Snegurochka

by Judith Heneghan

  Outside on Desyatynna Street Rachel breathes in the freezing air. Ivan is still grasping the copy of Time, the top corner damp and ragged where he has mouthed it. She takes it from him and taps on the window of the security guard’s concrete booth.

  ‘For Doctor Alleyn,’ she says, pushing it under the glass.

  The guard looks at her strangely.

  ‘Your baby is bleeding,’ he says, touching his own lips.

  Rachel checks her son. There’s no blood, just flecks of red magazine paper round his mouth.

  She wipes them away with the back of her glove.

  Chapter 13

  Lucas once told Rachel that he loved her for her secrets. They were lolling beneath a tree on a prickly stretch of New Forest heath, gazing at the clouds piling up like over-yeasted dough and eating cherries from a bag. He said that Rachel had hidden depths and he wanted to be the one to plumb them.

  Rachel had laughed. ‘My head is empty,’ she said. ‘I’m just an airhead. Any thoughts pass straight through me, and out the other side.’ But even as the words slipped from her lips, both knew this was a lie.

  * * *

  One afternoon, just after lunch, the telephone rings in the apartment. Rachel, folding washing in the bedroom, thinks it must be Lucas. It isn’t Lucas. It is Zoya, her voice flat and tinny on the poor local line.

  ‘A driver wishes to deliver six boxes of nappies. I told him we cannot take them at the office.’

  Rachel’s grip tightens on the receiver. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply. Suzie has done what she asked.

  ‘I said,’ repeats Zoya, ‘a driver wishes . . .’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Rachel, collecting herself. ‘Sorry. Are they Pampers? Is Lucas there?’

  ‘Yes, and no,’ says Zoya. ‘Lucas has an appointment at the Ministry of Finance. This is why I am calling you.’

  ‘Right.’ Rachel is already imagining the nappies with their neat folds and self-sealing fastenings, their soft elastication and velvety, leak-proof coating. She wants to touch them. Count them. ‘Can you ask the driver to send them up to Staronavodnitksa Street? And pay him, please – use Lucas’s emergency dollars. I’ll pay it back.’

  ‘I have told the driver to return tomorrow. He has no paperwork. No invoice.’

  ‘Zoya!’ Rachel tries not to shout. ‘I need them now! Tonight!’

  ‘Then I tell him to come back. Lucas can drive them up later.’

  Rachel is still absorbing the fact that the nappies have arrived at all. Lucas doesn’t know about the order. He’ll hate the fact that she’s buying them from Rob, but she won’t let him refuse to take them as he refused the washing machine.

  ‘Zoya, listen. Lucas is trying to save money, but I need those nappies and I ordered them without telling him. Please can you drive them here for me? I –’ she hesitates – ‘I can give you ten dollars if that helps.’

  Zoya doesn’t reply and the phone goes dead. Rachel assumes she has gravely offended her and weeps at her own stupidity, until forty minutes later the doorbell rings and she spies Zoya standing on the landing with several cardboard boxes balanced on top of the washing machine.

  ‘I have done this for Ivan,’ says Zoya, when Rachel opens the door, still blowing her nose. ‘Clearly, if you don’t receive Pampers, you will become insane.’ The two women stare at each other, Zoya frowning as she always does, her plucked eyebrows a line of rebuke, a line that will not stand a challenge, yet perhaps can bear a truce.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Rachel.

  * * *

  At four o’clock Lucas returns home with a slab of pork wrapped in newspaper. He seems buoyant in the way he used to be, before he and Rachel came to Kiev.

  ‘I’m going to the Dovzhenko studios tonight,’ he says, jiggling Ivan’s bouncy chair. ‘They’re doing some voice edits for A Golden Promise.’

  ‘For what?’ Rachel looks up from the button she is sewing on to an old denim shirt.

  ‘A Golden Promise. That’s the title of the film. The one I’m writing about. Keep up, Rach!’ He grins, too fired up to care that his wife doesn’t remember. ‘It’s the perfect time to get some background sound for my feature, and Sorin says the director has guaranteed an interview. He’s been hard to pin down, so I’m not going to miss him. I’m sick to death of churning out bulletins from Parliament, when all London thinks it needs is the nuclear story.’

