Snowdrops

by A. D. Miller

  Katya took off her coat and sat down. Beneath her shirt I caught a glimpse of a new fuck-me tattoo on her hip bone.

  “How is college?” I asked her.

  “Good,” she said. “Excellent. I am number two in class. Soon I will have exams.”

  She gave us a long angry account of how, that evening, two men had got on to her tram and extracted ten roubles from each of the passengers by pretending to be ticket inspectors. Since almost none of the passengers had tickets, they all paid, even though they knew the men were fraudsters.

  “Terrible,” said Masha.

  “Terrible,” I said, as if this was the most terrible event any of us could think of, or wanted to.

  They had two things to say to me that evening. One of them, the first one, the softener I realise now, was that around the end of May or beginning of June they were planning to go to Odessa for a long weekend, and would I like to go with them?

  “You remember?” said Katya. “From photos.”

  The photos they’d shown me on our first night, at the floating Azeri restaurant at the beginning of the winter. Did I remember? “Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

  They said they had a distant uncle who had a place out near the beach where we could stay. We’d swim and go to nightclubs. It would be “class,” Katya said. It would be perfect, Masha said. I said I’d love to go to Odessa with them.

  The other thing they wanted to talk about was the money.

  “Stepan Mikhailovich is having problems with money, money for Tatiana Vladimirovna,” Masha explained, “because of some questions with his business. He says it is very slow, this building. It is necessary to pay his men from Tajikistan. He can pay police to arrest all Tajiks—this is cheaper—but then he must find new workers. He can give twenty-five thousand for Tatiana Vladimirovna but for this other twenty-five there is problem. Of course Tatiana Vladimirovna does not ask for such money, and so Stepan Mikhailovich may simply say she will have only half, only twenty-five thousand. This way is easy. But we are thinking it is more kind if he is borrowing money to give to her.”

  “Why doesn’t Stepan Mikhailovich just give her the money later, when he’s in the clear?”

  “This also is possible,” Masha said. “But, frankly speaking, after they change apartments, I think Stepan Mikhailovich will think it is better he keep money than give it to this babushka. But if he is owing money to someone important, then he may pay. Like if he will owe money to foreigner. Maybe to lawyer.”

  It took me a while to work it out. Then I said, “When? When will they need it?”

  “They must make agreement for day of sale. I think it can be after two or three months. Maybe soon after Odessa.”

  I’d never bought a house in London. I rented the place that I shared for a while with my old girlfriend (I pointed it out to you once, I think, on the way to a dinner party thrown by that woman from your old agency, I can’t remember her name). I hesitated when house prices were on the way up, then decided to wait until they went south. I had quite a lot of money sitting lazily in my bank account, waiting for me to decide what to do with it, what I was going to do when I grew up. I earned a nice living, more than my parents ever could between them: not a lot by new Russian standards, maybe, but enough so I could spare twenty-five thousand dollars for a few months. I’d lent a bit of money to Russians once or twice before, in fact—a secretary at work, a Siberian girl I met at a party who wanted to buy a motorcycle—and always got it back. I thought I could pick them. With Masha and Katya I told myself that whatever was going on, we were on the same side. Though I think at the same time I was pleased to pay up, even relieved—because it made me useful, but more than that because I think I’d always known there had to be a price, and it had turned out to be only money, at least for me. As for them, I think they asked me for it just because they could, as if it was a sort of moral duty.

  Masha said they needed twenty-five thousand dollars for Tatiana Vladimirovna. But it was also twenty-five thousand for that dinner with my mother, and in particular for the upcoming weekend on the beach in Odessa, maybe staying in the same room where Masha had taken the photo of herself in the mirror, almost naked, a picture that I can still see if I close my eyes, like an exiled believer can see a favourite icon.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell Stepan Mikhailovich I am ready to lend him the money. Tell him I insist.”

  “Okay,” said Masha.

  “Okay,” said Katya, and poured.

  “To us!” Masha said, and we clinked, her lips moistened by the vodka as it slipped into her, my throat burning and my skin clammy with apprehension, and the thrill my misgivings brought with them.

  “I’m not scared,” I said.

