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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.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_969ab835-fd68-5db1-aefa-098381a2da11)
Traffic moved swiftly this morning, the drivers anxious to escape from the new cold. On the Tchaikovsky Street stretch of the ring road which encircles the heart of Moscow lorries bored through the snow while ugly Volga taxis bullied their way along giving precedence only to the big black Chaikas with their curtained rear windows heading for the Kremlin. Single-decker buses and trams were crammed with Muscovites glum with the feel of winter. Drivers turned their Chevrolets and Cadillacs cautiously into the American Embassy convinced that the cab drivers would forgive the cold if only they could score a dent in the side of a bourgeois automobile.
This morning, glowing with temporary elation, Luke Randall noticed people and buildings and cars afresh. He confirmed his first impression that the American Embassy looked like a large, bankrupt hotel—mustard-coloured, old before its time, as prosaic as a plane tree.
The militiaman outside saluted him with the wary cheerfulness which policemen reserve for foreigners. ‘Zdrastvuite.’ What was he at home, denuded of uniform and boots? Did he put his stockinged-feet on the table, grumble behind Izvestia and Pravda and slop borsch down his vest? Or did he divest himself of authority, stick postage stamps in an album and adore a peasant woman with a rump like two bed bolsters?
He collected his mail and took the lift up to his floor. The duty marine who had recently arrived from Vietnam greeted him with a deference tinged somehow with the contempt he felt a military man should feel towards a diplomat. A closed-circuit television set recording departures and arrivals outside flickered beside him.
‘Seen anyone suspicious on that thing today?’ Randall asked.
The marine, crew-cut and built like a Wimbledon champion, shook his head. ‘Seen one helluva lot of snow, Mr. Randall,’ he said.
‘Should be a change after Vietnam.’
The marine shrugged. ‘I guess it’s a change right enough.’
‘But not a change for the better?’
The marine grimaced. What had he done to deserve Moscow?
In his office the secretary he shared with another diplomat was dealing his letters on to his desk.
‘You look like a card sharper,’ he said.
‘No card sharper should have fingers as cold as mine,’ she said.
Her fingers, he reflected, looked cold even in the summer. Thin and chalky like a school teacher’s fingers. Elaine Marchmont finished the deal and sat down at her desk. She was wearing her boots for the first time since the last winter had melted and dried up.
‘Shouldn’t you take those things off in the office?’ he asked.
‘Is it against protocol to wear boots in the office?’
‘Not as far as I know. I didn’t think they looked too comfortable, that’s all.’
‘If it was someone like Joyce Holiday or … or Mrs. Fry wearing them you’d tell them to keep them on.’
‘Why Mrs. Fry?’ he asked. And added quickly: ‘Or why Miss Holiday for that matter?’ He hoped Janice Fry had left his flat by now.
‘Because they’re the sort of women men like to see in boots.’
‘I don’t give a damn about boots on anyone. Those happened to look uncomfortable. You didn’t steal them from a Russian soldier did you? I noticed one on guard outside the Kremlin without his boots on.’
Elaine Marchmont said: ‘Why do you have to keep riling me? We can’t all be sex kittens.’
Then he felt sorry for her. Sorry about the boots that did nothing for her. Sorry about her myopia, her thin body, her hair which was the colour of dried grass rather than straw.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘There’s some decoded cables for you,’ she said. ‘Some mail from the pouch. A report from Chambers in agriculture. Three invitations to cocktail parties and APN’S translations of the Soviet Press.’
There was a duty letter from his wife, written with effort, recording the boys’ progress at school, asking for money to redecorate the flat in Washington. The words only flowed naturally when briefly they were oiled by anger, and she recalled his infidelity. The words became her voice, precise and plaintive and Anglicised. ‘Who, I wonder, is the current girl friend.’ Then she remembered her Bostonian upbringing; the voice faded and she hoped without sincerity that he was keeping well.
The cables contained Washington reaction to Soviet reaction to American policy in Vietnam. Their phraseology was as drearily predictable as the wording of a protest note.
Cocktails with his neighbours who still included his wife on the invitation although they knew she had left. Cocktails with his opposite number at the British Embassy. Cocktails with his own ambassador. Gallons of cocktails, except that there were never any cocktails—Scotch and soda, gin and tonic, occasionally Russian champagne.
Snowflakes pressed against the window and peeped in before dissolving. He walked to the window and gazed down at Tchaikovsky Street. A few parchment leaves adhered to the branches of the trees, clinging hopelessly to summer. Fur hats and head-scarves bobbed and weaved among each other and an ambulance, not much bigger than a limousine, raced towards Kutuzovsky Prospect where he lived.
‘The first road accident of the winter,’ he said.
‘And I’m willing to bet a cab was involved,’ said Elaine Marchmont. ‘The cab drivers are pigs. Worse than the French.’
‘Cab drivers are the same the world over. Except in Lagos. There’s nothing quite as bad as a Lagos cab driver.’
Elaine Marchmont knew nothing of Lagos cab drivers. ‘These pigs won’t even stop for you,’ she said. ‘And when they do they’re as surly as hell.’ She ground out half a cigarette. ‘I hate them,’ she said.
Randall looked at her speculatively. ‘Elaine,’ he said, ‘how long have you been here?’
