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

has been pushed back to July and Lukyanenko won’t let him sit in on the editing. Lucas has asked Teddy to take pictures for an Observer feature he’s hoping to bag, but Teddy has problems of his own. Karl’s café has been vandalised; disgusting graffiti have been daubed on its walls. They are thinking of shipping out to the Balkans, or so he tells Lucas one evening at the apartment on Staronavodnitska Street. Events in Bosnia aren’t fixed yet, he says. He wants to document a more fluid, less predictable story.

‘The story’s not fixed here, either, unless we make it so!’ says Lucas.

‘Everyone makes it so,’ argues Teddy, with uncharacteristic sourness. ‘Politicians, editors, readers. Journalists are the worst. I want something else.’

Rachel, meanwhile, is preoccupied with Ivan. When she takes him outside he throws off his mittens and his hat, again and again, chuckling like a maniac, playing the game that always gets her into trouble with the old folk on the trolleybus. He is starting to look more Ukrainian with his cowlick of blond hair, the vests with strange fastenings and some woolly leggings made in Korea. He is crawling now, too – a sort of lop-sided scoot. One moment he is under her feet in the kitchen and the next he has vanished along the hallway. If she doesn’t intercept him he will pull out the drawer from under the bed and fling nappies across the parquet with frowning concentration. She keeps the living room door shut, of course, and when Lucas is out she always wedges a chair under the handle.

Nevertheless, there are some difficulties that Rachel cannot keep at bay with her rituals and her barriers and her pages. When Ivan sits on the bedroom floor and his eyes spill swollen tears, she thinks he’s starting to peer into the future. When she opens the cupboard door and slips behind it to stow his vests, perhaps he thinks she will disappear like Lucy Pevensie, away to Narnia, and never return. She tries playing peekaboo with the door, but Ivan won’t be tricked. Sometimes he howls for hours. The only remedy is to take him out in the baby carrier or the pushchair, down across the waste ground, over to Podil by way of the river or up through Tsarskoye Selo to the monastery, with its winding cobbled paths.

* * *

‘Do you know of any parks?’ Rachel asks Zoya, next time she meets her in the basement.

‘Parks?’ Zoya snorts. ‘Are you not looking? There are parks everywhere in Kiev.’

‘I know,’ says Rachel. ‘But I want a quieter space, away from all the kiosks and monuments.’

Zoya turns and mutters to Elena, who is emptying used teabags onto newspaper at her workbench. Elena no longer seems to sit in her cubicle upstairs, but spends most of her working day foraging in the dump bins for eggshells and banana skins. Not that she ever had much to do other than twitch her curtain and bang on the glass whenever someone forgot to wipe their feet. Elena and Zoya are becoming friends, it seems; Rachel often finds them talking together – not chatting, exactly, but murmuring and nodding with their arms folded across their chests. Now when the old woman hobbles forward her fingers are caked in dirt and the deep pockets of her overalls are actually full of the stuff she’s dug up from somewhere. Rachel has noticed that her cubicle is full of seedlings sprouting in cones of newspaper or in yoghurt pots ranged on the windowsill and the shelf above the desk. Her own private greenhouse.

‘You could try the Botanical Gardens,’ says Zoya. ‘Though you’ll have to pay. They charge tourists.’

Elena, however, is interrupting her, her eyes bright in the lamplight. ‘Botanicheskiy sad?’ She grips Rachel’s arm. ‘Bas – pesyat shest. Pesyat. Shest.’

Rachel nods, this time understanding.

Take the number fifty-six.

* * *

As the creaking trolleybus approaches the stop on Kutuzova Street, Rachel, waiting on the pavement, lifts Ivan out of the pushchair, folds it down and picks it up with her spare hand. Ivan is becoming too heavy for her to manage for more than short periods in the baby carrier. She hopes the Botanical Gardens live up to Elena’s enthusiasm. She hopes she will be able to find them.

The bus is crowded, as the buses always are. She climbs on board and stands near the front, wedging the concertina’d pushchair between her hip and the edge of a seat. The man sitting there balances a pale green porcelain toilet bowl on his lap. His arms are folded across the rim; its weight must surely press into his thighs, yet the man’s eyes are closed and his head lolls. He doesn’t notice when Ivan tugs off his knitted hat and drops it past his ear into the bowl. Rachel will have to fish it out, but the woman behind her makes a sucking noise with her teeth as if to say this bare-headed foreign malchik will now catch pneumonia or scarlet fever or whooping cough and it will be its mother’s fault, for no baby should be out without its head covered and at least one sour-faced granny in attendance. Rachel blows a soft raspberry on Ivan’s forehead. She has read her pages. She has checked the piles of nappies. We are off on an outing, she thinks, and no one can stop us.

Outside, the watery sunlight glances off the car windscreens as the bus sighs and heaves its way into the flow of traffic. Rachel tips forward, then shifts her weight so as not to fall. People begin to shuffle and mutter as someone stands up and starts moving along the aisle, but she takes no notice and looks out of the window, ticking off the traffic lights, counting the plane trees that line the boulevard. At the tenth tree she hears a low voice behind her.

‘Pazhalsta.’

Rachel looks over her shoulder. She recognises the speaker straight away, but it takes her a moment to realise that his thick black moustache, his