FICTION
Retreat from Moscow
I wake up shivering. All I know is that I am facing a wall. I pull the blanket around me. The blanket is too small. It is completely dark. When I wake again it is light and I do not recognise the room. There are some empty bottles and a sickening smell comes from an ashtray, overturned, near my head. My left eye, the side I have been lying on, is gummed shut. The walls are painted but it was done a very long time ago, and the pale winter light comes through the dirty windows. I turn over to take in the room. There are two chairs, one on its side. The other sits squarely on its four legs and is looking down at me so directly it seems to have a personality, seems to be addressing me, like a fighter who has knocked me down and is challenging me to get up again. My ribs hurt. I am fully dressed and wearing my boots and am terribly cold, the kind of deep cold that goes right to the core.
I get up off the floor and stand before the window. It is snowing hard, falling thickly upon a strange white world. I am on perhaps the sixth or seventh floor and do not recognise the area. Apartment blocks the colour of ash, a small red car struggling through the furrows of snow. It could be anywhere in the city.
There are more rooms and I wander through them, not expecting to meet anybody, but moving carefully all the same. One room is empty like the one I have slept in, except for a single, stained mattress. There are several magazines by the mattress. I flick through them. There are two women’s magazines. I look at the pictures of women. There is an article on how to have a better orgasm, and I actually begin to read it. The other magazine is a television guide from the year before. The next room is stuffed full of old furniture, draped in plastic sheeting. Mostly it is the massive kind with which people cramp their small rooms, with cases and shelves for displaying their things, their coffee cups and saucers and statuettes of Little Bo-Peep. In the kitchen the fridge is plugged in and humming, and I find this strange, that something is actually functioning. Inside are several jars containing what may be jam, probably plum jam, thick and black. My mouth is very dry. I find a cup and rinse it out and drink half a cup of tap water. I find loose tea also and there is a kettle but I feel uncomfortable touching anything. I feel like a trespasser. For all I know I, or the people I have been with, have broken into this place, and the real owner could walk in at any second. I will be unable to explain my presence. Also, everything is covered in a mixture of grease and dust, and now it is on my fingers. There is no soap. I rinse my hands and wipe them against my trousers. In the frigid air, my hands remain damp and cold.
I am dressed only in a t-shirt, and outside these unheated rooms the snow is falling so fast it looks like a film speeded up. I am not badly hungover. It is that dense, careless fog when the alcohol is still in your blood and you have not slept, and my real problem is the cold. In the bathroom I find my shirt, bundled, damp and stinking in the sink. I drop it in the bath and rinse my hands again. I shake them nearly dry. They are red and very cold. I urinate. Though my bladder is full it takes several moments before I can let it go. The flush is unnervingly loud.
I try to organise myself to leave, but there is no sign of my sweater, my jacket or even my hat and scarf. I remember us in the car, me in the back seat, wipers swiping madly at the snow, going someplace. I remember the girl sitting on my knee because there was no room in the car, my arm around her waist, her arm around my shoulder. I remember kissing her on the mouth, us alone in the hallway. I remember the one who drove detaching me from her with one hand, so authoritively that I felt sure I had overstepped some decent limit. But that might have not been the case at all, and I realise with a sense of humiliation that perhaps I was simply too drunk to resist this more composed personality. Then they were kissing each other and I was watching. I don’t remember much else.
My wallet is gone, and my ID, and my keys. I return to the first room and look under the blanket. Of course, there is nothing under the blanket. On the floor of the hallway, by the door, under a small table on which a phone sits, I find my wallet, empty. At least I still have my trousers and my boots. It seems important suddenly to get out of this place.
