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

to the infants bitten by strange lizards as she sucks on the wafer-thin chocolates by her bed. Luckily it is an extra-large box, the sort they sell in the airport Duty Free to shell-suited mafia men or liquor reps or the new apparatchiks or maybe foreign journalists with sick wives holed up in the flat on the thirteenth floor.

Lucas doesn’t know how to help her, so he closes the front door behind him and strides about the city, looking for ways to make money, ways to make his name or career, anything to convince himself he’s made the right decision and settle the panic in his chest. Radio bulletin after radio bulletin is filed down the wires, grey as President Kravchuk and just as unremarked-upon. The revolutions are over and in London there’s no interest in the government sackings, the strikes and the price rises, the endless press conferences with their blank officialise and incomprehensible squabbles. Editors want colour, Lucas reckons, a nation’s quirks and curiosities served up in ninety-second sound-bites, so he walks down blind alleys and files short fillers about girls in bright headscarves selling jars of smetana outside the monastery or the men in blue overalls who move along the boulevards stripping leaves off the trees. He’ll have to be quick: autumn is a day’s work in Kiev. Along the wide streets and beneath the market archways, women queue to buy bags of buckwheat flour. They lug them up dark stairwells and mix the flour with water to make a thick grey paste. Newspaper is stuffed into window frames then daubed with the paste, which dries into a tight, brittle seal. The city is sucking itself inwards.

Elena Vasilyevna, caretaker of Building Four on Staronavodnitska Street, awakes from her nap and watches to see if the foreign woman on the thirteenth floor will know what to do. She doesn’t hold her breath, for the woman doesn’t show herself for a week; she certainly doesn’t go shopping for the right kind of flour. Instead, when she finally emerges from the lift with her fat little baby in that flimsy foreign buggy, off they dawdle past the kiosks on Kutuzova Street as if there’s no such thing as winter. The baby isn’t dressed properly and shouldn’t be outside. Elena has tried telling her, but the woman just pulls an ugly face and leaves the lobby door wide open. The buggy makes marks on the floor.

Really, someone needs to put her straight and it’s not going to be that lanky husband of hers. He carries a rucksack, for crying out loud. Elena knew a journalist once. He wore a blue serge jacket and a black leather cap. The cap made him look serious – someone who meant business. When they hanged him from the second-floor window of the post office it had fallen to the pavement like a fat drop of ink. No one dared touch it for a week.

* * *

There are birds in the roof of the universam. Starlings or house martins, or maybe some middle-European species Rachel cannot identify. They don’t chatter, though their sudden wing-beats startle her as she stands in the cavernous state-owned store less than half a mile from Staronavodnitska Street. She’s not sure what’s for sale at the counter, but a small crowd is milling and someone is pushing behind her and if she circles round to take a look she will lose her place. Some recent advice from Vee still echoes in her head. New deliveries don’t stick around for long; never ignore a queue of more than five people.

It took her ages to find the shop or market or whatever she is supposed to call it. The antibiotics have muddled her. She felt the same when she left the hospital with Ivan. Everything beyond its shiny mint-green corridors seemed unfamiliar and unreal. This is a hairbrush, she would tell herself. This is a kettle. This is your front door and this is your newborn son.

The universam is a circular concrete bunker. Hexagonal grey and blue tiles tessellate its mushroom-shaped roof and rotting leaves pile up in its gutters. It squats in the middle of a courtyard off Kutuzova Street, half hidden by the surrounding horse chestnuts and bourgeois-era apartments with their iron balconies and the scrambling vines that characterise this part of the city. Inside, most of the shelves are bare. Rachel can see only a row of zinc watering cans and, further along, several pyramids of purplish sausage. Despite the lack of merchandise, women in nylon shop coats are leaning against the counters that surround the central foyer. Two of them bring out buckets and start to mop the floor. It must be quite a job, coping with all the bird droppings. The mopped area spreads like a stain.

Rachel squints at a one-word sign high up on the wall in front of her. The letters are orange, rounded. She sounds out the Cyrillic characters to herself – dee-ay-tee – and lessens her grip on Ivan’s buggy handles as she realises this is a word she knows: ‘children’. Perhaps they’ll have some baby wipes. She has been using loo roll dampened with water since her two boxes of Johnson’s ran out. It is making Ivan’s bottom sore.

The man in front of Rachel is blocking her view. He is wearing a cheaply-finished blouson jacket and stiff, stonewashed jeans. His neck is red, almost raw, and dandruff speckles his shoulders. When he raises a hand to smooth his thinning hair she pulls Ivan’s buggy back to avoid any falling flakes. Ivan kicks out his stubby little legs and waves an arm. He’s cranking himself up for something. No one is talking. The air tastes fusty, as if spores of mould have settled on Rachel’s tongue. The universam isn’t a dollar shop, she reminds herself. Its empty symmetry and its silence leach the vapours of a stagnant collective past.

The queue is moving slowly; someone nudges her from behind. She looks over her shoulder and sees a young