JI am an English man living in the south of Russia. I had lived there for nearly four years to help my ex-Russian girlfriend raise our daughter, now 8 years old. At 9 p.m. last night, I watched them board an overnight train to Moscow. From there, they will fly to Italy to join my daughter’s mother’s boyfriend there. Maybe never to come back.
Our separation was an almost comical scene of war, so clichéd was it – the escape on an overnight train, the tears, the hugs, the suitcases being lifted, the conversations you think you can carry on through the window and, finally, the faces that disappear in the distance. With the grandmother, we returned to our apartments empty, silent and sad, neither of us knowing what…
