Derek Lambert - Angels in 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.