‘I know!’ Lucas says, with a look that might be relief, or disappointment. ‘I know! Top of my list!’
Once Lucas has left and the tail lights of his taxi have vanished into the weather, Rachel attends to her routines. First she steps into the living room and shunts the sofa up against the balcony door. Then she moves the telephone out to the hallway, setting it up on the cheaply laminated bureau with the three-sided vanity mirror next to the front door. As she closes the living room door she wedges a kitchen chair beneath the handle.
‘The tropical rain fell in great drenching sheets,’ she murmurs, as if an incantation from her lost book might set a seal on her actions.
At midday she mashes a little stewed carrot into Ivan’s flaked rice. She washes all the bedlinen in the bath and hangs it to dry on a clothes rack in the bedroom, then realigns the depleted pile of Pampers in the drawer beneath the bed, despite her nagging awareness that Ivan has outgrown the size she brought with her from London. In the afternoon she takes her son outside in the pushchair, piling on the blankets to protect him from the caretaker’s disapproval as much as the cold. She learns to dislodge the build-up of slush around the wheels with a quick jab of her boot, and counts the strange, floating balls of mistletoe in the tops of the bare trees. At night, she re-reads chapters from Baby’s First Year, staring at the photographs of cluttered British homes, their chaos carefully constructed and cropped to put new mothers at their ease. Sometimes, when the squeaking starts up, she thinks about the rollerblading boy and the old man in the flat above her head, but she never meets anyone on the landing.
Then, one day, as she stoops to remove the dirty nappy that, yet again, the caretaker has deposited on the mat outside the front door, she finds a note tucked underneath it, written on a piece of thin squared paper that looks as if it has been torn from an exercise book. The note consists of two words:
Close windows!
It seems the caretaker knows a little English, but Rachel doesn’t understand. Is this a warning, or an admonition? The windows aren’t open. She picks up the nappy, places it back inside the rubbish chute and slams the steel door shut with a clang that makes her teeth rattle.
Later that afternoon, as she draws the curtains in the bedroom against the creeping dark, the telephone rings. Its harsh vibrations repeat along the parquet. Rachel scoops up Ivan, who is trying to pull himself along, knees beneath his hips, ready to crawl. His head bobs against her collarbone as she hurries from the bedroom. His grubby fingers clutch her shirt, but he is quiet. As Rachel bends down to lift the receiver from its cradle on the bureau, she sees her reflection in the three-sided mirror – a triptych of mother and child, strangely familiar, like a painting in a church.
‘Allo?’ she says, as Lucas has taught her. It can only be one of four people, she thinks.
‘Adeen, dva, tree…’ she counts.
The silence presses against her ear.
When Rachel was nine, her mother caught her thinking. Rachel was sitting on the swing in the narrow garden behind the bungalow. Her legs were a little too long already for the height of the seat so she’d tucked them under as she rocked back and forth, gently scuffing the toes of her sandals on the paving slab her father had placed there.
‘Rachel?’ shouted her mother from the kitchen window, hidden from view behind ragged stems of buddleia. Rachel didn’t know what her mother wanted, but she knew it would be a chore of some sort, so she slid off the swing and lay down on her side by the hedge, hoping no one would find her. She was just beginning to relax, enjoying the sensation of looking at the swing from a new angle while her lips formed the shape of the swear word she’d gleaned from the older children next door when her mother shouted again.
‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, trying to hide. Come inside now!’
At any other time, her mother’s words might have washed over her and meant nothing, but instead they came at that particular moment; at the exact moment to spark a new thought in Rachel’s mind.
At teatime that evening, as her mother piled spoonfuls of mince and onions onto three plates and then drained the peas, Rachel stared at the back of her head and tried to enter her thoughts. If you can read my mind then that’s a horrible thing to do and you had better stop it because it’s not fair and thoughts are PRIVATE and I HATE you.
‘Is the salt on the table?’ asked her mother, without turning round.
Yes.
‘Rachel – did you hear me?’
YES.
Now her mother looked over her shoulder.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake – what’s got into you? It’s right under your nose!’
Stop pretending you can’t read my thoughts. I know you can and you should STOP IT RIGHT NOW.
Her mother put her plate of food down in front of her and turned back to the counter. Rachel would have to be careful. Her mother was very sneaky.
The phone isn’t dead – Rachel can hear a sort of fizzing on the line. Lucas has told her all about phone taps. He says they are still in place all over the city, though no one listens in any more. Rachel ought to replace the receiver, but she hesitates. That woman downstairs, the caretaker, the dezhornaya – isn’t it her job to spy on them all? She sifts through their rubbish with her dirty fingers. What if she is listening? What if she’s been trained, and what if she can hear Rachel breathing and Ivan snuffling through a headset clamped to her ears in her little cubbyhole downstairs? It’s possible – so why not?
‘Gavareetyi po’angliski?’ she tries. ‘Do you speak English?’
More fizzing.
‘All right, then,’ she says, feeling bolder. ‘Here is a message for you. Pass it up to Sorin or Sarin or whoever it is who stole my book. Tell President Kravchuk if you like. People should be allowed to have private thoughts and private conversations. Maybe you’ve been spying for so long you’ve forgotten to stop, down there with your earpiece in and your nasty prying eyes. What exactly would you do if I said I had a really big secret – a secret about the Russians or nuclear missiles or NATO or an awful terrible thing I might do, up here where you can’t stop me?’
She pauses to catch her breath and stares at her thighs and stomach mirrored three-fold in the glass, along with Ivan’s dangling leg, which is all she can see of him at this angle. Her heart is thumping beneath his downy head. Perhaps it is her reflection that is speaking, another version of herself. The one with no face.
‘I bet you’d do nothing, because you are pointless and no one would care about what you said.’
Silence. Of course, silence. Rachel breathes in the waxy smell of Ivan’s scalp and brushes his forehead with her lips. She is just about to replace the receiver when she hears another click.
‘Allo?’ says a voice.
She freezes.
‘Allo. Good afternoon. Am I speaking to Mrs Porter?’ The words, faint at first, emphasise the P as if it is being punched out of a Dymo machine.
‘Yes…’ whispers Rachel. ‘Who is this?’
‘Good afternoon,’ repeats the voice, a woman, her articulation too precise to be British. ‘My name is Lizbette Solwein and I am deputy director of human resources at the UN mission in Kiev. Mrs Porter, I have been given your name as someone who might be willing to undertake an independent consumer survey on behalf of our international staff. May I ask, do you hold a British passport and is this something that might interest you?’