Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “Where are the toilets?” Harry asked.

  “The executive washrooms are on the upper floor,” replied Lev.

  “I’d like to see the staff toilets.”

  “The staff toilets are not suitable for a man in your position.”

  “That’s why I want to see them.” To Alice, Harry whispered: “It’s a little trick of mine. See what the john’s like and you’ve got a picture of the whole enterprise, almost without fail.” He nodded with assumed sagacity, as though he’d uncovered a great truth.

  “If you insist.” Lev pointed down a side corridor. “They’re just there, around the corner. I’ll send one of my men with you.”

  Harry was already on his way. “I prefer to go alone,” he called over his shoulder.

  He rounded the corner, out of the others’ sight, and found the toilets easily enough; but the doors were not marked, not even in Cyrillic, let alone with any variation of the international stick-man/woman icon. With no idea which was the gents’ and which the ladies’, Harry opened the nearest door and stepped purposefully inside.

  Two vast women were standing at the washbasins, and a third was emerging from one of the stalls, ensuring that all clothing layers were returned to the right order as she did so. There was a brief hiatus while Harry’s presence was registered and analyzed; then all three women began approaching him at considerable speed. He stepped smartly back out the door and took several paces down the corridor, looking back to make sure that they weren’t following. He was still looking back when he walked straight into the wall.

  Several things became apparent to him in strict sequence. He’d walked into the wall because the corridor had turned a corner, and he’d kept going where the passageway hadn’t. This corner was the same one he’d passed on the way down, which meant that everyone—Alice, Lev and Bob—everyone who was waiting for him could now see him again. This in turn meant that he had no plausible excuse for turning tail and going back to the gents’, which after all had been the original purpose of the visit.

  Harry straightened his suit and strode back to the group, nodding at Lev in apparent acknowledgment that everything had been to his satisfaction. Alice was staring fixedly into the middle distance and making small trumpeting noises into the back of her hand.

  “Shit,” said Harry, reaching down for his fly. “Kennywood’s open.”

  They walked through an entrance hall and into the main body of the distillery, which stretched and soared to a ceiling five stories above. Vast vats of stainless steel and wood marched in rows across two walls and back on themselves. Technicians bustled at their bases and hurried between steaming structures of glinting metal. Bottles wobbled on conveyor belts, abruptly passing from one state to another like the ages of man: now empty, now full, now sealed, now with a metal cap, now clinking out of sight into a cardboard box. The wash of running liquid murmured softly beneath the machinery growl and the sounds of humans: footsteps, chatter, the odd laugh or cough. The sheer size of the operation alone impressed Alice; Americans and Russians share a passion for scale, an appreciation of gigantomania.

  “What base do you use?” she asked. “For your vodka.”

  “Wheat.”

  “Rye? Potatoes?”

  Lev snorted. “Rye’s what the Poles use. Potatoes are good for bathtub vodka only.”

  A sharp hiss away to their right made Alice jump. Two men were firing steam guns up the inside of thirty foot vertical pipes. The vapor left the nozzles in angry tight lines; by the time it spilled over the tops of the stacks, it was amiable and diffuse, like drunks stumbling out of the tavern at closing time. “They’re cleaning the purification columns,” Lev explained. “We filter the vodka through hot charcoal to remove contaminants. The more the vodka’s filtered, the better it is.”

  “And the more expensive,” Alice said.

  Lev smiled in recognition; more expensive, yes, that too.

  An indefinable shift in the atmosphere ran ahead of their progression across the factory floor. Wherever Lev went, everyone either stopped what they were doing or conspicuously and determinedly busied themselves with some task of great urgency. He seemed to have time for all the workers, clasping hands with the vat mixers and smiling benevolently at the bottlers; an inquiry about a sick child, a joke, a hand on the shoulder. When one of the cappers asked Lev a question, Alice saw that he answered instantly and decisively. Russians believe that the boss should know everything; to admit that any problem is not easily soluble is a sign of weakness and incompetence.

