Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

Elena is waving her hand towards the front door.

‘She doesn’t want us here,’ whispers Rachel, as she and Suzie climb the steps.

‘Too bad!’ laughs Suzie. ‘It’s ours! Rob got his lawyer to draw up a contract and we’ve paid for the first year in cash! She asked for used dollars, which wound him up no end.’

Despite her misgivings Rachel finds she is curious about the house. There isn’t much to see: a living room with an old table pushed against the wall and a couple of beaten-up chairs; a lean-to kitchen with an old-fashioned stove and a sink; and a downstairs bathroom, its tiles cracked and its floor covered by a piece of curling lino. The bedroom upstairs is spacious enough but instead of a bed a single mattress rests on the floor. Rachel cannot imagine how the old woman manages to heave herself up from it each morning, or how she escaped being frozen to death in the winter. There are few personal touches and no photographs. Elena’s cubicle at the apartment block seems more homely. Suzie, meanwhile, chats about her plans for the remont : she will arrange to import a ready-made kitchen; she will introduce a utility room; there will be recessed lighting, roman blinds, a shower room off the bedroom and a fully glazed veranda on two sides of the house.

‘Rob wants a sauna in the garden,’ she says. ‘That’s why we’re moving. The house itself will still be smaller than the flat.’

Rachel feels as if she is trespassing.

‘It’s a lot of work,’ she says, ‘for a place you’re just renting.’

‘Yes, but Rob says that Ukraine’s property laws aren’t fit for purpose. He’d rather buy, always. We should be in by August, if the workmen pull their fingers out. Rob’s got them on a penalty for late completion.’ Suzie smiles, her eyes bright, full of trust that all will be well, that white goods and white walls will prevail. ‘Then you can bring Ivan to toddle around the garden.’

‘Where will Elena go?’ asks Rachel. ‘Do you think she’s lived here for long?’

‘No idea. Now she can afford somewhere nice, though,’ says Suzie, her brow creasing in a brief flash of anxiety. ‘We’re hardly throwing her out on the street.’

No, thinks Rachel, but she’ll stop working at the apartment block. No more Simplemente Maria . No more tea in the kitchen, keeping Ivan safe.

As they leave the house Rachel looks over her shoulder towards Elena, who is now working at the far end of the orchard. The old woman bends down over the ground, digging up the deep-rooted dandelions, her legs planted firmly apart, her back rounded like a seedling as it emerges, inexorable, from the earth.

EVERYTHING CHANGES WHEN the warmer weather comes. As the sticky buds of the horse chestnuts burst into leaf and their creamy candles reach up to the light, as the breeze wafts the scent of lilac along the boulevards and the dandelions flower for a day, people pour on to the streets. Secrets are hard to keep without winter coats and fur hats. Arguments leave the stale one-room apartments and step out on to balconies. Lovers roam the sidewalks and drunks lie spread-eagled on the benches. Even the man playing tennis with his son at the edge of the car park thrashes him openly with his racquet when he fails to demonstrate his commitment to the game. By the first week in May, when the schoolchildren on the trolleybuses are sneezing from the drifting pollen, all things are laid out, laid bare, made open and exposed. This is how it is in Kiev’s summer months. This is how it is for Lucas and for Vee.

‘So,’ Vee says one night, as she and Lucas sit on stools at the bar of a shiny new place in a back street behind the Foreign Ministry. ‘Have you booked a room?’

‘What?’ asks Lucas, looking stricken.

‘Sure you have,’ says Vee. ‘But there’s something I must tell you first. I’ve been sleeping with Sorin, and he has told me everything about your secret story, and you know what? It’s a good one! Don’t look so surprised.’

Lucas doesn’t know what to think, so Vee helps him.

‘We could have sex,’ she says, pushing the slice of lemon in her vodka tonic under the surface with her finger. ‘And it would go badly because you would feel guilty and I would despise you for that. We might meet again, but I would sleep with other lovers and you would be angry and hurt and then Rachel would find out and she’d go crazy and try to jump off the balcony or leave you or something much worse and then you’d be in pieces and follow her back to England and your career would be finished.’

‘That’s funny,’ says Lucas, his heart pumping so loudly he fears she might hear it. ‘You’re funny.’

‘I know,’ says Vee. ‘I’m pretty hard to take.’

Lucas is silent for a while. His drink is too warm; the bar needs a new refrigerator before the weather gets hot, and he wants to scream at someone – the sullen waitress who poured it, or the bandit on the door or maybe just that weird guy in the corner with the moustache and the doleful eyes like a po-faced Omar Sharif. Instead he stays silent, knowing he must ask a question, hating how it is going to make him sound.

‘Don’t use my story,’ he says, trying not to beg.

Vee licks the finger she used to stir her drink, then reaches up to trace the line of his eyebrow.

‘Stop frowning,’ she says, solemnly. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m not a total bitch.’

The ninth of May is Victory Day. Zoya buys her grandfather three red gladioli and places them in a vase by his bed. She pins his Order of the Patriotic War, second class, to his pyjama jacket, even though tourists can buy them for a dollar apiece outside the metro at Arsenalnaya. She pours two glasses of vodka, raises one toast to the heroic survivors, another to the glorious fallen, and drinks them both before checking her watch. She’s due to meet Lucas at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in an hour. He is hopeful the communists will make a showing, waving their pension books and their framed pictures of Stalin, though this isn’t Moscow, as she never tires of pointing out. There’s no front page story being orchestrated in the hills above the Dnieper. In Lviv the holiday has been cancelled altogether.

Tanya arrives a quarter of an hour late. Zoya, irritated, picks up her bag and yanks the door shut behind her without saying goodbye. Two minutes later Tanya is opening the window and shouting down to her in the street.

Her grandfather isn’t breathing.

Zoya drops her bag and runs back up the stairs.

Elena Vasilyevna stays away from the commemorations, though the long finger of the war memorial is only a short walk from her cottage, across the summit of the hill. Today she has her possessions to pack up and a new flat to occupy. The flat she is moving to is on the second floor of the apartment block on Staronavodnitska Street. It’s been empty for a while. The locksmith who helped her gain entry didn’t ask questions. She has always been the caretaker, ever since the block first opened two decades before. That stinking gangster Mykola can threaten her – he can send his thugs to torture dogs as much as he pleases and replace her with someone whose husband or son owes money and who thus has no ears, no eyes – but Elena isn’t going anywhere.

Elena has enlisted some help with the removals. The boy Stepan will arrive soon with the handcart that she keeps in the basement at the apartment block. Her belongings are few even by Ukrainian standards: a mattress, bedding, two chairs, a chest of drawers and a couple of lamps. There are pots and pans, some crockery and a plastic laundry bag full of clothes. She rolls her old fur coat with care – the coat she hasn’t worn for four decades. It was given to her by the same man who drew up papers in her name for this house, with its strip of earth for growing vegetables and for planting fruit trees. She has already wrapped her gardening tools in neat parcels of newspaper after oiling them the night before.