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

‘Allo?’ says a voice.

She freezes.

‘Allo. Good afternoon. Am I speaking to Mrs Porter?’ The words, faint at first, emphasise the P as if it is being punched out of a Dymo machine.

‘Yes . . .’ whispers Rachel. ‘Who is this?’

‘Good afternoon,’ repeats the voice, a woman, her articulation too precise to be British. ‘My name is Lizbette Solwein and I am deputy director of human resources at the UN mission in Kiev. Mrs Porter, I have been given your name as someone who might be willing to undertake an independent consumer survey on behalf of our international staff. May I ask, do you hold a British passport and is this something that might interest you?’

Rachel breathes, in and out, in and out. This stranger can’t have heard; she can’t have heard . . .

‘Mrs Porter? Can you hear me? Mrs Porter?’

‘Yes,’ she manages. ‘Thank you. I see.’

* * *

The survey is delivered three days later by a man driving a silver Volvo. It is a fat slab of computer paper in a black ring binder. Eight hundred and seventy items, neatly tabulated, each row requiring her to insert the price charged by three different stores. Rachel tries not to be deterred by the impossibility of ‘Brie, French, 400g’ or ‘Sandwich toaster, Breville, model A530, silver’. Instead she resolves to start with things she knows how to find: tea and onions.

‘Come on, Ivan,’ she says as she packs her son into his snowsuit and his mittens and balaclava and belts him into his pushchair. ‘Let’s go shopping.’

Down in the foyer, she hurries past the caretaker’s booth without looking in. They set off for the kiosks and she hauls the pushchair over the tramlines, then up the lane past the decaying wooden houses with their skeletal cats and their arthritic trees to the ancient Kiev Pechersk monastery, at the top of the hill.

Chapter 8

Today there are no onions for sale at the roadside. Fortunately, however, the concrete kiosks with their barred windows stuffed with cigarettes and lighters and plastic combs have plenty of Liptons tea bags; they oblige Rachel with three different prices. She also finds bananas, or rather, one banana, lying next to some frost-blackened carrots and a trio of cabbages on a sheet of newspaper outside the Gate Church of the Trinity. The banana and the vegetables are crusted with snow. So is the old woman with sunken cheeks who squats on a crate beside them. Her head is swathed in several thick scarves. Her hands are wrapped in strips of dirty cloth.

‘Dobrey dyen. Skolko?’ asks Rachel. She points at the single piece of fruit, remembering too late that she needs a kilo price.

As the woman looks up, Rachel hears a click from somewhere to her left. She turns and there is Teddy, Vee and Lucas’s photographer friend, lowering his camera.

‘Don’t worry,’ he tells her. ‘You’re not in the shot.’

‘Oh, hello!’ she says, dismayed. She would rather not be watched by this grinning American as she tries to purchase a solitary banana from a babushka with bandages for gloves. Teddy is wearing an oversized hat made of rabbit fur, with the ear flaps dangling round his jaw. The fur is patchy and matted, as if the hat is diseased.

‘Shopping?’ he asks, tilting his head to one side.

‘Not really,’ Rachel says, as she realises she is being teased. ‘But I need bananas. Onions, too.’

Teddy smiles and exchanges a few words in Ukrainian with the woman.

‘She says your baby looks strong. And the banana is yours for twenty-five kouponi. You might find onions inside the monastery. Shall we take a look?’

Rachel finds her purse and pulls out a dollar. The woman takes it without demur and Rachel considers handing over her thick thermal gloves as well, but Teddy’s presence makes her hesitate.

‘They don’t like the pushchair,’ she says, sliding the banana into her pocket. ‘I’ve tried it before. Lucas says they think the wheels will damage the floors.’

‘Ah,’ says Teddy, with an exaggerated frown. He turns towards the entrance. ‘The Baba Yagas.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The Baba Yagas. The old witches. They sit in dark nooks in churches and museums, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting mothers, but any child will tell you the story of the real Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in an old house that struts about on chicken legs. She rides around the woods in a mortar, with a pestle for crunching babies’ bones.’ He sucks his cheeks in, comically, and Rachel glances back at the old woman hunched over her vegetables as Teddy lifts the pushchair through the narrow door. When he guides her beneath an archway with its flaking plasterwork and slippery paving, no one protests.

The monastery is starkly beautiful in the snow. Rachel has managed glimpses of it on previous walks, and Lucas has told her about its miracles and shrines, its concussion-inducing catacombs crammed with the remains of dead saints preserved in their coffins, fingers exposed at the hems of their shrouds like thin, shrivelled dates. She lets go of Ivan’s pushchair and turns round, taking it all in. The whiteness blankets the narrow flowerbeds and scrappy verges and draws her eye upwards to the green roof tiles, the gold domes and the small cross at the top of the tiered bell tower. Even the stark remains of the ruined church directly in front of her seem picturesque. Two pairs of black-robed monks process from one doorway to another, their skin bluish beneath their dark beards. Women in tight headscarves scrape the paths with ancient spades, and crows congregate in silence around a neat pyre of rubbish, each playing their part as if directed by an unseen hand.

Teddy finishes putting away his camera.

‘Don’t you want to photograph this?’ asks Rachel. ‘I feel like I’m in a painting.’

Teddy grins. ‘Nope. Already got what I want.’

‘What about over there? It looks like it was bombed.’

‘Not bombed. The main church was blown up. In 1941. The retreating NKVD laid explosives in the cellars. Two years ago UNESCO made it a