Snegurochka
Page 17
‘Well, where would you draw the line?’ asked Rachel. ‘I mean, how much would you give your family? And where does ‘family’ end? You’ve got all those second cousins!’ She tried smiling but Lucas was busy rummaging for coins.
‘There’d have to be a cut-off, obviously. You’d have to be professional about it – get proper advice. A pot for personal use, a pot for family, a pot for other stuff.’ Now Lucas looked at her, ready to deliver his coup de grâce. ‘Because wouldn’t it be great to make a difference, you know? Give to worthwhile causes; give to charity?’
The woman behind the bar wasn’t bringing the bill. This time Lucas waved, making a little signing gesture with his hand, though Rachel wasn’t finished: all sorts of thoughts were tumbling around her head. Couples were destroyed by this kind of thing – you read about it all the time. Wills causing disputes; disagreements between siblings or parent and child – why didn’t you give me a bigger share? Why aren’t my needs as important as theirs? It was human nature, to want more, to have more. Money is power, and power corrupts, as her O-level history teacher had never tired of repeating while he scratched his litanies across the blackboard.
‘I wouldn’t claim it,’ she said, turning towards the window again. A young man in a leather jacket glistening with damp sauntered past, his hand quickly checking his flies. ‘Or I’d give it all away. I’d have to do it quickly.’
‘Thanks!’ Lucas rolled his eyes. ‘Never mind your wretched husband, pissing peanuts all day long to keep you in overpriced coffees!’ He stood up, scraping back his chair so that an old man at a seat in the corner looked across, then looked away. ‘We’re going to have to abscond to get some attention . . .’
He walked over to the bar, where the woman was re-filling a tray with some greasy-looking pastries in between flipping eggs on the griddle behind her. Rachel, meanwhile, looked around for a loo, not knowing how long it’d be before they found another.
The cubicle was tucked away behind a drinks cooler. When she emerged Lucas was impatient to leave. As he held open the door he pushed something into her hand.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘I got you one. If you win, I want half!’
Rachel looked down in dismay at a slip of paper with a drawing of a church in coloured ink and the number 700321 above the words ‘Loteria Nacionale’.
‘I don’t want it,’ she said, but he wouldn’t take it back.
‘If you win and don’t claim, it would be an abdication of responsibility.’ He was teasing still – laughing and needling. ‘Think of all the anti-malarials it could purchase. Think of all the sex workers you could save or the slum children you could educate! Or maybe you’d rather do nothing? Now that would be something to feel guilty about.’
Rachel scrunched the ticket in the palm of her hand and thrust it into her shoulder bag. Lucas was right and he knew it and was already forgetting, moving on to the next thing, striding across the road, peering through the fog to the hire car. She, on the other hand, was culpable now, whichever way she looked at it.
The ticket stayed in her bag until the weekend. She checked the numbers at a roadside kiosk in La Coruña without telling Lucas and when she discovered she hadn’t won anything, she almost cried with relief.
* * *
Rachel is watching Simplemente Maria one afternoon when the phone rings in the hall. Elena has not joined her today – she has missed a few episodes lately, but Rachel tunes in, regardless. She doesn’t care about the storyline – Maria’s eyes fill with tears, Maria wears a jacket with big shoulder pads, Maria’s old love comes calling with flowers. The routine helps her breathe inside the flat. It helps calm the high-pitched sound in her head.
‘Hello, Rachel!’ says a soft voice. It is Suzie. The two have seen each other once or twice for coffee since Suzie sent the nappies, always at Suzie’s flat – never on the thirteenth floor. The nappies aren’t a secret, exactly, but Rachel tells herself that because they aren’t paying for them, Lucas doesn’t need to know.
Today, Suzie has some news.
‘We’re moving!’ she says, brightly. ‘Not far – to a little old house in the Tsar’s Village! It’s rotten and full of mice and God only knows what skeletons, but we’re going to do it up – the full remont! The rent is a ludicrous amount – I could see the dollar signs popping in the owner’s eyes. Rob will beat her down. You must come and see it. I need to know what you think!’
