Читать книгу Angels in the Snow - Derek Lambert, Derek Lambert - Страница 9

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 could 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.’

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 stained 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.’

‘I should watch your words,’ Keres said. ‘Nosov’s nose is nothing to do with drinking. It was a disease in his childhood.’

‘And so was my arsehole.’

‘And as for me, what better person is there to do this work?’

The trained mind of the first militiaman was beginning to operate. ‘What happens to all the bottles, by the way?’ he asked.

Keres frowned. ‘What bottles?’

‘The bottles the drunks bring in in their boots and pockets half full of vodka. Who drinks that and who sells the bottles?’

‘They don’t always have them,’ Keres said. ‘We thought you sold them.’

‘Watch your step,’ said the militiaman, ‘or you’ll end up in Lubyanka.’

Harry was sobering up a little without the assistance of the station staff. He felt sick and there was a bunched fist of pain in his stomach. ‘I demand to be taken home,’ he said. ‘I demand my rights as a citizen.’

‘Shut your face,’ said the first militiaman.

Harry turned to Keres. ‘You’re in charge here,’ he said. ‘You can see I’m sober. Discharge me and I’ll find my own way home.’

Keres said: ‘It’s against the regulations.’

‘I’ll pay the fine.’

‘You’ll pay that anyway. I’m sorry but you’ve got to stay the night here. It’s for your own good. Ivan here will look after you.’

‘This is a bloody disgrace,’ Harry said. ‘It wouldn’t happen in Britain.’

‘Perhaps they approve of drunkenness in Britain,’ Keres said.

‘They can hold their liquor—not like you bloody Russians.’

‘And you can hold your liquor, can you?’

Harry belched loudly and painfully. ‘I could drink you under the table,’ he said.

Keres said: ‘I doubt that. See to him, Ivan.’

The bald assistant put down the bread and raw onion he was eating. ‘Strip,’ he said.

‘Balls to you,’ said Harry.

Ivan removed his clothes as easily as if he were undressing a schoolboy. Then he dragged him to the shower, pausing on the way to bite his onion.

‘It’s easier if you don’t resist,’ Keres said. ‘Ivan sometimes loses his temper. Especially if you happen to kick him in the crutch.’

Harry shuddered as the water poured over him. ‘I’ll get you sacked for this,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got contacts. You see if I haven’t.’ His head was snapped back and the water sluiced over his face and into his mouth.

‘Puny little bastard, isn’t he,’ the first militiaman said. ‘Look at all those scars on his back. Wonder where he got those.’

Ivan put Harry’s clothes in a locker numbered three and threw Harry on to bed number three.

‘Are you going to behave yourself or do we have to strap you down?’ Keres asked.

‘I want to go home,’ Harry said. But he lay quietly on the bed, shivering violently, thin and sharp and beaten. They threw a soiled blanket over him.

On one side of him a jovial drunk who had been ordered not to sing aloud hummed ballads to himself. He was a regular client and was allowed to keep his guitar under his bed. He was a Georgian with curly black hair and a moustache; he looked like a bandit who would enjoy carousing or killing with equal appetite.

On the other side an alcoholic twitched in dribbling sleep. He awoke intermittently and whimpered with fear, knees drawn up to his stomach, palsied hands protecting his face. His mouth was stained with tobacco tar and his face was as starved as a jockey’s.

Harry brooded on the ignominy of it. He with the biggest stomach and bladder capacity in the beer hall carted off to a sobering-up station. When he closed his eyes the darkness heaved around him. He dozed and heard the call of ships in the Pool of London and went hop-picking as a child with his mother. He was awoken by Nosov’s voice in the adjoining room.

The cold encountered between the entrance to the chapel and the station had not improved the appearance of Nosov’s nose which was mauve and polished.

‘They’ll have to move us out soon,’ he told Keres. ‘You can’t run our business in a monastery. We’ll become the laughing stock of Moscow. I just tripped over a cross lying outside. Left there deliberately I shouldn’t wonder. How can we be expected to make a contribution to the celebrations of the anniversary of the glorious Revolution in a monastery?’

Keres shrugged. ‘I think you’re making too much of it,’ he said. ‘It’s only being restored as a museum after all.’

Nosov moved Ivan’s bread and onion from his desk. ‘That’s even better,’ he said. ‘A sobering-up station in a museum. That will really get us a good reputation. People wandering in and thinking we’re part of the museum. We’ll have to put our drunks in glass cases. No, we’ve got to get new premises. We cannot allow ourselves to be humiliated any longer.’

‘I think you are too sensitive,’ Keres said.

Nosov thumbed through the papers on his desk. ‘How many have we got in now?’

‘Four. One more was brought in while you were resting. He isn’t causing any trouble.’

‘Four. There was a time when all the beds would have been occupied and we’d have had a couple on the floor besides.’

‘When the winter sets in we’ll be full again. They’ll have their old excuse—drinking to keep the cold out.’

Nosov wandered into the next room. Harry, who had decided that he was completely sober, sat up and said: ‘I demand to be sent home.’

Nosov appeared startled. He shook his head. ‘This is all I need,’ he said. And added: ‘Keres, please leave the room.’

Five minutes later Harry Waterman was dressed. Keres looked at him in amazement. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked.

‘I’m going home,’ Harry said.

Nosov said: ‘This man is discharging himself.’

‘But he can’t,’ Keres said. ‘It’s against the regulations. And what about the fine?’

