Snegurochka

by Judith Heneghan

  Rachel, twisting her head, glimpses Mykola’s white shirt and dark hair on the far side of his car.

  ‘He’s not following us,’ she says.

  Zoya leans over the steering wheel, her head almost touching the windscreen.

  ‘Why would he? He knows where we live.’

  * * *

  The little Zhiguli shakes and rattles as it moves onto the dual carriageway. Zoya re-sets her mirror and wipes the perspiration from her neck, but she doesn’t slow down until they reach the outer suburbs. The car makes a thudding sound on its right side, towards the rear. Zoya mutters under her breath, then brakes to a stop by the tramlines and leans over the back seat to open Stepan’s door.

  ‘Ubiraysya otsuda!’ She spits out the words like a curse.

  ‘Nyet!’ cries Elena – the first word she has uttered since she climbed into the car. The two women start to gabble in Ukrainian. Zoya shakes off the old woman’s hand.

  ‘Stop arguing,’ pleads Rachel. ‘I don’t understand! Tell me what’s going on!’

  ‘I am not moving until that boy gets out!’ says Zoya. ‘He is spying on us! Who do you think told that man where to find us, eh? He didn’t need to go upstairs to fetch his coat!’ She slumps down in her seat, the anger suddenly gone out of her. ‘Elena still protects him. She says if I abandon Stepan, I abandon her, too . . .’ Her hands fumble with her cigarettes. She lights one and sucks hard, her eyes flicking to Rachel via the driver’s mirror as if she can’t make up her mind what to say next. Sweat glistens in the creases above her nose and when she speaks again her voice is low, hoarse. ‘You know what I discovered when I tried to find out about that gangster? He looks at my hospital files, at my grandfather’s files. He pays the doctors, he pays the typists, the officials, the boys like Stepan, then he calls me at my home and says I must be punished.’

  ‘Why? What for?’ Rachel looks at Stepan who is scratching his ribs, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. Stop it, she thinks, but he doesn’t.

  ‘Abortions!’ says Zoya. ‘Two – three – why not more? It is not a crime, the state allows, and why would I want a child to be born who was made in our poisonous air? But my grandfather – well, I tell you, that Mykola of yours is a liar, a disease. He says I am the one who killed him – my own grandfather! With black market morphine. He thinks he is a god – the one who decides, the one who passes sentence, but is he the one nursing his grandfather? Does he have to listen as an old man shrieks with pain in the night and shits himself in the only bed while his neighbours’ children grow sick with cancer of the thyroid or cancer of the blood? Why does he think he must protect you? You – as if you are so innocent . . .’ Zoya takes a deep breath, flicks ash out of the window. ‘Do not believe him, Rachel. He wants to control you.’

  Rachel cradles Ivan close to her chest. He is starting to cry, upset by the distraught voices, the car that isn’t moving. She wants to get him home, to feed him and bathe him and rock him to sleep and then count her pages, except that she has buried her book amongst the tree roots in the woods.

  ‘He is not my Mykola,’ she murmurs. ‘He can’t control me. Please, let’s go.’

  Stepan shifts in his seat, his bare legs making a sticking sound against the plastic. ‘You cannot go,’ he says, to Rachel. ‘There is broken tyre.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe Zoya want to wait for Mykola to fix it?’

  His provocation galvanises Zoya, who jumps out of the car, reaches in to the back seat and hauls the boy out on to the sticky tarmac by his t-shirt. He sits where she dumps him, pulling faces and complaining as she inspects the rear tyre then thumps her fist on the roof.

  ‘Out! Out!’ she shouts, waving her arm at Elena and Rachel. ‘Bystra! I cannot change the wheel while you sit there.’

  Rachel struggles out of the car and rests Ivan on her hip. He is grizzling, leaning his head backwards so that she almost loses her balance. She can feel the heat from the road on her legs as she reaches into her bag for her son’s hat. The tram stop is no more than a sign – there is no shelter, no tree, just a long, etiolated shadow cast by the concrete post. Zoya is muttering, rummaging in the boot for the jack and the wrench and the spare wheel as lorries behind her thunder past, creating blasts of dry wind. Elena, however, isn’t moving. The flowers and the knife lie in a heap on the floor of the car, but she is staring straight ahead through the dusty windscreen, as if she is in shock.

