Galia was the striking Russian wife of a colleague of my Father’s at the bank in Paris. I don’t remember exactly when it was that Paul and Galia began to figure in our lives and if I wanted to be exact I could call my Father to ask him but I don’t feel that really matters. We were in Paris from December 1978 to March 1982 and I’ll just assume they were there all along. I was only a little sprog of six or seven when I was first introduced to them but even at that age I remember being utterly smitten by the presence of this tall, long and elegant Slavic blonde of delicate features who radiated nothing but warmth. She was young, she was beautiful and she was kind and I was very much aware of all this. I think they had met when Paul had spent some time in the Soviet Union as a student and a love affair had crystallized into a marriage. As the wife of a British national she was permitted to leave the country and, whether it was via a meandering route that took them through other countries first, they eventually wound up in Paris thanks to Paul’s job as a very junior executive in training with LBI. I seem to remember we saw a fair amount of them. The first cat we ever had in our family had been given to us by them and Galia sent Sacha and I home one day with Kiska, which means kitten in Russian. Galia spoke passable English with a marked and seductive Russian lilt and her and Paul would occasionally break into Russian amongst themselves when something hadn’t been clear to her or perhaps when something needed to be expressed between them in private.

She came from a city west of the Urals about a thousand kilometers east or south of Moscow. Her parents had been divorced for years but things being as they were in that socialist paradise there had been nowhere available for one or the other to move to once their marriage had been annulled and they carried on sharing the same small flat despite leading separate lives. One year I recall that Paul and Galia managed to obtain permission from the Soviet authorities to let Galia’s mother come and visit them in Paris for a few weeks. The system generously allowed her to leave the country with, I believe, one hundred Rubles or some such pittance and so the Babushka came to stay for a spell. I remember going over to meet the lady at their flat and being plied, until I could eat no more, with plate after plate of delicious Russian dishes that she insisted I finish. I was a growing lad after all. I no longer have a clear picture of her in my mind’s eye but the few brushstrokes that remain paint a picture of a doting middle-aged Russian granny in a flowery apron. She spoke nothing but Russian and once she had fed me up I remember her gazing at me with a twinkle in her eye, clearly feeling pleased at a job well done.

Galia was no fool but I suppose that after a lifetime of quasi rationing in Russia there were still aspects of life in the West that she had yet to fully comprehend. I remember it being told that she and her mother had gone off one day on a spending spree in various department stores, signing cheques left and right for all sorts of items that included piles of clothes and various white goods and domestic appliances without having any notion as to whether there were funds in the bank to cover the expense. Paul was legally bound to honour payment for all these goods and found himself in a jam, having to take out a considerable personal loan to cover the shortfall. Apparently when he asked Galia what had possessed her when she was signing for all those things she replied that she had assumed there was plenty of money in the account as there were still half a dozen cheques left in the book at the end of the day.

One weekend Paul and Galia, my parents and my sister and I went off to Chartres on a day trip to visit the cathedral. Once Sacha and I had been dragged around its considerable interior by the grown ups, to the point of moody restlessness, my parents consented to buy me, at the gift shop, a little box containing lozenge shaped pieces of stained glass as a memento of the day. They came in various tones of blues and greens and were rather beautifull. Galia came over to me and we looked at them together as she pronounced her admiration for one or another. Those I had understood she had liked the most I wanted her to have and I offered them to her as a souvenir. Much as I yearned for her to accept these secret tokens of my love for her she would not accept my gesture…and I so wanted her to have them. A few years ago when my parents came to visit me in Barcelona my Mother brought me a little wine coloured velvet-covered box containing what remained of these bits of glass. I no longer remember where the box came from originally but it has been in their house for years.

My Father and Paul were part of a crowd of hot-blooded, expatriate, young executives working for the bank in Paris and they would all get together periodically for piss-ups at someone’s house or for flipper championships at what they called the sub-brunch which was the local bistro just around the corner. At one of these events one of the lads thought it might be fun to wind Galia up a bit and went up to her to ask if when she had still been living in Russia had she been a member of the party. The music was loud and Galia was dancing energetically perhaps to Ian Dury’s “Hit me with your rhythm stick.”

“Party…? Party…?” she quizzed him… “Ohh… I love to dance!!!” she replied with a wink and pout, turned away and went back to her moves.