Angels in the Snow

by Derek Lambert

  Harry licked his lips. ‘We had them in the hut,’ he said. ‘With the stove roaring away for the occasion. Outside it was minus forty or fifty. Real brass monkey weather. Your breath used to freeze in the air. And if you went for a piss you had to put your old man away toot sweet or it would drop off. We used to hug each other on the lorry going to the mine to try and keep warm. Cold? It was bloody agony. Some of the boys lost ears and noses.’

  ‘We know about the weather,’ Petrov said. ‘We don’t want to hear about the cold. Tell us about the girls. Where did they come from. And’—he leaned forward expectantly—‘what did they do?’

  ‘Do? What do you think they did? They didn’t come to play chess. Big girls they were with big arses. We used to make soup for them. A great pot of it. One of the boys would trap a wolf or something in the taiga. We’d skin it and toss it in the pot, skull, guts, everything. Hunger’s good sauce, you see. We’d thieve some black bread and spuds, throw them in skins and all. It would boil and bubble in the hut and we’d get randier and randier as the time drew near. Then they’d arrive. Great fat sluts. They sloshed the soup down and hitched their skirts up to tease us. Then when we could stand it no more we’d have them on the boards we slept on. They didn’t seem to care how many of us went through them. Then they’d get up and ask if there was any more soup. By then we didn’t care. We’d had our fill and told them to—off.’

  ‘Didn’t you want it again?’ Simenov asked. His face was greedy for more. ‘I mean after all that time you must have been pretty well stoked up.’

  Harry pointed at his empty tankard. ‘The tide’s run out,’ he said. ‘And it’s your turn to buy.’

  When they were sufficiently drunk and titilated by his sexual memories it was they who had to bribe him.

  ‘Then life wasn’t all that bad.’ Petrov said. He tried hard not to betray his interest as nakedly as Simenov and his face was impassive.

  ‘It was a living hell,’ Harry said. ‘A living, freezing bloody hell. The only reason we didn’t want the women again was because we were buggered what with the work down the mine and the cold and the food.’

  Harry Waterman didn’t tell them that he had been impotent since the days in the camp.

  Simenov returned with the beer and some black bread. Some of the beer splashed on his suit and he swore. ‘Vodka,’ he said. ‘Put a shot of vodka in them.’

  ‘That’s the last,’ Harry said. He pretended to squeeze the bottle and the last drops plopped into Petrov’s tankard.

  ‘Now tell us some more about the girls,’ Simenov said.

  ‘There was one girl,’ said Harry, ‘who would do anything for a bit more nosh.’ He winked at his two companions whose faces had become slyly sensual with vicarious enjoyment of Harry’s experiences. ‘She was a tall girl, better looking than the rest of the women. I think she must have had a bit of aristocratic blood in her—and you know what the bloody aristocrats were like. She’d take it all ways, sometimes two at a time if you follow me. And she enjoyed it too. What a girl. Big tits and yet soft hair down there—that’s what made me think she must have been the daughter of an aristocrat. She could have been the daughter of one of Rasputin’s tarts for all I know. She was shafted so much that you would have thought it would be like throwing a sausage up an alley. But it wasn’t. Tight as a drum she was. I can see her now with her skirt up with this lovely thing winking at us while she fed her face in between pokes. Then she’d go off to be serviced by the guards. At night-time after she’d gone you could tell that some of the blokes who hadn’t had her were thinking about her. You could hear them thinking about her if you see what I mean. You weren’t particularly shy about that sort of thing after a few years in the camp.’ Harry licked his lips. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that girl had class. And there’s nothing like having it with a bit of class. It’s a sort of victory in a way. I sometimes wonder where she is now. If she’s out and got married all I can say is God help the poor bastard who’s married her. He’d have to have a splint put on it.’

  One of the waitresses propelled herself through the throng. She glared at Harry’s empty vodka bottle. Her hair was stringy, her broad face incapable of registering emotion because all emotions had long since evaporated. She lived for her needs—food, drink, a place to sleep: she lived to exist. ‘You know that’s forbidden,’ she said. ‘I could have you banned from here.’

