Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

‘You think that Kiev is a hard place,’ continues Mykola. ‘You pity us for what you imagine we have endured. The women, you believe they have seen too much and that is why they shout and scold when you appear with your fine healthy baby. Yet she is not part of this story of yours. She is outside all of that and I can see that you won’t ask why because you are afraid. Well, a mother should never be afraid. You will hear what I have to say. You will hear what she has done.’

Mykola has lowered his voice. It is as if he is telling them a story. Rachel wants to stop him, yet her own dread prevents her.

‘Once, there was a woman who had a baby. She was unmarried, but that is how it goes sometimes. When the war came, she took up with a partisan who promised what he could not deliver. Then the fascists arrived. They pulled her lover out of the cellar where he hid and they marched him to a place outside the city to be shot. Well, the woman did not want to lose what she desired. So she pleaded with the soldiers to take her baby, to swap her baby for her lover. The guards laughed at her at first. Then they tossed her baby to her lover and while he held the infant they murdered him and he was the first to fall into the pit. The child was buried alive.’

When Mykola stops speaking Elena is still staring into her lap. Her lips are pushed forward and Rachel almost cries out as she sees what the old woman is really gripping amongst the flowers. A knife – the small paring knife from the hut – sharp enough for slicing through thick, fatty sausage. Zoya sees it too and reaches across, covering it with her own hand. An old woman holds a knife while a man tells a story no one asked to hear. Such things don’t belong in Zoya’s car and Rachel blinks too late to bury them, already grieving for what has been lost: the warmth by the stream, the picnic, the stroll up to the trees. What remains is impossible, unfathomable.

‘This woman is a murderer,’ says Mykola. ‘I tell you this, Rachel, to keep your son safe.’

Safe.

The word is a lie, one that breaks Mykola’s spell. With a sudden grunt, Zoya rams the gear stick into first. When she releases the handbrake, the car lurches forward so violently that Elena drops the knife and Ivan’s head is thrown backwards. The door is hanging open and it clips Mykola’s hand as Rachel leans out to yank it shut. She holds Ivan tight as the car skids across the potholes, spitting up stones from its wheels. The silver saloon is blocking their path but Zoya doesn’t slow down and instead pulls the steering wheel to the left so that they swing cartoonishly across the verge, into the narrow gap between the car and the trees, crushing a small sapling as it catches on the bumper. When they finally regain the rutted concrete, Zoya is shouting and even Stepan is leaning forward, yelling ‘Top Gun! Top Gun!’

Rachel, twisting her head, glimpses Mykola’s white shirt and dark hair on the far side of his car.

‘He’s not following us,’ she says.

Zoya leans over the steering wheel, her head almost touching the windscreen.

‘Why would he? He knows where we live.’

The little Zhiguli shakes and rattles as it moves onto the dual carriageway. Zoya re-sets her mirror and wipes the perspiration from her neck, but she doesn’t slow down until they reach the outer suburbs. The car makes a thudding sound on its right side, towards the rear. Zoya mutters under her breath, then brakes to a stop by the tramlines and leans over the back seat to open Stepan’s door.

‘ Ubiraysya otsuda!’ She spits out the words like a curse.

‘ Nyet! ’ cries Elena – the first word she has uttered since she climbed into the car. The two women start to gabble in Ukrainian. Zoya shakes off the old woman’s hand.

‘Stop arguing,’ pleads Rachel. ‘I don’t understand! Tell me what’s going on!’

‘I am not moving until that boy gets out!’ says Zoya. ‘He is spying on us! Who do you think told that man where to find us, eh? He didn’t need to go upstairs to fetch his coat!’ She slumps down in her seat, the anger suddenly gone out of her. ‘Elena still protects him. She says if I abandon Stepan, I abandon her, too…’ Her hands fumble with her cigarettes. She lights one and sucks hard, her eyes flicking to Rachel via the driver’s mirror as if she can’t make up her mind what to say next. Sweat glistens in the creases above her nose and when she speaks again her voice is low, hoarse. ‘You know what I discovered when I tried to find out about that gangster? He looks at my hospital files, at my grandfather’s files. He pays the doctors, he pays the typists, the officials, the boys like Stepan, then he calls me at my home and says I must be punished.’

‘Why? What for?’ Rachel looks at Stepan who is scratching his ribs, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. Stop it, she thinks, but he doesn’t.

‘Abortions!’ says Zoya. ‘Two – three – why not more? It is not a crime, the state allows, and why would I want a child to be born who was made in our poisonous air? But my grandfather – well, I tell you, that Mykola of yours is a liar, a disease. He says I am the one who killed him – my own grandfather! With black market morphine. He thinks he is a god – the one who decides, the one who passes sentence, but is he the one nursing his grandfather? Does he have to listen as an old man shrieks with pain in the night and shits himself in the only bed while his neighbours’ children grow sick with cancer of the thyroid or cancer of the blood? Why does he think he must protect you? You – as if you are so innocent…’ Zoya takes a deep breath, flicks ash out of the window. ‘Do not believe him, Rachel. He wants to control you.’

Rachel cradles Ivan close to her chest. He is starting to cry, upset by the distraught voices, the car that isn’t moving. She wants to get him home, to feed him and bathe him and rock him to sleep and then count her pages, except that she has buried her book amongst the tree roots in the woods.

‘He is not my Mykola,’ she murmurs. ‘He can’t control me. Please, let’s go.’

Stepan shifts in his seat, his bare legs making a sticking sound against the plastic. ‘You cannot go,’ he says, to Rachel. ‘There is broken tyre.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe Zoya want to wait for Mykola to fix it?’

His provocation galvanises Zoya, who jumps out of the car, reaches in to the back seat and hauls the boy out on to the sticky tarmac by his t-shirt. He sits where she dumps him, pulling faces and complaining as she inspects the rear tyre then thumps her fist on the roof.

‘Out! Out!’ she shouts, waving her arm at Elena and Rachel. ‘ Bystra! I cannot change the wheel while you sit there.’

Rachel struggles out of the car and rests Ivan on her hip. He is grizzling, leaning his head backwards so that she almost loses her balance. She can feel the heat from the road on her legs as she reaches into her bag for her son’s hat. The tram stop is no more than a sign – there is no shelter, no tree, just a long, etiolated shadow cast by the concrete post. Zoya is muttering, rummaging in the boot for the jack and the wrench and the spare wheel as lorries behind her thunder past, creating blasts of dry wind. Elena, however, isn’t moving. The flowers and the knife lie in a heap on the floor of the car, but she is staring straight ahead through the dusty windscreen, as if she is in shock.

‘Elena,’ murmurs Rachel, opening her door for her. She touches the old woman’s arm and is taken aback by the feel of bone beneath the skin. No muscle, no fat. Mykola said she’d had a lover and a baby – that she’d watched them both die, or worse. He’d been speaking in English, so Elena can’t have understood him, yet he has reached in and eviscerated her somehow, trailing her insides across the concrete – intimate, vulnerable, stinking. Rachel doesn’t know whether to believe him, and because of this she feels ashamed.