‘I have told the driver to return tomorrow. He has no paperwork. No invoice.’
‘Zoya!’ Rachel tries not to shout. ‘I need them now! Tonight!’
‘Then I tell him to come back. Lucas can drive them up later.’
Rachel is still absorbing the fact that the nappies have arrived at all. Lucas doesn’t know about the order. He’ll hate the fact that she’s buying them from Rob, but she won’t let him refuse to take them as he refused the washing machine.
‘Zoya, listen. Lucas is trying to save money, but I need those nappies and I ordered them without telling him. Please can you drive them here for me? I–’ she hesitates – ‘I can give you ten dollars if that helps.’
Zoya doesn’t reply and the phone goes dead. Rachel assumes she has gravely offended her and weeps at her own stupidity, until forty minutes later the doorbell rings and she spies Zoya standing on the landing with several cardboard boxes balanced on top of the washing machine.
‘I have done this for Ivan,’ says Zoya, when Rachel opens the door, still blowing her nose. ‘Clearly, if you don’t receive Pampers, you will become insane.’ The two women stare at each other, Zoya frowning as she always does, her plucked eyebrows a line of rebuke, a line that will not stand a challenge, yet perhaps can bear a truce.
‘Thank you,’ says Rachel.
At four o’clock Lucas returns home with a slab of pork wrapped in newspaper. He seems buoyant in the way he used to be, before he and Rachel came to Kiev.
‘I’m going to the Dovzhenko studios tonight,’ he says, jiggling Ivan’s bouncy chair. ‘They’re doing some voice edits for A Golden Promise.’
‘For what?’ Rachel looks up from the button she is sewing on to an old denim shirt.
‘A Golden Promise. That’s the title of the film. The one I’m writing about. Keep up, Rach!’ He grins, too fired up to care that his wife doesn’t remember. ‘It’s the perfect time to get some background sound for my feature, and Sorin says the director has guaranteed an interview. He’s been hard to pin down, so I’m not going to miss him. I’m sick to death of churning out bulletins from Parliament, when all London thinks it needs is the nuclear story.’
Sorin, remembers Rachel. This is the man who took Jurassic Park.
‘Will he – Sorin – be there?’ she asks.
‘Probably. I bet he’d love to hook up with an actress or two. Hey, why don’t you come with me?’
Rachel considers the possibility that she might recover her book. ‘What about Ivan? We can’t take him to a sound recording.’
‘Why not?’ Lucas opens the fridge door and pushes the meat inside. ‘It’s a huge place. You can wander round with him while I get what I need. I’ve got the car tonight. Zoya says she’ll meet us there.’ He sucks his lips into a pretend pout and puts on a fake Russian drawl. ‘You, baby, should be star of blockbuster film – screen goddess and wife of Hetman!’
Rachel has just secreted sixty-four perfectly pure Pampers nappies in the drawer under the bed and hidden the other four boxes under a blanket on top of the wardrobe. Their value is incalculable to her; they help keep the danger at bay. If she could only get her book back – if she could complete the ritual – then all might be well.
She looks at her husband. Go with him, she tells herself. Don’t overthink it. In fact, don’t think anything at all.
Lucas is 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.