Rachel pauses at one of the new craft stalls outside the monastery. The table is laden with wooden toys, some brightly painted and gleaming in the afternoon sunshine. Others are plain, cheaper, the do-it-yourself variety of stacking dolls – one for papa, one for mama, one for baby, or two or three. She is tempted by a bell-shaped figure with intricate gold and blue patterns on its skirt that tinkles when she lifts it.
Ivan reaches forward, his sunhat tipping back from his head as he strains at the belt of his pushchair. His clothes are summer-thin and he isn’t wearing shoes, so the woman behind the table scowls disapprovingly, but Rachel doesn’t care. She asks the price of the toy, counts out the right money and when it is handed over she pops it into her bag. Another souvenir for her son, she thinks. He is too young to remember their walks, the things they’ve seen. It will keep him entertained on the plane.
She turns the corner and heads along Lavrska Street towards the top end of Tsarskoye Selo.
* * *
Mykola crosses himself three times as he emerges from the little church in the Lower Lavra and exits the monastery via a gate in the wall. His car is parked a short distance away near the bus stop; he prefers to approach and leave the monastery on foot, to spend a few minutes alone to consider his petitions to Our Lady of the Dormition. His bodyguard, loitering in the trees, flicks away his cigarette when he sees him, and Mykola tries not to show his irritation as he climbs the steps at the edge of the park. The practicalities are distasteful to him, but security has become a necessary evil. These days paying the hospital bills of the local police chief’s daughter won’t keep the snakes in the sewers. He knows someone has opened a file on him down at the Justice Ministry.
Today he has business to attend to, an appointment in town. The thought distracts him from more recent preoccupations: a certain breathlessness, an inability to sleep. His doctors tell him his heart is healthy, but in the church just now he had to put his hand on the wall to steady himself. He’s a businessman, yet he also sees ghosts.
At the top of the hill, Lavrska Street is full of trucks and trolleybuses. It takes him a few seconds to adjust to the traffic, though he doesn’t resent the pollution or the sense of organised chaos around him: it is always good for cash-flow, for progress.
Then, just as his bodyguard opens the door of his silver Lexus, he notices a woman with a pushchair on the opposite side of the street.
He gestures to his man to wait for him at the car and walks south-east, in the direction of the river.
* * *
Ivan starts wailing as soon as Rachel turns into Panfilovstev Street. He wants to walk, his new obsession, but he likes to touch everything and there is broken glass amongst the weeds along the fences.
‘Let’s go to Elena’s house,’ Rachel murmurs, unwilling to return to the apartment just yet, and as she pushes her son down the rutted lane that dwindles between the cottages and the noise from the main road fades and the stones beneath the buggy’s wheels crunch and pop, he sits up. Eyes wide, he grips the sides of his buggy like an infant prince to whom all things – the insects, the overhanging branches, the weeds in the potholes before him – are both fascinating and unworthy.
The house, when they stop in front of it, has been transformed. A triple-glazed veranda runs along the front, with white wicker furniture just visible beyond the toughened glass. The path to the front door is paved with marble and security lights stare, blankly, from their steel mountings beneath the eaves. To the right sits a brand-new garage, its door open, empty, a dark maw. Beyond it Rachel can see the tiled roof of the sauna. The workmen haven’t quite finished yet; their tools and some bags of sand or cement lie beneath a tarpaulin.
The house itself is quiet. Deserted, even. The upstairs shutters are closed. If Suzie were here, Rachel would be embarrassed to be found outside, uninvited, but the stillness convinces her that no one is home. Turning left, she pushes Ivan slowly alongside the old blue-painted picket fence that marks out the property’s perimeter. The fence seems out of place now. Rachel recalls talk of a wall or something more secure, more private. She peers at the once-neat vegetable beds, already a tangle of bolting carrots and leeks, and wonders when these, too, will be concreted over.
Her gaze shifts towards the five or six fruit trees that huddle a few yards away in the lower part of the garden.
