She nods.
‘Well, anyway,’ says Lucas. ‘She says she needs to come in next week to do something with the windows. The boy didn’t explain it very well – apparently it’s a condition of our rental.’
Rachel remembers the note left outside on the mat, under the dirty nappy. Close windows!
‘I might be out. The survey . . .’
‘She said she’d only come up when you are in.’ Lucas peers over the table piled with dishes, sees Rachel’s exposed breast, Ivan’s saliva still glistening and a milky dribble on his lips. ‘Come on, Rach, I’m knackered. You’re knackered. Let’s both go to bed.’
* * *
Zoya sits on the back seat of the Zhiguli. Ice is forming on the windows in two-dimensional fronds, strange pinnae unfurling across the glass. It is cold outside, colder than usual, a bitter, frozen, silent cold that will kill the homeless and the drunks caught out tonight, but her own breath swirls warmly around her face; she’s been cleaning vigorously for the past half hour.
She finishes her scrubbing and rests for a moment. This is where Lucas’s wife sits, she thinks. Rachel sits here with her baby on her knee and stares at the back of her head. Zoya breathes in through her nose, and sighs. The interior still stinks of fecal matter, layered now with the astringency of the lemon Jif she has used on the plastic seats. She wonders if she should leave the windows open, just a crack, to air it overnight, but car thieves are everywhere and while they’d steal the Zhiguli without such assistance, she doesn’t want to make their job easier. Besides, she thinks, the windows will have frozen solid by now. She ought to get out before the door freezes, too, but she lingers, despite the smell. It is a space she knows intimately, like any driver, yet without the engine running its silence seems to wrap her in something like comfort. Outside, the road is empty, inhospitable; a street light flickers weakly as the cold descends.
Up in Zoya’s apartment, her grandfather is sleeping at last. If she hadn’t brought the car home with her the previous week she would never have been able to drive him to the clinic when his temperature started raging, when his lips turned black and when, stretched out on the back seat of the Zhiguli with his thin legs folded up and his head against the door, his insides had started pouring out in a hot, steaming torrent.
Zoya had only been to the clinic once before. It is a private practice near the Dynamo stadium, with a receptionist and a waiting area and nurses in white rubber clogs. If she’d taken him to the public hospital near the bridge, he would almost certainly have died. When she arrived at the clinic with her grandfather they took samples and put him on a drip, but as soon as the diaorrhea slowed and his temperature dropped she signed his discharge slip and brought him back to the apartment. When Tanya came out to help carry him upstairs she told Zoya she ought to have left him there. Tanya thinks Zoya’s made of money because she works for a foreigner, but the daily rate at the clinic is a whole week’s wages. The new pills in the box with the German brand-name cost even more. In the end, though, it’s not about the money. This is the man who made her pancakes with cherries when she came home from school; the man who made up stories about a mysterious underwater world and who washed her knitted tights when she started menstruating. He tried to hide her grade papers when she told him she wanted to study English at the university, because English meant American and those people were lascivious, not to mention dishonest and duplicitous with their claims about who won the war. He had fought with the Red Army at Zaporozhye in the autumn offensive of ‘43. No one leaves a man like that with a nurse in white clogs. He belongs with his granddaughter at home.
The car door has already frozen tight. Zoya rams it with her elbow until it flies open and she almost falls out. She collects her cleaning materials and kicks out the bag with the soiled nylon seat covers so that it lands in the snow at some distance from the car. If the car smells in the morning, there’s nothing more she can do. She can always blame it on Lucas’s baby. He should never have brought his child to this place.
Chapter 10
Rachel leans her head against the cold kitchen window and looks down towards the car park. The sun is bright for early January, glancing off the broken glass in one of the dump bins and burnishing the snowbanks. She has been standing like this for the past hour, waiting for the caretaker to leave the building and make her midday pilgrimage across the tramlines, then up the lane that rises between the cottages of Tsarskoye Selo. Only then can Rachel go out without being intercepted. This is how spies operate. You watch, you are patient, you learn your mark’s routines. Then you do what you must. The new year has brought new resolve. She will source a supply of Pampers via Suzie, she will finish the survey and she will recover her copy of Jurassic Park.