I lift the receiver of the phone, and am surprised there is a tone, and am about to dial for a taxi before I remember that I have no money, and in any case do not know the address. I try to think who I can call, who can help me in this moment. But there is nothing terribly wrong, except that I am temporarily lost. I am not injured or in any danger. It is simply that I would like to speak to somebody – a friend for example. Of course, I have friends, I have numbers I have dialled many times and have memorised. But I am not sure what to say to anybody. I dial my ex’s number and it rings and rings and when I get the answering machine I hang up. I would not have spoken to her anyway. Then I ring a number completely at random and a voice answers, a young woman’s voice, and I clear my throat and say, “Hello, taxi?” “I beg your pardon?” “I need a taxi to the airport.” She tells me I have the wrong number and I apologise and we even say goodbye to each other politely.
The feeling that I must leave this place quickly is very strong.
I hang up the phone, glance through each of the rooms again in turn, and open
the front door. I look nervously into the hall and step out unobserved and
the door seems on its own account to close. I press against it and am alarmed
that I have locked myself out, that I am unable to get back in. I have a feeling
that I have left something behind, like when you leave home and you ask yourself
automatically if you have brought your money, your keys, your ID. And the
answer in this case is I have not, and I must keep on going.
I take the stairs down. Outside the snow is lying thickly and more is falling.
I stand in the lobby looking at it and wish I had a hat. Just a hat that covered
my ears would make all the difference. It is the ears that always start to
hurt.
Well, I still have the greatest asset of any free and independent man, a good pair of boots, and now it is time to get walking. I push open the door and head into the falling snow. The first few seconds are actually quite pleasant, and I think, it really isn’t so cold at all, and choose to turn right and down the deserted street, crunching the snow, at a brisk pace. That’s odd, I think, that snow can squeak when stepped upon.
I do not know where I am going and after walking for several minutes everything looks exactly the same – ten-storey apartment blocks, one after another. There are some trees and in the windless air the snow has gathered steeply on even the smaller black branches to a height much greater than the thickness of the branches, so that everything is written in bold white. I know I am looking for a large street which will give me a sense of direction, of where the centre might be, of progress, and by now the first flakes have melted into my clothing and it is clear that a human being can die in such weather. I don’t know how long it would take, to fall down freezing, but I cannot resist such cold indefinitely. I think of refugees crossing mountain passes, of Antarctic explorers who stepped out for a moment, of mountaineers in blizzards stepping over cliffs, of Napoleon’s troops on the retreat from Moscow. Of course, history is full of people freezing to death, but that is not going to happen to me. At any moment I can admit defeat and step into the hallway of one of those anonymous apartment blocks, and perhaps even find a radiator. If I carry on and fall, the emergency services would presumably come, and take me to a hospital in time. But vagabonds, too, have frozen to death in cities.
I speed up, almost running, because I simply must make some progress out of
this ridiculous situation. All I have to do is to find a big street, and public
transport. Finally, I see someone I can ask, a short fat woman walking a small
dog that, wearing what appears to be a padded waistcoat, is better adapted
to conditions than me. The woman’s face is almost invisible, under hat
and scarf, but her eyes register fear as I approach her. Obviously I am a
mad person, hugging myself and hunched in the cold, snow falling in my hair,
teeth chattering, demanding, Where is the road, the road? Why is a crazy man
in a blizzard accosting her, jabbering about a road, when she simply wants
to take Fluffy around the block to do his poo-poos? Poor Fluffy, he can hardly
walk, the snow is up to his body now, and rising fast! What road, she asks?
The main road, I tell her, the big road! She points, and I set off running
in that direction.
At the bus stop I stand in a corrugated iron shelter. I no longer care what the well-dressed people think. I brush the snow from my shoulders. My teeth chatter, noisily. I see people who could do me an enormous kindness by lending me a scarf, perhaps, but people keep a distance. If it were so easy to help the poor, the deranged, the feckless, it would have been done long ago, obviously. The bottoms of my trouser legs are encrusted with snow and are frozen rigid towards the knee. My ears no longer hurt. My skin has become completely numb.
I take a back seat in the bus, and stamp the loose snow from my boots and concentrate on getting my hands dry. Now I am getting somewhere, I am out of the weather, and I will take care of one thing at a time, beginning with having dry hands again. I am huddled, looking out the window, as the city moves by swiftly. The snow ploughs have been through and have pushed up big banks of snow at the side of the road, trapping the parked cars. When I see a metro station I will disembark. Down in the metro stations the air is heated and I can beg a metro card and figure out my next move.
