Riding Icarus (12 page)

“But that won’t last, will it?” Masha was thinking how Igor had still left with a threat.

“No,” said Granny. “It won’t. Oy oy oy, too many questions. My leg aches. Where’s that tea?”

Gena came into the kitchen. “Did you give Igor fleas or something? I saw him outside and he was feeling in all his pockets and scratching away. Hey, what are these flowers for?”

“Congratulations for getting out of hospital,” Granny said sourly. “Congratulations indeed. For escaping from prison.”

Masha leant over to sniff the fat, perfect, red-black roses Igor had brought. They smelt of petrol.

M
asha lay in bed looking at the faint summer light still coming in through the window. She was thirsty and knew she couldn’t sleep. She could hear bursts of laughter floating up from the dim street below, the soft strumming of a guitar.

They had not gone back to the trolleybus. Granny’s leg seemed to be getting worse; when she had tried to get up from her seat in the kitchen she could hardly move it. It was obvious she couldn’t make the short walk down to the sandy riverbank. So Masha had been sent to bed in her old room again, and now she was lying waiting for Granny to join her.

She just had to get a drink. Quietly she got out of bed and padded into the hall in her bare feet.

Ira and Granny were still sitting in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” Ira was saying. “Sveta was my best friend for years; Masha is almost like a daughter. But I have Gena to think of. I don’t know what Sveta has been doing in Turkey; I don’t want to know. I can believe it wasn’t her fault, but she’ll have to keep quiet to protect Masha; Igor’s seen to that. I just can’t get mixed up in anything to do with the mafia, not with Gena. I don’t want to throw you out but you can’t stay here.”

She saw Masha in the doorway. “What are you doing, eavesdropping again?” she said angrily.

“I wasn’t! I came to get a drink, that’s all.”

“Well, all right.” Ira, rather shamefaced, poured Masha a glass of water and ruffled her hair when she gave it to her. “Now get back to bed, there’s a good girl. Sweet dreams.”

Sweet dreams, thought Masha dismally, climbing back into bed. What was happening? Was Ira, who’d been so nice all this time, going to send them away? Did she believe Igor that Mama was a criminal? No one would tell her what Igor had said her mother had done. Oh, these grown-ups, they wouldn’t explain what was really happening, but they weren’t helping; they weren’t looking after her. It was like living in a house that suddenly fell down, like discovering the roof that was meant to keep off the rain was made of cardboard. She’d waited so long for her mother to come home and take care of her again, and now that Mama was back she was useless and frightened and had done something stupid just as Masha might have done. And even Granny, her beloved Granny. It was all right to play tricks, but that wouldn’t make life go back to normal. Why couldn’t Granny do something to really stop Igor?

Masha thought about the witchcraft Granny had done for her, back in the village years ago, when she’d had all those bad dreams about snakes. Pouring molten wax into water, she knew, was a way of divining what was frightening a person and then stopping the fear. If she poured wax into water, Masha wondered, would she find out what had happened to Mama in Turkey? There was a small, fierce fire of anger burning inside her; anger that her silly mother had not told her everything and would not tell her. She had to
know
– wasn’t that what this was all about? Why Igor wanted to take her away to live with him. Where Mama had really been and what she had done.

She suddenly remembered what Mama had said, when she’d started talking to herself on the island.
He thinks if he’s got you then I can never tell the truth about what happened…
Even Mama had admitted that it was all about knowing. Masha didn’t understand exactly why, but she was suddenly sure that if she knew the truth about her mother, Igor would no longer be able to threaten them. Knowing would make the fear and uncertainty go away. That was why her grandmother poured wax into water. That was why Igor bullied her and Granny and Ira and even his wife—

There was one other person who knew what it was all about. That was why she had argued with Igor, and he had hit her. Nice, sad Aunt Anya.

With these awful thoughts in her head, she’d never be able to sleep. Never ever again. If only she could tell all this to someone! Masha closed her eyes and curled herself up into a ball of angry unhappiness, pulling the sheet over her head.

But there were other things to talk about, after all. The river was frozen over, a great gleaming sheet stretching away to the island, and there were exploded stars and flattened bubbles like pancakes caught in the ice.

“If you think about it,” Masha said to the little Cossack girl, “the air inside that bubble is already old. When the ice melts in spring it will be a tiny bit of winter that comes out.”

“Baaah humbug,” said the goat kid. It was standing on the ice, all four legs splayed out so that it didn’t fall over. “Are you ready for your second birthday yet, Masha? Do you know your heart’s desire?”

“But we still don’t know when her second birthday is,” said the Cossack girl, turning a graceful pirouette on one red skate.

“Silly,” said the kid. “Look down there and you’ll see it.”

Masha lay on her tummy and pressed her nose to the glassy ice. It was like looking through the night sky, past sprinklings of rainbow-edged galaxies, stars like bursting globes of mercury. There was yellow sunlight underneath it, and yes, there was the riverbank, with willow trees and allotments, and the church with its dome, and the old wooden dovecote, but it was all inside out.

“Go on, pull it up,” said the kid.

There was a hole in the thick ice, one of those round tunnels bored by an ice-fisherman. Masha put her hand into it. Down, down, until she caught hold of something. It felt like a wooden pole. She pulled, but nothing moved.

The Cossack girl put her hands round Masha’s waist, and they both pulled together. Still nothing moved.

