Snowdrops

by A. D. Miller

  I knew I didn’t have the kind of money she’d probably been hoping for. But I thought I could offer her security.

  I asked her what sort of ship her father had served on. She said she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, especially not a foreigner. Then she laughed loudly and said it probably didn’t matter anymore.

  “He was on boat—how do you say?—boat against ice. To make path for other boats.”

  “Icebreaker.”

  “Yes,” she said, “icebreaker. He was on atomic icebreaker. My grandfather also was on icebreaker. In war he was helping to break ice for Western ships. For your grandfather maybe.”

  “What was the ship’s name? Your father’s, I mean.” I thought that was another question you should ask about sailors.

  She said she wasn’t sure, she’d forgotten. But she thought for a few seconds and said, “Petrograd. Icebreaker was called Petrograd. Because of revolution.” She smiled, the way you might if you’d dredged up a lost but precious fact out of your memory.

  IN THE MORNING, when she was still asleep, with her head in profile on the pillow, I found a small crook two-thirds of the way up her nose, invisible from the front—the result, I guessed, of a fatherly backhander or a rough sailor boyfriend. I found matching dark freckles in the middles of the moon-white cheeks of her arse. And I noticed the tiny creases that were just appearing at the corners of her eyes. I remember how those lines made me want her even more, because they made her real, a physical thing that could die, but not only die.

  Later, when we were drinking our tea with lemon slices in the kitchen—IKEA mugs, IKEA chairs, most of my flat was from IKEA, which was by then as inevitable in Moscow as death and tax evasion (and cirrhosis)—she told me again about her aunt, the one who lived in Moscow. She told me that she and Katya saw her as often as they could but not as much as they should. She said she would like to introduce me soon.

  “Maybe next week,” she said. “Or week after next week. She is alone in Moscow and comes happy when we visit. She will like you. I think she is not knowing many foreigners. Maybe none. Please.”

  Yes, I said. Of course I would meet her aunt. Masha drank her tea, kissed me on the nose and went to work.

  IT WAS APPROACHING the middle of November. All the mokri sneg had melted, but some of the ice that had formed during the October cold snap survived, retreating into the cracks in the pavements and wounds in the roads like trapped platoons waiting for reinforcements. Tatiana Vladimirovna said, “Come in.”

  Say what you like about the Soviets, they were the all-time world champions of parquet. It stretched away from the plain front door of her apartment in interlocking Khrushchev-era boomerangs, interrupted in the middle of the floor by a faded Turkmen rug. There was a glittery communist chandelier, which looked fabulous as long as you didn’t get too close to it.

  We took off our shoes, hung up our coats, and followed Tatiana Vladimirovna down the corridor. I can remember her apartment much better than I’d like to. We passed a bedroom with two single beds, only one of them made up, plus a dark wooden wardrobe and a white dressing table with an ornamental mirror. There was another room half-full of packing boxes, then the door of the bathroom and a kitchen with tired linoleum and a primitive fridge. The lounge she led us to was covered in a kind of hairy brown wallpaper, peeling a little in one corner where it met the ceiling, with a bookshelf full of old Soviet encyclopaedias and reports and a big wooden desk covered in green baize. On the desk was the kind of Russian party spread I always dreaded, as inedible as it was extravagant. It had probably cost her about a month’s pension and a fortnight’s cooking, all sweaty fish, jellied and unidentifiable bits of animals, Russian chocolate broken into clumps, blinis that were getting cold, sour cream and a special sweet cheese they fry in little rolls.

  The windows were closed and the central heating—still controlled centrally by the city government, like in the old days—was inhuman. Tatiana Vladimirovna gestured us towards a moulting sofa. “Tea,” she said, a statement not a question, and left.

  The girls sat down to whisper. I got up and poked around. Tatiana Vladimirovna’s place overlooked the Bulvar and the pond at Chistie Prudy (“Clean Ponds”—typical Russian wishful thinking as far as the water was concerned, but an increasingly smart part of central Moscow). She had a big window that faced across the pond and the trees that flanked it. They’d packed away the Bedouin-tent-style restaurant that was set up on a platform over the water in summer, and the gondolas that offered overpriced serenades had been beached. On the other side of the pond was a strange blue building decorated with reliefs of real and imaginary animals, one of the beautiful things you sometimes trip over in that city, like flowers on a battlefield. I could make out owls, pelicans, double-headed griffins, two-tongued crocodiles, pouncing but somehow despondent hounds. The confused November sky reminded me of a black-and-white television set that hasn’t been tuned in.

