The caretaker – Teddy called her something. Baba Yaga. Well, Rachel doesn’t believe in witches, though the old woman clearly sees herself as some kind of spy. In the old days, she thinks, the caretaker must have been paid to listen and watch and poke through the rubbish. If you spoke against the Party, she’d have heard it. If you hoarded fuel, she’d have smelled it and if you took a lover, well, she’d have sniffed that out, too. Now, Lucas says, no one is rewarded for whispering any more. But what if other people’s business is all you know, and searching out weakness is what makes you feel strong? That old woman, she sits in her little hidey-hole across the foyer and purses her lips whenever Rachel walks by, wagging her finger like a stick to beat the bad wife who dares to leave her flat and flaunt her baby as if she’s proud of him, proud of what she’s produced. They’re everywhere, these crones, barren with secrets, berating her on the trolleybus or in the bread shop or murmuring and crossing themselves outside the cathedrals and the churches, tugging at her hair when she doesn’t cover her head and kicking the pushchair when she wheels it across the painted floor to show Ivan the candles at the back of those dark, cloying shrines….
Ivan has stopped crying. The only sound is her breathing, shallow and rapid. Rachel turns towards the caretaker’s cubicle. It has a glass front. A curtain strung on a length of drooping wire is drawn across the window.
‘Allo?’ she calls, her own voice unfamiliar in the empty, echoing space. ‘Dobry dyen?’ There is no reply. Shifting Ivan round to her hip, her forearm slotted under his shoulder, she walks over to the cubicle. The door is partly open. She steps closer, sees a chair with a worn, flattened cushion. It appears empty; all the same, she thinks she must knock, so she taps her fingers lightly on the glass. At her touch, the door swings wide and now she can see further inside – a cheap desk, a black telephone and some yellowing notices stuck to the window frame and pinned along the back wall.
The smell from Ivan’s nappy is sharp and sour. Rachel knows she needs to get him upstairs, that the ammonia that is forming will burn into his flesh. She ought to abandon the pushchair or exit the building and go outside to the steps that she thinks must lead down to the basement, but instead she’s distracted by the brown and white patterned tea cup and saucer placed to one side of a stained ink blotter. Above the tea cup hangs a calendar with an image of a teenage girl in folk dress, and there, pushed into a corner, lies a small pink plastic hairbrush with its nest of grey hairs. The muteness of these objects repels and moves her and she holds herself in for several seconds or even a minute until, finally, her eyes register something else. On the shelf behind the chair is a slim cardboard carton, rectangular, dark green, a little crushed. The gold clock is still visible on the side.
A box of After Eights. Her box – the one she threw down the rubbish chute.
Carefully, she lies Ivan down on his back across the desk and stretches over the chair to reach it. She raises the dented lid, runs her forefinger across the waxy sleeves. There’s no folded slip of paper, no hidden note; just a soft rustle like shifting sand and a fusty smell that mingles with a trace of peppermint.
‘Shto?’
The harsh voice behind her makes Rachel jump. In the same moment she sees two arthritic hands in fingerless gloves reaching forward. The hands pick up her son, who grabs hold of the teacup, and when Rachel turns round the caretaker is clutching Ivan to her chest and Ivan is opening his mouth to bawl, so she lets go of the box and all three of them look down to where dark squares are fluttering and thousands upon thousands of tiny black seeds are spilling and spinning across the cold floor.
Rachel needs her baby back, but the old woman is holding him tight. Her wrinkled face is no longer a mesh of disapproval. Instead, her mouth is open and her eyes are aghast. Something terrible is happening here. Something terrible has already happened.
Dreams bleed into memory and memory sinks into dream. Later that night, dogs bark as Elena Vasilyevna moans in her sleep. The old caretaker sees dark water; bodies glistening in the reeds. She is fishing, or trying to, for she has no lines or nets.
Her sister is crying. That English baby is crying while his mother makes strange noises, opening then shutting her mouth.
Elena should have told her. The river cannot feed them. The fish are all gone.
Chapter 9
LUCAS WAKES ON the morning of the twenty-fifth of December to find his legs trapped in a tangle of bedsheets. When he rolls over he pushes a solid object with his foot. It lands on the floor with a dull thump. His head is hurting, his mouth tastes of sick and something that feels like a strand of hair is caught at the back of his throat. He buries his face into the pillow. He wants to hide from the cold light that is seeping under the fringed curtain but a question nags him back into consciousness. What has he knocked off the bed?
He levers himself up, sees that he is alone and peers over the side of the mattress. On the floor is a dark shape, like a lumpy forearm or a badly packed Christmas stocking. With a grunt he reaches out and scoops it up. There’s a label attached with an elastic band. ‘To Daddy,’ it reads. ‘From Santa xx.’ It is a Christmas stocking.
‘Rach?’ he croaks. His voice isn’t working so he puts his hand into the top of the sock – not a thick sock, just one of his black work socks with a small hole in the heel. The contents, as he pulls them out, seem rather apt, in the circumstances – a bottle of imported Heineken, a six-pack of Bic lighters, a handful of walnuts in their shells and, in the toe, a shiny pair of nail clippers. The lighters make him want a cigarette and he contemplates an illicit one in bed until the fact that he is now a father breaks over him once again. Instead he leans back, opens the beer on edge of the headboard and tries to reassemble the events of the night before. He didn’t get back from Crimea until eleven and he hadn’t been through the door for more than three minutes before it all kicked off.
They’d had sex, him and Rachel – he is almost certain of this. The details are hazy – he remembers worrying that the two mattresses pushed together might suddenly separate and land them both on the floor. He takes a swig of his beer and then he feels guilty. They’d argued for a long time beforehand, Rachel weeping because he’d not brought any Pampers, then because he’d lost that stupid novel she’d picked up from somewhere and she might even have cried something about a Baba Yaga, though he’d probably dreamt that part. Anyway, he’d been too busy insisting that it was impossible to buy what wasn’t for sale and that this was a crap homecoming.
The problem, nevertheless, was that while the crap might be true, it was also true that he’d had a great time away from Kiev. What was it Sorin had said when the omnipresent press secretary had popped up at that junket vodka reception in Dnepropetrovsk? ‘A man must know when to be with his wife, and when to stay away.’ Straight out of the dark ages, and just the sort of Slavic macho anachronism Lucas could riff with in a slot on From Our Own Correspondent. All the same, he knew what Sorin meant. He’d smoked in the hotel bathroom, jacked off when the mood took him and, most important of all, he’d felt like a journalist again, wandering around, asking questions, observing and speculating without worrying about how to justify his actions.
Lucas tries to crack a walnut with the nail clippers but the shell is a bugger.
Things start to look up when he smells coffee and French toast.