Angels in the Snow

by Derek Lambert

  ‘I have told you that I am aware of what you have been through. Hardship affects people in different ways. It makes some people stronger, it made you weaker. I feel sorry for you but I have no respect for you. However, none of this matters. What matters is that you would like to return to Britain. It is no good saying that you only want to visit the old country as you put it. You and I know that once you got back there you would never return to the Soviet Union.’

  Harry spread his hands hopelessly. ‘You seem to know it all. You tell me. I tell you that I would like to visit Britain and return to the Soviet Union which is now my home. You tell me I would never return. There’s nothing more I can say.’

  Grechenko nibbled at the bubliki which the waitress had put on the table. He said: ‘Supposing I told you that it might be possible for you to return to Britain.’

  Inside Harry there sounded a small cry of hope and pain. ‘How’s that?’ he said. ‘How could that be?’ He spoke fuzzily like a man just awakening from sleep.

  ‘It is possible. Everything is possible. It is only you who have stopped yourself from returning. You, Harry Waterman, are your own worst enemy. You make so much noise in Moscow that we fear that you will make more noise in London.’

  ‘You mean you think I will say bad things about the Soviet Union? That I might sell my story to one of the papers or something like that?’

  ‘Precisely,’ Grechenko said. ‘That is precisely what we feel. Not even us so much. Your own Communist Party in Britain. It is they who don’t want you back, Harry. They think you would embarrass the Party in Britain.’

  ‘If they don’t want me back what can you do in Moscow? And’—his mind began to worry about the implications—‘why would you do it anyway?’

  ‘Have some more brandy, Harry. I know you like your drink. Only don’t end up at Papa Nosov’s tonight. Now come on, you cannot be as naïve as that. Does it matter what the Communist Party in Britain say if the order comes from the Kremlin?’

  ‘What do you want out of it then?’ Never trust a copper, his old man had said. And, by Christ, his old man had been right.

  ‘Just a little help, Harry. A little information from your friends.’

  ‘My friends? What, old soaks like Yury Petrov and Nicolai Simenov?’

  ‘Come, Harry. I said we should stop playing games. Your Western friends.’

  ‘I haven’t got any. They don’t want anything to do with me. Anyone would think I was some sort of sex criminal the way they treat me. They just don’t want to know me.’

  ‘So you don’t want to go back to Britain?’

  Harry heard a pub sign swinging in the breeze blowing up the Thames. Funny how he always thought of that sign even though he couldn’t remember the name of the pub. The Duke’s Head, maybe, or was it the Queen’s Head? And the sound of ships’ sirens and the smell of the mud and the sound of the water gurgling in the mud. Moorland, beaches, suburbs as dull as summer dust and villages pickled in cider: for these Harry Waterman felt nothing: to him England was the London Docks.

  ‘Of course I want to go back. I keep telling you.’

  Yellow fogs and acid London voices. Cranes and funnels, Charlie Browns and Laskar seamen. Girls with bobbed hair and ankle-strap shoes. The fashions had departed but the Cockney girls must be as pert and pretty as ever.

  ‘Of course I want to go back,’ he said again.

  ‘But how can we be sure that you won’t start telling the world what you think of the Soviet Union?’

  ‘I promise you I won’t. In any case people wouldn’t take any notice of what Harry Waterman thought about the Soviet Union.’

  ‘I wish you were right,’ Grechenko said. ‘Unfortunately you are wrong. Eight years in a prison camp just because you were born British. Quite a story. And we both know that certain elements in Britain would not waste an opportunity to publish anti-Soviet propaganda.’

  Harry said sadly: ‘Then all you’ve got is my promise.’

  ‘Which I am afraid is not worth a great deal.’ He considered his well-manicured hands. ‘However we are prepared to take the risk. You would, of course, have to give an undertaking that you wouldn’t indulge in anti-Soviet propaganda.’

  ‘You mean I can go?’

  ‘As I said there is a chance of you going if you can help us. Do not say you don’t have any Western friends because we know that you do have. You are friendly with several newspaper correspondents who are in turn friendly with diplomats. You also know a man called Randall.’

  Red double-decker buses and London bobbies. ‘But they wouldn’t tell me anything you wanted to know.’

  ‘We just want to keep contact, Harry. Tell us what they’re saying and thinking. Journalists talk a lot. They can’t help it—it’s like a disease with them. They might let a few things drop about the diplomats they know, their weaknesses and suchlike.’

  ‘And you would let me go home just for that?’

  ‘It’s possible if you showed willing. And if you came up with something really worth our while then we most certainly would.’

  Harry Waterman had never thought of himself as a traitor. Nor had anyone else for that matter. Was it treachery to relay a few snippets of harmless information to the Russians? What secrets would he ever have access to? Anyway he would not refuse Grechenko point blank: that way he would never see Britain again and they might make things difficult for him in Moscow. He really had no choice.

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ he said. ‘God knows what I can do for you though.’

