Angels in the Snow

by Derek Lambert

  ‘Paris, I guess. I’ve done a Vietnam stint.’

  Vietnam coloured everything if you were an American, Randall thought. Especially in Russia. Every day the Press attacked American policy with fierce words which had been de-gutted by repetition: instead of crusading the newspapers nagged. But nagging eroded the questioning spirit. ‘Bandit aggression … dirty war.’ The phrases stuck and were assimilated like repetitive advertising. Student demonstrators automatically daubed their banners with these words. They had become a habit.

  The counsellor for cultural affairs who looked as if he might have been a prize-fighter walked in and went through a pantomime of being cold. Shivering, rubbing his hands, calling for hot, very hot, coffee. Randall wondered why he still wore a lightweight suit. A first secretary who dealt with Press queries looked round the door, noticed the Pressmen present and hesitated. But the correspondents spotted him and waved; he was trapped.

  Two girl secretaries with sallow complexions drank milk and talked intensely. Randall guessed they were discussing their careers or last night’s Bolshoi. ‘So virile … a real man … imagine him leaping into your bedroom.’ It was the Bolshoi.

  ‘When is your wife coming back?’ the magazine man’s wife asked.

  You bitch, he thought. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I had a letter from her just this morning. She’s not quite up to it yet.’

  ‘Poor girl. I sympathise with her. It’s too darned easy to crack up in this place.’

  ‘She didn’t exactly crack up,’ Randall said. ‘She would have stayed on if it hadn’t been for the kids. But we had to get them to a decent school. They were growing up too fast.’

  The agency man’s wife folded her hands across her big belly. ‘I envy her,’ she said. ‘Oh boy, how I envy her being back in Washington.’

  ‘You’re free to go any time you like,’ said her husband. ‘You know that.’ There had been a row that morning.

  His wife smiled and became pretty again. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know that. But you know I couldn’t leave you here. God knows what you’d get up to.’

  They clasped hands, pleased that the others saw them happy together.

  ‘I must go,’ Randall said.

  In the transport section the season’s first automobile casualty was limping in, an apple-green Chev with a buckled fender.

  ‘What happened?’ Randall asked.

  The driver, one of the military attachés, said: ‘A —ing taxi.’

  The sky had lightened again and the snow on the ground was fading. But you could feel winter assembling around the city; converging from the Arctic, from Siberia; shivering the match-stick forests of larch and birch, crusting the lakes with tissues of ice, breathing into the rheumy old dachas in the villages.

  That afternoon, because the anti-freeze had not arrived at the embassy and the Russian anti-freeze tended to freeze, he poured a bottle of vodka in the radiator of his car.

  The rear entrances of the diplomatic block—there were no front entrances—reminded Randall of a set from West Side Story. There was, like Russian diplomacy, very little diplomatic about them.

  The tall flats, made of pale, dirty brick, almost surrounded the big car park and ramshackle playground. Balconies which few trusted seemed to have been stuck on the walls and were used by pigeons and sparrows and Africans who draped them with laundry. At night you could see television sets flickering and diplomats dining and sometimes the unwary undressing for bed.

  On summer nights youths from a dozen countries lounged against the big packing cases in which furniture was shipped in and out. They wore jeans and sneakers and commented on pretty women passing in languages which they hoped were not understood. Little girls, black, coffee and white, played hopscotch around the chalk-scrawled entrances; and on the benches sat mammies and mummies and nannies remembering greasy Accra evenings, the curried dusks of New Delhi, late sunshine on the Serpentine, night thickening and salted by the sea in San Francisco.

  The nights were pierced with children’s cries. Adolescent oaths in Spanish, French, Italian and many varieties of English. It was an international ghetto, a Block of Babel.

  When Randall arrived the fire engines had just pulled up. An Algerian boy playing with matches inside an empty packing case had set fire to it and the crate was in flames. The boy lay on the dirty sand shivering violently and whimpering; his clothes and hair were scorched and, although his parents were beside him, he kept calling for his baby sister.

