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 and noise and he’ll have to stay up long past his bedtime.
‘The smokers will stay in the kitchen,’ says Lucas as he takes two bottles of cheap Russian fizz out of the fridge and sticks half a litre of vodka in his coat pocket. ‘Vee has promised. And Ivan can sleep in her bed when he gets tired.’
‘You know that won’t work,’ chides Rachel.
‘But it’s my birthday,’ says Lucas, only half-joking. ‘And that means everyone does what I say.’
Vee’s apartment is at the top of the stairwell in a brown building near the Dnipro Hotel. The invitation says eight o’clock, but Rachel and Lucas are late because Rachel wanted to bathe Ivan first and get him into his pyjamas. She is already peeling him out of his snowsuit as Lucas presses the bell. The landing smells of garlic and dill, and there’s a handwritten sign stuck above the spyhole in Vee’s shiny steel door.
‘Sshh! Baby sleeping!’ it reads, in thick, cartoonish letters.
‘So thoughtful!’ says Lucas, tapping it when Vee opens the door. Vee puts her fingers to her lips and pulls a Betty Boop face, then laughs. She is wearing a clinging top over jeans and stylish high-heeled boots. The hallway behind her is jammed with guests; the clamour of voices rises over a pounding europop beat.
‘Happy birthday!’ she shouts, waving them inside. Lucas shrugs off his coat, then, while Rachel removes hers, he lifts Ivan up on one shoulder and ploughs into the crowd.
‘Don’t let him get over-excited,’ murmurs Rachel. It is too late. Ivan’s eyes are wide and bright, his legs kick enthusiastically and his fists reach out towards every passing thing. The apartment is warm with bodies and breath, there’s a string of gold tinsel dangling from the ceiling light and Vee is passing round plates of blinis garnished with baby gherkins, sour cream and a dollop of red caviar. She holds them high over everyone’s heads.
‘Hello!’ says a man with a beard as Rachel inches past a wardrobe in the cramped hall. It is Dr Alleyn from the embassy. Rachel, startled, slips into the dim cave of the living room that doubles as Vee’s bedroom. Lucas passes her a tumbler of sweet champanskoye and points past a couple trying to dance in a tiny space in front of Vee’s dressing table. He is motioning towards the bed where Teddy and his boyfriend Karl are sitting with their backs against the wall, clutching their knees. They are talking to an older, balding man in a white shirt who looks as if he has only recently removed his tie.
‘What’s Sorin doing here?’ Lucas mutters, before turning to greet an acquaintance from Interfax. Someone has given Ivan a plastic spoon. More guests squeeze in through the doorway – pale faces – no one Rachel recognises. The near-darkness in the living room, the crush of bodies and the noise create a cocoon of anonymity. She tips back her glass and drinks.
An hour or so later, Rachel is clutching a bottle of beer and squatting on the floor next to Teddy.
‘Where have you been?’ she asks, her eyes re-focusing on Ivan, who has fallen asleep in the crook of Karl’s arm. He looks so perfect, she thinks, so trusting and fragile.
‘Oh you know,’ says Teddy, rubbing his hand down his shin. ‘In the café, mostly.’
The café. Rachel remembers the photographs of figures standing still in the street, carefully positioned like statues or chess pieces, each staring at something outside the frame.
‘I want to ask you,’ says Rachel. ‘I mean,’ her head is a little fuzzy, ‘about that picture you took at the monastery, the one on the cover of Time…’
‘It was shit,’ says Teddy, pulling a face.
‘No it wasn’t…’ soothes Karl. His finger traces the edge of Teddy’s ear.
‘It was shit,’ insists Teddy. ‘A cheap shot. Old woman, snow, banana. State of the nation. God – I hate it all – hate the way we tell a story, as if it is just waiting for us to come along and scoop it up. Because story is king, right? Let’s all worship the story king.’