A house, thinks Rachel. Not a flat up in the sky, but a house on the ground.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘I’d love to.’
‘Next week,’ says Suzie. ‘When Rob says it’s ours.’
* * *
Rachel meets Suzie in the car park and they stroll across the tramlines together, Ivan in the pushchair, no need for his snowsuit today. Suzie is wearing grey wool trousers that show off her slender legs and a cream ski jacket with a neatly cinched waist. Rachel is wearing her new jeans, even though she told herself she’d save them for parties. The sun is shining. A few petals of pink apple blossom float above the dump bins. It’s a beautiful April day.
‘He’s growing so fast!’ observes Suzie, as Rachel stops to pick up the hat Ivan has tossed down to the tarmac. ‘Soon he’ll be walking, won’t he?’
Rachel remembers what Dr Alleyn told her. ‘He’s tall,’ she says. ‘So he has a higher centre of gravity. Maybe not yet.’
She and Suzie pick their way past the burnt-out Lada on the corner and on up the lane through Tsarskoye Selo. Rachel has walked here countless times, up and down from the monastery and the kiosks by the war memorial at the top of the hill. She has counted the wooden gates hinged with twists of wire and the battened and boarded cottages, each with a single upstairs window like a blank eye peering out from under the steeply angled eaves. Some are more dilapidated than others, with a scrawny cat lying on the steps or torn netting hanging from untended trees. There may be people inside, though Rachel never sees anyone – just a lick of paint on the fretwork above the doorways, a bright piece of sanitary ware sitting under a tree or a freshly concreted path, shovelled hastily, its edges already crumbling. Others appear uninhabited, their shutters tightly closed, though their gardens suggest otherwise: neat rectangles of tilled earth beside the steps; green shoots just emerging; fruit trees showing signs of recent pruning, their bare stumps painted an alarming dark red.
‘Can you imagine?’ says Suzie. ‘Me, in one of these? Rob says it’ll take three months to make it habitable. Then I can decorate it how I like, but you know me, it’ll be white, white, white!’
‘Fairytale houses,’ says Rachel, thinking of trails of breadcrumbs. ‘You’ll be like Hansel and Gretel.’
Suzie laughs her smoky, throaty laugh. ‘Oh, I was thinking more Sleeping Beauty! Ivan’s my prince. Look, this is us!’ She pulls Rachel down a stony track and they pass between two cottages towards a more isolated house beyond. It has a mansarded roof, a long, thin orchard displaying the first dabs of blossom, and a peeling waist-height picket fence painted the usual faded blue. There’s a figure bending over by the steps, but Rachel knows it isn’t Rob because Suzie has promised her that he is out of town. Besides, the figure is too short. It looks more like an old woman wearing baggy trousers. Her hair is tucked beneath a sort of knitted beret; thin scraps of it are escaping.
When Suzie and Rachel approach, the old woman straightens up slowly, as if it pains her.
‘That’s the woman we’re renting from, some old communist,’ whispers Suzie. ‘I didn’t know she’d be here.’
Rachel, however, needs no introduction. ‘It’s our dezhornaya!’ she says, taken aback, for she realises she has never asked where the caretaker actually lives, assuming it to be a one-room flat somewhere past the monastery, or even a dark corner in the basement of her own block of flats. ‘Elena, privyet!’
For a moment Elena seems bewildered. Then her eyes narrow and she nods to them both.
Elena is waving her hand towards the front door.
‘She doesn’t want us here,’ whispers Rachel, as she and Suzie climb the steps.
‘Too bad!’ laughs Suzie. ‘It’s ours! Rob got his lawyer to draw up a contract and we’ve paid for the first year in cash! She asked for used dollars, which wound him up no end.’
