‘That was your grandma,’ she says, scooping him up before he knocks his chin. There is something about his wide eyes, open, trusting, that reminds her of the hand-written notices on the lampposts on the road up to the monastery: all those flaps of paper, waiting to be torn off, waiting for someone to call the number on the slip, waiting for a connection. ‘She used to be a mind reader,’ she whispers, into his soft ear. ‘But not any more.’
A couple of days after Vee’s party, Rachel wakes up to a ringing sound.
‘Do you hear it?’ she asks Lucas, as he sits on the side of the bed to pull on his socks.
‘That’s tinnitus,’ he says. ‘I used to get it on night shifts when I was subbing. Like a worm in your ear. Bloody annoying.’
Rachel shakes her head. It is as if someone is standing by her shoulder, running a wet finger around the rim of a crystal glass. She thinks of Stepan, for some reason, though this is no squeak from a pair of rollerblades. The sound is most insistent when she reads Jurassic Park, counting the words and memorising entire pages. When she descends in the lift the ringing fades, and when she walks outside into the dense grey fog that has rolled up from the river it stops altogether. The sound isn’t unpleasant, but it does confuse her. ‘What?’ she asks Lucas, as he says goodbye.
When Elena arrives to watch TV Rachel turns up the volume, which in turn wakes Ivan from his nap. Elena draws a circle with her finger next to her temple in a gesture straight out of Simplemente Maria. ‘Vesna,’ she mutters as Rachel pads off to the bedroom. ‘Loco’. And perhaps Elena is right, perhaps Rachel has inhaled a little spring madness, because later that afternoon, before she can think twice, she is digging out the credit card that Lucas has asked her not to use and taking a trolleybus down to Khreschatyk to buy a pair of imported jeans from the place under the stone archway Suzie calls the ‘hookers’ boutique’. She can’t try them on because she has Ivan in the baby carrier, so instead she shakes them out, holding them against her legs and inspecting the seams, frowning and tutting like the women she has watched buying clothing in the musty corridors of the central department store. However, these jeans are not made of the cheap, bleached denim that everyone wears; they are cut from a dark indigo, good quality fabric, with tiny metal studs in the shape of a curvy ‘S’ on each back pocket.
‘One hundred twenty dollars,’ says a bored-looking young saleswoman with pushed-up breasts and piled-up hair.
Rachel’s hand shakes a little when she hands over her card; she must wait as the woman picks up the phone and reels off the long number, rolling her eyes at the incompetence of the operator down the line or maybe Rachel herself, who ought to know better than to waste her husband’s dollars on a tired, sagging backside.
Back at the apartment the jeans button digs in to the soft flesh of Rachel’s stomach and the fabric strains tight across her thighs. Nevertheless, when she squints she looks taller. When she closes her eyes she hears the high, ringing note, and imagines she is a Mexican polo player’s mistress, or a kohl-eyed violinist or a journalist throwing a party and smoking out in the hallway with someone else’s husband.
Chapter 17
THE FOG LINGERS across Kiev for five whole days. Like a cocoon, thinks Rachel, opaque and animal. The landscape is already morphing into spring by the time the sunlight glimmers through. A slick of green spreads between the apartment blocks. The lilacs that grow through the chain link fence by the military academy are in bud, and the air smells of wet earth and oily potholes and a more ancient smell – last winter’s thawing detritus, or maybe gas from the tunnels that once burrowed beneath the streets. The ground is sloughing off winter.
Lucas groans about the mud by the dump bins but otherwise pays little attention. His story about The Golden Promise is snagging – the general release has been pushed back to July and Lukyanenko won’t let him sit in on the editing. Lucas has asked Teddy to take pictures for an Observer feature he’s hoping to bag, but Teddy has problems of his own. Karl’s café has been vandalised; disgusting graffiti have been daubed on its walls. They are thinking of shipping out to the Balkans, or so he tells Lucas one evening at the apartment on Staronavodnitska Street. Events in Bosnia aren’t fixed yet, he says. He wants to document a more fluid, less predictable story.
‘The story’s not fixed here, either, unless we make it so!’ says Lucas.
‘Everyone makes it so,’ argues Teddy, with uncharacteristic sourness. ‘Politicians, editors, readers. Journalists are the worst. I want something else.’
Rachel, meanwhile, is preoccupied with Ivan. When she takes him outside he throws off his mittens and his hat, again and again, chuckling like a maniac, playing the game that always gets her into trouble with the old folk on the trolleybus. He is starting to look more Ukrainian with his cowlick of blond hair, the vests with strange fastenings and some woolly leggings made in Korea. He is crawling now, too – a sort of lop-sided scoot. One moment he is under her feet in the kitchen and the next he has vanished along the hallway. If she doesn’t intercept him he will pull out the drawer from under the bed and fling nappies across the parquet with frowning concentration. She keeps the living room door shut, of course, and when Lucas is out she always wedges a chair under the handle.
Nevertheless, there are some difficulties that Rachel cannot keep at bay with her rituals and her barriers and her pages. When Ivan sits on the bedroom floor and his eyes spill swollen tears, she thinks he’s starting to peer into the future. When she opens the cupboard door and slips behind it to stow his vests, perhaps he thinks she will disappear like Lucy Pevensie, away to Narnia, and never return. She tries playing peekaboo with the door, but Ivan won’t be tricked. Sometimes he howls for hours. The only remedy is to take him out in the baby carrier or the pushchair, down across the waste ground, over to Podil by way of the river or up through Tsarskoye Selo to the monastery, with its winding cobbled paths.
‘Do you know of any parks?’ Rachel asks Zoya, next time she meets her in the basement.
‘Parks?’ Zoya snorts. ‘Are you not looking? There are parks everywhere in Kiev.’
‘I know,’ says Rachel. ‘But I want a quieter space, away from all the kiosks and monuments.’
Zoya turns and mutters to Elena, who is emptying used teabags onto newspaper at her workbench. Elena no longer seems to sit in her cubicle upstairs, but spends most of her working day foraging in the dump bins for eggshells and banana skins. Not that she ever had much to do other than twitch her curtain and bang on the glass whenever someone forgot to wipe their feet. Elena and Zoya are becoming friends, it seems; Rachel often finds them talking together – not chatting, exactly, but murmuring and nodding with their arms folded across their chests. Now when the old woman hobbles forward her fingers are caked in dirt and the deep pockets of her overalls are actually full of the stuff she’s dug up from somewhere. Rachel has noticed that her cubicle is full of seedlings sprouting in cones of newspaper or in yoghurt pots ranged on the windowsill and the shelf above the desk. Her own private greenhouse.
‘You could try the Botanical Gardens,’ says Zoya. ‘Though you’ll have to pay. They charge tourists.’
Elena, however, is interrupting her, her eyes bright in the lamplight. ‘Botanicheskiy sad?’ She grips Rachel’s arm. ‘Bas – pesyat shest. Pesyat. Shest.’
Rachel nods, this time understanding.