Vodka

by Boris Starling

  I couldn’t have done it to adults, they’d have shrunk away from me, the men would have been too strong for me. Besides, they’re all awash with vodka, not like the kids. I’d offer them a hundred grams first, just to check, and if they didn’t drink it then that was it, fate sealed. Those children were victims of the Afghan war, through no fault of their own, just like we who fought there were victims. Those children died because of that war, as surely as if they’d stood on a land mine or been gunned down by a sniper.

  I’m sorry for one more thing: that I did it so close to home. You’ve always been good to me, Lev, and it was never aimed at you. The first ones were those who were nearest and easiest, and that meant Prospekt Mira. After that, when you suspected the Chechens and Karkadann used that against you, well, it was perfect for me, I could keep on knowing that your suspicions were elsewhere. I put Modestas’s body in the warehouse—in here—after the Chechens attacked, knowing the two would be linked. That wasn’t the Chechens who broke into our apartment and killed the Archangel blues—it was me. I was desperate, I thought if I could drink their blood I wouldn’t have to kill another child, but it was no good, my body rejected it. Only human blood would do.

  I ask only one thing: when you kill me, make sure it’s final. Sever my head from my body and place it between my legs. Perhaps I’ll still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from my neck. Or put a stake through my heart, bury me near a crossroads to confuse me, stake my corpse into its grave, bind my hands and arms to prevent my body from escaping, dismember my corpse and bury the pieces separately, burn my corpse to ashes, tear out my heart, throw boiling oil on my grave, bury me facedown, or with a willow cross under each armpit and one on my chest, put garlic in my mouth, break my neck, string wild roses around the outside of my coffin. Just make sure you release me from all this.

  In the warehouse, not a trace of movement.

  After long beats, Lev stood up and went over to Rodion. He was three or four times his size; a man was this much bigger than his pet dog.

  “You’ve made your own law, Rodya, and lived by it. But it’s not for you to decide how you die. I won’t indulge your wish to be beheaded, but nor will I make you suffer unnecessarily. You’ve suffered enough. I sentence you to ten years without the right of correspondence.”

  Ten years without the right of correspondence was the Soviet euphemism for a death sentence.

  Lev stepped around behind the amputee, held Rodion’s head still with one massive hand, raised his own revolver with the other, and dispatched a single bullet through Rodion’s brain.

  Rodion’s body was dumped outside Petrovka at dusk.

  Sveta and Galya hadn’t wanted to see Irk. He’d led the chase for Rodya, and so they blamed him for Rodya’s capture and death. He’d abandoned Rodya to the Mafia, they’d said, and now no one would ever be brought to justice for his murder.

  No, Irk had said, he hadn’t abandoned anybody. He’d simply been given no choice.

  They hadn’t listened. “Out, out,” they’d screamed. “Fuck off, leave us to our grief!” It wasn’t rational, it wasn’t how he’d have reacted, but what else could he do but obey? Even if they had known, what would they have done? A wife might have turned her husband in, but a mother her son? Never.

  Irk remembered the relief and joy on the faces of the Americans when he’d brought Josh home, but it was scant consolation. The Khruminsches had been Irk’s only friends in Moscow. He was on his own again.

  87

  Wednesday, March 18, 1992

  The phone was ringing when she returned to the apartment, and she ignored it. Alice didn’t feel like answering, whoever it was. She put the food into the fridge and freezer, and still the phone rang; she ran her hands under the faucet and dried them on a dishcloth, and still the phone rang. They’d surely hang up the moment she went to pick it up, but no, it was still going.

  “Hello?”

  “I need to see you.”

  It was Lev, his voice rolling like thunder as it jagged lightning in her heart. It seemed eons before Alice managed to speak.

  “No.”

  “I need to see you,” he repeated.

  “I’ve a good life here. I’m calm. I don’t need to stir everything up again.”

  “Alice, please.”