‘Pears!’ she says, unbuckling Ivan, lifting him up to her hip. Each fruit hangs from its branch like a gift, yellow and speckled, now waiting to be plucked and either gorged fresh from the tree or steamed, preserved or pickled. ‘Apa!’ repeats her son, kicking his legs and beaming. All that hoeing and weeding, pruning and thinning out, all those pots on the windowsill, those tiny black seeds. Elena would laugh at Ivan shouting at her fruit, but she never wasted food. She would want him to eat some.
A pear drops to the ground with a soft thump. Wasps bob and dip around the disturbance; the long, thin grass in the shade beneath the trees is littered with windfalls. Some of them are rotting already, the skin covered in brown circles and bruises, puckered and concave, with a dusting of velvety spores. Others look perfect, almost as if a careful hand has placed them there. They won’t last long. The worms and the ants are already advancing.
Rachel hoists Ivan into the air and sets him down on the other side of the fence. Then, hitching up her gathered denim skirt and holding on to a post, she stands on the seat of the pushchair and swings a leg over. The seat slips from under her and she scrapes the inside of her knee before landing awkwardly next to Ivan. Now the pushchair lies on its side on the path, one wheel slowly spinning. She frowns, anxious for a moment, then remembers that of course they can leave by the gate. She turns and ducks beneath the branches of the nearest tree.
The first two windfalls she slips into the pockets of her skirt. Their warm weight knocks awkwardly against her thighs, yet the urge to take more is too great and with no bag to hand, Rachel tugs off her old cardigan and spreads it on the ground. Soon she has collected a small pile. The scent from the fruit is heady – not sharp and cidery, but dense and honeyish. Insects crawl over her hands – ants, mainly, and the odd wasp, though she isn’t stung. When she shakes off the wasps they swoop drunkenly or lie on their backs and wave their antennae in the grass. She glances towards her son, who has grasped a fence post with one hand and is tugging at plantain heads with the other. No pear for him until they get back to the flat. The wasps will go straight for the sugar.
It is hot work, but Rachel gathers more than she needs. She ties the cardigan arms to make a bundle, then reemerges from the trees brushing a twig from her hair and looks up towards the house.
Still quiet.
No, not quiet.
A yelp to her right – a shriek of protest. Rachel turns to see a figure straightening up on the other side of the fence. A man in a suit is standing there; he is grasping Ivan beneath the armpits. Bare legs dangle in the sunshine. Mykola Sirko is taking her son.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks, bewildered. ‘Give him to me.’
Mykola regards her with his dark, sad eyes. ‘You should not be here. I will hold him. He knows me.’
A cry catches in Rachel’s throat. She has dreamt about this man, she has looked for his face on a crowded street, she has recoiled from his inferences and his stories about Elena, and now Elena is dead.
Ivan isn’t crying, though she sees how clumsily Mykola is clutching him. This Mykola seems different from the man she last saw on the road in the birch woods. His eyes flicker about. He is less steady on his feet.
‘Give him to me,’ she repeats. Ivan stops wriggling and stares at her, seeking clues. She steps towards the fence without taking her eyes off her son. Stay calm, she tells herself. Don’t frighten him.
Mykola moves backwards, keeping two arms’ lengths between them. He leans sideways and grasps the overturned pushchair with his spare hand, setting it upright.
‘
Be careful. There are wasps.’ His voice is low, soft. He looks at Ivan as if wondering what to do with him.
Rachel’s ribs press against the pickets. ‘Ivan’s thirsty. And hungry. I need to take him home.’
Mykola inclines his head. ‘This is natural. But I cannot let you feed him anything the old whore has grown. You must leave the fruit.’
The old whore – he means his own mother. Rachel’s heart is pounding. Ivan is wearing the little socks with the hens – the ones Elena bought him. She wants to feel her child’s hot damp feet in her palms. She is breathless with the pull of him, the longing to draw him close. She remembers the cardigan she is gripping in her hand and drops it to the ground. Pears spill and tumble across the grass.