  “This is my place,” he said to her. “Not in my office, but down here with my people.”

  She took it as it was intended; a statement, yes, but also a warning. Red October was not simply a place of work for its employees; it was the very center of their existence, even—especially—in a world changing as fast as theirs was.

  Lev opened a cabinet displaying the distillery’s commemorative paraphernalia. He passed the contents along to Alice one by one, cradling them with exaggerated care as though they were family heirlooms. Bottles made in various shapes: triangles, circles, squares; one in the form of a rocket—a special issue for Yuri Gagarin; another for Gagarin’s patron Nikita Khrushchev, with a blade of wheat from his native Ukraine; a bottle of Gzelkha, modeled in the blue and white porcelain of the same name and in the form of a double-headed eagle; and Alice’s favorite, a bottle cut in half to reveal the court jester’s two faces, a smile reflecting the joy of drinking and a grimace for the hangover’s misery.

  “You must be especially careful with this one,” Lev said, handing Alice a bust.

  “Who is it?”

  “Who is it? The reason we’re here in the first place, Mrs. Liddell. That’s Isidor, the inventor of vodka. He was a cleric, Thessalian Greek, who was imprisoned by Vasily the Third and rationed to water and grain. Isidor distilled the two together to make an alcoholic spirit that he offered to the guards. When they were comatose, he escaped! Only a Russian would have cunning like that.”

  “You just said he was a Thessalian Greek.”

  “In his state of mind, he was a Russian. And that, Mrs. Liddell, is how vodka was invented.” He took the bust back from Alice and kissed Isidor tenderly on the forehead. “Never believe anyone who tells you otherwise, especially a Pole. Poles always lie, and never more so than when they tell you that they invented vodka. Pffff!”

  Lev took the Westerners upstairs. They passed through three doors on the way, and he was careful to open each one for Alice, which again she took as it was intended; not as patronizing but as typical Russian male courtesy, a cultural trait designed to show respect. Women’s lib had yet to reach Russia. Russian men still wanted to pay for dates, uncork the wine, light cigarettes, carry shopping, do the driving—and, Alice thought, be waited on hand and foot.

  Galina, Lev’s secretary, was waiting for them in the antechamber to his office. She shook the Westerners’ hands and smiled at them through bee-stung lips. Harry looked at her as a father looks at his teenage daughter’s friends.

  Lev’s office had two panoramic views—one facing inside over the distillery floor, the other outside to the river and the Kremlin—and looked as though it had last been redecorated under Brezhnev. The tables and chairs were brown, the floor and walls gray, the two stock colors of the Soviet interior designer. Narrow gashes in the upholstery spewed out fragments of cushioning, and threads poked shyly through the carpet by the door and around Lev’s desk. Alice sensed slow but inexorable decay; the place was tatty around the edges, and everything needed a good cleaning. Bob moved to close the door behind him.

  “Leave it, please,” Lev said. “My door’s always open. Any of my workers who want to come and see me can do so, anytime, even during a meeting like this.” He didn’t ask if they minded, and didn’t look as though he’d have cared much if they did.

  Lev filled four glasses with dark brown liquid and handed them around. “Let’s have a drink.”

  “Okhotnichaya,” Alice said e
ven before she’d tasted it, and Lev nodded approvingly. Okhotnichaya was drunk by hunters returning from the kill. She sniffed at it and smelled aniseed; swirled it in the glass and sniffed again, finding ginger and pepper. When she drank it, she tasted the other ingredients—port, cloves, juniper, coffee, orange, lemon, tormentil, angelica.

  “The flavors are well balanced,” she said. “You’ve played the dry and sweet ones off each other very skillfully.”

  “Thank you,” Lev said. He seemed genuinely pleased at the compliment. “Vodka making is not a science, Mrs. Liddell, it’s an art. Since this is the best distillery in Russia, in the world, and I’m the head of it, that makes me the greatest craftsman of the lot. I’m Repin, I’m Kiprensky, I’m Surikov, all rolled into one.” He smacked his lips in approval of his own genius. “It’s always nice to be appreciated, especially—I hope you’ll take this in the right way, it’s not meant to offend—by a woman, and an American one at that. Your countrymen aren’t renowned for their prizing of good vodka.”