  He’d never begged her before, not that she could remember.

  You can tell yourself you’re not in love with someone, you can erect thousands of barriers in your mind against them, and if you try hard enough you can convince yourself that you’ve stepped over the very thin line into hatred. You can do all this, as Alice had done, and sometimes it’s simply not enough.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  Lev took her in his arms and held her for long minutes of silence. She froze against him at first, but gradually his warmth seeped into her and began to thaw her. When he started to apologize, she turned her face to his and kissed him to shut him up.

  A sort of homecoming. They’d been apart two weeks; for them both, it felt like two lifetimes.

  Alice drank her first and second glasses to get over the shock of seeing Lev, her third and fourth to celebrate their reunion. She was halfway through her fifth when he put a hand over the rim.

  She looked at him first in sharp rebuke, and then with uncertain wariness. Finally, his silence made her understand what he meant.

  “Do you think I need help?” she asked.

  There, she’d said it. It hung like a pendulum, swishing back and forth in the air between them.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” It sounded too defensive; he hadn’t given her the answer she wanted.

  “In all the time I’ve known you, sweetheart, I’ve never once seen you do this—” Lev moved his hand across his throat as though he were cutting it, the gesture Russians make when they’re full. “You drink and drink. You’ve never said, ‘That’s enough.’”

  “If I need help, are you going to make me seek it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Surprised.

  “How could I make you do something, Alice? You’d just dig your heels in and do exactly the opposite. You know what you’re like. If I asked you to do something, you’d cross an ocean; if I told you to do something, you wouldn’t cross the room. You’ll seek help when you want it, not before, and only you can decide when that’ll be. But yes, I think you do need help. And, yes, when you go and find it, I’ll be there for you.”

  She knew all the cold medical facts; as a teenager she’d tried to lecture her mother with them. Alcohol abuse can affect the brain, the liver, the kidneys, the stomach, the intestines, the pancreas, the heart, the arteries and veins. It can lead to memory loss, blackouts, premature aging, chronic coughing, malnutrition, the shakes, tingling sensations in toes and fingers, skin problems and ulcers. Social considerations aside, women are more at risk than men; because they’re lighter, they can absorb and metabolize alcohol quicker, and can therefore end up sustaining greater damage even if they drink less.

  “I drink in the evenings, sometimes in the afternoons too—at parties, or when work demands it, or when I’m with you, nice and relaxed and happy like we are now,” she said. “I know what alcoholism is—my mother was one, remember? Real alcoholics drink all the time, morning, noon and night. I’ve never missed a day of work because of alcohol; I’ve never called in sick, I’ve never had to go home because my hangover was too bad to concentrate. Real alcoholics can’t keep jobs, they can’t get out of bed in the morning because they’re so paralyzingly hungover. Sometimes they even sleep in the gutter. I’ve certainly never done that.”

  “I never said ‘alcoholic,’ Alice.” Lev’s voice was soft. “You did.”

  Alice slugged a capful of vodka when Lewis was getting his coat and followed him out to the car. She had the keys; he slid reluctantly into the passenger seat. They’d have walked, but it was hardly a night for promenaders: the wind circled and searched, trying to suck their hearts
from their chests and the flesh off their bones.

  They went to the Aragvi, a Georgian restaurant on Tverskaya next to a statue of Yuri Dolgoruky, Moscow’s founder. Georgians like to say, only half in jest, that Dolgoruky had at least had the sense to create his city near a good place to eat.

  A car alarm was blaring by the restaurant entrance, its tune shifting every few seconds—now simple two-tone, now a police siren, space invaders, something that sounded like a Tarzan imitation. It stopped just as Alice and Lewis passed it.

  “That’s a shame,” she said. “I was hoping it would launch into the ‘1812 Overture.’”

  The moment they were inside the Aragvi’s front door, they began to shed layers. The restaurant, like almost every other building in Moscow, was overheated. Some buildings needed their air-conditioning on constantly, even during winter, to stop their rooms from turning into saunas. Exterior and interior temperatures were rarely, if ever, in sync.

