Snegurochka

by Judith Heneghan

  Zoya makes the rules clear straight away.

  ‘If you need to answer a call of nature, climb back up the hill and go in the woods. Bury, please.’ She yanks out a small spade from the space beneath the steps.

  ‘What do you do out here?’ asks Rachel, as Stepan pulls his trainers off and hops across the stones and rough grass towards a shallow stream.

  ‘Do?’ Zoya looks amused. ‘We sit. We drink and eat.’ She turns to watch Elena, who is hobbling around the side of the building to inspect some remnants of soft fruit bushes and an ancient plum tree with thick branches that twist outwards like flailing arms. ‘My grandfather used to grow things here. Many things – fruit, vegetables – sometimes even flowers when I was a child. Elena won’t like the way everything is now wild, but I could not manage it when Dedushka was sick.’ She pauses, her twitching smile gone, her face empty.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ says Rachel, wishing she had better words to offer. She is an interloper, standing uselessly in the freshly-trampled grass with Ivan wriggling in her arms. She shifts him up her hip and looks around. ‘What can I do? Can I help with anything?’

  Zoya is fiddling with the padlock on the door. ‘You can help me find the vodka.’

  * * *

  The five accidental dachniki eat lunch on Ivan’s nap blanket, spread out in the long grass. The sausage is full of chewy lumps of gristle, though Rachel finds she is hungry and the salty fat isn’t so bad. Ivan eats the two pots of yoghurt she was saving for the plane, and for dessert she raids her son’s changing bag for biscuits and some sliced pear and apple. Elena sniffs the fruit and won’t touch it, but she takes several biscuits and slices the sausage with a small paring knife Zoya hands to her, managing surprisingly well with her broken teeth and a jaw that folds in on itself as she masticates each mouthful. Zoya then insists they all drink the vodka she has brought out from its hiding place in the hut. They have no glasses, but by now Stepan and Elena seem convinced that Ivan’s changing bag is a cornucopia of abundance and usefulness, so once again Rachel burrows amongst the nappies and fishes out Ivan’s spare beaker. She takes off the lid and pours a finger’s depth for Elena and herself, while Zoya swigs straight from the bottle. The vodka is unfiltered and slightly gritty; it burns Rachel’s throat and oesophagus as it slides its way down. Elena takes a sip, then passes the cup to Stepan.

  ‘I am baby!’ jokes Stepan, picking up the lid and pushing it back on to the cup.

  ‘No!’ pleads Rachel, helplessly. To her mind there is something repulsive about watching this boy suck vodka from the spout, though Zoya is smiling at her squeamishness and Elena is laughing so much that tears squeeze out of her eyes.

  And so the day gently unwinds. Rachel lies back in the grass and closes her eyes while Ivan pulls up handfuls of weeds in his chubby fists or tries to catch the flies gathering on the greasy crumbs, and Elena naps, snoring, then gets up and shuffles off towards the rear of the hut to rummage amongst the bolting vegetables and broken canes. Perhaps she is searching for something to prune back or harvest. Time slows, memories fade, the sun inches across a soft blue sky. Rachel feels her son scrambling over her hips. She puts her hand out, touches his dense, warm skin. This is real, she thinks, this bond of blood and survival. Today they are all saved and she could lie here forever with Ivan’s head on her stomach, pinning her down, his legs twitching gently against her own, even the weight of his wet nappy a reassurance that now, right now, she has everything she needs.

  * * *

  She wakes with a jolt when Ivan bashes something hard against her collar bone. Her head is spinning a little, from the sunlight or the blood-rush or possibly the vodka, but as her eyes readjust she sees that he is clutching the pot of Sudafed she always keeps in her handbag. Other items lay strewn across the blanket: keys, a couple of tampons, a pen with the ink starting to seep into the fabric. And her well-thumbed copy of Jurassic Park.

  Zoya is lighting a cigarette on the steps behind her.

  ‘I remember that book,’ she says, blowing smoke towards the stream. ‘You were reading it when you first arrived. Then Lucas gave it to Sorin, and you wanted it back.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Rachel, frowning.

