Snegurochka Read online

  ‘Oh – my – God!’ exclaims Vee. She steps through the glass door with Teddy. ‘The river, the monastery, that crazy Statue of Liberty looky-likey . . . Poor old maiden aunty Baba, they call her, Brezhnev’s dildo, waving her sword for the Motherland. Always looks like surrender to me. I filed a colour piece for The Economist when I arrived. Assholes didn’t run it.’

  ‘They didn’t have the right image,’ remarks Teddy, his voice low, the base notes to Vee’s contralto. ‘Now, up here, at dawn, long exposure, the smog a little blue in the background . . .’

  Lucas follows them out onto the balcony. ‘Rachel used to be a picture researcher. Travel books, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Is that right?’ says Teddy, turning and smiling through the doorway. ‘Who for?’

  Rachel tries to relax. She smiles back. ‘Gallon Press. Near the British Museum. No one’s ever heard of it.’

  ‘They use authors’ own pics, mainly,’ says Lucas. ‘Tightwads. It’s the same problem at the BBC. My lousy World Service retainer nails me to Bush House for all of three hundred pounds a month. I’m sick of peddling short bulletins that get knocked off the schedule by an old fart on the night desk. I need a story I can sink my teeth into – get a couple of solid half-hour features under my belt, something for Radio Four or a piece in the Sundays.’ He takes a swig of his beer, then leans out through the open window and peers down so that Rachel can’t see his head. ‘Smells like burning plastic down there,’ he declares, pulling his shoulders back inside and turning round to face Vee and Teddy. ‘So, what are you two working on now?’

  This, Rachel knows, is not the right question. Her husband seems jumpy, vulnerable in front of his Kiev friends. Here they are, Rachel and Lucas, saying things, stabbing at things, both, in different ways, out of their depth.

  Vee, on the other hand, gives nothing away. ‘Oh, you know,’ she says, twisting the silver necklace she wears. ‘Rule by decree. The World Bank’s latest doom-mongerings. Those so-called reformers whining about whether foreign films should be dubbed in Russian or Ukrainian – all talk and no action while the grandmas protest outside St Sophia’s and war vets starve along the boulevards. There’s a press conference tomorrow. They’re printing bigger denominations.’ She reaches into her handbag and pulls out a pack of Marlboro Lights. ‘One hundred kouponi, these cost me – and they’re counterfeit. See? The foil’s too smooth. Now that’s a story that won’t end well for some hapless new kid who tries to follow the money.’ She flips the lid with a glossy fingernail and holds the pack out to Lucas. He hesitates, until she turns and looks back apologetically at Rachel. ‘Sorry. God, that’s stupid of me. No smoking around the baby!’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Lucas, quick with his lighter. ‘It’s fine out here. If we shut the door.’ And Rachel sees now why he chose the flat with the glazed balcony where he and his fellow journalists can puff away all winter, guilt-free, even though he promised to give up when Ivan was born. This is his city, his job. These are his friends. Anyway, there are some things that only she knows. Ivan is stirring in his cot in the bedroom and immediately her breasts start to tingle as the let-down reflex floods the vessels behind her nipples. If she doesn’t go quickly, the pads will leak.

  Lucas twitches briefly as Ivan breaks into his high-pitched cry, though she’s already on her feet.

  ‘Can we see him? Will you bring him in here?’ calls Vee.

  ‘Sounds like an appetite!’ adds Teddy.

  ‘I have to feed him in the bedroom,’ murmurs Rachel as she slips down the hall.

  ‘We don’t mind – truly!’

  But Rachel is already closing the bedroom door.

  * * *

  Ivan’s face is turned inside out. His eyes are squeezed shut and his mouth is a red cave with its glistening, quivering uvula and hard ridges of gum. When Rachel lifts him away from the urine-soaked cot sheet he stops crying, but his lips are searching and she must be quick. She sits on the bed with her back against the flimsy headboard and her fingers rummage for the clip on her bra. As soon as she peels off the sodden, sticky pad, milk spurts forward and hits Ivan’s cheek. She hesitates only for a second, then bites down on her lip and brings his head towards her.

