Snowdrops

by A. D. Miller

  When we stood up I looked down into the snow, now dull but luminous in the darkness, and to my weak glasses-less eyes the hollow that Masha’s body had made looked like the shape of an angel. We ran back into the outhouse, our feet numbing, ice forming in our hair. Katya snatched up her stuff and ran out naked again up to the dacha. I picked up my boots, but Masha took them from me, dropped them, and led me back into the heat.

  “Did you have a banya in Murmansk?” I asked her. I could barely see her anymore through the scorching gloom.

  “Yes,” she said, and that was all she said.

  She felt strange at first, cold like a corpse from the snow almost everywhere except her mouth, but wet and electric. She was my private oblivion, my personal avalanche in the thin air of the banya. She blotted out, for those minutes, the creepy Cossack, the waste of my thirties, and all my doubts.

  I WOKE UP during the night with absolutely no idea where I was. I remember calming myself with the thought that I was in my bed in Birmingham, in the last student house I lived in, on one of the rougher streets in Edgbaston. Then I saw Masha asleep alongside me, underneath the worn covers in the narrow attic bed. The fine blond hairs on the knots of her spine glowed in the moonlight from the window, like a love letter written on her body in invisible ink.

  I needed to piss, the nocturnal weakness that ambushed me in my mid-thirties—an early signpost to the grave, if you stop to think about it, like the new and upsetting head-crushing hangovers of your twenties. I creaked down the stairs in my boxer shorts, passed Katya sleeping on the sofa, put on my boots and coat and waddled outside. I pissed, and saw the animal warmth of myself melting the deep snow in front of me. By the moonlight I could make out the submerged green leaves at the bottom of the hole I had cut in the whiteness.

  When I think back now, writing this, about my lost years in Moscow, despite everything that happened and everything I did, I still look back on that night as my happiest time, the time I would always go back to if I could.

  7

  Now and again, when I was in Moscow, I would hear in the street or through a window—or think I’d hear—a sound like the distinctive screech black London cabs make when they brake for a speed bump or to go round a corner. Now and again I would have liked someone to apologise to me when I stepped on their foot in the Metro, like people do on the Tube. On the basis of those reflexes I guess you might say that part of me missed England. I did sometimes wish I could decompress, just for an hour or so, in its law-abiding, unhectic familiarity. But the feeling was never enough for me to want to move back, not even at the end. London and Luton weren’t really home anymore.

  On Christmas Eve that winter I was driven out to Domodedovo Airport, through the grey slush, by a driver keen to share his scientific proof that Russian women were the best looking in the world, with the possible exception of Venezuelans. The theory, I remember, had something to do with how few men there had been left in Russia after the war, and how they’d had their pick of the abundant girls, who in turn had given birth to beautiful daughters, and so on … Someone important must have been on the move because the streets were temporarily barricaded by police cars, and we got stuck beneath the snowy outstretched arm of the Lenin statue at Oktyabrskaya. The ice on the reservoir was blotchy with fishermen sitting next to the holes they had cut in it. At the airport, as my passport was stamped, I felt the lightness everyone always feels, even if they love Moscow—the lifting of the weight of rude shopkeepers and predatory police and impossible weather—the lightness of leaving Russia.

  When we reached London, it was already dark. From the air, the lights flashing along the roads and down the river and blazing in the football stadiums seemed to be putting on their electric show just for me, in my honour, the conquering corporate-law hero.

  Three hours later, in my parents’ Luton semi, I was howling on the inside and knocking back my father’s supermarket-brand Scotch. They always make an effort, but you know what they’re like—it somehow manages to be claustrophobic and lonely at the same time. I arrived before the others and slept in the bedroom I shared with my brother until he went to university. My mum said again that she wanted to visit me, she wanted to see St. Petersburg, and how was the beginning of March? Cold, I told her, still very cold. My father’s back was playing up, but he tried, I could see that, asking me how work was going and whether the Russian president was as bad as they said in the papers. I don’t know why he always seemed so disappointed with me underneath. It might have been a moral thing, because I did a job that was more about money than making the world a better place. Or it might have been the opposite, and me and Moscow and the money I was earning reminded him of everything he’d never done and never would do himself.

