Despite the Falling Snow (9 page)

She thinks briefly of Alexander. It has been three weeks since the night they met and she has seen him a few times. Fewer meetings than he would have liked, which is just how she feels it should be; she is teasing out his eagerness. He came to see her again last night, and she had talked to him. That, she knew, was the way to begin. To reveal something of herself, not to probe him, not just yet. And although she has asked him a little about himself, he has been uninterested in replying at any length – in that respect, he seems unlike most other people that she knows. Instead, he has been full of questions to her – her work, her daily life, her thoughts and hopes and fears. She told him of the first two things. I am a school administrator. I run the school. And I get up at this time, and eat that for lunch, and do this in the afternoon, and sleep at around this time. The rest could come later, or not at all. He will wait for her tonight, this time at his apartment. For dinner. She smiles to herself. Although she told him little of real depth, she felt a liberation of some kind simply by speaking to him. Any kind of self-revelation is so rare for her that the mere fact of spending several hours with one human being who is focused solely on her, interested only in what interests her, has given her an unfamiliar sense of release. Of light-headedness. What will happen if she does not find her way back through this shower of snow? What if these pattering, dancing, floating flakes blind her and unhinge her and mislead her, and whisk her far away into the immutable, unending whiteness of the desert, and what if she never makes it home again? The long, pure vista of snow that she sees stretching out before her will continue for ever and ever, she feels, and her head is almost spinning with the seductive pain of being surrounded completely by whiteness and cold, no humans, no life, no end to it.

At the street corner, she stops, disconcerted, and finds that she is standing next to other people. Coated, hatted, bundled black shapes, blurry against the ice. She is back in the city, she suddenly finds, back on the street that she knows by heart, and has been removed from the vast, snowbound Siberian plain of her imagination. So, she thinks, as she crosses the street with the other shapes; so I will continue to live in this new world of mine, I will see him tonight, and he will see me, and we will carry on this game of getting to know each other a little better.

Five minutes later, she is inside the echoing concrete hallway of the school. Her everyday mind is returning as, bit by bit, the brilliant white of her imagination is being painted over with the various greys of this building. The stairs, the floor, the thick metal doors. The grey cabinets and chairs, and her own metal desk. Her grey metal typewriter. The grey skin of some of the teachers. The grey hair of the head teacher, who asks Katya, every few months, if she would not like to teach instead. If she would not like to be out of the school administration offices, and in front of a class of minds eager for knowledge.

Not for the knowledge I would be forced to teach them, she thinks, as she shakes her head again, politely, and laughs. The children would love you, the head teacher tells her; they already do. Her heavy squat body and square rustic head nod to the young woman in hopeless encouragement. Yes, Katya thinks, but children are innocent and superficial. They like me because I am prettier than most of their teachers, and because I am young. They would have crushes on me, the small girls and the small boys. They don’t care about anything else. Do they?

She has seen some of their eyes, the little children who come to that school, and she has seen a thirst and an adoration that shocks her. Such naked emotion in the eyes of those children. Smile at them, and they smile. Shout and they withdraw. Hit them and they cower. Such raw power these greying teachers hold. She wants no part of it, not directly. She does what she has to do behind the scenes. Curricula, timetables, state funds. As good a job as any other to earn a wage and fill her days. But she would rather not face that dependence and devotion, that innocence which has already had its new, sharp edges roughed away by state and parents.

She hates herself when she thinks like this, but she does not often think any other way. She herself has cowered, and longed for love from too many different aunts and uncles and friends with whom she spent her own childhood and adolescence. Much of the time, she was even separated from her only brother. There was no-one who wanted to take in two orphans. Two extra mouths to share the thin soups and occasional meats at the table. Two more pairs of feet to buy decent shoes for. In her loneliness, craving the love of her parents and the companionship of her older brother, she learned to turn into her own mind and heart for the satisfaction that she sought. Hours spent learning how to fully use her imagination, teaching herself to fight through to the farthest reaches of her mind in order to remove herself from the lonely, terrifying world she now inhabited. Nights spent holding herself in, learning to be content with her own company, to push away the longing for others, and to trust only herself. A good training, as it turned out, but not the easiest way to live. Alexander is already trying to find a way into this interior life of hers. She smiles and shakes her head at the idea. She walks into the office, and smiles a hello at Svetlana, who shifts self-consciously in her seat. At her desk Katya begins sorting out the stack of letters and memos which has piled up since yesterday afternoon.

The day is passing swiftly for once, and Katya types away, clattering fingers dancing over the keys.

“I can do those for you,” Svetlana says.

“I’ve given you more than enough for one day,” Katya replies. Besides, she likes the feel of the keys, and to watch the words being formed on the paper before her. She works with a soothing rhythm that is beginning to free her unconscious mind, and she is finding that her thoughts are drawn repeatedly to Alexander.

She looks up with a start. At her open door, two round blue eyes are staring at her out of an oval face. The eyes are welling with tears. She looks at the boy. He must be five or six, and his knee is bleeding. She stands and goes to him, and kneels down beside him.

“Did you fall?” she asks.

He nods, and the tears pool out and edge down his cheeks. She touches his head affectionately, then stands and briskly gets out a box of tape and bandages.

“Shall I take him to the nurse?” Svetlana asks, half-rising from her chair.

“I’ll manage,” Katya replies.

“But all injuries are supposed to be reported to the nurse…”

Svetlana’s voice trails away, silenced by Katya’s look of disbelief.

“It’s not a sin to do things differently now and then, Svetlana,” she says, with a laugh in her voice. Svetlana subsides, her full lips pursed hard against the mockery.

Katya cuts a small piece of tape, and applies it to the bandaged knee.