  When Ivan clamps on, she catches her breath and resists the urge to scream. The cracks in her skin re-open and she can see by the dribbles at Ivan’s mouth that the milk is blushed with blood. It’s the pink of her mother’s gelatinous salmon mousse that always made her want to gag. She closes her eyes, her head bent low over the baby as if this might ease the dragging, the burning. And it does ease, after a few minutes, as the pressure lessens and Ivan’s saliva softens the fissures and the scabs.

  Ivan is a big feeder and will drain her to the last drop. When his sucking flattens out into a more contented rhythm she brings her knees up to cradle him and leans her head back once more. Milk from her other breast has pooled across her stomach. She doesn’t wipe it away because she doesn’t care, in here, in this private space. Besides, every second is precious now, when the pain is fading and she knows she has two or three hours before she must endure it again. Her own breathing settles. The voices outside are forgotten. Time to sleep, the midwife would say in her sensible, seen-it-all tone. This same midwife told her to put Ivan on the bottle; that she needed to heal before she took her baby to a place with no emergency numbers, no guarantee of antibiotics. But formula milk means using sodium-rich mineral water that might poison her child, or that brown stuff from the tap in the kitchen.

  No, the midwife hadn’t understood. Rachel is staying awake. She needs to do the inventory.

  She starts with the bed. It is two singles pushed together; chipboard covered with a yellowish-brown veneer like every other piece of furniture in the flat. The mattress is hard and uneven. The blankets are heavy, boil-washed. Behind the bed, a large rug hangs on the wall. Not a traditional piece from Kazakhstan or the Caucasus but a factory-made brown rug with pink and red flowers. Opposite stands a wardrobe with her few clothes hanging neatly, not touching, where she placed them just two hours before. Lucas’s shirts hang beside them, with underwear hidden in a drawer. Ivan’s vests and babygros are folded on a shelf.

  Now she turns her head to the two small bedside cabinets. The one nearest Rachel contains her evening primrose cream and her breast pads and contraceptive pills, neatly spaced on the shelf. On top sit two books: her copy of Baby’s First Year full of words such as ‘weaning’, and a novel, Jurassic Park, which she found on the plane. She isn’t in the habit of picking up other people’s things, yet no one else seemed to want it. She will read ten pages a day, she’s decided. This will take five and a half weeks. The calculation helps her relax.

  Her eyes shift to the floor. The bedroom, the hallway and the living room are all coated in the same thick, uneven layer of varnish that reminds her of peanut brittle. Lucas says the landlord had it done so that he could raise the rent. The residue clogs up the gaps beneath the skirting.

  The floor brings to mind things she cannot see. Under the bed is a pull-out drawer. If she leans over she can reach it, though you always save the best to last if you know what’s good for you so she focuses instead on the large window. This window doesn’t bother her, despite the fact that the glass is smeared, veiled with a sagging net curtain. There’s no balcony on this side of the flat.

  Rachel looks down, still bewildered by the sight of her white arms cradling her son with the small brown spot above his right ear that will one day be a mole, his eyelashes like tiny scratches and his pink, almost translucent nostrils. Earlier, in the living room, she had glimpsed Ivan falling. Such visions, she knows, must be dismissed with a sharp shake of her head before they can fix themselves like premonitions, like memories, but Vee had been watching her, so she hadn’t moved. It’s a long way down from the thirteenth floor. Five seconds, she thinks. Maybe six. As the calculation freefalls, the impulse to lean over the side of th
e bed is something she can no longer ignore.

  Without detaching Ivan she stretches out her arm and gropes under the bed for the drawer. Out it slides, smooth on its castors and she is ready to weep with relief. The nappies sit exactly as she placed them: one hundred and twenty-six Pampers in twelve neat piles; four full packs she lugged over from England. Lucas has bought lots of cheap nappies, rigid and scratchy, imported from Latvia or Poland but they’re not as white or as soft or as absorbent and their tapes don’t stick and she suspects that, even now, a seepage of Ivan’s runny yellow faeces is flowering up his back. She’ll eke out the Pampers as she’ll eke out her reading: one nappy per night. Lucas won’t be allowed near them. He can change Ivan with the cheap ones.

  From the hallway beyond the door she hears footsteps. With a swift tap she rolls the drawer back under the bed, then wipes the sticky milk from her stomach and pulls her shirt across her chest. A soft knock, and Lucas’s face appears.

  ‘Asleep?’ he mouths. Rachel nods. Her husband slides into the room, closing the door behind him with exaggerated care. He is holding something in his hand. Dark green, rectangular, covered in shiny cellophane: a box of After Eights.