  ‘Leave that to us,’ Grechenko said. ‘Who knows, this time next year you might even be drinking in one of those London pubs you’re always telling everyone about.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Harry asked. ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Grechenko finished his brandy; his distasteful duty was finished; although he did not really think much had been accomplished. ‘There is just one thing, Harry. And I’m sure you’ll forgive the American turn of phrase. For once in your life keep your trap shut about this. You know where you’ll end up if you don’t.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  At the end of the war Harry Waterman felt resentful. It was no new experience to him. For most of his life he had resented someone or something: schoolmasters, employers, officers—officers in particular. But during the war you had to redirect your resentment because freedom to be able to express such feeling was at stake; you were therefore fighting for something worth while and the resentment could be sharpened into hatred and aimed at the common enemy.

  Then the allies won the war and Harry Waterman resurrected his old resentments. Like many other servicemen he directed them first of all towards Churchill who had been their general in victory. Harry Waterman forgot Churchill’s snarling words of defiance; forgot that Churchill, too, had been a rebel. In victory, once again, there were them and us. And Churchill was them, officer class. A blue-blooded warmonger who had involved Harry Waterman and his mates in years of unnecessary suffering. Why the hell should they vote for the Tories who had used ordinary soldiers to safeguard their fine mansions?

  So Harry and his kind voted Labour. And one night in a bar in Berlin, Harry who had volunteered to stay in the Army a little longer because it contained so much scope for resentment, became involved in an argument over politics.

  In Harry’s belly lay the Schnapps, as lethal as an iceberg below the beer chasers. And when the well-spoken young soldier with whom he was arguing accused him of being a traitor by voting against Churchill the iceberg surfaced, sharp and cruel.

  They fought bloodily in a yard behind the bar while a colleague kept watch for the military police. And after a while Harry felt the strength of the young soldier overcoming him; in front of his mates, too. So Harry and the Schnapps brought up their knee in the young soldier’s crutch and hit him in the throat as he creased over. He heeled over, cracked his head on the cobblestones and someone shouted: ‘He’s dead. You’ve killed the poor bastard.’

  Harry
who had never drawn blood in his life was on the run for a fortnight and wished for the next twenty years that he had been caught. Instead, more by chance than guile, he presented himself to the Russians who regarded him with suspicion; then, when his naïvety had been established beyond all doubt, with hostility. But Harry, intoxicated with the importance of seeking asylum in the USSR, talked a lot about trade union activities and his application before the outbreak of war to join the Communist Party. The Russians checked and found to their disappointment that Harry had in fact made some sort of application. And, because the rejection of a potential party member would be seized upon by Capitalist propagandists, they accepted him. Soon afterwards, extolling the virtues of a country that gave shelter to a fugitive, Harry applied to become a Soviet citizen. His application was granted because the Russians, accurately assessing his character, did not want him changing his loyalties again and seeking help at the British Embassy.

  One morning at the traditional hour of 1 a.m. he was arrested in his pyjamas, given five minutes to dress, tried next day for a barely specified crime against the State, bundled into a train and taken across the ermine countryside to Siberia which, until that day, had—along with salt mines—been something of a joke to him.

  Harry didn’t work in a salt mine: he worked in a coal mine. For the first time in his life he had cause for resentment which no one would have disputed.

  Many of his fellow prisoners died prematurely, their bodies powerless to withstand the cold and lack of nourishment, their minds powerless to withstand the lack of hope. Their privations were beyond the understanding of anyone who has not suffered similarly. The privations were not imposed Nazi style—experimentally or sadistically: they were just allowed to happen. The men died in the winter from the cold which frosted their blankets, froze their breath and took away their skin from their hands if they touched metal. They didn’t think of escape; only of keeping warm. In the spring and summer they died as their bodies relaxed from the grip of the cold and the fevers marched in.

  They worked all day down the pits, picking at the rock as energetically as possible because the effort kept them warm. On winter nights they clustered round the stoves in the wooden huts cooking thin stews, playing dominoes and remembering the lives they had left, perhaps for ever. Thieves, rapists, poets, politicians, artists, bank clerks. The innocent and the guilty sharing an interminable hardship in which the concepts of good and evil which they had left behind no longer mattered. Occasionally they had sex with women prisoners who were kept on another part of the camp; but never on the orgiastic scale which it later assumed in Harry Waterman’s mind. The men were too weak and, in any case, the guards kept the women busy.

  Harry coped with the conditions better than most. His Cockney resilience and ingenuity asserted themselves; and because he had little imagination he did not peer into the future and perceive the hopelessness ahead. He was also able to wallow in resentment. His suffering was beyond anything that humans were designed to endure but he was better equipped to withstand it than most.

  Then one day, after Stalin had died and his cynicism towards all human decencies had been publicly exposed, Harry was released and given a small pension to pay for the lost years of his life.

  He married a small, gentle girl called Marsha. No one could understand why she accepted him; some explored the possibilities of masochistic tendencies inherited from her father, Leonid; others stumbled upon the true solution—she loved him.

  Thereafter, until the fiftieth anniversary year of the Revolution, Harry Waterman lived the life of a drunkard and martyr interrupted by recurring bouts of home-sickness, a malady for which he knew there was but one cure.