  On Christmas day my brother came in from Reading with his wife and their children, William (the one who pinched your iPod at my dad’s seventieth) and Thomas, and my sister came up from London, alone. We gave each other the usual, impersonally practical presents—socks and scarves and I-give-up John Lewis vouchers. I’d brought Russian dolls and furry hats for the kids and picked up the rest in duty free.

  It could have been nice. There was no reason for it not to be nice. It was just that we’d gone separate ways and lost each other, leaving nothing much in common besides a couple of soft-focus anecdotes, featuring donkey rides and ice cream overdoses, that you’ve heard a dozen times, plus some old irritations that flare up like a phantom itch when we get together. The children had once felt like a second chance, for my brother and me, at least, but they let us down. We ate the turkey and said how moist it was, and lit up the Christmas pudding for the boys, then moved to the chintz sofas in the lounge wearing lopsided paper hats, persevering in the sort of dutiful drinking more likely to result in murder than authentic merriment.

  We had a lively exchange about the new parking restrictions in the town centre, and a ritual disagreement about whether we should watch the Queen’s Christmas message, as my father always wanted to. When my phone rang it was like hearing the all-clear in a bomb shelter.

  “How is England, Kolya?” I felt giddy, elated, like I might be sick.

  “Fine. Okay. How is Moscow?”

  “Moscow is Moscow,” Masha said. “Bad roads and many fools. I am missing you. When I am in shop I think about you. At night I also think about you, Kolya.”

  “Sekundochku,” I said: “just a second” in Russian, a bit of automatic camouflage that was doubtless more incriminating than talking in English. I rushed out of the room as though I’d been called by a teenage girlfriend. I went into the kitchen, where my mother had pinned her offspring’s phone numbers to the fridge with a magnet from Durham Cathedral. On the windowsill was a Christmas television guide, in which she’d put tragic little asterisks next to the programmes she wanted to watch. I’d been sucked, as I always was, into the time warp of family, the instant rewind that takes you back to the roles you’ve grown out of.

  “I’m thinking about you too,” I said. “I’ve told my family about you, Masha.” The second bit wasn’t true, I just thought it was something she’d like to hear. But the first part was. I was already thinking of her and me as real life, and the rest as somehow distant and less important. I wanted to tell her about whatever had happened to me, as if somehow without her knowing about it, it hadn’t really happened. Do you know what I mean?

  I asked her about Katya, and her mother in Murmansk, and about Tatiana Vladimirovna.

  “Listen, Kolya,” she said, “maybe you will bring something for Tatiana Vladimirovna, something for New Year. I think maybe she is not receiving so many presents.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Good idea. Definitely. What should I bring?”

  “You think of something, Kolya. Something English.”

  There was more, and most of it I’ve forgotten, but I can remember her saying, “I see you soon, Kolya. I think about you. I love you.”

  I went back to the lounge, and they all averted their eyes in an ostentatious show of in
difference. I felt trapped like you do after you’ve eaten your airline meal, and getting the stewardess to take your tray away so you can escape seems the only thing in the world that matters. Underneath it all, I suppose, was the knowledge that I could have turned out the same way as my parents, and the fear that maybe I still could—that I might not manage to make my own life at all.

  We sat looking at the children, willing them to do something adorable or eccentric. I lasted ’til the day after Boxing Day, then moved my return flight forward by a week to take me back home, back to Moscow, just before New Year.

  I HURRIED THROUGH the scrum of lean Russian youths who were wrestling for their parents’ luggage at the baggage carousels, and out into the crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers in the arrivals hall—into that particular Russian everyday war, the war of everyone against everyone else. I marched up through the check-in desks and bought a ticket for the train into the city.

