Vodka

by Boris Starling

  Alice’s hangover this morning was at level two. She padded to the bathroom on legs that felt like suet and looked at herself in the mirror. Tiny blood vessels had burst along her nose and cheeks; her hands trembled when she held them in front of her. She dry-heaved over the basin, and saw her reflection in the curved metal of the faucets. Her face was stretched and distorted; now long and flat, now bending around on itself, now back together with a snap.

  The phone was ringing. It was early in the morning, no one called at this time without good reason. Alice hurried into the living room, her head lurching in protest at the motion.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded as though she was swallowing a mouthful of molasses.

  “It’s me,” Lev said, and her heart gave a quickstep of joy. Hearing his voice was always a thrill, as if he were not quite real, someone she could only love as much as she did if he were a figment of her imagination. “You can’t have seen Pravda this morning?” he added.

  “Why not?”

  “Because otherwise you’d have called me.”

  Pravda had it all, every last detail, or so it seemed: a copy of Presidential Decree 182, testaments from sources within distillery and government alike, details of the scams Alice had uncovered, the attempt to sack Lev and the subsequent walkout, and of course Lev’s affair with Alice. The story ran across the first seven pages, and the reporters had done as thorough and efficient a job as they had on the child killings, to which this new story of course made reference.

  Alice was summoned to the Kremlin. Borzov himself wanted to see her.

  Lev and Arkin were there too. It was too early even for Borzov to have started drinking, though not too early to have stopped him working up a fury. “What the fuck is all this?” He flicked the back of his hand against a copy of Pravda. “What the hell are you two doing, sleeping with each other? Are you mad?”

  No, Alice thought, just in love. But she didn’t think it would be particularly helpful to say so.

  “Fools, fools, fools, all around,” Borzov said. “If Anatoly Nikolayevich had the choice, he’d sack the lot of you and start again from scratch. But it’s too late, the auction’s ten days away, we haven’t got time. On the other hand, ten days isn’t long, we can hold out till then. So here’s what we have to do.”

  This was what Arkin had meant, Alice saw, when he’d talked about Borzov being on an upswing. This was a crisis, a real threat to his power; this was where he came alive. He pointed at Arkin. “Kolya, you’re in charge of the government response. Deny everything. Say it’s all nonsense cooked up by the enemies of reform. Tell Pravda—and every other paper and TV station—that the next time they repeat such lies, we’ll shut them down.” Alice opened her mouth to protest, and shut it again almost immediately. She knew what they’d say, that this was Russia, this was how things were done here. “Flat denials. Act like it’s an effort for you even to lower yourself to the level of answering such crap.”

  Borzov turned to Lev. “Red October: the president doesn’t want a peep out of them, not a fucking peep. Tell them you’re doing everything for their own good, blame it on zealous reformers. The president knows what kind of hold you have over your workers—use that now, keep them sweet.

  “And you, Mrs. Liddell … You must deal with the West. They hope the new Russia will be their grateful handmaiden. Right now it’s a wild and willful hooligan, but tell them it won’t be like that forever and it shouldn’t undermine their support for reform. What’s important is that things get done, not how they’re done—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, all that. Talk to Washington, London, Paris and all the number-crunchers in Frankfurt and Geneva. They’re the ones you must answer to.”

  “You seem to have forgotten my husband,” she said.

  It was all Alice could do to put one foot in front of the other. The knots in her stomach seemed to be tying her limbs to the spot. It took five attempts before she finally succeeded in inserting her key into the lock, and she almost fell over herself as she stepped through the door. The Marriage of Figaro was playing on the stereo—an indication of Lewis’s state of mind; he hated Mozart. Time to face the music, Alice thought, and tried to force a smile.

  She went into the living room. Lewis looked at her without speaking, and his silence, so laden with accusation, hurt and betrayal, unnerved her more than any amount of shouting and screaming would have. Alice burst into tears: great heaving sobs, the way a child cries.