  ‘But you won’t,’ Harry said. He couldn’t make up his mind whether to be belligerent or conciliatory. ‘You won’t, will you?’ The vodka called for anger but any incisiveness was blurred by beer.

  The woman stared at him and shrugged. There was no point in arguing. She rarely argued any more. He would give her the bottle to sell for a couple of kopeks: she wouldn’t get him banned. It would take a few minutes but time was of no importance.

  Petrov said: ‘I think she likes you. Why don’t you take her home?’

  Simenov sucked at his beer; it tasted better with every swallow He could drink it all night, almost feel it pouring straight through his body. ‘Give her the bottle,’ he said irritably. ‘Then she’ll go away.’

  Harry clung briefly to masculine authority. ‘You couldn’t get me banned,’ he said. ‘I’m too good a customer.’

  The woman said: ‘I could get you banned right now. The boss is here.’

  ‘I was only joking,’ Harry said. He handed her the bottle. It disappeared inside her soiled white apron. She went behind the bar to hide it with the rest of her booty.

  ‘It’s nearly closing time,’ Petrov said. ‘We’d better drink up or they’ll take the glasses away.’

  Harry growled, ‘In England you can drink until ten. Or maybe it’s later now. I used to drink in a pub where if you knew the gaffer you could drink till midnight.’

  ‘That was a long time ago, Harry,’ Simenov said. ‘A long, long time ago.’

  ‘Not so long. Nineteen-forty-five. That’s not so long ago.’

  ‘It’s a lifetime,’ Petrov said. For a lifetime he had been driving his cab and writing unacceptable poems for magazines. Tonight he would write another.

  The women were clearing the men out now. In one corner a youth in a tattered dark red sweater put the finishing touch to a charcoal sketch of a fat man wearing a collar and tie who looked as if he might have money. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That will be fifty kopeks.’ The fat man looked at the sketch. ‘It’s not a bit like me,’ he said. ‘Fifty kopeks,’ said the artist. ‘It’s not worth ten,’ said the fat man. He stood up to leave but the artist grabbed him by his tie. ‘Fifty kopeks,’ he said. The fat man spat. The artist raised his arm to hit him but one of the waitresses held him from behind, calmly and effortlessly. The artist shouted impotently. ‘—— your mother and your mother’s mother.’ The fat man straightened his tie. ‘Another time,’ he said, ‘I’ll get a real artist to sketch me.’ When he had left the waitress released the artist. He tore the sketch into small pieces. ‘If he ever comes back I’ll kill him,’ he said. The other men laughed. Petrov said: ‘There’s only one thing stronger than vodka and that’s a Soviet woman.’

  They collected their coats and shapkas. Snow feathered the night, cotton wool cradling a knife.

  ‘I hate the snow,’ Harry said. ‘Christ I hate it.’

  ‘You have a lot of hate ahead of you,’ Petrov said.

  ‘I’ll get out soon,’ Harry said. ‘You see if I don’t.’

  Simenov wiped one pointed shoe on the back of his trouser leg. ‘You’ll never get out,’ he said. And you know it. You’re a Soviet citizen.’

  The men stood in groups outside the beer hall, some of them supporting their friends, all reluctant to return home to small flats smelling of wasted dinner, to mothers-in-law and babushkas, sleeping children and hostile wives. They were men and they lingered on the perimeter of a man’s world. The liquor still burned inside them and they didn’t feel the cold.

  ‘They say it will be a hard winter,’ Petrov said. He would write about the pristine snow s
tained with blood the colour of poppies during the Revolution. About frozen gunfire and desperate men eating red berries.

  ‘I wonder what the temperature is,’ Simenov said.

  ‘It’s not very cold,’ Harry said. ‘Zero, perhaps. A few degrees below.’

  They went their different ways through the falling snow. It muffled the sound of traffic, touched tired buildings with Christmas youth, soothed the raw outlines of the new blocks. It bemused the minds of drunken men and tantalised stray cats. Still it was hesitant, flirtatious; by lunchtime tomorrow it would be gone. Soon it would be there to stay.

