Snegurochka Page 3
Elena Vasilyevna, caretaker of Building Four on Staronavodnitska Street, awakes from her nap and watches to see if the foreign woman on the thirteenth floor will know what to do. She doesn’t hold her breath, for the woman doesn’t show herself for a week; she certainly doesn’t go shopping for the right kind of flour. Instead, when she finally emerges from the lift with her fat little baby in that flimsy foreign buggy, off they dawdle past the kiosks on Kutuzova Street as if there’s no such thing as winter. The baby isn’t dressed properly and shouldn’t be outside. Elena has tried telling her, but the woman just pulls an ugly face and leaves the lobby door wide open. The buggy makes marks on the floor.
Really, someone needs to put her straight and it’s not going to be that lanky husband of hers. He carries a rucksack, for crying out loud. Elena knew a journalist once. He wore a blue serge jacket and a black leather cap. The cap made him look serious – someone who meant business. When they hanged him from the second-floor window of the post office it had fallen to the pavement like a fat drop of ink. No one dared touch it for a week.
* * *
There are birds in the roof of the universam. Starlings or house martins, or maybe some middle-European species Rachel cannot identify. They don’t chatter, though their sudden wing-beats startle her as she stands in the cavernous state-owned store less than half a mile from Staronavodnitska Street. She’s not sure what’s for sale at the counter, but a small crowd is milling and someone is pushing behind her and if she circles round to take a look she will lose her place. Some recent advice from Vee still echoes in her head. New deliveries don’t stick around for long; never ignore a queue of more than five people.
It took her ages to find the shop or market or whatever she is supposed to call it. The antibiotics have muddled her. She felt the same when she left the hospital with Ivan. Everything beyond its shiny mint-green corridors seemed unfamiliar and unreal. This is a hairbrush, she would tell herself. This is a kettle. This is your front door and this is your newborn son.
The universam is a circular concrete bunker. Hexagonal grey and blue tiles tessellate its mushroom-shaped roof and rotting leaves pile up in its gutters. It squats in the middle of a courtyard off Kutuzova Street, half hidden by the surrounding horse chestnuts and bourgeois-era apartments with their iron balconies and the scrambling vines that characterise this part of the city. Inside, most of the shelves are bare. Rachel can see only a row of zinc watering cans and, further along, several pyramids of purplish sausage. Despite the lack of merchandise, women in nylon shop coats are leaning against the counters that surround the central foyer. Two of them bring out buckets and start to mop the floor. It must be quite a job, coping with all the bird droppings. The mopped area spreads like a stain.
Rachel squints at a one-word sign high up on the wall in front of her. The letters are orange, rounded. She sounds out the Cyrillic characters to herself – dee-ay-tee – and lessens her grip on Ivan’s buggy handles as she realises this is a word she knows: ‘children’. Perhaps they’ll have some baby wipes. She has been using loo roll dampened with water since her two boxes of Johnson’s ran out. It is making Ivan’s bottom sore.
The man in front of Rachel is blocking her view. He is wearing a cheaply-finished blouson jacket and stiff, stonewashed jeans. His neck is red, almost raw, and dandruff speckles his shoulders. When he raises a hand to smooth his thinning hair she pulls Ivan’s buggy back to avoid any falling flakes. Ivan kicks out his stubby little legs and waves an arm. He’s cranking himself up for something. No one is talking. The air tastes fusty, as if spores of mould have settled on Rachel’s tongue. The universam isn’t a dollar shop, she reminds herself. Its empty symmetry and its silence leach the vapours of a stagnant collective past.
The queue is moving slowly; someone nudges her from behind. She looks over her shoulder and sees a young woman with blue eyeshadow and dyed black hair. The woman is about the same age as Rachel. She is licking a slab of white ice cream wrapped in a piece of paper.
‘Eezveneetyie,’ ventures Rachel. Excuse me. Her voice sounds louder than she intends and the words aren’t the right ones; she remembers only a handful of phrases from the Russian classes she struggled to attend before Ivan was born. The woman, however, sees the buggy and leans around Rachel, offering her ice cream to Ivan.
