Or they might even have been traces from my own childhood, ghosts of my brother and I in a similar sunlit room that we shared, that also looked down from high up onto a garden, a tree. We played our set of Klezmer tunes, Breton and Scottish folk, and ended the concert with Shostakovich’s Waltz no 2, originally composed for a Soviet film about the Virgin Lands campaign in 1950s Kazakhstan.

The woman in the basement had made a stand and left the group, after posting an eloquent speech of disassociation. They had found a source, almost on the grounds of a nuclear power station, looking over to the islands of Arran and little Cumbrae. The woman in the Ukraine flat in early spring, the start of the war, playing out to spite the devastation, and Masha’s father this autumn in Moscow, his children and grandchildren gone, bent over his long dreamed of piano, playing on as his city becomes ever more unreachable. Now it is completely empty, apart from the enormous piano, and the old map in its permanent place, showing Palestine in biblical times, marked out in Cyrillic letters. Her writing explores the different ways that painting, drawings photographs and words give form to lived experience; how they are generated and reconfigured in time, as we attempt to put stories into words and pictures.The late sun kept striking the lighthouse and the half-ruined buildings of the island, lighting them up pink and gold. I had never noticed this room for the whole long lockdown and suddenly it claims my attention with its mess and sprawl, its restless reader. I swim with my nose at the level of the water, perfectly held between the air and the underwater, my eyes fixed on the island before me that is transformed, transcendent — the real world before me holding within it the dream, the idyll of the painting. The ground about the bandstand is slightly raised and curved, like a cake, and the wide floor is covered with dry brown leaves that have been left to pile and rustle. The room was partitioned into small spaces by low walls of books to make separate enclosures for three of the five children.

And so Masha’s father has become the caretaker of a full size Bechstein, that somehow made it intact up the six flights of low lit, dusty cement stairs to the large padded double doors of their flat. And as Andrzej Jackowski’s drawing The Visit, where the sea presses up at the half open door of a room — he has taken the sea from Carrà’s painting and put it in his drawing, just beyond the room. I don’t know where this envisaged idyll has come from but its hold is as convincing and actual as the shape that it inhabits before me. They are evidence of my lived experience moment to moment, the layering of marks recording the movement of my body when walking and the constant scanning of my vision as it alternates between a broad and narrow focus on all that I encounter. She too has had a reunion of long parted family members from different countries in a rented French house cancelled.

I am not a poppy wearer, nor a monarchist, but on dark November remembrance weekends in Glasgow I have usually listened to the Cenotaph and watched the blue sky, plane trees and sun on the grand white stone facades far off in London. But the woman in the basement had not looked out, and had not waved, and she often had kept her curtains closed in the day. In her book ‘ I Live Here Now‘ she describes how after a relocation to Moscow, she made drawings of all that she encountered as she walked through the streets to familiarise herself with the new city. It feels safer to have more languages to say things in, to keep the words endlessly edging around the things, moving in and out, so that the feeling of a thing is not disappeared by its definition.