Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “Because … of course I do.”

  He handed her a glass and sat down. “Don’t do this to yourself, Galya.”

  “Just tell me. Please.”

  Alice walked into the room.

  “Galya! I didn’t know you were here.” Alice started across the carpet toward her, and then stopped. Her instinctive reaction at seeing Galya had been happiness; it was only afterward that she’d remembered they weren’t friends, and why. They’d liked each other once. To Alice, it seemed as though their quarrels—like everything else—had taken place in another lifetime.

  Lev saw Alice’s confusion, and misinterpreted it. “It’s for medicinal purposes, darling,” he said, gesturing at the vodka. “I’m about to give Galya a nasty shock. Perhaps you’d prefer to leave the room.”

  “I want to see what’s happening in the world,” Alice said, and turned on the television.

  Lev, ignorant of the schism between Alice and Galina; Galina, ignorant of Alice’s long fall to the bottom of the bottle and slow rise back; Alice, ignorant of the magnitude of what Galina had come for. Lev opened his mouth to order Alice out, but that would spark an argument, and he was aware, too aware, of her fragility. Perhaps, he thought, this would be easier if she were there. She could give Galya some support, woman to woman. It was a feeble excuse, and Lev was disgusted at himself for making it, but he turned to Galina anyway.

  “It was quick. He felt no pain.”

  “What was quick?”

  “Rodya’s death.”

  Noise from the corner; a reporter talking excitedly. Would the Spetsnaz still be able to hear over the noise from the television? Galina moved closer to Lev, no longer caring if it seemed strange. “How did he die?”

  “He was shot.”

  “Who shot him?”

  Lev was a vor, and vory killed people, even when those people had worked for them, even when the vor had befriended their families. Vory killed people, and until then Lev had never found it hard to admit. Until a young woman’s relentless, naive probing had weakened him in a way that decades in a jail cell could never have.

  “I shot him.”

  “You shot him?” You, you: that was where she’d laid the emphasis.

  “Yes, I shot him—who else?”

  Where time had raced before, eating up the transmitter’s precious batteries, it suddenly juddered to a halt. For Galina, every second that the Spetsnaz didn’t come kicking down the door and smashing through the windows stretched as long as a Brezhnev speech; and every moment that passed unchanged brought with it imagined scenarios of doom. The transmission had broken down; they were fighting with Lev’s men outside; 21st Century thugs were raping and killing Sveta in revenge for Galina’s treason.

  Galina couldn’t believe what Lev had said; she could believe it all too easily. She raised her glass unsteadily at him, mockery of a toast. “In vodka veritas,” she said.

  “There was no alternative,” Lev said. Why did he feel the need to explain himself? “Years in one of those stinking jails waiting for …” he stumbled over his words, as his voice had seemed momentarily to be coming back at him from the television set: “… waiting for some judge to get off his ass”—there it was again, definitely coming in stereo, and he knew what it meant even as Galina and Alice shot puzzled looks at each other, finally reunited, albeit only in bewilderment. The frequency on which the T-4 was transmitting was too near that of the television channel Alice was watching, and so it was broadcasting Lev’s voice back through the set. Lev knew what the sound meant, every gangster did, they were paranoid about wires.

  Galina, confused, stepped away from Lev’s chair toward Alice, near enough the television set to send a piercing shriek of feedback around the room, and Lev fixed her with the certainty of his glare, deepest hurt and murderous hatred. She knew it must be something to do with the wire. This wouldn’t have happened with the Nagra, Galina thought helplessly. She should have been firmer back at the Kremlin—her, against the two most powerful men in the land, how could she have been?

  “In vodka veritas,” Galina said, and then again, more frantically, “in vodka veritas, in vodka veritas—” the last one little more than a yelp.

