Free Snowdrops by A. D. Miller Page A

it too." That was true: it was a normal accounting manoeuvre. Though probably I only tried to defend the Cossack because Steve had needled me over me and Masha.
    "It's not a Western firm, Nick. Listen," he said,swigging, "you have to understand, the Soviet Union produced the opposite of what it was meant to. They were all supposed to love each other, but it ended with no one giving a shit about anyone else. Not the public. Not shareholders. Not even you."
    I knew where his spiel went from there: communism didn't ruin Russia, it was the other way round, and after three more glasses, the rise of the KGB state, the legacy of Ivan the Terrible, and the comparative advantages of women from St. Petersburg. Looking at his dead, flecked eyes, I decided that Steve was jealous--of me and Masha, of anyone who had the hope and the ambition to be happy. His meandering Russian history lecture was just getting onto the long-term impact of the Mongol yoke when I interrupted him.
    "I feel like shit," I said, lying as I pushed away my plate. "Big night with Masha last night. I think I should go. Sorry, Steve. Let's do it again soon, okay?"
    "We all feel like shit," said Steve, raising an eyebrow at a waiter and tapping his glass. "It's fucking Russia. The booze. The pollution. The shit food. The fucking airplanes. The crap that falls out of the sky when it rains, you don't even want to think about. Russia is like polonium. It attacks all your organs at once."
    "What are you working on now?" I asked him as I put on my scarf.
    "Big energy story," he said. "Much bigger than your little oil terminal."
    "What's the angle this time? Business or politics?"
    "In Russia," Steve said, "there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories."

6

    There were times in every Russian winter when I thought I might not make it. Times when I might have headed straight for the airport, if I hadn't known the traffic would be so terrible. Walking became an obstacle course, with mounds of snow to swerve around and narrow runs of passable pavement that you battled over with people coming the other way. You know that thing that happens in London, when you run into someone on the pavement, and when you try to get around them they move in the same direction as you, and you're still in each other's way--but in the end you work it out, smile at the accidental intimacy and harmless bad luck, and carry on? That doesn't happenin Moscow. Once a month or so I forgot to curl my toes inside my fur-lined boots, my feet went cycling upwards, my arse downwards, and I lived through a long, long second of flailing helpless terror as I waited to hit the ice.
    Then there are the orange men. Every year, after the first proper snowfall, someone in the mayor's office pushes a button, and an army of men in orange overalls--new-age serfs from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Whereverstan--emerge like placid invading aliens from under the earth or the other side of the city's outer ring road. They drive around in prehistoric trucks, shovelling snow into piles and taking out stubborn patches of ice with WMD-grade chemicals. In the street where I lived they piled all the snow on one side, burying any cars that had been carelessly left there, which that winter included the rusting Zhiguli. And every night, at about four in the morning, the orange men come with shovels to hack the ice off the pavements, making a noise that only the dead could sleep through--a noise somewhere between the screech of fingernails on glass, the banging of a shipyard, and the yowling of randy cats. The worst part was my own bastard ingratitude. I resented them, but at the same time I knew it was only stupid chance that meant I was warm and inside, sometimes with a woman beside me, while they were outside breaking their backs.
    One grumpy evening, around the end of November, instead of running to the airport I fled to Masha and themobile phone shop where she