Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

Zoya stops what she is doing and leans in through the driver’s door to murmur something to Elena. ‘Come here,’ she says to Rachel, as Elena slowly swings out one leg and holds on to the door frame, refusing Rachel’s hand. ‘Elena must hold the baby. You and Stepan must help me take off the wheel.’

Certainly, fixing it will require them all to work together. Rachel hesitates for a moment before handing Ivan to Elena. Elena moves back from the verge, holding the child stiffly, not looking at him. It is as if she doesn’t know him or is afraid to rest her eyes on him. Instead she peers off to the left in the direction from which they have come, while Zoya jacks up the car and puts the wrench in position. Stepan steps onto its jutting arm, gripping Rachel’s shoulder for support, jigging up and down, his bare toes poking out of his plastic gym flip flops until the nuts loosen and Zoya can prise off the wheel and bolt on the spare.

By the time the damaged wheel has been stowed in the boot, all four of them are done in.

Zoya takes them back to Staronavodnitska Street. She drives carefully, silently, continually checking her rear-view mirror without moving her head. The sun has dipped behind the apartment block and in the shade the car park is gloomy. Stepan slips out before Zoya has turned off the engine and disappears behind the dump bins in the direction of the waste ground. Elena moves more slowly, pulling her cardigan around her before hobbling towards the steps.

Rachel hauls her suitcase out of the boot, too tired to do anything except drop it onto the tarmac. Nevertheless, she is reluctant to leave Zoya without some sort of reckoning.

‘I am sorry…’ She stops, seeing Zoya’s scowl.

‘ Sorry ? For what? This isn’t your business. I have already told you so.’ Zoya hooks out the pushchair and shuts the rear passenger door. ‘You are a good mother, Rachel. Believe this, look after your little boy, but stay away from Elena, yes? Or Mykola will hurt her.’

Rachel sucks in a breath, remembering the knife and the way Elena gripped it. ‘Why? Why would he do that?’

‘Because he wants to control everything! What she did in the past, we don’t know. You understand that, don’t you? She cares for Ivan and she cares for Stepan, too, though I cannot think why when that little shit betrays her. I will stay with her tonight. You must go upstairs. Find Lucas.’

When Zoya dismisses her in this way she makes everything sound so simple. Mykola’s words can’t be unsaid, but he is too young; he couldn’t have been present at the events he described. None of them can guess what torments Elena suffered. The war was a different time. A terrifying time. None of them has any right to judge.

Nevertheless, as Rachel lugs her case and Ivan’s pushchair up the steps, as she waits for the lift, as she puts her key in the door of their apartment, she counts the floors, counts the walls, and though she has buried her book, she comforts herself with the fact that its pages are filed like an insurance policy in her head.

Lucas doesn’t yell, or make a fuss, or even get up when Rachel parks their sleeping son’s pushchair in the hallway. She finds him sprawled on the floor in the bedroom, curtains pulled against the early evening sun. He is lying on his side, blowing smoke rings under the bed, with the half-empty bottle of Vee’s Christmas Stolichnaya near his ear.

‘You didn’t go then,’ he says, tipping his head back to see her. ‘I called your mum. She said you hadn’t told her you were coming, so I phoned the airline and they said they couldn’t tell me whether you had checked in.’

‘I went to the country with Zoya.’ Rachel looks at her husband, at his half-closed eyes and supine limbs stretched out on the parquet at her feet. He is blocking her path to the wardrobe. She wants to tell him to move, to stop smoking; she wants to feel his anger towards her for not catching her flight, yet his torpor makes her hesitate. Something has happened. She retreats to the kitchen to prepare Ivan’s milk.

As the pipe coughs and the water spurts from the tap into the kettle she hears Lucas kick the wardrobe door.

‘Rach,’ he calls, his voice thin and hoarse. ‘ Rach! ’

‘I’m here,’ she says, turning off the tap.

‘The film has been cancelled. Lukyanenko announced it this morning on the steps of the House of Artists. Then he set fire to the master reel. There won’t be a premiere, or any distribution. Nothing at all.’

Rachel leaves the kettle in the sink. She wasn’t expecting this. She steps back to the bedroom and stands in the doorway.

‘Why?’

‘Some politician said it was incendiary, an incitement, so no licences would be issued. Then the backers started pulling out. Vee knew it was going down the pan but she fucking lied to me. She’s just published a piece in The Washington Post . She must have been working on it for a week or two at least. Maybe longer. Maybe from the start.’ Lucas’s voice rises like a child’s. ‘She’s gone for the corruption angle. She even mentions me: “A naive English freelancer” like she’s writing my epitaph…’

‘Lucas…’

‘She played me,’ he says, groaning and rolling on to his back. ‘Lukyanenko must have known. I can’t stay here now. I can’t work here. I need to get out. This place has been a disaster. I’ve not made any money, I’ve got no credentials, I’m sleeping on the sofa…’ He twists his head to look up at her, but he is facing the wrong way and Rachel realises it must seem as if she is towering over him.

‘Shh,’ she says, stooping to pick up the vodka bottle. Lucas flails and grasps her wrist. His eyes struggle to focus, he stinks of cigarettes and alcohol and she recoils a little, yet he doesn’t let go. Hold on then, she wills him. Hold on. He is hiding nothing from her, though the day has been full of betrayal: Vee, but also Stepan, and Mykola with his terrible words about Elena. Zoya has always insisted that Rachel and Lucas don’t belong in this city, with these people. Lucas, on the other hand, knew Rachel before she became a mother. He had loved her when she was still a girl.

‘Shhh,’ she whispers, softer now. There is a kind of release in solace, in the comfort of the familiar, even if that comfort is more like the caress of a mother to her child. Lucas is willing, and soon he is eager. She is cautious at first, but then she unzips his trousers and holds him in her hand and she knows she could do anything at this moment – anything – and he would acquiesce. When she moves down to brush her lips against his skin, faces appear: Mykola in his white shirt, staring through the rear window; Zoya at the edge of the birch trees, watching her when she doesn’t think Rachel can see her; Elena; Stepan; her mother; even Lucas himself, until finally she blinks away these spectres, blocks her ears to their voices and, for a few charged seconds, has no memory at all.

THE FIRST TIME Rachel kissed a boy, she felt the strangeness within her – her lips felt different, her tongue was not her own. She was changed by it, she thought. It wasn’t like kissing a doll, or the mirror, or the back of her hand, even when she’d licked it. The first time she slept with Lucas, she felt different again. His stubble chafed her skin and he made her insides burn.

How many times can that happen, Rachel wonders. Once, or twice, or hundreds and thousands of times? You feel something, you remember the feeling and it becomes a story. Yet the story changes; all the time, it changes. The end, as it approaches, is never really the end.

Once Lucas is sober, once the wound of Vee’s betrayal is found not to be fatal, he tells Rachel it makes sense to stay in Kiev until they have used up the year’s rental on the apartment. It takes him a few days to recover his equilibrium, but money must be earned, there are news bulletins to file, political in-fighting to comment on and a spike in interest from British news desks about a burgeoning doomsday cult that is rumoured to be brainwashing children in the oblasts south of the city. Enough to keep a freelance journalist busy through the dog days of July and August.