  Zoya stretches out a leg and pushes the book with her foot. ‘Dinosaurs. The dangers of men playing god with science. You read it a lot, but what does it say? I think it is rubbish.’

  Rachel wishes the book had stayed at the bottom of the changing bag. She picks it up and flicks the pages slowly, as if the book is unfamiliar, until she finds one with the corner folded over. The fold is on page twenty-seven, marking the part where Elena the midwife leaves the window open at the clinic and the baby raptors climb inside and eat the newborn’s face. She must have counted the words of that section a hundred times at least.

  ‘I thought I needed this book,’ she murmurs.

  ‘And you have changed your mind?’ Zoya’s tone is neutral, but her questions, Rachel knows, are always loaded.

  ‘Elena helped me,’ she says. ‘I don’t need it anymore.’

  ‘Then get rid of it.’

  Rachel thinks for a moment. Ivan is safe. Now when she looks at the cover it seems ridiculous.

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘I’m going for a walk in the woods. You can come if you like, though I warn you, I’m taking the spade.’

  Zoya offers a hand and pulls Rachel to her feet.

  Up beneath the trees, the air is still and cool. They have left the wasps behind them and the ground is springy, made soft by decades of leaf fall. Light pools haphazardly between the birch trunks that stand white and straight like postulants stopped in prayer. Rachel feels as if she has stepped into a church.

  Ivan, whom she has once again carried on her hip, is trying to get down, so she sits him on the weedless grass and looks around her.

  ‘Anywhere will do,’ she says, taking the spade from Zoya. She thrusts it into the earth near a small anthill. ‘Here.’

  When a small hole is dug and the ants are scattering amongst the pale tree roots, Rachel tips her book inside, quickly, as if now she cannot wait to be rid of it, as if burying it is part of the ritual she never wanted, never craved. As an afterthought, she bends down and removes Ivan’s sodden nappy and drops it on top of the book.

  ‘There,’ she says, aware that Zoya is watching her.

  ‘You are killing two birds with one stone,’ remarks Zoya dryly.

  ‘Multi-tasking,’ says Rachel, as she kicks the soil back into the hole with her foot. ‘When I was little, we used to say, “good riddance to bad rubbish”.’ She pauses. A memory comes back to her, the love notes to the boy she’d left behind, hidden within those dark waxy sleeves. When her mother discovered one and confronted her with it, Rachel had collected up all the others and pushed them down amongst the chicken bones and broken eggshells at the bottom of the dustbin. ‘I hope it rots quickly.’

  Rachel scoops up Ivan and the two women turn and walk back to the edge of the trees, where the sun is strong and bright, the air full of heat. They raise their hands to their eyes and squint down the slope towards the little hut and the stream. The place appears deserted, but then a small movement to the left catches Rachel’s attention and she sees Stepan peeing, directing the arc of his urine at a flat stone near the edge of the reeds.

  Zoya sees him, too.

  ‘He likes to win, that one,’ she says. ‘If there’s no one to play against, he competes with himself.’

  ‘He seems very attached to Elena,’ says Rachel.

  Zoya snorts. ‘She gives him money.’

  ‘Oh.’ Rachel remembers how the boy looks at her sometimes. She wants to feel sorry for him; she knows that back in London he’d be in and out of children’s homes or on the streets. He is alone, and lonely teenagers must, of necessity, probe the limits of their power. ‘He steals parcels from my mum. He eats the stuff she sends me. Why did you let him co
me with us today?’

  ‘Why not? You came.’ A pause. ‘I thought I would be here alone. Then you wanted to see and I thought, okay, but not just you. You are too much for one person by yourself.’

  Rachel is never sure if Zoya means to offend her. ‘Well you know how to wind Lucas up,’ she says. ‘And I have to listen to him afterwards. So perhaps that makes us even.’

  ‘Ah, Lucas!’ Zoya lifts the spade and lets it rest across one shoulder. ‘He runs around Kiev, looking for his stories, listening in the wrong places . . .’ she stops, eyeing Rachel as if to gauge whether or not she has said too much.

