Vodka

by Boris Starling

“Because I am.”

  “I need more than that.”

  “The West won’t back out. Public opinion in Russia’s not strong enough to change a flat tire. Parliament won’t be able to do anything until it’s too late. The auction will go through.”

  “No. Tell me why you’re sure.”

  “Alice…”

  “Tell me.”

  He spoke through his sigh. “Because it’s a done deal.”

  A done deal? She didn’t understand.

  “You know about presidential decrees, right?”

  “Right.” In the absence of a proper legislature, many laws were made by the president. Borzov would decide on something, commit it to paper, and voilà!—it was law. That he could, and sometimes did, countermand or contradict it the next day was neither here nor there.

  “Well, decree number 182 exempts the Sports Academy from all taxes and duties.”

  “The Sports Academy?”

  “Runs training programs, camps and so on. Sport’s the only way of saving the nation. We’re for the public good, it’s a worthwhile cause. Hence, we’re exempt.”

  “So? No one pays taxes anyway.”

  “No, but this way we don’t have to bribe tax and customs inspectors.”

  “I still don’t understand what that’s got to do with anything.”

  “The Sports Academy is the largest importer and exporter of vodka in the country.”

  “Vodka? Very sporty.” Her sarcasm sloshed over him. “And the reason it’s so big is that … you don’t pay tariffs at either end.”

  “Correct.”

  “How much are we talking?”

  “Ten million dollars, give or take.”

  “That’s not so much.”

  “A month.”

  “Ah.” Alice was beginning to see where this was going. “That’s a hell of a concession.” He waited her out, letting her reach the truth in her own time. “And for Borzov to have given you that,” she mused, “you must have given something just as big in return.”

  “And what could Borzov want that’s so big?”

  She saw it now, and slapped her forehead in parody of sudden comprehension. “Light dawns over Marble-head! That’s the price, isn’t it? Borzov waives the taxes for the academy, and you agree to privatize Red October. That’s the price of your cooperation.”

  It was as cynical as used notes in brown envelopes. Lev smiled but said nothing. There was no shame, nor a facetious answer that would have patronized her. He was still waiting, she realized, waiting for her to find the last piece of the puzzle.

  “So what the fuck have I been doing all along, if this was sewn up from the start?”

  “Legitimizing it.” He spread his hands. “You make it aboveboard, Alice. So long as you’re involved, the West will be convinced everything’s being done properly. Without you, every government from Dublin to Rome would think that a bunch of shady crooks had struck some tricky backroom deal.”

  By Moscow standards, Machiavelli would have been—a cynic? Definitely not. A realist? Definitely. A liberal? Perhaps.

  “And all this time … all this time we’ve been screwing, you never thought to tell me?”

  “How could I?”

  “You profess to have feelings for me. I’m nothing but a veneer of respectability.”

  “Listen, darling…”

  “Don’t you dare call me darling. I was chosen for this job because I’m damn good. I fell into bed with you because you mean something to me. I feel this high—” She held her thumb and forefinger up, about an inch apart. “You can fuck off.”

  “You think I intended for this to happen between us? You’re the last person I wanted to … And yet I did. It doesn’t impinge on what I feel for you.”

  “Don’t be absurd. It’s all tied up together.”

  “And your behavior’s been above reproach, Alice? Sneaking around my office at night? Trying to have me sacked?” His eyes bored into her, spearing her with the memories of her own betrayals: Sabirzhan and the Suyumbika file, Galina and the bank details. “No, I haven’t behaved well. Nor have you. So let’s write it off and work out what to do.”

  “I can’t … I can’t just let it go that easily.”

  “You have to. Sabirzhan will phone you this evening. You have to know what to say to him.”

  “Does Sabirzhan know about this?” she asked. “About decree 182?”

  “Sabirzhan knows everything.”

