Snegurochka

by Judith Heneghan

  Things happen for a reason, she reminds herself. You see a man. You find your book. Mykola is a real person, though sometimes she imagines him. Perhaps she ought to watch for him again.

  Chapter 14

  The cold snap breaks at the end of February. Grey clouds barge across the sky, northwards now, and the mounds of shovelled snow soften like ancient boulders worn smooth by the passing of millennia.

  Lucas is relieved that Rachel seems more settled. Every Sunday, news permitting, he takes his wife and son on an outing. Family time, he calls it, and laughs at how they have arrived at something so suburban. Sometimes they take a trip in the car to the Architectural Park where they stroll around the little wooden huts and the drinks kiosks and show Ivan the life-size blue whale made of concrete. At Respublikansky Stadion they wander past the displays of cheaply made t-shirts and sweatshirts boldly proclaiming ‘Hugo Boss’ or ‘Gucci’ beneath drooping plastic awnings, or they hop on the 62 bus that runs along the river, then take the stately funicular past the Barbie sign and up the hill to St Andrew’s or St Sophia’s. When Lucas catches Rachel staring into crowds or turning her head towards strangers, he assumes she is merely curious. The two of them talk about Ivan, or about Lucas’s work, but they don’t discuss the future or their shared past. Those places are fraught with danger. Sex is a rare midnight fumbling; Rachel goes to bed before Lucas gets home and she’s up with Ivan at six. Anyway, Lucas needs his sleep. The agencies want news of disarmament treaties and the Black Sea Fleet, but instead there’s just rumour, stalling and a nudge off a sub-editor’s schedule. Each short bulletin takes its toll. He tells Zoya he’ll hold back his feature about Lukyanenko’s film until A Golden Promise is released. Then he can tell the whole story, rounded off with reaction from the premiere.

  Rachel, meanwhile, sticks to her routine. After breakfast she soaks the washing in a bucket with water boiled on the stove. Next she takes Ivan out to the universam or rides the trolleybus down to the shops along Khreschatyk, trawling the Bessarabsky market or the empty booths of the central department store within its grand carapace on the corner of Bohdana Khmel’nyts’koho Street. She marks her path across the city by tearing off the little handwritten slips from notices pasted to lampposts and walls. She doesn’t know what they say: they could be adverts for language lessons or prostitutes or pleas for lost children. Soon her pockets are full of telephone numbers.

  After lunch, Ivan naps while she keeps him safe by counting her words from Jurassic Park at the table in the kitchen until Elena knocks on the door for their daily dose of Simplemente Maria. Sometimes Elena brings a gift for Ivan – a musty-smelling balloon, a teething ring made from hard, unyielding plastic or, once, a pair of red nylon socks with a border of little yellow hens. Rachel wishes she could speak Russian or Ukrainian. She’s learned a long list of nouns, but conversation is much harder. There are things she wants to ask the caretaker.

  One afternoon in early March Lucas comes home for dinner with twelve dark red roses in a crackly cellophane bouquet.

  ‘Happy International Women’s Day!’ he says, kissing Rachel on the mouth with the tang of his last cigarette still strong on his breath. The roses aren’t fully opened, yet already their heads droop on flaccid stems, petals browning at the edges. ‘I couldn’t move on the trolleybus – wilting flowers everywhere. The woman who sold me these swore they’d been flown in from Tbilisi this morning! I bought chocolates for Zoya. She’d have sulked for a month if I hadn’t arrived at the office with a box of cherry liqueurs the size of a small table, and you can bet the dezhornaya was watching to make sure I’d remembered flowers for you. I suppose I should have bought some for her.’

  Rachel unwraps the roses and trims the ends from the stems before placing them in a tall jug of water. ‘They might revive,’ she says, as several petals fall to the floor. She is surprised to find she cares about a custom in which scowling, sheepish men do their once-yearly duty by their mothers and wives and female employees.

  Lucas tickles Ivan in his bouncy chair and peers into the fridge.

  ‘We should go out really, but I’m working again tonight. There’s interest in my Golden Promise feature from Radio Four. I’ve been speaking to a couple of programme editors. They all say I should go on a camera course. Start filming my own stuff. Become an all-rounder.’ He pokes at a tray of eggs. ‘Have we got enough eggs for an omelette? Good to see the washing machine has finally been taken away—’

  Rachel turns, sharply. ‘What?’

