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

she should patch things up with her mother. ‘You could think this whole thing through,’ he continues. ‘Ivan ought to play with other children. You could stop nursing him, get your hair done, see some friends. Then, when you’re ready, we could work out what comes next.’

‘What about you?’ asks Rachel when he stops talking and her hand is steady, and she can set the kettle safely on the hob and turn round to face him.

‘Me?’ He adjusts his expression as he retreats to safer territory. ‘I’ll work, like I always do. I’ll get my feature out, report twenty-four-seven, start making some decent money so that you – we – have some options.’

‘What if I don’t want to go?’

Lucas stares at his wife, uncomprehending.

‘I’m not going to force you!’

‘Then I’ll stay here.’

Lucas doesn’t say anything for a while. He opens the kitchen window and leans out as the sound of the first cannon booms from the war memorial and the fireworks around the Motherland statue wheeze and blossom and pop.

‘Why put ourselves through this?’ he mutters, as the night air trembles.

Why indeed? Rachel’s closest acquaintances are Suzie and Zoya and Elena. There’s Teddy and Karl, of course, and she might even count Mykola, as he knows so much about her. These people aren’t her friends, though sometimes they seem more real than her own husband.

But they are not why she cannot retreat from her struggle with the balcony. They are not why she needs to stay.

Chapter 20

Elena shows up a week after Victory Day. She knocks on the door of Rachel and Lucas’s apartment one lunch-time as if nothing has changed – as if she isn’t now a landlady with Suzie and Rob’s hard currency to spend. When Rachel, surprised, lets her in the old woman squeezes Ivan’s chubby calves, fishes her slippers out of her string bag, accepts a cup of tea and sits down in the kitchen to watch the latest episode of Simplemente Maria.

Later, while Rachel feeds Ivan and Elena rinses the cups in the sink, the two of them manage through the usual mix of mimed verbs and stabbing nouns to establish that Elena is not living across town, but has in fact moved into a flat downstairs.

‘Kharasho!’ says Rachel, nodding vigorously to express the rush of relief she feels. Elena, who quickly tires of Rachel’s attempts at conversation, shuffles into the bedroom and strips Ivan’s dirty cot sheet before moving to the living room and folding the crumpled bedding she peels off the sofa. Rachel peeks in from the hallway, dismayed that Elena should find evidence for the disharmony between herself and Lucas, but Elena doesn’t seem to notice. She stuffs the laundry into a basket and puts her shoes back on, before indicating that Rachel must take it downstairs to the washing machine.

When Rachel is alone with Ivan once again she wedges a chair against the living room door, tidies the bedroom and retrieves Jurassic Park from under the bed. It seems that everyone is busy in their separate spheres. Zoya doesn’t bring her sheets to the basement any more – perhaps she is working elsewhere, as Lucas has so often suspected. Suzie, meanwhile, is preoccupied with the renovations of Elena’s old house. Lucas is out most of the time, chasing interviews or drinking or confessing his sins to Vee or maybe just walking the streets. His absence allows him and Rachel to put further confrontation on hold. Instead they move around each other with a determined solicitousness, meeting only in the hallway or at the threshold of the bathroom or in the wedge of electric light in front of the refrigerator.

Chapter 21

Across the river in Darnytsia, Zoya, standing in the kitchen of her flat, sets the telephone’s receiver back in its cradle and sits down at the table.

She can guess the identity of her caller. The man had told her in his low, soft voice that he knew a great deal about her. He knew, for example, that her flat was still registered in her grandfather’s name, that she’d had three abortions in the mid-1980s and that she had been questioned about the provenance of her car at a road block the previous winter. ‘So what?’ Zoya had said, ready to cut him off. Then the man said he had copies of her grandfather’s medical records, that he knew about the morphine levels in his blood and his urine and that such things could be misconstrued if she was not more careful and continued to sniff like a bitch around the private affairs of legitimate businessmen. He also warned her not to discuss this conversation with the likes of that dried up whore Elena Vasilyevna.

Zoya lights a cigarette and blows smoke towards the open window. She doesn’t fear for herself, but Elena is another matter. She is going to have to be careful.

Chapter 22

June arrives like a pulsing heart, pink and glistening. There are swift thunderstorms and sudden showers, after which the city’s shining streets expand beneath the trees to accommodate the makeshift stalls with their blushing radishes and tender carrots, strawberries, smetana and clear linden honey. Meanwhile the hot water is turned off for a fortnight’s maintenance in the apartment block on Staronavodnitska Street. As the pipes bleed they make sad sounds, like whale song. Lucas starts shaving at the office, while Rachel boils pans on the stove and holds Ivan as he splashes in the sink. Sometimes she takes him to Suzie’s flat, whenever Suzie wants Rachel to examine her swatches of fabric samples or discuss the merits of pelmets or moan about the fact that the old woman who leased them the house still appears every evening to water the vegetable patch. Most of the time, however, Rachel walks, and as she walks she stares at the passers-by who seem, every day, more strange and more familiar.

One afternoon, as Rachel is watching a man buy raspberries from a fruit stall on Khreschatyk, Teddy spies