Snegurochka Judith Heneghan (most read book in the world .txt) 📖

world heritage site. The pilgrims and the tourists are returning now. Orthodoxy’s back.’

Teddy seems at ease here, she thinks. He leans over a table a few yards from the entrance. The table is laid out with wooden stacking dolls – matryoshki – each curved body split in half with five or seven or even ten smaller dolls lined up in descending order. Traditional models in brightly painted folk dress pout their red lips, the brushstrokes a little rough in places, but cheerful enough. The old man behind the table tries to tempt Rachel with what is clearly his most expensive item, a fancy ten-piecer with licks of gold paint. Teddy, however, is more interested in a series of Russian leaders. He counts them down for her: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Chernenko, Andropov, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, Lenin, Tsar Nicholas II and a tiny little figure no bigger than her finger nail with a black moustache and fierce, slanting eyes.

Teddy picks it up and shows it solemnly to Ivan.

‘Your namesake, The Terrible!’ he says, laughing as the old man flaps a mittened hand and scolds him for touching.

Rachel watches with an unexpected flush. She finds herself noticing how Teddy is not the same as Lucas. His eyes are brown. His hands are smaller, broader. His voice has a wider register, at ease with the notes at its disposal. She wants to count these differences, sort them and hoard them.

‘Look, there are your onions,’ he says, pointing to a basket in the snow beside the table. Then, once he has asked the price per kilo, and the old man has stuck up four fingers and Rachel has added what she hopes are the right number of zeros, Teddy wanders off.

When she has completed her purchase Rachel turns to see him standing a dozen yards away in the lee of the bell tower. He is talking to someone else – a young man, slightly built – Ukrainian, by the look of his bleach-spattered denim jacket and his sharp eastern cheekbones. Teddy brushes a snowflake from the man’s arm. They seem close, almost lovers. Their heads tilt together and their breath mingles in clouds about their heads.

Oh, she thinks, they are lovers.

Teddy beckons her over.

‘Meet Karl,’ he says, smiling. ‘Karl, this is Rachel, Lucas’s wife. And this is their baby, Ivan!’

Karl nods and smiles down quickly at Ivan, but he seems more serious, more reserved than Teddy.

‘Nice to meet you,’ says Rachel. ‘I must be getting back. Ivan is getting cold.’

‘This is not a good place to buy vegetables,’ says Karl, speaking with a strong Kiev accent and pointing to the bunch of onions she has hooked over the pushchair handles.

‘No.’ Rachel recalls the banana seller’s bandaged fingers and tells herself that next time, when she is alone, she’ll definitely give away her gloves. ‘But I am doing a survey, you see. A consumer survey. And I have to find three prices for everything.’

‘Ah, the UN!’ exclaims Teddy. ‘Vee put you on to this, didn’t she? You’ll be the most popular expat in town if you hike up the dollar prices. Everyone’s been waiting. The diplomats, the execs from the internationals – you’re setting the hardship allowance for the next three years. Just imagine the bribes . . .’ He stops, sees Rachel staring, round-eyed. ‘Hey, I’m joking. Three prices? That won’t be easy.’

‘I have to find dishwashers,’ she says. ‘Max Factor lipstick. One hundred per cent Arabica coffee beans.’ Suddenly, the enormity of the task overwhelms her. She shivers, and wishes she is back in the flat. She needs her rituals, her pages.

‘You’re freezing. Come with us,’ says Teddy. ‘We know a warm café.’

Karl looks up, contemplates the grey sky. ‘And Max Factor,’ he says.

* * *

The café is in a cellar in Podil, so Karl flags down a Lada saloon to take them there. The driver, a middle-aged man in khaki fatigues, glares at the pushchair with its dirty wheels and Ivan with his runny nose and his bright red cheeks, but Teddy feeds a dollar bill through the half-open window and soon they are bumping along the cobbles in the old part of the city, past the small huddle of protesters waving their placards near Independence Square, past the ragged line of schoolchildren at the top of the funicular and through narrow lanes that have wound their way down to the river between the merchants’ wooden warehouses since the days of old Kiev Rus.

‘Welcome to my gallery,’ says Teddy, once the three of them are seated on stools in a low-ceilinged back room with a stove blasting out heat in the corner. A young woman wearing an oversized purple sweater places three black coffees in front of them. The coffee is thick with grounds that leave a residue around the inside of Rachel’s cup. She takes a sip and stares at the photos that cover the smoke-stained walls; some are in clip-frames, most are just tacked up with tape. The images are of people, mainly, in washed out greys and greens, captured so that only part of each face is showing, unsmiling, a single eye staring away from the lens as if there is something far more important happening outside the frame.

Teddy seems pleased with the attention Rachel gives them. ‘So, I believe Ivan is the first baby to come here. He’s definitely the first English baby.’

Rachel hugs her son protectively on her knee. He gazes upwards, eyes bright, absorbed by the macramé lampshade that dangles from the ceiling. She wipes his nose with a paper napkin and rubs his cool hands in hers.

‘Most people in Kiev don’t like babies,’ she murmurs.

‘We love babies,’ says Karl.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’

‘We love babies, but there are problems, and the cancers. Many cancers. Also diphtheria. Everywhere there is sickness and no one is paying the doctors. People are afraid for any little ones. You are a foreigner, protected from danger. So they watch to see what you do.’

‘Oh.’ Rachel frowns as she processes this logic.

‘Vee says you’ve been unwell,’