* * *
‘Do you know of any parks?’ Rachel asks Zoya, next time she meets her in the basement.
‘Parks?’ Zoya snorts. ‘Are you not looking? There are parks everywhere in Kiev.’
‘I know,’ says Rachel. ‘But I want a quieter space, away from all the kiosks and monuments.’
Zoya turns and mutters to Elena, who is emptying used teabags onto newspaper at her workbench. Elena no longer seems to sit in her cubicle upstairs, but spends most of her working day foraging in the dump bins for eggshells and banana skins. Not that she ever had much to do other than twitch her curtain and bang on the glass whenever someone forgot to wipe their feet. Elena and Zoya are becoming friends, it seems; Rachel often finds them talking together – not chatting, exactly, but murmuring and nodding with their arms folded across their chests. Now when the old woman hobbles forward her fingers are caked in dirt and the deep pockets of her overalls are actually full of the stuff she’s dug up from somewhere. Rachel has noticed that her cubicle is full of seedlings sprouting in cones of newspaper or in yoghurt pots ranged on the windowsill and the shelf above the desk. Her own private greenhouse.
‘You could try the Botanical Gardens,’ says Zoya. ‘Though you’ll have to pay. They charge tourists.’
Elena, however, is interrupting her, her eyes bright in the lamplight. ‘Botanicheskiy sad?’ She grips Rachel’s arm. ‘Bas – pesyat shest. Pesyat. Shest.’
Rachel nods, this time understanding.
Take the number fifty-six.
* * *
As the creaking trolleybus approaches the stop on Kutuzova Street, Rachel, waiting on the pavement, lifts Ivan out of the pushchair, folds it down and picks it up with her spare hand. Ivan is becoming too heavy for her to manage for more than short periods in the baby carrier. She hopes the Botanical Gardens live up to Elena’s enthusiasm. She hopes she will be able to find them.
The bus is crowded, as the buses always are. She climbs on board and stands near the front, wedging the concertina’d pushchair between her hip and the edge of a seat. The man sitting there balances a pale green porcelain toilet bowl on his lap. His arms are folded across the rim; its weight must surely press into his thighs, yet the man’s eyes are closed and his head lolls. He doesn’t notice when Ivan tugs off his knitted hat and drops it past his ear into the bowl. Rachel will have to fish it out, but the woman behind her makes a sucking noise with her teeth as if to say this bare-headed foreign malchik will now catch pneumonia or scarlet fever or whooping cough and it will be its mother’s fault, for no baby should be out without its head covered and at least one sour-faced granny in attendance. Rachel blows a soft raspberry on Ivan’s forehead. She has read her pages. She has checked the piles of nappies. We are off on an outing, she thinks, and no one can stop us.
Outside, the watery sunlight glances off the car windscreens as the bus sighs and heaves its way into the flow of traffic. Rachel tips forward, then shifts her weight so as not to fall. People begin to shuffle and mutter as someone stands up and starts moving along the aisle, but she takes no notice and looks out of the window, ticking off the traffic lights, counting the plane trees that line the boulevard. At the tenth tree she hears a low voice behind her.
‘Pazhalsta.’
Rachel looks over her shoulder. She recognises the speaker straight away, but it takes her a moment to realise that his thick black moustache, his dark eyes are real and not a silent conjuring from her dreams. This time he is wearing his Astrakhan hat. A camel-coloured coat, probably cashmere, swings from his shoulders.
‘Oh!’ she exclaims. ‘Mr . . .’
‘Mykola,’ he reminds her, flicking his hand to rouse the man with the toilet bowl and let him know he should vacate his seat. The man says nothing, but after the briefest hesitation he locks his hands together around the toilet bowl and stands so that Rachel can slip into his place.
‘No!’ she protests, though it is pointless. Mykola is leaning in and his hand is on the pushchair. The man with the toilet bowl shows no expression. He shifts his feet further apart, his arms grip his burden and she wishes he would rest it on the floor.
