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

leaves her strangely hollow inside so she stands there for a minute or two in her stockinged feet and wonders what would happen if she stuffed her husband’s grimy shirts and her own rancid nursing bras into the rubbish chute and sent them tumbling down to Elena.

Nothing escapes the caretaker. She will know who took the washing machine away.

Then something else occurs to Rachel. Maybe it hasn’t moved as far as Lucas thinks.

* * *

After breakfast the next morning Rachel scoops up Ivan and takes him downstairs in the lift. The day outside is dull and misty. She can’t see the river from the windows in the foyer and even the Motherland monument is shrouded from view. The snow on the ground is pocked and grey, and the hunched women on their stick legs at the tram stop make the street look like a Lowry painting. The Siberian freeze may be receding, but winter has not yet left for good.

Elena is not in her cubicle. Her chair is pulled out and the dregs of her morning coffee sit darkly in the bottom of her usual cup. A newspaper lies flat on the desktop with lists of Cyrillic letters like shorthand jotted in the margins, and a neat row of plastic yoghurt pots from Denmark or Sweden, each filled with soil, sit on the shelf beneath the window. One or two seedlings are just starting to poke through, their pale backs still bent, still bearing the burden of the seed case from which they have just emerged.

‘Elena?’ Rachel says, not loudly, for the empty foyer is full of echoes. Ivan starts kicking her thigh. ‘Da,’ he says, ‘da-da’ like a good little Ukrainian boy. She kisses his head and wishes she had brought him down in the baby carrier. Instead she wraps her thick cardigan around her son’s shoulders and ventures outside.

Rachel has never been down to the basement. The door is round the side of the apartment block, at the bottom of an external service stairway. It has a broken metal rail and there are lumps of congealed salt on the concrete. She taps on the metal door which drifts open at her touch.

‘Elena? It’s Rachel . . .’

Her voice is drowned by a sudden acceleration of sound, a deep, juddering roar. Ivan’s back stiffens and his fists grasp her shirt, pinching her skin. Elena and another figure are standing beneath a strip light with their backs to the door. Lines of nylon rope strung from the ceiling pipes droop with strange, disembodied articles – dresses, trousers, pairs of sagging pants. In front of a stainless steel sink plumbed against what must be the bottom of the lift shaft she recognises the familiar bulk of the washing machine, shimmying sideways across the floor as its spin cycle peaks.

The figure next to Elena turns, and Rachel sees that it is Zoya, her arms full of soiled sheets.

* * *

We are all compromised by the washing machine, thinks Rachel, as she extracts another load of clean vests and pillow cases from the drum. She and Zoya have both lied to Lucas, who believes she still soaks the washing in the bath and takes it down to the basement merely to dry it. Elena appears to have banished her disgust for the machine – or with the man who sent it – and twists the dial to set the cycle as if she has been doing this for years. Ivan, meanwhile, watches the spinning washing from his bouncy chair with mute fascination until the rhythmic churning and plashing send him off to sleep. Rachel’s back no longer aches at night and her clothes smell fresh – fresher than before, at any rate, now that she’s discovered a Norwegian brand of washing powder at the black market kiosks near the football stadium. The box with its picture of a fjord on the front is emptying at an alarming rate. Zoya seems burdened by endless dirty sheets. Rachel wonders if she’s taking in her neighbours’ washing on the side.

‘Do you have children, Zoya?’ asks Rachel one day, a couple of weeks after the washing machine is moved. Rachel is less wary of Zoya since she recovered her copy of Jurassic Park and kept the secret about the nappies.

Zoya shakes out a pair of nearly dry jeans. The fabric cracks like a whip.

‘No.’

‘Any family at home?’

‘One relative, yes.’

‘Your mother? Father?’

‘No.’

Rachel gives up and squats down to hand Ivan a bread ring. Her son is sitting on his blanket on the floor, his chubby knees splayed out like a little Buddha’s, surrounded by the clothes pegs that the women have placed there for his amusement. He is safe like that she thinks – close to the ground. His trunk is sturdy and already he is trying to pull himself up if a chair is placed next to him. Soon he will be crawling.

‘What about Elena, I wonder?’ asks Rachel, peering into the gloom. Elena stands at her workbench beside the fuse boxes coiling torn strips of newspaper into cones for her spring seedlings. ‘Elena!’ she calls softly, adding the Russian word for children as a question. ‘Dyeti?’

Zoya stops sorting clothes and looks up, folding her arms beneath her breasts.

Elena carries on coiling. ‘Nyet,’ she says.

Rachel frowns, frustrated by her inability to communicate. ‘What’s the word for niece, or nephew?’ she asks, turning to Zoya, but Zoya isn’t in the mood for conversation.

‘There are plenty of underpaid teachers in this city,’ she says. ‘You should take some lessons.’

Chapter 15

Vee throws a party on the evening of Lucas’s twenty-eighth birthday. Vee’s own birthday falls two days later, so she calls it a joint celebration and invites all her friends. Teddy and his boyfriend will be there, and the usual crowd – journalists, plus a scattering of the diplomats and European Bank types that Vee always seems to attract.

Rachel lays out her dangly earrings and washes her hair in the sink. She is worried about taking Ivan to the party. There will be smoking