Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “Oh, go on without me.”

  “Tengiz, it’s New Year.”

  “Yeah—and what’s there to celebrate?” At midnight, the old regime would be officially extinct; joy enough for Lev, who’d refused even to recognize its existence, but calamity for Sabirzhan, KGB officer and sworn upholder of the Motherland.

  Lev had asked out of courtesy and expediency, and was glad that Sabirzhan had refused. He’d no more have wanted to spend his New Year with Sabirzhan than with Josef Stalin, but Sabirzhan was powerful in Red October, and it never did to alienate one’s allies unnecessarily.

  “What are you going to do instead?” he asked.

  Sabirzhan glanced toward Sharmukhamedov. The Chechen’s bald head was visibly reddening as the blood flowed into it. “Spend some time with my new friend, probably.”

  Right next door to Red Square, the Rossiya Hotel is perhaps the quintessential example of Soviet architecture. An oblong hollowed out around two inner courtyards, it’s almost a kilometer in circumference and covers ten acres. Even in a city with its fair share of ugly buildings, the Rossiya stands out, a graying monolith whose size is matched only by the numbing uniformity of its design. The Russians say that the best thing about staying there is that you can’t see the Rossiya.

  Lewis was unimpressed. “What a shithole. No decent city would allow that kind of eyesore.”

  The New Year clientele could have inspired Dante to rework the Inferno: stubble-scalped men with black turtlenecks and lumps under their blazers patrolled the lobby, while leggy Russian jezebels with dolphin-tight bodies strolled through the hotel stores, looking fetching in Chanel suits and impossibly high heels. Whores and pimps, small-time operators who’d bought concessions from the management to operate here, orbited around each other like planets, gravitating toward each potential client as though he were the firmament’s brightest star. It was a troika of unholy fluidity, and one where every member could claim to be both exploiter and exploited.

  Bob had swapped slacks and a sports jacket for a suit, though it clung uneasily to him and he knew it. His wife Christina peered at Alice from under her bob and proffered a damp hand. “Good to know you,” she said in a tone that suggested it was anything but. Christina was four inches shorter than Alice and a similar amount wider through the hips; she knew where the men’s attention would be, especially when Harry turned up with a stunning blonde called Vika.

  “How much did you have to pay her?” Alice asked Harry once they were out of earshot.

  He waved across the room at Vika and smiled proudly. “Not a dime.” It was just about plausible; Russians found Westerners so exciting that they’d flock to anyone with English as a first language, no matter how unappealing their other attributes. For straight, single Western men, there was no better place to be, as Moscow was packed with more female beauty than practically any other place on earth. And not cold, haughty types either, but inviting, curious beauty, always looking as if they were just desperate to try something new, trade up, succumb to curiosity or pressure, fall into some wild adventure. There were vixens on every sidewalk, sly seductresses riding down the metro escalators, femmes fatales pouring into the streets.

  The beauty of Russian women is above all in their eyes, large and limpid and almost always accentuated by eyeliner.

  “You must be from Texas,” Lewis said to Bob.

  “Never ask a man if he’s from Texas. If he is, he’ll tell you on his own. If he ain’t, no need to embarrass him.”

  He was stretching his vowels so far that Alice feared they’d snap. She’d noticed that all their accents were noticeably, defiantly, regional: Harry dropping D’s in the middle of words, just like a good Pittsburgher; Lewis stressing the start of almost every word, as though he’d forget if more than a syllable passed without emphasis. Asserting their roots so far from home. Alice wondered if she’d been doing likewise, playing up her Boston inflections.

  The waiter brought vodka aperitifs and told them that dinner was a set menu: blini with black caviar, smoked salmon in marinated pumpkin sauce, sturgeon soup with dumplings stuffed with crab, breast of pheasant, fillet of beef in red wine, pears with chocolate mousse—all for a hundred dollars a head. A hundred bucks, Alice thought; Russians could work several months for that, perhaps close to a year. When Harry leaned forward to light his cigar from the table candle, the waiter lunged forward with a Zippo; using candles as lighters is bad luck.

