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

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