  ‘Vee brought them,’ he whispers, balancing the box on top of Jurassic Park. ‘For you. Can they come in and have a look?’

  Rachel eyes the chocolates with suspicion.

  ‘You didn’t tell them, did you?’

  ‘Tell them what?’ asks Lucas, staring her down, not blinking in the way he always does when he’s guilty. Of course he’s told them. He’s always telling people how when she was eight she tucked love notes inside the little waxed envelopes and hid them all around her parents’ house in Swansea before convincing herself that she was having a baby. He thinks it is funny, and charming; at their wedding reception he turned it into his story, the story of how he knew she was the one he wanted to marry. ‘Christ, Rach! What’s your problem? It’s just a box of chocolates! People want to meet you, they want to get to know you!’ He sighs, walks over to the window. ‘Look, I know you’ve had a tough time – you’re exhausted. But what else should I say? Just tell me what you want me to say.’

  Rachel stares at Lucas’s back, and strokes the plaster on Ivan’s thigh that covers the site of the immunisations he had at the clinic near Clapham Junction only two days before. In those weeks alone after the birth, the fact of her husband had wavered. She would wake in the night when her son moved or murmured, unable to remember how she had arrived in that empty bed in the ground-floor flat with the trains rumbling and the wild, abandoned whoops of the sirens.

  ‘You’re still going out then?’ she asks, removing Ivan from her breast with a scoop of her little finger. In her head the question seemed conciliatory, disinterested, but these aren’t the sounds that come out of her mouth.

  ‘Yes, I’m still going out. You could come too, bring Ivan – Zoya could give us a lift in the car. No one would mind.’

  ‘Or you could stay in. I’ve only just arrived.’

  ‘This is my job, Rach,’ says Lucas, quietly. ‘This is why we’re here.’

  ‘Right,’ mutters Rachel. She doesn’t look up until he’s gone.

  * * *

  Once upon a time, Rachel and Lucas told each other a story.

  ‘We are going to live in garret,’ said Rachel, as the wind outside the tent whipped across the guy ropes and pummelled the flysheet. ‘In a crumbly old building with mice scratching in the eaves. I will make soup and sing at the window.’

  ‘And I will pull on my felt boots and go out to bring the news to the people and come home with black bread and bacon. It will be hard,’ said Lucas.

  ‘We will be cold,’ agreed Rachel, ‘but I’ll learn to knit. And we’ll have a stove that I’ll feed with kindling—’

  ‘Kindling!’ Lucas roared with laughter and pulled the sleeping bag up closer over their heads. ‘What sort of a word is kindling?’

  ‘Well,’ said Rachel, undeterred. ‘It’s a fairytale word. It goes with woodcutters and forests and witches.’

  ‘So I’m the woodcutter, hmm?’ Lucas put his hand up her fleece. ‘In that case, Princess Snow White, I happen to know you’re nothing but a peasant underneath that prim exterior . . . a grubby little Cossack!’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rachel, as he rolled her over. ‘A Cossack. That’s exactly what I am.’

  * * *

  Rachel wakes a little after three a.m. and listens to the click as the front door closes. She doesn’t move. Ivan is asleep in his new cot at the end of the bed; it took her two hours to settle him after his midnight feed. By the time her husband slides between the clingy nylon sheets her body is rigid with tension.

  ‘Are you awake?’ whispers Lucas. His hand brushes her shoulder. A nick of his dry skin catches on her t-shirt. ‘Rach?’

  Rachel says nothing, her thoughts pinning her down. If she responds, he’ll want to have sex. They haven’t made love properly since Ivan was born. She was too sore from the stitches, too tired. Then he flew back to Kiev. Anyway, sex might wake Ivan. This is what she tells herself. This is the story she’ll tell him.

  Lucas, however, is drunk and alcohol makes him persistent.

  ‘You’re all warm,’ he murmurs, nuzzling his chin against her cheek, moving his hand down her breastbone towards her stretchmarked belly. At this she flinches, turns away from him, fingernails digging into her palms.

  ‘I love you, Rach. I’ve missed you.’ His moist lips wheedle. Soft words. She’s got to decide. Her body is recoiling, yet her mind still toys with a different version of herself – a hazy, generous version, intent on pleasure, spreading her legs. Let go, Rachel. She knows it shouldn’t feel like being someone else, turning around, unbending, letting his fingers circle her breasts. Maybe she can do this; it’s what couples do and they are a couple. Outside, dogs are barking. It’s only natural – don’t overthink it. Or think yourself into it.