‘Nyet!’ exclaims Rachel, putting a hand in front of his mouth. The woman straightens up and frowns as Ivan’s arms reach out and he starts to whimper. The man with the dandruff turns round and finally the counter is revealed and Rachel can see that the items for sale are not baby wipes but plastic push-along toys, crudely moulded with gurning Donald Duck faces.
As she stares, the aproned clerk behind the counter sucks in her cheeks and waves her forward. It is Rachel’s turn, apparently, despite the other queuers milling. She takes out her purse.
‘Skolko?’ How much?
Already she knows this is the wrong question. There’s no till here, no cashbox. Where does she pay?
The clerk has no time for idiots. She rolls her eyes and beckons to the young woman behind Rachel to take her place. Only the man with the dandruff takes pity on her. He turns his head and says something to the clerk, who reaches for a pad of thin grey paper and a pen attached to the counter by a piece of string and scribbles down two words. She tears off the slip of paper and pushes it towards the man, who hands it to Rachel.
‘Spaseebo,’ she murmurs – thank you – still not sure what to do next. The man nods gravely and points towards a counter a few yards away near the door. The sign above says Kassa – cash desk. She must take the chit and pay at the desk and return with a receipt for the goods. That’s what everyone else has been doing.
Ten minutes later, Rachel emerges from the universam with a Donald Duck push-along toy dangling awkwardly from the handles of the buggy. She feels conspicuous, outlandish even, yet no one else seems to notice as she walks back to the apartment block. She passes an expensive-looking silver car in the car park, but its windows are tinted and she can’t see if anyone is inside.
The old caretaker is absent from the foyer.
Lucas is in the kitchen when she struggles through the front door. ‘Your first purchase!’ he says, sticking his head into the hallway. ‘Impressive! Shopping like a local! Tomorrow you should walk up through Tsarskoye Selo – the Tsar’s Village. Visit the monastery. You’ll love it.’
Rachel opens the cupboard next to the bathroom and pushes the toy inside. ‘What do you mean, the Tsar’s Village?’
Lucas shrugs. ‘That’s what the cottages on the hill are called. Zoya says they were built for Communist Party apparatchiks – a taste of suburbia for local flunkies of one sort or another. Most of them are wrecks now, mind you.’
Indeed, the houses of the Tsar’s Village are wrecks. Rachel squints at them from the kitchen window. They cling to the slopes that lead up to the thick walls and golden domes of the monastery, little more than wooden shacks, one room upstairs and one room downstairs, a bit of land, broken fences, stray dogs and rusting dump bins. She wanders up there with Ivan the next afternoon, searching for shops as she maps out the neighbourhood. There’s the universam, of course, echoing and empty apart from today’s meagre display of household cleaning items such as wire wool and mops and bags of indeterminate powder that might be detergent or flour. There’s the dollar store, called the kashtan, with its jars of out-dated baby food and packets of thick tan tights. Shiny loaves of white bread are baked and sold from a hole in the wall near the universam, or perhaps it is a part of the universam – Rachel isn’t sure. Then there are the concrete kiosks where she can buy dusty yellow packets of Liptons tea, Tampax, stretchy hairbands and sugary drinks from someone with a midriff but no face; the darkened windows are always at the waist height of the vendors inside. Finally she stops by the old women squatting outside the peeling green doors of the monastery. Their wares are laid out on cloth squares: a trio of wrinkled lemo
ns, a string of onions or pickled cucumbers floating in a jar like grey turds.
Rachel practises her Russian: two, ten thousand, twenty thousand, how much, thank you. The old women don’t look up. They just stare at her shoes.
* * *
Elena Vasilyevna hobbles along Lavrska Street beneath the high white wall of the monastery. Her bowed legs ache; hoeing is easier than walking, but today is an anniversary so she must be here. She doesn’t look over her shoulder, even though that boy from the fourteenth floor, Stepan, has been following her all the way from Staronavodnitska Street. He is up to something. She’s seen him leaning in through the window of a fancy car parked outside the flats. Last week she found several handfuls of burning hair smouldering and stinking in the wastepaper bin in her cubicle.