  ‘Elena,’ murmurs Rachel, opening her door for her. She touches the old woman’s arm and is taken aback by the feel of bone beneath the skin. No muscle, no fat. Mykola said she’d had a lover and a baby – that she’d watched them both die, or worse. He’d been speaking in English, so Elena can’t have understood him, yet he has reached in and eviscerated her somehow, trailing her insides across the concrete – intimate, vulnerable, stinking. Rachel doesn’t know whether to believe him, and because of this she feels ashamed.

  Zoya stops what she is doing and leans in through the driver’s door to murmur something to Elena. ‘Come here,’ she says to Rachel, as Elena slowly swings out one leg and holds on to the door frame, refusing Rachel’s hand. ‘Elena must hold the baby. You and Stepan must help me take off the wheel.’

  Certainly, fixing it will require them all to work together. Rachel hesitates for a moment before handing Ivan to Elena. Elena moves back from the verge, holding the child stiffly, not looking at him. It is as if she doesn’t know him or is afraid to rest her eyes on him. Instead she peers off to the left in the direction from which they have come, while Zoya jacks up the car and puts the wrench in position. Stepan steps onto its jutting arm, gripping Rachel’s shoulder for support, jigging up and down, his bare toes poking out of his plastic gym flip flops until the nuts loosen and Zoya can prise off the wheel and bolt on the spare.

  By the time the damaged wheel has been stowed in the boot, all four of them are done in.

  Zoya takes them back to Staronavodnitska Street. She drives carefully, silently, continually checking her rear-view mirror without moving her head. The sun has dipped behind the apartment block and in the shade the car park is gloomy. Stepan slips out before Zoya has turned off the engine and disappears behind the dump bins in the direction of the waste ground. Elena moves more slowly, pulling her cardigan around her before hobbling towards the steps.

  Rachel hauls her suitcase out of the boot, too tired to do anything except drop it onto the tarmac. Nevertheless, she is reluctant to leave Zoya without some sort of reckoning.

  ‘I am sorry . . .’ She stops, seeing Zoya’s scowl.

  ‘Sorry? For what? This isn’t your business. I have already told you so.’ Zoya hooks out the pushchair and shuts the rear passenger door. ‘You are a good mother, Rachel. Believe this, look after your little boy, but stay away from Elena, yes? Or Mykola will hurt her.’

  Rachel sucks in a breath, remembering the knife and the way Elena gripped it. ‘Why? Why would he do that?’

  ‘Because he wants to control everything! What she did in the past, we don’t know. You understand that, don’t you? She cares for Ivan and she cares for Stepan, too, though I cannot think why when that little shit betrays her. I will stay with her tonight. You must go upstairs. Find Lucas.’

  When Zoya dismisses her in this way she makes everything sound so simple. Mykola’s words can’t be unsaid, but he is too young; he couldn’t have been present at the events he described. None of them can guess what torments Elena suffered. The war was a different time. A terrifying time. None of them has any right to judge.

  Nevertheless, as Rachel lugs her case and Ivan’s pushchair up the steps, as she waits for the lift, as she puts her key in the door of their apartment, she counts the floors, counts the walls, and though she has buried her book, she comforts herself with the fact that its pages are filed like an insurance policy in her head.

  * * *

  Lucas doesn’t yell, or make a fuss, or even get up when Rache
l parks their sleeping son’s pushchair in the hallway. She finds him sprawled on the floor in the bedroom, curtains pulled against the early evening sun. He is lying on his side, blowing smoke rings under the bed, with the half-empty bottle of Vee’s Christmas Stolichnaya near his ear.

  ‘You didn’t go then,’ he says, tipping his head back to see her. ‘I called your mum. She said you hadn’t told her you were coming, so I phoned the airline and they said they couldn’t tell me whether you had checked in.’

  ‘I went to the country with Zoya.’ Rachel looks at her husband, at his half-closed eyes and supine limbs stretched out on the parquet at her feet. He is blocking her path to the wardrobe. She wants to tell him to move, to stop smoking; she wants to feel his anger towards her for not catching her flight, yet his torpor makes her hesitate. Something has happened. She retreats to the kitchen to prepare Ivan’s milk.

