Our final testimony evoking this family myth was to imprint the image of my father’s face and the sound of his words into the world which had threatened to destroy him but had formed his character for the rest of his life.

To do this and to draw the two journeys together, we projected his image onto the palm of my hand, held against a birch tree. We played recordings of a poem he had written in the diary dedicated to the Taiga, to its listening trees.