Back inside the flat, pipes grunt and cough. Girders stretch and creak and the squeaking, rolling sound like trolley wheels has started up again. Ivan murmurs in his cot, awake and round-eyed, but as Rachel bends to pick him up she sees her hands letting go of the After Eights box. This is what they do, she thinks. They let go. And because she must protect her child she carries him to the kitchen instead of the living room, then pulls up a chair and stares through the darkness down to Staronavodnitska Street where a shrieking, sparking tram makes its way towards the river and tail lights wink between the trees of Tsarskoye Selo. Across the valley, up on the hilltop, the floodlit steel bulk of the Motherland statue raises its sword to the heavens. Yes, thinks Rachel as she lifts her shirt and grits her teeth when her son’s gums clamp on: that statue is another hollow thing in this black night.
‘Dyed, kak tyi?’
Zoya’s voice carries across the tiny hall and into the dimness beyond. Her grandfather doesn’t answer. No one answers. For the past seventeen years it’s been Zoya’s name on the papers for this left bank apartment across the river on the outer edges of the industrial zone in Darnytsia, yet even now she cannot enter without calling out, as if asking for permission. She closes the door behind her and sniffs the sharp scent of the blackberry leaf tea her neighbour brews to disguise the smell of urine. As she unzips her boots by the coat stand and removes and hangs up her skirt, she considers making a cup for herself, but instead pushes open the door to her left. Beyond is the flat’s only room, apart from the cramped cubby holes that serve as kitchen and bathroom. There is no sound from the bed that takes up most of the floor space, although the dull glow from the fringed lamp on the table shows a figure lying motionless beneath the covers.
‘I’m home, Grandpa,’ she says. ‘I’ll just wash my hands.’
In the bathroom, Zoya switches on the light and counts the sheets bunched up on the cracked tiles by the toilet. Two. It used to bother her that Tanya, her neighbour, wouldn’t rinse them out. Now she doesn’t think about it. Tanya might drink her tea and forage in her drawers, but without the woman’s daily appearances Zoya wouldn’t be able to go to work at all. She unhooks the shower head and turns on the tap. Water trickles out; at least it is warm this evening. She breathes in the chemical smell of the soap powder and stands there in her nylon slip, eyes closed, water pattering on the sheets as if they are a row of blackcurrant bushes outside a rural back door.
When the sheets are hung, dripping, over the bath, Zoya pulls on a faded floral housecoat and shuffles back to the kitchen in her slippers. She is too tired to cook, but there’s cold soup on the stove and she eats some straight from the pan before decanting a little into a bowl, taking care to remove the soft lumps of cabbage. As she turns to look for a spoon, a note, scrawled on the back of an envelope and left underneath a bottle of yellow medicine on the windowsill catches her eye. ‘Gone to my sister’s,’ it reads. ‘Back Thursday.’ So, Tanya is taking a break. Zoya can’t go to work tomorrow. She’ll have to call Lucas and tell him the car’s got a problem. She’ll say she’s taking it to her cousin’s to get it fixed and he’ll grumble about how that’s what happens when the BBC gives them a tin can in a city full of potholes.
She places the bowl of soup on a tray, along with a wedge of cured pig fat and a few slices of pickled cucumber she finds in the ancient refrigerator. Then she takes two glasses and pours water in one before filling the other with vodka from a bottle she keeps tucked behind the stove.
‘Here we are, Grandpa,’ she murmurs, carrying the tray into the bedroom.
The air above the bed smells of old skin and stale breath and when Zoya sits down on the only chair, the figure beneath the bedclothes releases a feeble stream of wind. ‘Grandpa,’ she whispers, bending down to kiss the top of his bony head. She tends to him then, cajoling him into raising his head, easing him up onto the bolster, bringing a spoonful of soup to his mouth, wiping his chin with the bib that Tanya has left there. Her grandfather’s facial muscles strain and his tongue feels for the shapes of the words he can no longer find.
‘I saw someone else doing that today,’ she tells him. ‘The English woman, trying to speak words in Russian. Not as beautifully as you, though, my darling.’ And when the soup is finished and she has eaten the cold salo and the pickle and drunk some of the vodka, she dips her little finger into the glass and pokes it, so gently, between his lips.
Chapter 4
ELENA VASILYEVNA is pickling beetroot. Her arthritis has flared up now that the weather is colder and her shoulder joints grind, bone on bone, so she has enlisted the help of the boy Stepan. She can keep an eye on him in her lean-to kitchen on the hill in Tsarskoye Selo. He won’t come to any good idling in the car park at the apartment block or leering at her beneath the monastery walls. The so-called uncle he lives with is a slob.
Stepan’s job is to hold each jar steady while she stands on a stool and ladles in the soft purple heads. When the lids are secured and the jars wiped clean she will store them beneath the stairs with the bottled pears and tomatoes, the trays of chitting potatoes and the onion seeds in their twists of yellowed newspaper. If he likes, decides Elena, he could help her in the spring. She could start him on some digging.
Stepan screws up his face as the steam rises in vinegary clouds. He’ll want payment, that’s obvious, and he has a taste for preserved cherries so for now she will give him half a jar. Elena knows about hunger. She knows how starved limbs swell, how skin becomes shiny, almost see-through, before it splits open and the body’s fluids leak out.
Famine eats you from the inside. When winter comes, hold on to what you’ve got.
Chapter 5
RACHEL IS STANDING in a stranger’s apartment. She shifts Ivan on to her hip and turns her head slowly, eyes skimming from one object to another as her brain realigns itself to the changes in tone, texture, scale.
‘It’s so white,’ she murmurs. ‘Everything is so white.’ The tasteful shades of pale envelop her within their seductive, muffling depths. She wants to sniff the cream leather armchair, sink her toes into the sheepskin rug, run her fingers across the Egyptian cotton tablecloth and even slip into the white blouse her host is wearing as she pours coffee into milk-smooth porcelain cups. The silky fabric reminds Rachel of her mother’s face cream. Visibly Different, by Elizabeth Arden. For years she had watched her mother apply soft white dabs every night, frowning at the mirror, massaging her cheeks in slow, careful circles. Yet when Rachel, aged ten, had tried it for herself, twisting off the lid, sliding a fingerful under her vest and rubbing it across her stomach and chest, her mother had been furious. The pot was snapped inside her handbag after that. Such pleasures were only for grown ups.
Suzie, the Scottish woman Vee told her to call, straightens up and pushes her long ash-blonde hair back over her shoulder.
‘White is so easy, don’t you think?’
Rachel has been staring too long, but she can’t help it. The only white things in the flat on the thirteenth floor are the Pampers, though her stock is depleting daily. Even Ivan’s once-white vests and cot sheets are stained a greyish yellow. She can’t quite believe the existence of this pure, untainted space on the eighth floor of the neighbouring building.