‘I won’t take them. I don’t want them.’
Mykola doesn’t react.
‘Elena was kind to me,’ she goes on, rushing her words. ‘Whatever she did before, I know she regretted it. She helped me. To give you up like that – she must have been desperate. She must have thought she was keeping you safe – giving you the best chance.’
Mykola raises his free hand and rubs at the skin between his eyebrows. ‘You are mistaken,’ he murmurs, his gaze switching to the house. ‘Your friends have told you some things. The past, you should know, holds many stories. I told you one myself. Nevertheless, a mother should never break her bond with her child.’
Ivan keeps twisting his head. A wasp buzzes near his shoulder.
‘You’re right,’ says Rachel, willing it to stay away from her son. ‘But when you have no choice, like Elena—’
‘No!’ Mykola’s voice rises at the end of the word as if he is instructing a child. ‘She had a choice. Always! Elena Vasilyevna’s lover, my father, worked for the Kiev Regional Committee. His barren wife wanted a baby, so Elena agreed to exchange me for this.’ He waves towards the house, then the fruit trees. ‘Problem – the wife did not like me. Other problem – the NKVD did not like my father. Some minor disagreement, someone else after his position . . . He was shot in the head on Lavrska Street, where you walk. Outside the monastery! Well the monks took me in, but they could not keep me. Elena Vasilyevna knew, yet she chose to compound her crime. She did not take me back. Instead she locked her gate and tended her garden. Potatoes, onions, pears!’ He is shaking his head, as if he still can’t believe it. ‘No one took her name off the papers, you see. So now it is mine and I will destroy it and burn all the trees.’
He starts walking towards the gate that leads to the house. He is pressing Ivan against his shoulder with one hand, while with the other he drags the pushchair behind him. Rachel follows, walking parallel with the fence: steady, steady, not shifting her gaze.
When they both reach the gate Ivan strains against Mykola’s grasp and starts shouting in short, staccato bursts: ‘Apa! Apa!’
Rachel can’t bear it any longer.
‘Please . . .’ She breathes the word out, willing it to touch this man; for him to show mercy.
Mykola parks the pushchair in the long grass and turns to observe her, his head tilting slightly.
‘You are afraid, Rachel.’
‘I want my baby.’
‘Like a good mother. The mother I know you to be.’ He rests his free hand on the latch and frowns. Then, with a soft, slow ‘tak’ of resignation, he opens the gate and gives up the child.
Rachel, her body shaking, pulls Ivan into her arms, greedy for his weight as he wriggles, pressing her lips against his neck. She brushes past Mykola and takes a few hurried steps towards the lane before she sees the wasp on her son’s thigh, but when she flicks it away it stings the back of her hand. The pain is instant and intense, like the anger that unexpectedly grips her.
She stops, looks back.
Mykola is still gazing towards the house, arms loose at his sides.
‘She might have loved you,’ she says. ‘If she’d known who you were. You should have told her!’
‘She did know – at the end.’
‘How?’ Rachel is almost shouting. ‘Were you with her when she died?’
‘She was leaving your flat.’
‘And you followed her? You should have left her alone! So what if she visited? We gave her a key! She was returning something that belonged to me!’
‘You did not listen to my warning. I have struggled to forgive you.’
In the silence that follows, in no more than a moment, the truth rises, clear and cold.
‘You killed her,’ murmurs Rachel.
Mykola’s head drops; he won’t look at her now. He is shrinking back into the depths of his abandonment.
‘At the end she did not need me. Even for that.’
* * *
This is how Rachel will remember Mykola, his head turned away, his gaze fixed on the things she cannot see. But first she must make her way home.
As shock takes hold she stumbles as she half-runs along the lane. She still hasn’t reached the turn in the road when a horn blares, short and sharp. Ivan’s nails dig into her arm as he starts to wail. A black jeep sweeps in from Panfilovstev Street. The stones beneath its tyres make a cracking sound like cap guns.
