‘I hated it too,’ says Rachel.
‘Exactly,’ says Teddy. Then, after a moment, ‘What did you hate?’
Rachel takes a sip of beer and wipes her hand across her mouth.
‘That picture! I don’t know – it was wrong. Maybe because Ivan and I weren’t in it. We were there. We were part of that scene as much as the old woman.’
Teddy looks taken aback. ‘You wanted to be in it?’
‘No,’ says Rachel. ‘I don’t know, maybe. You made it look like she was begging, but I bought that banana and took it home and Ivan ate it. You didn’t show that. It sounds stupid, now…’ She peeks again at her sleeping son. ‘I like your gallery pictures better.’
‘Not stupid,’ murmurs Karl, stroking Ivan’s soft cheek. ‘You two should be on all the front covers.’
A few minutes after midnight Teddy climbs on a chair in the hallway to get everyone’s attention and Karl hands him a tray bearing a large pink iced cake.
‘Vee made me hide it in the bathtub,’ he says, laughing. ‘Happy Birthday, Lucas!’
‘You’re too late!’ shouts a voice from the kitchen. ‘It’s already tomorrow!’
Then someone starts singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in a comically deep tone and someone else turns the music down, while a handful of others join in. Soon they are calling ‘toast!’ and looking round for Lucas, because no one has seen him for a while, but then Rachel hears the front door open and sees her husband walk in from the outside hallway. Behind him steps Vee.
‘We were smoking!’ she cries. ‘Not having sex in the lift like you two, you squalid pair!’ She throws her pack of Marlboros at Teddy and Karl, and everyone laughs. Rachel laughs, too, and kisses her sleepy son because she is at a party with lots of different people and her fear is waiting quietly on the landing behind the door. By the time she has knocked back another shot of vodka the music has been turned up once again.
Later, as the night slowly unravels, as Teddy and Karl are curled around each other like two brown mice and Sorin is drinking Johnnie Walker with Lucas in the kitchen, Rachel opens her blouse and gives Ivan a discreet feed. A young stringer from The Telegraph sits next to her, his hand resting in a bag of pretzels; he has round, wire-framed glasses and an earnest expression and he doesn’t know where to look, so he shuts his eyes and reels off the latest IMF statistics.
‘Fifty per cent by the end of the month,’ he intones with a slow shake of his head. ‘You can’t shift from a command economy overnight,’ and Rachel nods, while her gaze wanders to the doorway. Vee is standing there, her lips still matt and red; she is listening to a woman whose bleached hair, backlit by a wall light, has become a frizzy halo. Rachel shuts her eyes for a moment to make sure she isn’t imagining things, but it’s Zoya, all right, dragging on her cigarette and blowing smoke past Vee’s ear as she talks in English before switching to rapid Ukrainian.
Ivan pinches Rachel’s breast; he hasn’t finished his feed and she is already adjusting her blouse. Something has happened – a murder or a strike or another presidential stand-off. The party is over. The journalists are reaching for their coats.
It is almost two a.m. when Zoya, on Lucas’s instructions, drops Rachel and Ivan back at the apartment block. Once her passengers are safely indoors Zoya sits motionless in the driver’s seat for a minute. As a few drops of sleety rain splatter across the windscreen, she reaches beneath the glove compartment for her wipers and climbs out of the Zhiguli to attach them. A stray dog – brindled and leggy – sidles across the car park. Zoya bends down to give him a stroke. His coat is rough and one of his eyes is infected, but his ears are silky smooth. Out in the darkness another dog barks. She looks up. It sounds as if the animal is high above her head, maybe on one of the apartment balconies. Her grandfather used to keep an Alsatian on the balcony. When Zoya was fourteen the dog ate rat poison, but he didn’t die. In the end, a brain tumour killed him.
The trolleybuses have stopped running when she turns the key in the ignition and pulls out on to Staronavodnitska Street. On impulse she turns left and drives up towards Lesi Ukrainky rather than right towards the river. She stops at a red light, the engine ticking over as she waits, though there are no other cars at the junction. When the light changes to green she turns right, puts the gear stick into neutral, switches off the engine and coasts down the hill. If anyone were to ask she might say it was to save petrol, but the truth is that at this hour she would rather listen to the wind. There is no one here to make crude gestures because she is a woman driving a car, no one to shout insults or say she cannot do this thing or that thing. She is alone on the six-lane boulevard, carried by the silence of the buildings and the trees.
Back on Khreschatyk, the prostitutes in their shiny leggings lean against the wall that leads down to the metro. A black Mercedes winks as it jumps the lights. The Zhiguli coughs after free-wheeling, though soon it is passing the new Seagrams store with its marble pillars, its Canadian maple panelling and blue satin presentation boxes of cognac costing two hundred dollars apiece. The stores patronised by the new elite take their place between the book shops and the bread shops and the shops selling machine-embroidered tablecloths and hand-daubed plates. Bribes flow like vodka. The suits and the watches may be flaunted more openly, but their new visibility makes it easier to steer Lucas round the pot holes of corruption, keeping him safe. Rachel is a different matter. She is secretive, like most mothers, though her cow eyes and her way of watching the world without looking straight on unsettle Zoya. Rachel counts buildings. She asks questions without purpose. Sometimes, she walks as if she is afraid of the floor.
The river is black as Zoya crosses over. In summer, the old communists and the young and the foolish who have stopped caring about radioactive contamination picnic and bathe on its islands. Now, though, the lights on the bridge are too dim to illuminate the water. On she drives, past the cement works and the tower blocks, past the schools and the Houses of Culture and the stretches of waste ground with their rusting see-saws and dented slides, until finally she reaches her own neighbourhood.
Upstairs in the little flat her neighbour Tanya is asleep on her sofa.
‘Wake up,’ says Zoya, giving her a shake.
‘He’s crapped himself,’ mutters Tanya, reaching for her coat. ‘You need to get some diapers.’
Zoya, cleaning her grandfather, holds her breath against the stench and grips his leg just a little too hard. Sometimes the need to squeeze and crush overwhelms her. The old man groans and she releases her grip and wipes her hand, relieved that she can still let go.
‘Forgive me, Grandpa,’ she whispers, as she dabs at his thighs with a towel. ‘Forgive me.’
Chapter 16
LUCAS, WHO HAS stayed out all night, phones the next morning to say there’s an Interior Ministry briefing. He asks whether Zoya mentioned anything as she hasn’t turned up for work and he’s pretty furious actually as he hasn’t seen her since she drove Rachel home from the party.
‘No,’ says Rachel. ‘What happened?’
‘A leak at Chernobyl.’
Fallout, thinks Rachel. Seepage. Half-lives. She takes a quick breath. ‘Is it dangerous? What should I do?’
‘What? Oh no. It’s contained. A mammoth fuck-up, all the same. Not what Kravchuk needs while he dithers over nuclear warheads.’
Rachel is silent. She has lots of things she wants to say to her husband: things like ‘come home’ and ‘don’t come home’, but sometimes it is as if there is a fine mesh in front of her mouth, catching her words. She tries to single out one question, push it through.