* * *
The survey is delivered three days later by a man driving a silver Volvo. It is a fat slab of computer paper in a black ring binder. Eight hundred and seventy items, neatly tabulated, each row requiring her to insert the price charged by three different stores. Rachel tries not to be deterred by the impossibility of ‘Brie, French, 400g’ or ‘Sandwich toaster, Breville, model A530, silver’. Instead she resolves to start with things she knows how to find: tea and onions.
‘Come on, Ivan,’ she says as she packs her son into his snowsuit and his mittens and balaclava and belts him into his pushchair. ‘Let’s go shopping.’
Down in the foyer, she hurries past the caretaker’s booth without looking in. They set off for the kiosks and she hauls the pushchair over the tramlines, then up the lane past the decaying wooden houses with their skeletal cats and their arthritic trees to the ancient Kiev Pechersk monastery, at the top of the hill.
Chapter 8
Today there are no onions for sale at the roadside. Fortunately, however, the concrete kiosks with their barred windows stuffed with cigarettes and lighters and plastic combs have plenty of Liptons tea bags; they oblige Rachel with three different prices. She also finds bananas, or rather, one banana, lying next to some frost-blackened carrots and a trio of cabbages on a sheet of newspaper outside the Gate Church of the Trinity. The banana and the vegetables are crusted with snow. So is the old woman with sunken cheeks who squats on a crate beside them. Her head is swathed in several thick scarves. Her hands are wrapped in strips of dirty cloth.
‘Dobrey dyen. Skolko?’ asks Rachel. She points at the single piece of fruit, remembering too late that she needs a kilo price.
As the woman looks up, Rachel hears a click from somewhere to her left. She turns and there is Teddy, Vee and Lucas’s photographer friend, lowering his camera.
‘Don’t worry,’ he tells her. ‘You’re not in the shot.’
‘Oh, hello!’ she says, dismayed. She would rather not be watched by this grinning American as she tries to purchase a solitary banana from a babushka with bandages for gloves. Teddy is wearing an oversized hat made of rabbit fur, with the ear flaps dangling round his jaw. The fur is patchy and matted, as if the hat is diseased.
‘Shopping?’ he asks, tilting his head to one side.
‘Not really,’ Rachel says, as she realises she is being teased. ‘But I need bananas. Onions, too.’
Teddy smiles and exchanges a few words in Ukrainian with the woman.
‘She says your baby looks strong. And the banana is yours for twenty-five kouponi. You might find onions inside the monastery. Shall we take a look?’
Rachel finds her purse and pulls out a dollar. The woman takes it without demur and Rachel considers handing over her thick thermal gloves as well, but Teddy’s presence makes her hesitate.
‘They don’t like the pushchair,’ she says, sliding the banana into her pocket. ‘I’ve tried it before. Lucas says they think the wheels will damage the floors.’
‘Ah,’ says Teddy, with an exaggerated frown. He turns towards the entrance. ‘The Baba Yagas.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The Baba Yagas. The old witches. They sit in dark nooks in churches and museums, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting mothers, but any child will tell you the story of the real Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in an old house that struts about on chicken legs. She rides around the woods in a mortar, with a pestle for crunching babies’ bones.’ He sucks his cheeks in, comically, and Rachel glances back at the old woman hunched over her vegetables as Teddy lifts the pushchair through the narrow door. When he guides her beneath an archway with its flaking plasterwork and slippery paving, no one protests.
The monastery is starkly beautiful in the snow. Rachel has managed glimpses of it on previous walks, and Lucas has told her about its miracles and shrines, its concussion-inducing catacombs crammed with the remains of dead saints preserved in their coffins, fingers exposed at the hems of their shrouds like thin, shrivelled dates. She lets go of Ivan’s pushchair and turns round, taking it all in. The whiteness blankets the narrow flowerbeds and scrappy verges and draws her eye upwards to the green roof tiles, the gold domes and the small cross at the top of the tiered bell tower. Even the stark remains of the ruined church directly in front of her seem picturesque. Two pairs of black-robed monks process from one doorway to another, their skin bluish beneath their dark beards. Women in tight headscarves scrape the paths with ancient spades, and crows congregate in silence around a neat pyre of rubbish, each playing their part as if directed by an unseen hand.