  Galina was backing toward the door, Lev hissing and spitting as he rose from his chair like an erupting volcano, Alice asking: “What the hell’s going on?” and it was all Galina could do to keep her legs moving through mists of white panic, and suddenly the world exploded, light and smoke everywhere, and Galina thought for a moment, really believed, that Lev had somehow spontaneously combusted with rage, and as her eyes streamed and she lost all notion of which way was up, she realized that it was of course the Spetsnaz with their thunder-flashes coming to the rescue, and not a moment too soon.

  Two Spetsnaz trussed Galya’s hands behind her back and pressed her head against the floor. When she tried to shout her innocence, she took a smack in the mouth. This was how they worked: secure everyone first, then sort it out later. Bodies writhed through the smoke, disoriented, choking and eyes streaming, Lev was struggling against six men, and it was all they could do to keep him in check.

  There were people everywhere, barking shouts and gunfire in staccato flicks. Alice’s throat hurt, that was the only way she knew she was screaming, because she sure as hell couldn’t hear it above the shots and the yelling and the wet slaps as bodies hit the floor or were flung against walls. She was on her feet now, out into the fresh air of the fire escape and down, down, down, Lev and Galya with her, shins and ankles cracked hard against the metal rungs and the leathered lumps of dead Mafiosi, and this was where the endless circles of deceit had gotten them all, into the back of Spetsnaz trucks and howling through the streets of Moscow.

  Galina was taken home; Lev and Alice were brought to the Kremlin. They were confined to one of the guest apartments, a gilded prison where they were provided with all the comforts and told absolutely nothing. There were guards at their door and outside their window, all silent as Trappist monks; there were no telephones in the apartment, and the nearest they had to contact with the outside world was a television set and the view over the battlements out across the river. In the square below, staff bustled with tables and chairs. Saturday would be Borzov’s seventieth birthday, and a ball was being held in his honor.

  Lev kept constant watch over Alice, reassuring and protecting her in equal measures. They talked until the wee hours before curling around each other, their clothes firmly on. Alice muttered about being embarrassed with all the guards there, and not knowing what was happening to them, but they both knew that excuses did not equal reasons.

  94

  Wednesday, March 25, 1992

  Borzov had summoned Lev; just Lev, not Alice. Before he left her, Lev kissed her hard and told her everything would be all right, and he said it with such sincerity that he almost believed it himself. As they walked to Borzov’s office, he dwarfed the guards who surrounded him. Watching from the window, Alice thought of tugboats escorting a super tanker from harbor.

  Borzov and Arkin were waiting. Vodka was poured and pleasantries exchanged. Arkin handed Lev a copy of Pravda. “A country abandoned by its government,” the headline screamed. Underneath, the text continued in more sober fashion. “Under communism, there was a social contract, guaranteeing a safety net in return for political acquiescence. Now the government continues to run things, but for its own benefit only. It has abandoned the social contract.”

  The figures made depressing reading. Three percent thought the government guaranteed timely payment of wages, pensions and salaries. Another three percent—or perhaps the same three percent—thought that social protection of the unemployed, homeless and needy was all it could be. Six percent thought Russia was moving in the right direction; double that number thought it was stationary. They were clearly misguided, Lev thought; Russia was never stationary. Four percent thought the government was doing a good job fighting organized crime, and eight percent approved of the way in which law and order was m
aintained.

  “What do you think?” Arkin said.

  “The eight percent who approve of law and order is promising.”

  “Anatoly Nikolayevich wants you to come to the chief’s birthday on Saturday,” Borzov said happily, “and he wants you to try and kill him there.”

  The assassination attempt would not be for real, of course. Lev’s gun would be loaded with blanks. The important thing was that it would look real, and therefore engender public sympathy for Borzov and swing back in his favor the public opinion that had been ebbing ever since the August coup and was now, after the shelling of the White House, approaching dangerously low levels. Borzov had no qualms about being authoritarian—a state of emergency was still in effect—but he didn’t want to be unpopular with it. All good dictators are popular at least for a while; one in six Russians still think of Stalin as their greatest leader. But things were changing, and he couldn’t rule as they had in the old days, not indefinitely.

  “Anatoly Nikolayevich believes absolutely in what he’s trying to do,” Borzov said, “and in time the Russian people will too; but he needs that time.”