  Rachel is nodding her head, slowly. ‘That’s exactly what Vee says . . .’ Her voice tails off. She hasn’t thought of Vee or her husband all afternoon. Lucas’s longing for something better is a dead weight, dragging him under. She should have found a way to call him. She should have left him a note. Her flight would have arrived at Heathrow by now.

  Somewhere through the trees, perhaps nearer the village, a bird screeches a warning.

  ‘Vee is a magpie,’ says Zoya.

  ‘Magpies steal.’

  ‘And this is what frightens you?’

  Rachel blows a little soil out of Ivan’s hair. Without his nappy his bottom is small and bony. He feels light, almost weightless, like a bird.

  ‘I’m not frightened of Vee,’ she says. ‘But I should probably go back to Kiev.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Soon. After I’ve dipped Ivan’s feet in the stream. His first paddle.’

  ‘Tak,’ murmurs Zoya, as Rachel sets off down the hill. ‘At first I did not like you. Now I do.’

  Chapter 25

  Zoya has been driving for half an hour. Elena, sitting in the front with a bunch of cornflowers across her knees, snores gently, her chin bobbing against her chest. Stepan is sleeping, too, his head lolling against the dusty window as he sprawls on the back seat next to Rachel. His anorak lies discarded by his feet.

  Rachel’s arms ache from holding Ivan. Her left elbow is wedged between the seat and the door and the basket on her right is digging into her thigh. Elena actually managed to unearth some self-seeded carrots, thin and misshapen with feathery tops. Their smell is strong and earthy and Rachel’s stomach rumbles. Boiled and mashed for Ivan or chopped into a soup – she could live on soup quite happily if she had to – a few onions, a little garlic, some potatoes, a pan on the stove, tipping scraps in, a pinch of pepper or some of Elena’s homegrown herbs . . .

  Ivan stirs and kicks his legs out. His thigh, Rachel notices, is marked with pinpricks of bright pink. Not ticks, though – ant bites. She licks a finger and dabs the raised skin as she remembers her mother once doing.

  ‘Oy!’ mutters Zoya, pressing on the brake in her careful, measured way, though they haven’t yet reached the city.

  Rachel peers around Zoya’s headrest. There’s a vehicle about fifty metres in front of them and it isn’t moving; instead it straddles the single-lane road. It is a silver car, sleek and foreign. It looks out of place in the birch woods.

  ‘Is it an accident?’ she asks, squinting as the late afternoon sunlight glances off the bonnet.

  ‘Maybe the engine has overheated,’ says Zoya, slowing the car to a stop while they are still some metres away. ‘Or they have no fuel.’ She eases the handbrake upwards, but she doesn’t turn off the ignition.

  Rachel shunts Ivan up against her left shoulder, wincing at the stabbing pins and needles in her hand. Cars don’t run out of fuel at right angles to the road, she thinks. There are no other vehicles in sight. This block to their progress is deliberate, and it is probably the police because Lucas is always complaining about the cursory checks they make, the bribes they require. But the man stepping out of the trees doesn’t look like a policeman. His hair is dark; he has sloping shoulders, a measured gait. She recognises him straight away.

  ‘Mykola!’

  ‘Mykola?’ repeats Zoya, turning her head a little, as if she might have misheard. Stepan opens an eye, yawns and pushes his knees into the seat in front so that they leave dents in the vinyl. Elena stirs also, muttering something as she wakes. She covers her eyes with one hand and gathers the cornflower stems with the other. The skin on her knuckles is stretched thin like tracing paper as she clutches the stalks. Rachel remembers how she spat at the man who’d delivered Mykola’s washing machine. She remembers Mykola’s warnings. There is unfinished business between these two. Now he will see that she and Ivan are with Elena, out here in the woods, when he told her to stay away. Rachel’s chest tightens. He has been waiting for them here.

  Mykola skirts round the Zhiguli’s bonnet.

  ‘Lock the door,’ instructs Zoya. ‘I will deal with this.’ But Rachel is too slow; Ivan is fully awake now, stamping his feet on her thighs. The door is already being opened.

  ‘Hello Mykola,’ she says, keeping her voice bright. ‘Has your car broken down?’ Zoya glares at her in the rear-view mirror.

