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