The problem, of course, is that no one with a baby could ever be a spy. When the caretaker finally leaves the building, Rachel lowers Ivan into the new baby carrier. She almost tips sideways as she swings it across her shoulders and picks up her gloves, but already she is learning to bend her knees and take the weight across her hips. Outside, as her breath condenses in pale clouds and she picks her way past the empty bottles of new year vodka strewn like curling stones between the vehicles, her son’s legs find the ledge of her hips and he bobs up and down in his padded snowsuit, murmuring his appreciation.
All the same, when Rachel spots the boy from upstairs she wavers a little. He is loitering on the steps to Suzie’s apartment block. He stares at her, his hands in his jeans pockets, shoulders hunched inside a hooded nylon anorak. Then, suddenly, he leaps in the air and executes a kind of pirouette, before sliding away from her like a figure skater on a rink. He’s just a child, she tells herself. He’s bunking school, vulnerable and adrift. Lucas thinks the old man is his pimp. The thought horrifies her, yet the boy still gives her the creeps.
Rachel takes the lift up to Suzie’s. When she knocks, the door opens almost straight away.
‘Hello, Suzie—’
‘God, I thought you weren’t talking to me.’
Suzie is wearing a dove grey suede skirt and a pale silky blouse. Her eyes are accented with mascara and her hair is arranged in a perfect French plait that reminds Rachel of the souvenir snow maidens with their doe eyes and New Year pouts in shop windows along Khreschatyk. Suzie pulls Rachel inside and shuts the door.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘Rob’s out. By which I mean to say, he didn’t come home.’
All at once, Rachel is sorry she hasn’t followed through with Suzie. She abandoned her after that night at the restaurant; she’d been frightened, but Suzie on her own is a different person: open, self-deprecating. Suddenly Rachel wants to sit down on her soft leather sofa, drink her coffee, chat and laugh about how stupid things are and how they might be.
‘I’m sorry I’ve not been in touch,’ she says. ‘Lucas went away, and I’ve had this survey to do and then it was Christmas—’
Her excuses sound hollow, though Suzie doesn’t seem to notice. She is busy helping Rachel with the baby carrier and then taking her coat. Rachel kicks off her snowboots and pads after Suzie into the living room, carrying Ivan in her arms.
‘Shall I get a blanket for Ivan to lie on?’ asks Suzie.
‘Oh, no thank you.’ Rachel sets Ivan down on the rug. ‘Look, he’s sitting now. If I just put a couple of cushions behind him . . .’
‘He’s growing up so fast!’ exclaims Suzie. ‘Look at you, wee man!’ Ivan is leaning forward, clutching at the long fibres of the rug, tugging them towards his mouth. Suzie goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on and while she’s gone Rachel wipes the drool off his chin.
‘Wee man!’ she whispers, trying to make the words fit.
When Suzie returns she sits down on the sofa and smiles. ‘Rob can be a prick sometimes, but I don’t want that to stop us being friends.’
Rachel takes a deep breath. ‘He goes to Finland quite a bit, doesn’t he?’
‘
Yes, though I hope you don’t feel we can only see each other when he’s out of the country!’
‘No, no, what I meant was, do you think he could do something for me?’
Now Suzie is surprised.
‘Like what?’
‘I – well, I really need some Pampers – Ivan needs them. A dozen packs would be great. I brought some with me but they’re too small now, and the local brands . . .’
‘What size?’ asks Suzie, quickly.
‘Oh, well, the large ones – one size below Junior. I’ll pay whatever it costs, plus the shipping . . .’
Suzie smiles and nods. For the next half an hour the two women moan about the snow and the shopping and Rachel tells Suzie about the white goods shop she’s on her way to visit and Suzie tells her how to find a pharmacy in Lipki where they sell Nivea hand cream and Tylenol. Yet when Rachel gets up to leave, she knows they have both been play-acting. She came because of nappies, and Suzie is nobody’s fool.