  Harry Waterman glanced up through the sparkling muslin and saw the winking red light of an airliner. Perhaps it had come from London. He bowed his head and pushed on through the snow, sometimes reeling from one side to the other. When the militia picked him up he tried to tell them that he was walking to the airport to meet the London plane.

  The sobering-up station was housed in a derelict monastery about a mile from the Kremlin.

  Ever since the Revolution the monastery had mouldered on a small hill overlooking the river. Its domes were husks, its spires broken like the teeth of an unkempt old man, its bricks crusted with stalactites of pigeon droppings. The chapel which had been used as a warehouse smelled of distemper, the stagnant past and incense as if someone had been secretly burning it. In the frail houses attached to the monastery Russian families still lived and their children played beneath the wasted trees outside the chapel.

  But now the Soviet authorities had decided to renovate many of the churches and chapels which emerged, their cupolas burnished, like clusters of bright mushrooms, amid Moscow’s new buildings. And the monastery was in the process of resurrection.

  The encircling walls were caged with a filigree of scaffolding. Above the entrance to the chapel the face of Christ was reappearing in new pebbles of mosaic; on the ice-tissued ground lay icons, their features blurred and faded as if in martyred protest against blasphemy, and great rusty skeletons of crosses. Workmen had burrowed into dim monastic rooms baring frugal decorations and releasing imprisoned prayers.

  With the snow falling and the past disturbed it was really no place to bring fanciful drunks. But there it was: no alternative accommodation had been found and Moscow abounded with such incongruities—even the American Club had once been a morgue and there were those who said it still was.

  The sobering-up station adjoined the chapel and, if their sight was unimpaired by vodka, one of the first sights the drunks beheld was half the face of Christ gazing reproachfully at them. Many suspected they were in heaven, which they had been led to believe did not exist, and fell in belated postures of worship. This irritated the staff.

  In particular it irritated Leonid Nosov who was in charge of the station. He was a serious man who saw no humour in his job and frequently pointed out, as prison warders and military policemen point out, that someone had to do it. He was aptly named, having a large nose pitted, he asserted, by disease and not the weakness which characterised his customers.

  Nosov was anxious to do well during the coming months of the fiftieth anniversary year of the October Revolution. Already there had been hints of a reward for the most efficient sobering-up station of the year. An article encouraging officials to work 40 more diligently had been published in a police gazette; it had been reprinted in the satirical magazine ‘Krokodill’. Nosov could not think why.

  Nor could he understand why the authorities had decided to renovate the monastery. You were either a Christian country or you were not: the Soviet Union was not and yet here they were, this historic year, pandering to tourism and Western opinion. And doing it on the doorstep of his premises which made an invaluable contribution to the welfare of the State and had until recently had one of the best records of any station in the country. Now he was not so sure about the statistics: militiamen who rounded up the drunks were not enthusiastic about visiting the monastery in its new garb and the drunks themselves were said to be drinking in areas where they would be dumped in a rival station which was not haunted by a forsaken religion.

  The suspicion that anyone could prefer to be sobered up elsewhere infuriated Nosov. ‘It just shows you,’ he said. ‘Religion. What good did it ever do anyone? Here I had the best sobering-up station in the Soviet Union. Then they start uncovering religion and what happens? Business starts to fall off.’

  ‘Perhaps people are drinking less,’ said Keres, one of Nosov’s assistants, a reformed alcoholic who had renounced liquor after a sustained bout of drinking in which he had believed that he was the reincarnation of Stalin.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Nosov said. ‘They’re drinking more than ever. That’s why we must work harder than ever this anniversary year of the great victory over capitalism.’

  ‘I sometimes think you approve of drunkenness. You’re like a policeman who would be out of a job if there was no crime.’

  ‘I look upon myself as a doctor curing sickness,’ Nosov said. ‘What would happen to these wretched people if it weren’t for us?’

  ‘They’d go home and sleep it off instead of being stuck under a cold shower and fined for the privilege.’

  Nosov ran a finger over the enlarged pores on his nose and plucked a hair from a nostril. ‘You’re becoming cynical,’ he said. ‘There’s no place for cynicism in our scheme of things.’

