‘Skolko?’ How much?
Already she knows this is the wrong question. There’s no till here, no cashbox. Where does she pay?
The clerk has no time for idiots. She rolls her eyes and beckons to the young woman behind Rachel to take her place. Only the man with the dandruff takes pity on her. He turns his head and says something to the clerk, who reaches for a pad of thin grey paper and a pen attached to the counter by a piece of string and scribbles down two words. She tears off the slip of paper and pushes it towards the man, who hands it to Rachel.
‘Spaseebo,’ she murmurs – thank you – still not sure what to do next. The man nods gravely and points towards a counter a few yards away near the door. The sign above says Kassa – cash desk. She must take the chit and pay at the desk and return with a receipt for the goods. That’s what everyone else has been doing.
Ten minutes later, Rachel emerges from the universam with a Donald Duck push-along toy dangling awkwardly from the handles of the buggy. She feels conspicuous, outlandish even, yet no one else seems to notice as she walks back to the apartment block. She passes an expensive-looking silver car in the car park, but its windows are tinted and she can’t see if anyone is inside.
The old caretaker is absent from the foyer.
Lucas is in the kitchen when she struggles through the front door. ‘Your first purchase!’ he says, sticking his head into the hallway. ‘Impressive! Shopping like a local! Tomorrow you should walk up through Tsarskoye Selo – the Tsar’s Village. Visit the monastery. You’ll love it.’
Rachel opens the cupboard next to the bathroom and pushes the toy inside. ‘What do you mean, the Tsar’s Village?’
Lucas shrugs. ‘That’s what the cottages on the hill are called. Zoya says they were built for Communist Party apparatchiks – a taste of suburbia for local flunkies of one sort or another. Most of them are wrecks now, mind you.’
Indeed, the houses of the Tsar’s Village are wrecks. Rachel squints at them from the kitchen window. They cling to the slopes that lead up to the thick walls and golden domes of the monastery, little more than wooden shacks, one room upstairs and one room downstairs, a bit of land, broken fences, stray dogs and rusting dump bins. She wanders up there with Ivan the next afternoon, searching for shops as she maps out the neighbourhood. There’s the universam, of course, echoing and empty apart from today’s meagre display of household cleaning items such as wire wool and mops and bags of indeterminate powder that might be detergent or flour. There’s the dollar store, called the kashtan, with its jars of out-dated baby food and packets of thick tan tights. Shiny loaves of white bread are baked and sold from a hole in the wall near the universam, or perhaps it is a part of the universam – Rachel isn’t sure. Then there are the concrete kiosks where she can buy dusty yellow packets of Liptons tea, Tampax, stretchy hairbands and sugary drinks from someone with a midriff but no face; the darkened windows are always at the waist height of the vendors inside. Finally she stops by the old women squatting outside the peeling green doors of the monastery. Their wares are laid out on cloth squares: a trio of wrinkled lemons, a string of onions or pickled cucumbers floating in a jar like grey turds.
Rachel practises her Russian: two, ten thousand, twenty thousand, how much, thank you. The old women don’t look up. They just stare at her shoes.
Elena Vasilyevna hobbles along Lavrska Street beneath the high white wall of the monastery. Her bowed legs ache; hoeing is easier than walking, but today is an anniversary so she must be here. She doesn’t look over her shoulder, even though that boy from the fourteenth floor, Stepan, has been following her all the way from Staronavodnitska Street. He is up to something. She’s seen him leaning in through the window of a fancy car parked outside the flats. Last week she found several handfuls of burning hair smouldering and stinking in the wastepaper bin in her cubicle.
He needs an occupation, she thinks. Like most boys.
As Elena passes the frescoed Gate Church of the Trinity, she glimpses the young Englishwoman, head uncovered, her baby on her hip. She is trying to drag that buggy of hers through the narrow wooden doorway. Well, if the gatekeepers don’t send her packing then the pilgrims certainly will. They kneel and scrape as if the old faith has never stopped flowing through their dried-up veins. Elena sucks her teeth and spits. She has no interest in trinities or holy mothers. She won’t cross herself when she passes, she won’t mutter a prayer. Her faith fell out of her like a stillborn infant when she was barely grown.
This is Lavrska Street, where assassins creep.
She walks on.
Lucas is out on the balcony. He is fixing his map of Ukraine to the side wall with pieces of chewed gum. It is taking him a long time to secure it; the gum won’t stick to the tiles.
‘Rach!’ he calls. ‘Rach!’
Rachel is sitting on the floor in the kitchen. She is giving her son his first taste of solids. Ivan is semi-upright in his bouncy chair in front of her, a bib under his chin and a panicky look in his eyes. Rachel is panicking, too. She has memorised the chapter on weaning in Baby’s First Year, poring over the photographs of artfully messy kitchens and smiling, hippy-ish parents in high-ceilinged Victorian semis. She has sterilised the spoon, boiled the water, measured out the baby rice she brought with her from England and mixed it to the texture of sloppy wallpaper paste.
‘Come out here, Rach! I want to take a photo of you and Ivan.’
Rachel wishes Lucas would go to his press conference. She nudges Ivan’s chair a little further away from the open doorway with her foot.
‘It’s too cold,’ she says over her shoulder.
‘It’s not cold!’ shouts Lucas. ‘January will be cold.’ A pause. ‘You haven’t been out here at all yet.’
Rachel suspends the plastic spoon in mid-air, but she can’t blink away the falling baby, the splayed limbs, the flopping head. ‘The height makes me feel dizzy,’ she murmurs, listening as the balcony door closes and her husband’s footsteps approach along the hallway. ‘I prefer going for walks.’
‘I’m sorry you’re not keen on the flat,’ he says, leaning against the door frame. A rare memory stabs at him, swift and bright: Rachel, his new fiancée on a weekend away in Paris, stretching her arms up into the air from a viewing platform on the Eiffel Tower, flushed and teasing, pretending to fling his passport over the top of the safety barrier. She’d not been dizzy then, he thinks, though his head had been reeling. ‘We can’t move again. I’ve paid for the year up front. We wouldn’t get the money back. Anyway, you should have seen the cockroaches in my last place, not to mention the lethal wiring. This place is brighter, and safer. In the spring we can put a table on the balcony, get some pots, grow some herbs like proper Ukrainians.’
Rachel nods, slowly, as if her husband has helped her to accept something she hasn’t previously understood; as if this is the last time he needs to mention the subject. She waits for Ivan to open his mouth, then slips the spoon between his lips.
‘He doesn’t like it much!’ says Lucas, peering over Rachel’s shoulder. ‘He’s just spitting it back out.’
‘He’s feeling it with his tongue,’ she murmurs, leaning forward and using her little finger to scoop a dribble back into her son’s mouth. ‘He’s not used to anything that doesn’t come from me.’ These are words she has memorised. They are easy to say. Easier than words about choking, turning blue, not breathing. She doesn’t know where the nearest hospital is. Lucas can’t tell her if there’s an English-speaking doctor and she wouldn’t be offering her son solids at all if he didn’t scream for milk every two hours. Her body needs a chance to heal.