That night on the rubbish dump I settle down with two bottles of Rkatseli to keep me going till dawn. I prop myself up against the bank, dropping off for a second, waking with a start and swallowing a couple of mouthfuls of wine. I keep a strict watch over the level of liquid in the bottle. Hold on, I tell myself, it’s not evening yet! Reflecting on my situation I laugh out loud: “Look at you, my boy!” I even mumble a verse that comes into my head:
My room – a stinking garbage pit
My bed – an old newspaper
More than one tramp died here
And so it seems, shall I
I do not know whether I’ll live till dawn, but I don’t care too much either way. Let death come tonight. It’ll put an end to life’s torments once and for all. But I do fear the dt’s. I fear I’ll lose control and do something very bad. And I’m deeply ashamed of my filthy, festering body. I haven’t been to the bathhouse for weeks; I can’t use the communal pool because of my wound and I can’t afford a private cabin. I’m filled with shame as I imagine the state my body will be in when it’s found in the morning.
***
But I do not die on that Tblisi rubbish dump. In the morning I manage to drag myself out of my lair, gather some empties and limp over to the wine shop. I come out clutching a litre of fortified wine in each hand. As I cross Mardzhanishvili Square I trip and fall, instinctively flinging up my arms to save the bottles. My face slams into the asphalt, but by some miracle the bottles remain intact. With a groan of relief I pass out.
I awake to find myself lying on the pavement with a crowd gathered about me.
“We’ve called an ambulance,” a voice says.
Thank God the police won’t be involved, I relax and let myself be carried off to hospital. I don’t care that my nose is broken and my eyes so swollen I can barely see; I fear only the dt’s, which are fast approaching. Believing that I’ve witnessed a dreadful crime and the police want to interview me, I try to hide. I am also convinced that the perpetrator of the crime is tracking me down in order to kill me. In mortal terror of every living soul, I leap out of bed and run around the hospital, squeezing into dark cupboards and cowering under beds.
The staff finally catch me, put me in a strait-jacket and pack me off to ‘Happy Village,’ a large mental asylum in the mountains. There I’m cared for by an unusually kind young doctor who pays no attention to my repulsive appearance. She even suggests I go to a special clinic to have my nose repaired but I decline: “I’m not planning to become a film star; I need a psychiatrist not a surgeon.”
The doctor orders me to be tied to a bed and then she injects me with Sulfazine.36 With fiendish strength I tear off the sheets that bind me and run away. Although the staff have removed the handles of the ward doors I manage to prise them open with a dinner spoon. I run out of the hospital and down the road. Orderlies catch me two blocks from the clinic, drag me back and tie me up again. I get another shot of Sulfazine. My temperature soars. For two or three days I lie motionless, soaked in sweat. Gradually I return to my senses. When I admit to the doctor that no one wants to kill me she takes me off the Sulfazine and orders me to be untied.
Soon I am cracking jokes with the doctor and making her laugh. Through her contacts she finds me a job as a night watchman in a Tblisi theatre. With a roof over my head I’m able to keep off the drink for several months. One day, however, I run into Tolik, an old friend from Zestafoni who’s trying his luck begging in the capital. He has nowhere to sleep. I can’t recommend the cavern so we agree that after the theatre performance has ended Tolik will tap on my window and I’ll let him in for the night. He sleeps curled up on some newspaper in a corner, refusing my offer of the couch: “No, no, Vanya, I piss myself after I’ve had a bottle or two.”
Despite his alcoholism Tolik is so sharp he only has to look at a few lines of Pravda to arrive at conclusions we hear a month later on Voice of America. He tells me that something is changing in the USSR.
“But what difference will it make to our lives, Tolik?” I ask. “What happens in Moscow might as well take place on the moon.”
The theatre management know about my weakness and try to keep me away from the bottle. However it seems churlish not to accompany Tolik when he pours his wine at night. Early in the morning he sneaks out, taking the empties with him. He spends the day begging and I give him some money from my pay to buy bottles for the night.
