‘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,’