Vodka

by Boris Starling

  As they stood looking at the statue, the son turned to his father and wrapped his arms around his waist, clasping him so tightly that he knocked his glasses half off his nose. Irk watched them for a second, son with father, father with son. It was a moment of warmth to melt this cold, cold city, and Irk felt his eyes prick even as he remembered that Moscow did not believe in tears

  28

  Sunday, January 19, 1992

  Lev’s penthouse was in the Kotelniki building, twenty-four stories above the junction of the Moscow and Yauza rivers. The Kotelniki is one of the so-called Seven Sisters, Stalin’s gothic skyscrapers that dominate the Moscow skyline like vast, layered wedding cakes pockmarked with windows and girded with crenellations, their vertiginous spires topped by glowing ruby stars as they reach for the clouds. The Kotelniki aside, there’s an apartment house at Kudrinskaya Square near the American embassy; two ministries, Transport and Foreign Affairs; two hotels, the Ukrainia and the Leningradskaya; and the Moscow State University in the Lenin Hills.

  Lev was brooding, and it was Karkadann who loomed spectral in his thoughts; Karkadann, the man who was surely behind the deaths of three children already; Karkadann, now in hiding and nowhere to be found.

  There would be less to brood about, Lev thought, if he could comprehend more. As someone who had spent much of his adult life in prison, how could he hope to understand a hoodlum barely out of school who was already earning millions? It was like appointing a member of the Communist Youth to the Politburo. A man needed to grow, to accumulate experience; he shouldn’t expect things to be his by right. Lev had worked hard to be where he was, he’d done his time—that was what being a vor meant.

  Decades on, he still recalled with pride the words of the three vory who had sponsored his entry into the brotherhood (three sponsors, when you needed only two for the Party): “His behavior and aspirations are totally in accordance with the vory worldview,” they’d said. “He staunchly defies camp discipline and is practically never out of the punishment cell. His soul is pure, so let him in.”

  Let him in they had, rechristening him Lev, the lion. The name was initially for his flowing mane, but it wasn’t long before it also stood for his natural leadership. He’d never used his birth name again—there was no one left who remembered him by that name; he had no family but the vory now. After the initiation ceremony came the admittance tattoos—a dagger-pierced heart and a suit of aces inside the cross—the first of the hundreds that now swarmed his skin. News of his admission had spread through the gulags, from the harsh northern route of Vologda, Kotlas, Vorkuta, Salekhard, Norilsk, Kolyma and Magadan; down to Komsomolsk and Sovetskaya Gavan near the Mongolian border, to Bratsk and Taishet in western Siberia and the Kazak hellholes of Karaganda, Ekibastuz and Dzhezkazgan.

  Camp life was different once you were a vor. Lev was now entitled to a corner of the cell to himself, away from the door and the communal toilet where the small fry and homosexuals were forced to cluster. When Lev wanted to watch television, his underlings were made to pedal exercise bikes to ensure a steady flow of electricity; if he wanted them to take a fall for him, that was their duty. But he had responsibilities too: he couldn’t lose his senses when drinking vodka, he had to honor his debts and, most importantly, he was charged with making and enforcing regulations, gathering information, organizing prison life and making necessary and sometimes unpleasant decisions. Without these, effective leadership was impossible.

  Lev was jerked out of his reverie by the arrival of Juku Irk. It was the first time the investigator had been to the apartment, and he seemed suitably impressed. The ceilings were high, the finishings marble, steel and hardwood. The bar was topped with leather, and the carpet on which he walked—having first exchanged his shoes for the slippers provided for guests—was thick and white. On the far wall of the living room, an icon sat atop a prayer: O Mother Russia, your role is sacrifice. No land like ours has been called upon by history. No land like ours has the deep will to respond.

  Lev gave Irk a handshake, a vodka and an armchair; Irk began to give Lev a précis of the investigation’s progress, but only got as far as his visit to the Belgrade when Lev interrupted.

  “You went to see Karkadann?” Lev exclaimed. “Where is he?”

  “They blindfolded me. I couldn’t find it again if I tried.”

