Vodka

by Boris Starling

  Privatization was agreed, Harry would have the books; they were really starting to make progress, Alice thought, and not before time. It was almost a month since she’d first met Borzov and Arkin—where had all the days gone?

  Alice wandered through to the antechamber, where Galina was bashing away at an old typewriter. “You might be able to help me, Galya,” she said, and Galina looked up, flushed with excited enthusiasm. “I need a hundred and fifty people—keen, intelligent, honest people—to help out on the day of the auction, but I haven’t got the time or resources to advertise and interview thousands of applicants.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Galina said instantly. “Let me handle it.” The doubt on Alice’s face made her hurry on. “I’ve got friends, friends of friends, people I was at college with—they’d chop off their right arms to be involved with something like this, they really would.”

  Perhaps it was a conflict of interest, perhaps not. Alice had neither the time nor the inclination to care, as long as Galina delivered. “That would be great. Thanks, Galya; I owe you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Alice walked back into Lev’s office, crossed over to the internal window and looked down at the factory floor. Today was payday, the penultimate Friday of the month, and a long line—a typically Soviet line, Alice thought—of employees stretched away from the cashier’s window through copses of columns and stills.

  She watched as the cashier checked a worker’s name off on a list—hard copy, of course, Red October had yet to dip more than a toenail into the scary waters of information technology—counted out his pay from shrink-wrapped piles of rubles, and pushed the money through in a metal tray beneath the glass partition. The employee—this was where Alice’s attention was pricked—then walked over to Sabirzhan, who was standing a few paces away, counted out some notes from his pay packet, and handed that portion to Sabirzhan before walking off.

  That was strange, Alice thought, though there was probably a perfectly innocent explanation. Perhaps Sabirzhan had lent the man some money and was claiming it back; perhaps it was payment for some rare item that Sabirzhan, with his contacts, had managed to procure.

  She saw the next man in line do exactly the same thing, then the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that.

  Lev came into view and walked across the distillery floor toward Sabirzhan who, collecting money with the impassiveness of a Roman tribune, barely seemed to acknowledge him. Lev said something to Sabirzhan; Sabirzhan said something back, his attention still on the supplicants.

  Alice was about to go down to the distillery floor herself, when she saw a third man join the huddle. He looked gentle enough, but his arrival had clearly prompted tension. Lev shook hands willingly enough, but for Sabirzhan the gesture seemed to require a monumental effort.

  Lev took the man a few paces away, toward the edge of the floor. Sabirzhan turned his back on them and continued to collect the money. A small line had formed in the hiatus.

  Alice went downstairs at a brisk trot.

  The door that led from the staircase onto the distillery floor had a small porthole inset at eye level. Alice noted vaguely that this window seemed to have been blacked out, and she was reaching for the handle, when she heard voices from the other side. She realized that the blackout was Lev’s back, obscuring the entire aperture as he leaned against the door.

  It was the tone of the men’s voices that first held Alice frozen as she stood. They were arguing. She warmed to the daringly clandestine thrill of eavesdropping even as she battered away another image, that of the banisters on the landing of her childhood home in Boston, where she’d watched and listened as her parents—her father sober, her mother steaming drunk—had squabbled.

  “Let’s not lose sight of the most important thing.” It was the other man speaking; Lev’s voice was too distinctive to be mistaken. “The quicker these murders stop, the better, for both of us.”

  It was another hour before Lev returned to his office. Throughout that time Alice’s curiosity nagged at her like scabies. She had so many questions that she hardly knew where to begin, and she couldn’t imagine that the answers to any of them were going to be what she wanted to hear.

  “What the hell was all that about?” she said when he finally came back.

  “What was all what about?”

  She gestured down to the factory floor. “Sabirzhan, taking people’s cash off them.”

  “Oh, that.” He flapped a hand in the air. “That’s standard procedure.”

  “Not anywhere I’ve seen, it’s not.” Alice wanted to say that it was bullying, but there is no such word in Russian. The notion that it’s unfair for a powerful person to threaten someone weaker is very much a Western one; in Russia, everything gets done by bullying.

