Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

Ivan reaches forward, his sunhat tipping back from his head as he strains at the belt of his pushchair. His clothes are summer-thin and he isn’t wearing shoes, so the woman behind the table scowls disapprovingly, but Rachel doesn’t care. She asks the price of the toy, counts out the right money and when it is handed over she pops it into her bag. Another souvenir for her son, she thinks. He is too young to remember their walks, the things they’ve seen. It will keep him entertained on the plane.

She turns the corner and heads along Lavrska Street towards the top end of Tsarskoye Selo.

Mykola crosses himself three times as he emerges from the little church in the Lower Lavra and exits the monastery via a gate in the wall. His car is parked a short distance away near the bus stop; he prefers to approach and leave the monastery on foot, to spend a few minutes alone to consider his petitions to Our Lady of the Dormition. His bodyguard, loitering in the trees, flicks away his cigarette when he sees him, and Mykola tries not to show his irritation as he climbs the steps at the edge of the park. The practicalities are distasteful to him, but security has become a necessary evil. These days paying the hospital bills of the local police chief’s daughter won’t keep the snakes in the sewers. He knows someone has opened a file on him down at the Justice Ministry.

Today he has business to attend to, an appointment in town. The thought distracts him from more recent preoccupations: a certain breathlessness, an inability to sleep. His doctors tell him his heart is healthy, but in the church just now he had to put his hand on the wall to steady himself. He’s a businessman, yet he also sees ghosts.

At the top of the hill, Lavrska Street is full of trucks and trolleybuses. It takes him a few seconds to adjust to the traffic, though he doesn’t resent the pollution or the sense of organised chaos around him: it is always good for cash-flow, for progress.

Then, just as his bodyguard opens the door of his silver Lexus, he notices a woman with a pushchair on the opposite side of the street.

He gestures to his man to wait for him at the car and walks south-east, in the direction of the river.

Ivan starts wailing as soon as Rachel turns into Panfilovstev Street. He wants to walk, his new obsession, but he likes to touch everything and there is broken glass amongst the weeds along the fences.

‘Let’s go to Elena’s house,’ Rachel murmurs, unwilling to return to the apartment just yet, and as she pushes her son down the rutted lane that dwindles between the cottages and the noise from the main road fades and the stones beneath the buggy’s wheels crunch and pop, he sits up. Eyes wide, he grips the sides of his buggy like an infant prince to whom all things – the insects, the overhanging branches, the weeds in the potholes before him – are both fascinating and unworthy.

The house, when they stop in front of it, has been transformed. A triple-glazed veranda runs along the front, with white wicker furniture just visible beyond the toughened glass. The path to the front door is paved with marble and security lights stare, blankly, from their steel mountings beneath the eaves. To the right sits a brand-new garage, its door open, empty, a dark maw. Beyond it Rachel can see the tiled roof of the sauna. The workmen haven’t quite finished yet; their tools and some bags of sand or cement lie beneath a tarpaulin.

The house itself is quiet. Deserted, even. The upstairs shutters are closed. If Suzie were here, Rachel would be embarrassed to be found outside, uninvited, but the stillness convinces her that no one is home. Turning left, she pushes Ivan slowly alongside the old blue-painted picket fence that marks out the property’s perimeter. The fence seems out of place now. Rachel recalls talk of a wall or something more secure, more private. She peers at the once-neat vegetable beds, already a tangle of bolting carrots and leeks, and wonders when these, too, will be concreted over.

Her gaze shifts towards the five or six fruit trees that huddle a few yards away in the lower part of the garden.

‘Pears!’ she says, unbuckling Ivan, lifting him up to her hip. Each fruit hangs from its branch like a gift, yellow and speckled, now waiting to be plucked and either gorged fresh from the tree or steamed, preserved or pickled. ‘Apa!’ repeats her son, kicking his legs and beaming. All that hoeing and weeding, pruning and thinning out, all those pots on the windowsill, those tiny black seeds. Elena would laugh at Ivan shouting at her fruit, but she never wasted food. She would want him to eat some.

A pear drops to the ground with a soft thump. Wasps bob and dip around the disturbance; the long, thin grass in the shade beneath the trees is littered with windfalls. Some of them are rotting already, the skin covered in brown circles and bruises, puckered and concave, with a dusting of velvety spores. Others look perfect, almost as if a careful hand has placed them there. They won’t last long. The worms and the ants are already advancing.

Rachel hoists Ivan into the air and sets him down on the other side of the fence. Then, hitching up her gathered denim skirt and holding on to a post, she stands on the seat of the pushchair and swings a leg over. The seat slips from under her and she scrapes the inside of her knee before landing awkwardly next to Ivan. Now the pushchair lies on its side on the path, one wheel slowly spinning. She frowns, anxious for a moment, then remembers that of course they can leave by the gate. She turns and ducks beneath the branches of the nearest tree.

The first two windfalls she slips into the pockets of her skirt. Their warm weight knocks awkwardly against her thighs, yet the urge to take more is too great and with no bag to hand, Rachel tugs off her old cardigan and spreads it on the ground. Soon she has collected a small pile. The scent from the fruit is heady – not sharp and cidery, but dense and honeyish. Insects crawl over her hands – ants, mainly, and the odd wasp, though she isn’t stung. When she shakes off the wasps they swoop drunkenly or lie on their backs and wave their antennae in the grass. She glances towards her son, who has grasped a fence post with one hand and is tugging at plantain heads with the other. No pear for him until they get back to the flat. The wasps will go straight for the sugar.

It is hot work, but Rachel gathers more than she needs. She ties the cardigan arms to make a bundle, then reemerges from the trees brushing a twig from her hair and looks up towards the house.

Still quiet.

No, not quiet.

A yelp to her right – a shriek of protest. Rachel turns to see a figure straightening up on the other side of the fence. A man in a suit is standing there; he is grasping Ivan beneath the armpits. Bare legs dangle in the sunshine. Mykola Sirko is taking her son.

‘What are you doing?’ she asks, bewildered. ‘Give him to me.’

Mykola regards her with his dark, sad eyes. ‘You should not be here. I will hold him. He knows me.’

A cry catches in Rachel’s throat. She has dreamt about this man, she has looked for his face on a crowded street, she has recoiled from his inferences and his stories about Elena, and now Elena is dead.

Ivan isn’t crying, though she sees how clumsily Mykola is clutching him. This Mykola seems different from the man she last saw on the road in the birch woods. His eyes flicker about. He is less steady on his feet.

‘Give him to me,’ she repeats. Ivan stops wriggling and stares at her, seeking clues. She steps towards the fence without taking her eyes off her son. Stay c alm, she tells herself. Don’t frighten him .

Mykola moves backwards, keeping two arms’ lengths between them. He leans sideways and grasps the overturned pushchair with his spare hand, setting it upright.