A Little White Death by John Lawton Page A

soil. He had to make a speech – how else would he have passed the time in that sealed train except
by writing a speech?
    ‘Don’t tell me it’s a dive, Freddie,’ said Charlie, reading his mind. ‘It’s this or nothing. Or to be precise, it’s some other place exactly like this
or one of the hard-currency joints in the hotels which are strictly for the tourists. I can’t play the tourist. I’m here for life. Begin as you mean to go on, Isay.’
    Dark eyes under beetle brows occasionally glanced at them as Charlie forced a way through to the bar. Miserable men, working men, heavily wrapped up against the winter cold, heavily wrapped
upagainst the working life, their heads in clouds of tobacco fug, their feet in puddles on the floor, streaming from their boots. Two toffs, two foreigners, in good clothes, but scarcely meriting
enough attention to detract from the serious business of getting seriously drunk.
    Charlie got both elbows on the bar and seized the attention of the barman. He was a dead ringer for the late Maxim Gorki, a face consisting largely of open pores, a nose like a ripe strawberry
and a moustache the size of a yard brush.
    ‘Now we get to the heart of the matter. Four fucking days in this utter fucking igloo of a country and I still can’t muster enough of the lingo to ask this bugger for a drink. I got
you here just to order the booze. Tell him I want a whisky, and make damn sure he pours at least three fingers.’
    This struck Troy as innocent, but he asked anyway.
    ‘Where do you think you are?’ said the barman. ‘What do you think this is? Order vodka or piss off the pair of you.’
    Troy translated loosely for Charlie.
    ‘It’ll have to be vodka. That’s all they serve.’
    ‘If your English pal wants whisky he’ll have to use his privileges. In this place there are no privileges. We’re the scum of the earth. Vodka or vodka. And none of that fancy
shit with bison grass or red peppers in it. Take it or leave it.’
    ‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Two large ones.’
    ‘Not so fast,’ said Gorki, and pointed over his shoulder to a small blackboard and the chalked entries under the heading ‘menu’.
    ‘First you order a meal.’
    The kopeck dropped for Troy. It was not a bar; there was no such place as a bar. In a nation of drunks there were only two places to get drunk outside the privacy – or not – of your
own home. In the street or in a café. An approximation of which this place seemed to be.
    ‘Charlie – you have a choice. Sausages, fish dumplings or soup.’
    ‘Sausages,’ said Charlie. ‘Anything as long as the bugger pours me a drink.
    Troy ordered for them.
    ‘Nah,’ said Gorki. ‘Bangers is off.’
    ‘Dumplings then.’
    ‘Nah, dumplings is off too.’
    Troy looked around the room at the pack of miserable boozers. Each one of them had in front of him a bowl of yellowish gruel. Not one of them seemed to have touched it.
    Another kopeck dropped.
    Nobody ate a damn thing in this satanic hole; the pretence of food, the utterly ‘off ’ menu, was just a front to keepa fraction the right side of the law. If a militiaman – the
Soviet version of a copper – walked in, doubtless a few elbows would ply a few spoons, but that was it. A bar by any other name in a country where there were no bars was a caff.
    Just for the pleasure of the hunt, he said, ‘What’s the soup?’
    ‘Yeller soup,’ said Gorki.
    Troy could see that.
    ‘Yellow what?’
    ‘Yeller taters and yeller cabbage, bit o’ this, bit o’ that.’
    ‘Sort of like saffron?’
    ‘If you like.’
    Then a kopeck dropped for him too.
    ‘Bloody good idea.’ He turned to a fat man in a greasy apron lounging behind him. ‘Andrei, change the menu. From now on its soupe au saffron .’ He stuck two bowls
in front of them and ladled out the yellow mess.
    ‘Good bloody grief,’ said Charlie. ‘ Crambe repetita . School dinners.’
    ‘You don’t have to eat it,’ said Troy. ‘No one else