The kid took hold of the Cossack girl’s shiny green trousers in its teeth, and they all three pulled – and pulled – and pulled – and sat down with a bump, because the wooden dovecote came up through the hole, and attached to it was the green ground, and out came allotments, and willow trees, and the church with its faded blue dome.

“Look! You see, here we are!” cried the little Cossack girl. They sat in a round green hollow, like the palm of a hand, and the dovecote curved up on one side, and the church dome curved up on the other.

“Is this where my birthday is?” Masha asked the goat kid.

“When, not where,” said the kid, flapping its ears. “Between midsummer and midsummer, what have you got?”

“Nothing,” said Masha. “Because there’s only one midsummer.”

“Wrong!” shouted the Cossack girl. “There’s the magic time!”

The kid blinked its yellow slotted eyes, and there was a chinking sound exactly like a coin falling into a money box.

“Between the church and the dovecote, what have you got?”

“Nothing,” Masha said. “Because you can’t see the dovecote and the church dome at the same time.”

“Wrong!” the Cossack girl shouted. “There’s the enchanted place!”

Kerchink!
went the sound of the coin dropping.

But a new, harsh voice croaked,
“Wrong!”
It was a big black crow sitting on the kid’s back.
“The proper answer is: Nothing.”

At the bottom of the green hollow was the icefisherman’s hole. Masha looked through it, and on the other side was a huge white space. No roads, no towns, no trees. It was Nothing. She was tumbling down into it when she felt the Cossack girl’s hand seize hold of her own to rescue her.

G
ranny had hold of her hand and was patting it gently. “Wake up, little one.”

Masha lay blinking at the slanting bars of sunlight peering in between the curtains. It took a moment for the feeling of falling to fade.

“You were dreaming,” Granny said.

“Yes, I was.” Masha sat up slowly. She wanted to ask her grandmother about the magic time and the enchanted place. But when she opened her mouth, a completely different question came out. “What
was
Mama doing in Turkey?”

Granny turned towards the warm stripes of sunshine. Their clear light on her face made her look very old and tired. “I don’t know, Masha.”

“But what did Igor say? You’ve got to tell me,” Masha insisted. She grabbed her T-shirt, pulling it roughly over her head, and emerged glaring.

Granny only sighed. “Oh, Mashenka.”

“I hate it that no one tells me,” said Masha loudly. “Not even Ma—” She stopped. “I don’t suppose even Mama would say,” she went on carefully, after a moment. Granny looked so tired, so worried, that Masha desperately wanted to tell her that Mama was all right; she was in Kiev. She was stuck on an island, true; she was being chased by Igor, true; but she was here and she was all right.

She almost blurted it out, but she bit her lip and said nothing.

Granny turned back to her. “Up you get. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

“Have we? What?”

“Why don’t you get dressed, and I’ll tell you over breakfast.”

Granny was already wearing her old faded cotton dress, a headscarf covering up her white hair. But then, as long as Masha had known her, Granny had never bothered to get undressed to go to bed. Masha often thought it must be nice to be old and stop bothering with all those annoying things like having baths, cleaning your teeth, putting on pyjamas and taking them off again. She pulled on her shorts. It was already stickily hot in the flat. Even so, she carefully wound the long Cossack belt round her waist.

Ira made the best breakfasts; this morning it was
syrniky
, little fried cakes of curd cheese, with apricot jam.

“So what have we got to do today?” Masha asked, tucking in next to Gena.

“We’re going to the village,” said Granny. “Back to my old house to live.”

“To the village?” Masha stared. She hadn’t been there for a long time. A sudden picture popped into her mind of the dusty road winding through green, green fields, the little low whitewashed houses, the flocks of foolish, officious geese. Oh, how nice to be there, far from anywhere, where it was cool and quiet, and there was nothing to think about except climbing the hill or running down the valley to the river.

But what about Mama?

“We can’t go,” she said. “We need… I mean…” She stopped. It was so hard not to tell Granny about Mama. But she knew she couldn’t just disappear off to the countryside without telling her mother.

“What about your leg, Granny?” she asked instead. “How will we get there?”

“Ira is going to find someone to drive us.”

“How long will we stay?”

“We thought for the summer,” Ira said, and Masha suddenly remembered what she had said yesterday, that they had to leave. So Ira really was throwing them out.

“The old beekeeper is living in my house,” said Granny. “Do you remember him, Masha? There’s plenty of room for us too. Wouldn’t you like to be back there?”

Masha thought about the dim inside of Granny’s house with its hanging bunches of herbs and reeds. She thought about pouring hot wax into water, into the cold hard shapes of nightmares. The village was far, far away from Igor, from Icarus, from everything – and from Mama.

“Yes, I would,” she said slowly. “When are we going?”

“This afternoon, if we can find a driver.”

“Do we have to go so soon? There’s something I have to do here first. Can’t we go next week?”

“No. Today or tomorrow.” That was Ira. “I think it would be so much better for you in the village,” she went on, putting more cakes on Masha’s plate. “Don’t you?” She sounded pleading.

The village. A blaze of excited hope was kindling in Masha’s mind. “Who’s going? Will there be room in the car for me and Granny and – and one other person?”

“Who?” Ira asked. “Gena’s not going, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, just – it doesn’t matter. I’m only wondering. I mean, I’ll be able to stretch out and sleep, won’t I?”