Take the number fifty-six.
As the creaking trolleybus approaches the stop on Kutuzova Street, Rachel, waiting on the pavement, lifts Ivan out of the pushchair, folds it down and picks it up with her spare hand. Ivan is becoming too heavy for her to manage for more than short periods in the baby carrier. She hopes the Botanical Gardens live up to Elena’s enthusiasm. She hopes she will be able to find them.
The bus is crowded, as the buses always are. She climbs on board and stands near the front, wedging the concertina’d pushchair between her hip and the edge of a seat. The man sitting there balances a pale green porcelain toilet bowl on his lap. His arms are folded across the rim; its weight must surely press into his thighs, yet the man’s eyes are closed and his head lolls. He doesn’t notice when Ivan tugs off his knitted hat and drops it past his ear into the bowl. Rachel will have to fish it out, but the woman behind her makes a sucking noise with her teeth as if to say this bare-headed foreign malchik will now catch pneumonia or scarlet fever or whooping cough and it will be its mother’s fault, for no baby should be out without its head covered and at least one sour-faced granny in attendance. Rachel blows a soft raspberry on Ivan’s forehead. She has read her pages. She has checked the piles of nappies. We are off on an outing, she thinks, and no one can stop us.
Outside, the watery sunlight glances off the car windscreens as the bus sighs and heaves its way into the flow of traffic. Rachel tips forward, then shifts her weight so as not to fall. People begin to shuffle and mutter as someone stands up and starts moving along the aisle, but she takes no notice and looks out of the window, ticking off the traffic lights, counting the plane trees that line the boulevard. At the tenth tree she hears a low voice behind her.
‘Pazhalsta.’
Rachel looks over her shoulder. She recognises the speaker straight away, but it takes her a moment to realise that his thick black moustache, his dark eyes are real and not a silent conjuring from her dreams. This time he is wearing his Astrakhan hat. A camel-coloured coat, probably cashmere, swings from his shoulders.
‘Oh!’ she exclaims. ‘Mr…’
‘Mykola,’ he reminds her, flicking his hand to rouse the man with the toilet bowl and let him know he should vacate his seat. The man says nothing, but after the briefest hesitation he locks his hands together around the toilet bowl and stands so that Rachel can slip into his place.
‘No!’ she protests, though it is pointless. Mykola is leaning in and his hand is on the pushchair. The man with the toilet bowl shows no expression. He shifts his feet further apart, his arms grip his burden and she wishes he would rest it on the floor.
‘Good afternoon,’ murmurs Mykola, smiling down at Rachel when she has settled in the seat.
‘Why are you here?’ she asks, then quickly looks down; the question seems a little too direct.
Mykola, however, has no problem avoiding an answer.
‘It is a beautiful day,’ he says. ‘Your little boy – he is well? You are well?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ she replies, as Ivan wriggles on her lap. She lifts him up so that he can stand on her knees.
‘I am glad to hear this. Spring has come. So much better for mothers and their children. But you, you are not afraid of the cold!’
Rachel doesn’t know what to make of his small talk. People are staring, and Mykola and the man with the toilet bowl are blocking the aisle. She doesn’t know if she’ll recognise the stop at the Botanical Gardens. She is hoping to see something that looks like a park, but her view is obscured by the woman sitting next to her.
‘Tell me,’ says Mykola. ‘The washing machine I sent to you. Is there a problem? You have not yet installed it in your flat?’
‘Oh, no.’ She bites her lip, wondering how he knows this. ‘Not in the flat. My husband – he wasn’t sure…’
Mykola puts up a hand as if to say she doesn’t need to explain.
‘These things can be difficult.’ He smiles at Ivan yet doesn’t try to touch him. ‘Now, I think you must be going to the Botanical Gardens. We will arrive there in one minute, God willing, but it is better if you stay seated until the bus has stopped. Don’t worry about this,’ he adds, as the bus makes a sudden lurch and Rachel reaches out for the pushchair. ‘I am getting off myself. I will look after it.’
And when the bus wheezes to a halt and the doors jerk open, that is exactly what happens. Mykola even retrieves Ivan’s hat from the toilet bowl and nods politely to its owner before following Rachel down the steps. He stands a little apart on the pavement while she settles Ivan with a bread ring and clips him into his safety belt.
‘Well, thank you again,’ she says, straightening up and looking round at the road lined with horse chestnuts, their sticky buds swollen and ready to burst. The tower blocks have given way to older buildings with tall, thin windows. A wall made of concrete panels snakes into the distance. Rachel wonders what business Mykola has in this part of town and if he, too, was already going to the Botanical Gardens, or whether this has only now become his aim. Her sense of freedom is fast evaporating.
‘This way,’ he says, indicating that she should walk in the direction of the disappearing trolleybus. ‘It really isn’t far.’
A dozen or so yards along the road, before Rachel has worked out how to part company politely, they arrive at the entrance to the gardens. Several other people walk through a gate in the wall, and then it is their turn. They pass in front of a small kiosk and straight away a woman behind the little glass window flicks it up and demands 200 kouponi. Rachel worries that Mykola will offer to pay, but he stands back and admires some bird wheeling high above their heads while she fumbles for her purse and hands over the money. A hand-written ticket is passed back to her, and they walk on. Mykola, Rachel notices, doesn’t buy a ticket. Indeed, no one else passing into the gardens is stopped at the kiosk. She is the tourist. Tourists pay.
Because Mykola is walking beside her, his strides measured, the sound of his leather soles discreet yet persistent, Rachel doesn’t at first take in the view that opens out ahead. She sees the long brown flower beds, some tulip leaves starting to push their way out, the fissured tarmac paths, the ever-present horse chestnuts and some spindly, still bare birches. She sees a dirty yet ornate greenhouse to her left and a fountain with no water to her right and it is only slowly, after five minutes or so, that she notices the way the gardens stretch downwards across the hillside, paths winding and criss-crossing through clumps of newly flowering cherry and magnolia. Some contain little detours, steps that lead to benches with views across the bright grey-blueness of the Dnieper. Gold onion domes rise above the railings – there’s a church below them somewhere.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she says, stopping for a moment. The sun feels warm across her shoulders so she shrugs off her coat and slings it over the handles of the pushchair. It occurs to her that this is the first time she hasn’t worn a coat outside since she arrived six months earlier. She breathes a long sigh of relief as Mykola strolls on. This is fine, she thinks. This is where he leaves her and she can discover this place on her own.
Except Mykola isn’t leaving her. He pauses in front of a budding lilac bush and breaks off a bough that is almost in bloom, its cone of purple buds quivering as he snaps it clear.
‘For you,’ he says, walking back towards her. ‘In Kiev, spring means two things. The horse chestnut – our beautiful kashtan – and the lilac.’
The buds and the heart-shaped leaves tremble on their stems.