  ‘The washing machine. It’s gone.’ Lucas straightens up, a carton of UHT milk in his hand. ‘Didn’t you notice? Your dodgy salesman must have had second thoughts – or found a buyer.’

  Sure enough, when Rachel hurries along the hallway and pulls open the front door, there’s nothing next to the doormat except a square of unwashed lino. Has Mykola been here to remove his troublesome gift? The space left behind leaves her strangely hollow inside so she stands there for a minute or two in her stockinged feet and wonders what would happen if she stuffed her husband’s grimy shirts and her own rancid nursing bras into the rubbish chute and sent them tumbling down to Elena.

  Nothing escapes the caretaker. She will know who took the washing machine away.

  Then something else occurs to Rachel. Maybe it hasn’t moved as far as Lucas thinks.

  * * *

  After breakfast the next morning Rachel scoops up Ivan and takes him downstairs in the lift. The day outside is dull and misty. She can’t see the river from the windows in the foyer and even the Motherland monument is shrouded from view. The snow on the ground is pocked and grey, and the hunched women on their stick legs at the tram stop make the street look like a Lowry painting. The Siberian freeze may be receding, but winter has not yet left for good.

  Elena is not in her cubicle. Her chair is pulled out and the dregs of her morning coffee sit darkly in the bottom of her usual cup. A newspaper lies flat on the desktop with lists of Cyrillic letters like shorthand jotted in the margins, and a neat row of plastic yoghurt pots from Denmark or Sweden, each filled with soil, sit on the shelf beneath the window. One or two seedlings are just starting to poke through, their pale backs still bent, still bearing the burden of the seed case from which they have just emerged.

  ‘Elena?’ Rachel says, not loudly, for the empty foyer is full of echoes. Ivan starts kicking her thigh. ‘Da,’ he says, ‘da-da’ like a good little Ukrainian boy. She kisses his head and wishes she had brought him down in the baby carrier. Instead she wraps her thick cardigan around her son’s shoulders and ventures outside.

  Rachel has never been down to the basement. The door is round the side of the apartment block, at the bottom of an external service stairway. It has a broken metal rail and there are lumps of congealed salt on the concrete. She taps on the metal door which drifts open at her touch.

  ‘Elena? It’s Rachel . . .’

  Her voice is drowned by a sudden acceleration of sound, a deep, juddering roar. Ivan’s back stiffens and his fists grasp her shirt, pinching her skin. Elena and another figure are standing beneath a strip light with their backs to the door. Lines of nylon rope strung from the ceiling pipes droop with strange, disembodied articles – dresses, trousers, pairs of sagging pants. In front of a stainless steel sink plumbed against what must be the bottom of the lift shaft she recognises the familiar bulk of the washing machine, shimmying sideways across the floor as its spin cycle peaks.

  The figure next to Elena turns, and Rachel sees that it is Zoya, her arms full of soiled sheets.

  * * *

  We are all compromised by the washing machine, thinks Rachel, as she extracts another load of clean vests and pillow cases from the drum. She and Zoya have both lied to Lucas, who believes she still soaks the washing in the bath and takes it down to the basement merely to dry it. Elena appears to have banished her disgust for the machine – or with the man who sent it – and twists the dial to set th
e cycle as if she has been doing this for years. Ivan, meanwhile, watches the spinning washing from his bouncy chair with mute fascination until the rhythmic churning and plashing send him off to sleep. Rachel’s back no longer aches at night and her clothes smell fresh – fresher than before, at any rate, now that she’s discovered a Norwegian brand of washing powder at the black market kiosks near the football stadium. The box with its picture of a fjord on the front is emptying at an alarming rate. Zoya seems burdened by endless dirty sheets. Rachel wonders if she’s taking in her neighbours’ washing on the side.

  ‘Do you have children, Zoya?’ asks Rachel one day, a couple of weeks after the washing machine is moved. Rachel is less wary of Zoya since she recovered her copy of Jurassic Park and kept the secret about the nappies.

  Zoya shakes out a pair of nearly dry jeans. The fabric cracks like a whip.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any family at home?’

  ‘One relative, yes.’

