Читать книгу Angels in the Snow - Derek Lambert, Derek Lambert - Страница 7

FIRST SNOW

The first snow of winter fell at night. Middle-aged women who saw it rejoiced because in the morning there would be work clearing the pavements; lovers in doorways kissed tenderly because, they said, their love was as pure and clean as the flakes settling on their shoulders; militiamen guarding the apartment blocks where the foreigners lived swore as they peered into the five months of frozen misery that lay ahead.

The snow fell hesitantly at first. It was late this year and the people of Moscow had been waiting for it as they would wait for the thaw in the spring, as people wait for the rains in the tropics, as if crises were seasonal to be buried or thawed or drowned. Soon the tired city was polished with new light.

The flakes touched the window of the bedroom where Luke Randall was making love to someone else’s wife.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘it’s snowing.’

‘Is it?’ he said. The arrival of the snow seemed to crystallise the knowledge that in the morning he would no longer find the woman beside him attractive.

‘Tell me you love me,’ she said.

‘I love you,’ he said. He filed away the knowledge for the night and embraced her softness and warmth. But there was desperation, hatred almost, about his love-making.

On the embankment beside the bridges snow-ploughs held their annual reunion. The river was dark and strong and the only colour in the black-and-white city came from the illuminated red stars on the Kremlin towers; in the morning the cupolas would gleam with a new lustre amid the snow.

The snow covered the children’s playground outside the foreigners’ flats. Yesterday it had been a seedy place: a few benches and a couple of swings planted in soiled sand. Now it was sugared and clean, awaiting the children.

Three floors above Luke Randall’s flat a Middle East diplomat quietly hanged himself. No one ever knew why. Women, men, Moscow. Everyone included Moscow in their speculation. The curtains of his bedroom were drawn and some said that if he had drawn them and seen the snow he might have cancelled, or at least postponed, his journey. Others said he killed himself because he had seen the snow.

Richard Mortimer was not at all surprised to see the snow when his TU 104 landed at Sheremetievo Airport several hours late from London. He had never envisaged Moscow without snow. He had seen pictures of river beaches and sunny boulevards; but only the sombre prints of dark buildings brooding in the snow had been fixed in his mind.

So the airport was as he had expected it. He was elaborately polite to the officials and surprised that the formalities were finished within ten minutes. The red neon letters MOCKBA reminded him of a milk bar.

He was met by a young diplomat in a fur hat who said his name was Giles, Giles Ansell.

‘I’ve got the old jalopy outside,’ Ansell said. ‘It’s only an Eleven-hundred but it’s quite adequate for Moscow. Having a bit of trouble with the gears though.’

He tried to ram the gear lever home and there was a rasping protest from the car. Porters and taxi drivers stared without smiling. ‘Peasants,’ said Ansell. ‘Bloody peasants.’

The first attack of home-sickness, like a small explosion of weak acid inside him, came as they drove through herring-bone woods of silver-birch. He saw them through the falling snow, fragile, cold and lonely. He saw himself as a child walking in the woods at home hearing a wood pigeon disturbing the snow in the ceiling of branches. The wood pigeon flew away and he was alone in the muffled tranquillity. Wellington boots and Balaclava, woollen gloves with fingers sticking out of holes; the humiliating laxative of fear.

‘We saw Giselle last night,’ Ansell said. ‘You don’t know what ballet is until you’ve been to the Bolshoi.’

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ Mortimer said.

‘It’s absolutely bloody marvellous. The choreography’s superb. Nutcracker’s my favourite.’

The small boy began to cry. His Wellingtons were leaking, his fingers aching, and if he ever got home again he would always be good.

‘Does the mail take long?’ Mortimer asked. He would write home as soon as he reached the flat.

‘Ordinary mail I’m told takes about a week,’ said the diplomat. ‘But of course we use the bag.’

They turned on to a broad, badly-lit highway. Headlights swooped on them through the snow.

‘I keep thinking they’re going to hit us,’ Mortimer said. ‘I’m only used to driving on the left.’

‘You’re not allowed to have your headlights on in the city,’ Ansell said. He enjoyed old-handing it with newcomers. He pointed out of the window. ‘See that monument? That’s as far as the Germans got in the last war.’

Richard saw the blurred outline of huge wooden crosses tilted like trench fortifications. Then they were in the outskirts of the city; over a bridge, through a bright tunnel, past big, square buildings.

‘Here we are,’ said Ansell. ‘Home sweet home.’

The snow faltered and faded and Richard Mortimer saw the block. It was as he had expected it: high, bleak and impersonal. Only the cars on parade in the yard seemed snug, rounded and softened by the snow.

The militiaman on guard emerged from his hut to inspect the newcomer. ‘Zdrastvuite,’ he said.

‘Zdrastvuite,’ Ansell said.

Mortimer said: ‘Good evening.’ He looked at the policeman’s gritty, smiling face, the blue uniform, the grey sentry box. ‘I’m in Russia,’ he thought. ‘For heaven’s sake I’m in Russia.’