‘Good afternoon,’ murmurs Mykola, smiling down at Rachel when she has settled in the seat.
‘Why are you here?’ she asks, then quickly looks down; the question seems a little too direct.
Mykola, however, has no problem avoiding an answer.
‘It is a beautiful day,’ he says. ‘Your little boy – he is well? You are well?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ she replies, as Ivan wriggles on her lap. She lifts him up so that he can stand on her knees.
‘I am glad to hear this. Spring has come. So much better for mothers and their children. But you, you are not afraid of the cold!’
Rachel doesn’t know what to make of his small talk. People are staring, and Mykola and the man with the toilet bowl are blocking the aisle. She doesn’t know if she’ll recognise the stop at the Botanical Gardens. She is hoping to see something that looks like a park, but her view is obscured by the woman sitting next to her.
‘Tell me,’ says Mykola. ‘The washing machine I sent to you. Is there a problem? You have not yet installed it in your flat?’
‘Oh, no.’ She bites her lip, wondering how he knows this. ‘Not in the flat. My husband – he wasn’t sure . . .’
Mykola puts up a hand as if to say she doesn’t need to explain.
‘These things can be difficult.’ He smiles at Ivan yet doesn’t try to touch him. ‘Now, I think you must be going to the Botanical Gardens. We will arrive there in one minute, God willing, but it is better if you stay seated until the bus has stopped. Don’t worry about this,’ he adds, as the bus makes a sudden lurch and Rachel reaches out for the pushchair. ‘I am getting off myself. I will look after it.’
And when the bus wheezes to a halt and the doors jerk open, that is exactly what happens. Mykola even retrieves Ivan’s hat from the toilet bowl and nods politely to its owner before following Rachel down the steps. He stands a little apart on the pavement while she settles Ivan with a bread ring and clips him into his safety belt.
‘Well, thank you again,’ she says, straightening up and looking round at the road lined with horse chestnuts, their sticky buds swollen and ready to burst. The tower blocks have given way to older buildings with tall, thin windows. A wall made of concrete panels snakes into the distance. Rachel wonders what business Mykola has in this part of town and if he, too, was already going to the Botanical Gardens, or whether this has only now become his aim. Her sense of freedom is fast evaporating.
‘This way,’ he says, indicating that she should walk in the direction of the disappearing trolleybus. ‘It really isn’t far.’
A dozen or so yards along the road, before Rachel has worked out how to part company politely, they arrive at the entrance to the gardens. Several other people walk through a gate in the wall, and then it is their turn. They pass in front of a small kiosk and straight away a woman behind the little glass window flicks it up and demands 200 kouponi. Rachel worries that Mykola will offer to pay, but he stands back and admires some bird wheeling high above their heads while she fumbles for her purse and hands over the money. A hand-written ticket is passed back to her, and they walk on. Mykola, Rachel notices, doesn’t buy a ticket. Indeed, no one else passing into the gardens is stopped at the kiosk. She is the tourist. Tourists pay.
Because Mykola is walking beside her, his strides measured, the sound of his leather soles discreet yet persistent, Rachel doesn’t at first take in the view that opens out ahead. She sees the long brown flower beds, some tulip leaves starting to push their way out, the fissured tarmac paths, the ever-present horse chestnuts and some spindly, still bare birches. She sees a dirty yet ornate greenhouse to her left and a fountain with no water to her right and it is only slowly, after five minutes or so, that she notices the way the gardens stretch downwar
ds across the hillside, paths winding and criss-crossing through clumps of newly flowering cherry and magnolia. Some contain little detours, steps that lead to benches with views across the bright grey-blueness of the Dnieper. Gold onion domes rise above the railings – there’s a church below them somewhere.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she says, stopping for a moment. The sun feels warm across her shoulders so she shrugs off her coat and slings it over the handles of the pushchair. It occurs to her that this is the first time she hasn’t worn a coat outside since she arrived six months earlier. She breathes a long sigh of relief as Mykola strolls on. This is fine, she thinks. This is where he leaves her and she can discover this place on her own.