  On one wall of the room there was a set of plates, with the classic blue-and-gold St. Petersburg pattern, and a certificate from a technical college in Novosibirsk. There was an old Bakelite-style radio, a faux-mahogany contraption as big as a trunk that opened at the top. Two framed black-and-white photos sat on the bookshelf. One showed a young couple perching on some windy rocks by the sea, she laughing and looking at him, he prematurely balding, wearing serious spectacles and looking into the camera. The couple looked happy in a way that I didn’t think people in the Soviet Union were supposed to have been happy. In the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, in stencilled white lettering, it said “Yalta, 1956.” The other photo showed a girl stretching herself across the diameter of a sort of outsized hamster wheel, her hands clutching the rim, apparently taking part in a synchronised gymnastics routine: two more wheels with girls inside them jutted into the picture. When I crooked my head and looked closely, I could see that the angled figure was the same slim girl as in the beach photo, maybe a few years younger, wearing tennis-style shorts that were sexier than they were probably meant to be and a wide fixed grin. It was her, my bent head finally understood. It was Tatiana Vladimirovna.

  Behind the buffet on the desk was another photo, showing the man with the glasses, now a little older, sitting at the same desk, which in the photo was covered with orderly papers, an ashtray, and an old-fashioned rotary telephone. He had half turned from his work to face the photographer, as if the work was too important to forget about altogether.

  “That is my husband,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna in Russian. She was standing behind me with a small silver samovar in her hands. “That is Pyotr Arkadyevich.”

  She made tea in the Russian way, pouring superstrong dark shots from a teapot, then topping them up with steaming water from the samovar. She gave us each a little saucer of jam, and teaspoons to dip in it so we could eat the jam with the tea, alternating sips and slurps in a way that I could never quite get the hang of.

  We talked. Some of the conversation felt like a job interview, some of it like a tourist-board guide to Russian geography.

  “What is your profession, Nikolai?”

  “I am a lawyer.”

  “What is your father’s profession?”

  “He is a teacher. My mother is also a teacher. But now they are retired.”

  “Do you like Moscow?”

  “Yes, I like it very much.”

  “And apart from Moscow, where have you been in our Russia?”

  I said I’d been to one or two of the monastery towns near Moscow, I’d forgotten their names, I was sorry.

  Hadn’t I been to Siberia to see “our great Lake Baikal”? Did I know it was the biggest lake in the world? Did I know that there were eleven kinds of salmon in the rivers of Kamchatka?

  I switched onto autopilot. My eyes kept flitting towards the arc of Masha’s thigh. And then, as old Russians often do, Tatiana Vladimirovna mentioned something that made me feel infinitely naïve, born yesterday in comparison to what she’d lived through and seen—an extreme version of h
ow you feel when you’re twelve and your parents talk incomprehensibly about taxes or somebody getting divorced. In Russia it might be how uncle such and such went to the Gulag and didn’t come back, or just some humdrum everyday heroism or indignity—how someone shared a room with his parents ’til he was forty, or used to have her mail censored or stand in three-day queues for potatoes.

  She asked me if I’d been to St. Petersburg. I said no, not yet, but that my mother was planning to visit me, soon maybe (it was true, she was threatening to), and that we were hoping to go there together.

  “I am from St. Petersburg,” she said. “From Leningrad. I was born in a village near Leningrad.”

  In the village, she went on, her mother had milked cows and prayed in secret. Her father worked on a collective farm. They’d moved to the city after he died, Tatiana Vladimirovna said, just before the Great Patriotic War, when she was seven or eight years old. She lost a sister and her mother in the siege. An elder brother, she told me, still smiling, had been killed at the battle of Kursk. Some years after the war she’d gone with her new husband, the man in the photos, to Novosibirsk, a university town in Siberia. It was strange, she said, in Siberia they felt almost free, more than in Leningrad before the war or in Moscow later. Her husband was a scientist and—here my Russian threatened to give out, though I’m not sure my English would have been up to it either—I think he helped to design a paint that went inside missile silos, or something like that, and was tough enough, she said, to resist the heat when the missiles took off.

