her lover. But apparently she didn’t make Grey happy either. Becoming a rear-gunner in the RAF was practically a form of suicide. We all believed that he didn’t want to go on living.’

If I was a little shocked by the onslaught, I was also fascinated. If true, Uncle Kyril’s annihilation left Sofka with little integrity. I found some things hard to believe, but I was still left with many questions. It seemed impossible to me that Sofka hadn’t really loved Grey, but could their relationship have been more complicated than I imagined? And did she really abandon such a young baby? Could she have been as wilfully selfish and destructive as her in-laws claimed? I wondered too about the Communism. What were her motives? And did she care about how other exiled Russians felt about her?

‘She may have changed, later . . . that I don’t know,’ Kyril said as he kissed me goodbye – three times, Russian-style. His advice was to think again about writing a book about Sofka: ‘Her life isn’t interesting enough – there isn’t enough material.’ But I was becoming steadily more ensnared by my quest to understand Sofka.

Back home in Athens, I unpacked Sofka’s documents. In addition to the boxes, I’d acquired several packages of letters and memorabilia from my uncles, my father and some old friends. I sat surrounded by piles of papers: pre-Revolutionary Russian certificates, love letters to Jack, notebooks filled with quotations and poems, telegrams, appointment diaries, loose envelopes filled with photos, essays on Shakespeare’s plays, drafts of memoirs, passports, photograph albums. They smelled musty and old. Sometimes I thought I got a whiff of the cottage (dogs, woodsmoke, melted butter and damp bathroom), but then it just seemed like dust. They were an opening to Sofka’s life but also a confirmation of her death.

I was now full of questions; there seemed to be certain discrepancies and gaps in Sofka’s own portrayal of her life. What really went on with Grey? During Sofka’s lifetime he had seemed an almost sacred subject – too painful and significant to talk about. Even his son, Patrick, claimed to know almost nothing about his father. I wanted to find out what sort of person he really was. Uncle Kyril’s warnings of unreliability and promiscuity haunted me. The idea that Sofka might have betrayed the supposed love of her life spurred me on to find out more about what her priorities were. I wanted to get to know her well enough to understand her motives as well as her actions. And what about Leo, my grandfather? What was his story? All I knew were the stiff 1930s photographs of a severe if interesting-looking man, with round spectacles and sparse hair. Nobody spoke about how he lived.

My solution was to begin at the beginning and to look at the extraordinary intertwining of fate and character which produced such extremes in Sofka’s life. She always felt herself to be firstly a Russian, claiming jokily that ‘All Russians are crazy!’ And her own definition of the Russian character was based on its contrariness: ‘a paradox, a series of conflicting elements . . . mysticism and realism, apathy and achievement, thirst for knowledge and abysmal ignorance, idealism and greed . . .’.

Sofka’s story wasn’t just the familiar one of a princess who loses her privileges, or an exile who loses her homeland. She was a refugee from Communism who embraced the philosophy of her supposed enemy. Here was a strongly emotional person who could show remarkable detachment, a mother who placed other priorities – romantic love, literature, work and travel – before her children. Sofka behaved as many men have always done, but if this is still provocative and unusual, in her era it was far more shocking.

The deeper I dug, the more fascinating these oppositions appeared: the principled, practical person who extolled the pleasures of drinking, party-going and far niente, and the sensitive woman who longed for security yet lived a life which practically ensured that she remained broke and peripatetic.

Because I seek for roots who am a leaf
Whirled blind upon a gale,
Because I strive for stillness through the storm,
Because I long for peace . . .

she wrote in her forties, when stillness and peace were still years away.

Before going back to Sofka’s origins, I finished reading the diary. It was one of her many Russian admirers in Paris who offered her a way out. Nikolai evidently had connections in the right place, and promised that he could raise the fifteen thousand francs necessary to smuggle Sofka out of the country through unoccupied France and then Spain. The agreement was that the lenders would be paid back double after the war.
On 5 December, there is a pencil scrawl:

Just back from seeing Nikolai – he has fixed for me to leave on 10th. Not a word to anyone, specially not parents. No luggage. He got money from all round . . . Hardly dare even think, can’t wait, can’t wait. Darling. I do love you. It’s agony cold today – a black frost. Bloody. G’night, beloved – please not to forget me.

The writing in the diary ends there. The planned escape was only two days away. Early the next morning, there was a loud knocking on the door. Sofka opened it to find a French gendarme. He was not unpleasant, but firm. She must go with him, he told her, and bring things for twenty-four hours.