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

driving with the interior light on. He is holding a street map above the steering wheel and peering at the blank-faced buildings that flicker past them like a spool of Kodak Super 8 as the twilight deepens and the bare trees crowd in.

Rachel, sitting in the back of the Zhiguli with Ivan on her knee, is struggling to read her husband’s script in the gloom.

‘What does freedom mean to Kievans doing a little late shopping down on the city’s main street, Khreschatyk?

 

[clip: demonstrators chanting]

 

Some say they write poetry, while others join the singing in Independence Square. A few daub nationalist slogans, while many simply apply for a passport, rent out their flat or cross themselves as they pass their local church.

 

[clip: get some nationalist music here – folk singers outside St Sophia’s?]

 

But if you are a true Cossack you revive a legend. Everyone here knows the story of Hetman Polubotok, who in 1723 deposited 200,000 gold coins in the vaults of the Bank of England and bequeathed them to an independent Ukraine. Back in 1990, the poet Volodymyr Tsybulko did the maths. He declared that the interest amounts to sixteen trillion pounds sterling. According to his calculations, every man, woman and child from Donetsk to Lviv is owed precisely thirty-eight kilograms of the Hetman’s treasure. Director Viktor Lukyanenko has been quick to seize on the story for one of the first post-independence films to be produced at the Dovzhenko studios here on Peremogy Prospekt. Mr Lukyanenko, I’m told you are describing the film as a romantic epic . . .

 

[clip: interview with Viktor Lukyanenko] . . .’

‘So, what do you think?’ he asks.

Rachel is trying to catch hold of her husband’s breezy tone.

‘Great,’ she says, nodding. ‘Great!’

‘It’s just the intro,’ says Lucas. ‘A bit of scene-setting. I need to interest different audiences, not just the World Service lot.’ He yanks on the wheel so that the car turns sharply left. ‘Peremogy Prospekt. Over there.’

Rachel drops the script and grasps sleeping Ivan more tightly.  The Zhiguli bumps over the fissures in the concrete and comes to a halt outside some sort of warehouse.  She peers out of the window. The building might be a sports hall or a House of Culture or a hospital or a market: they all look the same from the outside with their closed-up, peeling frontages and their lack of lights and signs. She thinks of the old amusement halls on the seafront at Southsea and mouths the Cyrillic letters that hang lopsidedly above some padlocked doors until she makes the right sounds.

‘Dov – Dovzhenko keenostudio . . .’

The passenger door is wrenched open.

‘Why have you come?’ asks Zoya, frowning with no trace of their earlier complicity.

‘She’s an extra!’ declares Lucas.

Rachel climbs out with Ivan in her arms and follows Lucas and Zoya across the icy crust of the car park towards a steel door. The metal is dented as if someone has given it a kicking. Zoya stops to stamp the snow off her boots.

‘Ready for your debut?’ Lucas asks.

Rachel hears Zoya grunt, but as they step inside and walk down a narrow corridor past a wall light that softly fizzes, she sees that Zoya is wearing eyeshadow. Green eyeshadow. She hasn’t changed her clothes; she’s still in her padded coat and her heavy, lumpen boots. Yet the eyeshadow changes her. It makes her look younger. Or older. It makes her look something.

The corridor is long and smells of molten wire. Ivan is wriggling inside his snow suit. Rachel pulls off his balaclava as they turn a corner, and soon they are passing open doors and stepping round old women sitting on stools. The women have spongy, swollen knees and wear slippers on their feet. A man in brown overalls squeezes past. He is carrying an old-fashioned suitcase.

‘In here,’ says Zoya, nodding towards a side room with shiny green walls and a single lightbulb dangling from a flex. There’s a curtained recess at the far end, and people are pushing in and out, creating a bottleneck. She hands Lucas his audio recorder along with a neat coil of cable. ‘Don’t lose this – you have no spare.’ Then off she goes, swallowed up by the huddle. Lucas hooks the recorder strap over his shoulder and pushes the cable into his pocket. He takes Ivan from Rachel and holds him up above his head as they push their way through.

‘This is the sound stage,’ whispers Lucas, as they emerge into a cavern-like room the size of a school gymnasium. Its high roof is crisscrossed with pipes and drooping wires. In the centre is a big tent made from swathes of grey felted fabric suspended from the ceiling. People mill everywhere, some in small groups, others forming a long line that snakes around the walls. A few men are playing cards at a table by the light of a fringed lamp that seems better suited to an old-fashioned cloakroom or a seedy sort of club. At another table, two women count out bundles of small paper notes into piles. The line of people shuffles forward.

‘Are they filming this?’ Rachel asks.

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ says Lucas. ‘It’s pay day! Those people must be crew, or extras.’ He hands Ivan back to Rachel and points at a man wearing headphones. The man is standing half way up a ladder, near the tent. ‘There’s the director, Viktor Lukyanenko. He’s the one I’m here to interview.’

As Lucas finishes speaking, the man with the headphones raises his arms and sweeps them twice through the air. Immediately the hum of conversation pulses more intensely. Then he presses one hand down and Rachel realises that he is orchestrating the sound, directing small clumps of queuers whose voices rise and fall in response to the signals he gives them. They are being recorded even while they line up to collect their wages.

Lucas raises his eyebrows and turns to talk to someone – a woman with short, silver hair wearing owlish glasses and a crumpled cotton jacket. He