  ‘Then there should be. Cynicism is necessary to maturity.’

  ‘Dangerous thinking,’ Nosov said. It was one of his favourite observations. ‘You don’t want to go around being too critical about things. You never know who might hear.’ He pointed to the room where tonight’s drunks had been laid out on shabby beds in various stages of stupefaction.

  ‘You’re not suggesting that drunks are sent in to spy on us?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting they’re sent as spies. But they might think it their duty to report back. And indeed it would be their duty.’

  ‘What, to report me for questioning our methods of sobering up boozers?’

  ‘We are a State organisation,’ Nosov said. ‘We are appointed to safeguard the welfare of our comrades. By fining them we provide funds for the State. If you criticise our sobering-up station then you are in effect criticising the State.’

  ‘I sometimes wish I was one of the customers again.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ Nosov said. ‘You know what happened last time. There’s no knowing who you might think you are next time. Why, you might even think you’re …’ He paused, frightened of the name he had been about to utter.

  Keres looked at him contemptuously. ‘And if I did I might try and purge you,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no need to be impertinent.’

  A vehicle drew up outside.

  ‘More customers,’ Keres said.

  The station comprised two ante-rooms of the chapel. They were bare and dirty. In one was a primitive shower, some lockers and half a dozen beds. In the other a desk, some straps with which to bind the livelier visitors and a cupboard full of medicines and bandages with which to dress the wounds of those who had injured themselves.

  Harry Waterman saw the incomplete features of Christ floating in the falling snow and said: ‘This isn’t the airport.’

  One of the militiamen said: ‘Shut up.’ And kicked him on the calf of his leg.

  ‘What’s the point of kicking a drunk?’ asked the other.

  ‘Why not? He can’t complain. We can always say he got all his bruises when he fell down. In fact there’s no better person to kick than a drunk when you think about it. It’s the only thing that makes this part of the job worth while. In any case it’s good for my boots. They’re brand new and they need breaking in.’ He kicked Harry’s other leg.

  Harry said: ‘I thought you were taking me to the airport.’

  ‘Why, are you a pilot or something?’ the first militiaman asked.

  ‘I wanted to meet the plane from England.’

  ‘He’s English, I think,’ said
the second militiaman. ‘There was something about it on his papers. English by birth but a naturalised subject of the Soviet Union.’

  The first militiaman kicked Harry again. ‘That’s for being British,’ he said. ‘Drunk and British. What better combination could there be to earn a good kick?’ He massaged the leather on the instep of his boot. ‘Except of course drunk and American.’

  Keres was waiting for them with the third member of the station staff, a bald, powerful man with a big, hard belly. He was nick-named Ivan the Terrible and he was there in case of trouble. Nosov had disappeared for a nap on one of the pews in the chapel.

  ‘Where did you find him?’ Keres asked.

  ‘Down by the river. Said he was trying to get to the airport.’

  ‘He seems very quiet. You didn’t soften him up, did you?’

  ‘Come now, comrade,’ said the militiaman who had been kicking Harry Waterman. ‘What do you take us for? You’ve been reading too much about police methods in the West.’

  ‘You forget I was once a drunk,’ Keres said. ‘The times I tripped and fell on the toe of a militiaman’s boot was astonishing.’

  ‘You should have been more careful where you fell. In any case you said you were Stalin. What more did you expect?’

  Keres wrote down Harry Waterman’s particulars. ‘Anything to say for yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘What was that face outside?’

  The second militiaman laughed. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘That was Jesus Christ.’

  Harry pointed a wavering finger at Keres. ‘And I suppose that’s Joseph Stalin,’ he said.

  ‘It was,’ said the first militiaman.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Harry said.

  ‘You should have gone home hours ago,’ Keres said.

  ‘You speak from experience,’ said the first militiaman.

  ‘It’s always sad to see a drunk,’ Keres said. ‘They’re all unhappy men.’

  ‘This is a bloody fine station,’ said the first militiaman. ‘The officer in charge has got the biggest boozer’s nose I’ve ever seen. The second in command is a reformed alcoholic—if they ever reform, that is. And the third member of the staff. Well, look at him. A peasant.’