  ‘Your mother? Father?’

  ‘No.’

  Rachel gives up and squats down to hand Ivan a bread ring. Her son is sitting on his blanket on the floor, his chubby knees splayed out like a little Buddha’s, surrounded by the clothes pegs that the women have placed there for his amusement. He is safe like that she thinks – close to the ground. His trunk is sturdy and already he is trying to pull himself up if a chair is placed next to him. Soon he will be crawling.

  ‘What about Elena, I wonder?’ asks Rachel, peering into the gloom. Elena stands at her workbench beside the fuse boxes coiling torn strips of newspaper into cones for her spring seedlings. ‘Elena!’ she calls softly, adding the Russian word for children as a question. ‘Dyeti?’

  Zoya stops sorting clothes and looks up, folding her arms beneath her breasts.

  Elena carries on coiling. ‘Nyet,’ she says.

  Rachel frowns, frustrated by her inability to communicate. ‘What’s the word for niece, or nephew?’ she asks, turning to Zoya, but Zoya isn’t in the mood for conversation.

  ‘There are plenty of underpaid teachers in this city,’ she says. ‘You should take some lessons.’

  Chapter 15

  Vee throws a party on the evening of Lucas’s twenty-eighth birthday. Vee’s own birthday falls two days later, so she calls it a joint celebration and invites all her friends. Teddy and his boyfriend will be there, and the usual crowd – journalists, plus a scattering of the diplomats and European Bank types that Vee always seems to attract.

  Rachel lays out her dangly earrings and washes her hair in the sink. She is worried about taking Ivan to the party. There will be smoking and noise and he’ll have to stay up long past his bedtime.

  ‘The smokers will stay in the kitchen,’ says Lucas as he takes two bottles of cheap Russian fizz out of the fridge and sticks half a litre of vodka in his coat pocket. ‘Vee has promised. And Ivan can sleep in her bed when he gets tired.’

  ‘You know that won’t work,’ chides Rachel.

  ‘But it’s my birthday,’ says Lucas, only half-joking. ‘And that means everyone does what I say.’

  Vee’s apartment is at the top of the stairwell in a brown building near the Dnipro Hotel. The invitation says eight o’clock, but Rachel and Lucas are late because Rachel wanted to bathe Ivan first and get him into his pyjamas. She is already peeling him out of his snowsuit as Lucas presses the bell. The landing smells of garlic and dill, and there’s a handwritten sign stuck above the spyhole in Vee’s shiny steel door.

  ‘Sshh! Baby sleeping!’ it reads, in thick, cartoonish letters.

  ‘So thoughtful!’ says Lucas, tapping it when Vee opens the door. Vee puts her fingers to her lips and pulls a Betty Boop face, then laughs. She is wearing a clinging top over jeans and stylish high-heeled boots. The hallway behind her is jammed with guests; the clamour of voices rises over a pounding europop beat.

  ‘Happy birthday!’ she shouts, waving them inside. Lucas shrugs off his coat, then, while Rachel removes hers, he lifts Ivan up on one shoulder and ploughs into the crowd.

  ‘Don’t let him get over-excited,’ murmurs Rachel. It is too late. Ivan’s eyes are wide and bright, his legs kick enthusiastically and his fists reach out towards every passing thing. The apartment is warm with bodies and breath, there’s a string of gold tinsel dangling from the ceiling light and Vee is passing round plates of blinis garnished with baby gherkins, sour cream and a dollop of red caviar. She holds them high over everyone’s heads.

  ‘Hello!’ says a man with a beard as Rachel inches past a wardrobe in the cramped hall. It is Dr Alleyn from the embassy. Rachel, startled, slips into the dim cave of the living room that doubles as Vee’s bedroom. Lucas passes her a tumbler of sweet champanskoye and points past a couple trying to dance in a tiny space in front of Vee’s dressing table. He is motioning towards the bed where Teddy and his boyfriend Karl are sitting with their backs against the wall, clutching their knees. They are talking to an older, balding man in a white shirt who looks as if he has only recently removed his tie.

  ‘What’s Sorin doing here?’ Lucas mutters, before turning to greet an acquaintance from Interfax. Someone has given Ivan a plastic spoon. More guests squeeze in through the doorway – pale faces – no one Rachel recognises. The near-darkness in the living room, the crush of bodies and the noise create a cocoon of anonymity. She tips back her glass and drinks.