  “Haven’t seen a Russkie move so fast since they were kicked out of Afghanistan.” Harry waved the glowing tube at the waiter’s retreating back. “Anyone here been to New Orleans? Just like Moscow; everyone late for work and early home. You know what the Russkies think a workaholic is? An alcoholic in the office!” He tipped his head back and roared at his own joke.

  “I’m from New Orleans,” Lewis said.

  “Then you’ll know what I’m talking about!” Harry replied, missing the point by such a country mile that Alice actually laughed, half gurgle and half giggle, a saucy, choked chuckle that started high in her head, ended by her knees and earned her a reproving stare from Lewis.

  Alice sucked at her vodka and let herself melt into the evening. A few more glasses and she was in the swing, holding court, the boss, taking their deference as her due, ignoring both her own mild unease at being the center of attention and Christina’s murderous stares as she kept the table enthralled with tales of restitution claims from aristocratic families whose land had been confiscated by the Bolsheviks—“there’s one who wants half of Yekaterinburg back”—and some of the more eccentric privatization applications. “A guy in Nizhny Novgorod called me yesterday because he wants to build a distillery on the site of a former nuclear reactor, can you believe it? He’s gonna distill the vodka in the reactor’s water filters and call it ‘thermonuclear.’ Get out of here, I told him, you can’t be serious. And he told me straight, vodka cleans radioactive particles, and that’s why they gave extra rations to crews of Soviet nuclear submarines.”

  They all laughed, even Vika. These crazy Russians, what would they think of next?

  Five vodkas to the wind, Alice raised her glass. “We’re going to perform the greatest transformation ever. We’re going to make them be like us. To the end of history!”

  Laughing, they all clinked glasses—all except Vika. “Your enthusiasm is infectious, but your expectations are too high,” she said. Submarine vodka was one thing, but now a line had clearly been crossed. “If you ask me, anything less than complete chaos will be a success. Do you think you can control everything, bend everyone to your will? There are a hundred and fifty million people here, scattered over twelve time zones; you can’t make them do anything.” Harry was trying to nuzzle Vika’s ear, but she pushed him away; she wanted to make her point. “Do what you can. Leave the rest to fate.”

  “But you’ve had political freedom,” said Alice. “You’ve had perestroika and glasnost. Why is economic freedom so different?”

  “Political freedom allowed us to reject our past; economic freedom forces us to confront our future.” Vika paused. “We’ve always been good at the first.”

  There was a stage at one end of the room, and half an hour before midnight the restaurant manager appeared on it and called for silence. The chatter subsided like the ebbing of the tide, Harry the last one still talking—“and that’s how it went on all semester, night after night, it was wild, man,”—and the houselights were dimmed while a spotlight sought out the manager. He was holding a bottle of vodka; a single, perfectly ordinary half liter of Stolichnaya. He tapped the microphone to make sure that it was working, and spoke into the bulbous head.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, and anyone from Chechnya.” The crowd laughed. “It’s nearly midnight, the dawn of a new era, but we at the Rossiya thought we’d kick things off a little early, so we’re going to have a little auction. The rules couldn’t be simpler: one bottle of this excellent Stolichnaya, sold in Moscow’s finer establishments for”—he puffed his cheeks while he th
ought—“forty rubles, give or take. But tonight, it will go to the highest bidder. Let’s start at the street price. Do I hear forty?” A forest of hands shot up. “Fifty? Seventy-five? A hundred?” Still the hands. “That’s more like it.”

  “What’s all this ruble rubbish?” Harry shouted. “Let’s get on to dollars.”

  “Dollars?” The manager dipped a shoulder, as though the idea had never occurred to him. “Of course. Do I hear ten dollars? Fifteen?”

  Harry raised his hand. Vika looked away, already disillusioned.

  “Against the American gentleman with the cigar, twenty dollars.”

  The price climbed faster than a pine auger runs up a tree. There were four people left by the time it reached $50; three at $100; and when Harry pulled out at $120—it was just a bottle of vodka, after all—the bidding leapt ahead as though suddenly freed from his weight.

  “Expensive, terribly expensive,” Vika cried as though in pain.