  “He was big scientist,” said Katya in English.

  “That is why Tatiana Vladimirovna has this apartment in the centre of Moscow,” Masha said in Russian. “For services to the fatherland.”

  “Yes,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna. “Comrade Khrushchev gave my husband the apartment in 1962. It was a major worry at that time, how to launch the missiles without burning the silos. Pyotr Arkadyevich worked very hard, and in the end he found the answer.”

  She herself still worked, she said, as a part-time guide at a museum near Gorky Park, dedicated to some famous Russian scientist I hadn’t heard of. She had the deference that old people sometimes show towards the young, racing through her life story so as not to take up too much of our precious youthful time. I liked Tatiana Vladimirovna. I liked her immediately, and I liked her right ’til the end.

  “So, Nikolai,” she said, “what do you think of our little scheme?”

  I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I glanced at Masha. She uncrossed her legs and nodded.

  “I think it’s an excellent scheme,” I said, wanting to please.

  “Yes,” Tatiana Vladimirovna said. “Excellent.”

  We all smiled.

  “Nikolai!” said Tatiana Vladimirovna, jumping up and changing the subject. “Girls! You haven’t eaten anything.”

  We all cooed around the desk, where Tatiana Vladimirovna handed out the plates and saw to it that I got the fish I didn’t like. I made sure I had enough cold blinis to hide it under.

  We sat down. Tatiana Vladimirovna asked Katya about university.

  “It is hard work,” Katya said, “but very interesting.”

  We drifted into a well-meaning but awkward silence.

  “Fish loves to swim!” Tatiana Vladimirovna exclaimed. She got to her feet, went to the kitchen, and came back with an unopened bottle of vodka and four old shot glasses with snowflakes etched into them. She poured, and we all stood up to clink our glasses.

  “To your success, kids!” said Tatiana Vladimirovna, and knocked back her vodka in the efficient Russian way.

  The three of us drank too. I felt the vodka at the back of my throat, then in my stomach, and after that the warmth in my chest and the instant elation that made it such a curse. I felt the colour in my cheeks, and the liver damage and indiscretions that were on their way. I hadn’t troubled to ask anyone what the scheme was.

  Ten minutes later (“To Russia!” “To us!” “To the Queen of England!”), I asked Masha in English whether she was ready to go. She said no, she needed to talk to Tatiana Vladimirovna. I knew it might be rude to leave before the bottle was empty, but I told Tatiana Vladimirovna that unfortunately I had a meeting to get to. “But you haven’t eaten anything,” she protested, looking at my overworked plate and clasping her hands in front of her.

  I said, “I’m sorry.” I said it had been a great pleasure to meet her.

  I kissed both girls on the cheek. Tatiana Vladimirovna followed me as I swam across the parquet to put on my coat and shoes.

  “Good-bye,” I said. “Enormous thanks. Until we meet again.”

  “You haven’t eaten anything,” she repeated as she shut the door behind me. I bolted down the stairs, escaping the heavy suffocating childlessness.

  LATER THAT DAY I found Oleg Nikolaevich standing on the half landing between our floors, wearing a black suit and shirt and a black trilby. He was darkly immaculate, apart from a couple of stray cat hairs on his lapel. He seemed to have trimmed his beard. He looked like he was going to his own funeral.

  “How are you, Oleg Nikolaevich?” I think I was still a little tipsy.

  “Normal, Nikolai Ivanovich,” he said. “What is it you say in English? Without news is good news. Only, I cannot find our neighbour Konstantin Andreyevich.”

  “What a pity,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “My friend Konstantin Andreyevich,” he went on. “He lives in the building behind the church. He isn’t answering his phone.” He peered at me as if maybe I might say, Oh, that Konstantin Andreyevich, you should have said, he’s upstairs in my kitchen.