  WHEN I GOT HOME that evening, I found a smear of blood along the inside walls of my building, running up the stairs at about waist height. Outside one of the doors on the second floor the blood plummeted downwards, as if the person leaning against the wall and leaking it had collapsed there. Underneath there was a little bloody puddle, and next to the puddle a pair of old black shoes, standing neatly parallel to one another with their laces done up.

  When I went downstairs in the morning the blood had been washed off the walls, but the shoes were still there. It was one of the alcoholics on the top floor, someone told me later. He fell. It was nothing to worry about, they told me.

  13

  At the end of March the brown Moscow snow started to melt, then tried to freeze again when the temperature dipped for a day or two, living on as a nasty ooze—sliakot, the Russians call it—from which you almost expect a hairy prehistoric arm to reach out and drag you under. The pavement and curb on the side of my street where the snow was piled up were slowly reappearing, the glacial heaps giving up their territory inch by inch. A single stained headlight emerged from the one in which the lost Zhiguli was buried, winking out like a muddy bloodshot eye.

  It was the end of March, or maybe the very beginning of April. We met at Tatiana Vladimirovna’s place so she could sign the preliminary contract papers that I’d prepared, using the power of attorney she’d given me: her place by the pond to be exchanged for the new one in Butovo, plus fifty thousand dollars, on a day in early June. I walked around the Bulvar to her apartment through the afternoon slush. In the underpass at Pushkin Square, I remember, there was an old man playing the accordion with a spaced-out kitten on his lap, but I was hurrying and I didn’t give him anything.

  I was early. Maybe I was early on purpose, wanting to get there before Katya and Masha without really knowing why. It was only my second time alone with Tatiana Vladimirovna, after those few minutes in the waiting room at the notary, when Katya had got a better offer and left us. It was that afternoon, before the girls showed up, when I found out that she was not and never had been their aunt—not an aunt in English, not in Russian, not an aunt in any language. It was my last chance.

  I took off my shoes. She’d already started to pack. Cardboard boxes were stacked along the parquet of the corridor, unsealed and stuffed with papers and trinkets (the arm of a candelabra stuck out of one of them, like a cadaver’s arm from a coffin), plus one or two of those enormous patterned bags that you see immigrants lugging around airports. But in the lounge nothing seemed to have been touched yet. The photos of her lithe Stalinist self and her dead husband, the musty encyclopaedias, and the medieval telephone still sat there like exhibits in a “how they used to live” museum, along with my bus-shaped box of English tea. The phantasmagoric animals watched me from across the pond through the soup of an afternoon. Tatiana Vladimirovna brought tea and jam.

  I gave her the corny cathedral snow globe I’d bought for her in St. Petersburg. She smiled like a baby, then kissed me and put it on the desk in between the telephone and the photograph of her husband.

  She asked me whether I liked St. Petersburg. The truth was that I’d found it stressful and vaguely spooky, but I white-lied and said I did, it was very beautiful, the most beautiful city in the world. I can’t n
ow remember whether I prompted her, or whether she just started on her own, the conversation receding naturally from my visit to her past, but that day we talked about the siege.

  She said that when she thought about Leningrad now, it was always cold and always snowing—she looked over at my gift and smiled—though she knew that some of the time she was there it must have been summer and hot and light. Of course, she said, St. Isaac’s wasn’t a cathedral then. The communists had turned it into a museum of atheism, or a swimming pool, she couldn’t remember which, she must be losing her mind.

  “Everything,” she said, “was turned upside down. At first we listened to the radio and it told us we were heroes, and that Leningrad was a hero city, and we felt like heroes. But then people became animals, do you understand? And all other animals were food. We had a dog, he was only a little dog, and we hid him from the other people. But he died anyway, and in the end we ate him ourselves. It would have been better to eat him when he was fat!”

  She laughed, a short, fierce Russian laugh.

  “The richest people were the people who had the most books,” she said. “They burned them, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, though of course I didn’t.

  “Books were for burning. Dogs were for eating. Horses were for eating, sometimes when they were still alive. They fell down in the street and people ran with knives. Boots and shoes were for making soup.”