  The big freeze was on, the real cryogenic deal that I could feel in my teeth, and then everywhere else, when I stepped out of the clammy underpass and into the fierce air at Pushkin Square, after the airport train and the Metro. It hadn’t been that cold when I’d left for England, minus ten maybe. Walking down the Bulvar to my place, I remember, my breath froze differently from the way it had before Christmas, congealing into a kind of tangible fog. The bit of exposed skin on my cheeks, between my upturned collar and my pulled-down hat, stung and then went numb. My nostrils froze together, the hairs inside them hugging each other for survival. The electronic thermometer outside McDonald’s said minus twenty-seven Celsius. It was so cold that there was almost nobody smoking in the streets. The traffic police had been issued with old-fashioned felt boots, an ancient Russian precaution that kept their feet from falling off while they hung around extorting bribes from people.

  I called Masha and arranged to spend New Year’s Eve with her and Katya and, at least to start with, Tatiana Vladimirovna. There were two days of work left before the statutory ten-day New Year break, a national binge referred to by my colleagues as the “oligarch skiing holiday.” I had nothing else to do, so I went into the office on the day after I got back.

  “That fucking surveyor,” Paolo said when I shut the door to his office. Beneath his window the orange men burrowing around in the white expanse of Paveletskaya Square looked like an army of angry ants. “That fucking Cossack.”

  “Happy New Year, Paolo.”

  “It is almost finished,” he said. “The client is almost happy. Everyone is almost happy. Except for this surveyor. Where is he, Nicholas?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know, sometimes I wish we never saw the Cossack at all. Why must it be project finance? Why must it be the British Virgin Islands? Always the British Virgin Islands. How are you, by the way?”

  8

  The truth is that, in those days, even the bankers didn’t care all that much whether the banks they worked for got their money back. They earned their bonuses just for shelling it out, and would probably have moved on or upstairs before the Russians or whoever got a chance to default. All the Western banks were desperate to do business in Moscow, because everyone else seemed to be, and most of them weren’t too fussed about the destination of their loans. Half the time, when they were lending to one of the huge energy or metals firms, the bankers handed over the cash with no security at all: the Russians were drowning in petrodollars, and anyway the firms’ bosses knew they would get even richer in the long run if they observed the niceties—right?

  All the same, because the Cossack’s project company was new and had no credit history, there were boxes that we had to tick. We’d received the letters from the regional governor, committing him to supporting the project. Narodneft had signed reassuring agreements about how much oil it would pump from its northern fields to the terminal once it was operational, and the export fees it would pay. We had statements of interest from prospective buyers for the oil in Holland and America. The banks had taken out political risk insurance (covering them in case of expropriations or coups). The main contract for the loan was watertight and oil proof.

  That wasn’t quite enough for the banks to release the first tranche of cash. We also needed a report from Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor, confirming the suitability of the site chosen for the terminal and the progress of preliminary construction. We needed it immediately if the banks were to transfer the money—a hundred and fifty million dollars, I think, or thereabouts—before the end of the year.

  The Cossack wanted the cash yesterday, he said he had liabilities to meet with his construction workers and suppliers. The bankers wanted to give it to him, especially because, if they waited until the following year, their bonuses for the closing one would be smaller. But there was a hitch. In the middle of December, Vyacheslav Alexandrovich had finally made it up to the Arctic. Then he disappeared.

  In our office we worried that maybe he’d fallen through a hole in the ice or made friends with the wrong lady at the hotel bar. The Cossack said there were no holes in the ice and he was sure everything was normal. He wanted us to come to a meeting at Narodneft’s Moscow headquarters, on New Year’s Eve, to sign the last documents we had to send to New York and London before the banks released the money. Paolo agreed to go. He said he thought it would be a waste of our time, but we’d be on the clock even so. He took me and Sergei Borisovich with him.

