Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes

by Walton, Caroline

  “Try this, genuine Kashgar marijuana!” someone offers me.

  It gives me nothing more than a pain in my temples. It’s just as well that I don’t take to hashish. Being an alcoholic is enough.

  In Bukhara I work as a stoker in the brick kilns. You have to be very agile to avoid getting burned. The strongest men make up to 80 roubles a day, an amount which would take me nearly a month to earn back in Chapaevsk. The trouble is that no matter how much anyone earns they never save a kopeck. They drink it all away and I am no exception. I make so much money that I never have to be sober.

  After a while the Central Asian climate begins to wear me down. My bones ache and I find it hard to sleep. I decide to return to Chapaevsk. The problem is that however much I earn I can never manage to save enough for a ticket home. After finishing a job I have to toast its completion; by the time I sober up my pockets are empty and I need money for my hair-of-the-dog.

  I decide to look for work in a more remote area away from temptation. I return to Fergana, go down to the labour exchange and come to a quick arrangement with a Korean who has a plantation in the mountains. The man takes me up on the back of his motorbike, dipping the machine to left and right around tortuous hairpin bends. On left-hand curves my stiff right leg sticks up higher than my head. My hands are shaking so much from my hangover that I fear at any moment I’ll lose my grip and fly off, hurtling down to the valley floor hundreds of metres below. Rising up through clouds that soak our clothes and faces in moisture, we finally reach the plantation. Onions, garlic, watermelons and rice grow on high terraces through which glacier water flows. The Korean’s entire family, from tiny children to an ancient grandmother, work from dawn to dusk, yet they need extra labour to help weed the terraces. State investigators are bribed to keep away.

  I am given a few roubles a day, food and packets of Beggars of the Mountain cigarettes. We work barefoot in freezing water while our bodies are exposed to the burning mountain sun. Our backs blister and our hands crack. At night we drop into pits lined with paper sacks and throw our exhausted bodies onto heaps of old rags.

  A cobra slides into our pit. One of the Tadzhik labourers catches it by the neck and prepares to kill it.

  “Stop!”

  The Korean grandmother peers into the pit. She makes a sign for us to wait. Then she brings a large glass jar with a plastic lid and puts the snake inside. For the next three days she leaves the jar out in the sun. Liquid oozes from the dying snake. We feel sorry for it, but the old lady collects the liquid and uses it to make little cakes. The whole family eats them but we refuse. The Koreans explain that people who eat them will be immune to snakebites for the rest of their lives.

  The one advantage of working in the mountains is the absence of alcohol. This enables me to return to Fergana after a month with enough money for a ticket home. Before I can leave town I have to go back to the hostel to pick up my passport. On the way I notice an inviting bar, with tables laid out under shady trees. I deserve a drink to celebrate, and I’ll still have plenty of cash for my ticket.

  ***

  ‘ALCOHOLICS AND LAYABOUTS!’ proclaims our banner in bold white letters on black cloth. We are a filthy procession of swollen-faced men and women. Some have black eyes; some are on crutches. A trolley rolls along behind us, supporting a camera which is filming us for Fergana TV. A local who had a starring role on a previous march tells me that we’ll appear on the news tonight.

  We parade down the middle of the road in full view of shoppers and passers-by. People laugh and shake their heads but no one shouts abuse. They probably think: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’

  The police picked me up after finding me passed out in a ditch. They hosed me down, put me in a cell for the night and in the morning forced me to stand in the yard with the other detainees while the superintendent lectured us on the evils of drink.

  When we return from the penitential march they make us pay for our night’s lodging and fine us each 25 roubles, except the two men who carried the banner. They’re excused five roubles of their fines, which no one begrudges.

  After my release I go back to the labour exchange. I am hired by another Korean with a plantation in the mountains, but again on my return I drink away my pay before I can reach the railway station. It’s the same story all summer. I take jobs in Kuvasai and Kizil Kiya in Kyrgyzia. Finally, when the weeding season ends, I manage to reach the railway station without being diverted and settle down in the station buffet to wait for the Tashkent train. My disreputable appearance must have given me away: a cop comes over and hauls me off. Fortunately some foreigners are staying in Fergana so I don’t have to repeat the penitential march.