Despite her misgivings Rachel finds she is curious about the house. There isn’t much to see: a living room with an old table pushed against the wall and a couple of beaten-up chairs; a lean-to kitchen with an old-fashioned stove and a sink; and a downstairs bathroom, its tiles cracked and its floor covered by a piece of curling lino. The bedroom upstairs is spacious enough but instead of a bed a single mattress rests on the floor. Rachel cannot imagine how the old woman manages to heave herself up from it each morning, or how she escaped being frozen to death in the winter. There are few personal touches and no photographs. Elena’s cubicle at the apartment block seems more homely. Suzie, meanwhile, chats about her plans for the remont: she will arrange to import a ready-made kitchen; she will introduce a utility room; there will be recessed lighting, roman blinds, a shower room off the bedroom and a fully glazed veranda on two sides of the house.
‘Rob wants a sauna in the garden,’ she says. ‘That’s why we’re moving. The house itself will still be smaller than the flat.’
Rachel feels as if she is trespassing.
‘It’s a lot of work,’ she says, ‘for a place you’re just renting.’
‘Yes, but Rob says that Ukraine’s property laws aren’t fit for purpose. He’d rather buy, always. We should be in by August, if the workmen pull their fingers out. Rob’s got them on a penalty for late completion.’ Suzie smiles, her eyes bright, full of trust that all will be well, that white goods and white walls will prevail. ‘Then you can bring Ivan to toddle around the garden.’
‘Where will Elena go?’ asks Rachel. ‘Do you think she’s lived here for long?’
‘No idea. Now she can afford somewhere nice, though,’ says Suzie, her brow creasing in a brief flash of anxiety. ‘We’re hardly throwing her out on the street.’
No, thinks Rachel, but she’ll stop working at the apartment block. No more Simplemente Maria. No more tea in the kitchen, keeping Ivan safe.
As they leave the house Rachel looks over her shoulder towards Elena, who is now working at the far end of the orchard. The old woman bends down over the ground, digging up the deep-rooted dandelions, her legs planted firmly apart, her back rounded like a seedling as it emerges, inexorable, from the earth.
Chapter 19
Everything changes when the warmer weather comes. As the sticky buds of the horse chestnuts burst into leaf and their creamy candles reach up to the light, as the breeze wafts the scent of lilac along the boulevards and the dandelions flower for a day, people pour on to the streets. Secrets are hard to keep without winter coats and fur hats. Arguments leave the stale one-room apartments and step out on to balconies. Lovers roam the sidewalks and drunks lie spread-eagled on the benches. Even the man playing tennis with his son at the edge of the car park thrashes him openly with his racquet when he fails to demonstrate his commitment to the game. By the first week in May, when the schoolchildren on the trolleybuses are sneezing from the drifting pollen, all things are laid out, laid bare, made open and exposed. This is how it is in Kiev’s summer months. This is how it is for Lucas and for Vee.
‘So,’ Vee says one night, as she and Lucas sit on stools at the bar of a shiny new place in a back street behind the Foreign Ministry. ‘Have you booked a room?’
‘What?’ asks Lucas, looking stricken.
‘Sure you have,’ says Vee. ‘But there’s something I must tell you first. I’ve been sleeping with Sorin, and he has told me everything about your secret story, and you know what? It’s a good one! Don’t look so surprised.’
Lucas doesn’t know what to think, so Vee helps him.
‘We could have sex,’ she says, pushing the slice of lemon in her vodka tonic under the surface with her finger. ‘And it would go badly because you would feel guilty and I would despise you for that. We might meet again, but I would sleep with other lovers and you would be angry and hurt and then Rachel would find out and she’d go crazy and try to jump off the balcony or leave you or something much worse and then you’d be in pieces and follow her back to England and your career would be finished.’
‘That’s funny,’ says Lucas, his heart pumping so loudly he fears she might hear it. ‘You’re funny.’
‘I know,’ says Vee. ‘I’m pretty hard to take.’