* * *
The white goods shop is in a basement down a side street on the west flank of Khreschatyk. There’s no sign, but the new–looking steel shutters are raised and Rachel can see Hotpoint and Bosch stickers in the large picture window that rises up to the level of the street. The familiar names startle her with their confidence, their branded superiority. This is the place Vee told her about. She shunts Ivan’s carrier higher across her shoulders and reaches up to check that his mouth is clear of her scarf.
‘Washing machines!’ she whispers over her shoulder, as if they are about to enter Santa’s grotto or the frost cave of Ded Moroz.
The steps down to the doorway have been swept clear of snow, but there’s a shiny grey mass of impacted ice on the pavement at the top. Rachel treads carefully in her thick-soled boots, still adjusting to the weight of the baby she is carrying on her back. The doorway is lit from above and there is a security alarm instead of the usual dented sheet metal. She hesitates again. In this shop they’ll speak the smooth, sleek language of microwaves and spin cycles. The queuing, the spitting, the grit on the floor and the women saying nyet – she won’t find those things here.
Imposter Syndrome – that’s what Lucas calls it. He thinks it’s a joke.
A buzzer sounds as Rachel pushes open the door. Ivan starts to grizzle beneath his balaclava, but she is already distracted. The shop is full of machines. Some are encased in shrink-wrap plastic. A few are still boxed, while others are stacked up to the ceiling in twos and threes. Recessed lighting spreads its soft sheen over the ceramic plates of an electric hob, the curved glass door of a tumble dryer. No harsh fluorescent strips here. Rachel pulls off a glove, ready to touch.
‘Dobry dyen!’ A young woman, skinny in a tight blue dress with black hair and pale, pearlescent lipstick, appears from behind a row of air conditioning units. Rachel hides her hand in her pocket.
‘Dobry dyen . . .’ she says, her nerves returning. ‘Do you speak English?’
The young woman frowns. ‘Mykola!’ she calls, not looking away.
‘You see I’m doing a survey, a consumer survey. It’s for the UN and I wonder if you’d mind . . .’
The woman has disappeared; Rachel is now talking to herself. She peers round a box with ‘INDESIT’ printed on the side. A door is ajar, but she cannot see anything through the gap. It must lead to a back office, because there’s no desk in this part of the shop, no telephone, no paperwork; just the appliances, some packaging and a bentwood stand in the corner from which hangs a man’s dark overcoat and a lozenge-shaped hat. The hat is made of a black fur that undulates in silky soft waves like the coat of a newborn lamb. Astrakhan, or something like that. If he could reach it, Ivan would clutch it in his fingers, bring it to his mouth. She moves away, stifling the urge to run her forefinger along its rippled crown.
A man’s voice exclaims from close behind her.
‘A baby? Yes! A nice good little baby!’
She tries to turn round, but someone is scooping Ivan out of his carrier and the sudden loss of his weight makes her lose her balance.
‘Such beautiful cheeks – like apples! A boy, no? So strong . . . and it is so cold this afternoon!’
With a sharp shrug, Rachel shucks off the baby carrier and twists round to see Ivan in the arms of a man who is perhaps in his early forties – slim, balding, not tall, with a thick moustache and dark eyes fringed with full lashes. His face seems familiar, though this might be because there are many men with moustaches in Kiev. He’s wearing a suit, an expensive one, and Ivan is already crushing its lapel in his chubby little fist.
‘Please,’ she says, aware that this is not the first time she’s had to ask a stranger to stop touching her baby. However, this man isn’t like the caretaker. His eyes register her distress and he passes Ivan back to her straight away.
‘A baby needs his mother,’ he says. His voice is deep and accented, with an emphasis that suggests his delight in speaking English. He nods at the baby carrier. ‘It is good to visit places together. So,’ he stands formally, heels touching, ‘in what way may I help you?’
‘Oh.’ Rachel frowns. ‘Do you have a price list you can show me? I’m doing – I am conducting a survey.’ She fumbles with the flap of her bag, tugs her other glove off with her teeth and produces the thick file of paper. ‘It’s for the UN. A consumer survey to help them establish the cost of living for their staff in Kiev. I have to find three prices for everything. Food items, services, soft furnishings, electrical goods . . .’
