It was not until many years later that something new occurred to me: how lonely she must have been. What also occurred to me around the same time was that perhaps she didn’t stand out after all; perhaps there were hundreds, even thousands of other women like her. They would have conducted their lives unaware of one another’s existence, content with their self-sufficiency, resentful of one another’s lack of courage, or aspiration, or resolve to fight. It was from either a failure of the relevant institutions or a lack of imagination that my mother lived all her life in a Socialist state convinced that one can only ever fight against others, never alongside them. I would have offered my sympathy, if I hadn’t thought she would feel insulted.