Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

Then, as she folds a blanket, another memory rolls up from her gut like the dark waves of the Dnieper. This memory belongs to a time before the war, when she was still a child. It washes over her, blocks out the present moment and takes her breath away, so that she must sit down on the stairs.

The blanket in her mind is knitted from rough yarn. It is grey and moth-eaten. Even now she can feel the looped wool between her fingers and sniff again the smell of sickness and mould. At dusk she takes it down to the river with her sister. The two girls wade out through the shallows until the current pushes up against their hips. They stretch the blanket between them, gripping its corners, and they stand there for hours, thin bodies numb with the cold, even though it is summer, arms aching, burning, then dropping with hunger and exhaustion as they wait for a fish.

There are no fish. As the sun rises they stumble out of the river and lie in the mud. When their mother comes to find them she falls down and weeps, and they gnaw at the blanket, gagging and sucking because the great famine is upon them and their stomachs contain nothing but leaves.

Memories are burdens. Elena, old now, sits on the stairs for some time, the blanket clutched in her fingers. She has never wept for her mother and her sister. When they died, they were saved.

At last Stepan arrives with the handcart and helps Elena to her feet.

‘Come on,’ he says in Ukrainian, impatient to load up the mattress and the chairs.

As they trundle down Panfilovtsev Street, the faint strains of piped military music start up on the hill behind them. The tramlines at the bend on Staronavodnitska Street prove tricky; they almost lose a soup bowl, but they finally reach the apartment block and Stepan carries her possessions up the steps, then stacks them in the foyer by the lift.

When Elena gives him a fifty dollar note he sniffs it before stepping back outside and inspecting it in the sunlight.

‘ Eta vsyo ,’ she says, more to herself than to Stepan. That’s it .

Across the tramlines and up the hill, in the lee of the Motherland monument, Rachel and Ivan are out with the crowds. There’s a fresh breeze and it’s chilly in the shade, yet the sun itself is hot. Faces grow pink, while the ice cream sellers and the kvas trucks are making a killing. Ivan is having the time of his life, shrieking at the bouquets of tulips and gladioli, the dandelion seeds that waft across the concrete, the uniforms with their burnished buttons, the sense of occasion. Rachel buys him a pretzl to suck on, even though it is stale and full of salt. She walks slowly, one hand on the pushchair, watching the old men leaning on a grandchild or a great grandchild – the boys in v-necked jumpers lugging their replica assault rifles, the girls’ hair tied back with patriotic blue and yellow pompoms. Really though, she is looking out for Mykola. She’s been seeing him everywhere since her trip to the Botanical Gardens. Zoya hasn’t told her anything, and now it is as if his face carries something archetypal, something she seems to recognise in the expression of every man she passes: a glance, the twist of a mouth, the shadow of a moustache. She wanders for ages, yet he doesn’t materialise and this both relieves and dismays her. He is watching, she decides, but he is concealed.

Instead she glimpses Lucas in the distance, striding about, bending down to speak with someone, trying to balance his notebook on his knee. He starts to shake his biro up and down and she almost goes to him, almost reaches into her bag for a spare, but then a family strolls across her sightline and he is gone. Anyway, she won’t interrupt him while he is working. She certainly doesn’t want to talk to him.

Up ahead she spots a bench in the shade, one half unoccupied. She sits down next to a middle-aged couple and fumbles in Ivan’s nappy bag for his lidded beaker. The beaker is an innovation. She bought it at the House of Children in Lipki and Ivan hated it at first. He threw it to the floor and splashed the water Rachel had carefully filtered and boiled and cooled all over the kitchen. Now the warmer weather has arrived he is thirstier and glugs at it noisily, gripping its two handles with his moist pink fingers, his eyes rolling slightly. The sight of him sucking triggers the let-down reflex in Rachel’s breasts and she pulls her thin cardigan across her chest.

The couple next to her are talking in low voices. The man, who is wearing brown polyester trousers and a carefully pressed short-sleeved shirt, holds the woman’s hand and the woman presses her knee against his leg. To Rachel they seem sweet – demure, unshowy in their solicitude. They smile at her child and make encouraging noises, and the man reaches forward and gently pats Ivan’s head.

Then the woman leans round her companion and speaks directly to Rachel in a quick burst of Ukrainian.

‘ Nye panimayu ,’ says Rachel, shaking her head apologetically. ‘I don’t understand.’

Her response seems to agitate the woman, who says something to the man. They both point at Ivan, who has kicked off his knitted slipper. He beams at the pantomime these strangers are performing for his amusement.

‘ Fut! ’ says the woman, then again, more sharply, ‘ Fut!’

‘Oh,’ says Rachel, smiling politely, though with no intention of covering up his toes. Her new strategy for batting off the imperatives from every woman over forty is to gabble at them in a language they can’t decipher. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ she says. ‘Bare feet won’t kill him. In England, unlike in your country, we know about germs and vitamin D. We know how to bring up our babies quite safely in the fresh air, with no hat on, with no boots on and, sometimes, would you believe it, with no clothes at all!’

This time something is wrong. The man looks angry. He stands, and so does the woman.

‘Then consider yourself fortunate,’ he says, in precise English. ‘My wife wished only to help you. We did not expect an insult in return.’ And with that the couple move away.

Rachel gets up, too, a low mood upon her, exposed and ashamed by her outburst. She wants to be at home now, she wants to read her pages and she wants to hang her washing out in the basement in straight lines, tightly pegged, as tight as she can possibly stretch the towels and the vests and the sheets. She picks up the dropped slipper and rushes away from the park, out through the gates, across Lavrska Street and down the lane towards the tower blocks on Staronavodnitska. Building Number Four still broods there like a standing stone. She looks up, as she always does when she passes into its shadow. As she raises her head someone throws something from one of the balconies. Whatever has been thrown falls clumsily, straight at first, then wheeling and unfolding as it approaches the ground. Rachel sees it is a piece of cardboard or packaging of some kind. She swallows down the bile that has risen in her throat and hurries inside, wishing that Elena was here to shout and summon the lift in order to bang on the door of the offending apartment.

When Rachel walks across the foyer there’s a different old woman sitting in her cubicle.

‘ Gdye Elena Vasilyevna ?’ she asks. Where is she?

The woman shrugs and scowls at the pushchair’s dirty wheels.

Lucas marches along Khreschatyk, too much energy in his legs. There’s a pink flush below his cheekbones and he wants all the strollers around him to get out of his way. This city is too much, sometimes – the queues at the kiosks, the endless holidays, the wide blank faces. Take Zoya, who didn’t show up at the War Memorial today. He wants to find her, to tell her straight that he is going to hire someone else, that he’ll be paying someone else to do the job instead of her. She thinks she’s so good he won’t fire her, and that’s his problem, as usual, because he does need her. Back at the office he took a call from Sorin. There’s an obstruction with some of the permissions he needs for his film feature. Lucas could go ahead anyway, but he doesn’t want to upset the director at this point in production – he needs to be invited to the premiere, now scheduled for July.