  Merciless in his stillness, Lewis didn’t move a muscle. He waited for Alice to catch her breath and dry her eyes. He’d have waited there all day, it seemed to her.

  “It’s true, then,” he said.

  She jerked her head, an approximation of a nod.

  “Yes. It’s true.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And me?”

  “Oh, Lewis.” He waited her out again. She took a deep breath, knowing that no matter how much the truth might hurt, the lying hurt more.

  “Do you love me?” he repeated.

  “No. I don’t.” She looked away as she said this, not wanting to see his face. “I’ve tried to love you. But I can’t deceive myself anymore, Lewis. I love him.”

  It was, Alice thought, as though she’d been skating on the surface her whole life. Hairline cracks in the ice give you glimpses of what it’s really like beneath, but afraid of the danger, you steer away. Then suddenly one of those cracks opens up anyway and drags you down—and that’s life, cold and dirty and exhilarating and a straight fight for survival. And the more you fight the more alive you feel.

  Lewis was shaking his head, more in bewilderment than anything else. It had never occurred to him that he might love someone else, and therefore it had never occurred to him that Alice might; that was the way his mind worked. “No,” he said, more to himself than her. “No. You must love me—look at you, you wouldn’t be crying like that otherwise.”

  “Of course I’m crying, Lewis. I’m turning my life inside out.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Exactly four weeks, she thought, though it seemed like four years. “What are you doing, Alice? Looking for excitement? Glamour and glitz, is that what seduced you? Because you want to live dangerously?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Of course it is. I can see it all, Alice, I know you. I’m too dull for you, is that it? Too boring, too dependable? Just remember this: the problem with being swept off your feet is that you tend to land damn hard on your ass.”

  “Lewis, you couldn’t sweep a damn floor. He makes me feel—”

  “Don’t blame me for this, Alice. Blame it on—oh, I don’t know, those crazy hours you’ve been working, or my shifts at the hospital. We’re displaced, Alice, both of us. We haven’t given enough time to our marriage. We can change that, starting now. I’ll take a few months off, we’ll talk about it. We’ll thrash things out, clear the air, start again, sort out your drinking. That’s what has brought all this on—drinking and lying.”

  “What lying?”

  “Screwing someone behind my back—that’s not lying? It’s the drink—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “Alice, you have a drinking problem. That’s why you’ve taken up lying—that’s what people with drinking problems do. They compartmentalize, and they lie. You’ve lied so much that you no longer know which way is up.”

  “Lewis, stop looking for excuses. It’s too late. Yes, I feel guilty about lying and hurting you. Yes, I feel responsible. But I don’t love you.”

  “And you love him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m your husband, and I love you.”

  “Love!” she said. “You don’t know what it is, Lewis. The love I have with Lev is something you’ll never understand.”

  Bob, Christina and Harry would all side with Lewis. They were already on their way over to console him. Alice’s friendship with Galina was dead. She went back to Lev. He was all she had.

/>   62

  Saturday, February 22, 1992

  For Lewis, it wasn’t the first few hours that were the worst; it was the morning after a sleepless, solo night, with the shock wearing off and reality beginning to bite. He went to the hospital, driving without consciously seeing the roads. He wasn’t due on shift for another twenty-four hours, but if he couldn’t help himself, the least he could do was help others.

  Lev and Alice spent the day cooped up in the Kotelniki penthouse, trying to shut themselves off from the world. They were riding out the storm, what else could they do? They’d both done as Borzov had asked, as had Arkin. The government was denying everything, Red October’s workers had been pacified, and the West had been reminded what realpolitik was all about.

  “This place is bad for me,” she said.

  “This place is in your blood. You love the drama of it all.”

  “It’s still bad for me. If it wasn’t for you, I’d leave.”

  “Alice, you’d stay here even without me.”

  “Would I?”