Lucas is silent for a while. His drink is too warm; the bar needs a new refrigerator before the weather gets hot, and he wants to scream at someone – the sullen waitress who poured it, or the bandit on the door or maybe just that weird guy in the corner with the moustache and the doleful eyes like a po-faced Omar Sharif. Instead he stays silent, knowing he must ask a question, hating how it is going to make him sound.
‘Don’t use my story,’ he says, trying not to beg.
Vee licks the finger she used to stir her drink, then reaches up to trace the line of his eyebrow.
‘Stop frowning,’ she says, solemnly. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m not a total bitch.’
* * *
The ninth of May is Victory Day. Zoya buys her grandfather three red gladioli and places them in a vase by his bed. She pins his Order of the Patriotic War, second class, to his pyjama jacket, even though tourists can buy them for a dollar apiece outside the metro at Arsenalnaya. She pours two glasses of vodka, raises one toast to the heroic survivors, another to the glorious fallen, and drinks them both before checking her watch. She’s due to meet Lucas at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in an hour. He is hopeful the communists will make a showing, waving their pension books and their framed pictures of Stalin, though this isn’t Moscow, as she never tires of pointing out. There’s no front page story being orchestrated in the hills above the Dnieper. In Lviv the holiday has been cancelled altogether.
Tanya arrives a quarter of an hour late. Zoya, irritated, picks up her bag and yanks the door shut behind her without saying goodbye. Two minutes later Tanya is opening the window and shouting down to her in the street.
Her grandfather isn’t breathing.
Zoya drops her bag and runs back up the stairs.
* * *
Elena Vasilyevna stays away from the commemorations, though the long finger of the war memorial is only a short walk from her cottage, across the summit of the hill. Today she has her possessions to pack up and a new flat to occupy. The flat she is moving to is on the second floor of the apartment block on Staronavodnitska Street. It’s been empty for a while. The locksmith who helped her gain entry didn’t ask questions. She has always been the caretaker, ever since the block first opened two decades before. That stinking gangster Mykola can threaten her – he can send his thugs to torture dogs as much as he pleases and replace her with someone whose husband or son owes money and who thus has no ears, no eyes – but Elena isn’t going anywhere.
Elena has enlisted some help with the removals. The boy Stepan will arrive soon with the handc
art that she keeps in the basement at the apartment block. Her belongings are few even by Ukrainian standards: a mattress, bedding, two chairs, a chest of drawers and a couple of lamps. There are pots and pans, some crockery and a plastic laundry bag full of clothes. She rolls her old fur coat with care – the coat she hasn’t worn for four decades. It was given to her by the same man who drew up papers in her name for this house, with its strip of earth for growing vegetables and for planting fruit trees. She has already wrapped her gardening tools in neat parcels of newspaper after oiling them the night before.
Then, as she folds a blanket, another memory rolls up from her gut like the dark waves of the Dnieper. This memory belongs to a time before the war, when she was still a child. It washes over her, blocks out the present moment and takes her breath away, so that she must sit down on the stairs.
The blanket in her mind is knitted from rough yarn. It is grey and moth-eaten. Even now she can feel the looped wool between her fingers and sniff again the smell of sickness and mould. At dusk she takes it down to the river with her sister. The two girls wade out through the shallows until the current pushes up against their hips. They stretch the blanket between them, gripping its corners, and they stand there for hours, thin bodies numb with the cold, even though it is summer, arms aching, burning, then dropping with hunger and exhaustion as they wait for a fish.
There are no fish. As the sun rises they stumble out of the river and lie in the mud. When their mother comes to find them she falls down and weeps, and they gnaw at the blanket, gagging and sucking because the great famine is upon them and their stomachs contain nothing but leaves.
Memories are burdens. Elena, old now, sits on the stairs for some time, the blanket clutched in her fingers. She has never wept for her mother and her sister. When they died, they were saved.
* * *
At last Stepan arrives with the handcart and helps Elena to her feet.