  The coatroom attendant gave Lewis and Alice ticket numbers 40 and 42 for their coats; there was no 41, as that was when Hitler had invaded Russia, and no 45 either, because victory over the hated Nazis was sacred, to be enjoyed by everybody rather than any specific individual.

  A waiter led them to their table and asked them what they wanted to drink.

  “I’ll take me a glass of red wine,” Lewis said.

  “I’ll have a Smirnoff Black,” Alice said.

  The waiter nodded approvingly. “Large or small glass?”

  “A bottle.”

  “I don’t think so, Alice,” Lewis said. He turned to the waiter. “A glass will be fine.”

  “A bottle,” Alice repeated.

  “A real man would help you drink it, rather than argue about it,” the waiter muttered to himself, and Alice laughed as he departed.

  They sat in uncomfortable silence. Alice picked a couple of wrapped sugar lumps from the bowl and turned them over in her hands. The wrappers were patterned in an unfortunate brown, white and black motif that made them look at first glance like cigarette butts. Lewis inspected the artificial flowers.

  When the waiter returned, Alice virtually snatched the Smirnoff from him. She drained her first glass in one gulp and was halfway through her second when she saw Lewis’s expression.

  “Are you going to be like this all evening?” he said.

  His tone made her childishly defensive. “Probably.”

  “Well, if you won’t have a good time, I will.”

  The waiter was still there, ready to take their order and pretending not to hear their argument. Alice asked for mushrooms baked in sour cream and trout with nuts and plum sauce. Lewis chose a selection of cold fish delicacies and spicy red bean stew.

  Alice was still just about sober enough for Lewis’s determined jolliness to soften rather than irritate her. To forestall another argument, she veered to neutral topics—films, books, plans for the summer—anything, in fact, other than the invisible elephants around which they skated with studied nonchalance.

  The level in the bottle of Smirnoff Black went steadily south. She was getting very drunk.

  “I think it’s time we left,” Lewis said.

  “Why? We still have dessert and coffee to come.”

  “Not the restaurant—Moscow. I think it’s time we left Moscow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I hate it here. And it’s not as if you’ve got any reason to stay, is it?”

  Lewis could make the most throwaway comments sound hurtful. Alice bit her lip. The vodka afterburn hummed under her tongue.

  “Is it?” he persisted.

  It was bubbling inside her now, a rising tide: Tell him, tell him and get it over with. Alice lifted the candle from the center of the table and began to play with it, twisting it through two planes to make the wax drip in different patterns down the side.

  “For God’s sake, Alice, it’s a simple enough question.”

  Nerves jangling, she started suddenly, involuntarily, tipping the dangling columns of molten wax onto her fingers, right on her wedding ring. She yelped in pain and scrabbled to pull the ring off, metal on both sides hot against her skin. It came off in a rush, spinning across the table while Alice shook her hands to ease the pain. A livid crimson weal marked the place where the ring had been. She’d been branded.

  “I saw him today,” she blurted. “I saw him, I saw Lev, and I’m going to do it to you again, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry, but it’s him I love, him I can’t live without, and I want to be here with him, here in Moscow.”

  Alice was up and out the door before Lewis could speak. She couldn’t bear to look at his face or hear his reply, she couldn’t bear to watch his heart being broken again. She didn’t pause to get her coat from the coat-room; she didn’t even take what was left of the vodka.

  There were grim flashes that may or may not have been the green snake of drunken hallucination; fleeing from herself like a dog with rabies, Alice could no longer tell.

  She passed a conga line of old women standing shoulder to shoulder, stamping their feet while their blank eyes gazed into the distance. The women’s gray heads and black ankle-length coats made them look like crows, and their rough hands held out merchandise varied enough to have filled several bazaars: loaves, Ukrainian sausages, Chinese handkerchiefs, T-shirts, used boots, old cameras, faucets, showerheads, milk, laundry detergent, lamps, washbasins, doorknobs, frying pans, toothpaste, glue, string, old shoes and ersatz designer clothing.