  She was lying on her stomach, naked. He took her right foot in his hands, cradling the heel in one palm while rubbing the other down the length of her sole, her soul, slowly pulling each toe toward him in turn, smiling as she shuddered at the touch. When he’d done the same with her other foot, he began to kiss all the way up the backs of her legs, around the orbs of her buttocks, lingering at their summits, then the downy hair at the base of her spine, feeling for it with the dryness at the very tip of his tongue.

  Alice rolled onto her back and reached for him. Her head hung over the side of the bed, hair sprayed on the carpet, her pleasure magnified as the blood rushed to her head.

  “Yes,” Lev said as they lay flushed and panting afterward. “You would.”

  He offered her some Smirnoff Black, just about the best vodka in Russia. It’s made from the highest quality neutral grain spirit, distilled in a copper-pot still to preserve the grain’s natural mellowness and flavors before being filtered through Siberian silver-birch charcoal. Alice tasted tones of light rye overlaid with creamy charcoal and the slightest hint of acetone, tanginess ending with a brief sharp burn.

  “You’re my vodka,” she told him.

  “How so?”

  “How many ways do you want? No matter how much I see of you, I always want more; too much is not enough. I count the time between when I last saw you and when I’m next going to see you. You drip-feed life back into me. It’s the way you make me feel, up here”—she pointed to her head—“and in here.” She indicated her heart. “The way you make me glow, the way you make me forget my troubles…”

  “Even though I’m the biggest trouble of all?”

  “Even though you’re the biggest trouble of all.”

  63

  Sunday, February 23, 1992

  It was Defenders of the Motherland Day, originally declared in memory of a Russian victory over German forces at St. Petersburg on that date in 1918, now the second most important militarist holiday after Victory Day itself. From his office in the Kremlin, Borzov looked down at the Red Square crowd through blue-tinted bulletproof windows. The color-staining, installed to protect the Kremlin treasures from sunlight, made the world outside look even colder and bleaker than it really was. The bulletproof glass bulged and refracted; seen through this lens the crowd seemed to repeat itself, the distortion a mocking, physical manifestation of the ways in which the man up here was out of touch with those down there. Borzov wondered what he’d unleashed.

  Red Square was packed. Above a sea of fur hats and flat caps swayed banners in the stark colors of protest: communist red, the nationalist blend of black, silver and gold. It was hard to tell who’d have been more stunned by this unlikely pairing of far left and far right, the Romanovs or the revolutionaries who’d murdered them.

  The security forces had bickered about who was supposed to do what, so they’d been woefully unprepared when the protesters had arrived and the cordon erected to protect Red Square had been broken with embarrassing ease. Now the police, the OMON and the army troops could do little but form a sullen ring around the protesters and try to ignore the chanting and taunting. Their eyes darted nervously under ill-fitting helmets; when they banged their truncheons against cracked riot shields, it was more to lift their own spirits and keep warm than to intimidate the demonstrators.

  Borzov’s meaty, ruddy face creased with a sly smile. The combination made him look tipsy even when he was absolutely sober, scheming when he was at his most open and menacing when he was at his friendliest—none of which applied at this precise moment.

  “The president will address the people personally,” he said. “It’s time to show those ungrateful bastards who’s boss.”

  There was a time when Borzov had worked crowds like a pro, chatting to everyone within range. Charm had flowed from him like liquid gold. Haughty and heroic in repose, his face had seemed transformed into that of a mischievous boy when he smiled. “Let’s have a question-and-answer session,” he used to say. “No holds barred.” No Russian politician had ever done this, and Borzov’s spontaneous openness had won him the admiration and affection of the people. Counselor, confidant, faith healer—they had told him their problems, and he had listened. When they were desperate for truth and hope, Borzov had given them both; in return they’d given him adoration.

  No more. Puffy-faced and enclosed within a phalanx of bodyguards and officials, Borzov seemed to have aged a decade. Cocooned from the world by a wall of muscle and deference, he no longer had that precious connection with the people. Now he stood atop Lenin’s mausoleum and preached capitalism.

