Angels in the Snow. Derek Lambert

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.