Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

But they are not why she cannot retreat from her struggle with the balcony. They are not why she needs to stay.

ELENA SHOWS UP a week after Victory Day. She knocks on the door of Rachel and Lucas’s apartment one lunch-time as if nothing has changed – as if she isn’t now a landlady with Suzie and Rob’s hard currency to spend. When Rachel, surprised, lets her in the old woman squeezes Ivan’s chubby calves, fishes her slippers out of her string bag, accepts a cup of tea and sits down in the kitchen to watch the latest episode of Simplemente Maria .

Later, while Rachel feeds Ivan and Elena rinses the cups in the sink, the two of them manage through the usual mix of mimed verbs and stabbing nouns to establish that Elena is not living across town, but has in fact moved into a flat downstairs.

‘ Kharasho! ’ says Rachel, nodding vigorously to express the rush of relief she feels. Elena, who quickly tires of Rachel’s attempts at conversation, shuffles into the bedroom and strips Ivan’s dirty cot sheet before moving to the living room and folding the crumpled bedding she peels off the sofa. Rachel peeks in from the hallway, dismayed that Elena should find evidence for the disharmony between herself and Lucas, but Elena doesn’t seem to notice. She stuffs the laundry into a basket and puts her shoes back on, before indicating that Rachel must take it downstairs to the washing machine.

When Rachel is alone with Ivan once again she wedges a chair against the living room door, tidies the bedroom and retrieves Jurassic Park from under the bed. It seems that everyone is busy in their separate spheres. Zoya doesn’t bring her sheets to the basement any more – perhaps she is working elsewhere, as Lucas has so often suspected. Suzie, meanwhile, is preoccupied with the renovations of Elena’s old house. Lucas is out most of the time, chasing interviews or drinking or confessing his sins to Vee or maybe just walking the streets. His absence allows him and Rachel to put further confrontation on hold. Instead they move around each other with a determined solicitousness, meeting only in the hallway or at the threshold of the bathroom or in the wedge of electric light in front of the refrigerator.

ACROSS THE RIVER in Darnytsia, Zoya, standing in the kitchen of her flat, sets the telephone’s receiver back in its cradle and sits down at the table.

She can guess the identity of her caller. The man had told her in his low, soft voice that he knew a great deal about her. He knew, for example, that her flat was still registered in her grandfather’s name, that she’d had three abortions in the mid-1980s and that she had been questioned about the provenance of her car at a road block the previous winter. ‘So what?’ Zoya had said, ready to cut him off. Then the man said he had copies of her grandfather’s medical records, that he knew about the morphine levels in his blood and his urine and that such things could be misconstrued if she was not more careful and continued to sniff like a bitch around the private affairs of legitimate businessmen. He also warned her not to discuss this conversation with the likes of that dried up whore Elena Vasilyevna.

Zoya lights a cigarette and blows smoke towards the open window. She doesn’t fear for herself, but Elena is another matter. She is going to have to be careful.

JUNE ARRIVES LIKE a pulsing heart, pink and glistening. There are swift thunderstorms and sudden showers, after which the city’s shining streets expand beneath the trees to accommodate the makeshift stalls with their blushing radishes and tender carrots, strawberries, smetana and clear linden honey. Meanwhile the hot water is turned off for a fortnight’s maintenance in the apartment block on Staronavodnitska Street. As the pipes bleed they make sad sounds, like whale song. Lucas starts shaving at the office, while Rachel boils pans on the stove and holds Ivan as he splashes in the sink. Sometimes she takes him to Suzie’s flat, whenever Suzie wants Rachel to examine her swatches of fabric samples or discuss the merits of pelmets or moan about the fact that the old woman who leased them the house still appears every evening to water the vegetable patch. Most of the time, however, Rachel walks, and as she walks she stares at the passers-by who seem, every day, more strange and more familiar.

One afternoon, as Rachel is watching a man buy raspberries from a fruit stall on Khreschatyk, Teddy spies her from across the street. He runs over to her, dodging a truck with flapping tarpaulin sides. It beeps its horn and makes Ivan shriek.

‘Hey,’ he says, planting a kiss on her temple. ‘Raspberries! The first of the season. I want some.’

‘Do you think they’re safe to eat?’ asks Rachel, who knows that if she asks the stallholder he will swear they’ve been grown in the Caucasus.

Teddy smiles. ‘I hope so. I’ve given up worrying.’ He glances at Ivan. ‘Seriously, it’s too early in the season for them to have come from the exclusion zone. Don’t they smell fabulous?’

They both pause for a moment, waiting as the man at the front of the queue refuses the little newspaper cones offered by the stallholder and instead opens up his peeling vinyl briefcase so that she can heap the soft fruit inside.

‘I should have brought a bag,’ says Teddy. ‘Those cones are going to leak.’

Rachel pulls a pastel blue nappy sack out of her handbag. ‘Would you like one of these? They’re quite hygienic. I use them all the time.’

‘Rachel,’ exclaims Teddy, ‘you are beautiful and resourceful! We must have raspberries with ice cream. And meringue – Karl loves a Pavlova. I’m going to tell Vee that’s what I want at my leaving dinner. Not cherry dumplings. Dumplings are for winter.’

Rachel feels a little unsteady on her feet. She grips the handles of the pushchair.

‘Are you leaving?’

Teddy looks down at her, surprised. ‘Didn’t Lucas tell you? That boy is something else! Well, I’m off to Bosnia with Karl. New adventures! Hey, don’t look so sad! We’re having a last supper at Vee’s. Next Saturday. You better come – I refuse to sit next to anyone else!’

‘Dinner is difficult…’ murmurs Rachel. ‘With Ivan – now he’s older it’s harder to take him out at night.’

‘So let’s find you a babysitter,’ says Teddy. ‘How about that caretaker – the one who’s retired with a suitcase of cash. She’s fond of Ivan, right?’ He smiles, rueful, sympathetic. ‘Lucas needs to show you off.’

‘Lucas wants me to go back to London.’ The words rush out of Rachel before she can stop them; for a moment she doesn’t recognise the woman discussing her husband with a man she barely knows. But this is Teddy, she reminds herself. Not Mykola.

Teddy rubs his chin.

‘Then please come for my sake, and yours.’

Rachel thinks about Teddy’s suggestion as the trolleybus rattles up the broad boulevard of Lesi Ukrainky. She doesn’t want to leave Ivan with someone else, but neither does she want Lucas to visit Vee’s flat without her. Teddy knows something; he’s just too loyal to pass it on.

As she pushes Ivan across the waste ground she spies Stepan. He is lounging in the grass; she can just see his shorn head and shoulders through the tangle of stems and weeds. He is with that horrible man, his minder. That they are outside is not, Rachel reminds herself, so unusual. These days she often encounters bodies sprawled in the sunshine. Sometimes she passes lovers grappling silently, like molluscs, or she steers the pushchair round a pair of mottled legs sticking out across the path. Old men slump on the benches and chat softly or stare down at their hands. Young girls with their skinny arms and bright hair accessories sit cross-legged and play clapping games or chalk neat rows of sums on the concrete, and several times she has seen the same middle-aged couple enjoying a picnic of gherkins and sausage laid out on a blue handbag amongst the dandelions.