The man doesn’t move. He is smiling at Ivan, who is wriggling, straining away from her as if he wants to be put down. Rachel forgets the rest of her carefully prepared speech.
‘You work for the UN?’ he asks, holding out his finger so that Ivan can grasp it.
‘No,’ she says, hoping Ivan won’t pull it towards his mouth. ‘I’m –’ there is an official phrase but the words veer away from her – ‘a third party. The UN always asks a third party to do the survey.’ She feels embarrassed now, just as she knew she would. It sounds so ridiculous, saying words like ‘the UN’ as if she’s their spokesperson or something. She isn’t remotely credible, standing here with a baby, feigning competence and importance in her snow boots. This man, this Mykola will see right through her and send her straight back out on to the street. ‘My husband works for the BBC,’ she adds, knowing before the words come out of her mouth that this sounds even more ridiculous.
Mykola takes her seriously, even so.
‘Ah,’ he says, nodding. ‘BBC. World Service. Very good. Good to have you here in Ukraina. And the United Nations. Also very good. Kiev, London, New York. You respect us and we respect you – joint enterprise, START treaty – this is how it is now. But a survey . . .’ He reaches out and takes the file from Rachel’s hand. ‘A survey is a special thing. Prices are a delicate matter. With inflation, with our kouponi – as a wife, as a mother you know how it is. Viktoria!’
With a flick of her hair the young woman returns. Mykola hands her the survey and nods, murmuring something in Russian.
‘She will make a copy. One for you, and one for me. Okay?’
Rachel stares helplessly as the woman retreats behind the door. She hears a beep, then a wheezing sound as a machine warms up.
‘So,’ he says. ‘In a few minutes we can talk about this survey. First, some coffee? No? I can see you are interested in appliances. You are new here. You have apartment, a baby. You need things! What do you like? Bosch? You like German I think?’
Rachel tries to concentrate on what the man is saying, but now she is aware of another difficulty. A sweetish smell, cloying and rancid, rises up from her son. Ivan is filling his nappy. The odour is spreading fast and because he has nappy rash he will soon start to scream. She will have to get him out of here. She must find somewhere she can change him, though there’s nowhere but the snow.
‘The survey . . .’ she says. ‘I�
��m sorry, I have to go – my son . . .’
Mykola’s dark eyes look concerned, sympathetic.
‘Your son needs some attention, I think. Please, there is no need for you to leave. Viktoria will help you. Here.’ He doesn’t touch her; instead he guides her towards the door behind which Viktoria disappeared and pushes it open. ‘Take your time.’
Rachel sees a new-looking photocopier. The survey whirs through its innards. Viktoria, holding the empty ring-binder, glances at the man and there’s only the faintest flicker of disgust before she steps aside. There’s a desk on which sits the grey bulk of a computer, but the beige carpeted floor is clean and Rachel is grateful, absurdly grateful as she kneels down, lays Ivan on the floor and unzips his snowsuit. Viktoria retreats, and the man speaks to her softly. They both stay in the shop, which is just as well, because Ivan’s bottom is as ghastly as Rachel fears. Pale faeces are already leaking out of the soaked nappy, caking his skin and soiling his clothes. When she lifts away his vest, the stench fills the airless room. She finds some baby wipes and a spare nappy in her bag, but the sores are like craters, glistening and inflamed. Ivan whimpers as she cleans him; he twists his head and arcs his back. Quickly she secures the straps of the new nappy, removes the stained vest and returns him to his clothes. If she was back in the apartment she’d feed him now, but she can’t do that here so instead she licks her little finger and inserts it into his mouth for him to suck. He accepts it greedily, his grey eyes fixed on hers.
‘I will take that.’
‘Oh . . .’ Rachel looks up. Mykola has picked up the soiled nappy. She should have hidden it straight away. Now he has touched it and she feels dizzy with panic, even though he is smiling. He opens a plastic bag and the nappy disappears. She struggles to her feet. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’
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