  NARODNEFT IS MORE like a state than a company. Along with its wells and pipelines and tankers, it has hotels and planes and football teams. It owns sanatoriums in the Caucasus and an island in the Caribbean. It runs a submarine in the Gulf of Finland, and, rumour has it, a couple of satellites in space. It operates bespoke brothels and tame assassins. It was at that time said to bankroll half the members of the Russian parliament. It also boasts a weird HQ in southern Moscow that was built in the nineties, during what had evidently been the era of maximum eccentricity in Russian architecture, and looks like an inverted spaceship. Paolo, Sergei, and I pulled up outside it first thing in the morning, at maybe half past eight. It was New Year’s Eve, my last New Year’s Eve in Russia.

  Normally in the winter you can expect twenty or thirty seconds of leftover warmth, after you step out of a car or leave a building, before the heat of inside wears off and you suddenly feel the cold—a temporary delusion of comfort, like the extra time a decapitated chicken gets to run around before it realises it’s dead. You don’t get that period of grace at minus twenty-seven. It was instant nostril freeze and eye water. (While I’d been away in England someone in the office had taken off a glove to answer his mobile in Paveletskaya Square, and the phone had frozen to his palm.) We hurried into the security cabin at the front of the Narodneft complex to have our passports checked, then up past the frozen fountains in the landscaped compound and into the main building. A ginger Narodneft “greeter” in a green minidress showed us into the lift and wiggled us to a meeting room up near the spaceship’s nose. The room had a sideboard set with vodka, glasses, and bits of herring impaled on toothpicks, and a floor-to-ceiling view over the frigid city. The sky was as white as the snow on the ground, whiter maybe, because the exhaust fumes didn’t reach that far.

  The girl sat down on one of the chairs along the wall and smiled at us. Sergei Borisovich ate some herring. We waited, pretending not to look at her.

  After maybe an hour, at about half past nine, the Cossack came in. He was accompanied by two lawyers and a deputy director of Narodneft, who seemed to be about nineteen. I found out later that he was the son-in-law of the head of Russian military intelligence. The Cossack whispered something to the girl and slapped her arse as she walked out.

  “A little vodka?” he asked in Russian.

  “Extreme,” said Sergei Borisovich, in English.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Come on,” said the Cossack, “it’s New Year’s Eve.”

  “First we work,” said Paolo, “then we drink.” You could tell Paolo was a Moscow vet
eran if you knew where to look. He showed up at parties at midnight, at airports he charged to passport control like a stampeding animal to avoid the queues, he went outside to smoke when it was minus twenty degrees, and he was never surprised.

  “Okay,” said the Cossack. We sat down at the conference table. He whispered to one of the lawyers, who left the room for five minutes and then came back. We had a languid chat about legal technicalities. About twenty minutes later, Paolo’s mobile phone rang.

  “Maybe,” said the Cossack, “this will be good news.”

  Paolo answered it and walked over to the window to talk. I heard him say “Where are you?” and some swearing in Italian. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and asked what the phone number was in the meeting room. One of the Narodneft people told him, he repeated it and hung up.

  “Vyacheslav Alexandrovich,” Paolo said, sitting down again. “He’s in Sochi.” You might already know this, but Sochi is on the Black Sea, about three thousand kilometres from where Vyacheslav Alexandrovich was supposed to be. “He’s calling back.”

  A phone rang in the middle of the conference table. The Cossack reached over and switched on the loud speaker.

  Vyacheslav Alexandrovich told everyone he was sorry, please forgive him, it had been a family emergency, it would never happen again. But we shouldn’t worry, he said. He’d been up to the Arctic with his assistants—spent almost a week up there, in fact—and everything was normal. The construction team was ahead of schedule and on budget. They had started welding the pipeline that would run from the shore to the floating terminal, the first parts of the onshore pumping station had arrived and were waiting to be assembled when the weather improved. The supertanker was in a dry dock along the coast and had begun to be converted (the hull adapted to take in oil from the pipeline on one side and pump it out to customers’ ships from the other). They’d identified the locations on the sea floor where the twelve permanent anchors would be sunk. All this was in his official report. He was wrapping it up now and it would be with us in hard copy very soon. He talked for about twenty minutes, spraying around measurements and statistics—decibars, barrels per day, metres per second, tons per year. He apologised again and rang off.