  Mykola peers in. He is wearing a white shirt, no jacket. His head is bare. ‘Good afternoon, Rachel,’ he says. He looks at Ivan before staring briefly at the other occupants. ‘You have had a pleasant afternoon, I think. Please get out of the car.’

  Rachel shifts Ivan onto her lap. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Mykola.

  ‘No,’ says Zoya, with a warning pump on the accelerator. ‘Stay where you are.’

  Now there are two people telling Rachel what to do. Zoya sounds strained, furious. Mykola, on the other hand, remains impassive, his dark eyes upon her.

  ‘These are bad people,’ he says. ‘The boy, I know him. I have no problem with him, if he keeps his mouth shut. But your driver, and her –’ he pauses, raising his chin towards Elena, though his gaze doesn’t shift. ‘You must come back to Kiev with me.’

  Insects buzz around the car outside, but inside there is silence. Stepan is examining a scab on his elbow while Elena just stares down at her lap, her grey hair sticking out and her shoulders hunched forward. She is still gripping the cornflowers, though their baby-blue heads are beginning to wilt.

  ‘Zoya and Elena are my friends,’ says Rachel, carefully. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t need your protection.’ She wants to shut the door, but Mykola is in the way. He is patting the car roof with his right hand: one, two, three.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘If you will not come with me, then I shall tell you about her because she is a mother, like you, and also nothing like you.’

  This man is talking about mothers again, yet Elena and Zoya don’t have children. Zoya won’t catch Rachel’s eye, so she glances across to Stepan and although he has turned away, staring out through the glass towards the woods, it is as if he holds her gaze in his reflection. His pale eyes are unreadable, unreachable.

  ‘You think that Kiev is a hard place,’ continues Mykola. ‘You pity us for what you imagine we have endured. The women, you believe they have seen too much and that is why they shout and scold when you appear with your fine healthy baby. Yet she is not part of this story of yours. She is outside all of that and I can see that you won’t ask why because you are afraid. Well, a mother should never be afraid. You will hear what I have to say. You will hear what she has done.’

  Mykola has lowered his voice. It is as if he is telling them a story. Rachel wants to stop him, yet her own dread prevents her.

  ‘Once, there was a woman who had a baby. She was unmarried, but that is how it goes sometimes. When the war came, she took up with a partisan who promised what he could not deliver. Then the fascists arrived. They pulled her lover out of the cellar where he hid and they marched him to a place outside the city to be shot. Well, the woman did not want to lose what she desired. So she pleaded with the soldiers to take her baby, to swap her baby for her lover. The guards laughed at her at first. Then they tossed her baby to her lover and while he held the infant th
ey murdered him and he was the first to fall into the pit. The child was buried alive.’

  When Mykola stops speaking Elena is still staring into her lap. Her lips are pushed forward and Rachel almost cries out as she sees what the old woman is really gripping amongst the flowers. A knife – the small paring knife from the hut – sharp enough for slicing through thick, fatty sausage. Zoya sees it too and reaches across, covering it with her own hand. An old woman holds a knife while a man tells a story no one asked to hear. Such things don’t belong in Zoya’s car and Rachel blinks too late to bury them, already grieving for what has been lost: the warmth by the stream, the picnic, the stroll up to the trees. What remains is impossible, unfathomable.

  ‘This woman is a murderer,’ says Mykola. ‘I tell you this, Rachel, to keep your son safe.’

  Safe.

  The word is a lie, one that breaks Mykola’s spell. With a sudden grunt, Zoya rams the gear stick into first. When she releases the handbrake, the car lurches forward so violently that Elena drops the knife and Ivan’s head is thrown backwards. The door is hanging open and it clips Mykola’s hand as Rachel leans out to yank it shut. She holds Ivan tight as the car skids across the potholes, spitting up stones from its wheels. The silver saloon is blocking their path but Zoya doesn’t slow down and instead pulls the steering wheel to the left so that they swing cartoonishly across the verge, into the narrow gap between the car and the trees, crushing a small sapling as it catches on the bumper. When they finally regain the rutted concrete, Zoya is shouting and even Stepan is leaning forward, yelling ‘Top Gun! Top Gun!’