It’s not long however, before we overdo it. The director arrives in the morning to find me sitting among the scenery as drunk as wine itself. Centre stage, Tolik strikes the pose of a Roman senator as he declaims Bezimensky’s Tragedian Night. All around us roll empty bottles. We are puffing away like the Battleship Potemkin, although smoking is strictly forbidden in the theatre. They throw my friend out and call an ambulance for me. I am taken back to Happy Village and this time the doctor is not so kind.
***
I have been away from Chapaevsk for many years and hardly keep in touch with my family, apart from the occasional phone call to my sister. After my second cure I receive news from her that our mother has died. I go back to Chapaevsk for the last time, staying with my sister and her family. I don’t understand them nor they me, but we are civil to each other.
My sister is the only family member I have left in Chapaevsk. Dobrinin died some years ago; Uncle Volodya moved to Ukraine. I hear he took to drink after he was widowed. My wife and daughter have been living in Estonia since they left me back in 1967. My sister occasionally gives me news of them.
I wonder whether to try to find out what happened to my real father. Since the time of Khrushchev I have accepted that he was shot. In the new climate of political openness it might be possible to learn details of his arrest and trial. But I decide it’s better not to know the truth. If he was a Chekist he was probably responsible for sending people to their deaths.
My sister tells me there is some furniture left from our parents’ house that she wants to sell.
“Keep the money,” I tell her, “all I want is enough for a ticket out of this hell-hole.”
“Where are you going?”
“Who knows? Fiji maybe.”
And I really am thinking how good it will be to leave the country. Preferably forever.
Just before I leave Chapaevsk I run into a couple of old drinking acquaintances who are wending an unsteady way back from the cemetery. “Poor old thing,” they say, after exchanging greetings with me: “They let us join the wake so it’d look as though she had someone to mourn her. We only knew her by sight; she died in the old people’s home.”
“Who was it?”
“Marusya Timofeyevna. Perhaps you knew her. She used to live in Bersol.”
The dead woman was our old home-help, Cyclops. I pity her now, for her life turned out to be even more wretched than mine. After she left my parents she looked after children in other Party families until she became too old and infirm. She never married. The war left millions of surplus women and Marusya was last in the queue. Having no one to care for her, she entered the old people’s home. It is the oldest building in town and worse than any strict-regime prison. The staff steal all the food and leave the inmates to decay in their own filth. As you pass the home you can see the old people standing outside on metal balconies, gazing forlornly at a world they have already left.
And that is where I’ll end up if I stay in Chapaevsk, providing I don’t drink myself to death first.
36 A powerful tranquillizer.
12
London
The 1990s
I have no reason to stay in Chapaevsk so I return to Georgia. The theatre takes me back as a watchman and I manage to stay sober for a while.
Change is in the air. Georgia no longer wants to be part of the Soviet Union. Civil war looms. My friends at the theatre fix me up with Georgian papers and take me with them on tour to the UK. I claim political asylum. I’ll start life afresh.
At first I’m excited by my new surroundings. Like every n
aive Russian visitor I marvel at the shops. ‘You could cover our walls with their toilet paper,’ I write to my sister. It doesn’t take me long to discover that vodka is cheaper than eau de Cologne. There’s no need to drink substitutes when you can afford the real thing.
I discover too, that our propagandists didn’t lie about the decadence of the West. People go around in clothes that would shame a Zestafoni tramp – and not only the poor: one day I see a young man walk out of an expensive restaurant in a bushlat – a padded grey Soviet prison jacket.
It shocks me to see a teenage girl put a bottle of beer to her lips. Back home even tramps rarely stoop that low; we keep personal drinking vessels. In any Russian park, if you look carefully, you’ll see a glass under a hedge or bush, covered over with twigs to protect it from dirt. But perhaps we’re more concerned with practicalities than appearances, for when your hands are shaking like death it is impossible to lift a bottle to your mouth. Besides, to spill a glass is a misfortune; to spill a bottle a tragedy.