  So this was the plan, as audacious, radical and harebrained as most Russian programs tend to be. Lev would fire the gun; the bodyguards would overpower him and bundle Borzov out of the room; the press would be told that Lev had gone berserk, even after Borzov had been decent enough to extend him an olive branch by inviting him to the ball; and Lev would be ostensibly jailed. In reality, he and Alice would be free to start a new life wherever they pleased, and Borzov would afford them every resource necessary to do this.

  “It’s absurd,” Lev said.

  “It’s perfect,” Arkin said. “Motive, means, opportunity. It’ll take Anatoly Nikolayevich back to the people, which is where he belongs.”

  It was an article of faith among many Russians that Gorbachev had organized the August coup, Lev thought. Why couldn’t Borzov set up an assassination attempt against himself?

  “You’re asking me to give up everything I have here. Everything I’ve worked for; everything I’ve believed in.” Neither Borzov nor Arkin demurred. “And if I don’t?”

  “You’ve confessed to the murder of Rodion Khruminsch,” Arkin said. “We have it on tape. You’ll spend the rest of your life in Butyurka.”

  Butyurka is one of Moscow’s most notorious jails. It had been the starting point for czarist convoys of prisoners bound for Siberia, a wasteland they’d reached not in cattle trucks or on horseback, but on foot, and in fetters. After the revolution, Butyurka had become an overcrowded transit prison, cramming cells to six times their supposed limit and squeezing two thousand men, including Solzhenitsyn, into the church, where they’d been obliged to drink soup from their coattails. Borzov wasn’t going to dignify Lev as an enemy of the state by sending him back to the Lefortovo, where he’d still have an active network of accomplices.

  He laughed. “Butyurka? I’ve spent half my life in the gulag. You think I care about going to Butyurka?”

  “Before, no. Now …” Arkin let the word hang in the air. “You’d never see your lover again.”

  Borzov was silent, Lev noted. It was Arkin playing the hard man, stabbing home the president’s wishes, his master’s voice.

  “I need time to think,” Lev said.

  “No. No time. Decide now. If you say no, you’ll never see her again. You’ll go straight from here to Butyurka. We’ll take her out of the Savior Gate and dump her in Red Square. You’re all she has left. You can do that to her, abandon her, and then spend the next twenty years climbing the walls of your cell because you chose wrong.”

  “Your methods stink.”

  “My methods are for the greater good.”

  “My?”

  “Our.”

  Lev turned to Borzov. “You have mixed eyes, Anatoly Nikolayevich.”

  “How so?”

  “I see a dreamer in one eye and a fool in the other.”

  Arkin stiffened at the insult, but Borzov laughed; he recognized the truth of it. “Perfect to lead a nation of dreamers and fools, then,” he said.

  95

  Thursday, March 26, 1992

  The Izvestiya front page carried the story of the cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who’d returned to earth yesterday after ten months in space only to discover that, on a salary of fifteen hundred rubles a month, he was more or less broke. Krikalev, Russia’s own Major Tom, had blasted off last May as a resident of Leningrad in the Soviet Union; he’d returned as one of St. Petersburg in Russia. This was the third time he’d tried to land; the coup attempt had kept him aloft last August, and a dispute between Russia and Kazakstan over who owned the Baikonur cosmodrome had repeated the process two months later. Judging by the shock and consternation on his face, Alice thought, Krikalev would rather have stayed up in space until the end of time, far from the madding crowd and all the bullshit. She wondered whether he’d had enough vodka to last him.

  Lev and Alice would go and live in the middle of nowhere. A couple could lose themselves in Russia’s vastness till the end of time, safe from any pursuers. There were places where the locals still didn’t realize communism was no more, and where they’d have cared even less if they had known; places that took days to reach, accessible not by train and car but boat and horseback; places where they didn’t even know who Borzov was.