  Instead, I just tried to smile and look pained at the same time. “I am sure everything is okay,” I said. I remember thinking that Konstantin Andreyevich, whoever he was, had probably had his phone disconnected or drunk himself into temporary deafness. But I did my best to take Oleg Nikolaevich seriously.

  “Maybe he has gone to his brother in Tver.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “you can help me. Help me to find him.”

  “I would be happy to,” I said, “but I’m not sure there’s anything I can do.”

  “Yes, you can,” he said. “You are a lawyer. An American.”

  “I’m not American.”

  “Well,” he insisted, “you have a credit card. You have a secretary. You can speak to the police or to the prosecutor’s office. I am an old man. This is Russia.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Of course. If I can help you, I will. I will try. I promise, Oleg Nikolaevich.”

  He came towards me, and for a second I thought he was going to grab me or punch me. But instead he put his hand on my left shoulder, and his mouth very close to my right ear, so that when he spoke his tongue was virtually in it.

  “Respected Nikolai Ivanovich,” he said, “only an idiot smiles all the time.”

  5

  I guess there might in theory have been a time, maybe in the early afternoons, when Steve Walsh got by for more than five minutes without either a shot of coffee or a slug of red wine—just as in theory there must be a short, intermediary thirtysomething phase in the lives of Russian women between high-heeled exhibitionism and middle-aged spread. But whenever I saw Steve, he was chugging down one or other of his drugs. Like most of the expat alcoholics, he had a tactic for persuading himself that he wasn’t one: he ordered his wine by the glass, even if he drank twelve or twenty of them at a sitting, which was worse for his wallet but better for his self-esteem. When I saw him for lunch and told him about Masha and me, he had already graduated from coffee to vino.

  “So,” Steve said, after I summarised the relationship so far, “has she got you to buy her anything yet? Diamonds? Car? Tit job, maybe?”

  “It isn’t like that.”

  “What is it like?”

  “It’s different, Steve. Don’t.”

  “Do you think she wants you for your looks?”

  Steve was technically
British, but he had been trying to avoid England and himself for so long and in so many far-out places—Mexico for three or four years before Moscow, I think, and before that the Balkans, and before that somewhere else that I and maybe even he can’t remember—that by the time I met him he had become one of those lost foreign correspondents that you read about in Graham Greene, a citizen of the republic of cynicism. He exploited me for leads I wasn’t supposed to give him—hints about which cartel was borrowing how much from who, to take over which oil or aluminium firm, equations of greed that helped him to work out who was up and who was down in the Kremlin, who was going to be the next president and who was heading for a prison camp in Magadan. Steve pretended to check my leads, then used them in his articles for the Independent and some Canadian paper that his London employers didn’t know about. I exploited him too, for conversation in English that wasn’t about bonuses. We exploited each other. In other words, we were friends. I think maybe he was my only real friend in Moscow.

  He was slimy blond and must once have been handsome, but by then he was furrowed and rioja florid. He looked a bit like Boris Yeltsin.

  “Steve,” I said, “don’t take the piss, but I think I might be in love.”

  You’ve never been the jealous type, though on the other hand you’ve never had much to be jealous of. My guess is you can live with this.

  “Fucking Christ,” Steve said, waving his glass in the air.

  We were eating beef Stroganoff in the French restaurant at the back of the Smolensky shopping centre, where the mistresses of minigarchs go to drink overpriced tea between pedicures. It was, I think, almost the end of November. The big, heavy snow had just arrived, falling overnight like a practical joke, making a new city in an hour. Ugly things became beautiful, beautiful things became magical. Red Square was an instant film set—the encrusted mausoleum and snow-dusted Kremlin on one side, and the imperial department store lit up like a fairground on the other. On building sites and in churchyards, packs of stray dogs were optimistically nosing around in the mush. The street taxis had hiked their prices: you could tell how long foreigners had been in Moscow by the length of time they would stand in the whiteness negotiating. The begging babushkas had assumed their blackmailing winter position, kneeling in the pavement snow with their arms outstretched. And beneath the fur coats and grimaces, you knew that the Russians were happy, relatively speaking. Because, along with the fatalism and the borsht, the snow is part of what makes them them and nobody else.