At first I don’t understand what is happening, or what the man is holding to my face. I look up but already he is showing it to others, and people are digging into their pockets for tickets and bus passes and he is checking them, handing them back, and finally there is just me, going through my pockets, and he is waiting just for me. He gives a nod and then two of his colleagues are standing over me. The other passengers are watching.
At the first stop we disembark.
I explain to them I have been robbed, that I have no money to pay a fine, and that I have no ID to show them, for the same reason. I actually believe at first that they will understand, but they imagine I am standing there freezing because I am obstinate, because I am a liar. Yes, these men have heard all the excuses. I am angry now at being persecuted, rather than helped, by three well-dressed ticket inspectors. They stand there in their hats and padded jackets, snow falling in our eyes, nothing in their heads but how much money I can give them. Do you think I’m joking? I ask. Do they think I’m standing around wet and freezing for some kind of joke? They smirk at each other. Well then, says the big fat one, who appears to be in charge, you’ve broken the law, we’ll have to get the police. I consider just walking away from them. What will they do? Chase me through the snowstorm? I decide to give pity one last go. One of them looks more intelligent than the other two, or at least human, and I address myself to him. Look, I say, have some decency. Can’t you see I’m freezing to death? I’ve been robbed and I have no money. He is clearly a good man, I can see it in his face, but before I can reach him, the fat one has his hand on my shoulder and is telling me to be reasonable, just hand over such and such a sum and they needn’t call the police. I hiss something in his face, incoherent except for two words - your mother – and brush his paw from my shoulder with enough force that the other two think I am going for him and step in to hold me back.
My name is called. A woman’s voice behind me calls out my name. She rushes into the middle of it, thrusts the coloured paper at the big one, then is pulling me away by the hand. She is taking me somewhere, through the snow, now falling more thickly than ever, muffling the shapes of things, blinding me, forcing me to walk with my head down. We take a turn away from the blocks of big buildings, into a street, unexpectedly, of older two- and three-storey houses. Some of them even have wooden fences and gates. We seem to walk some distance. She has given me her hat and scarf and her reddish hair is covered in snow and she is still leading me by the hand. I am about to ask her how much further when she stops and opens a gate. As we enter a small courtyard she tells me to wait and she goes forward and ties up a large black dog that emerges from a makeshift shelter. We pass through the courtyard, the dog snarling at me, straining at the end of a chain, and through a doorway into a hallway with a steep wooden staircase going up. We go down three steps, along a narrow passageway to the left of the staircase, and through a door and out the back of the building, again into the snow. There are trees and the backs of other buildings. It is all very old and tumbledown, this little corner which has somehow escaped the general destruction, the bulldozers, and is hidden from the city. We go carefully down several stone steps covered with snow to a semi-basement, and she opens a door with a large key almost the length of her hand. The door is stiff. She pushes it with her shoulders and it gives with a creak.
There is a tiny square hallway and two doors. The one straight ahead, slightly open, is to the bathroom. To the left we enter a small room with a couch, a dresser, a stove, and an armchair. I sit on the couch and she removes my boots, my socks. My wonderful walking boots get confiscated. It is now time for me to avoid frostbite. From the bottom of a dresser she digs out clothing, and a towel. She turns around and busies herself arranging wood to light the stove, allowing me to undress. The sodden t-shirt falls to the floor. I prise off my trousers with some difficulty, my fingers being almost useless. My member has gone into hiding. Well, that’s how they avoid freezing off. I give it a good rub. The towel is rough but clean. The clothes belonged to a man who was much bigger than me – a pair of grey trousers that an office worker might have worn, a red plaid shirt with buttons missing from cuffs that dangle over my hands and a dark blue wool sweater, smelling faintly of mothballs. I feel like a man who has shrunk. She lights the paper beneath the wood and soon the dim brown room is filled with shapes and shadows, hers wavering across the back wall as the sticks begin to crackle.