Teddy finishes putting away his camera.
‘Don’t you want to photograph this?’ asks Rachel. ‘I feel like I’m in a painting.’
Teddy grins. ‘Nope. Already got what I want.’
‘What about over there? It looks like it was bombed.’
‘Not bombed. The main church was blown up. In 1941. The retreating NKVD laid explosives in the cellars. Two years ago UNESCO made it a world heritage site. The pilgrims and the tourists are returning now. Orthodoxy’s back.’
Teddy seems at ease here, she thinks. He leans over a table a few yards from the entrance. The table is laid out with wooden stacking dolls – matryoshki – each curved body split in half with five or seven or even ten smaller dolls lined up in descending order. Traditional models in brightly painted folk dress pout their red lips, the brushstrokes a little rough in places, but cheerful enough. The old man behind the table tries to tempt Rachel with what is clearly his most expensive item, a fancy ten-piecer with licks of gold paint. Teddy, however, is more interested in a series of Russian leaders. He counts them down for her: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Chernenko, Andropov, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, Lenin, Tsar Nicholas II and a tiny little figure no bigger than her finger nail with a black moustache and fierce, slanting eyes.
Teddy picks it up and shows it solemnly to Ivan.
‘Your namesake, The Terrible!’ he says, laughing as the old man flaps a mittened hand and scolds him for touching.
Rachel watches with an unexpected flush. She finds herself noticing how Teddy is not the same as Lucas. His eyes are brown. His hands are smaller, broader. His voice has a wider register, at ease with the notes at its disposal. She wants to count these differences, sort them and hoard them.
‘Look, there are your onions,’ he says, pointing to a basket in the snow beside the table. Then, once he has asked the price per kilo, and the old man has stuck up four fingers and Rachel has added what she hopes are the right number of zeros, Teddy wanders off.
When she has completed her purchase Rachel turns to see him standing a dozen yards away in the lee of the bell tower. He is talking to someone else – a young man, slightly built – Ukrainian, by the look of his bleach-spattered denim jacket and his sharp eastern cheekbones. Teddy brushes a snowflake from the man’s arm. They seem close, almost lovers. Their heads tilt together and their breath mingles in clouds about their heads.
Oh, she thinks, they are lovers.
Teddy beckons her over.
‘Meet Karl,’ he says, smiling. ‘Karl, this is Rachel, Lucas’s wife. And this is their baby, Ivan!’
Karl nods and smiles down quickly at Ivan, but he seems more serious, more reserved than Teddy.
‘Nice to meet you,’ says Rachel. ‘I must be getting back. Ivan is getting cold.’
‘This is not a good place to buy vegetables,’ says Karl, speaking with a strong Kiev accent and pointing to the bunch of onions she has hooked over the pushchair handles.
‘No.’ Rachel recalls the banana seller’s bandaged fingers and tells herself that next time, when she is alone, she’ll definitely give away her gloves. ‘But I am doing a survey, you see. A consumer survey. And I have to find three prices for everything.’
‘Ah, the UN!’ exclaims Teddy. ‘Vee put you on to this, didn’t she? You’ll be the most popular
expat in town if you hike up the dollar prices. Everyone’s been waiting. The diplomats, the execs from the internationals – you’re setting the hardship allowance for the next three years. Just imagine the bribes . . .’ He stops, sees Rachel staring, round-eyed. ‘Hey, I’m joking. Three prices? That won’t be easy.’
‘I have to find dishwashers,’ she says. ‘Max Factor lipstick. One hundred per cent Arabica coffee beans.’ Suddenly, the enormity of the task overwhelms her. She shivers, and wishes she is back in the flat. She needs her rituals, her pages.
‘You’re freezing. Come with us,’ says Teddy. ‘We know a warm café.’
Karl looks up, contemplates the grey sky. ‘And Max Factor,’ he says.