He needs an occupation, she thinks. Like most boys.
As Elena passes the frescoed Gate Church of the Trinity, she glimpses the young Englishwoman, head uncovered, her baby on her hip. She is trying to drag that buggy of hers through the narrow wooden doorway. Well, if the gatekeepers don’t send her packing then the pilgrims certainly will. They kneel and scrape as if the old faith has never stopped flowing through their dried-up veins. Elena sucks her teeth and spits. She has no interest in trinities or holy mothers. She won’t cross herself when she passes, she won’t mutter a prayer. Her faith fell out of her like a stillborn infant when she was barely grown.
This is Lavrska Street, where assassins creep.
She walks on.
* * *
Lucas is out on the balcony. He is fixing his map of Ukraine to the side wall with pieces of chewed gum. It is taking him a long time to secure it; the gum won’t stick to the tiles.
‘Rach!’ he calls. ‘Rach!’
Rachel is sitting on the floor in the kitchen. She is giving her son his first taste of solids. Ivan is semi-upright in his bouncy chair in front of her, a bib under his chin and a panicky look in his eyes. Rachel is panicking, too. She has memorised the chapter on weaning in Baby’s First Year, poring over the photographs of artfully messy kitchens and smiling, hippy-ish parents in high-ceilinged Victorian semis. She has sterilised the spoon, boiled the water, measured out the baby rice she brought with her from England and mixed it to the texture of sloppy wallpaper paste.
‘Come out here, Rach! I want to take a photo of you and Ivan.’
Rachel wishes Lucas would go to his press conference. She nudges Ivan’s chair a little further away from the open doorway with her foot.
‘It’s too cold,’ she says over her shoulder.
‘It’s not cold!’ shouts Lucas. ‘January will be cold.’ A pause. ‘You haven’t been out here at all yet.’
Rachel suspends the plastic spoon in mid-air, but she can’t blink away the falling baby, the splayed limbs, the flopping head. ‘The height makes me feel dizzy,’ she murmurs, listening as the balcony door closes and her husband’s footsteps approach along the hallway. ‘I prefer going for walks.’
‘I’m sorry you’re not keen on the flat,’ he says, leaning against the door frame. A rare memory stabs at him, swift and bright: Rachel, his new fiancée on a weekend away in Paris, stretching her arms up into the air from a viewing platform on the Eiffel Tower, flushed and teasing, pretending to fling his passport over the top of the safety barrier. She’d not been dizzy then, he thinks, though his head had been reeling. ‘We can’t move again. I’ve paid for the year up front. We wouldn’t get the money back. Anyway, you should have seen the cockroaches in my last place, not to mention the lethal wiring. This place is brighter, and safer. In the spring we can put a table on the balcony, get some pots, grow some herbs like proper Ukrainians.’
Rachel nods, slowly, as if her husband has helped her to accept something she hasn’t previously understood; as if this is the last time he needs to mention the subject. She waits for Ivan to open his mouth, then slips the spoon between his lips.
‘He doesn’t like it much!’ says Lucas, peering over Rachel’s shoulder. ‘He’s just spitting it back out.’
‘He’s feeling it with his tongue,’ she murmurs, leaning forward and using her little finger to scoop a dribble back into her son’s mouth. ‘He’s not used to anything that doesn’t come from me.’ These are words she has memorised. They are easy to say. Easier than words about choking, turning blue, not breathing. She doesn’t know where the nearest hospital is. Lucas can’t tell her if there’s an English-speaking doctor and she wouldn’t be offering her son solids at all if he didn’t scream for milk every two hours. Her body needs a chance to heal.
Lucas straightens up, goes to the window, sees the nearly empty box of After Eights on the windowsill.
‘When did you eat these?’
Now Rachel really wants him to leave. She wipes Ivan’s chin with his bib. Lucas opens the fridge and peers inside; fingers the packet of baby rice. Then he picks up her copy of Jurassic Park and flicks through the pages.