On the tenth floor the hanging body of the Arab, not long dead, moved in a vague breeze. His eye-balls bulged and his swollen tongue protruded as if someone had just popped it in his mouth.

Three floors below Luke Randall awoke briefly and drank some Narzan mineral water. The woman beside him who could no longer sleep because she was frightened waited for him to put his arm around her, but he turned on his back and slept again snoring gently.

Two miles away Harry Waterman sensed the snow in his sleep because he had been anticipating it for weeks. He awoke and watched the flakes brushing the window. He thought, as he always did when the snow came, of the camp.

He woke his wife. ‘The snow’s come,’ he said.

She shivered although it was warm in the flat; shivered with the knowledge of the winter ahead; shivered with chilled resignation.

‘Somebody always tried to escape when the snow came,’ Harry said.

‘I know, Harry,’ she said. ‘I know.’

She stroked his back, hard and scarred from the mines.

‘Give it six weeks and I’ll be able to go fishing on the ice with a bottle of vodka.’

‘You’re getting too old for that, Harry. You’ll catch pneumonia.’

‘Too old at forty-eight? Don’t talk bloody nonsense woman.’ He spoke in English as he often did when he was angry. She spoke in Russian.

‘You’ve been through a lot,’ she said. ‘You’re not as strong as other men.’

‘I’m as fit as any bloody Russian,’ he said.

She put a hand on his hairless chest. ‘You are Russian,’ she said.

He pushed her away. ‘I’m British. I’m as British as the Queen of England.’

‘Go to sleep, Harry,’ she said. ‘Go to sleep.’

In the morning the children were out early on the playground surrounded by the foreigners’ flats. There was about half an inch of snow and they scooped it up with the sand beneath and threw it at each other, but it disintegrated in mid-flight. They tried to make a slide but the snow was too thin; they tried to make a snowman but the snow wouldn’t stick. But they didn’t care: the snow had arrived.

The day bloomed white, blue and gold and the air rasped with the scrape of the babushkas’ shovels. The women moved with relentless rhythm—‘Fifty roubles a month, fifty roubles a month’—cosseted in scarves and boots and dungarees, moving like automatons, thinking of roubles and soup and hot potatoes. They were the widows of the last war, the mothers of dead children. They worked for warmth and food and if they hated at all they hated only the memory of the Germans. Some took on larger areas of pavement or car park and earned 100 roubles a month.

Snow ploughs began to sweep the streets and motorists who had forgotten winter fought the skids and smiled nervously as the militia, angry with the cold, blew their whistles and waved their batons.

The Kremlin emerged from the night and became a palace of fantasies, its spires and domes notes of music muted and frozen overnight, the gilt as bright as ice. The frosted domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, twisted like barley sugar, were Christmas tree baubles.

Some of the snow sneaked through the windows in Luke Randall’s bedroom and lay, knife-edged, on the window-sill. He, too, remembered childhood; snow in Washington touching the windows of his parents’ ideal-home flat, the maid coming to wake him and the realisation that his parents had left for a two month vacation in Europe.

He rolled out of bed and went to the window, a big man with dark hair just greying, who reminded himself when he looked in the mirror of a badger. He was more aware of his age than other people were and everyone said he didn’t look his thirty-nine years.

A handful of sparrows scattered across the playground and a pigeon with a breast the colour of evening sky in winter, perched on the balcony, ruffled and indignant with the snow.

The breeze picked up a corkscrew of snow and drove it across the car park. In December the children sprayed the playground with water and their skates sang in the dusk. Now they scrabbled and fell and laughed at a puppy nosing in the snow for moles or bones. By February the snow would be piled eight foot high around the clearing as soiled and sordid as dirty sheets.

In the kitchen he drew the curtains and watched two cockroaches, brown and shiny, run for cover frantically waving their long antennae. In India he had seen cockroaches as big as your thumb. He made some coffee and took a cup to the woman waiting for him in the bedroom.

She sipped it slowly, feeling for words, knowing the answers.

‘When does your husband return?’ he asked.

‘Next week. You know that.’

‘I never promised anything,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘you never promised anything.’

‘You make me feel like a heel.’

‘I don’t mean to.’

Two diamond tears formed in the corners of her eyes.

‘For God’s sake don’t cry.’

‘Don’t look at me then.’

The two tears coursed down her cheeks and reinforcements took up their positions. Her eyes were green in the sunlight, the colour of sea-water just past the shallows. The flesh beneath her chin was tired and her breasts beneath the black nylon nightdress chosen for illicit love were flaccid.

‘I’m not looking at you,’ he said. He turned towards the snow again and the bright sky curdling towards the centre of the city into a pall of creamed smoke from the power station. It was always there in the winter, quite grand sometimes or—according to your mood—obscene with the convolutions of a naked brain. A red Moskvich car moved off painting black ribbons in the snow. A Russian chauffeur brushed snow from a Mercedes with a brush made from thick, flowering grass grown in the south, with the delicacy of a hairdresser. He looked very compact and self-sufficient nine floors below. The pigeon peered into the bedroom, pulsing its throat.