  “I don’t have time to explain it to you now, but it’s all perfectly normal. Anything else?”

  If Lev had been forthcoming about Sabirzhan, Alice might have left it at that, but there was little she disliked more than being kept in the dark, and her anger skidded her forward.

  “What murders?” she asked.

  Lev bluffed and stalled and denied, but Alice wasn’t about to let this one go. It took him a quarter of an hour to relent and tell her about events at Prospekt Mira, as quickly and succinctly as he could, as much to minimize the evident horror on her face as anything else. He took her to the window and pointed out German Kullam. He hadn’t wanted her to know, he said, for several reasons. What they were trying to do with Red October was complex and unprecedented. He knew the West was keen to see it succeed, but he knew too how squeamish Westerners could be, and he hadn’t wanted to complicate the situation any further.

  “Complicate?” Alice didn’t even try to hide her sarcasm. “Children are being murdered, probably by a Chechen warlord hoping to put pressure on you, and you think that’s a complication?” She looked away, feeling as deceived as if he were a cheating lover; there was the same indignity of being the last to know, the same dulled anticipation that there might still be more left undiscovered. “Didn’t you think I should know?”

  Lev shrugged. “In Russia, Mrs. Liddell, what you should or shouldn’t know is of no consequence; the only thing that matters is what you do know.” He moved as if to take her hand; she pulled back. “Please, Mrs. Liddell. These are my children. Not biologically, of course. But it’s my sworn duty to keep these young people safe, and I’m failing. Don’t you see? I didn’t tell you because I’m ashamed.”

  She looked at him; into him. “I’m ashamed,” he repeated more softly, and she knew he was telling the truth. A man who would not let himself love a woman or have children, had taken on others’ children by proxy and loved them in his own faltering, uncertain way as if they were his own.

  Alice knew that a line had just been crossed. She was still determined that nothing would happen between them. And equally certain that if it did, she’d be powerless to resist.

  “Vodka?” he asked, his voice wavering as he turned away from her and busied himself at the cabinet, selecting a bottle. She nodded mutely. “Here—a bottle of the finest Tolstoy. You think he’d have seen the funny side? A teetotaler—worse, an abstentionist propagandist—and he’s immortalized in vodka! You might as well name a synagogue after Adolf Hitler.” He handed the bottle to her. “You pour.”

  Alice’s hands were shaking so violently that she had to touch the bottle’s neck to the glasses in order to stop the vodka from spilling. She was vaguely aware of Lev crossing the room. When she looked up, he was on his way back toward her, and she saw that he’d closed the door—the door, she remembered, which was always open, always.

  He moved his lips to hers, and she was destroyed.

  He looked as though he’d been painted, top to bottom. His toes were ocher claws, his feet sapphire and sage. Tongues of primrose licked up his calves to rows of crimson stars across each kneecap, each point on the stars representing a year inside. He saw Alice’s stare.

  “No
one’s ever made me kneel,” he said.

  How long did it take to cover such an enormous man? How long, and how painful? Prison tattooists didn’t come with colored ink, disposable needles and sterilization kits; they mixed charred shoe leather and molten rubber with water, sugar and piss, sharpened sewing needles on the concrete floors of the cells, and—if you were lucky—waved them through a flame before setting to work.

  Lev was lying across her, but Alice was not conscious of his weight. She felt blurred and primitive, satiated and insatiable. It was as if she had shed her skin, making her feel everything with immeasurably greater intensity, at once incredibly fragile and incredibly strong.

  He stirred and she pulled him closer, holding him like a child after a nightmare. Around him ebbed her discomfort, her pain, her tension; her life as she’d known it, in fact.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, and she knew the truth of this only at the moment she spoke it, as though thought and speech had also become one. “For a very long time, I think.”

  “When I first saw you,” he replied, “I knew I’d met you before. I’d heard your voice, I’d smelled your fragrance. I’d already tasted you before I kissed you. I didn’t need to touch you to know how you felt. You’re inside me too.”