  Lev’s alliance with Borzov went back seven years, to the start of Gorbachev’s tenure. They’d seen in each other an ally in the task of dismantling the Soviet Union. Both men had defined themselves with regard to the communist system, one by his participation and the other by his opposition. Both had also appreciated the central irony of the situation; despite their implacable opposition, the Party and the vory had been more similar than different. Both had been arranged around a paramilitary hierarchy, both had been hostile toward outsiders, both had rewarded their own and both had regarded the law as an inconvenience.

  Even as Lev had been doing his bit to destroy Gorbachev, he and the other vory had also been helping keep the system afloat. In the Soviet Union’s final twelve months, the vory had controlled a black economy worth sixty billion dollars in spare parts, automobiles, timber, caviar, precious metals, gems and, of course, vodka. The kind of deal struck between the KGB and the 21st Century in 1987 for control of Red October was repeated across the union, sometimes for tiny cooperatives, sometimes for massive industrial plants without which entire towns would have closed. By circulating goods and services around the union, the vory’s smuggling had saved the state’s industrial machine from choking on its own red tape—they’d been the closest thing the Soviet Union had to a service industry. The vory had been doing it for themselves, of course; any benefit to the regime had been entirely unintentional.

  And now Lev and Borzov, having helped destroy the union, were helping to ensure its replacement. Not for free, of course; nothing ever comes free in Russia. Criminals and politicians, politicians and businessmen, businessmen and criminals—the troika reinvented.

  Alice cooked dinner and ate it without tasting a mouthful. Lewis was talkative, which suited her on two counts: it meant he didn’t notice her distraction, and absolved her from the need to keep the conversation going by, say, confessing her infidelity. When the phone rang, she forced herself to stroll rather than sprint across the room.

  “Hello?”

  “Have you decided?”

  Sabirzhan’s voice was soft, and no less menacing for it. He was a creature of the twilight, Alice thought. Would he really fight his battles in public, as he was threatening? She couldn’t stop privatization, and she wouldn’t tell her husband about Lev—why should she, until she absolutely had to? She should call his bluff; a bully couldn’t coerce someone who wouldn’t be intimidated. “I think you must have the wrong number,” she said, and hung up.

  60

  Thursday, February 20, 1992

  The revelation came to Alice with sudden and unexpected simplicity. She was watching Lewis gather his things for another night shift at the Sklifosovsky—he’d been working many of those lately—when she realized something at once intensely sad and deeply relieving: she was no longer in love with him. She’d always thought that whatever Lev gave her, whatever problems she and Lewis were having, Lewis was her husband and she loved him. But now, just as Lewis was buttoning his shirt, an unremarkable and pifflingly domestic moment, Alice saw in a flash that she didn’t. It was like deteriorating vision; you get it so gradually that it’s hardly noticeable, then one day you put on glasses and the world becomes once more as sharp and clear as it was always meant to be.

  Alice had been lying to Lewis and concealing things from him ever since she’d met Lev, and maybe even before that. She recognized now that she’d also been hiding the truth from herself. It’s an awful thing, not to love someone who loves you. The prospect of inflicting such a humiliating, annihilating blow on someon
e she cared about so deeply—and she could and did love Lewis without being in love with him—was enough to infuse Alice with terror. She should love him, of course, but wasn’t there an absolute delight in loving the wrong man? Love is like a lump of coal, she thought: hot, it burns you; cold, it makes you dirty.

  She knew every little thing about Lewis: that he liked to read biographies in bed; that he took ketchup but never mayonnaise with hamburgers, and mustard but never ketchup with hot dogs; that he often gave a quick three-pronged snuffle as he dropped off to sleep; that he walked with his weight slightly to one side, so that the heel of his right shoe wore away twice as fast as the heel of his left. She knew all these things, and many more, but it was no longer enough. There was no hope for her and Lewis anymore. Lewis was wrong for Moscow, and Moscow was where she wanted to be. Ergo, Lewis was wrong for her.

