After forty minutes, when the letters start jumping and the terror of dropping Ivan over the balcony is temporarily in retreat, she is almost too cold to stand up and rub herself dry. She shivers on the edge of the toilet seat with a towel wrapped around her and closes her eyes.
Things happen for a reason, she reminds herself. You see a man. You find your book. Mykola is a real person, though sometimes she imagines him. Perhaps she ought to watch for him again.
Chapter 14
THE COLD SNAP breaks at the end of February. Grey clouds barge across the sky, northwards now, and the mounds of shovelled snow soften like ancient boulders worn smooth by the passing of millennia.
Lucas is relieved that Rachel seems more settled. Every Sunday, news permitting, he takes his wife and son on an outing. Family time, he calls it, and laughs at how they have arrived at something so suburban. Sometimes they take a trip in the car to the Architectural Park where they stroll around the little wooden huts and the drinks kiosks and show Ivan the life-size blue whale made of concrete. At Respublikansky Stadion they wander past the displays of cheaply made t-shirts and sweatshirts boldly proclaiming ‘Hugo Boss’ or ‘Gucci’ beneath drooping plastic awnings, or they hop on the 62 bus that runs along the river, then take the stately funicular past the Barbie sign and up the hill to St Andrew’s or St Sophia’s. When Lucas catches Rachel staring into crowds or turning her head towards strangers, he assumes she is merely curious. The two of them talk about Ivan, or about Lucas’s work, but they don’t discuss the future or their shared past. Those places are fraught with danger. Sex is a rare midnight fumbling; Rachel goes to bed before Lucas gets home and she’s up with Ivan at six. Anyway, Lucas needs his sleep. The agencies want news of disarmament treaties and the Black Sea Fleet, but instead there’s just rumour, stalling and a nudge off a sub-editor’s schedule. Each short bulletin takes its toll. He tells Zoya he’ll hold back his feature about Lukyanenko’s film until A Golden Promise is released. Then he can tell the whole story, rounded off with reaction from the premiere.
Rachel, meanwhile, sticks to her routine. After breakfast she soaks the washing in a bucket with water boiled on the stove. Next she takes Ivan out to the universam or rides the trolleybus down to the shops along Khreschatyk, trawling the Bessarabsky market or the empty booths of the central department store within its grand carapace on the corner of Bohdana Khmel’nyts’koho Street. She marks her path across the city by tearing off the little handwritten slips from notices pasted to lampposts and walls. She doesn’t know what they say: they could be adverts for language lessons or prostitutes or pleas for lost children. Soon her pockets are full of telephone numbers.
After lunch, Ivan naps while she keeps him safe by counting her words from Jurassic Park at the table in the kitchen until Elena knocks on the door for their daily dose of Simplemente Maria. Sometimes Elena brings a gift for Ivan – a musty-smelling balloon, a teething ring made from hard, unyielding plastic or, once, a pair of red nylon socks with a border of little yellow hens. Rachel wishes she could speak Russian or Ukrainian. She’s learned a long list of nouns, but conversation is much harder. There are things she wants to ask the caretaker.
One afternoon in early March Lucas comes home for dinner with twelve dark red roses in a crackly cellophane bouquet.
‘Happy International Women’s Day!’ he says, kissing Rachel on the mouth with the tang of his last cigarette still strong on his breath. The roses aren’t fully opened, yet already their heads droop on flaccid stems, petals browning at the edges. ‘I couldn’t move on the trolleybus – wilting flowers everywhere. The woman who sold me these swore they’d been flown in from Tbilisi this morning! I bought chocolates for Zoya. She’d have sulked for a month if I hadn’t arrived at the office with a box of cherry liqueurs the size of a small table, and you can bet the dezhornaya was watching to make sure I’d remembered flowers for you. I suppose I should have bought some for her.’
Rachel unwraps the roses and trims the ends from the stems before placing them in a tall jug of water. ‘They might revive,’ she says, as several petals fall to the floor. She is surprised to find she cares about a custom in which scowling, sheepish men do their once-yearly duty by their mothers and wives and female employees.
Lucas tickles Ivan in his bouncy chair and peers into the fridge.
‘We should go out really, but I’m working again tonight. There’s interest in my Golden Promise feature from Radio Four. I’ve been speaking to a couple of programme editors. They all say I should go on a camera course. Start filming my own stuff. Become an all-rounder.’ He pokes at a tray of eggs. ‘Have we got enough eggs for an omelette? Good to see the washing machine has finally been taken away—’
Rachel turns, sharply. ‘What?’
‘The washing machine. It’s gone.’ Lucas straightens up, a carton of UHT milk in his hand. ‘Didn’t you notice? Your dodgy salesman must have had second thoughts – or found a buyer.’
Sure enough, when Rachel hurries along the hallway and pulls open the front door, there’s nothing next to the doormat except a square of unwashed lino. Has Mykola been here to remove his troublesome gift? The space left behind leaves her strangely hollow inside so she stands there for a minute or two in her stockinged feet and wonders what would happen if she stuffed her husband’s grimy shirts and her own rancid nursing bras into the rubbish chute and sent them tumbling down to Elena.
Nothing escapes the caretaker. She will know who took the washing machine away.
Then something else occurs to Rachel. Maybe it hasn’t moved as far as Lucas thinks.
After breakfast the next morning Rachel scoops up Ivan and takes him downstairs in the lift. The day outside is dull and misty. She can’t see the river from the windows in the foyer and even the Motherland monument is shrouded from view. The snow on the ground is pocked and grey, and the hunched women on their stick legs at the tram stop make the street look like a Lowry painting. The Siberian freeze may be receding, but winter has not yet left for good.
Elena is not in her cubicle. Her chair is pulled out and the dregs of her morning coffee sit darkly in the bottom of her usual cup. A newspaper lies flat on the desktop with lists of Cyrillic letters like shorthand jotted in the margins, and a neat row of plastic yoghurt pots from Denmark or Sweden, each filled with soil, sit on the shelf beneath the window. One or two seedlings are just starting to poke through, their pale backs still bent, still bearing the burden of the seed case from which they have just emerged.
‘Elena?’ Rachel says, not loudly, for the empty foyer is full of echoes. Ivan starts kicking her thigh. ‘Da,’ he says, ‘da-da’ like a good little Ukrainian boy. She kisses his head and wishes she had brought him down in the baby carrier. Instead she wraps her thick cardigan around her son’s shoulders and ventures outside.
Rachel has never been down to the basement. The door is round the side of the apartment block, at the bottom of an external service stairway. It has a broken metal rail and there are lumps of congealed salt on the concrete. She taps on the metal door which drifts open at her touch.
‘Elena? It’s Rachel…’