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

in the foyer Elena is waiting to say goodbye. She bends forward to give Ivan a kiss and a squeeze. When she straightens up she is smiling, but her eyes are watery with tears. Zoya speaks to her quickly in Ukrainian and Elena bows her head.

‘What did you say to her?’ asks Rachel, as they exit through the door.

‘I told her to stay out of your flat.’

‘What?’ Rachel looks back at Elena, who is already retreating up the stairs.

Zoya sighs. ‘Your flat. She has a key. Lucas gave her one while you were ill.’

Rachel thinks about this for a moment. ‘I don’t mind if she lets herself in for a bit,’ she says. ‘Lucas wouldn’t like it, but he gave her the key. Imagine – he comes home, and Elena is sitting on the sofa watching Simplemente Maria!’ She starts laughing, surprising herself, while Zoya rolls her eyes to hide her smile.

* * *

Rachel’s mood changes as they drive out of the city. She sits on the back seat of the car with Ivan on her knee and winds down the window. Zoya glances in her mirror and tuts, but Rachel takes no notice. The day is calm and warm, with a high blue sky. The smells of scythed grass and tar compete with the exhaust fumes as they drive along the boulevards. The trees are in full leaf now and the sun is glancing off the empty windows of the shops announcing Khleb or Kneegi or Myaso, so that people walking past in the shade look blurry, like the figures in Victorian photographs who moved while the plate was exposed. Everything in Kiev is alien to Rachel – the cars, the people, the noises, the language, the smells – yet it feels more real to her than anywhere else.

‘I don’t want to go back to England,’ she says softly, to the back of Zoya’s head.

Zoya studies her in the rear view mirror.

‘Then don’t go.’

The wind is blowing Rachel’s hair across her face. She pushes it away. ‘What are you doing today? I mean, after you’ve dropped me at the airport. Are you going to the office?’

‘No.’

Rachel is used to Zoya’s curtness. She adjusts her son’s legs – he is falling asleep and she tries to make him comfortable. However, just as she resigns herself to silence, Zoya takes one hand off the wheel and winds down her own window a little way.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she says, ‘I am going to my grandfather’s place in the country.’

‘Oh.’ Rachel tries to imagine Zoya in the woods; she struggles to picture her anywhere but the city. ‘Do you grow things there? Can I come with you?’

Zoya snorts. ‘I have things I must do. You have a plane to catch.’

‘Well, you said, “Then don’t go,” and I don’t want to.’ Rachel leans forward, gripped by the possibility that she might be allowed to change her mind. ‘We could go back and fetch Elena. She’d love a day in the country – she must be missing her little house in Tsarskoye Selo!’

Zoya says nothing for a while. She drives around a pot hole, then pulls over beneath a hoarding and eases up the handbrake.

‘You don’t belong here,’ she murmurs, not unkindly.

‘You may be right,’ says Rachel, as a flush burns across her cheeks. ‘But you aren’t the one who decides.’

* * *

The little Zhiguli sways and bumps along the track around the edge of an untended field and on into the straggle of birch wood, where the light flickers through the leaves and the air smells of moss and something vaguely medicinal. Elena sits beside Zoya in the front, while Rachel remains in the back with Ivan dozing in her lap and Stepan beside her. No one says very much. Perhaps, thinks Rachel, they are as surprised as she to find themselves here together on a jaunt to the country. Once again, Elena almost cried when they drove back to fetch her, and Stepan – well, he was loitering by her door and Elena said he must come too, despite Rachel’s head-shaking and his insistence on going back upstairs to fetch his anorak. Zoya stopped at a roadside kiosk a few miles out of Kiev to buy a picnic of kvas, rye bread and sausage, but otherwise they’ve come as they are. Elena is wearing a heavy cardigan around her shoulders, Stepan a blue tee shirt and his skimpy footballer shorts. He has bunched up his anorak to make a pillow. His narrow thighs jut outwards so that Rachel must point her knees towards the door. He has grown in the past few months; his shoulders seem more angular. There is new hair on his lip.

‘Are we nearly there?’ Rachel asks, breaking the silence. Her words echo memories of childhood trips to the seaside, never knowing whether the blue-grey plate of the English Channel lay just beyond the next hill or whether, in fact, she would never arrive, lost in the chasm between home and away. It mattered to her, as a child. It still does.

Zoya doesn’t answer – no surprise there. As Rachel looks about her, the track widens and the spindly trees thin out. A wooden dacha comes into view. It has pretty carved shutters, but they don’t stop beside it; neither do they stop at the others that follow, all in varying states of upkeep, all with panelled fences and low, drooping roofs. The place seems deserted, despite a couple of rusting Tavrias parked up along the roadside and the crowing of a cockerel in someone’s backyard.

Just as the little settlement begins to peter out, Zoya slows to a halt and turns off the engine. She says something to Elena, then opens the door and steps on to the verge.

‘There are ticks,’ she says, eyeing Rachel through the open window. ‘It is good you are wearing trousers. Push the legs inside your socks.’

‘What about Ivan?’ asks Rachel. ‘And Stepan? They’ve both got bare legs!’

Zoya is tying a scarf around her head. It makes