Back inside the flat, pipes grunt and cough. Girders stretch and creak and the squeaking, rolling sound like trolley wheels has started up again. Ivan murmurs in his cot, awake and round-eyed, but as Rachel bends to pick him up she sees her hands letting go of the After Eights box. This is what they do, she thinks. They let go. And because she must protect her child she carries him to the kitchen instead of the living room, then pulls up a chair and stares through the darkness down to Staronavodnitska Street where a shrieking, sparking tram makes its way towards the river and tail lights wink between the trees of Tsarskoye Selo. Across the valley, up on the hilltop, the floodlit steel bulk of the Motherland statue raises its sword to the heavens. Yes, thinks Rachel as she lifts her shirt and grits her teeth when her son’s gums clamp on: that statue is another hollow thing in this black night.
* * *
‘Dyed, kak tyi?’
Zoya’s voice carries across the tiny hall and into the dimness beyond. Her grandfather doesn’t answer. No one answers. For the past seventeen years it’s been Zoya’s name on the papers for this left bank apartment across the river on the outer edges of the industrial zone in Darnytsia, yet even now she cannot enter without calling out, as if asking for permission. She closes the door behind her and sniffs the sharp scent of the blackberry leaf tea her neighbour brews to disguise the smell of urine. As she unzips her boots by the coat stand and removes and hangs up her skirt, she considers making a cup for herself, but instead pushes open the door to her left. Beyond is the flat’s only room, apart from the cramped cubby holes that serve as kitchen and bathroom. There is no sound from the bed that takes up most of the floor space, although the dull glow from the fringed lamp on the table shows a figure lying motionless beneath the covers.
‘I’m home, Grandpa,’ she says. ‘I’ll just wash my hands.’
In the bathroom, Zoya switches on the light and counts the sheets bunched up on the cracked tiles by the toilet. Two. It used to bother her that Tanya, her neighbour, wouldn’t rinse them out. Now she doesn’t think about it. Tanya might drink her tea and forage in her drawers, but without the woman’s daily appearances Zoya wouldn’t be able to go to work at all. She unhooks the shower head and turns on the tap. Water trickles out; at least it is warm this evening. She breathes in the chemical smell of the soap powder and stands there in her nylon slip, eyes closed, water pattering on the sheets as if they are a row of blackcurrant bushes outside a rural back door.
When the sheets are hung, dripping, over the bath, Zoya pulls on a faded floral housecoat and shuffles back to the kitchen in her slippers. She is too tired to cook, but there’s cold soup on the stove and she eats some straight from the pan before decanting a little into a bowl, taking care to remove the soft lumps of cabbage. As she turns to look for a spoon, a note, scrawled on the back of an envelope and left underneath a bottle of yellow medicine on the windowsill catches her eye. ‘Gone to my sister’s,’ it reads. ‘Back Thursday.’ So, Tanya is taking a break. Zoya can’t go to work tomorrow. She’ll have to call Lucas and tell him the car’s got a problem. She’ll say she’s taking it to her cousin’s to get it fixed and he’ll grumble about how that’s what happens when the BBC gives them a tin can in a city full of potholes.
She places the bowl of soup on a tray, along with a wedge of cured pig fat and a few slices of pickled cucumber she finds in the ancient refrigerator. Then she takes two glasses and pours water in one before filling the other with vodka from a bottle she keeps tucked behind the stove.
‘Here we are, Grandpa,’ she murmurs, carrying the tray into the bedroom.
The air above the bed smells of old skin and stale breath and when Zoya sits down on the only chair, the figure beneath the bedclothes releases a feeble stream of wind. ‘Grandpa,’ she whispers, bending down to kiss the top of his bony head. She tends to him then, cajoling him into raising his head, easing him up onto the bolster, bringing a spoonful of soup to his mouth, wiping his chin with the bib that Tanya has left there. Her grandfather’s facial muscles strain and his tongue feels for the shapes of the words he can no longer find.
‘I saw someone else doing that today,’ she tells him. ‘The English woman, trying to speak words in Russian. Not as beautifully as you, though, my darling.’ And when the soup is finished and she has eaten the cold salo and the pickle and drunk some of the vodka, she dips her little finger into the glass and pokes it, so gently, between his lips.
