We trudge on. "Stalin wanted a German town, so he took Königsberg. At first people were too scared to come. They thought the Germans would come back and go..." He bats his hand against the air. "Some Germans stayed. They were deported in the 1950s. They had great apartments and my parents got a nice fully equipped..." We are almost at the beach. The snow is rolled into the sand by the wind. 

"Have you ever met a German?" 

Sergei smokes right down to the filter. "Well, usually I take German tourists around. Sometimes they cry. But quickly we Russians tell them it's OK and sometimes we visit them in Germany. It's good to make connections." A strange pang hits me. Can't you even be proud of what you've done, rather than profiteering from heritage tours to buy a new home appliance?  

The night is drawing in. The regimented poplar trees that line this long, formerly suburban road cast Euclidean shadows. I think of the Russian conscripts who howled when they broke into Prussian larders and found neatly stacked jars of jam. "Why had they invaded our lands where there has been no jam since 1914?" Königsberg was thus destroyed in the Carthaginian manner, with experimental flame-throwers and bulldozers, its annihilation built into the plan. 

The guide has rushed back to the car. "I show the Germans this." It is a laminated map of the area, covered in a thick coating of place names. We are in Yantarny, formerly Pamlicken. He grins. "The Germans find this very interesting. They pay good money to see these sights. Take photos. Come back every year." 

I noticed a Star of David engraved on a monument on the shore. "What's that?" Sergei dusts snow from a plaque. "פנ"[Hebrew for "Here Lies"] Here in 1945 more than 7,000 Jews were marched into the sea by the German Army." Marched into the sea? There is something so medieval about this that I shudder to think that some of the perpetrators may still be alive.

Pink pastels scrawled across the sky, and thick bouncy clouds. What a nice sunset. What a lovely beach. It's a little too much. 

"Have you ever been windsurfing?"

There were no waves upon the iced sea.