  As the pipe coughs and the water spurts from the tap into the kettle she hears Lucas kick the wardrobe door.

  ‘Rach,’ he calls, his voice thin and hoarse. ‘Rach!’

  ‘I’m here,’ she says, turning off the tap.

  ‘The film has been cancelled. Lukyanenko announced it this morning on the steps of the House of Artists. Then he set fire to the master reel. There won’t be a premiere, or any distribution. Nothing at all.’

  Rachel leaves the kettle in the sink. She wasn’t expecting this. She steps back to the bedroom and stands in the doorway.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some politician said it was incendiary, an incitement, so no licences would be issued. Then the backers started pulling out. Vee knew it was going down the pan but she fucking lied to me. She’s just published a piece in The Washington Post. She must have been working on it for a week or two at least. Maybe longer. Maybe from the start.’ Lucas’s voice rises like a child’s. ‘She’s gone for the corruption angle. She even mentions me: “A naive English freelancer” like she’s writing my epitaph . . .’

  ‘Lucas . . .’

  ‘She played me,’ he says, groaning and rolling on to his back. ‘Lukyanenko must have known. I can’t stay here now. I can’t work here. I need to get out. This place has been a disaster. I’ve not made any money, I’ve got no credentials, I’m sleeping on the sofa . . .’ He twists his head to look up at her, but he is facing the wrong way and Rachel realises it must seem as if she is towering over him.

  ‘Shh,’ she says, stooping to pick up the vodka bottle. Lucas flails and grasps her wrist. His eyes struggle to focus, he stinks of cigarettes and alcohol and she recoils a little, yet he doesn’t let go. Hold on then, she wills him. Hold on. He is hiding nothing from her, though the day has been full of betrayal: Vee, but also Stepan, and Mykola with his terrible words about Elena. Zoya has always insisted that Rachel and Lucas don’t belong in this city, with these people. Lucas, on the other hand, knew Rachel before she became a mother. He had loved her when she was still a girl.

  ‘Shhh,’ she whispers, softer now. There is a kind of release in solace, in the comfort of the familiar, even if that comfort is more like the caress of a mother to her child. Lucas is willing, and soon he is eager. She is cautious at first, but then she unzips his trousers and holds him in her hand and she knows she could do anything at this moment – anything – and he would acquiesce. When she moves down to brush her lips against his skin, faces appear: Mykola in his white shirt, staring through the rear window; Zoya at the edge of the birch trees, watching her when she doesn’t think Rachel can see her; Elena; Stepan; her mother; even Lucas himself, until finally she blinks away these spectres, blocks her ears to their voices and, for a few charged seconds, has no memory at all.

  Chapter 26

  The first time Rachel kissed a boy, she felt the strangeness within her – her lips felt different, her tongue was not her own. She was changed by it, she thought. It wasn’t like kissing a doll, or the mirror, or the back of her hand, even when she’d licked it. The first time she slept with Lucas, she felt different again. His stubble chafed her skin and he made her insides burn.

  How many times can that happen, Rachel wonders. Once, or twice, or hundreds and thousands of times? You feel something, you remember the feeling and it becomes a story. Yet the story changes; all the time, it changes. The end, as it approaches, is never really the end.

  * * *

  Once Lucas is sober, once the wound of Vee’s betrayal is found not to be fatal, he tells Rachel it makes sense to stay in Kiev until they have used up the year’s rental on the apartment. It takes him a few days to recover his equilibrium, but money must be earned, there are news bulletins to file, political in-fighting to comment on and a spike in interest from British news desks about a burgeoning doomsday cult that is rumoured to be brainwashing children in the oblasts south of the city. Enough to keep a freelance journalist busy through the dog days of July and August.

  Zoya no longer translates for Lucas, though she still drives them occasionally, when the mood takes her, when she’s not working on her own stories or poking at the margins of Mykola Sirko’s business affairs, trying to find a weak link or a disgruntled official who might slip her a lead. At night Zoya stays with Elena in the flat on the second floor and Rachel rarely sees the old caretaker any more. Indeed, Rachel has concluded that Elena is avoiding her. The thought troubles her as she does her laundry in the basement by herself, though she doesn’t go looking for Elena. No more Simplemente Maria, no more biscuits or extravagantly mimed enquiries about whether Ivan is eating properly or sleeping well. Of course she would ask Elena in if she came knocking on the door, but Elena doesn’t.