  Sorin, remembers Rachel. This is the man who took Jurassic Park.

  ‘Will he – Sorin – be there?’ she asks.

  ‘Probably. I bet he’d love to hook up with an actress or two. Hey, why don’t you come with me?’

  Rachel considers the possibility that she might recover her book. ‘What about Ivan? We can’t take him to a sound recording.’

  ‘Why not?’ Lucas opens the fridge door and pushes the meat inside. ‘It’s a huge place. You can wander round with him while I get what I need. I’ve got the car tonight. Zoya says she’ll meet us there.’ He sucks his lips into a pretend pout and puts on a fake Russian drawl. ‘You, baby, should be star of blockbuster film – screen goddess and wife of Hetman!’

  Rachel has just secreted sixty-four perfectly pure Pampers nappies in the drawer under the bed and hidden the other four boxes under a blanket on top of the wardrobe. Their value is incalculable to her; they help keep the danger at bay. If she could only get her book back – if she could complete the ritual – then all might be well.

  She looks at her husband. Go with him, she tells herself. Don’t overthink it. In fact, don’t think anything at all.

  * * *

  Lucas is driving with the interior light on. He is holding a street map above the steering wheel and peering at the blank-faced buildings that flicker past them like a spool of Kodak Super 8 as the twilight deepens and the bare trees crowd in.

  Rachel, sitting in the back of the Zhiguli with Ivan on her knee, is struggling to read her husband’s script in the gloom.

  ‘What does freedom mean to Kievans doing a little late shopping down on the city’s main street, Khreschatyk?

  [clip: demonstrators chanting]

  Some say they write poetry, while others join the singing in Independence Square. A few daub nationalist slogans, while many simply apply for a passport, rent out their flat or cross themselves as they pass their local church.

  [clip: get some nationalist music here – folk singers outside St Sophia’s?]

  But if you are a true Cossack you revive a legend. Everyone here knows the story of Hetman Polubotok, who in 1723 deposited 200,000 gold coins in the vaults of the Bank of England and bequeathed them to an independent Ukraine. Back in 1990, the poet Volodymyr Tsybulko did the maths. He declared that the interest amounts to sixteen trillion pounds sterling. According to his calculations, every man, woman and child from Donetsk to Lviv is owed precisely thirty-eight kilograms of the Hetman’s treasure. Director Viktor Lukyanenko has been quick to seize on the story for one of the first post-independence films to be produced at the Dovzhenko studios here on Peremogy Prospekt. Mr Lukyanenko, I’m told you are describing the film as a romantic epic . . .

  [clip: interview with Viktor Lukyanenko] . . .’

  ‘So, what do you think?’ he asks.

  Rachel is trying to catch hold of her husband’s breezy tone.

  ‘Great,’ she says, nodding. ‘Great!’

  ‘It’s just the intro,’ says Lucas. ‘A bit of scene-setting. I need to interest different audiences, not just the World Service lot.’ He yanks on the wheel so that the car turns sharply left. ‘Peremogy Prospekt. Over there.’

  Rachel drops the script and grasps sleeping Ivan more tightly. The Zhiguli bumps over the fissures in the concrete and comes to a halt outside some sort of warehouse. She peers out of the window. The building might be a sports hall or a House of Culture or a hospital or a market: they all look the same from the o
utside with their closed-up, peeling frontages and their lack of lights and signs. She thinks of the old amusement halls on the seafront at Southsea and mouths the Cyrillic letters that hang lopsidedly above some padlocked doors until she makes the right sounds.

  ‘Dov – Dovzhenko keenostudio . . .’

  The passenger door is wrenched open.

  ‘Why have you come?’ asks Zoya, frowning with no trace of their earlier complicity.

  ‘She’s an extra!’ declares Lucas.

  Rachel climbs out with Ivan in her arms and follows Lucas and Zoya across the icy crust of the car park towards a steel door. The metal is dented as if someone has given it a kicking. Zoya stops to stamp the snow off her boots.

  ‘Ready for your debut?’ Lucas asks.

