Vodka

by Boris Starling

  In the depths of his soul, way deeper than anything that man’s machines could detect, Lev felt the world slipping from him. There was to be no miraculous recovery, and that was only fitting; the reason why none of Russia’s great novels have happy endings is because Russians wouldn’t know what to make of them if they did.

  Lev thought once more how grateful he was that he’d lived long enough to love Alice. “Good-bye, goodbye,” he said to himself; “good-bye my only love, my love forever lost, until we meet again in the next world.” He was Lev, and he was dying, and yet he wasn’t Lev, because Lev was the name he’d been given as a vor, and how could he still be a vor when he’d broken so many of their rules? How could he still be a vor when he’d have given everything up to be with a woman? He’d lived his life in the brotherhood, and right at the last he’d chosen to forsake it; his love for Alice was too great.

  Lev saw images that seemed strange and unfamiliar: him in a church, holding hands with a woman in white; him splashing in a brown ocean under a blazing sun, somewhere hot; him in a large hospital, and he couldn’t work out why until he heard a baby fill its lungs and yell out a life-affirming squawk, and he knew. Lev had always thought his life would flash before him when he died, but he didn’t remember any of these things. Then he realized that what he was seeing was not his life past but his life future, all the things he was meant to have done with Alice and now would never have time to.

  How appalling it is, how terrifying, to stand up and face death, to run toward death rather than away from it. How terrible it is to die before your time. Lev wanted to stay alive. He’d already resigned himself to fate, but this desire was stronger than any thought. This desire was so vast that nothing could be compared to it; it could not be measured.

  It was not enough.

  Lewis showed Alice which button on the ventilator to press, and she did so without fuss or ceremony. The machine’s humming wound down to silence, Lev’s chest ceased its endless rise and fall, and on the monitor at the head of his bed, the spiky line of his heartbeat smoothed to the flatness of a spirit level.

  “What’s life, if you live it on a flat line?” Lev had told her once. “No great downs, true, but no great ups either. You might as well be dead. Ups and downs are proof that you’re alive. Flatlines are what happen to patients in the hospital when their bodies give out on them.”

  The body in the bed was so unlike Lev that Alice concluded he simply wasn’t there. His sufferings were over; he was free. But the extinction of the last, faintest hope that he might recover had intensified her agony even further. She felt the world becoming darker and darker; it must have been the unbearable pain in her soul that was dissolving the boundary between her inner existence and the real world.

  The lights in the room flickered briefly, fading before burning strongly again. “Fluctuation in the power supply,” Lewis muttered, “it happens all the time,” but Alice shook her head; she knew better. It was Lev’s soul on its way out, and the motes of the air stirred and rearranged themselves as it went.

  Lev’s soul came to visit Alice, as she’d known it would. It was not a sensory manifestation—she didn’t see or hear him, let alone smell or taste or touch him—but rather an indefinable sense of his presence. She walked the streets for hours in the watery sunshine, visiting all the places they’d been together; she stood outside the gates of the distillery and sat down on the steps of the Kotelniki, she walked around the Kremlin and sat at the bar of the Vek restaurant, letting the tears fall into her mineral water. Lev was in all these places as surely as if he’d been standing next to her.

  The prospect of the soul’s journey—for death is the beginning of a voyage, undertaken either by boat or in a sled drawn by a troika of wild horses—is a dreadful one, a reckoning and a test. The soul isn’t alone, for its guardian angel accompanies it, but the companionship is not necessarily consoling. The angel isn’t simply benign, a good fairy by another name; its task is to reveal to the astonished soul the true meaning of its lifetime’s deeds and choices, however terrible they might appear. The prayers that mourners offer for the soul’s peace at this time are in deadly earnest, for few can contemplate this kind of truth, unmediated, without fear.

  The journey is in three stages. Firstly, the soul remains on earth for three days and three nights, visiting the places where it spent most of its mortal hours. Next, it ascends to heaven to meet its god, where it stays for six days. On the ninth day after death, it is taken down to hell for a month. After a total of forty days traversing the regions inhabited by various demons who tear asunder a consciousness infected by sin comes the moment of individual judgment, when everything the soul has learned on its journey becomes real, when it begins to face the consequence of actions it might have chosen to forget, and when it faces the genuine prospect of torment stretching onward to the end of time.

