Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

Rachel scoops up Ivan and the two women turn and walk back to the edge of the trees, where the sun is strong and bright, the air full of heat. They raise their hands to their eyes and squint down the slope towards the little hut and the stream. The place appears deserted, but then a small movement to the left catches Rachel’s attention and she sees Stepan peeing, directing the arc of his urine at a flat stone near the edge of the reeds.

Zoya sees him, too.

‘He likes to win, that one,’ she says. ‘If there’s no one to play against, he competes with himself.’

‘He seems very attached to Elena,’ says Rachel.

Zoya snorts. ‘She gives him money.’

‘Oh.’ Rachel remembers how the boy looks at her sometimes. She wants to feel sorry for him; she knows that back in London he’d be in and out of children’s homes or on the streets. He is alone, and lonely teenagers must, of necessity, probe the limits of their power. ‘He steals parcels from my mum. He eats the stuff she sends me. Why did you let him come with us today?’

‘Why not? You came.’ A pause. ‘I thought I would be here alone. Then you wanted to see and I thought, okay, but not just you. You are too much for one person by yourself.’

Rachel is never sure if Zoya means to offend her. ‘Well you know how to wind Lucas up,’ she says. ‘And I have to listen to him afterwards. So perhaps that makes us even.’

‘Ah, Lucas!’ Zoya lifts the spade and lets it rest across one shoulder. ‘He runs around Kiev, looking for his stories, listening in the wrong places…’ she stops, eyeing Rachel as if to gauge whether or not she has said too much.

Rachel is nodding her head, slowly. ‘That’s exactly what Vee says…’ Her voice tails off. She hasn’t thought of Vee or her husband all afternoon. Lucas’s longing for something better is a dead weight, dragging him under. She should have found a way to call him. She should have left him a note. Her flight would have arrived at Heathrow by now.

Somewhere through the trees, perhaps nearer the village, a bird screeches a warning.

‘Vee is a magpie,’ says Zoya.

‘Magpies steal.’

‘And this is what frightens you?’

Rachel blows a little soil out of Ivan’s hair. Without his nappy his bottom is small and bony. He feels light, almost weightless, like a bird.

‘I’m not frightened of Vee,’ she says. ‘But I should probably go back to Kiev.’

‘Now?’

‘Soon. After I’ve dipped Ivan’s feet in the stream. His first paddle.’

‘ Tak, ’ murmurs Zoya, as Rachel sets off down the hill. ‘At first I did not like you. Now I do.’

ZOYA HAS BEEN driving for half an hour. Elena, sitting in the front with a bunch of cornflowers across her knees, snores gently, her chin bobbing against her chest. Stepan is sleeping, too, his head lolling against the dusty window as he sprawls on the back seat next to Rachel. His anorak lies discarded by his feet.

Rachel’s arms ache from holding Ivan. Her left elbow is wedged between the seat and the door and the basket on her right is digging into her thigh. Elena actually managed to unearth some self-seeded carrots, thin and misshapen with feathery tops. Their smell is strong and earthy and Rachel’s stomach rumbles. Boiled and mashed for Ivan or chopped into a soup – she could live on soup quite happily if she had to – a few onions, a little garlic, some potatoes, a pan on the stove, tipping scraps in, a pinch of pepper or some of Elena’s homegrown herbs…

Ivan stirs and kicks his legs out. His thigh, Rachel notices, is marked with pinpricks of bright pink. Not ticks, though – ant bites. She licks a finger and dabs the raised skin as she remembers her mother once doing.

‘ Oy! ’ mutters Zoya, pressing on the brake in her careful, measured way, though they haven’t yet reached the city.

Rachel peers around Zoya’s headrest. There’s a vehicle about fifty metres in front of them and it isn’t moving; instead it straddles the single-lane road. It is a silver car, sleek and foreign. It looks out of place in the birch woods.

‘Is it an accident?’ she asks, squinting as the late afternoon sunlight glances off the bonnet.

‘Maybe the engine has overheated,’ says Zoya, slowing the car to a stop while they are still some metres away. ‘Or they have no fuel.’ She eases the handbrake upwards, but she doesn’t turn off the ignition.

Rachel shunts Ivan up against her left shoulder, wincing at the stabbing pins and needles in her hand. Cars don’t run out of fuel at right angles to the road, she thinks. There are no other vehicles in sight. This block to their progress is deliberate, and it is probably the police because Lucas is always complaining about the cursory checks they make, the bribes they require. But the man stepping out of the trees doesn’t look like a policeman. His hair is dark; he has sloping shoulders, a measured gait. She recognises him straight away.

‘Mykola!’

‘Mykola?’ repeats Zoya, turning her head a little, as if she might have misheard. Stepan opens an eye, yawns and pushes his knees into the seat in front so that they leave dents in the vinyl. Elena stirs also, muttering something as she wakes. She covers her eyes with one hand and gathers the cornflower stems with the other. The skin on her knuckles is stretched thin like tracing paper as she clutches the stalks. Rachel remembers how she spat at the man who’d delivered Mykola’s washing machine. She remembers Mykola’s warnings. There is unfinished business between these two. Now he will see that she and Ivan are with Elena, out here in the woods, when he told her to stay away. Rachel’s chest tightens. He has been waiting for them here.

Mykola skirts round the Zhiguli’s bonnet.

‘Lock the door,’ instructs Zoya. ‘I will deal with this.’ But Rachel is too slow; Ivan is fully awake now, stamping his feet on her thighs. The door is already being opened.

‘Hello Mykola,’ she says, keeping her voice bright. ‘Has your car broken down?’ Zoya glares at her in the rear-view mirror.

Mykola peers in. He is wearing a white shirt, no jacket. His head is bare. ‘Good afternoon, Rachel,’ he says. He looks at Ivan before staring briefly at the other occupants. ‘You have had a pleasant afternoon, I think. Please get out of the car.’

Rachel shifts Ivan onto her lap. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Yes,’ says Mykola.

‘No,’ says Zoya, with a warning pump on the accelerator. ‘Stay where you are.’

Now there are two people telling Rachel what to do. Zoya sounds strained, furious. Mykola, on the other hand, remains impassive, his dark eyes upon her.

‘These are bad people,’ he says. ‘The boy, I know him. I have no problem with him, if he keeps his mouth shut. But your driver, and her –’ he pauses, raising his chin towards Elena, though his gaze doesn’t shift. ‘You must come back to Kiev with me.’

Insects buzz around the car outside, but inside there is silence. Stepan is examining a scab on his elbow while Elena just stares down at her lap, her grey hair sticking out and her shoulders hunched forward. She is still gripping the cornflowers, though their baby-blue heads are beginning to wilt.

‘Zoya and Elena are my friends,’ says Rachel, carefully. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t need your protection.’ She wants to shut the door, but Mykola is in the way. He is patting the car roof with his right hand: one, two, three.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘If you will not come with me, then I shall tell you about her because she is a mother, like you, and also nothing like you.’

This man is talking about mothers again, yet Elena and Zoya don’t have children. Zoya won’t catch Rachel’s eye, so she glances across to Stepan and although he has turned away, staring out through the glass towards the woods, it is as if he holds her gaze in his reflection. His pale eyes are unreadable, unreachable.