* * *
The café is in a cellar in Podil, so Karl flags down a Lada saloon to take them there. The driver, a middle-aged man in khaki fatigues, glares at the pushchair with its dirty wheels and Ivan with his runny nose and his bright red cheeks, but Teddy feeds a dollar bill through the half-open window and soon they are bumping along the cobbles in the old part of the city, past the small huddle of protesters waving their placards near Independence Square, past the ragged line of schoolchildren at the top of the funicular and through narrow lanes that have wound their way down to the river between the merchants’ wooden warehouses since the days of old Kiev Rus.
‘Welcome to my gallery,’ says Teddy, once the three of them are seated on stools in a low-ceilinged back room with a stove blasting out heat in the corner. A young woman wearing an oversized purple sweater places three black coffees in front of them. The coffee is thick with grounds that leave a residue around the inside of Rachel’s cup. She takes a sip and stares at the photos that cover the smoke-stained walls; some are in clip-frames, most are just tacked up with tape. The images are of people, mainly, in washed out greys and greens, captured so that only part of each face is showing, unsmiling, a single eye staring away from the lens as if there is something far more important happening outside the frame.
Teddy seems pleased with the attention Rachel gives them. ‘So, I believe Ivan is the first baby to come here. He’s definitely the first English baby.’
Rachel hugs her son protectively on her knee. He gazes upwards, eyes bright, absorbed by the macramé lampshade that dangles from the ceiling. She wipes his nose with a paper napkin and rubs his cool hands in hers.
‘Most people in Kiev don’t like babies,’ she murmurs.
‘We love babies,’ says Karl.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’
‘We love babies, but there are problems, and the cancers. Many cancers. Also diphtheria. Everywhere there is sickness and no one is paying the doctors. People are afraid for any little ones. You are a foreigner, protected from danger. So they watch to see what you do.’
‘Oh.’ Rachel frowns as she processes this logic.
‘Vee says you’ve been unwell,’ says Teddy, stirring his coffee with his finger. ‘But here you are, out and about, no Lucas in tow, doing your thing, getting a job . . .’
‘It’s not a proper job,’ says Rachel. ‘Only collecting prices. It seems a bit pointless, really. They’ll have changed again by tomorrow.’
‘Dear Rachel,’ says Teddy, mock sighing, rolling his eyes. ‘You’re already infected.’
‘What do you mean?’ asks Rachel.
‘I mean you’ve picked up Expat Disease. It’s the wall we all hit. And then you have to decide. You can sink into the system, tie yourself up in red tape and grow cynical and sticky with all the misery and corruption, even when you tell yourself you’re above it all.’
‘Or?’
‘You say fuck it, and have a good time!’
Rachel is silent for a moment. ‘I just meant the price rises,’ she says.
‘Ha!’ Teddy smiles. ‘So – this survey. You ought to be careful. If I were you I’d just make it all up, because the kiosks have always been compromised, but now the gangsters are deep in every fancy import store. You’ve seen them – the thugs in their shell suits, the money men in fancy tailoring and cashmere coats. No price tags or bar codes. I mean,’ he glances at Karl with just the hint of a wink – ‘take a Max Factor lipstick. Eight bucks back home in Kalamazoo. Here, fifteen? Twenty? And it’s still fake.’
‘I’m supposed to give a store name, or at least a location,’ says Rachel.
Now Teddy is leaning back and reaching into a drawer behind them. He rummages a little, then extracts a shiny black cylinder of lipstick and places it on the table in front of her. The Max Factor brand name is embossed in gold on the lid.
‘Special for you, ten dollars, Café Karl!’ says Teddy with an exaggerated salesman’s drawl.
Ivan lurches forward and grabs hold of the lipstick, almost hitting his chin on the edge of the table. Rachel prises it from his hand before he can jam it in his mouth, then puts it down, out of reach.
‘Shame it’s not my shade!’ she says, brightly, needing to know that Teddy is still joking.
Teddy nods, then smiles as he always does.
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Hey, that little tyrant looks hungry. Let me know when you’re ready to go home.’
* * *
By the time Rachel returns to Staronavodnitska Street, Ivan is howling. He’s thirsty, and his nappy is bloated and sagging inside his snowsuit. She prays that the lift is working, that she won’t have to climb the stairs. Her need to count the depleting pile of Pampers beneath her bed is making her heart race.
