‘Come on,’ he says in Ukrainian, impatient to load up the mattress and the chairs.
As they trundle down Panfilovtsev Street, the faint strains of piped military music start up on the hill behind them. The tramlines at the bend on Staronavodnitska Street prove tricky; they almost lose a soup bowl, but they finally reach the apartment block and Stepan carries her possessions up the steps, then stacks them in the foyer by the lift.
When Elena gives him a fifty dollar note he sniffs it before stepping back outside and inspecting it in the sunlight.
‘Eta vsyo,’ she says, more to herself than to Stepan. That’s it.
* * *
Across the tramlines and up the hill, in the lee of the Motherland monument, Rachel and Ivan are out with the crowds. There’s a fresh breeze and it’s chilly in the shade, yet the sun itself is hot. Faces grow pink, while the ice cream sellers and the kvas trucks are making a killing. Ivan is having the time of his life, shrieking at the bouquets of tulips and gladioli, the dandelion seeds that waft across the concrete, the uniforms with their burnished buttons, the sense of occasion. Rachel buys him a pretzl to suck on, even though it is stale and full of salt. She walks slowly, one hand on the pushchair, watching the old men leaning on a grandchild or a great grandchild – the boys in v-necked jumpers lugging their replica assault rifles, the girls’ hair tied back with patriotic blue and yellow pompoms. Really though, she is looking out for Mykola. She’s been seeing him everywhere since her trip to the Botanical Gardens. Zoya hasn’t told her anything, and now it is as if his face carries something archetypal, something she seems to recognise in the expression of every man she passes: a glance, the twist of a mouth, the shadow of a moustache. She wanders for ages, yet he doesn’t materialise and this both relieves and dismays her. He is watching, she decides, but he is concealed.
Instead she glimpses Lucas in the distance, striding about, bending down to speak with someone, trying to balance his notebook on his knee. He starts to shake his biro up and down and she almost goes to him, almost reaches into her bag for a spare, but then a family strolls across her sightline and he is gone. Anyway, she won’t interrupt him while he is working. She certainly doesn’t want to talk to him.
Up ahead she spots a bench in the shade, one half unoccupied. She sits down next to a middle-aged couple and fumbles in Ivan’s nappy bag for his lidded beaker. The beaker is an innovation. She bought it at the House of Children in Lipki and Ivan hated it at first. He threw it to the floor and splashed the water Rachel had carefully filtered and boiled and cooled all over the kitchen. Now the warmer weather has arrived he is thirstier and glugs at it noisily, gripping its two handles with his moist pink fingers, his eyes rolling slightly. The sight of him sucking triggers the let-down reflex in Rachel’s breasts and she pulls her thin cardigan across her chest.
The couple next to her are talking in low voices. The man, who is wearing brown polyester trousers and a carefully pressed short-sleeved shirt, holds the woman’s hand and the woman presses her knee against his leg. To Rachel they seem sweet – demure, unshowy in their solicitude. They smile at her child and make encouraging noises, and the man reaches forward and gently pats Ivan’s head.
Then the woman leans round her companion and speaks directly to Rachel in a quick burst of Ukrainian.
‘Nye panimayu,’ says Rachel, shaking her head apologetically. ‘I don’t understand.’
Her response seems to agitate the woman, who says something to the man. They both point at Ivan, who has kicked off his knitted slipper. He beams at the pantomime these strangers are performing for his amusement.
‘Fut!’ says the woman, then again, more sharply, ‘Fut!’
‘Oh,’ says Rachel, smiling politely, though with no intention of covering up his toes. Her new strategy for batting off the imperatives from every woman over forty is to gabble at them in a language they can’t decipher. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ she says. ‘Bare feet won’t kill him. In England, unlike in your country, we know about germs and vitamin D. We know how to bring up our babies quite safely in the fresh air, with no hat on, with no boots on and, sometimes, would you believe it, with no clothes at all!’
This time something is wrong. The man looks angry. He stands, and so does the woman.
‘Then consider yourself fortunate,’ he says, in precise English. ‘My wife wished only to help you. We did not expect an insult in return.’ And with that the couple move away.