  This was what the future seemed to hold for Alice. Eternity retreated before the agony of her lost love.

  EPILOGUE

  Saturday, May 9, 1992

  Victory Day is the biggest holiday in the Russian calendar. Deliverance from the Nazis is a celebration that will always endure, no matter what political system is in place. Bemedalled old women and bowlegged ex-cavalrymen in archaic uniforms reminisced, wept, sang and danced to accordion music. Almost everywhere, it seemed, people recalled the autumn of 1941.

  Off the Stalinist squares and avenues, the back streets were deserted, a mellower Moscow of courtyards and lanes in every hue of crumbling brick and stucco; a city of hidden charms. The sun was warm, and pedestrians strode purposefully in shirtsleeves; the mud and slush had finally receded, and the first dandelion leaves were pushing through the concrete sidewalks. Moscow is seen as a city of endless winter, but this is a myth. Yes, it has to endure six months of snow, but no sooner has the thaw begun than the race for summer is on. Days lengthen and begin to simmer, nights are fire and smoke. The heat obliterates all memory of the cold that has been and is yet to come.

  It was the fortieth day since Lev’s death, the day on which his soul would return from its wanderings and face the final judgment. Alice wanted to get to Lev’s grave as quickly as possible, but he stilled her: Hush, my love, hush, we have all the time in the world. So she slowed her pace and looked around. She was a Russian now, and as such she should appreciate the way in which her people deal with death.

  Feeling as though the legions of dead were watching her, Alice walked through thickets of tombstones, staggered by their variety and artistry. In a country where everyone was dying, cemetery space was so tight that husbands and wives were sometimes buried on top of each other. Perhaps that was where Alice would end up too, on top of Lev; she thought briefly of the times they’d made love, her above him, him above her.

  Headstones were engraved not simply with names but with pictures and sculptures too. She saw gold eagles, outsize boxing gloves and maple leaves; a winding road commemorated a woman killed in a car crash. Husbands and wives bumped each other in little oval portraits, the men dignified and the women strict, hairstyles as flattened as their expressions. Pine needles were gathered in wreaths, bright flowers bunched in bouquets.

  When Alice had first arrived in Moscow, she’d have found these decorations tacky and corny; because she’d have looked at them with Western eyes trained to abhor gaudy sentimentality. Now she found them moving; she understood them.

  A freight train tooted a mournful refrain as it chugged slowly past the cemetery’s north wall. Alice found Lev’s grave and sat down. It was just the two of them now.

  She rummaged in her bag and brought out a bottle—mineral water, of course. Vodka had been her lover before she’d found her real lover, and her real lover had saved her from the traitorous vodka; he’d pledged to stand by her, and he’d not let her down. He’d have been proud of her today, standing there with her bottle of water. He’d have been proud that she’d not drunk yesterday, that she was not drinking today, and that she’d not drink tomorrow. That w
as how she was getting through it, a day at a time, and she’d keep her eyes on the road in front and never dare lift them to the summit for fear it would seem too daunting. It was hard by the yard, they said, but it was a cinch by the inch.

  Now, finally, when she’d renounced vodka, she understood why the Russians love it so deeply. No other spirit is half as compatible with their soul. The subtle lithesomeness of wine, best taken in the open air with fine cheese and warm bread, is a bad fit with Russia’s long winters and short growing seasons. But vodka, so pure and purposeful, so ideal for warming the despondent soul in February or for cooling passions in August, is a feast-or-famine sort of drink, and Russia is a feast-or-famine sort of place.

  Alice wondered how everyone else was spending their Victory Day. Arkin was still interim president, and stood a good chance of making the job his permanently in the elections next month. She’d stuck to their agreement, regardless of what had happened to Lev. Arkin had told her he was the best man for Russia, and Alice agreed, he was. She’d seen Irk in the street the other day, and chatted with him briefly; Canute-like, he was still trying to stem the tide of lawlessness. When she’d asked about Sveta and Galya, he’d wiped his hand across his face and shaken his head. Lewis had gone back to the States, as had Bob and Christina. Harry was still there, and still pestering her to set up a business with him. Perhaps she would, in time. She didn’t need to work for a while, she still had plenty of money from her days on Wall Street. She hoped they were all happy, but she was no longer for them, nor they for her.