  “How was he? What did he look like?”

  “What did he look like?” Irk considered the question for a moment. “Hollow.”

  “Did he admit responsibility?”

  “He didn’t give me a straight answer.”

  “For heaven’s sake—it’s so obvious.”

  “I’m keeping an open mind.”

  “You’re keeping an empty mind, Investigator. I expected more of you.”

  “All right.” There was only so much bullying a man could take. “Let’s assume you’re right. Let’s assume that Karkadann is behind all this. Why not negotiate with him?”

  Lev steepled his fingers. “You’re an educated man. You know what Kutuzov told Napoleon.”

  “That was different.”

  “Not in the slightest.” Lev quoted the great general: “‘I should be cursed by posterity were I regarded as the first to take any steps toward a settlement of any sort. Such is the spirit of my nation.’ And so it remains, Investigator. Even if I could get Karkadann to talk with me, what would be the point? In Russia, it’s victory or defeat, nothing else will do. Feuding’s bad for everyone, but the only way to peace is hegemony, and the only way to hegemony is by eliminating the opposition.”

  Irk had heard it all before. Russians may enchant with their arts and inspire with their courage, but horror, tragedy and drunkenness spiral through their genes. He finished his vodka and got to his feet.

  “How can I help you, Lev, if you won’t help me?”

  29

  Monday, January 20, 1992

  Everyone in Russia knows there are only two certainties, death and taxes; but since no one pays their taxes, death is doubly sure.

  Alice returned to Red October with a legion of short, matronly and ineffably formidable women: the representatives of every branch of the tax inspectorate—customs, bankruptcy, monopoly, pricing and several more whose names and functions she hadn’t caught—all supplied for her on Arkin’s express order. Each inspector was accompanied by two armed tax policemen. Collecting taxes was a high-risk profession; most businessmen felt that evasion was their right, given that they were having to pay separately for protection services the state should have provided. Inspectors were frequently shot, beaten up, blackmailed, kidnapped or found their offices and homes torched.

  Red October’s security force took one look at the raiding party and stepped aside, deterred more by the women than the men. Even Lev wouldn’t take on a detachment straight from the Kremlin. The tax posse marched across the factory floor, where the workers seemed to be more industrious than on Alice’s last visit, and into Lev’s office—his door was always open, after all—brandishing demands for every tariff Alice had thought of and several she hadn’t: VAT, income, profit, property, salary, municipal transport, export, import, garbage collection, ecological … Alice stood with her arms folded in the corner by the door. It was truly Marxist, she thought; as in Groucho, Chico and Harpo, rather than Karl.

  Lev pushed his chair back from the desk and retreated across the room on its casters so fast that Alice thought he might plow straight through the plate glass of the internal window and down onto the distillery floor. He stopped just in time and held his hands up. “Enough! Enough! What’s all this about? What about the energy giants? They owe billions, trillions even; far more than I do. Why don’t you go after them first?” He pushed himself to his feet. “The tax I pay one month is gone, raised, lowered or superseded the next. Even if I wanted to pay taxes, I couldn’t get anyone to tell me what I owe.”

  That at least was true, Alice conceded. She looked out the external window, down at the traffic crawling along Sofiyskaya. As
she watched, a pedestrian on the sidewalk raised his arm, and two vehicles dived for the curb, one of them a police car. The drivers got out and began to argue as to who’d take the fare. From up here, the cars with their open doors looked like insects, legs splayed either side of their bodies.

  When she looked back into the room, Lev was smiling appreciatively at her. This time she’d dominated him rather than vice versa. It was as if she’d flipped him onto his back and sat astride him.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll let you privatize this place.”

  Lev escorted Alice to the sideboard by the internal window; it was just the two of them now, the tax dragons had all gone, mollified by promises of this and that. He offered her some Pertsovka vodka, nut-brown with red tinges. It contained infusions of cubeb berries and pepper pods, red and black. Touches of aniseed and vanilla played on Alice’s nose when she sniffed it; it was surprisingly sweet on her lips, and as she sipped she saw Lev chuckling. Before she could ask him what was so funny, she found out as the aftershock from the pepper suddenly ignited on her gums and tongue.