  In the lamp-washed glow of their Kremlin apartment, they planned their new life together: they’d have a small cottage, outbuildings, a garden with tomato plants down one end, some livestock too, a well, they’d be entirely self-sufficient, at one with the earth like true peasants.

  They’d go to villages where the women would wait for the bread truck, and where they’d gather around and take their loaves, simply and without fuss, when it arrived. There’d be no pushing or jostling, let alone raised voices; everyone would know that they’d get their allocation, so they’d stand in line and gossip quietly. One of the old women would begin to sing “By the Long Road,” and the rest of them would take up the chant, slowly coming in when it felt right to them. An old Russian folk song is like a weir; it may look as though it’s no longer flowing, but in its depths it’s ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates, and its stillness is an illusion.

  Lake Baikal, Lev said; that was where they should start, because Baikal is the perfect metaphor for Russia. It’s unimaginably vast in both dimensions. It holds more water than all five of America’s Great Lakes combined, and it’s steeped in its own ecosystem, teeming with plant and animal species, many of them unique.

  Alice had changed. Before, she couldn’t even have considered living such a timeless existence. Now she was ready to give everything up for Lev. She’d die for him, she said, and insisted on this when he demurred. It’s something that people always say, but she really meant it: she really would.

  It was mutual, he said.

  For Lev and Alice, everything they’d ever believed and lived for had been swept away. That was how they saw each other now, stripped to the bone and beyond.

  96

  Friday, March 27, 1992

  The waiting was almost over. This was the last night they’d spend in Moscow, the city Alice loved so much.

  The schedule for tomorrow had been fully worked out. In the evening, just before the ball, Lev would be given a gun filled with blanks. There’d be dinner, and then Borzov would make a speech. It was then, when everyone was watching, that Lev would make the apparent assassination attempt. Afterward he would be taken to Lefortovo prison, just for show. Any would-be presidential assassin would automatically be taken to Lefortovo, the traditional place of incarceration for enemies of the state. Lev’s presence there, no matter how brief, was therefore imperative to the charade. With appearances satisfied, he’d be secretly removed from Lefortovo later that evening and driven to Domodedovo Airport, where Alice would be waiting. They’d board a military plane bound for Baikal, and they’d disappear.

  “He refused to negotiate for your life,” Lev told
Alice. “He tried to kill me in the White House. And now he puts us through this senseless farce. The fucker’s lucky they’re only giving me blanks.”

  Another day drowned in the river beyond the battlements of the old fortress.

  They went to a banya in the Kremlin. Lev lifted Alice over the threshold. When she looked quizzical, he explained: “It’s an old superstition. Stillborn children are often buried underneath the banya; a man carries a woman inside so that their own kids don’t suffer the same fate.”

  The steam and heat swarmed at them, tangible entities. They undressed in silence. Lev checked the fire under the rocks; the smoke smelled like Siberian cedar, one of the commonest banya woods, along with birch and pine—but never aspen, regarded as a sorrowful tree. Satisfied the logs were burning strongly, he tossed some water on the rocks, and Alice giggled as the steam hissed.

  The attendants had left them some switches made of birch branches. Lev picked a couple up and soaked them in the hot-water bucket for a few moments, to make sure that the leaves were soft. When he took them out, he flicked through the branches carefully, checking for stray shrubs. “I’ve heard unhappy stories from people who’ve unwittingly added a sprig or two of poison ivy,” he said, and smacked one of the switches across Alice’s back.

  “Ow!” she said. “That hurt!”

  “It’s supposed to.” He handed her the other one. “Here, do it to me.”

  She whipped the switch across his back, at first reluctantly; then, as she saw it was part of the ritual, with more confidence, driving the scalding steam deeper into Lev’s skin, seeing the crimson weals through his tattoos and the way sweat sprang from the marks.

  “Here,” he said eventually, and guided her to one of the wooden benches. He reached into the small bag he’d brought with him and brought out a small container of milk, which he opened and poured over her, watching the creamy streams part on the ridges of her shoulders and flow down both sides of her, front and back. She shivered, and not from cold.