  She paused, sort of swallowed, always trying to smile.

  “I was in a basement … I remember after the war, in the children’s camp, they gave me an ice cream. They told me I was lucky.”

  I said, “Would you really like to go back to St. Petersburg?”

  “Maybe.” She closed her eyes for about five seconds, then opened them. “No.”

  I asked whether Masha and Katya’s family had been in Leningrad with her during the siege.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There were many people in Leningrad. More at the beginning, of course.”

  “Didn’t you live together?”

  “What?”

  “I thought you might have lived together?”

  “Why would we have lived together?”

  “Because you were family.”

  “Family? No, they are not my family.”

  Yes, I was surprised, though maybe not altogether surprised. But in that moment I chose to hide it. I chose to turn my last chance down.

  “I’m sorry, Tatiana Vladimirovna,” I said. “I made a mistake. I thought you were their aunt.”

  “Their aunt? No,” Tatiana Vladimirovna said, shaking her head but smiling, “I don’t have any family now. Nobody.” She looked away from me and rocked slightly in her seat.

  “How do you know them, then?” I asked her as calmly as I could. I didn’t want to alarm her but I wanted to know the facts. “How do you know Katya and Masha?”

  “It was very strange,” she said, shifting her buttocks on the sofa like she was settling in for a long and gripping story. “I met them on the Metro.”

  I’LL COME BACK to Tatiana Vladimirovna, I promise, but I want to flash forward again, just by a few hours. I want to tell you what happened later that day. I think it will help you to understand the way I was behaving. Assuming you want to understand. It helps me: looking back, the two meetings feel part of the same event, one little revelation spread over an afternoon and evening.

  After we left Tatiana Vladimirovna’s, I went with Paolo to meet Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor and the Cossack. It was a Sunday, I think, but we needed to see them urgently. The banks were due to release the last and biggest tranche of the loan the next day: two hundred and fifty million dollars, give or take the odd million. The Cossack invited us to an office building on the embankment, near the old British embassy and across the river from the flesh-coloured walls of the Kremlin. It wasn’t his office, we found out later. I doubt the Cossack even had an office then. He just had a Hummer, his chutzpah, and his krisha.

  We went up in a mirror-walled lift to the third or fourth floor, to a room with an imposing conference table and windows overlooking the river. It was late afternoon and gloomy, but you could see how down below the ice on the river was buckling and cracking, great plates of it rubbing and jostling each other as the water shrugged it off, a vast snake sloughing off its skin. Down along the embankment the yellow and grey buildings disappeared into the dirty sky, the lights of the upper windows flashing out of the murk like low-flying UFOs.

  There was vodka (plus some black bread and pickles, for the sake of appearances).

  “Something to drink?” said the Cossack, heading for the sideboard.

  “Just one,” Paolo said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “No thanks,” said Vyacheslav Alexandrovich.

  Paolo knew him from the previous time he’d worked with us, but I’d only met him once before, at the beginning of the winter, when we signed him up for the oil terminal job. He was a short, pale man, with thick hair, thick Soviet glasses, and worried eyes. I suppose if you wanted to you could say he looked like a sort of compressed or stunted version of me. His suit smelled of cigarettes and Brezhnev. I remember he had scrunched-up bits of cotton wool plugged into his ears, a precaution some superstitious Russians take if they go outside when they have a cold.

  The vodka bottle was shaped like a Kalashnikov. The Cossack picked it up by the butt and poured four large shots. When he held my glass out towards me, I saw that his cuff links were miniature dollar bills.

  “Something to drink,” he said to Vyacheslav Alexandrovich, telling him, not asking, as he gave him the glass he hadn’t wanted.

  “To us!” said the Cossack, knocking his back in one, then wiping his mouth on the back of his funeral-black sleeve. Paolo and I clinked and drank. It was top quality, smooth, no after burn, almost no taste.

  Vyacheslav Alexandrovich took a sip and smiled thinly.

  “Drink it,” said the Cossack, not smiling.

  Vyacheslav Alexandrovich took a deep breath, like a diver going under, and downed it. Afterwards he gasped, his mole eyes blinking and watering behind his glasses.

