‘You don’t belong here,’ she murmurs, not unkindly.
‘You may be right,’ says Rachel, as a flush burns across her cheeks. ‘But you aren’t the one who decides.’
The little Zhiguli sways and bumps along the track around the edge of an untended field and on into the straggle of birch wood, where the light flickers through the leaves and the air smells of moss and something vaguely medicinal. Elena sits beside Zoya in the front, while Rachel remains in the back with Ivan dozing in her lap and Stepan beside her. No one says very much. Perhaps, thinks Rachel, they are as surprised as she to find themselves here together on a jaunt to the country. Once again, Elena almost cried when they drove back to fetch her, and Stepan – well, he was loitering by her door and Elena said he must come too, despite Rachel’s head-shaking and his insistence on going back upstairs to fetch his anorak. Zoya stopped at a roadside kiosk a few miles out of Kiev to buy a picnic of kvas, rye bread and sausage, but otherwise they’ve come as they are. Elena is wearing a heavy cardigan around her shoulders, Stepan a blue tee shirt and his skimpy footballer shorts. He has bunched up his anorak to make a pillow. His narrow thighs jut outwards so that Rachel must point her knees towards the door. He has grown in the past few months; his shoulders seem more angular. There is new hair on his lip.
‘Are we nearly there?’ Rachel asks, breaking the silence. Her words echo memories of childhood trips to the seaside, never knowing whether the blue-grey plate of the English Channel lay just beyond the next hill or whether, in fact, she would never arrive, lost in the chasm between home and away. It mattered to her, as a child. It still does.
Zoya doesn’t answer – no surprise there. As Rachel looks about her, the track widens and the spindly trees thin out. A wooden dacha comes into view. It has pretty carved shutters, but they don’t stop beside it; neither do they stop at the others that follow, all in varying states of upkeep, all with panelled fences and low, drooping roofs. The place seems deserted, despite a couple of rusting Tavrias parked up along the roadside and the crowing of a cockerel in someone’s backyard.
Just as the little settlement begins to peter out, Zoya slows to a halt and turns off the engine. She says something to Elena, then opens the door and steps on to the verge.
‘There are ticks,’ she says, eyeing Rachel through the open window. ‘It is good you are wearing trousers. Push the legs inside your socks.’
‘What about Ivan?’ asks Rachel. ‘And Stepan? They’ve both got bare legs!’
Zoya is tying a scarf around her head. It makes her look like a woman in a Soviet propaganda poster – a factory worker or a peasant. ‘You will see if something crawls on to your son,’ she says.
‘I burn them so they pik, pik!’ adds Stepan, flicking his fingers.
‘I will take tweezers and pull them out,’ warns Zoya.
Rachel tries to open her door without waking Ivan. ‘Where is the house? Is it far?’
Zoya sighs. ‘If you get out of the car, I will show you.’
Rachel sits Ivan on her hip and picks her way along an overgrown footpath. Stepan follows behind with the bottles of cloudy kvas while Zoya walks ahead with Elena, who treads carefully, shuffling along in her outdoor shoes and nursing the newspaper-wrapped sausage. After a few minutes they leave the line of trees behind and descend into a valley. A tin roof protrudes beyond some reeds, and now Rachel can see that the house is not a house at all. There are no shutters, there is no veranda, no mansarded roof, no quaint fretwork. To Rachel it is a shed: a single room dwelling raised on concrete blocks. Its windows are made from thick plastic sheets and the metal door has clearly been salvaged from somewhere, cut and welded to fit. There is no sign of a toilet, no plumbing, not even a pump.
Zoya makes the rules clear straight away.
‘If you need to answer a call of nature, climb back up the hill and go in the woods. Bury, please.’ She yanks out a small spade from the space beneath the steps.
‘What do you do out here?’ asks Rachel, as Stepan pulls his trainers off and hops across the stones and rough grass towards a shallow stream.
‘Do?’ Zoya looks amused. ‘We sit. We drink and eat.’ She turns to watch Elena, who is hobbling around the side of the building to inspect some remnants of soft fruit bushes and an ancient plum tree with thick branches that twist outwards like flailing arms. ‘My grandfather used to grow things here. Many things – fruit, vegetables – sometimes even flowers when I was a child. Elena won’t like the way everything is now wild, but I could not manage it when Dedushka was sick.’ She pauses, her twitching smile gone, her face empty.
‘I’m sorry…’ says Rachel, wishing she had better words to offer. She is an interloper, standing uselessly in the freshly-trampled grass with Ivan wriggling in her arms. She shifts him up her hip and looks around. ‘What can I do? Can I help with anything?’
Zoya is fiddling with the padlock on the door. ‘You can help me find the vodka.’
The five accidental dachniki eat lunch on Ivan’s nap blanket, spread out in the long grass. The sausage is full of chewy lumps of gristle, though Rachel finds she is hungry and the salty fat isn’t so bad. Ivan eats the two pots of yoghurt she was saving for the plane, and for dessert she raids her son’s changing bag for biscuits and some sliced pear and apple. Elena sniffs the fruit and won’t touch it, but she takes several biscuits and slices the sausage with a small paring knife Zoya hands to her, managing surprisingly well with her broken teeth and a jaw that folds in on itself as she masticates each mouthful. Zoya then insists they all drink the vodka she has brought out from its hiding place in the hut. They have no glasses, but by now Stepan and Elena seem convinced that Ivan’s changing bag is a cornucopia of abundance and usefulness, so once again Rachel burrows amongst the nappies and fishes out Ivan’s spare beaker. She takes off the lid and pours a finger’s depth for Elena and herself, while Zoya swigs straight from the bottle. The vodka is unfiltered and slightly gritty; it burns Rachel’s throat and oesophagus as it slides its way down. Elena takes a sip, then passes the cup to Stepan.
‘I am baby!’ jokes Stepan, picking up the lid and pushing it back on to the cup.
‘No!’ pleads Rachel, helplessly. To her mind there is something repulsive about watching this boy suck vodka from the spout, though Zoya is smiling at her squeamishness and Elena is laughing so much that tears squeeze out of her eyes.
And so the day gently unwinds. Rachel lies back in the grass and closes her eyes while Ivan pulls up handfuls of weeds in his chubby fists or tries to catch the flies gathering on the greasy crumbs, and Elena naps, snoring, then gets up and shuffles off towards the rear of the hut to rummage amongst the bolting vegetables and broken canes. Perhaps she is searching for something to prune back or harvest. Time slows, memories fade, the sun inches across a soft blue sky. Rachel feels her son scrambling over her hips. She puts her hand out, touches his dense, warm skin. This is real, she thinks, this bond of blood and survival. Today they are all saved and she could lie here forever with Ivan’s head on her stomach, pinning her down, his legs twitching gently against her own, even the weight of his wet nappy a reassurance that now, right now, she has everything she needs.
She wakes with a jolt when Ivan bashes something hard against her collar bone. Her head is spinning a little, from the sunlight or the blood-rush or possibly the vodka, but as her eyes readjust she sees that he is clutching the pot of Sudafed she always keeps in her handbag. Other items lay strewn across the blanket: keys, a couple of tampons, a pen with the ink starting to seep into the fabric. And her well-thumbed copy of Jurassic Park.