  Rachel hears Zoya grunt, but as they step inside and walk down a narrow corridor past a wall light that softly fizzes, she sees that Zoya is wearing eyeshadow. Green eyeshadow. She hasn’t changed her clothes; she’s still in her padded coat and her heavy, lumpen boots. Yet the eyeshadow changes her. It makes her look younger. Or older. It makes her look something.

  The corridor is long and smells of molten wire. Ivan is wriggling inside his snow suit. Rachel pulls off his balaclava as they turn a corner, and soon they are passing open doors and stepping round old women sitting on stools. The women have spongy, swollen knees and wear slippers on their feet. A man in brown overalls squeezes past. He is carrying an old-fashioned suitcase.

  ‘In here,’ says Zoya, nodding towards a side room with shiny green walls and a single lightbulb dangling from a flex. There’s a curtained recess at the far end, and people are pushing in and out, creating a bottleneck. She hands Lucas his audio recorder along with a neat coil of cable. ‘Don’t lose this – you have no spare.’ Then off she goes, swallowed up by the huddle. Lucas hooks the recorder strap over his shoulder and pushes the cable into his pocket. He takes Ivan from Rachel and holds him up above his head as they push their way through.

  ‘This is the sound stage,’ whispers Lucas, as they emerge into a cavern-like room the size of a school gymnasium. Its high roof is crisscrossed with pipes and drooping wires. In the centre is a big tent made from swathes of grey felted fabric suspended from the ceiling. People mill everywhere, some in small groups, others forming a long line that snakes around the walls. A few men are playing cards at a table by the light of a fringed lamp that seems better suited to an old-fashioned cloakroom or a seedy sort of club. At another table, two women count out bundles of small paper notes into piles. The line of people shuffles forward.

  ‘Are they filming this?’ Rachel asks.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ says Lucas. ‘It’s pay day! Those people must be crew, or extras.’ He hands Ivan back to Rachel and points at a man wearing headphones. The man is standing half way up a ladder, near the tent. ‘There’s the director, Viktor Lukyanenko. He’s the one I’m here to interview.’

  As Lucas finishes speaking, the man with the headphones raises his arms and sweeps them twice through the air. Immediately the hum of conversation pulses more intensely. Then he presses one hand down and Rachel realises that he is orchestrating the sound, directing small clumps of queuers whose voices rise and fall in response to the signals he gives them. They are being recorded even while they line up to collect their wages.

  Lucas raises his eyebrows and turns to talk to someone – a woman with short, silver hair wearing owlish glasses and a crumpled cotton jacket. He gestures towards the tent and starts fiddling with the dials on his recorder. Rachel steps out of his way. It doesn’t seem like the right time to ask him whether he has spotted Sorin.

  A young man with thinning blond hair pulls gently on Ivan’s foot.

  ‘Malchik?’ he asks, smiling.

  Rachel knows this word. Boy. She nods. The young man puts his head on one side.

  ‘Ameree-can?’

  ‘Oh no,’ whispers Rachel. ‘English.’

  ‘Engleesh,’ repeats the young man, grinning. His forehead is inflamed with acne, its surface like the woodchip that lines her mother’s front room. ‘London. Film London.’

  She nods again, but now the director on the step ladder is speaking, his voice ringing over the crowd’s swelling chorus. It is only when the chatter reverts to its usual formlessness that she realises the segment has ended. Lucas has disappeared, so Rachel watches while two women clear a space in front of the tent, shooing people away and frowning. Inching sideways, she sees that an old-fashioned microphone is suspended from wires just inside the tent. She stands on tip-toe as a shortish man steps forward and positions himself beneath it. The director signals to the crowd to stop talking. At this point, however, few people are watching, so he claps, twice, his palms cracking like a starting pistol. Instantly, everyone falls quiet.

  It is the silence that upsets Ivan, not the clapping. He is seven months old, already settling into the life-long yearning for pattern, the fear of the broken rhythm. Silence jolts him into self-awareness. He makes a fretful droning sound. Rachel, alerted, pushes her finger into his mouth, but he doesn’t want a pacifier. He wants milk. She looks around, eyes searching for an exit. Not now, she thinks. Then, of course now. Anxiety prickles along her arm and provokes her son still further. The more she bounces him on her hip, the more his limbs resist. Ivan leans back, arching away and then, before she can raise her hand to stop him, he smashes his forehead into her cheekbone. The blow is so sharp that Rachel actually stumbles sideways. She utters a short cry, then clamps her mouth shut and tries to move back so she can steady herself against the wall. She knows what is coming. Ivan’s eyes are wide with shock. His throat is opening.