‘I’ll pay the fine,’ Harry said. ‘If that’s all that’s bothering you.’ He turned to Nosov. ‘And now may I go home?’

Nosov pointed to the door. ‘Clear out,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of taxis outside.’

The blue mosaic eyes of Christ watched icily as Harry picked his way past snow-felted heaps of crosses and eroded sculptures.

‘Why did you let him go?’ Keres demanded.

Nosov sighed. ‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘may I ask a favour?’

‘There’s no harm in asking.’

‘We’ve been good friends. Good colleagues devoted to the cause. Doing our small bit for the furtherance of the aims of the State. May I plead with you never to mention this to anyone again?’

‘But why did you let him go?’

‘He happens to be married to my daughter,’ Nosov said. ‘This very night my wife is sleeping at his flat.’ He tugged at his nose as if he were trying to remove it.

‘What a disgrace,’ said Harry’s mother-in-law. ‘What a terrible disgrace.’

‘It can’t be all that bloody disgraceful,’ Harry said. ‘After all it’s your husband’s work.’

‘To think that my daughter’s husband should be taken to a sobering-up station.’

‘Your husband’s sobering-up station.’

‘Good kind man that he is,’ said Nosov’s wife who frequently told her husband that he was the most evil and cruel man in the Soviet Union. ‘Letting you go like that.’

Harry’s wife Marsha said: ‘I was worried about you, Harry. I thought perhaps you’d been hurt in a fight. You do provoke people so.’

‘I don’t get hurt,’ Harry said. ‘It’s the others who get hurt. And as for your husband …’ he rounded on his mother-in-law ‘… the only reason he let me go was because he knew he’d be the laughing stock sobering up his own son-in-law. That and the fact that he was scared stiff of what you’d say.’

‘I would have been all for keeping you in,’ she said. ‘Best place for you if you ask me.’

‘No one is asking you. But the point is Leonid thought you would be angry if he kept me in and brought disgrace to the family. As it is I was never officially there. And the drunks won’t be able to spread gossip about me when they wake up in the morning.’

His mother-in-law was planted in front of the dead television set to which she seemed to address her remarks. She was eating small biscuits as hard as nuts from a box on the table beside her. She was grossly fat, Harry thought. Like most Russian women. A sexless lump of peasant stock.

‘What’s for dinner?’ Harry asked.

‘Strogonoff,’ said his wife. ‘I’m sorry, Harry, but it’s a bit dried up. You’re so late, you see.’

Harry was again reminded of the injustice of life. ‘Strogonoff,’ he said. ‘It’s always bloody Strogonoff. Can’t you cook anything else?’

‘I thought it was your favourite, Harry. You always said it was.’

‘Well it isn’t,’ Harry said. ‘Get me something else.’

‘Give him nothing,’ said his mother-in-law to the television set.

Marsha said: ‘There’s nothing else to eat. I made the Strogonoff especially for you. You’ve got to eat more now the cold weather’s coming.’

‘I suppose that means the borsch season’s starting,’ Harry said. ‘Bowls and bowls of bloody borsch.’

‘I’ll make other soups. You know you like the way I do them.’

Harry massaged his shrunken belly, wishing his fingers could reach the pain inside. ‘You know what I’d like?’ he said. ‘I’d like baked beans on toast. That’s what I’d like. And a great mug of decent tea. And a slab of Cheddar cheese to follow.’

Marsha said: ‘There’s a little bit of cheese and sausage left. I could cut them up with some salad.’

‘You don’t know what real sausages are like,’ Harry said. ‘Not real sausages.’ He undid his belt. ‘Anyway I’ll have a bit of cooked cheese.’

He sank back in his chair and examined the flat. It smelled of food and soap and the cologne he used to drown all odours. A bowl of plastic flowers stood on the table; in one corner of the room was a brass simova which was never used. Through a crack in the patched curtains he could see the snow on the window-sill. On the old cabinet, its surface fingered with black cigarette burns, stood a half-full bottle of Haig which he kept for Western visitors. But only the newcomers to Moscow came these days; they came once, said how much they had enjoyed themselves, and never came again.

He ate the cheese, cooked Georgian style, with exaggerated effort. ‘It’s like bloody chewing gum,’ he said. ‘Why can’t we get some decent cheese?’

His wife returned to the kitchen. He knew she was crying and he felt a little ashamed of himself for upsetting her. He followed her, uncertain whether to placate her or to continue the persecution. She was washing dishes. The tears slid down her cheeks and fell in the water.

‘Can I help you?’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘Are you going to sulk all night?’

‘I’m not sulking.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry I was a bit narked. It’s that old bitch in there.’

‘She’s my mother. Why can’t you be a bit nicer to her?’

The anger that rose and fell like a yo-yo these days bounced back. He had apologised and the gesture had been ignored. ‘I’ll do for her one of these days,’ he said.

‘Oh Harry,’ she said. ‘Oh Harry.’

‘Are you sorry you married me? A bloody Englishman?’

She put the dishes away. ‘It’s time to go to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get up in the morning.’

They turned down the sofa and made up the camp bed in the kitchen for Marsha’s mother.

After they had been in bed for half an hour Harry decided to make it up with his wife. He turned to her but she was asleep. Her tranquillity, her ability to sleep immediately after a crisis and her regular breathing fortified the poison in his mind. In the morning, he decided, he would ask some of his Western friends about the possibility of returning to Britain. After all he was British by birth.