  During those bouts Harry unlocked the bottom drawer of the old dresser in the living room in which he kept his private collection in a black metal box. And he examined its contents with the love which some men lavish on postage stamps or smooth old coins. His Army cap badge, a couple of Service ribbons, a sepia postcard of Tower Bridge, a paper Union Jack which someone had bought him at London Airport, a photograph cut from a magazine of a ship in the Port of London on VE Day bedecked with red, white and blue bunting, a matchbox filled with British soil.

  Not even his wife knew what was in the black box. No one suspected that despite his callow, braggart ways, despite the mutiny of his spirit—the prerogative, he thought, of any old soldier—Harry Waterman was a patriot. He kept the secret well and only polished the cap badge, thin and smooth from his attentions, when the apartment was empty. Nevertheless the patriotism, a tiny glowing ember in the ashes of his soul, gave him greater stature than any of the other defectors who regarded him with contempt. No one, not even Grechenko, least of all Harry, realised this.

  But now the patriotism and the home-sickness were becoming confused. He managed to persuade himself that by relaying harmless information about Westerners in Moscow he was not being unpatriotic; that when he reached London he would be able to relay valuable information to the British—the identity of Grechenko the watchdog, for instance. Sometimes he doubted these motives, but by day the doubt was subordinate to the yearning to return home.

  Only at night did the doubt surface in his bewildered conscience and ride there banishing sleep.

  Now, as Harry went shopping with his wife, the doubt had been suppressed for the day and he amazed her with his fevered good humour.

  They went first to GUM, shouldering their way through the crowds in the tall, draughty arcades, queueing for everything, waging war with other customers. It was, thought Harry, like shopping in war-time Britain.

  ‘What about a glass of champagne?’ he said.

  Marsha looked at him in amazement. ‘Harry,’ she said, ‘what has got into you? We’ve never drunk champagne in our lives.’

  ‘You might not have drunk champagne,’ he said. ‘As it happens Harry Waterman is very fond of a drop of bubbly. It’s my favourite drink—next to draught bitter.’ He took her arm. ‘Come on, you don’t have enough treats.’

  They went to the champagne bar in the department store—the ultimate incongruity in a city of austerity—and Harry bought two glasses of champagne.

  ‘Happy New Year,’ he said.

  ‘And to you, Harry.’ There was puzzlement and wonderment in her voice.

  ‘And a Happy Christmas. It’s funny, isn’t it—it’s the most Christmassy-looking city in the world and yet they don’t celebrate it.’

  ‘If we are not a Christian country how can we celebrate the birth of Christ?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Will we be celebrating Christmas this year in any way?’

  ‘None of my fine Western friends have invited us anywhere,’ Harry said. ‘They never do at Christmas time. It’s too precious for them to share with a bloody turncoat. Snotty bloody lot.’

  ‘We’ll celebrate it, Harry,’ Marsha said. ‘Just you and me. I know you love it and I don’t see why you should be deprived of it just because you’re living in the Soviet Union.’

  Harry squeezed her arm. You’re a good girl,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  ‘I sometimes think you hate me,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve never hated you,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I hate myself.’ He wished vaguely that he had the money to buy her a decent coat.

  ‘It’s so wonderful to see you happy like you are today. Why are you so happy, Harry?’

  ‘Christmas, New Year. Being out with a gorgeous girl like you. What more could a man want?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re happy. When you’re unhappy I’m unhappy.’

  They walked out to Red Square and watched the goose-stepping changing of the guard outside Lenin’s Tomb. The queue to enter the tomb stretched for nearly a mile.

  Harry pointed at the Kremlin. ‘It’s funny to think the old bastard lived there,’ he said.

  ‘You mean Stalin?’

  ‘Of course I mean Stalin. The old bastard who put me away for eight years.’

  ‘Forget
it now, Harry. It’s nearly Christmas.’

  ‘All right,’ said the new Harry Waterman, ‘I’ll forget it.’

  Before catching the tram home they went to the Post Office where Harry bought some New Year cards to send as Christmas cards to his Western friends.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Moscow’s Western community awaited Christmas with frenetic impatience. Partly because they wanted to forget Christmas at home, partly because they wanted to put up a defiant show in a heathen land.

  They prematurely bought trees which shed their needles and stood in corners of rooms, like illuminated fish-bones, dripping with decorations. They dispatched their wives to Helsinki to buy the children lavish presents. They gave parties awash with duty-free liquor. They sent each other thousands of Christmas cards. They imported turkeys and plum puddings; they sang carols in the nostalgic evenings and lit Finnish candles of delicate colours on their dining tables.

  They celebrated with the bravado which characterised prohibition parties. But all the time they knew that, outside the aura of the candle-light, the cold shadows of suspicion and hostility were still there. And all the time they knew that even as they sang carols in their apartments they might be broadcasting to a bored policeman.

  In previous years some of the best parties had been held at the American Club. But just before Christmas the Russians closed it. Its passing was mourned by film fans and nannies, and Elmer was posted back to the States which seemed only right and proper because without the club he was like a Broadway producer without a play.

  After that only the British Club was left. This came into its own and was soon showing films as bad as those screened in the hey-day of its American rival. Except on Monday nights when members played Bingo with dedication, drinking British draught beer and angrily silencing any visitors who were not aware of the seriousness of it all.