  The Cossack laughed and slapped him on the back. They must have been about the same height, but the Cossack had a heavy prison-weight-lifter build, and Vyacheslav Alexandrovich was all slouch and paunch, with one of those ill-fitting bodies that are somehow fat and skinny at the same time. He shot forward, then steadied himself and tried to smile again.

  “Well done,” said the Cossack. “So, let’s sit down.”

  We were there to certify the papers the banks needed before they could write the final cheque or push the money-transfer button. We each had laminated copies of the letters of assurance from the Arctic regional governor. We had those promises of high-volume oil deliveries from Narodneft. The banks had their political risk insurance and our comforting book-length contract. But we needed Vyacheslav Alexandrovich’s latest progress report.

  I took notes. Everyone else smoked, Vyacheslav Alexandrovich inhaling in a hurry but looking less relaxed with each drag. He told us that the supertanker had been fully converted, and the tugs were about to tow it out to the loading site. The twelve anchors that would hold it in place had been sunk, the sea floor had been prepared. He stood up and talked us through a presentation that he projected onto a screen on the wall. It included scale drawings and photos of relentless bits of spiky equipment burrowing into mud. There was one of a stretch of pipe lying half buried in the ice, like a negligently disposed-of corpse, and a blurry image that was supposed to show the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The presentation stalled at one point, and I could see the sweat standing out on Vyacheslav Alexandrovich’s neck and nose as he pummelled the computer to get it to start up again.

  In conclusion he said he was confident the equipment was in place for reliable oil exports to commence very soon. At the end he looked down at the table and smoked like his life depended on it.

  The Cossack said, “Good news!”
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br />   Paolo and I conferred. I was distracted that evening, it’s true. But it was mostly a formality anyway. It was too late for us to advise the banks to back off, even if we’d wanted to. And we didn’t want to: Vyacheslav Alexandrovich seemed thorough and Narodneft was still on side. We didn’t confer for long. Paolo said he thought the banks should release the funds. I agreed. We told the Cossack.

  “Okay,” he said, twitching his fringe.

  But the main reason I remember that evening—the reason it has melded with my chat with Tatiana Vladimirovna earlier, the reason I want to tell you about it—is not the meeting itself or the expertly casual torture I watched the Cossack inflict on Vyacheslav Alexandrovich. It’s what we did afterwards. It was the only time I ever saw Paolo really angry, even including what happened later, and the only time we ever argued, he being a man whose purpose in life had been to transform arguments into agreements, find acceptable forms of words, gloss over unpleasant realities.

  We wrapped up our business. The illuminated Kremlin palaces were glaring at us from across the river and through the sudden night. The Cossack invited us to dinner to celebrate. “And after dinner,” he said, “who knows?” His eyes flickered with rape, pillage, and money-laundering schemes.

  Vyacheslav Alexandrovich made his excuses and left. Paolo, the Cossack, and I walked down the street to the Cossack’s tinted-window Hummer. Paolo turned up the collar of his Italian coat. I remember the Cossack was wearing one of those fur hats, made from some endangered animal, that sit on top of Russian men’s heads and leave their ears exposed, just to show how butch they are. Inside the car he had a plasma television, a fridge, and a driver with a purple scar down one cheek. The driver lowered the window, letting in the sharp late winter air, and with his other hand reached underneath the front passenger seat and produced a blue police light which he slapped onto the roof. He pushed a button and we set off through the dusk and along the river with our blue light flashing—past a hotel with a two-hundred-dollar Sunday brunch and up to the House on the Embankment, the bad-karma building where Stalin’s henchmen lived in the thirties, until they didn’t, and which by then had a giant rotating Mercedes sign on top. At Kropotkinskaya, along the outer wall of the cathedral, a line of old women was standing and moaning hymns under the yellow streetlights, waiting to see whichever repatriated icon—some lock of saintly hair or scrap of holy kneecap—was on display inside. They looked unreal, like extras on a film set, there in that city of neon lust and frenetic sin. We got stuck at the lights, and the Cossack swore and kicked the back of the driver’s seat.