‘Hey, you’re not still reading this . . .’ He doesn’t know about her ten-pages-a-day habit. He doesn’t know that six days ago she reached the part where the newborn’s face is gnawed by baby raptors who climb in through the clinic window while its mother sleeps in the next room. Sometimes when she’s finished her allotted words she goes back and reads that page again, three, four, five times, tapping each word with her finger, counting its beats to keep her own baby safe.
‘Look,’ Lucas says, turning towards Rachel, his tone softening as he tries to tackle her silent non-compliance. ‘I know it’s tough for you. You’ve been ill and you’re knackered and you’re doing everything for Ivan, washing his clothes, feeding him yourself, getting up in the night. I really think it would help if you went out more – I mean, come to the office sometimes, go into town. You’ve been here over two weeks. Which reminds me – you’ll never guess who rang the office number this morning. Your mother!’
‘Mum?’ Rachel pulls the spoon away from Ivan’s lips. ‘Why didn’t she call here?’
Lucas shrugs. ‘She’s never going to make it easy for herself, or you. I gave her the number for the apartment, but I think she just wanted to check the address. She said you’d left it on a piece of paper but she couldn’t read your handwriting. Maybe she wants to send you a parcel.’
Rachel thinks about the last time she saw her mother. She had made a great fuss over the journey up to London, but the afternoon had been dismal, her mother tutting over the state of the little basement flat. She’d not offered to tidy up or cook; she sat upright in the only armchair and turned down her mouth when Rachel took her grandson into the bedroom to feed him.
‘She can read my writing perfectly well,’ she murmurs, letting Ivan suck on her finger. He judders slightly and his eyes half close, his whole body focused on satisfying this need. The familiar tingling starts up in her breasts. ‘Did she ask about Ivan?’
‘She went on about boiling stuff and and not giving him unpasteurised cheese,’ replies Lucas. He looks at his watch. ‘Anyway, next week I’ll take some time off. We could go to a restaurant. Drive to a park. No – I tell you what – we’ll all go out this afternoon – in the car, down to Khreschatyk. I’ve got some recording to do at the central market and we’ll visit the dollar store near the office. We need to normalise things – find ways to make you more independent. Kiev is an incredible city once you start to scratch the surface. There’s so much I want to show you.’
He stoops, rubs his hand across her shoulders. Rachel fixes her eyes on the curve of her son’s cheek.
‘It might help . . .’ He falters, still searching for the right words to express an unfathomable doubt. Then the doorbell rings and they are both spared.
It is Zoya, his fixer. Zoya always likes to be at press conferences forty minutes early. She’d honed her English by listening to the World Service and identified herself as the BBC’s eyes and ears in Kiev long before Lucas arrived. Now she is relegated to erra
nds-runner, occasional translator, driver of the office car. She’s a small, round-hipped woman of thirty-six whom Lucas assumes to be at least a decade older because of her bleached yellow hair and the nicotine-stained teeth she only shows when she’s picking them. She pokes her head into the kitchen, her shiny forehead creased into a frown.
‘The dezhornaya is angry,’ she says, nodding at Rachel. ‘Dirty nappies are coming down the rubbish chute. They make a bad smell. If you must use the disposables you will have to carry them down to the waste bins yourself. I am passing the message to you, however I am not your messenger. Now, please, the car is downstairs and we must not be late.’
Lucas smiles and rolls his eyes at Rachel, as if to reassure her that he’s the one in charge. Then he and Zoya are gone, both lighting up before the front door shuts behind them.
Rachel doesn’t notice, until she looks for it later, that Lucas has taken her book.
* * *
‘How is your wife enjoying Kiev?’ asks the Finance Ministry’s press officer.
Lucas turns round. Zoya has ensured he is early for the press conference; the drab room with the usual nylon backdrop ruched in dusty folds behind the podium is still only a quarter full. Vee and Teddy are talking near the exit; their heads are angled towards each other. He pulls distractedly on his ear. They look as if they’re discussing something interesting.
‘Oh, it’s all good, good . . .’ he murmurs, wondering how the man with mousy flat hair and watery eyes knows about his wife. Maybe Vee’s been talking. What’s his name? Torin? Tarin? Zoya would know, but Lucas has sent Zoya off to buy more batteries for his audio recorder.