“There you are. Is that better?”

The boy looks down, uncertain.

“You are a brave young man, aren’t you?” she says.

He looks at her, suspicious. Her amiable, kind tone is unexpected, and he turns suddenly and runs away. Katya watches him go with a small pain in her heart, and some anger flashing in her eyes. Not at the boy, but at everything that has made him push her away. She is almost sitting down at her desk again when she suddenly stands instead, and the abrupt scraping of her chair, together with the metallic slam of the office door which Katya throws open make Svetlana look up, wide-eyed. But Katya is already gone, her chair having fallen to the floor.

She is running down the hallway. It is silent and deserted, for the children have now started their final lesson. But as she flies down the corridor, and turns a corner, she sees her little boy, the one with the cut knee; he is almost back at his classroom. He stares at the woman bearing down on him, and she stops, and they watch each other for a moment. She considers. Another kind word and he will probably run again.

“Come here,” Katya tells him, with authority, despite the fact that she is suddenly unsure quite what she is doing, following this unknown child.

He frowns, and then slowly begins the walk down the corridor towards her. He stands before her, and she looks down at the top of his head, her arms folded.

“Please,” she says. “Please don’t run from me like that,” she says, her voice soft and kind now.

Quickly, she passes her fingers through his hair, caressing it, tidying it, and then she turns and walks back down the corridor. She can hear the echoing of her own footfalls clamouring back at her from the hollow walls, but she can hear nothing else. She turns again, and looks at the boy, standing there, still watching her. His soft eyes are too large, too tentatively adoring, too thrilled. She closes her own eyes against them.

“Go back to your lesson,” she says, pushing a tone of command into her voice, and he runs from her, back to the classroom.

“Where did you go to?” Svetlana’s timid voice makes Katya want to snap back a reply.

“Bathroom,” she says.

“Oh.”

She suspects very strongly that her secretary’s main purpose in life, or at least here at school, is to watch her. Either she is one of those people whose lives are so dull and mean that she keeps herself from boredom by spying on everyone around her, or she has a definite instruction from someone, somewhere to keep an eye on Katya. This would not be unusual, given that Katya’s parents were killed under Stalin, as enemies of the state; and her brother Yuri’s subsequent escape to the United States did nothing to help the situation. But then, Katya has always relished a challenge, and began her campaign for acceptance and credibility in the Party long ago as a young Pioneer. In her smart uniform – a red hat and scarf over a white shirt, which were some of the best pieces of clothing she owned – she had stood in an orderly row and sworn solemnly to uphold the ideals of Lenin and Stalin. She still remembers the thundering sound of hundreds of childish voices around her, echoing around the hall in which they stood. Soon after that, she had calmly signed a denouncement of her parents, requested of her at the age of thirteen as her civic duty. That had gotten her some points for “heroism” in the Party records. Even then, at that age, with no idea of how she could ever effect a sort of revenge for her parents’ deaths, she was clear in her own mind that she wanted to do so. It was always simply a question of how, not whether or not she should.

She glances once more at Sveltana. Her light brown eyes hold streaks of gold within them, and they are superficially striking, but they are always darting, watching; and her delicate mouse-like ears are always twitching. There is plenty of use for unassuming, steady people like her; the local resident’s associations, the work councils, the police – they all use observations from people like that all the time. Katya glances at the clock on the wall behind her. Five minutes to go.

She begins packing up her things.

“It’s only five minutes to,” Svetlana points out, helpfully.

“I can read a clock,” Katya tells her. “I am going home.”

Svetlana watches Katya’s swift, easy movements. Her admiration of her beautiful superior, with her tall, slim figure and her ink-black hair and eyes has turned to envy over the past year, and even dislike. Svetlana too is pretty in her own way, and as helpful as she can be, and she has tried to make Katya like her, but she will not.

The school bell rings, and a dulled scraping of chairs in thirty rooms above and around them penetrates the thick, solid blocks of the office walls. Katya looks up at her co-worker, and smiles, more kindly. The girl is pleased, and smiles back, coyly, but not without a desperation behind her light eyes that makes Katya shiver inwardly. But Katya smiles again, anyway, before looking back to her own desk, where she picks up her bag. She waits for a moment and listens. Outside the office door, a hundred pairs of feet hustle through the corridor. There is no stampede for the door; even getting out of this place cannot inspire these children with enthusiasm, Katya thinks.

She pushes back her own metal chair, and reaches for her coat.

“Bye, Svetlana,” she says.

“Bye, Katya.” There is a pause – enough to mark a change of subject, but not enough to allow Katya to escape.

“Doing anything tonight?” Svetlana asks, and her sugary friendliness makes Katya’s skin crawl.

“No.” She is seeing Alexander. She will go to his apartment, where he wants to cook dinner for her. But that is something private. Even when it has nothing to do with her clandestine work, Katya has never been one to speak of her internal life, of thoughts and feelings, even to her few friends.

“No,” she repeats. “You?” she asks, politely, although she does not really care.

“I am re-reading Comrade Stalin’s speeches. A little every evening,” Svetlana replies.

That should be a stimulating night, thinks Katya, but her eyes lose nothing of their polite smile. “They are very interesting,” she says. “Very good.”

“I know, they….”

“I have to go.”

“Going home, Katya?” she asks.

“I already said that,” is the curt reply.

“Oh.” Svetlana looks down at her account books once again. “It’s just… you don’t always go straight home after work. Do you?”

Katya resists the impulsive response, which is to turn and stare sharply at the girl, to evaluate the meaning of her words. Instead, she keeps her head down where it was, in her bag, looking for her hat, and when she finds it, she pulls it out and looks at her with a sigh and says, “Don’t you have anything else to worry about?”