The jeep fills the narrow lane. As it slows to a crawl and its chrome bumper inches level with her thigh the wing mirror snags an overhanging branch. Rachel shields Ivan’s head with her stung hand and presses herself against the hedge that pokes through the fence to her left. The vehicle’s windows are tinted; she can’t see the driver, but the passenger window glides down and a woman removes her sunglasses.
‘Hello! Where are you going?’
It is Suzie. Her eyes have a pinkish tinge; the skin beneath them is puffy and grey. Rachel shakes her head, too overcome to explain about her throbbing knuckles, about Mykola, about Ivan’s distress.
‘I came to pick windfalls. From your garden.’
‘Oh – you should have called . . .’
Now Rachel sees Rob in the driving seat. His broad shoulders and square head fill the space beyond his wife.
‘Sounds like trespassing,’ he mutters sourly, his shades mirroring the sun’s glare. He flicks off the air conditioning and leans forward over the steering wheel. ‘Who the fuck is that on my driveway?’
Rachel looks at Suzie, at her strained face, at the elastic band peeping out from her sleeve. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, apologising for the trouble that will come; trouble that it is too late to halt now. She must concentrate on the narrow gap that leads round the back of the jeep towards Panfilovstev Street beyond.
‘Who is that?’ persists Rob, thick thumbs pushing on the horn so that Rachel jumps and Ivan stiffens.
‘Mykola Sirko,’ she says, yanking her skirt free of the hedge.
‘Mykola Sirko – that cunt. I told him to stay out of my way . . .’
Ivan is struggling to get down. Rachel realises she has left the pushchair by the gate, but there’s no going back. ‘He’s Elena’s son. Your new landlord!’ she shouts, her hand pressing against the rear window as she clambers round the bumper. The street ahead curves away to the right. Its trajectory pulls her forward – her tired feet, her arms that ache and throb, but which now she knows are strong.
I am leaving, she thinks, and the two windfalls in her pockets bump like soft fists against her thighs.
* * *
Once Rachel has passed the old houses, once she has crossed the tramlines at the bend on Staronavodnitska Street and avoided the dogs idling beneath the rowans, she slows down and takes several deep breaths. The smell of warm concrete fills her nostrils, along with exhaust fumes and a hint of dry leaves. There is the apartment block ahead of her, its shadow stretching past the dump bins. Ivan has stopped crying, so she sets him on the pavement and lets him walk a little. His fingers grip hers as he struts and goose-steps across the car park. With every stride he seems more confident of the ground beneath his feet.
‘Adeen, dva, tre, chitirye,’ she counts, right up to thirteen, in a funny voice that makes him giggle.
Upstairs on the landing, in the open doorway of the apartment, she pauses. Lucas is out, packing up his equipment at the office, shredding old files. The rooms are silent; the ceiling is silent above her head. She closes the front door behind her and settles Ivan on the parquet before moving to the kitchen to bathe her hand. Only then does she slide the stolen pears from her skirt pockets, sniff their musty sweetness and take a knife out of the drawer to cut away the bruised flesh. She saves the pips in a saucer, thinking she might plant them by the fence on the waste ground or leave them on the windowsill for the birds. The rest she slices into slivers, pale and glistening with juice.
‘Tea time, Ivan,’ she murmurs as she carries the plate through to the living room and sets it on the sofa for her son.
The afternoons are growing shorter already. Soon the women spilling from the trams will dig out their winter hats, but for now the warmth lingers. Rachel stands at the balcony window long after the fruit has been eaten, listening to the slap of Ivan’s bare feet as he cruises down the hallway. He will want his milk soon, she thinks, as she gazes at the trees and roofs of Tsarskoye Selo, as the sun draws itself over the back of the apartment blocks, as the silver ribbon of the river, the gold domes of the monastery and, finally, the glinting sword tip of the Motherland statue lose their lustre and sink into shadow.
Snegurochka Page 24