  Sparks spiralled into the evening fog pressing down over the city. A breeze blew the sparks to one side and flames, like orange liquid, ran down the side of another case dust-dry after the hot late-summer. The case, as big as a small shop, was addressed in black paint to Cairo. A middle-aged woman with a dark creased face moaned, clasped her hands and shook her head.

  ‘All her furniture’s in there,’ someone shouted.

  ‘Let’s get it out then.’

  ‘Can’t, there’s no bloody key.’

  ‘The key,’ shouted a Swede. ‘You must give us the key.’

  The woman began to rock from side to side. ‘My husband,’ she said. ‘My husband.’

  Firemen in khaki were running with a hose to a hydrant.

  Randall got a crowbar from his car. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’ll bust it open.’ He grabbed the arm of a young man hurrying across the playground towards the fire. It was the Englishman he had collided with that morning. Most of Randall’s mind was occupied with saving the furniture; but a sliver of it observed maliciously that the stranger’s new coat, bright shoes and raw gloves would never be quite the same again.

  Randall jammed the crowbar behind the bar of metal held by a padlock and pulled. The Englishman pulled beside him. He felt the bar give a little. Spectators crowded the precarious balconies and children chased the sparks. Then the jet from the hose hit the side of the case thrusting it backwards. Smoke and steam enveloped Randall and the Englishman.

  ‘Pull,’ Randall shouted. ‘For Christ’s sake pull.’

  The bar ripped loose and the doors burst open. Hot white smoke burst out. Other men ran forward and helped them pull the furniture, bandaged in newspaper, out of the case. The cheap veneer was blistered and butterflies of flames fluttered among the newspaper. The woman watched, still rocking, murmuring to herself in Arabic.

  ‘Poor bitch,’ Randall said. ‘She was going home tomorrow. That’s all she needed.’ He looked at the Englishman and laughed. His eyes were red, his cheeks coursed with sooty streams, his coat singed and flaked with ash. ‘You’d better come up and have a drink,’ he said. ‘You look as if you need one.’

  ‘No thanks. I’m perfectly all right. I need a bath more than a drink.’

  ‘A drink first,’ Randall said firmly. ‘Come on. What’s your name by the way?’

  ‘Mortimer. Richard Mortimer. I only arrived last night.’

  ‘A baptism of fire,’ Randall said.

  Mortimer smiled, teeth flashing coonishly in his blackened face. ‘It’ll be something to write home about,’ he said.

  Randall entered the flat cautiously in case Mrs. Fry had returned, or never left. There was a note in the bedroom: that was inevitable. It would have taken over an hour to compose, vituperation distilled into four painstaking paragraphs. He tore it up without reading it. The room smelt faintly of her hair lacquer.

  ‘What can I get you?’ he asked. Mortimer was patrolling the lounge examining his possessions—the simova, two heavy brass candlesticks, beaming wooden dolls, flabby succulents, a cactus which had sprouted two ears and looked like a cat, a collection of china eggs bought in one of the commission shops, the modern art sprawled across one wall.

  Mortimer said he would have a beer. Randall said: ‘You need a Scotch.’ And poured him one. ‘What do you think of them?’ He pointed at the paintings.

  ‘I think they’re splendid,’ Mortimer said.

  ‘I think that one looks like two Indian footprints, one on either side of a lavatory pan. My wi
fe bought it. She bought them all.’

  ‘I take it you don’t like them.’

  ‘I don’t mind them for what they are. An hour or so’s decorative work. I object to them being described as art.’

  ‘I don’t much care for modern art myself,’ Mortimer said.

  ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’

  Mortimer tinkled the ice in his glass. ‘Perhaps because I didn’t want to offend you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps because I’m a diplomat. Perhaps because I’ve been taught manners.’

  ‘Well said. Have another Scotch.’

  Outside, as the evening chilled and darkened, an ambulance arrived to take the burned boy away.

  ‘Poor little devil,’ said Randall. He was thinking of his own boys. ‘I expect he was looking forward to the snow.’

  ‘Was he badly burned?’

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly not. I can’t stand seeing children hurt.’