  “Perhaps you could start calling me Alice, then,” she said, and they laughed.

  Alice left her car at the distillery. She wanted to get some air. More, she chided herself, she wanted an excuse to return to Red October tomorrow. Besides, the half-bottle of Tolstoy they’d shared afterward had surely made her too drunk to drive, though she must have been the only person in Moscow who cared about that.

  She walked around the west side of the Kremlin, where the snow was thick on slopes that fell steeply away from the imposing crimson walls. Under the benevolent and indulgent eyes of their parents, a few children were sledding on trays, flattened bin liners or simply their own asses. Alice passed two women perched on a bench with their bottoms on the rim of the backrest and their feet on the seat where snow was compacted between the slats.

  “Children are the flowers of life,” one said, watching the sledders.

  “Yeah—on their parents’ graves,” the other replied.

  In the darkness, it seemed to Alice that the street lamps glowed with the brilliance of searchlights, illuminating everything in crystal clarity.

  An old woman glided smoothly along, only her head and torso visible above snowdrifts piled high on grass verges. When her whole body became visible, Alice saw that her feet were trotting along nineteen to the dozen, a furious motion entirely at odds with the serene progress of her upper half. Alice thought of a swimming duck, fluid on top but paddling like fury underneath; she thought of herself.

  She reached the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was five to seven, and they changed the guard every hour. It would be good to see the ceremony, Alice thought, hoping it would slow the pace of her chattering heart. She stood by the barriers and read the plaque that told her that the soldier—your name is unknown, your deeds immortal—had died at mile 41 on the airport road, the point at which the Red Army had halted the German advance on Moscow.

  The tomb and eternal flame were guarded by two sentries in small glass shelters. They held bayonets in their right hands and their feet were aligned at ten to two. Their replacements came goose-stepping in perfect synchronicity. A score of people had joined Alice now, most of them materializing in the last couple of minutes as though from the ether. She smelled vodka on breaths, heard giggling and the fizz of soft-drink cans being opened. An old woman was crying; perhaps she’d lost her husband to the Nazis. Her companion tutted at the disrespectful young.

  It was not until the guard had been changed that Alice realized the reason for the laughter: the eternal flame had gone out.

  Alice took a tube of mints from her coat pocket and popped a couple into her mouth. She didn’t want Lewis to smell vodka, or worse, on her.

  The door was on the latch; he was home. She took a deep breath and stepped inside. “Hi,” she called, and her voice didn’t waver. She listened to it as though it had come from outside her skull, and almost nodded in approval: she’d caught just the right tone.

  “Hi,” he called back.

  “I’m in the bedroom.” His unsuspecting voice brought home to Alice the enormity of what she’d done. Lewis trusted her implicitly, and she’d betrayed him. What cut her most was the blithe ignorance in his words; he had no idea what had just happened. Even if he had, would he have believed it? For all his intellect and medical aptitude, Lewis was in many ways a simple soul. If he wasn’t capable of something, he didn’t see how anyone else could be. Depravity and immorality were alien to him. Lewis would no more have considered being unfaithful than he’d have stuck needles in his eyes.

  Alice felt a keening of dereliction. She’d failed Lewis, failed their marriage; failed herself.

  She went into the bedroom and kissed Lewis lightly on the lips, once. Not too passionate, not too distant. Again, right on target.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” he said.

  For Alice, the room seemed to hold in still life for a moment; only her pulse hammered. She forced herself to take a long, deep breath, an attempt to lasso her heart rate, which she disguised as a show of exasperation. “Such as?”

  “If you’re not telling me, Alice, then I wouldn’t know. Would I?”

  She switched from misunderstood vexation to wounded indignation. “Lewis, what are you trying to insinuate? I was late because I was working.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant. I don’t suspect you of having an affair, darling. At least, not beyond the one you’re already having.”

  “You’ve lost me.” She almost believed it herself. “What affair?”