Chapter 4
Elena Vasilyevna is pickling beetroot. Her arthritis has flared up now that the weather is colder and her shoulder joints grind, bone on bone, so she has enlisted the help of the boy Stepan. She can keep an eye on him in her lean-to kitchen on the hill in Tsarskoye Selo. He won’t come to any good idling in the car park at the apartment block or leering at her beneath the monastery walls. The so-called uncle he lives with is a slob.
Stepan’s job is to hold each jar steady while she stands on a stool and ladles in the soft purple heads. When the lids are secured and the jars wiped clean she will store them beneath the stairs with the bottled pears and tomatoes, the trays of chitting potatoes and the onion seeds in their twists of yellowed newspaper. If he likes, decides Elena, he could help her in the spring. She could start him on some digging.
Stepan screws up his face as the steam rises in vinegary clouds. He’ll want payment, that’s obvious, and he has a taste for preserved cherries so for now she will give him half a jar. Elena knows about hunger. She knows how starved limbs swell, how skin becomes shiny, almost see-through, before it splits open and the body’s fluids leak out.
Famine eats you from the inside. When winter comes, hold on to what you’ve got.
Chapter 5
Rachel is standing in a stranger’s apartment. She shifts Ivan on to her hip and turns her head slowly, eyes skimming from one object to another as her brain realigns itself to the changes in tone, texture, scale.
‘It’s so white,’ she murmurs. ‘Everything is so white.’ The tasteful shades of pale envelop her within their seductive, muffling depths. She wants to sniff the cream leather armchair, sink her toes into the sheepskin rug, run her fingers across the Egyptian cotton tablecloth and even slip into the white blouse her host is wearing as she pours coffee into milk-smooth porcelain cups. The silky fabric reminds Rachel of her mother’s face cream. Visibly Different, by Elizabeth Arden. For years she had watched her mother apply soft white dabs every night, frowning at the mirror, massaging her cheeks in slow, careful circles. Yet when Rachel, aged ten, had tried it for herself, twisting off the lid, sliding a fingerful under her vest and rubbing it across her stomach and chest, her mother had been furious. The pot was snapped inside her handbag after that. Such pleasures were only for grown ups.
Suzie, the Scottish woman Vee told her to call, straightens up and pushes her long ash-blonde hair back over her shoulder.
‘White is so easy, don’t you think?’
Rachel has been staring too long, but she can’t help it. The only white things in the flat on the thirteenth floor are the Pampers, though her stock is depleting daily. Even Ivan’s once-white vests and cot sheets are stained a greyish yellow. She can’t quite believe the existence of this pure, untainted space on the eighth floor of the neighbouring building.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she says, to Suzie.
‘Well, it’s easy for us. Rob just brings it all in through Finland.’
‘What does he do?’ asks Rachel.
‘Do?’ Suzie rolls her carefully mascaraed eyes. ‘Pisses about, mainly. Don’t they all? He’s got lorries. Leases them for cross border imports. Sofas, freezers, all that stuff. You can’t get anything decent down on Khreschatyk. A few folksy linens; painted trays and lacquered boxes – nothing you want to keep. If you’re planning to stay, you’ll have to bring in your own furniture. Our things here are mainly Swedish, though I made him bring out a few pieces from our house back at home.’ She walks over to a lime
-washed bureau, picks up a photograph in a plain silver frame and hands it to Rachel. The photograph shows a beautiful clap-board cottage with green wooden shutters and the sea, blue and hazy, in the background. ‘That’s us. Suffolk, near Aldeburgh. Where they have the music festival.’
Rachel blinks. This woman Suzie makes it all seem so effortless. Of course her real home is a cottage in Suffolk. There are other pictures, too: a bridal couple in a village churchyard, soft focused, all daisies and cow parsley; a broad-chested man in a wetsuit, the top half peeled off, drinking a beer on a beach. This is how people live back in England, she thinks. Where things are nice.
Ivan bumps his head crossly against her shoulder blade. She remembers that her back is aching. ‘Do you mind if I put Ivan down?’ she asks. ‘I’ve brought a change mat in case he leaks.’
