to be struck by the wind and its burden of hurled snow, made breathless and blind by it. Vorontsyev staggered against her, knocking the breath from Marfa’s lungs. She felt drowned in rushing air. Then her breath caught. Sodium lamps flared like distant gas rigs in the bellow of the storm, showing the snow as impenetrable, solid.
‘All — right?’ she screamed against his cheek.
‘Yes!’ he bellowed back, a thin, small noise.
‘This way. Over hereV
He merely nodded, his head slow like that of an ailing donkey, as she guided him towards the car park. Their boots clumped through six or seven inches of snow and, as the wind numbed her to the bone, she was further chilled by the thought of an iced car, the failure of the engine, the condition of the road. She was afraid of awakening the pain in his ribs as she touched at his elbow, moving them like two ridiculous, lost blind people across the indeterminate white expanse of the car park. She looked up once, twice, a dozen times to orientate herself by the dim, masked lights of the main hospital block. There was no noise but the wind, no images that were not fluid and white, except the occasional whitened lumps of cars, shapeless as cows asleep in a field. She began to yearn for the warmth that even the distanced, almost obscured hospital lights dimly promised.
Then she lurched in a cuffingly stronger surge of wind into her own car, her numb gloved hand smearing the snow on the windscreen. She rubbed at it furiously as if to uncover a familiar, buried face. Vorontsyev was crouching beside the lock, flicking at a cigarette lighter, which refused to ignite in the storm.
‘Try it,’ he said.
The key turned like a lever lifting a great weight, then she pulled the door open, climbed in and unlocked the passenger
“door. Vorontsyev collapsed gingerly into the seat and shut the door. The blizzard seemed hardly diminished by the metal of the car; it drummed and plucked on it, making it a sounding box. The windscreen fugged. Marfa turned the key in the ignition. The engine coughed and refused. Twice, three, four coughed and accepted at the fifth attempt. The engine sounded very small, like that of a distant lawnmower. She heard Vorontsyev’s laboured breathing before she gently pressed the accelerator.
She had left the handbrake off when parking. The back of the car squealed and shimmied itself like the rear of a cat about to strike, before it moved out of its parking place, clambering over thick snow covering rutted ice. The car struggled, danced drunkenly, slipped and mocked its way towards the exit. In the headlights came the occasional whitened shape of another car and the flying snow.
The streetlights …? Two of them — another two as she turned onto the road towards the invisible town. Another two coming slowly out of the storm as she passed the second two then a fourth pair, a fifth, measuring out their tortoise journey across the treacherous, cleared but filling road. The snowploughs could do no more than bail desperately, like men in a sinking dinghy. And all the time, Vorontsyev’s breathing …
… maddening her. A snowplough surged forward like a liner, flung snow enough to bury them, moved away behind them.
The car skidded across the road, then furiously back as if eager to make amends. Her wrists ached … arms … eyes … Eventually, her ears dulled to his breathing and winces of pain.
A hundred pairs of streetlamps, two hundred — phantasms of shops and cafes like blank screens to either side, and finally, after perhaps an hour or more, the semi-darkness of the old town, then the dome and cross of the church against the town’s bleary light. She drew the car close against dilapidated fencing, behind another vehicle — a customer, in this weather? The libido — pigs\ Exhausted mockery and contempt whirled slow as planets in her mind.
She looked across at Vorontsyev, who was struggling from a doze.
‘Are we — here?’
She nodded.
‘Yes,’ she sighed, releasing the steering wheel with difficulty, as if she had captured it long ago as a prize. ‘Yes. The knocking shop — do you think you’re ready for it, sir?’ Then she began giggling with relief, aware that he was looking uncomprehendingly at her, helpless to prevent the giggle from becoming a roar of laughter.
‘OK now?’ he asked in the eventual quiet.
Catching her breath, she said: ‘Yes. Can you climb out unaided or shall I?’
‘Help me, please,’ he said with ungentle abruptness.
She got out of the car, rounded it through the snowdrift, and struggled his weight upright. He leaned gratefully on the roof while she locked the car, then dumbly followed her beside the churchyard, across the lane and along the side paih to the brothel. The old house seemed shrunken by the blizzard, its walls stippled and sheened with ice. The light above the front door fell weakly onto the snow-covered, trodden steps. Vorontsyev slumped against the stone of the porch as she rang the bell.
Dmitri tugged back the door as if startled from sleep, his features widening into shocked relief, then narrowing at once to solicitation as he admitted Vorontsyev’s condition.
‘You look like my mother!’ Vorontsyev growled.
Dmitri closed the door behind them. Vorontsyev raised his head and found himself confronted by Sonya’s bulk. She was dressed in an expanse of red sweater and trousers that seemed like those of a badly stuffed teddy bear. Her face was a hard, heavily made-up mask. Teplov, in dark slacks and jacket that hung from his small frame, stared out from behind her as if slung from her matronly back, his eyes tired and pessimistic.
Vorontsyev laughed barkingly, the noise almost at once becoming a cough of pain.
‘What do you want. Major — a reduction for a party booking?
We don’t have any girls to accommodate her, by the way ‘
Sonya and Marfa glowered at each other.
‘Why, Major — why?’ Teplov moaned, complaining to an invisible and higher authority. Sonya appeared violently pleased at Vorontsyev’s injured helplessness.
‘Because there’s nowhere else-‘ he began, but Dmitri interrupted.
‘I told them it was surveillance, Alexei.’
Vorontsyev shook his head. ‘Misha won’t have swallowed that
— will you, Misha?’ Teplov appeared to wish he had been able to digest the fiction; devoutly so. ‘It’s Turgenev, Misha. He and Bakunin are after us.’ Fear, cunning, hopelessness pursued each other across Teplov’s thin features, animating the corpselike skin. He shrugged. ‘See, Dmitri? Misha knows it’s too dangerous to tell anyone. They’d bump him off, too.’
‘You are a shitV Sonya bellowed, striking Vorontsyev across the face, causing him to stagger against Dmitri, cry out with renewed pain. Sonya announced at once: ‘Get him upstairs, into a bed. Come on, you stupid policewoman, help me!’
She walked Vorontsyev to the staircase, and began half-lifting him up each step. Three of Teplov’s girls watched Sonya and Marfa, prepared either to giggle or commiserate.
‘Where’s Lock?’ Vorontsyev called back to Dmitri, climbing the stairs behind them together with Teplov.
‘Along the corridor — nice room. Lubin’s with him.’
Sonya knocked loudly on the door, demanding it be opened.
Lubin’s bright look faded as he saw Vorontsyev, who snapped:
‘I’m not dying — just need a rest. Painkillers …’ he added in a mumbling voice to Marfa.
Lock’s face was appalled. Vorontsyev was thrust onto a bed by Sonya’s large, strong hands. The pillows were scented, clean, utterly soft, enveloping, and the big bed was welcoming, so welcoming and embracing …
… blinked awake.
‘What-?’ He attempted to move, then squealed with pain.