Snegurochka by Judith Heneghan (best ebook reader for laptop .TXT) 📕

Ivan is in the shuddering phase after a prolonged bout of screaming. His eyelids droop, his damp head lolls from the exhaustion of his assault upon himself, yet every time Rachel turns towards his cot the crying begins again. So she flicks off the lamp and rocks him in the strange blank snow light, swaying from one hip to the other in a movement that sometimes she continues even when she isn’t holding him; when her body, no longer weighted, tries to float up into the air.

‘Once upon a time,’ she whispers, ‘once upon a time there lived a little old man and a little old woman in a hut in the middle of the forest.’ She pauses, brushing Ivan’s ear with her lips. There’s a story about the snow buried deep in her childhood. If she thinks too hard she won’t remember, but if she speaks it, she might. ‘They had enough to eat and plenty of kindling for the fire and they had each other, yet still this wasn’t enough. They longed for a child.’

The whirring sound stops in the bathroom.

‘Then one winter,’ she continues, pressing her forehead against the cold glass, ‘when the snow lay deep and thick on the ground, the old couple went outside and made a child out of snow.’

‘I know this story,’ says Lucas from somewhere behind her. ‘Snegurochka, the little snow maiden. She melts in the spring. Mind you, these days poor Snegurochka has Ded Moroz for a sugar daddy. She’s morphed into some busty blond with plaited hair extensions handing out free samples of coke in a spangly cape down in Independence Square.’ He pulls open a drawer. ‘The nationalists hate those Russian folktales, but as long as Snegurochka dispenses gifts, she’s a keeper.’

Rachel stops swaying. She thinks she can see a figure far below – a smudge, really, sweeping the path that leads away from the flats towards the road. Is it the caretaker? She looks like a small grey crab, jabbing and flailing.

‘Sometimes the caretaker comes up in the lift and leaves Ivan’s dirty nappies on the doormat,’ she says.

‘What? Oh Jesus, that old witch is such a communist. I’ll get Zoya to put her straight.’

‘Zoya says it’s not her job,’ Rachel reminds him. ‘Anyway, she says the caretaker hates nappies because they can’t be re-used. Plastic, cardboard, food waste is all good. But not dirty nappies.’ She touches the bridge of her nose, comforted by the familiar contours of cartilage and bone. ‘Do you think we could buy a washing machine soon?’

Lucas packs his aftershave into his holdall and steps over to the window. Small words can open deep chasms, he finds. He never knows what might set his wife off these days, or cause her to retreat into the dull silence that made him put that call in to his editor at Bush House. It’s just a short trip he’s taking, so he can clear his head.

‘Maybe,’ he answers, cautiously. ‘We’ve maxed out on Visa, but I’ll be earning while I’m away. Then in the new year I’ll focus on my film project.’ Another pause. ‘Vee says she’ll call you. But if you’re worried, I mean, worried about anything – the snow, Ivan – you could use the emergency office dollars. Zoya can always book you a flight. You could go back to the UK and spend Christmas with your mum. I bet she’s missing you, even if she’s crap at showing it.’

Rachel has been waiting for this. She knows it would be the sensible thing to do – the midwife, her GP, the few acquaintances she can call on in London would all agree. The prospect cannot be allowed to distract her. Fear, ever-present, makes Rachel grip Ivan more tightly. Instead she recalls her parents’ fifties bungalow: her old bedroom with the stained hand basin in the corner and the pyrocanthus scratching at the window; the cramped porch where her father used to smoke before he took himself on a golfing holiday to Singapore and never came back. Her mother blamed Rachel, the child who had made her tedious. Rachel pictures her now, slicing carrots in the kitchen, fist gripping the knife, hammering it down on the red formica worktop, never looking her daughter in the eye, never asking the right question.

‘I like the snow,’ she says, counting Ivan’s ten toes with her fingers, the ten days that Lucas will be away, each with its five separate parts: sleeping, feeding, washing, shopping, reading. Truly, when she parcels it up like that it’s not so bad. ‘And anyway, we can’t afford the flights. Though if you see any Pampers in Lviv . . . the sixteen to twenty-four pound size?’

‘I know!’ Lucas says, with a look that might be relief, or disappointment. ‘I know! Top of my list!’

* * *

Once Lucas has left and the tail lights of his taxi have vanished into the weather, Rachel attends to her routines. First she steps into the living room and shunts the sofa up against the balcony door. Then she moves the telephone out to the hallway, setting it up on the cheaply laminated bureau with the three-sided vanity mirror next to the front door. As she closes the living room door she wedges a kitchen chair beneath the handle.

‘The tropical rain fell in great drenching sheets,’ she murmurs, as if an incantation from her lost book might set a seal on her actions.

At midday she mashes a little stewed carrot into Ivan’s flaked rice. She washes all the bedlinen in the bath and hangs it to dry on a clothes rack in the bedroom, then realigns the depleted pile of Pampers in the drawer beneath the bed, despite her nagging awareness that Ivan has outgrown the size she brought with her from London. In the afternoon she takes her son outside in the pushchair, piling on the blankets to protect him from the caretaker’s disapproval as much as the cold. She learns to dislodge the build-up