  Next to the women, two men were slumped underneath a statue of Lenin with his right arm flung out before him as if he was directing traffic. There was nothing else for him to direct anymore, after all. The men were brandishing a bottle of vodka. As Alice staggered past, they called out to her. “Hey, you! Yes, you, will you be the third one?”

  Ah-ha, she thought—a vodka troika. When it comes to drinking, three is the lucky number. She changed course, listing like a galleon, and headed for her newfound companions.

  A well-dressed woman hissed at Alice. “It’s bad enough for the men, let alone you.”

  Alice put her right thumb between her first and second fingers and jabbed the ensemble in the woman’s direction. “Get stuffed,” she snarled.

  She knelt down by the river of vodka and drank deeply, trying to drown herself.

  She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, she was alone in the cold and the dark. There was a weight on her chest, which she felt was a rough, heavy coat; someone must have left it for her, seeing how she was so unsuitably dressed. Beside her was a bottle of vodka. Drink me, it whispered to her, sweetly seductive, and she knew that if she did, she’d die, either of alcohol poisoning or exposure. Her job was gone, and now her husband too. Would it be so wrong to open up the hemlock? All she’d have to do was stay here and let death come; it wouldn’t be long before he found her.

  Alice was in that nonmaterial world on the borderline between sleep and wakefulness, where her surroundings consisted of visions and thoughts that momentarily arose and dissolved in consciousness; a transitional woman in a transitional nation.

  There was a man in uniform standing over her, and then all was black.

  88

  Thursday, March 19, 1992

  When Alice woke again, the acrid smell and the drying dampness around her groin let her know even before she’d opened her eyes that she’d soiled herself, and badly. For one horrifying moment, she thought she was back in captivity again, but the voices she could hear were female and Russian, not Chechen. When she forced her eyelids apart, she found herself looking at a vision of hell: a room full of harridans, their faces drunken, torpid and unwomanly, their clothes thick with dirt, all of them expectorating staccato bursts of foul language in between hysterical giggles. Alice didn’t know where she was, or what time it was; she’d lost all those senses, and if she wasn’t careful she’d lose herself too.

  With the special tenderness and patience that a Russian feels for a drunkard, someone had placed a pillow u
nder Alice’s head and some sheets of newspaper under her legs.

  A young woman in jeans and a sweater came over. Her black hair was streaked with gray and cropped close to the skull; her front teeth were askew, and her nose was so wide that her small oval glasses could hardly make it over the bridge. It was not a pretty face, but it was a kind one.

  “Where am I?” Alice asked.

  “You’re in the aquarium,” the woman said, then, seeing Alice’s baffled expression: “one of the sobering-up centers. I’m a volunteer here. My name’s Nadhezda.”

  “Nadhezda” meant hope. Alice looked around the room again. Hopeless would have been a more appropriate name. “Who are all these people?” she asked.

  Nadhezda pointed to five women in quick succession, going right to left. “That’s Ivana Babushkina. She’s twenty-seven, a technical assistant; she was found in the middle of the street, unable to walk unaided. The one next to her was lying in the doorway of an apartment building; the one next to her was sleeping in a market gateway; that one”—she indicated a woman of pensionable age, still clutching a dog in her arms—“was brought in from the outskirts; and the worst of all, that one in the corner, well, she was drinking away her own son. Cute kid, four years old, and she was offering him to anyone who’d give her a bottle of vodka.”

  Alice screwed her eyes shut, as though when she next opened them she’d be in her own bed, safe and clean and warm. “I don’t belong here, you know,” she heard herself say.

  “Oh, but you do,” Nadhezda replied simply. “Everyone’s equal when they come here.”