She navigates the double doors of the entrance by pushing backwards with her hip and rocking the buggy wheels over the metal grate. As they rattle into the foyer, she remembers she’s forgotten to knock the snow off the wheels. Clumps of blackened ice drop in her wake as she hurries across the floor. She’ll have to be quick so that the caretaker won’t catch her. Ivan’s wails echo around the walls, but the lift is ahead of her now, yawning open, its interior empty like the vertical box that the magician’s assistant climbs into before the door is locked and trick swords are thrust through its sides. It’s all right, she thinks, we’ll make it. Then as she approaches the toneless bell pings and a weak light glows above her head. Someone on the ninth floor has just called the lift, so she shunts the pushchair quickly over the threshold. This is a mistake. The scuffed brown doors make a grinding noise and judder towards each other. Before she can pull back, they clamp against the metal frame. The pushchair is trapped.
Rachel tugs, so hard that an onion from the string dangling down from the handle breaks off and rolls out into the middle of the foyer. She stabs at the buttons on the control panel as her mind floods with visions of her son’s head crushed beneath the lintel as the lift starts to rise. Then sense kicks in and she stoops forward, releases the straps and lifts Ivan out of his seat. Holding him against her shoulder, she yanks again at the pushchair. The frame is stuck tight. Ivan’s feet scrabble for a purchase beneath her ribs. Perhaps she should simply abandon the pushchair and take the stairs. But what if someone else removes the pushchair? She can’t manage without it. There is only one thing to do. She’ll have to find the caretaker.
The caretaker – Teddy called her something. Baba Yaga. Well, Rachel doesn’t believe in witches, though the old woman clearly sees herself as some kind of spy. In the old days, she thinks, the caretaker must have been paid to listen and watch and poke through the rubbish. If you spoke against the Party, she’d have heard it. If you hoarded fuel, she’d have smelled it and if you took a lover, well, she’d have sniffed that out, too. Now, Lucas says, no one is rewarded for whispering any more. But what if other people’s business is all you know, and searching out weakness is what makes you feel strong? That old woman, she sits in her little hidey-hole across the foyer and purses her lips whenever Rachel walks by, wagging her finger like a stick to beat the bad wife who dares to leave her flat and flaunt her baby as if she’s proud of him, proud of what she’s produced. They’re
everywhere, these crones, barren with secrets, berating her on the trolleybus or in the bread shop or murmuring and crossing themselves outside the cathedrals and the churches, tugging at her hair when she doesn’t cover her head and kicking the pushchair when she wheels it across the painted floor to show Ivan the candles at the back of those dark, cloying shrines….
Ivan has stopped crying. The only sound is her breathing, shallow and rapid. Rachel turns towards the caretaker’s cubicle. It has a glass front. A curtain strung on a length of drooping wire is drawn across the window.
‘Allo?’ she calls, her own voice unfamiliar in the empty, echoing space. ‘Dobry dyen?’ There is no reply. Shifting Ivan round to her hip, her forearm slotted under his shoulder, she walks over to the cubicle. The door is partly open. She steps closer, sees a chair with a worn, flattened cushion. It appears empty; all the same, she thinks she must knock, so she taps her fingers lightly on the glass. At her touch, the door swings wide and now she can see further inside – a cheap desk, a black telephone and some yellowing notices stuck to the window frame and pinned along the back wall.
The smell from Ivan’s nappy is sharp and sour. Rachel knows she needs to get him upstairs, that the ammonia that is forming will burn into his flesh. She ought to abandon the pushchair or exit the building and go outside to the steps that she thinks must lead down to the basement, but instead she’s distracted by the brown and white patterned tea cup and saucer placed to one side of a stained ink blotter. Above the tea cup hangs a calendar with an image of a teenage girl in folk dress, and there, pushed into a corner, lies a small pink plastic hairbrush with its nest of grey hairs. The muteness of these objects repels and moves her and she holds herself in for several seconds or even a minute until, finally, her eyes register something else. On the shelf behind the chair is a slim cardboard carton, rectangular, dark green, a little crushed. The gold clock is still visible on the side.
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