But I soon get tired of the emptiness of the West. Here, people turn their lives into a ceaseless scramble for money. Most are rich beyond the dreams of a Chapaevsk citizen yet they are never content with what they have. Their system is a treadmill, not freedom.
All the same, I settle into life here, with my own room and a small pension. My furniture comes from the streets: chairs, mattress, sofa, vacuum cleaner, TV and a video that I repaired myself. At night I like to wander around my neighbourhood, seeing what I can pick up. Looking through people’s rubbish, I learn a lot about them – what they read and what they eat, whether they’re drinkers and whether they’re ashamed of what they drink.
From time to time new arrivals from Russia come to stay with me while they get settled. They remind me of myself when I left home all those years ago. These young people expect the streets to be paved with gold, but they can only find illegal work as washers-up or cab-drivers. Some give up and go home again, tired of being treated as less than human.
I have begun a new career as an actor; some film students invited me to work with them. And I went to a studio and had my voice recorded for the new James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. They wanted a Russian speaker to curse like a sailor. I let rip, but in the end they only allowed me to use the mildest words.
Outside of work I hardly mix with local people. At my age it’s hard to learn a new language. Even if I could communicate we wouldn’t understand each other. I’m not lonely; on the contrary, I sometimes long to go away from this city to a quiet village by the seashore, where I know no one at all.
Mostly I occupy myself by thinking about my past, trying to make sense of it. Like the disgraced teachers and engineers of Toliatti’s market-place I always held the Soviet system responsible for my downfall. Throughout my life I felt plagued and persecuted by Komsomolists, bosses, judges and camp Godfathers. This isn’t to say that when I poured myself a glass of wine in the morning I did it as an act of protest against the system. Of course not. But it consoled me to think that if I drank too much it was because I had no choice.
Now this old line of defence has fallen away. I am free from Komsomolists and Godfathers but I still drink. At least I know that whatever I have done, however deeply I have degraded myself, I shall pay for it. The thought cheers me slightly.
Despite everything I sometimes thank God that I became an alcoholic and took to the road instead of spinning out my days in Chapaevsk, talking of nothing but work and how many potatoes my allotment has yielded. I’ve broken through walls that confine the normal human being. I’ve discovered that things I once feared hold no terrors at all. Prison doesn’t worry me; I can live by begging. I can live without a home, possessions or human companionship.
I’ve learned too, that there is no limit to how far a man can fall. Every so often you reach a barrier. No, you say, you have some pride left, you won’t quaff furniture polish or drink in the street; you’ll never hold out your hand and ask for money. But you do. People are like electric currents: they follow the path of least resistance, and it’s easier to move downwards. The most terrible thing of all is that you get used to your degradation. Human beings can adapt to anything. And if ever a shadow of guilt or self-disgust darkens your door – alcohol soon chases off such unwelcome guests.
So I’ve discovered that my early fears were not so terrifying after all. Yes, I’m dependent on vodka, but that renders me independent of my surroundings, albeit temporarily.
Do I miss Russia? Perhaps not, yet still images haunt me of my past, particularly those days in the forest looking after the beekeepers’ hives. I even feel nostalgic for the patter of raindrops on my tent roof and the sharp scent of herbs hanging up to dry.
But I haven’t severed all my ties with the past; I even receive occasional letters from Olga. She never remarried. When my sister told her I had emigrated she started to entertain hopes, perhaps thinking I’d come off the bottle at last. Well I soon dashed those expectations; I told her that the West has given me no reason to stop drinking. Then she wrote back: Come home Vanya, let us show you how to live.
Her arrogance makes me angry. After all these years she still can’t understand what led me to drink in the first place. I was not interested in becoming the ideal Soviet family man. The truth is, I just wasn’t ready for a family at all. Yet at the same time her letter arouses feelings of guilt, especially towards my daughter, who is now ill.