  With Lewis she could simply be, in a way she never could with Lev. Seeing Lev was always an event: she was always buzzing, always in top form, always superwoman. She and Lev had never spent an evening slumped in front of the television or reading in companionable silence. It was as though she was scared that the moment she stopped or even slowed, Lev would see her for a mistress of illusion. If he knew how unworthy she was, he’d surely stop loving her, and there was nothing she now feared more than the loss of his love.

  The Hungry Duck was a Western bar on Pushechnaya that was working hard to maintain its reputation as one of Moscow’s most degenerate nightspots. Tonight was ladies’ night—women only and free drinks until nine o’clock. For Alice, it was the perfect place to blow off steam. There was no word from Sabirzhan, and she was going nuts sitting around waiting for the hammer to fall.

  She found a quiet corner—well, quiet by Hungry Duck standards—and splashed vodka into her glass. The wall above her head was plastered with advertisements for other themed nights: Czar in the Bar, when a costumed actor roved the room ensuring that no glass remained empty for long, or Countdown, with a sliding scale of cut-rate drinks, five for the price of one between eight and nine, four for one between nine and ten, and so on until normal service was resumed at midnight.

  No one asked her to join them, which suited Alice just fine. She wanted to be alone; she wanted to be in a crowd.

  At nine o’clock sharp, the doors opened onto—and, by the look of it, under the sheer weight of—a male tsunami. Scores of men brimming with vodka and testosterone came barreling into the bar with the speed and relentlessness of a swollen mountain torrent, sniffing and yelping and licking at any women who were unfortunate enough not to get out of their way in time.

  People didn’t go to the Hungry Duck to talk, they went to unwind. It was the new, licentious Russia writ large. Every night, the place was packed to the rafters with thrill-seeking expats and Russians intent on drinking themselves blind, finding someone to fuck, and maybe getting into a fistfight or two—in short, everything they hadn’t been allowed to do under communism.

  Alice was at the bar when the first fight began. Two very drunk Russians were suddenly punching each other. She hadn’t even seen it start, there was no preamble of raised voices, dire warnings, pushes in the chest and handbags at five paces. They just got stuck in.

  Two more fights broke out, and then another two, like cells multiplying. Alice clambered onto the bar so as not to get knocked over. Her stomach lurched momentarily as she half lost her balance on a beer slick. One of the original combatants finally managed to knock the other to the floor and was kicking him in the head when security arrived, hauled him off and proceeded to beat the crap out of him—partly for their own pleasure and partly to encourage the others to pack it in. The crowd by the bar started shouting at Alice to dance.

  “No way.” She flipped them the finger.

  “It might stop us seeing up your skirt,” someone yelled.

  “I’m not your type,” she shot back. “I’m not inflatable.”

  There was nowhere for her to get down, so she started to shuffle from side to side, careful to keep her footing—she was drunk enough as it was, she wouldn’t need much excuse to fall over—and they were clapping rhythmically, wolf-whistling and cheering, so she started to do some sexy moves for them, gyrating her hips and running her hands down the sides of her thighs. Now she was loving this as much as they were—it felt good to have all these randy men egging her on, to know that she could have taken her pick, crooked her finger at them and watched them step on their cocks as they tried to get up there fast enough.

  Someone propositioned her. She waved her hand in his face, showing him her wedding ring, and in that instant all her hypocrisies came pouring into her head, through the noise and heat and vodka, and she had to leave, she had to get out, now. She motioned to the crowd to clear a space for her, and they helped her down, hands groping her en route, but she just wanted out as quick as possible, she didn’t even want to spend split seconds slapping the wandering paws away.

  The stairs were as crowded as the bar had been. Alice barged her way down the flights and was almost at ground level when she saw what was going on. Girls were sliding down the banisters, all the way from the top, stark naked with their legs either side of the rail, and at the bottom men lined up with their tongues laid flat or their erections held down against the wood.

  One girl lost her grip at the top and fell down the outside of the staircase, sixteen feet or more to the ground, and when she landed it sounded like a small explosion. Even allowing for how drunk she was and therefore how limp and relaxed she’d have been when she hit the ground, she must have at the very least broken a limb, lying naked and spread-eagle with all her dignity gone. Not a single person moved to help her. The men were too busy yelling for another girl to come sliding down, and hurry the fuck up about it too.