  They stood at the window watching the marionettes far below tidying up the drama. On the other side of the playground women were burning refuse on a bonfire. One by one the lights came on in the block across the way.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Randall said, ‘I feel as if I can control everything from here. See that car moving over there? I’ll park it in that space beside the Mercedes and the Chev.’ Obediently the car turned in. ‘And I’ll lead the driver across the sand, where he will pause briefly to look at the burned-out case, to entrance seven.’ The man followed the instructions.

  ‘Very impressive,’ Mortimer said.

  ‘Not really. He always parks there and he lives at number seven. I knew he wouldn’t bother too much with the fire. He’s a Norwegian, not very imaginative.’

  ‘There’s certainly a lot of nationalities here.’

  ‘The lot. The East Europeans are in that new block over there. We don’t mix except for cocktails. You’ll be having a lot of cocktails. Are you married?’

  ‘No. Are you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. My wife is in America.’ He poured himself another drink. ‘We’re separated if you must know,’ he said; and wondered why the green young Englishman was the first person in whom he had confided.

  ‘I’m sorry. Have you any children?’

  ‘Two.’ Randall didn’t want to discuss it any more. ‘A diplomat hanged himself here this morning,’ he said.

  ‘So I heard.’

  The stylised understatement irritated Randall. ‘You Goddam Englishmen,’ he said, is that all you can say—so I heard?’

  ‘It’s terrible. I’m sorry but I’m a bit overwhelmed. The fire, a hanging, my first day in Moscow …’

  ‘You’ll soon settle down. When the real snow comes. It sort of cossets you the first time round. It’s how you always imagined Russia. Come February and March you never want to see another snowflake. It’s on your second or third winter that you start to crack up.’

  ‘It is my experience,’ said Mortimer, selecting his words carefully, ‘that wherever you arrive there’s always someone around who wants to frighten you. I don’t believe that it’s such a bad place. It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Randall said. ‘It’s me. Have another drink.’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll have to go now. Thanks for your hospitality.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Drop in any time.’

  He watched the marionette Mortimer, lit by the lamps round the playground, walking towards his entrance. Soiled overcoat flapping, gloves in hand, staring at the ground. Prim and proud and gullible. The affection which Randall felt surprised him. He retained it, examined it and put it aside. And guided Mortimer into his entrance.

  Then he tore up the cocktail party invitation and walked around smoking and drinking whisky. The flat seemed more empty than ever before, resonant, washed with restless shadows. The children’s room was now the lumber room. In one corner stood a pile of broken toys. In a drawer of a filing cabinet he found last year’s Christmas cards. One of them was a Russian New Year card from his wife, a gold bust of Lenin on a blue background scattered with stars. ‘A happy Christmas, darling, and a happy New Year.’ But it had all been over even then. And two more Russian cards, bright, beaming dolls linking arms, from the children. There was a film of dust over the cards.

  More whisky and ice from the freezer. He switched on the record player and listened to ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ played by the Bolshoi orchestra, a present from his wife. He opened the window and smelled the night, cold and cruel. Lights glittered in the hotel opposite but they had no warmth.

  He went to bed and dreamed that it was the last day on earth. He and his family were trying to climb a slope to escape a wave of radioactive gas sweeping towards them They ran but they were on rollers. The smaller boy fell and the gas engulfed them. He tried to speak to his wife, to apologise for what he had done. She laughed.

  The big man lying on the bed whimpered and tried to embrace the emptiness beside him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The beer hall was a basement in a side street of small offices, cemented together and uniformed with flaking mustard paint. Thirsty men queued on the hollowed steps nipping at bottles of vodka so that often they were drunk by the time they got inside. Vodka and brandy were banned in the beer hall since the Kremlin ordered a drive to keep the drunks off the streets but the lure of forbidden booze was stronger than the fear of punishment. At night shadows on the sidewalks reared up and walked under cars and wayward, homeward men sang ballads and fighting songs as tearfully and defiantly as any Dublin taproom tenor.