  The police want to know why I haven’t paid my first fine. I’m still registered at the chemical plant so I say I’m waiting for my wages. The superintendent tells a policeman to escort me to my hostel to collect my passport, which they will hold until I pay off my fines. The policeman and I set off on foot. The man is so tired after his night shift that he lets me continue alone, making me promise to hand in my passport the next day. That’s the last the Fergana police see of me. I pick up my passport and head for Margilan.

  At Margilan station an Uzbek buys me a ticket and in return I smuggle a caseload of tomatoes to Tashkent for him. I find that city in uproar after a spontaneous explosion of nationalism during a football match between the local Milk-Churners team and the visiting Ukrainian Miners. Rioting spreads into the streets after the game. The police and local militia are busy breaking up fights and beating up anyone they can find. Train passengers are warned not to walk into the town. I spend a few days in the station trying to find a way home. The conductors on Moscow-bound trains are unusually strict and won’t let me on without a ticket. At last a Kuibyshev train pulls in. I approach a young conductor standing on the platform.

  “Hey mate, take me along with you.”

  He looks me up and down: “Have you got any money?”

  “Not a kopeck. If I had I would’ve bought a ticket.”

  The lad laughs and asks sarcastically: “Would a ride as far as Kuibyshev suit you?”

  “It would. Then I can catch a local train.”

  “So three thousand kilometres isn’t far enough for you! Where is your final destination?”

  “Chapaevsk,” I reply, looking around to see if I might try my luck elsewhere.

  “You’re from Chapaevsk then?”

  “Yes.”

  “What part?”

  “Bersol.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “What’s the point of lying? The train’s about to leave and we’ll never see each other again.”

  “Wait,” he says, “what street do you live on?”

  “Clinic street.”

  “Do you know anyone on Short Street?”

  “Lyokha Pop”

  “What about Lyuska Trepalina?”

  “Everyone knows her.”

  Lyuska is the local whore. She hangs around the hostel where I lived. I’ve only spoken to her a couple of times but that’s enough for the conductor to let me on board.

  The train departs and I settle down in a window-seat. The endless steppe slides past, as smooth as bone, broken only by a dry shoreline that was once lapped by the Aral Sea. When we stop at desolate towns the conductor, whose name is Yura, does a roaring trade selling vodka and cigarettes to crowds on the platform.

  “There’s no alcohol or tobacco in their shops,” he explains. “I have to give a cut to the station-master and chief conductor but I make enough. Have a drink.”

  ***

  My friend Oleg from the Astrakhan camp asks me to come and stay with him. I sell some blood to help the Vietnamese victims of American aggression and buy a ticket on the steamer Sergei Uritskii, an old man of the Volga built in 1912. It stinks of dried Caspian roach and the over-ripe melons that are piled high in baskets on the upper deck blocking everyone’s way. It is pleasant to sit on the passenger deck in old wicker chairs und
er a canvas canopy. Cream silk curtains flap like sails through open windows. For two days and nights I gaze at the shoreline, mesmerised by the gleam of distant cities and hydro-electric power projects.

  In Astrakhan I find Oleg living in a district built in the popular Cheryomushki style. Although he has an official job checking shop burglar alarms he earns his money in billiard halls. We settle into a routine. I take over his rounds while he goes off to play. After lunch I join him.

  Pretending not to know Oleg, I bet on the outcome of the game. With a prearranged signal he lets me know how it will end. That way we always win. If he loses I collect money for backing his opponent; if he wins our takings are doubled. No one knows me in the town and we do not broadcast our friendship. All the same we don’t win much, just enough to feed ourselves and the family.

  Oleg is on the wagon which is fortunate as drinking and billiards do not go together. Fights in billiard halls are common and so is cheating. When an apparently stronger player loses there’s always a post mortem which rarely ends peacefully. The winner often has to beat the money out of the loser. It is forbidden to play for money so Oleg and I have to be careful. If caught making bets we’d go straight back to prison.

