‘Why? What for?’ Rachel looks at Stepan who is scratching his ribs, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. Stop it, she thinks, but he doesn’t.
‘Abortions!’ says Zoya. ‘Two – three – why not more? It is not a crime, the state allows, and why would I want a child to be born who was made in our poisonous air? But my grandfather – well, I tell you, that Mykola of yours is a liar, a disease. He says I am the one who killed him – my own grandfather! With black market morphine. He thinks he is a god – the one who decides, the one who passes sentence, but is he the one nursing his grandfather? Does he have to listen as an old man shrieks with pain in the night and shits himself in the only bed while his neighbours’ children grow sick with cancer of the thyroid or cancer of the blood? Why does he think he must protect you? You – as if you are so innocent…’ Zoya takes a deep breath, flicks ash out of the window. ‘Do not believe him, Rachel. He wants to control you.’
Rachel cradles Ivan close to her chest. He is starting to cry, upset by the distraught voices, the car that isn’t moving. She wants to get him home, to feed him and bathe him and rock him to sleep and then count her pages, except that she has buried her book amongst the tree roots in the woods.
‘He is not my Mykola,’ she murmurs. ‘He can’t control me. Please, let’s go.’
Stepan shifts in his seat, his bare legs making a sticking sound against the plastic. ‘You cannot go,’ he says, to Rachel. ‘There is broken tyre.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe Zoya want to wait for Mykola to fix it?’
His provocation galvanises Zoya, who jumps out of the car, reaches in to the back seat and hauls the boy out on to the sticky tarmac by his t-shirt. He sits where she dumps him, pulling faces and complaining as she inspects the rear tyre then thumps her fist on the roof.
‘Out! Out!’ she shouts, waving her arm at Elena and Rachel. ‘Bystra! I cannot change the wheel while you sit there.’
Rachel struggles out of the car and rests Ivan on her hip. He is grizzling, leaning his head backwards so that she almost loses her balance. She can feel the heat from the road on her legs as she reaches into her bag for her son’s hat. The tram stop is no more than a sign – there is no shelter, no tree, just a long, etiolated shadow cast by the concrete post. Zoya is muttering, rummaging in the boot for the jack and the wrench and the spare wheel as lorries behind her thunder past, creating blasts of dry wind. Elena, however, isn’t moving. The flowers and the knife lie in a heap on the floor of the car, but she is staring straight ahead through the dusty windscreen, as if she is in shock.
‘Elena,’ murmurs Rachel, opening her door for her. She touches the old woman’s arm and is taken aback by the feel of bone beneath the skin. No muscle, no fat. Mykola said she’d had a lover and a baby – that she’d watched them both die, or worse. He’d been speaking in English, so Elena can’t have understood him, yet he has reached in and eviscerated her somehow, trailing her insides across the concrete – intimate, vulnerable, stinking. Rachel doesn’t know whether to believe him, and because of this she feels ashamed.
Zoya stops what she is doing and leans in through the driver’s door to murmur something to Elena. ‘Come here,’ she says to Rachel, as Elena slowly swings out one leg and holds on to the door frame, refusing Rachel’s hand. ‘Elena must hold the baby. You and Stepan must help me take off the wheel.’
Certainly, fixing it will require them all to work together. Rachel hesitates for a moment before handing Ivan to Elena. Elena moves back from the verge, holding the child stiffly, not looking at him. It is as if she doesn’t know him or is afraid to rest her eyes on him. Instead she peers off to the left in the direction from which they have come, while Zoya jacks up the car and puts the wrench in position. Stepan steps onto its jutting arm, gripping Rachel’s shoulder for support, jigging up and down, his bare toes poking out of his plastic gym flip flops until the nuts loosen and Zoya can prise off the wheel and bolt on the spare.
By the time the damaged wheel has been stowed in the boot, all four of them are done in.
Zoya takes them back to Staronavodnitska Street. She drives carefully, silently, continually checking her rear-view mirror without moving her head. The sun has dipped behind the apartment block and in the shade the car park is gloomy. Stepan slips out before Zoya has turned off the engine and disappears behind the dump bins in the direction of the waste ground. Elena moves more slowly, pulling her cardigan around her before hobbling towards the steps.
Rachel hauls her suitcase out of the boot, too tired to do anything except drop it onto the tarmac. Nevertheless, she is reluctant to leave Zoya without some sort of reckoning.
‘I am sorry…’ She stops, seeing Zoya’s scowl.
‘Sorry? For what? This isn’t your business. I have already told you so.’ Zoya hooks out the pushchair and shuts the rear passenger door. ‘You are a good mother, Rachel. Believe this, look after your little boy, but stay away from Elena, yes? Or Mykola will hurt her.’
Rachel sucks in a breath, remembering the knife and the way Elena gripped it. ‘Why? Why would he do that?’
‘Because he wants to control everything! What she did in the past, we don’t know. You understand that, don’t you? She cares for Ivan and she cares for Stepan, too, though I cannot think why when that little shit betrays her. I will stay with her tonight. You must go upstairs. Find Lucas.’
When Zoya dismisses her in this way she makes everything sound so simple. Mykola’s words can’t be unsaid, but he is too young; he couldn’t have been present at the events he described. None of them can guess what torments Elena suffered. The war was a different time. A terrifying time. None of them has any right to judge.
Nevertheless, as Rachel lugs her case and Ivan’s pushchair up the steps, as she waits for the lift, as she puts her key in the door of their apartment, she counts the floors, counts the walls, and though she has buried her book, she comforts herself with the fact that its pages are filed like an insurance policy in her head.
Lucas doesn’t yell, or make a fuss, or even get up when Rachel parks their sleeping son’s pushchair in the hallway. She finds him sprawled on the floor in the bedroom, curtains pulled against the early evening sun. He is lying on his side, blowing smoke rings under the bed, with the half-empty bottle of Vee’s Christmas Stolichnaya near his ear.
‘You didn’t go then,’ he says, tipping his head back to see her. ‘I called your mum. She said you hadn’t told her you were coming, so I phoned the airline and they said they couldn’t tell me whether you had checked in.’
‘I went to the country with Zoya.’ Rachel looks at her husband, at his half-closed eyes and supine limbs stretched out on the parquet at her feet. He is blocking her path to the wardrobe. She wants to tell him to move, to stop smoking; she wants to feel his anger towards her for not catching her flight, yet his torpor makes her hesitate. Something has happened. She retreats to the kitchen to prepare Ivan’s milk.
As the pipe coughs and the water spurts from the tap into the kettle she hears Lucas kick the wardrobe door.
‘Rach,’ he calls, his voice thin and hoarse. ‘Rach!’
‘I’m here,’ she says, turning off the tap.
‘The film has been cancelled. Lukyanenko announced it this morning on the steps of the House of Artists. Then he set fire to the master reel. There won’t be a premiere, or any distribution. Nothing at all.’