  Alice looked around for those still in the chase, and was surprised to find that they were both Russian. Westerners clearly no longer had a monopoly on wealth in Moscow. The bidders battered each other up to $300 until one shook his head; he’d made his point.

  “Three hundred bucks for a bottle of Stoli!” Harry could barely make himself heard over the applause for the victor, who was shaking the manager’s hand and holding the bottle up as though it were a boxing belt. “That’s fucking nuts, man. Fucking nuts.”

  No, thought Alice; it was perfectly logical. The winner had bought the bottle just because he could, because there was no longer anyone to tell him not to.

  “Imagine how you’d feel if they’d stopped at a hundred and twenty dollars and left you with the bottle, Harry,” said Bob. “What would you have done?”

  “Given it to Alice, probably,” muttered Christina.

  10

  Wednesday, January 1, 1992

  “I gotta take a piss sooooo bad. I need to pee like a Russian racehorse.”

  Alice needed three hands; one to push her off the bed, another to find the way to the bathroom because she couldn’t open her eyes and a third to clutch at her head and make the pain go away. Her hangover was a physical weight, pressing her down into a crouch that was more simian than human. She reached the bathroom by touch alone and flopped gratefully onto the first piece of porcelain she found, vaguely aware that the toilet seemed an odd shape and colder against her ass than she’d expected, but it was only when she was halfway through urinating that she realized why. Alice sighed, finished, stood on wobbly legs and monkey-walked back into the bedroom.

  “I just tinkled in the bidet,” she said.

  Lewis was getting dressed; his hospital shift began at ten, and his wide-awakeness sent a little thrill of shame through Alice. He looked at her and shook his head, too deadpan for her to know whether he was being serious. “You’re a disgrace,” he said.

  “Why can’t the Russians have one big porcelain throne in the bathroom, like Americans? What’s with these people, Lewis? They refuse to shower regularly, but they want to have the cleanest asses in town.” She moved over to him and closed her hand playfully around his groin. “Didn’t we …?”

  “I’m surprised you can remember.”

  “’Course I can remember. Christening a new city—how could I forget? It was great.”

  “That’s what you always say when you’re drunk.” He adjusted his tie until the knot was just so. “I’ll be back before seven.”

  It was past midday when Alice finally crawled out of bed for good. Coffee, a shower and ZZ Top on the Walkman couldn’t cure her hangover; perhaps the winter air could. She wrapped herself in five layers and walked through deserted streets, realizing that the entire city shared her hangover. Everyone was indoors, sleeping off the excesses of New Year’s Eve and trying not to think about tomorrow, when—for the first time in Russian history—all prices were to be freed. For almost an entire century, Russia had been a giant laboratory, performing on itself giant innovations in social engineering. Now, for the second time, it was starting afresh, reshaping its state, society and economy all at once. One of history’s most awesome experiments was ending, and an equally daunting one was beginning; only the experimenters had changed. It was a journey back from utopia, and toward—well, who knew?

  Sabirzhan allowed himself only as much sleep as he thought suitable for Sharmukhamedov, which meant half an hour snatched here and there. Sharmukhamedov looked as unkempt as one would have expected from a man entering his third day of torture; Sabirzhan, on the other hand, felt fine, and then some. Administering pain seemed to energize him. In dark agonized corners of Lubyanka, his reputation still lurked; if a suspect needed to be worked on through the night, made to lap their own piss from the floor like a cat, Sabirzhan was your man.

  The sparrow over, Sharmukhamedov was back on the table. Sabirzhan strapped a gas mask to Sharmukhamedov’s face, loosening the straps to fit better and lifting the back of the Chechen’s enormous head from the table with something not far short of tenderness. He took a bottle of insecticide from the floor and gave the nozzle a few exploratory squirts. Even in such small doses, the chemical made him gag. He pressed the nozzle against the mask’s mouthpiece.

  “We call this the little elephant,” he said, and noted with satisfaction that Sharmukhamedov’s eyes were wide behind the perspex.

  Sabirzhan pressed down hard on the nozzle and watched the mask fill with insecticide.

  “Don’t scream,” he said softly, rubbing at the bridge of his pince-nez. “Don’t scream, Baltazar; you’ll only inhale it quicker.”