Except Mykola isn’t leaving her. He pauses in front of a budding lilac bush and breaks off a bough that is almost in bloom, its cone of purple buds quivering as he snaps it clear.
‘For you,’ he says, walking back towards her. ‘In Kiev, spring means two things. The horse chestnut – our beautiful kashtan – and the lilac.’
The buds and the heart-shaped leaves tremble on their stems.
‘We probably shouldn’t pick things here,’ Rachel says nervously.
Mykola laughs and shakes the flowers for Ivan’s amusement. ‘Why do you think all these people come?’ He gestures towards a woman with a headscarf tied at the back of her head. She is crouched low in the middle of a flower bed. Rachel shades her eyes with her hand and sees that the woman is in fact digging with a spoon around the base of a scrappy-looking corm that has only recently emerged from the snow. Where are the gardeners? Where are the babushkas shouting nyet? The woman discards the spoon and starts to dig with her fingers, feeling around the corm’s roots and then prising it out with a grunt. She wraps it in a sheet of newspaper, before pushing herself slowly back up to her feet.
‘There’s plenty to go round,’ says Mykola. ‘Maybe in a year, two years, the flowers will be gone but in Ukraina we grow things and their descendants will live on – though perhaps not here.’
Rachel thinks of Elena, with her seeds and her pockets of compost and the earth beneath her fingernails.
‘Did you follow me here?’ she asks suddenly, surprising herself.
Mykola stops smiling.
‘I saw you get on the bus,’ he says. ‘I come here often. Sometimes, things happen that way.’
Ivan whimpers. She looks down, sees that he is fidgety and starts to push him again, slowly, with Mykola walking beside her. He is still holding the spray of lilac that she won’t accept and she knows she has upset this man with whom she has spoken only once before. Or twice, if she counts what she still thinks was a dream of him at the film studio. She isn’t afraid, though – not yet. There are plenty of people around, strollers, lovers, young men lounging on benches, legs splayed, and old women wielding pruning knives in the bushes.
‘Elena,’ she says, ‘our dezhornaya – she spat at the man who delivered the washing machine. Do you know her?’
Mykola doesn’t answer straight away.
‘Elena Vasilyevna.’ When he does speak, he says her name as if it is something he hasn’t spoken for a long time. ‘You must not approach her. You must not let her touch your child.’
‘Oh, but she is much kinder than she seems!’ exclaims Rachel. ‘At first I thought she was a dreadful old witch – she was so cross and unfriendly and the spitting is disgusting – but really she’s just lonely, and she’s helped me with the flat, and—’
‘You invite her into your apartment.’ Mykola interrupts her sharply. He is not asking a question. He stops walking, so that she must stop too. ‘You must not let her in. You are a beautiful mother, remember? Your child is your gift to the world. I have allowed much, too much and this I cannot overlook. Promise me – do not let her in.’
Now Rachel is afraid. Mykola doesn’t touch her; he is standing a clear two yards away from her, but she sees the anger in his eyes, feels it in the distance he maintains so carefully between them. She hasn’t told him about the basement, she remembers. Yet he knows that they haven’t installed the washing machine in the apartment. In which case, he must know it has been moved downstairs.
‘I will be honest with you,’ he says. ‘I noticed you some months ago in the restaurant where you ate with your husband and your friends. You were nursing your baby. You wore a platok – a veil.’
He sweeps his hands across his shoulders, and Rachel realises he is talking about the shawl she wears when breastfeeding in public. You were in the corner, by the bathroom, she thinks. You heard me crying. She glances sideways and takes in the wide path to her right that leads back towards the entrance. There are people about, though they might not help her. Her heart is racing. Her legs feel heavy, as if a low swell of water is pressing against her calves.
‘The veil protects, you see. Our Most Holy Lady holds out her veil and shelters her people beneath.’ Mykola holds out his arms. ‘But who protects her? Who protects our Blessed Mother?’