  Life would be fine apart from problems on the domestic front. Oleg and his wife Lily fight day and night. Their punches, slaps and screams end in no less violent reconciliations. The police have long since stopped responding to neighbours’ complaints. They know that by the time they arrive the combatants will be locked in such a tight embrace it will be impossible to prize them apart. If they manage to arrest Oleg then Lily will turn on them like a tigress. Once when they try to arrest her, Oleg dangles their daughter out of the window until the police let her go.

  It is impossible to live in this atmosphere so after a month I decide to return to Chapaevsk. Before I leave, Oleg takes me to a village near the sea where we buy 1,000 dried bream for a fantastically low price. In Kuibyshev these fish are in great demand as an accompaniment to beer. I can sell them for enough money to support me for several months.

  As luck would have it the Sergei Uritskii is waiting in dock. I manage to buy a ticket for a place on deck and board just at the last minute. As I am arranging my bags I hear a familiar voice.

  “Vanya! Going back already? Didn’t you find your friend?”

  It’s one of the waitresses, Asya, who I got to know on the journey down.“I did,” I reply, “but a husband and wife make one devil. I felt uncomfortable in the middle of their quarrels. I’m going home now to sell my fish.”

  “But you have so many bags and no berth.”

  I smile: “I’m alright. I’ll sleep under the stars again.”

  Shyly Asya asks me to share her berth.

  As the ship approaches Kuibyshev I ask for her address. She shakes her head. “It’s better not to raise hopes. They are too easily crushed.”

  Asya is one of those rare women who are untouched by the filth of this world. I could have arrived home not only without the bream but without trousers, money or documents. Robbing me would have been as easy for Asya as spitting.

  Back in Chapaevsk I decide not to sell my fish to the thieves and swindlers who run the market. Instead I give them to my uncle Volodya in return for an advance. By the end of the week I’m back on the bottle again and have forgotten all about the bream. As luck would have it I bump into Yura the conductor and am able to thank him properly for the ride.

  I move into another hostel. It is built like pre-war barrack housing except it’s made of brick and has an indoor toilet. All day long snotty children play in the corridor under lines of grey underwear. Everyone knows which pair of underpants belongs to whom. If a brassiere falls on the floor you can pick it up, examine it and identify its owner by the way it is patched. Then you knock on her door: “Auntie Dusya, here’s your bra. The kids were using it as a football.”

  Domestic rows blow up with boring regularity. Every family drinks. The noise only abates in the early morning when the bottles are empty and the shops still shut.

  Each morning my hangover gets me out of bed, just as if I was going to work. I gather together bottles from the night before and go next door to shop No. 28 to exchange the empties for a glass of cheap fortified wine. This disgusting brew helps me control myself until ten o’clock when the spirits section opens.

  In the morning my hands shake so much that I can’t hold a glass without spilling it over myself. If I have a companion with me he pours the wine down my throat; if not I use a belt. I wrap one end round the hand that holds the glass and pass the other around my neck, pulling on it until the glass reaches my lips.

  On the days when the shop is out of wine we have to look for eau de Cologne or aftershave lotion. These are hard to drink on an empty stomach. Furniture polish is the worst – that is real poison and always makes me puke. However, once I’ve lined my stomach with a hair-of-the-dog I can drink whatever comes my way.

  Alkies from the whole district congregate in my room. It’s warmer than the street. I open the day’s session by banging my fist on the table:

  “What’s the fucking use of thinking?

  Fill your glasses and start drinking!”

  Each person takes a bite from a stale hunk of bread on the table as they pass the bottle around. If a new face appears at the door I shout: “Come in! Welcome to the communist state. Don’t worry about a thing. Put on what you like and sleep with who you like. In the morning we sort out clothes and girls.”