  As Lucas pushes on she shuts her eyes and tries to relax, tries to block out the squeaking noise she hears, not from their bed but wheeling somewhere up above their heads. It’s the same noise she heard earlier, in the kitchen. Back and forth it rolls. Up and down. Round and round and round.

  Chapter 2

  Lucas and Rachel were supposed to conquer Eastern Europe. So said the best man at their New Forest wedding, the messages in the leaving cards from colleagues and the friends they’d accumulated along the way. Lucas’s mother, a twice-divorced Reader in Renaissance studies at a northern university, teased her youngest son about his pale-faced bride who couldn’t possibly imagine what she was getting herself into. Rachel’s mother, on the other hand, accepted Lucas as a fait accompli, seemingly relieved that her secretive daughter with her silent, strangled rebellions was now off her hands.

  Lucas, went the story, was a golden-haired adventurer in pursuit of the exotic, the Slavic, the surreal. Rachel, the soft-chinned picture researcher, was swept up in his wake. She wasn’t a Romanian spymaster’s daughter or a ­dissident-cum-catwalk model or an almond-eyed soloist from the St Petersburg conservatoire, though this was never discussed openly among the junior sub-editors and fledgling lawyers with whom the couple mingled back in London. She liked Cornwall, and expeditions to the National Portrait Gallery, and drinking frothy coffee in cafés along Northcote Road. No one considered that she might long for somewhere else. Running away was what her father had done, and he was a feckless deceitful bastard in anyone’s eyes; most especially, Rachel’s mother’s.

  Then one night, a little drunk, Rachel tried to catch a pigeon in Old Compton Street, scooting along with her hands sweeping forward, swearing she’d pluck it and bake it in a pie. Lucas, who felt he was on the cusp of something and might otherwise, at some not-too-distant moment, have ditched her, made a mental note, along with the After Eights story and the Cossack in the sleeping bag and other minor adventures he’d committed to memory. He confessed to
his debts, raised a glass to the future and eleven months later, they were married. When he told everyone his new wife was pregnant, eyebrows were raised, but not for long. She’d never made much of an impression.

  Now, Rachel has a fever. She doesn’t leave the apartment for a week – a week in which every day stretches out, each minute an hour. Instead she shuffles up and down the echoing hallway, waiting for the unfamiliar antibiotics that Vee has sent over to ease the infection in her milk ducts. When Ivan is feeding she lets out a little scream, because if she clamps her mouth shut she might bite off her tongue. When he is sleeping she bends over the yellowing bath to scrub the faeces off his clothes so that her breasts hang down, burning and engorged. Then when the chores are done, she lies on her back and reads Jurassic Park slowly, ten pages a day, measuring each word from the first deadly mauling to the infants bitten by strange lizards as she sucks on the wafer-thin chocolates by her bed. Luckily it is an extra-large box, the sort they sell in the airport Duty Free to shell-suited mafia men or liquor reps or the new apparatchiks or maybe foreign journalists with sick wives holed up in the flat on the thirteenth floor.

  Lucas doesn’t know how to help her, so he closes the front door behind him and strides about the city, looking for ways to make money, ways to make his name or career, anything to convince himself he’s made the right decision and settle the panic in his chest. Radio bulletin after radio bulletin is filed down the wires, grey as President Kravchuk and just as unremarked-upon. The revolutions are over and in London there’s no interest in the government sackings, the strikes and the price rises, the endless press conferences with their blank officialise and incomprehensible squabbles. Editors want colour, Lucas reckons, a nation’s quirks and curiosities served up in ninety-second sound-bites, so he walks down blind alleys and files short fillers about girls in bright headscarves selling jars of smetana outside the monastery or the men in blue overalls who move along the boulevards stripping leaves off the trees. He’ll have to be quick: autumn is a day’s work in Kiev. Along the wide streets and beneath the market archways, women queue to buy bags of buckwheat flour. They lug them up dark stairwells and mix the flour with water to make a thick grey paste. Newspaper is stuffed into window frames then daubed with the paste, which dries into a tight, brittle seal. The city is sucking itself inwards.