Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

‘I will take tweezers and pull them out,’ warns Zoya.

Rachel tries to open her door without waking Ivan. ‘Where is the house? Is it far?’

Zoya sighs. ‘If you get out of the car, I will show you.’

Rachel sits Ivan on her hip and picks her way along an overgrown footpath. Stepan follows behind with the bottles of cloudy kvas while Zoya walks ahead with Elena, who treads carefully, shuffling along in her outdoor shoes and nursing the newspaper-wrapped sausage. After a few minutes they leave the line of trees behind and descend into a valley. A tin roof protrudes beyond some reeds, and now Rachel can see that the house is not a house at all. There are no shutters, there is no veranda, no mansarded roof, no quaint fretwork. To Rachel it is a shed: a single room dwelling raised on concrete blocks. Its windows are made from thick plastic sheets and the metal door has clearly been salvaged from somewhere, cut and welded to fit. There is no sign of a toilet, no plumbing, not even a pump.

Zoya makes the rules clear straight away.

‘If you need to answer a call of nature, climb back up the hill and go in the woods. Bury, please.’ She yanks out a small spade from the space beneath the steps.

‘What do you do out here?’ asks Rachel, as Stepan pulls his trainers off and hops across the stones and rough grass towards a shallow stream.

‘Do?’ Zoya looks amused. ‘We sit. We drink and eat.’ She turns to watch Elena, who is hobbling around the side of the building to inspect some remnants of soft fruit bushes and an ancient plum tree with thick branches that twist outwards like flailing arms. ‘My grandfather used to grow things here. Many things – fruit, vegetables – sometimes even flowers when I was a child. Elena won’t like the way everything is now wild, but I could not manage it when Dedushka was sick.’ She pauses, her twitching smile gone, her face empty.

‘I’m sorry…’ says Rachel, wishing she had better words to offer. She is an interloper, standing uselessly in the freshly-trampled grass with Ivan wriggling in her arms. She shifts him up her hip and looks around. ‘What can I do? Can I help with anything?’

Zoya is fiddling with the padlock on the door. ‘You can help me find the vodka.’

The five accidental dachniki eat lunch on Ivan’s nap blanket, spread out in the long grass. The sausage is full of chewy lumps of gristle, though Rachel finds she is hungry and the salty fat isn’t so bad. Ivan eats the two pots of yoghurt she was saving for the plane, and for dessert she raids her son’s changing bag for biscuits and some sliced pear and apple. Elena sniffs the fruit and won’t touch it, but she takes several biscuits and slices the sausage with a small paring knife Zoya hands to her, managing surprisingly well with her broken teeth and a jaw that folds in on itself as she masticates each mouthful. Zoya then insists they all drink the vodka she has brought out from its hiding place in the hut. They have no glasses, but by now Stepan and Elena seem convinced that Ivan’s changing bag is a cornucopia of abundance and usefulness, so once again Rachel burrows amongst the nappies and fishes out Ivan’s spare beaker. She takes off the lid and pours a finger’s depth for Elena and herself, while Zoya swigs straight from the bottle. The vodka is unfiltered and slightly gritty; it burns Rachel’s throat and oesophagus as it slides its way down. Elena takes a sip, then passes the cup to Stepan.

‘I am baby!’ jokes Stepan, picking up the lid and pushing it back on to the cup.

‘No!’ pleads Rachel, helplessly. To her mind there is something repulsive about watching this boy suck vodka from the spout, though Zoya is smiling at her squeamishness and Elena is laughing so much that tears squeeze out of her eyes.

And so the day gently unwinds. Rachel lies back in the grass and closes her eyes while Ivan pulls up handfuls of weeds in his chubby fists or tries to catch the flies gathering on the greasy crumbs, and Elena naps, snoring, then gets up and shuffles off towards the rear of the hut to rummage amongst the bolting vegetables and broken canes. Perhaps she is searching for something to prune back or harvest. Time slows, memories fade, the sun inches across a soft blue sky. Rachel feels her son scrambling over her hips. She puts her hand out, touches his dense, warm skin. This is real, she thinks, this bond of blood and survival. Today they are all saved and she could lie here forever with Ivan’s head on her stomach, pinning her down, his legs twitching gently against her own, even the weight of his wet nappy a reassurance that now, right now, she has everything she needs.

She wakes with a jolt when Ivan bashes something hard against her collar bone. Her head is spinning a little, from the sunlight or the blood-rush or possibly the vodka, but as her eyes readjust she sees that he is clutching the pot of Sudafed she always keeps in her handbag. Other items lay strewn across the blanket: keys, a couple of tampons, a pen with the ink starting to seep into the fabric. And her well-thumbed copy of Jurassic Park .

Zoya is lighting a cigarette on the steps behind her.

‘I remember that book,’ she says, blowing smoke towards the stream. ‘You were reading it when you first arrived. Then Lucas gave it to Sorin, and you wanted it back.’

‘Yes,’ says Rachel, frowning.

Zoya stretches out a leg and pushes the book with her foot. ‘Dinosaurs. The dangers of men playing god with science. You read it a lot, but what does it say? I think it is rubbish.’

Rachel wishes the book had stayed at the bottom of the changing bag. She picks it up and flicks the pages slowly, as if the book is unfamiliar, until she finds one with the corner folded over. The fold is on page twenty-seven, marking the part where Elena the midwife leaves the window open at the clinic and the baby raptors climb inside and eat the newborn’s face. She must have counted the words of that section a hundred times at least.

‘I thought I needed this book,’ she murmurs.

‘And you have changed your mind?’ Zoya’s tone is neutral, but her questions, Rachel knows, are always loaded.

‘Elena helped me,’ she says. ‘I don’t need it anymore.’

‘Then get rid of it.’

Rachel thinks for a moment. Ivan is safe. Now when she looks at the cover it seems ridiculous.

‘All right,’ she says. ‘I’m going for a walk in the woods. You can come if you like, though I warn you, I’m taking the spade.’

Zoya offers a hand and pulls Rachel to her feet.

Up beneath the trees, the air is still and cool. They have left the wasps behind them and the ground is springy, made soft by decades of leaf fall. Light pools haphazardly between the birch trunks that stand white and straight like postulants stopped in prayer. Rachel feels as if she has stepped into a church.

Ivan, whom she has once again carried on her hip, is trying to get down, so she sits him on the weedless grass and looks around her.

‘Anywhere will do,’ she says, taking the spade from Zoya. She thrusts it into the earth near a small anthill. ‘Here.’

When a small hole is dug and the ants are scattering amongst the pale tree roots, Rachel tips her book inside, quickly, as if now she cannot wait to be rid of it, as if burying it is part of the ritual she never wanted, never craved. As an afterthought, she bends down and removes Ivan’s sodden nappy and drops it on top of the book.

‘There,’ she says, aware that Zoya is watching her.

‘You are killing two birds with one stone,’ remarks Zoya dryly.

‘Multi-tasking,’ says Rachel, as she kicks the soil back into the hole with her foot. ‘When I was little, we used to say, “good riddance to bad rubbish”.’ She pauses. A memory comes back to her, the love notes to the boy she’d left behind, hidden within those dark waxy sleeves. When her mother discovered one and confronted her with it, Rachel had collected up all the others and pushed them down amongst the chicken bones and broken eggshells at the bottom of the dustbin. ‘I hope it rots quickly.’