Suzie is slicing into some freshly baked apple cake. ‘Go ahead.’ She puts a plate beside Rachel and sits down, her right hand encircling her left wrist. ‘Sometimes I think I’d like a baby. Rob’s adamant though. Not happening.’
‘Oh . . .’ Now Rachel doesn’t know what to say. She lays Ivan down on his vinyl sheet and glances again towards the photograph of the man in the wetsuit.
Suzie laughs. ‘It’s okay. Hard to imagine a child in this flat. It can’t be easy. For you, I mean. With a baby . . .’
Ivan is kicking his legs on the mat, staring up at the recessed lights in the ceiling. Here in this apartment where Rachel feels like she’s floating, even though it’s on a lower floor than her own, her son looks just like any other baby: all the babies she ever saw before she had one herself. Her head is full of the words she might speak: it’s fine, everything’s fine, nothing is fine; millions of women have done it before her and in markedly more difficult circumstances; the health visitor told her it wasn’t safe to come though she had to come, had to escape her own mother with her bitter jibes and injunctions; she’s lucky to be here at all; sometimes she wishes she’d never had a baby, never met Lucas. The balcony crumbles, the baby falls, she raises her arms above her head and flings her son into the void, but it won’t happen if she remembers that her sole task is to keep him away from the edge . . .
‘Lucas says I get a bit obsessive,’ she responds, surprising herself. ‘I do worry, though. I keep getting infections, and I don’t know any doctors. What if he gets sick?’
‘Oh, there are nurses at most of the embassies, and I’ve heard there’s a British doctor coming soon. Rob says I’m not to go near a local hospital. You can always fly back to London. What about your mum?’ Suzie pauses, waiting, but when Rachel remains silent she breezes on. ‘God, if I had a baby, my mother would be on the first plane out. And then Rob would leave me!’ She laughs again, a throaty laugh like the laugh of a smoker and Rachel notices a little loose skin beneath her chin. She’s probably nearly forty, though her body is toned and her limbs are slender.
‘Look,’ says Suzie, turning up the sleeve of her blouse to reveal a thin elastic band around her wrist. ‘My shrink told me to do it. Every time I feel stressed about something I give this a ping.’ She pulls it away with her other hand, then lets it go so that it snaps back against her blue-veined skin. ‘It stopped me craving carbs, stopped me getting lazy. Maybe it’ll stop me wanting kids.’
When they have finished their coffee, Suzie shows Rachel around the rest of the flat. There are two bedrooms, one with a rowing machine set up on the floor. The main bedroom contains an ornate limed oak sleigh bed with a mound of white bedlinen piled up in the middle. Rachel admires the way Suzie doesn’t care about her seeing the unmade bed. She notices the expensive toiletries, the soft sweaters and pressed shirts revealed by the half-open wardrobe. There are white towels in the bathroom; a gleaming white Kenwood Chef sits on the counter in the kitchen.
‘We should do dinner,’ says Suzie, when it’s time to slide Ivan back into his snowsuit. ‘Sometime next week. Rob would love to meet you both. He’s keen on some new restaurant near Andriyevsky Spusk. The food is terrible, but it’s fun.’
‘Okay,’ says Rachel, thinking this is how it’s done – you have coffee with someone, you introduce your husbands and then you are friends. Maybe things can be smoothed, made white and safe with pings from an elastic band.
Lucas will be pleased.
* * *
When Lucas returns that evening Rachel is reading her copy of Baby’s First Year. She has reached page sixteen. No skim-reading; she’ll have to start again if she fails to enunciate every single word in her head. This book, she knows, will never carry the compensatory power of the novel Lucas took, yet it offers some distraction. Reading out loud is permitted, though only if Ivan is awake. Right now he is dozing in his bouncy chair, which she taps with each new syllable.
‘The line’s out in the office,’ says Lucas, walking into the kitchen before Rachel can turn her page. ‘Just when I’m ready to file. I’m going to have to do it here.’
Rachel closes the book and places it on the table. She hasn’t worked out what to do if a page cannot be completed, but the memory of Suzie’s elastic band still pricks sharp and bright. Just a pinch for now, then. Her finger and thumbnail pluck at the pale skin on the inside of her wrist.