  “You could have told me,” she spluttered.

  “Here.” His fingers brushed hers as he passed her a bowl of rice. “It’ll dampen the fire. Besides, Pertsovka highlights the seasoning and nuttiness of rice. Vodka does that, you know, brings out the flavors in food. If you have herring and sour cream, the vodka melts the cream’s richness and slices through the herring’s oiliness. Or take caviar. Vodka promotes beluga’s creamy, nutty relish, together with a hint of sweetness that recalls almonds and marzipan. The lightly fishy, brie-and-roquefort taste of oscietra becomes even smoother with vodka. And vodka softens the sea-salt flavor of sevruga, which can be a little harsh.”

  Alice felt absurdly enthusiastic in the face of his knowledge, as though she were a schoolgirl with a crush on Teacher. Watching him over the rim of the glass—a gaze that they both held a beat too long—she wondered whether his kiss would taste as explosively violent as the Pertsovka.

  “I suppose there’s no point in asking you to make beer too?” she said at last.

  “Beer? Beer? Over my dead body. Beer’s not alcohol, for heaven’s sake. Have you ever drunk beer and felt like you knew the secrets of the world, felt like you understood love and art and music? Of course you haven’t. Beer’s a hangover cure, no more and no less.” In Russia at least, this is true; supermarkets stack beer in the same section as they do mineral water and cola.

  Alice’s face was as red as Lev’s, but in her case it was from laughing. “I was joking. I wouldn’t want you to offend the Great God of Vodka.”

  When she looked back toward St. Basil’s, she saw the domes as vodka bottles. Vodka, not religion, was the true opium of the masses. She shook her head to clear the image, and when she looked again she saw the onion domes—Russia’s other perfect symbol. Onions have multiple layers, and the more you peel away, the more you weep.

  Lev was happy simply to shake hands on the deal, but Alice wanted something in writing. Not that an agreement was worth the paper it was printed on. Russians don’t view contracts the same way Westerners do. With constant shifts in power a fact of life, Russians need to be free to renegotiate, modify, ignore, abrogate or apply conditions selectively—whatever the new circumstances dictate.

  Worse, contracts mean legal agreements, and after seven decades of living under cruel, arbitrary and punitive legislation the Russian people have learned to consent in public and seek loopholes in private. Fundamentally, there are only two laws that have ever been recognized in Russia: one for the rich, the other for the poor.

  Lewis was on the phone when Alice returned, jabbing angry fingers into the air as he talked. “Fat lot of good that’ll do.” He looked up at Alice. “Bob, gotta go. Alice has just come in. Yeah, talk to you soon.” He put the phone down, but didn’t get up.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, slurring the elision slightly.

  “Damn car’s been stolen.” A Mercedes midrange sedan, unexceptional by American standards, bought two weeks before from a showroom on Novy Arbat. “From out of the hospital parking lot, you believe that? And not insured, of course, because we couldn’t get insurance, because nothing in this country fucking works.” The last two words came at a yell, and Alice took half a pace back; Lewis shouted about once a year. “Damn Reds’ll pinch anything that’s not nailed down.”

  “Lewis, it could have happened anywhere.”

  “Anywhere? I haven’t had a car stolen in twenty years back home. But the moment I come to Moscow, look what happens. Jesus. Might as well hand the keys to the nearest guy and invite him to help himself. Jesus.”

  Alice went over and knelt beside him. He kissed her on the cheek, distracted and perfunctory, which annoyed her. “Lewis, please. It’s just a car. We’ll get it back.”

  “You think so? Who’s going to get it back for us? You think the Russian police are gonna give two hoots for our stolen Mercedes?”

  “The police, no. But I know a man who will.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Lev.”

  “Oh, Lev. Lev will find the car for us, of course he will. Tell me; has he agreed to privatize yet, or is he still jerking you around?”

  “We agreed today.” His expression didn’t change. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

  “Not when you smell like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re drunk. Every time you go to that distillery, you come back drunk.”

