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

woman with blue eyeshadow and dyed black hair. The woman is about the same age as Rachel. She is licking a slab of white ice cream wrapped in a piece of paper.

‘Eezveneetyie,’ ventures Rachel. Excuse me. Her voice sounds louder than she intends and the words aren’t the right ones; she remembers only a handful of phrases from the Russian classes she struggled to attend before Ivan was born. The woman, however, sees the buggy and leans around Rachel, offering her ice cream to Ivan.

‘Nyet!’ exclaims Rachel, putting a hand in front of his mouth. The woman straightens up and frowns as Ivan’s arms reach out and he starts to whimper. The man with the dandruff turns round and finally the counter is revealed and Rachel can see that the items for sale are not baby wipes but plastic push-along toys, crudely moulded with gurning Donald Duck faces.

As she stares, the aproned clerk behind the counter sucks in her cheeks and waves her forward. It is Rachel’s turn, apparently, despite the other queuers milling. She takes out her purse.

‘Skolko?’ How much?

Already she knows this is the wrong question. There’s no till here, no cashbox. Where does she pay?

The clerk has no time for idiots. She rolls her eyes and beckons to the young woman behind Rachel to take her place. Only the man with the dandruff takes pity on her. He turns his head and says something to the clerk, who reaches for a pad of thin grey paper and a pen attached to the counter by a piece of string and scribbles down two words. She tears off the slip of paper and pushes it towards the man, who hands it to Rachel.

‘Spaseebo,’ she murmurs – thank you – still not sure what to do next. The man nods gravely and points towards a counter a few yards away near the door. The sign above says Kassa – cash desk. She must take the chit and pay at the desk and return with a receipt for the goods. That’s what everyone else has been doing.

Ten minutes later, Rachel emerges from the universam with a Donald Duck push-along toy dangling awkwardly from the handles of the buggy. She feels conspicuous, outlandish even, yet no one else seems to notice as she walks back to the apartment block. She passes an expensive-looking silver car in the car park, but its windows are tinted and she can’t see if anyone is inside.

The old caretaker is absent from the foyer.

Lucas is in the kitchen when she struggles through the front door. ‘Your first purchase!’ he says, sticking his head into the hallway. ‘Impressive! Shopping like a local! Tomorrow you should walk up through Tsarskoye Selo – the Tsar’s Village. Visit the monastery. You’ll love it.’

Rachel opens the cupboard next to the bathroom and pushes the toy inside. ‘What do you mean, the Tsar’s Village?’

Lucas shrugs. ‘That’s what the cottages on the hill are called. Zoya says they were built for Communist Party apparatchiks – a taste of suburbia for local flunkies of one sort or another. Most of them are wrecks now, mind you.’

Indeed, the houses of the Tsar’s Village are wrecks. Rachel squints at them from the kitchen window. They cling to the slopes that lead up to the thick walls and golden domes of the monastery, little more than wooden shacks, one room upstairs and one room downstairs, a bit of land, broken fences, stray dogs and rusting dump bins. She wanders up there with Ivan the next afternoon, searching for shops as she maps out the neighbourhood. There’s the universam, of course, echoing and empty apart from today’s meagre display of household cleaning items such as wire wool and mops and bags of indeterminate powder that might be detergent or flour. There’s the dollar store, called the kashtan, with its jars of out-dated baby food and packets of thick tan tights. Shiny loaves of white bread are baked and sold from a hole in the wall near the universam, or perhaps it is a part of the universam – Rachel isn’t sure. Then there are the concrete kiosks where she can buy dusty yellow packets of Liptons tea, Tampax, stretchy hairbands and sugary drinks from someone with a midriff but no face; the darkened windows are always at the waist height of the vendors inside. Finally she stops by the old women squatting outside the peeling green doors of the monastery. Their wares are laid out on cloth squares: a trio of wrinkled lemons, a string of onions or pickled cucumbers floating in a jar like grey turds.

Rachel practises her Russian: two, ten thousand, twenty thousand, how much, thank you. The old women don’t look up. They just stare at her shoes.

* * *

Elena Vasilyevna hobbles along Lavrska Street beneath the high white wall of the monastery. Her bowed legs ache; hoeing is easier than walking, but today is an anniversary so she must be here. She doesn’t look over her shoulder, even though that boy from the fourteenth floor, Stepan, has been following her all the way from Staronavodnitska Street. He is up to something. She’s seen him leaning in through the window of a fancy car parked outside the flats. Last week she found several handfuls of burning hair smouldering and stinking in the wastepaper bin in her cubicle.

He needs an occupation, she thinks. Like most boys.

As Elena passes the frescoed Gate Church of the Trinity, she glimpses the young Englishwoman, head uncovered, her baby on her hip. She is trying to drag that buggy of hers through the narrow wooden doorway. Well, if the gatekeepers don’t send her packing then the pilgrims certainly will. They kneel and scrape as if the old faith has never stopped flowing through their dried-up veins. Elena sucks her teeth and spits. She has no interest in trinities or holy mothers. She won’t cross herself when she passes, she won’t mutter a prayer. Her faith fell out of her like a stillborn infant when