“It won’t smoke so much when it gets going,” she says.
The circumstances of our acquaintance are unclear. She mentions
the name of a woman I used to be with, of a club I used to drink in, years
ago, and I know I have seen her face before, many times. But it is one of
those faces that is always in the background, in the periphery of the group,
one you nod to and nothing more, because you are just not interested. Her
skin is very pale, and her hair reddish, and you can not imagine colour in
her thin lips. I feel a vague uneasiness that I had ignored her when things
were going well, she who is my friend, who knows me and has helped me in this
bad situation.
“How do you feel?”
I am still shuddering, but at this point it is almost pleasant. Sensation is returning to my limbs. My hands and feet hurt.
“Better.”
She arranges cushions and has me lie on the couch, and puts a blanket over me. I lie there, looking up at the one window, high on the wall, peeking over the lip of the earth. The light is fading and soon it will be night. Surely she is a little bit mad, I think, living in a place like this, taking me off the street and not even curious to ask what has happened. But now the fire is burning well, and in the reddish light I see some kind of a life around me – postcards on the wall, books and letters on the shelf.
“It has never snowed like this,” she says, rattling the grate. “Like it is going to keep on going forever.”
Like it will drown the whole world, and just the two of us left.
She pulls back a hanging strip of plastic that serves as the cupboard door of a plywood compartment. There are potatoes, onions, carrots, salt, a plastic bottle of oil, and a bottle of rum. She asks about the woman we both used to know and I tell her I have had no news for years.
“I could do with some of that rum,” I say.
“Oh, no,” she says. “It’s just the bottle. I keep vinegar in it. I’ll make you a nice cup of hot chocolate. I should make it with milk, but I have none.” She boils some water. It is something from a sachet and in the end it tastes not much like chocolate. But in any case, it is sweet and hot. She peels potatoes over a metal bucket. She peels so that the skin comes off in one long spiralling strip, the way some people peel oranges, and she drops the potatoes into a big cast-iron pot of water with some carrots and onions.
When I wake, to the sound of the heavy lid of the bubbling pot repeatedly rising and clanking back in place, she is asleep in the armchair, mouth open, head slightly to one side, the reddish hair falling over one eye. It is almost warm. I still don’t know her name.
“Hey!” I call. “Hey!”
She starts and looks at me, with the odd blank look of one
awoken.
“You don’t have to sleep there,” I say. I shift over in
the couch until my backside is to the wall, and raise the blanket. She gets
up slowly, and slides the pot to a cooler place and places the lid at a tilt
so steam can escape. She has her back to me and I am unsure whether she is
ignoring me. With a special metal hook she opens the door of the stove and,
crouching, stokes it with more split logs. She is wearing faded denim jeans
and a sweater and I observe for the first time that her shape, silhouetted
in firelight, is not bad at all. Then she walks to the couch and climbs under
the blanket, with her back to me. The couch is narrow, her body against mine
and, naturally, my arm goes over her. It has nowhere else to go. Her hair
smells pleasantly of smoke. She is a woman I could have had long ago, who
was waiting there, but I simply was not interested, there being better women
to have, in better times. I will know how she kisses, the noises she makes
when we copulate, before I leave this room. But not today.
“I need to stay here for a while,” I tell her.
It is unclear whether I am talking about a few hours or a few months, but
this seems not to trouble her.
“Oh, you can stay as long as you like.”
“Thank you. I think I will.”
I look at the window. There is no more light coming through it. A drift of snow now covers it completely, and probably it is still snowing hard, falling thickly, possibly harder than it has ever snowed before on this city, and it may continue all night, drowning everything in thick drifts, paralysing even the buses, even the trucks. Yes, such weather could kill a man, if his luck deserted him entirely. I let my head fall back upon the cushion, next to hers, my lips close to the back of her neck. I close my eyes and listen to the pot boil.