‘In here – you mean the living room?’ She pushes the book against the wall behind the fruit bowl and places the salt cellar on top of it.
‘No, in here. The acoustics are cleaner – less echo – and the phone cable is long enough to reach from the hall.’ Lucas squats down and squeezes Ivan’s stubby foot. ‘If the quality’s okay then London doesn’t care where I file from and I could spend a bit more time with you two, maybe. It’s all coming together now, Rach – there’s an Interior Ministry day trip to Poltava next week and the news pieces are coming in, so I can’t avoid the press pack, but I can do most of the background for the film feature from home.’
He looks so convincing in his button-down shirt with his pen in his breast pocket. Rachel’s visit to Suzie’s has made her feel like someone else and so, for a few minutes with her book tucked away and while her husband sets the kettle on the stove, then untangles wires and fetches a black metal box from the hall with plastic knobs and little dials before withdrawing for a cigarette and a read-through of his notes, she believes him. She believes he is a good journalist, a serious journalist who thinks on his feet and understands what is required and how to get it done. This is his profession and she is his wife and the mother of his child, the woman to whom he comes home and for whom he makes coffee and smokes out on the treacherous balcony.
She watches him set up his microphone and adjust the levels. She even feels a little guilty that she won’t let him light up in the kitchen while he works. Maybe tonight it will be all right, if he is gentle, if his piece is well-received and they can play at being this straightforward couple a little longer. Crisp white sheets. Photos on the side table.
‘I went over to Suzie’s today,’ she says. ‘You know, the woman who lives in the other block. Vee put me in touch with her. She’s invited us for dinner next week. To a restaurant.’
‘Great!’ says Lucas, but he is absorbed now, pressing one side of a set of bulky headphones against his ear and dialling the global filing number for Bush House. This feels okay, too, so she retrieves her book, picks up Ivan in his bouncy chair and decamps to the bedroom.
‘You won’t make a noise, will you?’ she whispers as she sits on the bed, opens her shirt and puts Ivan to her breast. ‘Daddy’s busy.’ She shuts her eyes, bites her lip until the pain subsides, then listens to the low, modulated sounds from the kitchen and drifts off for a few minutes to the rhythmic squeaking that comes from somewhere above the ceiling. Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy Daddy’s busy.
The mantra doesn’t work.
She opens her eyes. Lucas is shouting in the kitchen.
‘What’s the matter?’ she calls, leaving Ivan asleep on the bed.
�
��Bush House won’t use my piece! They say they can’t strip out that noise from upstairs! That squeaking! I’m going up there. Some randy wanker . . . how am I supposed to get anything done in this place?’ He marches down the hall and slams the front door behind him.
Now Rachel doesn’t know what to do. She ought to go after him, she thinks. She ought to call him back, so after a few seconds she leaves the apartment, too, stepping on to the stale grey landing, past the rubbish chute and through the heavy door to the concrete stairs. She won’t take the lift.
The fourteenth floor feels strange. There are three doorways, the usual locks and quilted sound-proofing and spyholes, but one door has a rubber doormat outside, while another has a complicated bell. Lucas is already knocking. Rachel stands a little way behind him, not sure now that she wants the squeaking noise to stop.
‘Lucas . . .’
They hear a low muttering. Lucas knocks again. This time a cough, then suddenly the door swings open and an older man with a large belly steps out.
‘Shto?’ he says, aggressively. What?
Rachel doesn’t catch her husband’s reply. In the rectangle of electric light behind the man’s sagging outline she looks down a hallway that is exactly like their own. The floors are uncarpeted, with the same over-varnished parquet and she can tell that all the doors in the flat are open because more light spills out from them and into that light swings a boy on rollerblades. He is tall, with a child’s narrow chest, and he is naked apart from some old cotton pants that don’t quite cover a flaky red patch of skin on his hip. He looks twelve, maybe thirteen, and she realises she’s seen him before, perhaps in the lift or loitering near the kiosks by the Eternal Flame. The boy glides towards the old man’s back and just when she thinks he is going to crash into him he executes a sharp, squeaking turn and stumbles a little before pressing his hand against the wall and pushing off back down towards the bedroom.
Snegurochka Page 5