Rachel gets up, too, a low mood upon her, exposed and ashamed by her outburst. She wants to be at home now, she wants to read her pages and she wants to hang her washing out in the basement in straight lines, tightly pegged, as tight as she can possibly stretch the towels and the vests and the sheets. She picks up the dropped slipper and rushes away from the park, out through the gates, across Lavrska Street and down the lane towards the tower blocks on Staronavodnitska. Building Number Four still broods there like a standing stone. She looks up, as she always does when she passes into its shadow. As she raises her head someone throws something from one of the balconies. Whatever has been thrown falls clumsily, straight at first, then wheeling and unfolding as it approaches the ground. Rachel sees it is a piece of cardboard or packaging of some kind. She swallows down the bile that has risen in her throat and hurries inside, wishing that Elena was here to shout and summon the lift in order to bang on the door of the offending apartment.
When Rachel walks across the foyer there’s a different old woman sitting in her cubicle.
‘Gdye Elena Vasilyevna?’ she asks. Where is she?
The woman shrugs and scowls at the pushchair’s dirty wheels.
* * *
Lucas marches along Khreschatyk, too much energy in his legs. There’s a pink flush below his cheekbones and he wants all the strollers around him to get out of his way. This city is too much, sometimes – the queues at the kiosks, the endless holidays, the wide blank faces. Take Zoya, who didn’t show up at the War Memorial today. He wants to find her, to tell her straight that he is going to hire someone else, that he’ll be paying someone else to do the job instead of her. She thinks she’s so good he won’t fire her, and that’s his problem, as usual, because he does need her. Back at the office he took a call from Sorin. There’s an obstruction with some of the permissions he needs for his film feature. Lucas could go ahead anyway, but he doesn’t want to upset the director at this point in production – he needs to be invited to the premiere, now scheduled for July.
He passes a woman pulling along a grizzling child and thinks of Rachel, which doesn’t help. Her silences, her deliberateness, her superstitions depress him. When she was pregnant, he loved her softness, her needs. Now, everything is weighted and weighed – a touch, a caress – nothing is gifted to him, nothing is free. He needs to act. He needs to take control of their lives and the emptiness he feels where there used to be attention and ardour. All the same, he wishes Rachel would decide to go back to England without his urging. Nothing permanent – not yet. He’d miss Ivan, but a break would allow them both to breathe. There’s the cost of the flight, though if she stayed with her mother it needn’t be too expensive.
He’ll try to steer her round over dinner.
* * *
In Rachel’s dream she neither flies nor falls. Instead she sits on a chair in the middle of the living room, looking out beyond the balcony to the white gauze of the sky. In her dream everything is still. She sits still; her bones inside her skin rest lightly, her feet skim the surface of the parquet.
When she wakes she is disoriented. The furniture spins around her with a speed she cannot match. She sits up and Jurassic Park slides off the bed to the floor. She must have fallen asleep while counting so she’ll have to start again later. Ivan isn’t in his cot and now she hears noises – the opening of a cupboard, the judder of a tap. Lucas is home. She looks at her watch. Seven-thirty.
Her husband is standing at the kitchen
counter with his back to her when she reaches the doorway. He is hacking at a pimply-skinned chicken.
‘Coq au vin,’ he says, with a wave of his knife. ‘I wanted to do chicken Kiev, but I couldn’t find a recipe.’ On the table sits a bottle of plastic-topped wine and some vegetables – carrots, onions – along with a sizeable heap of peelings. Ivan is sitting on the floor underneath waving a thin coil of potato skin. Rachel scoops him up, presses her lips against his hair and stares at the mess, still dazed from her nap. Back in London Lucas sometimes made dishes like lasagne or shepherd’s pie. He always wanted her to guess the secret ingredient he’d added – fennel, or coriander or something just as unfamiliar.
‘How did things go at the War Memorial?’ she asks. ‘Did you get what you needed?’
Lucas grunts dismissively. ‘There was no story. Just the usual reminiscences, rose-tinted recollections of comrades. Even the protests were half-hearted. People don’t want to remember the truth. There’s no mileage for me in that kind of self-delusion.’
Rachel thinks of the set faces on the trolleybus, the sagging shoulders and shuffling in the queues and feels a ripple of affinity with the city’s pensioners.