  “The wetter they are, the quicker they come down,” Alice heard someone say.

  She tried to fight her way through the mêlée to the injured girl, but there were too many people in the way, solid phalanxes of leering perverts. She heard American voices among them—dweebs raised in the suburbs, the kind of men who at home would have been afraid to jump subway turnstiles, now blind drunk, blowing chunks and thinking they were tough guys. There was a word for people like them, she thought bitterly: dorkadent.

  Alice walked back through empty, frozen streets; but she was warmed from inside, a great molten core of vodka. Her thoughts seemed to flow down endless rivers of distilled spirit. Vodka was her friend. No one else really understood her, Alice felt, not even Lev. But vodka did, vodka made everything better. Everything better, she thought, everything better—until it made everything worse.

  She was hiding, always hiding: behind the vodka at night, behind her professional persona by day. And sometimes, very occasionally, she peered into the gap between the two and spied what was left of her real self, trying to fight its way through, confused and frightened and lonely, pleading for help and trying desperately to be free.

  When she was with Lewis, she felt guilty; when she was with Lev, she felt needy. The more this guilt distanced her from Lewis, the needier she became with Lev; the needier she became with Lev, the guiltier she felt about Lewis; the guiltier she felt about Lewis, the more she distanced herself from him, and so it went on. She drank to drown the confusion, drank to drown the shame and the slow erosion of integrity that accompanied duplicity. She felt dishonorable and evil, and her life was spiraling downward, lubricated by vodka and made bearable by anesthesia.

  It didn’t matter how fast or slowly Alice walked. Confusion stayed with her. A telephone pole stretched longingly toward the stars, its wires joining with others—power lines, overhead bus cables—in a thick canopy above her, endless connections to all points urban that linked buildings divided by eclectic architectural patchworks and their own place in history.

  Here were bulbous church domes and vast turn-of-the-century imperial government buildings colored in pink and green or huge slabs of pale yellow and light blue; here were functional structures based o
n machines and a total absence of idle elements, granite and severe half-ruins from the cruel dreams and superwills of the century’s most successful tyrants; here triumphant classicism reflecting postwar pride in cultural values and heritage; here softer and kinder socialist apartment buildings from the eras of Khrushchev and Brezhnev; and here the darkened glitter of new offices in chrome and glass.

  Like the buildings around her, Alice felt she was now one thing and now suddenly another, a whole in spite of rather than because of the differing, clashing parts within. She’d lost her bearings. She didn’t know anything about herself anymore, not really. Sometimes she couldn’t tell what she despised and what she admired. She felt as though everything was being doubled in her soul, just as objects appear twinned to weary eyes. Some schizophrenics are unable to recognize themselves in a mirror—would that happen to her? What would she see? Her own face, twisted and distorted? Two of her, identical twins? Someone else entirely? Or simply nothing?

  61

  Friday, February 21, 1992

  Alice’s hangovers came in degrees of awfulness, roughly divisible into three categories. First, the mild hangover, when her head throbbed like a fairground generator and her parched mouth felt as if someone had lit a small bonfire in it. These symptoms were amenable to, though not entirely cured by, a mixture of aspirin, water, cola and vitamin C.

  Then there was the moderate-to-severe hangover, in which general malaise was accompanied by paranoia (exactly what had she done last night?) and the feeling that Lilliputian secret policemen had spent the hours since her last drink pummeling her head and body—especially her kidneys—with small but lethally efficient rubber truncheons.

  Finally, there was the humdinger hangover, when she’d wake with a ghastly start at five in the morning, overwhelmed by panic, dread and the certain knowledge that the rest of the day, and possibly the following night too, was going to be lost to remorse, pain, self-pitying tears, chronic anxiety and insomnia. Unless she had another drink, of course—the only remedy that worked, at least temporarily, until the deferred hangover caught up with her all over again.