  “Lewis, this is Moscow. Everyone drinks a lot. Everyone.” She spun the word out, singsong.

  “I can’t remember the last time I saw you turn down a drink.”

  “That’s the way it is here. You go to a meeting, you go to a reception, they virtually hold you down and pour it in.”

  “Not where I work.”

  “Lewis, you work in the Skil … the Slik … that hospital. It’s not a business culture there. If I took all the drinks I was offered, I wouldn’t be able to get up. I’m drunk, yes. Beautiful. So what? I’m your wife. I’m not an infant, I’m not a pet. I’m a functioning adult, and I can make my own decisions. Let me live my own life.”

  “And me? And my own life? Am I enjoying myself here? What do you think? I’m too old for this, Alice. I want a comfortable life in a civilized country with my lovely wife and my adorable kids. I don’t want to be in a city where I’d be out of a job if people were sober. I don’t.”

  30

  Tuesday, January 21, 1992

  Arkin bestowed his movie-star smile on Alice. “It’s rather fitting, isn’t it, that we’re here to celebrate privatization on the anniversary of Lenin’s death?” he said.

  Alice had already had three vodkas before arriving at Lev’s penthouse. Tonight was a big occasion and she wanted to rise to it; there was no quicker or surer method than vodka, the cold rushing river that swept her away from the dangerous rapids of trouble and stress and into the calmer pools of happiness and contentment. A quick dab of the elixir, and gone was the gauche and tense Alice who always seemed to appear when she was least wanted. That no one else seemed to notice this awkwardness—Alice felt herself as adept an actor as she was a drinker—didn’t make it any less real. With vodka came the Alice that everybody would love and want to know: confident Alice, funny Alice, mature Alice, sophisticated Alice, cynical Alice, a smooth operator who could thrive and survive in the asylum that was Moscow. The real Alice, she liked to think; in vodka veritas. Vodka was a liquid makeover from the inside out.

  The party had brought together an eclectic mix of people, but then Alice would have expected no less of Lev. Arkin was with some men from the finance ministry, gray of suit and even grayer of face. Sabirzhan kissed her hand again, this time leaving behind a thin trail of saliva. Galina bubbled with excitement as she introduced Alice to Rodion and Svetlana, who pinched Alice’s cheeks and told her she should forget that stupid American obsession with diet and eat properly. Lewis was more handsome than all the o
ther men in the room put together. Harry had come with a date, not Vika from New Year’s Eve but another Moscow vixen cast from the same impossibly blond mold. Bob and Christina had brought their son Josh because there was, in Christina’s spitting words, “no one in this damn city to baby-sit for us.”

  “No one you’ll trust to do the job, you mean,” Alice said uncharitably, though Christina’s disgusted tutting revealed that Alice had been all too accurate. Alice sank to her haunches and looked Josh in the eye. “How old are you, Josh?”

  “Six and a little.”

  “When are you seven?”

  “Soon.” Against the white carpet his coffee-colored skin looked darker than it was. “Do you want to hear a joke?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “What noise annoys an oyster most?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to repeat the question.”

  “Oh. OK. I don’t know; what noise annoys an oyster most?”

  “A noisy noise annoys an oyster most.” Josh burst out laughing; his smile was a split galosh.

  Alice reached under his armpits and tickled him, which made him laugh even more. “That’s a terrible joke,” she said. “You deserve to be tickled all evening for that.”

  He squirmed in her arms and tried to tickle her in return, but she held him away so he couldn’t reach her. He thrashed his arms in giggling impotence.

  They were interrupted by the shrill tinkling of metal against glass: Lev, calling for silence.

  “For a drinking party like this,” he said, “one shouldn’t hesitate to slice the last cucumber. It’s my house, my party, so I’m the toastmaster. I’ll start with an old favorite.”

  Lev waited while his bodyguards went around filling glasses. “Two-thirds full only,” he reminded them. “Only philistines fill to the top, because they don’t mind spilling vodka down their shirtfronts. And this is good vodka—Kubanskaya, made by Cossacks in the Kuban lowlands, a little bitter. Everyone ready? Good.”