‘I know I look ugly,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t ugly last night, was I?’

‘You were beautiful,’ he said. ‘I loved you and desired you.’

‘And then?’

‘And then it snowed.’

Upstairs a fat maid called Larissa arrived early for once in her lazy life and, on her way to draw the curtains in the lounge, walked into the hanging carcass of her master. She felt the body uncomprehendingly, then screamed, then fainted, then screamed again and ran out of the flat. At first no one took any notice because noises in the flats were many and varied and the Cubans across the way were accustomed to screams at any time of the day. Finally a woman delivering cables slapped the maid’s cheeks and fetched the militiaman from the courtyard. The agencies reported the death and it made two paragraphs in the New York Times.

Across the courtyard Richard Mortimer inspected his new home. A narrow, spinsterish bedroom, a small lounge where he would have intimate dinner parties, a bathroom with a hand-shower, a parquet-floored corridor linking all three. It was his for two years and he was excited with the knowledge.

Outside, Moscow was again as he had imagined it. The blocks of flats staring at each other with dead eyes, grey or yellow-bricked. The snow and the mufflered children. From the other window he looked across the highway at a vast hotel, a lunatic cement wedding-cake, sand-coloured and bayoneted with spires.

He dressed carefully in his new charcoal suit. White shirt, striped tie, waistcoat.

Harry Waterman spent the morning sticking strips of newspaper across the joins in the windows to prevent the iced wind piercing the flat in deep winter. He worked slowly and inefficiently, and as he worked the familiar sourness spread inside him like a stain—eight years of his life lost, the dwindling years ahead. He could look neither behind nor ahead for comfort. The sourness was becoming worse, an ulcer of the soul. He drank a neat vodka, then another, and the sourness sharpened into anger.

He went into the kitchen which was the only other room in the flat, to see what his wife had left him for lunch. There was a saucepan of borsch, cold sausage and tomato salad on top of the stove. Soup, sausage and spuds. It was as bad as the food in the camp, he lied to himself.

He went down to the road to a beer hall, hiding his bottle of vodka inside his coat, scowling at the cold. In the beer hall they greeted him and listened to his routine stories of life at the camp on condition that he stoked them with vodka and told them about the girls.

Luke Randall finished dressing and said good-bye to the woman in his bed. ‘Try and be gone before the maid arrives,’ he said.

‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked.

‘I hate myself,’ he said.

‘You’ll destroy yourself,’ she said. ‘Soon you’ll have no one. You can’t go on using people and rejecting them. You can’t say you love people one minute and throw them out the next. No wonder your wife left you.’

‘She’s on holiday in the States,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

‘She’s left you and I don’t blame her.’

‘How do you know she’s left me?’

‘Because I read a letter from her to you.’

‘You’d better be gone when I come back this afternoon,’ he said.

‘She left you because of your affairs.’

He looked at her with distaste. She looked middle-aged and bitter. They had reached the spiteful stage. ‘The trouble with my wife,’ he said, ‘is that she understands me.’

He took his coat, left the flat and waited for the lumbering lift. In the flat across the landing, as bare as a prison cell, a French woman screamed at her husband. The husband screamed back and there was silence.

The lift arrived and he slammed the gate with the finality of a man closing a book at the end of a chapter. Stuck inside the lift, as ponderous as a pulley on a building site, was a typewritten slip advertising a Moskvich for sale; it had been bought duty-free by a diplomat who was now out for his profit on the open market.

Outside, the shining sky had dulled to slate. Wisps of snow as sparse as last autumn leaves drifted from the greyness, flakes of whitewash dislodged from the ceiling.

A snowball squeezed into a small cannon-ball of ice hit him in the back.

‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘who threw that?’ He thought about throwing a snowball back; then thought about his own children and walked away, a big badger of a man, with his head tucked into the wind. Thus he collided with the young man emerging from the adjoining block. A young man too smart by far wearing a new dark overcoat and new sheep’s wool gloves and new shining shoes. Luke Randall was in no mood for pleasantries. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re walking,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Richard Mortimer. And spent the next half hour cursing himself for accepting the blame for what was patently the big man’s fault.

Perversely the encounter stimulated Luke Randall. He decided to walk to work. As he rounded the corner of the block and emerged on to the main street he felt the wind, tunnelled between the buildings on either side, push him. He turned and walked against the wind. The snowflakes accelerated as they turned the corner and fled down the broad highway. He opened his mouth, felt the wind in his throat and raised his head, exhilarated.

He walked quickly, wanted to run. But diplomats never run. He smiled and the pale, screwed-up faces passing by stared at him curiously. No fur hat and a smile on his face—the big man was drunk or mad.

He made a couple of skipping steps like a ballroom dancer showing off with the quickstep, swallowed a snowflake and laughed. He was free again for a while.