‘Please leave me alone,’ Rachel murmurs, gripping the pushchair’s handles. ‘I don’t know what you want. I am not a blessed mother. Just leave me alone.’
Mykola remains still for a few seconds. Then he nods once and walks away, down the hill towards the gold domes of the church. When Rachel tugs the pushchair round to move in the opposite direction, she sees he has laid the lilac branch carefully across Ivan’s lap.
Chapter 18
‘Zoya,’ says Rachel, the next morning, when she has checked to make sure they are alone in the basement. ‘What do you know about the man who gave me the washing machine?’
Zoya is folding sheets but she’s in a hurry, swinging her arms out and back in and flapping the green polycotton into submission.
‘Gangster,’ she says, without missing a beat. ‘Bad money. Black market. Corruption. Extortion. Sometimes violence.’
The words snap like flicked tea towels. They are frightening words, but also distant, make-believe. They don’t explain why a virtual stranger in a cashmere coat is following Rachel.
‘He came to the Botanical Gardens,’ she persists. ‘He might have been at the film studios. He said strange things about me being a mother.’
Zoya shakes her head.
‘Probably you are imagining it. You are -’ she concentrates, searching for the right expression, ‘tightly strung.’
‘No,’ says Rachel, firmly. ‘He sent me the washing machine, remember? And yesterday he actually followed me to the Botanical Gardens. I think he’s spying on me. He warned me to stay away from Elena.’
‘Elena Vasilyevna?’
‘Yes, Elena,’ repeats Rachel. ‘Why would he do that? How does he know her?’
Zoya drops the folded sheet into the laundry basket on the floor, but her face is a mask in the dim light and for a few moments the only sounds are the sighs and the soft clunks from the pipes that lead to and from the boilers.
‘I will try to find out something. Do not tell Lucas. He would not handle it well.’
‘I know,’ says Rachel. ‘He would be a nightmare.’
* * *
‘Opposites attract!’ laughed Lucas’s mother when Lucas and Rachel announced their engagement. And it was true, in a way, for both were curious about the other. Sometimes, though, in the first weeks of their marriage, Rachel felt herself peering into the cracks between them, fearing what she could not see.
Once they had a fight about a lottery. They had gone to Spain for their honeymoon. Not the package version, but somewhere Lucas called ‘undiscovered Spain’, the north-west corner, because Rachel had expressed a wish to visit the end of the world and he had a yen to indulge her. The fog hadn’t lifted since their arrival. They had stopped for breakfast in a café on the outskirts of Vigo, where the streets stank of cooking oil and diesel.
‘Christ,’ said Lucas, folding the copy of El País he was attempting to read and stabbing at a
n article with his finger. ‘People here go crazy for the lottery. “El Gordo”, they call it. The Fat One!’ He leaned back and stretched his legs out under the table, which wobbled and made Rachel’s pen jump across the postcard she was writing.
She looked up. ‘Pardon?’
‘The lottery. It’s plastered all over the place – posters on the windows, ads on beermats. A throwback to Franco, maybe. It gives people a little hope, stops them thinking about the big stuff.’
Rachel nodded. Nodding was becoming a habit.
‘There’s an old boy here who won a million pesetas,’ continued Lucas. ‘He died of a heart attack the next day. Poor bastard! Never even got the chance to buy a decent bottle of Cava.’
‘Oh, that’s awful!’ murmured Rachel, staring out past the peeling posters on the window to the ghostly cranes of a storage depot and longing for a sun-drenched beach. ‘I’d never buy a lottery ticket.’
Lucas put his arms behind his head.
‘Wouldn’t you? Why not?’
‘Well, I’d never be able to decide what to do with the money if I won.’
‘Yes, you would. A big house, straight off.’
Rachel frowned. ‘I suppose . . .’
‘I know what I’d do,’ said Lucas, glancing over his shoulder for the bill as he slipped his cigarettes back into his shirt pocket. ‘I’d invest in a couple of properties, give some to both our families and put some in trust for our kids.’
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