  Sharmukhamedov’s arms jerked as he tried to tear at the mask, but his hands were pinioned to the table. He was mixing shrieks, sobs and coughs into the most inhuman clamor. Only when Sabirzhan saw the perspex splatter with vomit did he remove the mask. He didn’t want Sharmukhamedov choking to death, not before he’d told Sabirzhan what he wanted to know. Besides, you couldn’t have half as much fun with a corpse as with a sentient victim.

  “Best New Year I’ve ever had,” Sabirzhan said, and meant every word.

  “I’m sorry if I was crabby this morning,” Lewis said when he got back.

  “You were annoyed that I got so smashed last night.”

  “I didn’t want to go to work on New Year’s, that was why.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” And Alice chose to believe it as the truth, even as Lewis nodded toward the glass in her hand. “Is that vodka in there?”

  “If it’s not, I need to have a word with my taste buds.”

  “I’m surprised you can even take a sip without hurling.”

  “Hair of the dog, I guess.”

  “I’ve never seen you drinking on your own before.”

  “Lewis, I’m having a drink. I’m not drinking. Anyway”—Alice gestured toward the window and Moscow beyond—“when in Russia, do as the Russians do. Join me?”

  The bottle was on the dressing table. To Alice, for an instant, it might as well have had a paper label tied around its neck with the words “drink me” beautifully printed in thirty-six-point type.

  Lewis went over, poured himself a measure, filled Alice’s glass, and slumped into the nearest armchair. His collar and tie rode up around his neck. “I’m so tired, I could make dodo right now,” he said. “Into bed, out like a light.”

  “How was work?” Alice asked.

  “This place, this fucking place. It’s New Year’s, so gangsters get drunk, start arguing, pull out their guns—and guess who has to clean it all up? You got it.”

  “And they come to you because Sklifosovsky’s the best emergency department in Moscow?”

  “Gunshot wounds a specialty, and I haven’t even had the pleasure of the weekly consignment of troops too stupid to work out the business end of a rifle. You should see what happens when a car with yellow number plates pulls in.” Yellow number plates denoted a foreigner.

  “Gravel burns as your money-hungry orderlies drag wou
ld-be patients from their cars?”

  Lewis laughed, which pleased Alice; as a child seeks to impress a parent, so Alice liked to make Lewis laugh. “Something like that.”

  Alice picked up the vodka bottle with too much force; it was empty, lighter than she expected.

  “We can’t have finished it all,” said Lewis. “I’ve only had a shot.”

  “I spilled some earlier,” said Alice.

  11

  Thursday, January 2, 1992

  Day zero dawned in deep blue and rich gold, a perfect Russian winter’s morning. The temperature had risen as if in sympathy, hovering around freezing; monochrome Moscow shone in technicolor brightness. In a nation whose inhuman weather has shaped so much of its history, the elements were doing their bit to help the latest brave and foolhardy souls trying to drag Russia to the promised land.

  Alice was out on the streets at nine o’clock sharp, fur hat down and collar up to keep the bare nape of her neck from getting cold. She walked around central Moscow all morning and watched the prices climb with the sun. Staff could hardly keep up with the changes; stock markets had crashed with less rapidity. For decades, bread had been thirteen kopecks; the price was so unchanging that it was baked into the loaves. By lunchtime, a loaf was two rubles. In a supermarket on Tverskaya, Alice heard a woman moan: “Bread is all I can afford to buy now.” Polish sausage had doubled to sixty rubles per kilo; gasoline had tripled to one ruble twenty per liter; the price of carrots had risen sixfold, from fifty kopecks to three rubles per kilo; a bottle of vodka was now ten days’ wages. Everything cost what it cost, not what the state decreed it should.

  The rising prices were a good sign, Alice thought. The billions of rubles hidden under mattresses throughout the country had created a vast monetary overhang, an ocean that had to be absorbed before the economy could start functioning properly. And yet, and yet … she could appreciate that economic sense dragged with it social trauma. The people hurrying from store to store looked like accident victims: shock and anxiety crowding their faces, eyes glazed and mouths hanging open, the usual reflexes of speech and action working at half speed.