  That much at least was true, Alice knew. Vodka owes its popularity in America largely to its suitability as a cocktail base, which in turn stems from what Americans perceive as its lack of aroma or taste. For Russians, drinking vodka with mixers is an even greater crime than pissing on Lenin’s tomb.

  They chatted about this and that—their families, plays and ballets they’d seen recently—anything and everything, so long as it was unconnected with the business at hand. Russians like to get to know someone before doing business with them; it’s a far cry from the American way, where warmth is turned on and off like a tap.

  “I’ve read many of your literature’s classics, of course,” Lev said. “Henry James”—he pronounced it “Khenry”—“Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain; and of course Hemingway. I’ve read all his books, start to finish.” He turned to Harry. “Tell me, Mr. Exley; of all Hemingway’s books, which is your favorite?”

  Harry looked startled and guilty, an unprepared child undone by a teacher’s questioning. “Er … To Have and Have Not, I guess.”

  “To Have and Have Not? The one that Hemingway himself called his worst book? Come, Mr. Exley. That can’t be your favorite.”

  “It is, actually.”

  “Then you can’t have read any others.”

  “You’re right; I haven’t.”

  “Uncultured,” Lev muttered to himself.

  “I’ve seen Doctor Zhivago, though,” Harry said.

  “Tchah! Zhivago played by an Egyptian. Western pap. Desecration of a great book.”

  “There was a book?”

  Sabirzhan came in, all smiles and unction. He kissed Alice on the hand and left an imprint of clammy wetness there; she wiped it surreptitiously against her jacket while he greeted Harry and Bob.

  “So good to meet you all at last,” he said. “So good.”

  The wall clock showed they’d been there two hours, and only now—a bottle of Okhotnichaya to the wind, and most of that consumed by Alice and Lev, because Bob and Harry had stuck at two glasses each—did they get down to business.

  “This is the only way it can be,” Alice said. “In the past, staff have come to work and they’ve been paid, irrespective of what they have or haven’t done. Now things are different. State subsidies are on the way out; in their place will come a shareholders’ society, where people will have to provide for themselves. They’ll come to work, they’ll realize production, they’ll get money. Workers should see the link between their own work and the income they receive. Make them shareholders too, and they’ll work harder, because their livelihood is determined by profits.”

  “Their livelihood depends on me, Mrs. Liddell, and it’s a responsibility I take seriously.”

  “And that’s going to change. Red October has apartments, a school, kindergarten, a day care center, supplementary benefits, yes? You can’t maintain these on thin air, you’ll need to start making profits. In a market economy, competition is cruel; it takes decisions independent of your will, as director here, or of what the shareholders want, even of the government’s desires. The market economy allows only those organizations that have arranged their resources properly to remain afloat.”

  “It’s merciless.”

  “It’s fair.”

  “This is Russia, Mrs. Liddell, and what you’re asking of me is something profoundly un-Russian; to be the guinea pig. If I do this, what happens when the Communists get back to power?” He’d said when, not if, Alice noticed. “They could confiscate my factory, prosecute me; jail me, even.”

  “Oh, come on. The Communists aren’t going to get back in.”

  “And you know that for a fact? No. You think that because you’re American, Mrs. Liddell. Americans believe in a brighter future, because that’s all you’ve known in the past two generations. In Russia, it’s always our past that’s golden, never our future. There are no good times here, just bad times and worse times. That’s why we’re pessimists. You equate shareholders with opportunities; I equate them with trouble. Outsiders don’t know the difficulties we face, and won’t have any interest in them. They’ll just sell their holdings the moment things get tough and leave us even deeper in the shit.”

  “What we want here is cooperation. It’s not a matter of me thinking that my way’s better than yours, or me trying to exploit you. We both want to help Red October operate to its full potential, and the best way of doing this is through combining our expertise and your experience.”

