Angels in the Snow. Derek Lambert

propelled herself through the throng. She glared at Harry’s empty vodka bottle. Her hair was stringy, her broad face incapable of registering emotion because all emotions had long since evaporated. She lived for her needs—food, drink, a place to sleep: she lived to exist. ‘You know that’s forbidden,’ she said. ‘I could have you banned from here.’

      ‘But you won’t,’ Harry said. He couldn’t make up his mind whether to be belligerent or conciliatory. ‘You won’t, will you?’ The vodka called for anger but any incisiveness was blurred by beer.

      The woman stared at him and shrugged. There was no point in arguing. She rarely argued any more. He would give her the bottle to sell for a couple of kopeks: she wouldn’t get him banned. It would take a few minutes but time was of no importance.

      Petrov said: ‘I think she likes you. Why don’t you take her home?’

      Simenov sucked at his beer; it tasted better with every swallow He could drink it all night, almost feel it pouring straight through his body. ‘Give her the bottle,’ he said irritably. ‘Then she’ll go away.’

      Harry clung briefly to masculine authority. ‘You couldn’t get me banned,’ he said. ‘I’m too good a customer.’

      The woman said: ‘I could get you banned right now. The boss is here.’

      ‘I was only joking,’ Harry said. He handed her the bottle. It disappeared inside her soiled white apron. She went behind the bar to hide it with the rest of her booty.

      ‘It’s nearly closing time,’ Petrov said. ‘We’d better drink up or they’ll take the glasses away.’

      Harry growled, ‘In England you can drink until ten. Or maybe it’s later now. I used to drink in a pub where if you knew the gaffer you could drink till midnight.’

      ‘That was a long time ago, Harry,’ Simenov said. ‘A long, long time ago.’

      ‘Not so long. Nineteen-forty-five. That’s not so long ago.’

      ‘It’s a lifetime,’ Petrov said. For a lifetime he had been driving his cab and writing unacceptable poems for magazines. Tonight he would write another.

      The women were clearing the men out now. In one corner a youth in a tattered dark red sweater put the finishing touch to a charcoal sketch of a fat man wearing a collar and tie who looked as if he might have money. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That will be fifty kopeks.’ The fat man looked at the sketch. ‘It’s not a bit like me,’ he said. ‘Fifty kopeks,’ said the artist. ‘It’s not worth ten,’ said the fat man. He stood up to leave but the artist grabbed him by his tie. ‘Fifty kopeks,’ he said. The fat man spat. The artist raised his arm to hit him but one of the waitresses held him from behind, calmly and effortlessly. The artist shouted impotently. ‘—— your mother and your mother’s mother.’ The fat man straightened his tie. ‘Another time,’ he said, ‘I’ll get a real artist to sketch me.’ When he had left the waitress released the artist. He tore the sketch into small pieces. ‘If he ever comes back I’ll kill him,’ he said. The other men laughed. Petrov said: ‘There’s only one thing stronger than vodka and that’s a Soviet woman.’

      They collected their coats and shapkas. Snow feathered the night, cotton wool cradling a knife.

      ‘I hate the snow,’ Harry said. ‘Christ I hate it.’

      ‘You have a lot of hate ahead of you,’ Petrov said.

      ‘I’ll get out soon,’ Harry said. ‘You see if I don’t.’

      Simenov wiped one pointed shoe on the back of his trouser leg. ‘You’ll never get out,’ he said. And you know it. You’re a Soviet citizen.’

      The men stood in groups outside the beer hall, some of them supporting their friends, all reluctant to return home to small flats smelling of wasted dinner, to mothers-in-law and babushkas, sleeping children and hostile wives. They were men and they lingered on the perimeter of a man’s world. The liquor still burned inside them and they didn’t feel the cold.

      ‘They say it will be a hard winter,’ Petrov said. He would write about the pristine snow stained with blood the colour of poppies during the Revolution. About frozen gunfire and desperate men eating red berries.

      ‘I wonder what the temperature is,’ Simenov said.

      ‘It’s not very cold,’ Harry said. ‘Zero, perhaps. A few degrees below.’

      They went their different ways through the falling snow. It muffled the sound of traffic, touched tired buildings with Christmas youth, soothed the raw outlines of the new blocks. It bemused the minds of drunken men and tantalised stray cats. Still it was hesitant, flirtatious; by lunchtime tomorrow it would be gone. Soon it would be there to stay.

      Harry Waterman glanced up through the sparkling muslin and saw the winking red light of an airliner. Perhaps it had come from London. He bowed his head and pushed on through the snow, sometimes reeling from one side to the other. When the militia picked him up he tried to tell them that he was walking to the airport to meet the London plane.

      The sobering-up station was housed in a derelict monastery about a mile from the Kremlin.

      Ever since the Revolution the monastery had mouldered on a small hill overlooking the river. Its domes were husks, its spires broken like the teeth of an unkempt old man, its bricks crusted with stalactites of pigeon droppings. The chapel which had been used as a warehouse smelled of distemper, the stagnant past and incense as if someone had been secretly burning it. In the frail houses attached to the monastery Russian families still lived and their children played beneath the wasted trees outside the chapel.

      But now the Soviet authorities had decided to renovate many of the churches and chapels which emerged, their cupolas burnished, like clusters of bright mushrooms, amid Moscow’s new buildings. And the monastery was in the process of resurrection.

      The encircling walls were caged with a filigree of scaffolding. Above the entrance to the chapel the face of Christ was reappearing in new pebbles of mosaic; on the ice-tissued ground lay icons, their features blurred and faded as if in martyred protest against blasphemy, and great rusty skeletons of crosses. Workmen had burrowed into dim monastic rooms baring frugal decorations and releasing imprisoned prayers.

      With the snow falling and the past disturbed it was really no place to bring fanciful drunks. But there it was: no alternative accommodation had been found and Moscow abounded with such incongruities—even the American Club had once been a morgue and there were those who said it still was.

      The sobering-up station adjoined the chapel and, if their sight was unimpaired by vodka, one of the first sights the drunks beheld was half the face of Christ gazing reproachfully at them. Many suspected they were in heaven, which they had been led to believe did not exist, and fell in belated postures of worship. This irritated the staff.

      In particular it irritated Leonid Nosov who was in charge of the station. He was a serious man who saw no humour in his job and frequently pointed out, as prison warders and military policemen point out, that someone had to do it. He was aptly named, having a large nose pitted, he asserted, by disease and not the weakness which characterised his customers.

      Nosov was anxious to do well during the coming months of the fiftieth anniversary year of the October Revolution. Already there had been hints of a reward for the most efficient sobering-up station of the year. An article encouraging officials to work 40 more diligently had been published in a police gazette; it had been reprinted in the satirical magazine ‘Krokodill’. Nosov could not think why.

      Nor could he understand why the authorities had decided to renovate the monastery. You were either a Christian country or you were not: the Soviet Union was not and yet here they were, this historic year, pandering to tourism and Western opinion. And doing it on the doorstep of his premises which made an invaluable contribution to the welfare of the State and had until recently had one of the best records of any station in the country. Now he was not so sure about the statistics: militiamen who rounded up the drunks