Judith Heneghan - Snegurochka

‘Be careful. There are wasps.’ His voice is low, soft. He looks at Ivan as if wondering what to do with him.

Rachel’s ribs press against the pickets. ‘Ivan’s thirsty. And hungry. I need to take him home.’

Mykola inclines his head. ‘This is natural. But I cannot let you feed him anything the old whore has grown. You must leave the fruit.’

The old whore – he means his own mother. Rachel’s heart is pounding. Ivan is wearing the little socks with the hens – the ones Elena bought him. She wants to feel her child’s hot damp feet in her palms. She is breathless with the pull of him, the longing to draw him close. She remembers the cardigan she is gripping in her hand and drops it to the ground. Pears spill and tumble across the grass.

‘I won’t take them. I don’t want them.’

Mykola doesn’t react.

‘Elena was kind to me,’ she goes on, rushing her words. ‘Whatever she did before, I know she regretted it. She helped me. To give you up like that – she must have been desperate. She must have thought she was keeping you safe – giving you the best chance.’

Mykola raises his free hand and rubs at the skin between his eyebrows. ‘You are mistaken,’ he murmurs, his gaze switching to the house. ‘Your friends have told you some things. The past, you should know, holds many stories. I told you one myself. Nevertheless, a mother should never break her bond with her child.’

Ivan keeps twisting his head. A wasp buzzes near his shoulder.

‘You’re right,’ says Rachel, willing it to stay away from her son. ‘But when you have no choice, like Elena—’

‘No!’ Mykola’s voice rises at the end of the word as if he is instructing a child. ‘She had a choice. Always! Elena Vasilyevna’s lover, my father, worked for the Kiev Regional Committee. His barren wife wanted a baby, so Elena agreed to exchange me for this.’ He waves towards the house, then the fruit trees. ‘Problem – the wife did not like me. Other problem – the NKVD did not like my father. Some minor disagreement, someone else after his position… He was shot in the head on Lavrska Street, where you walk. Outside the monastery! Well the monks took me in, but they could not keep me. Elena Vasilyevna knew, yet she chose to compound her crime. She did not take me back. Instead she locked her gate and tended her garden. Potatoes, onions, pears!’ He is shaking his head, as if he still can’t believe it. ‘No one took her name off the papers, you see. So now it is mine and I will destroy it and burn all the trees.’

He starts walking towards the gate that leads to the house. He is pressing Ivan against his shoulder with one hand, while with the other he drags the pushchair behind him. Rachel follows, walking parallel with the fence: steady, steady, not shifting her gaze.

When they both reach the gate Ivan strains against Mykola’s grasp and starts shouting in short, staccato bursts: ‘ Apa! Apa! ’

Rachel can’t bear it any longer.

‘Please …’ She breathes the word out, willing it to touch this man; for him to show mercy.

Mykola parks the pushchair in the long grass and turns to observe her, his head tilting slightly.

‘You are afraid, Rachel.’

‘I want my baby.’

‘Like a good mother. The mother I know you to be.’ He rests his free hand on the latch and frowns. Then, with a soft, slow ‘ tak ’ of resignation, he opens the gate and gives up the child.

Rachel, her body shaking, pulls Ivan into her arms, greedy for his weight as he wriggles, pressing her lips against his neck. She brushes past Mykola and takes a few hurried steps towards the lane before she sees the wasp on her son’s thigh, but when she flicks it away it stings the back of her hand. The pain is instant and intense, like the anger that unexpectedly grips her.

She stops, looks back.

Mykola is still gazing towards the house, arms loose at his sides.

‘She might have loved you,’ she says. ‘If she’d known who you were. You should have told her!’

‘She did know – at the end.’

‘How?’ Rachel is almost shouting. ‘Were you with her when she died?’

‘She was leaving your flat.’

‘And you followed her? You should have left her alone! So what if she visited? We gave her a key! She was returning something that belonged to me!’

‘You did not listen to my warning. I have struggled to forgive you.’

In the silence that follows, in no more than a moment, the truth rises, clear and cold.

‘You killed her,’ murmurs Rachel.

Mykola’s head drops; he won’t look at her now. He is shrinking back into the depths of his abandonment.

‘At the end she did not need me. Even for that.’

This is how Rachel will remember Mykola, his head turned away, his gaze fixed on the things she cannot see. But first she must make her way home.

As shock takes hold she stumbles as she half-runs along the lane. She still hasn’t reached the turn in the road when a horn blares, short and sharp. Ivan’s nails dig into her arm as he starts to wail. A black jeep sweeps in from Panfilovstev Street. The stones beneath its tyres make a cracking sound like cap guns.

The jeep fills the narrow lane. As it slows to a crawl and its chrome bumper inches level with her thigh the wing mirror snags an overhanging branch. Rachel shields Ivan’s head with her stung hand and presses herself against the hedge that pokes through the fence to her left. The vehicle’s windows are tinted; she can’t see the driver, but the passenger window glides down and a woman removes her sunglasses.

‘Hello! Where are you going?’

It is Suzie. Her eyes have a pinkish tinge; the skin beneath them is puffy and grey. Rachel shakes her head, too overcome to explain about her throbbing knuckles, about Mykola, about Ivan’s distress.

‘I came to pick windfalls. From your garden.’

‘Oh – you should have called…’

Now Rachel sees Rob in the driving seat. His broad shoulders and square head fill the space beyond his wife.

‘Sounds like trespassing,’ he mutters sourly, his shades mirroring the sun’s glare. He flicks off the air conditioning and leans forward over the steering wheel. ‘Who the fuck is that on my driveway?’

Rachel looks at Suzie, at her strained face, at the elastic band peeping out from her sleeve. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, apologising for the trouble that will come; trouble that it is too late to halt now. She must concentrate on the narrow gap that leads round the back of the jeep towards Panfilovstev Street beyond.

‘Who is that?’ persists Rob, thick thumbs pushing on the horn so that Rachel jumps and Ivan stiffens.

‘Mykola Sirko,’ she says, yanking her skirt free of the hedge.

‘Mykola Sirko – that cunt. I told him to stay out of my way…’

Ivan is struggling to get down. Rachel realises she has left the pushchair by the gate, but there’s no going back. ‘He’s Elena’s son. Your new landlord!’ she shouts, her hand pressing against the rear window as she clambers round the bumper. The street ahead curves away to the right. Its trajectory pulls her forward – her tired feet, her arms that ache and throb, but which now she knows are strong.

I am leaving, she thinks, and the two windfalls in her pockets bump like soft fists against her thighs.

Once Rachel has passed the old houses, once she has crossed the tramlines at the bend on Staronavodnitska Street and avoided the dogs idling beneath the rowans, she slows down and takes several deep breaths. The smell of warm concrete fills her nostrils, along with exhaust fumes and a hint of dry leaves. There is the apartment block ahead of her, its shadow stretching past the dump bins. Ivan has stopped crying, so she sets him on the pavement and lets him walk a little. His fingers grip hers as he struts and goose-steps across the car park. With every stride he seems more confident of the ground beneath his feet.