Damn them all. I push the letter aside. What did they expect? At least I can be proud that I resisted their pressure to change into someone I am not.
I have to get out of the house. I pick up my stick and set off down the Romford Road. It is a typical English June day, blustery, the sky weighted with grey clouds. It starts to rain. Women huddle under bus shelters, adjusting their hijabs.
My sore kidneys twinge and the filthy air makes me wheeze more than usual. In the far distance seagulls wheel over the Barking dump, reminding me of my far-off days on The Wave.
As I pass a kebab shop I catch the eye of an acquaintance through the window. He rushes to the door:
“Vanya! Where are you going?”
“Hello Grisha. For a walk.”
He falls in beside me. Grisha arrived a couple of years ago with his family. He usually takes great care of his appearance but this morning he is unshaven and his clothes are crumpled.
“I’ve left home. To teach them a lesson. My wife and her mother ganged up on me again. All I wanted was a Mercedes, for God’s sake. I’m a man, aren’t I? I can get credit but they said we couldn’t afford it. I know my mother-in-law wants to humiliate me. She doesn’t respect me.”
Neither do I. But I like Grisha’s mother-in-law and by giving Grisha a place to stay for a while I’ll be lifting a burden from his family’s shoulders. Besides, for once I feel like some company.
“Grisha, let things calm down. You can sleep on my sofa.”
“Vanya, you’ve saved my life,” he claps me on the shoulder.
We pass a supermarket. To cheer him up I suggest: “How about a bottle?”
***
The next few days are a blur. I wake up at the foot of my stairs with my pockets empty and my walking stick broken. My bones ache as though I’ve been beaten by a whole station of policemen. Grabbing the banisters, I haul myself up to my room. After swallowing the pain-killers my doctor gave me, I lie down.
The horror approaches. I stare into it like a rabbit transfixed before a cobra. I have to act while I can still think.
I call a friend, a young girl from Rostov. “Irina, I’m going to die tonight for sure. Call a taxi and take me to hospital.”
“Ivan Andreyevich, you know the hospital won’t admit you again.”
“Excuse me for troubling you.”
I put the phone down just in time. The mouthpiece has started to crackle with sounds I identify as Voice of America.
Irina is right. Since being in this country I’ve dried out in hospital four times. The detox clinic won’t
take me again either. Not that they’re much use. They insisted on talking about my past, how I related to my father and other nonsense. They expected me to bare my soul to some young whelp with no knowledge of life. I begged them to give me injections, to knock me out while I got over the worst of the dt’s. Surely the West must have discovered a cure for alcoholism; it is impossible they don’t have that drug in their arsenal. But they refused me. They probably thought I was a drug addict to boot. So I drank all the mouthwash I’d brought with me and that wasn’t enough. I managed to get to a phone and call Grisha, who brought in a hot-water bottle full of vodka. Somehow the doctors found out I’d had a drink and ordered me to leave. I lost my temper and raged at them but they would not relent.
***
Hours pass and with every minute I feel more scared. If only I can ride this one out I’ll stop drinking for a while and then keep things under control like I managed to in Georgia. The TV flickers. Silent cues shoot coloured balls across the screen. They are not enough to distract me. Rain patters on my window. The street lamp outside my room casts a yellow pool onto the wet pavement. Tiny devils frolic in the gutter. If I drop my guard they’ll climb up the drainpipe and slip in under the window frame.
I close my eyes and wait for night. Alarms wail in the distance. Cement mixers roar up and down the road. A sharp pain jabs through my leg; I sit up in time to see a devil running across the floor, squealing and brandishing his fork. I yell and Grisha hurries out of the kitchen with a bottle in his hand. Cradling my head in his arm, he wedges a pen between my teeth, unscrews the bottle cap and puts the neck to my lips.
Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes Page 20