  I try to avoid my former workmates. They are all drinkers too, but unlike me, they don’t comb the shops for lacquer and varnish. Occasionally I see my mother in the streets and then I have to duck out of her sight. Unfortunately ours is a small town, and local gossips inform her of my descent into street drinking. When she comes down to shop No. 28 and bundles me into a taxi I resign myself to the inevitable. My mother has a bag already packed. We drive out to a hospital at Rubezhnoye, a former country estate where Catherine the Great’s lover, Count Orlov, kept thoroughbred horses. After the revolution the house was converted into a hospital, but 50 years of Soviet power have brought it to a state of collapse.

  The director turns a blind eye if patients get drunk on occasion; the most important thing is to repair the place. A condition of treatment is that each patient has to work four hours a day without pay. They paint and plaster walls and build the director’s dacha in the grounds. My job is to watch the hospital’s water tank, making sure it never overflows or runs dry.

  “Go on, drink your damned vodka! Drink the filthy stuff!” the doctor stands in the middle of our circle, conducting us like a circus ringmaster. We each have a bucket between our knees. The doctor has injected us with apomorphine before making us swallow a warm solution of bicarbonate of soda. Then we drink vodka from the three bottles we have each been told to bring with us to the hospital.

  The doctor examines everyone’s bucket. I can’t manage to throw up, so he makes me drink a mixture of vitriol, castor oil and grease. The next morning I stick two fingers down my throat while the doctor’s back is turned. Anything is better than drinking that dreaded cocktail again. After a dozen sessions I start to vomit blood and they take me off the treatment – a blood vessel has burst in my stomach.

  Next we’re treated with Antabuse, with a cruelty and intensity I have never yet experienced. After my dose the doctor makes me drink 20 grams of vodka. I suffocate. My chest feels as though it’s being crushed by rocks. As I struggle for breath the doctor holds up a hand mirror. My face turns purple and then deathly white. My hands and feet are freezing. The doctor gives me oxygen, wraps me in blankets and monitors my blood pressure.

  With each treatment they increase the dosage of vodka. When I return to consciousness, only half alive, the doctor leans over me and says: “There, you see, in hospital, in the presence of a doctor, you almost died. What will happen to you if you have a drink outside? You will die! You’ll die gasping like a dog!”

  Despite this torture I still
do not believe in the efficacy of Antabuse; however I stay off the bottle for a few weeks after my release. I hope to keep sober for long enough to find a more interesting circle of friends. I am sick of hanging around the vodka shop with completely degraded people. After my two unsuccessful attempts to escape Chapaevsk I begin to suspect that I will only find the company I desire in Moscow. In the capital there must be people who live life in the fullest sense of the word, who write novels and read poems to each other. But how could I live among those parasites? They think they are above us provincials, all the while bleeding us dry, living off our backs. They think themselves so superior, yet to boast that you are a Muscovite born and bred is as absurd as boasting that you were born on Saturday.

  Even if I decide to go to the capital I’ll have to live rough as I know no one there. And all those plate glass windows reflecting the ugly curve of my leg will be a constant reminder of my disability.

  Instead of Moscow I go out to the steppe. My sister’s husband Yura keeps bees and he needs someone to watch the hives during the summer.

  The last remnants of the ancient forest that once covered most of Kuibyshev province were cut down during the Great Patriotic War.23 Now the steppe-land crops are protected from dry winds by strips of plantation. These trees have grown from the saplings which my classmates and I helped to plant twenty five years ago.

  Along the edge of the plantation are some 80 beehives belonging to different owners. They take it in turns to bring me food, water, tea and cigarettes. Yura lends me a tent, a camp-bed and a pair of Wellington boots. He offers me a dog but I don’t want one. She’ll bark at every wild animal that passes.

  I quickly become attuned to the life of the forest. After a few days I put my watch away; I’ve learned to tell the time by the sun and the stars. I notice that the magpie chatters in quick alarm at the approach of a human, while his chatter has a different timbre when an animal approaches. When the ants begin to scurry, trying to cover the entrance to their nests, I know it’s time to take some dry wood into my tent. Sure enough, leaves rustle, the mosquitoes bite more viciously, and I hear the first patter of raindrops on my tent roof.