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

‘Pazhalsta . . .’ begins Rachel, wanting to ask her how long it will take and why she needs flour, but Elena turns and holds out a green overall she has brought with her. She waggles her fingers, motioning Rachel to put it on. Then she opens a kitchen cupboard, rummages until she finds a suitable saucepan and passes this, too, to Rachel.

‘Seychas,’ she says, ‘davai rabotat.’ Now, work.

* * *

Rachel’s job, it seems, is to sit on the red chair in the living room and tear sheets of newspaper into rectangles the size of a small matchbox. The first pieces are too small, so Elena takes the newspaper from her with a tutting noise and demonstrates the desired proportions. The rectangles go into the saucepan, while Elena turns her attention to her bucket of flour and water. She mixes it with immense concentration, testing it on her tongue and squeezing it between her fingers before pressing the mixture into the gaps between the window and its frame. As soon as she finishes one side, she wipes her hands on her pinafore and begins to layer the newspaper pieces neatly over the paste to create a seal.

Rachel finds the work strangely calming, despite the presence of the old woman in the apartment. Ivan chews on a bread ring in his bouncy chair, perfectly content as long as she rocks him regularly. There is no need to speak. The television news hums softly from the set in the corner. Pictures of a forest somewhere in the Balkans. Two truckloads of skinny soldiers. A square-headed commander in a peaked green cap striding across a hillside. She notices that when the old woman frowns her twisting black eyebrow hairs tangle above her nose. Her misshapen hands shake a little as she works, but there is no point in signalling for her to stop. Elena, she can tell, will complete this task, even to her last breath. If Rachel were to try to prevent her she would never have the courage to cross the foyer downstairs again. So she doesn’t intervene when Elena moves across to the balcony door and seals that up, too. On the contrary, the glued door offers immediate relief from her struggles with the building’s outer fabric. Rachel doesn’t care what Lucas will say. He promised to stop smoking and he hasn’t. She jogs the bouncy chair with her foot and leans forward to smile down at her son.

‘Smatri!’ says Elena, loudly. She is pointing at the television. ‘Simplemente Maria.’

Rachel doesn’t understand.

‘Simplemente Maria!’ Elena moves over to the television and mimes the action of turning up the volume with sharp flicks of her wrist.

‘Oh.’ Rachel rises to her feet and does as she is instructed. She’s noticed Simplemente Maria before, bemused by the Russian dubbing of what appears to be a Mexican soap from the early eighties. The station airs it at least three times a day, in between the aerobics workouts with young women in uncomfortably tiny leotards, so perhaps it is popular: after all, it isn’t hard to follow. Maria the maid gets seduced by the polo player. His shirt is very white against the straw. His long black boots stay on. She still gets pregnant, though. They always show the birth in the closing credits.

This time, however, the plot seems quite complicated; it involves a young girl who is either Maria’s child or Maria as a child or the child of her employers. In the next scene Maria seems older, still with long raven plaits. She is dispensing sugary churros as the cameras linger on her tear-filled eyes and brave half-smile.

As the episode unfolds, Rachel looks over at Elena. The caretaker has finished working at the window and is now leaning against the wall. She has pushed her hands deep into the front pockets of her overall, as if cradling her belly. Her face bears the same expression of deep concentration she wore as she tasted the flour paste; narrow lips pushed out, eyes flicking from one character to another. Rachel turns her attention back to the screen, curious about what so enthrals her. Soon she herself is equally absorbed, puzzling over whether Maria has been penetrated by the family patriarch as well as his playboy son.

When the doorbell rings, both women jump.

Elena straightens up, muttering, disconcerted perhaps to be caught so far from her cubicle downstairs. Rachel responds more slowly. Maybe it is Zoya, who will most likely sneer at both the nature of the drama unfolding on the television and Rachel’s latitude with the caretaker. She crosses to the front door and puts her eye to the spyhole. Something is blocking the light. Then the view clears and she pulls her head back sharply.

The little fish eye lens has shown her the face of a madman.

‘Zdravstvuyte!’ shouts a voice. A fist bangs twice against the door. ‘Steeralnuyu mashinu zakazyvali?’

Elena comes hurrying.

‘Shto? Steeralnaya mashina?’ She glares at Rachel suspiciously, then takes hold of the little stool that sits by the phone and hauls it over to the door so that she, too, can peer through the spyhole. A stream of Russian invective ensues, mainly from Elena, with one or two muffled words from the madman. The caretaker keeps glancing over her shoulder with a look of increasing fury until Rachel understands that it isn’t the madman she is appalled by so much as Rachel’s own ineptitude in causing him to appear. Then Elena climbs down from the stool with a huffing noise and begins working both locks with fingers like gristly chicken bones.

‘Don’t!’ implores Rachel. It is too late. The door is open and the madman isn’t a madman at all, but a man with a horribly damaged eye, the eyelid so bruised and swollen she cannot see his eyeball. Next to him sits a huge cardboard box that reaches up to his waist. She sees the picture before she forms the words. A square with a circle