  The women who served in the beer hall were bruisers arrogantly confident of their ability to eject the slurred men who sometimes tried to fight. They regarded their customers with contempt, but allowed them to bring in vodka because they took the empty bottles and sold them. They served chipped tankards of beer, black bread and fresh-water Crustacea from behind a bar; the men leaned on long, high tables and talked about the Dynamos or Torpedoes, their wives and mistresses, the Revolution and their war service, the stupidity of their bosses.

  Occasionally a tart with wild red or blonde-streaked hair wandered in and leaned against the wall waiting for a cigarette and an offer. They stayed until a waitress ordered them out, brandishing a fist attached to a forearm as thick as a thigh.

  The walls were the colour of beer and the ceiling was kipper brown. The men wore poor suits, dark grey mostly, many with open-neck wool shirts. Sun-tans had faded and their skins awaited winter. They came from factories, offices and building sites and their hair, badly cut by their wives, was dulled with sweat and dust. There was no glow of good health about them, but they laughed a lot as they ate greedily, cracking shells with their fingers, and they created an aura of unassuming virility.

  Harry Waterman was in high spirits as he slugged his beer with vodka and passed the bottle to his cronies. He drank hugely and grinned when, as usual, they commented on the capacity of his bladder; although recently it had become painful to hold the beer for as long as he would have liked. Once he had been unable to reach the stinking toilet in time and had fled into the night to hide and dry his shame.

  ‘You don’t know what beer is,’ he said. ‘Real beer. British beer. It froths like a petticoat. This stuff is just piss.’

  ‘You seem to like piss,’ said Yury Petrov. He drove a taxi and wrote laborious poetry. ‘I sometimes think you take your mug out there’—he pointed at the toilet—‘and replenish it yourself.’

  ‘And, Harry, when did you last taste British beer?’ Nicolai Simenov asked. He worked in a tax office and had recently bought a Western suit from a tourist. It was a size too big for him but it was much admired.

  Harry winked slyly. ‘More recently than you think,’ he lied. ‘There are no flies on Harry Waterman.’ He used expressions in vogue in the West in the thirties and mid-forties when he had left Britain for the last time. He spoke bad Russian laced incongruously with the antiquated Western slang; he swore both in English—because he enjoyed the ugly rasp of the words and he co
uld insult unsuspecting Russians—and in Russian because of the vehemence of the oaths which usually involved someone’s mother.

  ‘But when?’ Simenov asked. He flicked cigarette ash from his suit, blue mohair with a deep shine on the seat.

  ‘You don’t have to go back to the old country to drink their wallop,’ Harry said. ‘There are ways and means.’ He picked up the vodka bottle from the floor. ‘Have another shot,’ he said, to distract their attention.

  The vodka spiralled in the thin beer and vanished. They drank and wiped their mouths with their hands.

  ‘Where do you get the vodka from?’ Petrov said. ‘It costs a lot of roubles.’

  Harry could never resist a boast. ‘Never you mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a lot of friends.’ Which was almost true. They were acquaintances rather than friends. Americans and British who bought liquor cheaply in the dollar shops and gave some to Harry because they felt sorry for him. They also let him watch soccer on their television sets and brought him back red, white and blue gifts which they just remembered to buy at London Airport. ‘I even used to get liquor in the camp,’ Harry said.

  ‘Tell us about the camp,’ Simenov said. ‘What did you do for girls?’ He winked at Petrov.

  ‘Real cuties, they were,’ Harry said. ‘They used to come in once a week to keep us happy. Sit with their skirts up. They had tattoos with arrows pointing up to you-know-what.’

  The men leaned forward, elbows in puddles of beer. They didn’t know whether to believe Harry or not. It didn’t matter. Harry’s stories of women in the camp were better than the movies or television.

  Harry combed his dark, dry hair with his fingers. The back of his hand was already blue with veins, the palm as hard and shiny as a saddle. He drank deeply to dispel the familiar sensation of time shrinking around him. In a wallet deep inside a pocket of his sports coat with its leather-patched elbows, there was a picture of Harry Waterman the teenager. A wholesome young man with thick, creamed hair eager to defend his country against the Fascist foe.

  ‘Go on,’ said Petrov. ‘Tell us about the girls.’