  “When the distillery is privatized, and the reactionaries have seen the benefits and no longer rail against those who’d make this country better, then Red October can produce a people’s vodka. A high-quality vodka that the man in the street can afford.” He puffed out his chest. “People of Russia, Anatoly Nikolayevich pledges this to you as your president: you will drink in comfort and safety. Anatoly Nikolayevich’s name will be on the label, and above that his picture, so that the factory worker in Yekaterinburg, the salesman in Irkutsk, the football coach in Vladivostok, the soldier in Kazan—they’ll all give thanks to their president every time they take a hundred grams.”

  The audience laughed and Borzov smiled, unwilling or unable to appreciate that the laughter was at him rather than with him. Protesters jeered and chanted. They held posters portraying Borzov as a vulture picking at a carcass, and his administration as Jews with yarmulkes, long beards, wide lips and hooked noses, all crammed inside a synagogue.

  The deprivations Russia was suffering were serious, but hardly unprecedented. Now that Western levels of prosperity were seemingly around the corner, however, they felt more severe than before. De Tocqueville identified a similar phenomenon during the French Revolution: the most dangerous moment came not when the people were at their poorest, but when their expectations of significant improvement were raised only to be frustrated.

  The protesters began to chant. “Borzov, go now!” With every repetition it spread and lifted until the entire multitude had taken it up. Behind the voices came a metallic banging, tuneless and yet somehow orchestral: it was the sound of thousands of empty pots and pans, symbolizing the protesters’ hunger, clanging in unison.

  Around Red Square, the police flinched, the OMON snarled, the troops twitched.

  More noise and yet more, as loud as it could go and louder. This was taking on a primal momentum of its own. Policemen and soldiers retreated behind their riot shields and backed up against their vehicles. Some of the men were scared, some sympathetic, others intolerant and itching for a scrap; a shot rang out as a panicky finger pulled a trigger—there was no way he’d have heard an order over this noise—and then it was all going off, the familiar rattling of gunfire, protesters recoiling and surging forward, old women trying to escape and skinheads rushing to the action, flurries of skirmishing limbs, tear-gas canisters tracing arcin
g clouds through the air, people choking and flailing and trampling. And somehow the television cameramen held themselves steady and trained unblinking lenses on the fighting.

  The din carried to the Yauza River and through the thick windows of Lev’s penthouse. Alice ran into the living room and turned on the television. Channel One, the government channel, was showing an Uzbek film; Channel Two, more supportive of the protesters, was carrying live coverage. Sounds from outside mingled with the broadcast in eerie, staggered echoes.

  “Jesus Christ, Lev, come quickly.”

  Alice had never seen so many abominably twisted faces, so much odium and animosity. They really hated what she stood for, what she was hoping to do for them. She rocked back on her haunches and stood up, still staring at the screen.

  “We’re trying to help you, for fuck’s sake,” she cried.

  This wasn’t just Defenders of the Motherland Day; it was also the forty-eighth anniversary of the Chechen deportations, when Russian troops had rounded up women and children, and those men who weren’t away at the front, fighting the Nazis. According to folk belief, the day had been predicted by tribal elders who forecast that there would be snow at their backs—and indeed, though it was spring, a sudden snowfall had completed the fulfillment of the prophecy.

  Villages had been sealed off and communications cut as lend-lease Studebaker trucks drew up to transport everyone to Grozny station, where hundreds of freight trains were lined up and waiting. The Russian soldiers had been drunk. They had given the Chechens twenty-five minutes to get ready before sending them off, thousands of miles across the desert wastes. The deportees were fed once a week, nowhere to wash, nowhere to piss, nowhere to shit, typhoid in the carriages, the harshness of the Kazak winters matched only by the coldness of the Kazaks themselves, who had been told that here were cannibals come to drink their blood.