‘Elena has moved,’ she says. ‘The caretaker – she’s rented out her house to Suzie and Rob. She’s not working here anymore.’
‘So I heard. Funny to think of her as the landlady for those two. You did pretty well to get on the right side of her. She always looked like she wanted to murder me.’ He turns around. ‘Dinner will be a good hour or so. If you stick Ivan in the bath I’ll bring you a beer. I won’t do any more work tonight. We should talk.’ He pulls a long face for his son, then smiles, and Rachel sees that this costs him, which makes her both sorry and wary.
‘Okay,’ she says. Then, when she’s sitting on the loo seat with her feet on the edge of the bath and Ivan is kicking his legs in the yellowish water and shrieking with delight at the sound of his own echo bouncing off the tiles, she chews her lip and wonders what Lucas has planned.
Sure enough, when Ivan is asleep and the chicken has been eaten, Lucas asks her to come out onto the balcony while he has a smoke.
‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ he says. ‘Come and talk to me. Look at the stars.’
‘You know I don’t like the balcony,’ replies Rachel, trying to keep her voice even. But Lucas, who has already deviated from the script he has rehearsed, can’t leave it there.
‘I’m not asking you to take Ivan outside. Just us two. For five minutes.’
Rachel doesn’t move, doesn’t uncross her legs. This is what happens when you fall asleep, she thinks. There are consequences when you don’t read your pages.
Lucas scrapes back his chair, gets up, paces down the hall to the living room, then returns to the kitchen. ‘Look,’ he says, his voice tight. ‘I get the fact that the height gives you vertigo. Never mind that the balcony is perfect for some fresh air and sunshine and that maybe it would be nice to sit on a couple of chairs and drink a beer and not have to leave you to go out by myself for a smoke – I get that you don’t want to.’
Rachel stands up now. She has to do something, so she puts the kettle on the stove, tilting her head as she tries to settle the ringing sound behind her left ear.
Lucas ploughs on. ‘But what I don’t want is for Ivan to grow up with your – issues.’ He sucks in some air, as if drawing on a cigarette before blowing out the next words in a rush. ‘I don’t want him to be afraid of heights. I don’t want him counting shops or lampposts under his breath and I don’t want him getting a headache if something isn’t in a neat pile. I want him to be normal and healthy and happy. Why don’t you just do it? Why don’t you make yourself stand on the balcony? Fetch Ivan, do what any new-agey counsellor would tell you and take him out there, for all our sakes, Rach! I mean, what exactly do you think is going to happen if you do?’
Rachel’s fingers grip the kettle handle. Ivan, she tells herself, is safe in his cot in the bedroom; she remembers closing the door. A vision of her mother’s hardboiled egg slicer rises unbidden in her mind. You place the naked, glistening egg in the little hollow and push down the handle and the row of fine wires presses into the whiteness and all the way through. What you hope for is a perfect cross-section – no grey rings – just white and sunny yellow, still slightly warm, the fanned segments cradled by a leaf or two of lettuce, a dab of salad cream.
‘Things are fucked up,’ says Lucas, quieter than before. ‘I’m sorry – I know it sounds harsh, but maybe you should go back to England for a while.’ He clears his throat as if a cough might, even yet, make everything clear and right. In the old days Rachel would be crying by now. Then he could go to her – he’d know what to do, knowing she wanted it too. Now, though, he keeps pushing on, saying they both need a break and maybe she should patch things up with her mother. ‘You could think this whole thing through,’ he continues. ‘Ivan ought to play with other children. You could stop nursing him, get your hair done, see some friends. Then, when you’re ready, we could work out what comes next.’
‘What about you?’ asks Rachel when he stops talking and her hand is steady, and she can set the kettle safely on the hob and turn round to face him.
‘Me?’ He adjusts his expression as he retreats to safer territory. ‘I’ll work, like I always do. I’ll get my feature out, report twenty-four-seven, start making some decent money so that you – we – have some options.’
‘What if I don’t want to go?’
Lucas stares at his wife, uncomprehending.
‘I’m not going to force you!’
‘Then I’ll stay here.’
Lucas doesn’t say anything for a while. He opens the kitchen window and leans out as the sound of the first cannon booms from the war memorial and the fireworks around the Motherland statue wheeze and blossom and pop.