  “The one with this—” Lewis reached into the wardrobe and pulled out a bottle of vodka. The rush of relief was so strong that it made Alice want to vomit, which in turn made her laugh. She could drink vodka till the cows came home, but the sight of it almost made her puke.

  “Oh, that.” She flicked an airy wrist. “I bought it the other day, the same time as I got that blouse and those jeans on Neglinnaya. I must have just put it in with them when I was unpacking and forgot all about it.” She felt shame at the lie, pride at the ease with which it came. Lewis scratched at a thin strip of sideburn; he was unconvinced. “Come on,” Alice pressed. “It’s not even open, is it?”

  “It was hidden among your clothes.”

  “It was not hidden.”

  “It was jammed underneath a pile of sweaters.”

  “You were looking through my drawers?”

  “You’d deliberately concealed it.”

  “I said, were you looking…?”

  “Alice!” The unexpected sharpness of his voice made her jump.

  They sighed in almost perfect stereo. “All right, all right,” said Alice. “I did hide it.”

  “Thank you. Why did you hide it?”

  “Because you think I drink too much.”

  “You do drink too much.”

  “I hid it because I didn’t want to annoy you. I realized we already had some, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just buried it there and forgot all about it. I shouldn’t have bought it, if that’s what you want to hear. I shouldn’t have bought it.”

  “So why did you?”

  “I told you, I thought we needed some. And besides, I’d had a shitty couple of days at work. It’s all over now. Things are going ahead, the pressure’s off for a while.”

  “I don’t know why you need to drink so much.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t loosen up about it.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Just because I don’t like to get drunk doesn’t mean I’m uptight. I’m just not mad about losing control.”

  Oh, I am, thought Alice, I am.

  34

  Saturday, January 25, 1992

  There had be
en a Mafia shootout at the Intourist Hotel on Tverskaya, and traffic was snarled even worse than usual around Red Square. In a classic case of bolting every stable door long after even the slowest nag would have left, the police had closed all roads within a quarter-mile radius, but only after two hours of letting people walk in and out of the hotel unhindered. Now the police were engaged in a futile hunt for clues, cavorting around Lenin’s mausoleum as if they’d found him resurrected.

  Alice was angry, not merely at the delay but at Lev. He hadn’t been at Red October when she’d gone to pick up the Mercedes. Not that she’d have known what to say to him in the cold, sober light of a winter morning, but she’d have liked to have had the option of making a tongue-tied, quasi-teenage fool of herself, that was all. Either way, she was in no mood to sit in traffic for hours.

  The jam was even worse than a Boston rubberneck, when drivers slowed to a crawl to check out an accident on the other side of the road. Alice pulled out of the line, turned hard left and headed through a no-entry sign onto a side street. The road was empty and she’d almost made it to the other end, when a traffic policeman stepped smartly out from between two parked cars and twirled his baton at her like a drum majorette. “Stop!”

  Her first reaction was to pretend she hadn’t seen him, but if her vision was that bad, then she shouldn’t have been anywhere near the wheel of a car in the first place. Besides, the cop would simply radio through to the next guy down the line, who’d give her twice as much hell. She pulled over, and the policeman smirked when he saw her yellow license plates; foreigners are easy shakedowns because they can usually spare more money than time. Harry counted on being stopped about once every two weeks, Bob once a week—it was a black thing, he averred. At least her plates were clean, Alice thought. The slightest splash of mud sends dollar signs whirring behind policemen’s eyes.

  Alice pulled the vehicle documents from the sun visor and her personal ones from her purse, checking instinctively that she had them all: the tekhpasport, which gave her name and vehicle registration number; the tekhosmotr, which confirmed that the car was road-worthy (making it the nation’s biggest-selling work of fiction); her international driver’s license, open at the Cyrillic page; and her Russian visa and work permit. The cops always ask to see them all, and if any are absent or expired, then it’s the long walk home and a car abandoned to the tender mercies of Muscovites. “Without documents,” the Russians like to say, “you’re shit.”