  * * *

  An hour or so later, Rachel is clutching a bottle of beer and squatting on the floor next to Teddy.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asks, her eyes re-focusing on Ivan, who has fallen asleep in the crook of Karl’s arm. He looks so perfect, she thinks, so trusting and fragile.

  ‘Oh you know,’ says Teddy, rubbing his hand down his shin. ‘In the café, mostly.’

  The café. Rachel remembers the photographs of figures standing still in the street, carefully positioned like statues or chess pieces, each staring at something outside the frame.

  ‘I want to ask you,’ says Rachel. ‘I mean,’ her head is a little fuzzy, ‘about that picture you took at the monastery, the one on the cover of Time . . .’

  ‘It was shit,’ says Teddy, pulling a face.

  ‘No it wasn’t . . .’ soothes Karl. His finger traces the edge of Teddy’s ear.

  ‘It was shit,’ insists Teddy. ‘A cheap shot. Old woman, snow, banana. State of the nation. God – I hate it all – hate the way we tell a story, as if it is just waiting for us to come along and scoop it up. Because story is king, right? Let’s all worship the story king.’

  ‘I hated it too,’ says Rachel.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Teddy. Then, after a moment, ‘What did you hate?’

  Rachel takes a sip of beer and wipes her hand across her mouth.

  ‘That picture! I don’t know – it was wrong. Maybe because Ivan and I weren’t in it. We were there. We were part of that scene as much as the old woman.’

  Teddy looks taken aback. ‘You wanted to be in it?’

  ‘No,’ says Rachel. ‘I don’t know, maybe. You made it look like she was begging, but I bought that banana and took it home and Ivan ate it. You didn’t show that. It sounds stupid, now . . .’ She peeks again at her sleeping son. ‘I like your gallery pictures better.’

  ‘Not stupid,’ murmurs Karl, stroking Ivan’s soft cheek. ‘You two should be on all the front covers.’

  * * *

  A few minutes after midnight Teddy climbs on a chair in the hallway to get everyone’s attention and Karl hands him a tray bearing a large pink iced cake.

  ‘Vee made me hide it in the bathtub,’ he says, laughing. ‘Happy Birthday, Lucas!’

  ‘You’re too late!’ shouts a voice from the kitchen. ‘It’s already tomorrow!’

  Then someone starts singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in a comically deep tone and someone else turns the music down, while a handful of others join in. Soon they are
calling ‘toast!’ and looking round for Lucas, because no one has seen him for a while, but then Rachel hears the front door open and sees her husband walk in from the outside hallway. Behind him steps Vee.

  ‘We were smoking!’ she cries. ‘Not having sex in the lift like you two, you squalid pair!’ She throws her pack of Marlboros at Teddy and Karl, and everyone laughs. Rachel laughs, too, and kisses her sleepy son because she is at a party with lots of different people and her fear is waiting quietly on the landing behind the door. By the time she has knocked back another shot of vodka the music has been turned up once again.

  Later, as the night slowly unravels, as Teddy and Karl are curled around each other like two brown mice and Sorin is drinking Johnnie Walker with Lucas in the kitchen, Rachel opens her blouse and gives Ivan a discreet feed. A young stringer from The Telegraph sits next to her, his hand resting in a bag of pretzels; he has round, wire-framed glasses and an earnest expression and he doesn’t know where to look, so he shuts his eyes and reels off the latest IMF statistics.

  ‘Fifty per cent by the end of the month,’ he intones with a slow shake of his head. ‘You can’t shift from a command economy overnight,’ and Rachel nods, while her gaze wanders to the doorway. Vee is standing there, her lips still matt and red; she is listening to a woman whose bleached hair, backlit by a wall light, has become a frizzy halo. Rachel shuts her eyes for a moment to make sure she isn’t imagining things, but it’s Zoya, all right, dragging on her cigarette and blowing smoke past Vee’s ear as she talks in English before switching to rapid Ukrainian.

  Ivan pinches Rachel’s breast; he hasn’t finished his feed and she is already adjusting her blouse. Something has happened – a murder or a strike or another presidential stand-off. The party is over. The journalists are reaching for their coats.