‘Why put ourselves through this?’ he mutters, as the night air trembles.
Why indeed? Rachel’s closest acquaintances are Suzie and Zoya and Elena. There’s Teddy and Karl, of course, and she might even count Mykola, as he knows so much about her. These people aren’t her friends, though sometimes they seem more real than her own husband.
But they are not why she cannot retreat from her struggle with the balcony. They are not why she needs to stay.
Chapter 20
Elena shows up a week after Victory Day. She knocks on the door of Rachel and Lucas’s apartment one lunch-time as if nothing has changed – as if she isn’t now a landlady with Suzie and Rob’s hard currency to spend. When Rachel, surprised, lets her in the old woman squeezes Ivan’s chubby calves, fishes her slippers out of her string bag, accepts a cup of tea and sits down in the kitchen to watch the latest episode of Simplemente Maria.
Later, while Rachel feeds Ivan and Elena rinses the cups in the sink, the two of them manage through the usual mix of mimed verbs and stabbing nouns to establish that Elena is not living across town, but has in fact moved into a flat downstairs.
‘Kharasho!’ says Rachel, nodding vigorously to express the rush of relief she feels. Elena, who quickly tires of Rachel’s attempts at conversation, shuffles into the bedroom and strips Ivan’s dirty cot sheet before moving to the living room and folding the crumpled bedding she peels off the sofa. Rachel peeks in from the hallway, dismayed that Elena should find evidence for the disharmony between herself and Lucas, but Elena doesn’t seem to notice. She stuffs the laundry into a basket and puts her shoes back on, before indicating that Rachel must take it downstairs to the washing machine.
When Rachel is alone with Ivan once again she wedges a chair against the living room door, tidies the bedroom and retrieves Jurassic Park from under the bed. It seems that everyone is busy in their separate spheres. Zoya doesn’t bring her sheets to the basement any more – perhaps she is working elsewhere, as Lucas has so often suspected. Suzie, meanwhile, is preoccupied with the renovations of Elena’s old
house. Lucas is out most of the time, chasing interviews or drinking or confessing his sins to Vee or maybe just walking the streets. His absence allows him and Rachel to put further confrontation on hold. Instead they move around each other with a determined solicitousness, meeting only in the hallway or at the threshold of the bathroom or in the wedge of electric light in front of the refrigerator.
Chapter 21
Across the river in Darnytsia, Zoya, standing in the kitchen of her flat, sets the telephone’s receiver back in its cradle and sits down at the table.
She can guess the identity of her caller. The man had told her in his low, soft voice that he knew a great deal about her. He knew, for example, that her flat was still registered in her grandfather’s name, that she’d had three abortions in the mid-1980s and that she had been questioned about the provenance of her car at a road block the previous winter. ‘So what?’ Zoya had said, ready to cut him off. Then the man said he had copies of her grandfather’s medical records, that he knew about the morphine levels in his blood and his urine and that such things could be misconstrued if she was not more careful and continued to sniff like a bitch around the private affairs of legitimate businessmen. He also warned her not to discuss this conversation with the likes of that dried up whore Elena Vasilyevna.
Zoya lights a cigarette and blows smoke towards the open window. She doesn’t fear for herself, but Elena is another matter. She is going to have to be careful.
Chapter 22
June arrives like a pulsing heart, pink and glistening. There are swift thunderstorms and sudden showers, after which the city’s shining streets expand beneath the trees to accommodate the makeshift stalls with their blushing radishes and tender carrots, strawberries, smetana and clear linden honey. Meanwhile the hot water is turned off for a fortnight’s maintenance in the apartment block on Staronavodnitska Street. As the pipes bleed they make sad sounds, like whale song. Lucas starts shaving at the office, while Rachel boils pans on the stove and holds Ivan as he splashes in the sink. Sometimes she takes him to Suzie’s flat, whenever Suzie wants Rachel to examine her swatches of fabric samples or discuss the merits of pelmets or moan about the fact that the old woman who leased them the house still appears every evening to water the vegetable patch. Most of the time, however, Rachel walks, and as she walks she stares at the passers-by who seem, every day, more strange and more familiar.
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