  Lev squinted at her, attempting to gauge whether she was being sarcastic.

  “Let me explain to you how business works in Russia today, Mrs. Liddell,” he said. “Boris and Gleb meet. Boris wants to buy a cartload of, I don’t know…”

  “Vodka.” Alice smiled.

  “A cartload of vodka, why not? Gleb says yes, fine, he’ll sell him one. They agree on a price. Then Gleb tries to find that cartload, and Boris tries to find the money.”

  “So?”

  “So everything. That’s the way we do business. You talk of market institutions, market culture, market memory—we’ve nothing of that.”

  When they’d finished the Okhotnichaya, Lev opened a bottle of Ultraa. It was distilled using the pure oxygen-rich waters of Lake Ladoga, he told them, and its recipe was based on one that had been used in the czar’s imperial palaces. Alice’s senses were not yet so numbed that she couldn’t smell the delicate, lightly sweet aroma, nor miss the touches of needle in a smooth taste, nor fail to feel the very slight oiliness of texture.

  “One of yours?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “But I appreciate any vodka that’s good, as long as it’s Russian, of course. Not from anywhere else. Especially not Poland.”

  “Why do you like vodka?” Harry asked Lev. Alice buried her head in her hands.

  “Why do I like vodka?” Lev snorted. “That’s like asking why it snows in Russia. Only a foreigner could ask such a ridiculous question. It’s like asking for a definition of the Russian soul.”

  Whatever the rights and wrongs of Alice’s case, it gradually became clear that, on some basic level, she and Lev were still miles apart. The Westerners had come equipped with graphs, statistics, market research, forecasts and projections, Bob and Harry giving the kind of slick presentation they’d done hundreds of times before in airport hotels the world over. They emphasized contents and slighted context, guarded emotions and shared facts. Lev did exactly the opposite, trying to read between their lines while apologizing that he wasn’t much of a details man—he left that sort of thing to Tengiz, they should sort things out with him later. Lev refused to be drawn on any issue, particularly the twin prospects of redundancies and a reduction in his own personal position.

  “My ears are swollen,” he told them eventually. “I’m tired of listening.”

  “You’re an uncompromising bastard,” Alice said.

  “That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me all day.” He was genuinely pleased.

  Alice goaded and
goaded Lev; even she’d had enough of going nowhere. Lev’s face began to flush red; Alice almost looked under the table to see if he was pawing the ground. Bob tried to interject, then Sabirzhan, and finally Harry, but they were all brushed aside.

  “You think I’m going to be shunted out of the way just like that?” Lev snapped. “You think I’m so stupid that I can’t see what you’re trying to do?”

  “What am I trying to do?”

  “Wreck the Russian economy, that’s what; maintain Russia in some kind of semicolonial tutelage to the West. You can keep your expertise and your theories. The only thing capitalists are creating is misery. People begging on the streets, folks dying faster than they can make the coffins, no potatoes in the stores, babies born with only half a face, people who can’t take a piss because they’ve got the clap, pensions worth shit. You knock us to the ground and then want to buy the wreckage. That’s not just shit, it’s insulting.”

  Alice held her hand up to try and interrupt the flow, but she might as well have tried to hold off a tsunami.

  “You were pushing each other out of the way to get on the plane when that fool Gorbachev rode off into the sunset. ‘Shock therapy,’ you tell us. ‘A few months of pain and it’ll all be over.’ Yes, well, we’re getting the shock all right, but I don’t see much therapy. And what’s the West doing? You sweep in here as if you’re emissaries of light, bringing salvation to the natives living in the dark forest. You think you’re heroes because people give you free drinks and ask your advice. You think that what works for you will automatically work for everyone else. Your teeth are whiter than ours and your clothes better, so suddenly you’re the arbiters of public morality. You assume America’s the ultimate model, and so you judge everything simply by how close it comes to your own ideal. You think you’ve carte blanche to remake Russia in your own image. You don’t, and you won’t—not here.”