  She’d chosen the design of Lev’s memorial herself. The tombstone was black and white, as Khrushchev’s was, reflection of the light and dark that had existed side by side in Lev. He’d been dangerous, emotional and irresponsible, and yet haunted by conscience; he’d been cruel, yet fundamentally childlike. He’d been broad yet narrow, reckless yet cautious, tolerant yet censorious, independent, docile, tough, malleable, kind, hateful, naive, cynical … Most of all, he’d been Russian, and what are Russians if not human beings writ large? There’s duality in everyone, it’s the most universal of human characteristics, and though this isn’t unique to the Russians, they take it to greater extremes than other peoples.

  Most people experience love without noticing that there’s anything remarkable about it. To Alice and Lev—and this was what had made them unusual—the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence were moments of revelation, greater understanding of life and themselves.

  Maybe she’d known all along that he was doomed, maybe that was why she’d fallen so deeply for him. A famous Russian fairy tale tells of a princess made of ice who knows how she’ll die; one day she’ll meet a mortal man, their passion will last a day and a night, and then she’ll melt and expire. What was the story of Lev and Alice if not that very fairy tale in reverse?

  But does life stop with death? No, she thought, of course it doesn’t. A man is not dead until he’s forgotten, and Alice would never forget Lev. When someone you love dies, Alice thought, they take a piece of you with them; but equally they leave a piece of themselves with you. She felt a stirring deep inside her. It was nothing so prosaic as a biological changing; it was a feeling, a hunch, rooted in nothing more than the absence of a monthly occurrence and the sure knowledge of herself and him, and therefore as irrefutable as a mathematical proof. She was already at the disposal of the future she carried within her; she was no longer only herself, she was Lev too, and another, a fusion of them both, and one day she’d sit her son down and tell him everything about his father; that this, truly, had been a man.

  She’d been at his grave for some time. The sun was burning down the west, and the skies were darkening. The twilight above Lev’s gravestone seemed to rearrange itself momentarily in the shape of his grin, hanging in the air as it had always seemed to—and then the apparition was gone, his soul spiraling upward toward its judgment, and she was alone.

  Alice walked back through the cemetery, past a shed where green-stained copper tongues lolled from the mouths of drainpipes and where two old grave diggers were playing chess with vodka bottles as pieces. Whenever one player took a piece, he had to drink the contents; judging by the state these particular combatants were in, this game had been going on for quite a while. Each man was left with a king, a queen and a rook—a gangster, his moll and their bodyguard, perhaps—and these figurines chased each other endlessly around the board, white on black, black on white, radiating lines of force and magnetism, attraction and repulsion, permission and interdiction, from and to and across every square. The chessboard is a haven of precision and clarity, Alice thought, and as such it’s an inaccurate reflection of the world. There’s no black and white in real life; there’s only gray.

  The grave diggers saw Alice watching them, and greeted her cheerily. She pointed to the bottles and laughed. “You’d better watch it. They’ll be the death of you.”

  “Well, vodka’s a poison that kills slowly,” said the man playing white.

  “And as it happens,” Black added, “I’m in no hurry.”

  She laughed again. “Who’s winning?”

  “He is,” said Black.

  “No, he is,” White said. “We both want to play with black, that’s the problem.”

  “Surely that’s a disadvantage? Doesn’t white have the first move?”

  They shrugged. Maybe so, but that was how it was; black was white, white was black, a disadvantage was an advantage. It all made sense if you stepped through the looking-glass and surrendered yourself to the peculiar principles of logic that held sway in Wonderland. Alice had never felt more Russian than then, when she’d gone teetotal and forsworn the very soul of Russia itself, and if that wasn’t a Russian thing to think, then she didn’t know what was.

  “You’d stay without me,” Lev had said; and he’d been right, she would.

  Alice paused a moment at the gate, orienting herself by the embers of the setting sun, and then began to retrace her way through the streets of Moscow at dusk, the great city hanging suspended in all its contradictions: halfway between day and night, past and future, east and west, sanity and madness, picturesque and squalid, good and evil.

  Copyright © 2005 Boris Starling

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  Seal Books/published by arrangement with Random House Canada

  Random House Canada edition published 2005

  Seal Books edition published January 2006

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36595-8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Seal Books are published by Random House of Canada Limited.

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