  Lucas notices a change in his wife. When he brings up the subject of what they will do when they go back to London she doesn’t give him the cold shoulder, but talks of playgroups and getting in touch with a couple of estate agents. He can barely recall the girl he once knew, or what he once saw within her – something hidden that stirred him and made him wonder. Motherhood has changed her, he decides. She seems more practical now that the difficult post-birth months are over. She tries new recipes – cooks proper meals rather than chewy pasta added to whatever she can find at the market. She visits Suzie to drink coffee and hear the latest about the house along the lane in Tsarskoye Selo, including how Rob wants to buy it outright from Elena before the refurbishment is complete.

  At the end of July Lucas suggests they fly down to Yalta for a weekend. To the seaside, as he puts it – their first holiday as a family. It is easy to arrange. They stay in a sanatorium built for communist party chiefs. Beneath the modernist chandeliers white-uniformed staff trained in balneotherapy and calisthenics feed Ivan soupy kasha flavoured with cherries and guide his limbs into geometrical shapes. The sea reminds Lucas of Brighton, while the tunnel down to the beach is like a set-piece from Dr No. One night he and Rachel make love on the unforgiving mattress of the big walnut bed and it occurs to him that if his wife keeps her eyes closed it must be because she is taking pleasure for herself. He can give her that, he thinks. They can work on that. He pushes Vee out of his mind – it isn’t hard, now that she’s been offered a job in DC and has flown over to meet her new boss. Despite his set-backs, he feels lighter, more optimistic. He has applied for a job in Alma-Ata. Another starter post, but this one comes with a house and the prospect of some TV work at last. He won’t tell Rachel just yet. The interview is at Bush House on the fifth of September. They’ll leave for London three days before.

  When Lucas takes Ivan and wades into the Black Sea Rachel picks up a pebble, smooth and grey: a souvenir for their son of a place he will never remember.

  ‘Take a photograph!’ Lucas shouts, exultant, as he dips Ivan’s legs into the lapping waves.

  Rachel clicks the shutter on her little Instamatic. She won’t tell her husband that she has already blessed their son’s feet in the stream at Zoya’s grandfather’s hut. She lets the foam splash over her bare toes and scrunches them into the shingle.

>   * * *

  Back at the apartment block on Staronavodnitksa Street, Elena steps out of the lift. The doors clank shut behind her as she shuffles across the thirteenth floor landing, one hand gripping a brown Jiffy envelope, the other hand fumbling in her pocket. Her joints are stiff this evening. Her fingers won’t respond as they should, but she manages to grasp the key Lucas gave her and push it into the lock.

  As the door swings open, she pauses, catching her breath. No one is at home. Light from the living room window floods the hallway and she feels its warmth on her face. She should have made this journey before, but she couldn’t face the young mother, Rachel. She couldn’t face her own shame.

  She slips off her shoes before making her way to the bedroom. The curtains are drawn; there is no air in the flat, but she won’t stay for long. As she bends down, wincing, and rolls the drawer out from beneath the bed, a light brown cockroach flees beneath the wardrobe. The padded envelope looks odd amongst the nappies. It can’t be helped. The drawer is the only place where that husband of Rachel’s won’t rummage.

  As Elena leaves the flat, closing the door firmly behind her, a shadow passes in front of the window by the rubbish chute and blocks out the light. She peers, and flinches. A man stands in front of her. She knows this man, or thinks she does. This is the gangster who drives the silver car, the man who has threatened her, the man she would have stabbed if she could on the way back from Zoya’s hut.

  ‘Zdravstvuy, Mama.’

  Sacred, dreadful words. Finally, everything she has hidden, everything she has buried is laid bare.

  ‘Oleksandr?’

  Her heart is absorbing every atom of her son. She lost him forty years ago, and now he is here. He has been here all along.

  Her shoulders drop. She breathes out. She waits.