  He screams.

  * * *

  ‘So,’ says the man from the white goods shop as he leads Rachel down the passageway. ‘I will take you to a quiet place. Here it is, to your left.’

  ‘Mykola,’ she mouths, her skull still pounding. She is unsure whether she is speaking out loud but relieved she has remembered his name. At least Ivan’s cries have slowed; he hiccups and starts to suck his fingers, calmed by the dim lights and his mother’s steady pace. The man opens a door. Beyond it she sees a small store room with shelves and a mop and bucket in one corner. Two middle-aged women with dyed hair sit on stacking chairs with a picnic laid out on their laps.

  ‘Eezvenitye,’ says Mykola, motioning to the women to continue with their meal. He turns to Rachel. ‘Your baby is hungry.’ He gestures to a third chair. ‘Sit.’

  Rachel stares at this man with the rounded shoulders and dark, soft eyes. She cannot fathom why he is here, but the stillness envelops her and the warmth from a small electric heater makes her sigh and sit down.

  ‘You will not be disturbed,’ he says, placing his hand on the door handle. ‘I will wait outside.’

  Rachel looks at the two women. They are laying out strips of pickle. ‘Thank you. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You are safe here.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  He nods, then closes the door with the gentlest of clicks. She doesn’t hear a key turning, but neither does she hear his footsteps retreating. Even Ivan has fallen silent. A strange kind of peace settles across her shoulders, like feathers, soft and weightless. As the two women politely incline their heads, then dip their black bread in a little pot of salt, chew their sausage and wipe their fingers on yellow cotton napkins, she opens her jacket and feeds her son.

  * * *

  Some time later, when Ivan is asleep and Rachel’s head is nodding with tiredness, Lucas opens the door.

  ‘Hey! Are you okay?’

  Rachel looks up. The two women have gone. There is no trace of their picnic, no heater, no yellow napkins. They must have slipped out while she was dozing.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine.’ She tries to remember who else entered the room. ‘Did you see anyone come in – or go out?’

  ‘No. I’ve been tied up wit
h Lukyanenko for the past hour. Got a great interview, though we all heard Ivan bellowing. Kashmar! as the babushkas say. Mind you, I’ll probably keep him in my piece. These sound accidents often create a more authentic audio experience.’ Lucas walks over and lifts Ivan out of Rachel’s arms, settling him into his shoulder. ‘Your first brush with fame, son of mine! Just as well you managed to tuck yourselves away in here. Hey, what happened to your cheek?’

  Rachel touches her face, wincing where her skin feels tender, then stands up and checks Ivan’s forehead. His skin is white, unmarked.

  ‘Ivan head-butted me.’

  ‘Ouch – that’s quite a bruise,’ says Lucas. ‘This’ll make you feel better. Sorin brought it.’ He fishes something out of his pocket with his spare hand. It is a paperback book with a silhouette of a T-rex on a yellow disc on the cover, scored by a familiar white crease. Her copy of Jurassic Park.

  Rachel stares, caught in a moment’s disbelief. She takes the book in both hands and grips it, testing its density, its solidity beneath her thumbs. Her arms tremble. She will not let it go again. Quickly she pushes it into the inside pocket of her coat.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank Zoya,’ says Lucas, hoisting Ivan a little higher. ‘She remembered to ask for it. She told Sorin you needed to know who gets eaten at the end.’

  * * *

  Back at home in the flat on the thirteenth floor, Rachel settles Ivan into his cot and runs a bath while Lucas steps out for a smoke. Lying in the tepid water with the door locked, the back of her neck against the unforgiving rim, she takes up her book and turns the pages, her lips mouthing the numbers as she counts the words, the now-familiar see-saw of anxiety and release pulsing across her synapses.

  After forty minutes, when the letters start jumping and the terror of dropping Ivan over the balcony is temporarily in retreat, she is almost too cold to stand up and rub herself dry. She shivers on the edge of the toilet seat with a towel wrapped around her and closes her eyes.