Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “I knew I didn’t have to worry anymore about dying the worst way of all. I wouldn’t need to keep a bullet or grenade in reserve in case the mujahidin got me. They did terrible things to the ones they caught, the mujahidin did. They’d kill a man with pitchforks, or peel off his skin and throw him onto hot sand, or slit open his stomach, bend him over and push his face into his own intestines…

  “And who can blame them, when you know what we did to them in return? They used to interrogate men in threes, take them up in a helicopter, all blindfolded. The first guy got thrown out, no questions asked; all the others heard were his squeals. The second one sometimes talked, sometimes didn’t—if not, out he went too. The third one always talked. And we’d cut the ears off the mujahidin we killed, so that later we could lay them on the tombstones of friends who never made it back. That was our way of telling our mates that they could rest in peace, that we’d avenged them.

  “They gave me more vodka back at the base. It took so much to knock me unconscious that my body temperature went right down, and my pulse and breathing were so shallow, the medics thought I was dead. They put me in a zinc coffin and loaded me onto a black tulip—that’s what we called the planes that carried the dead flowers of Soviet youth. Each coffin came with a slip, saying something like—I can’t remember the exact words—‘nature of consignment: coffin with body of Ministry of Defense soldier. Weight: six hundred and sixty. Declared value: zero rubles.’ Worthless, in other words. Wasn’t that the truth?

  “Anyway, halfway through the flight I woke up. Coming around and realizing that you’ve been buried alive … well, it’s the worst fear imaginable. I banged on the coffin lid, but of course no one was back in the hold watching over the coffins, and the pilots couldn’t hear me above the roar of the engines. I went nuts in there. Elbows, fingers, stumps—I beat them until they were scraped raw in my frenzy to get out. It was only when the flight landed at Tashkent and the engines were shut off that they finally heard me. And you know how I survived that long? Because the zinc coffin I was in was substandard. It wasn’t airtight. In a normal screwed-down box, I’d have been dead within the hour. If that had been a real corpse in my coffin, it’d have stunk the place out. Shitty Soviet workmanship saved my life.”

  Studenetsky fingered the cleft in his chin. “You may think we could have done more for him, Investigator, and in many ways I’d agree. This institute is one of only two psychiatric clinics that are qualified to treat Afghan veterans—the other’s in St. Petersburg. What use is that, if you live in Magadan, or Kazan, or Syktyvkar? But remember too how far we’ve come. Ten years ago, Rodya wouldn’t have even had a chance of treatment. That we’re having this conversation at all is a miracle.”

  The vampire hadn’t just emerged from nothing. He’d been created by the old system and nurtured by the new, forged in the white heat of a revolution ushered through without the first thought for what it would do to people like him, the little ones, the forgotten ones. Rodion had been a product not of his own nature but of the insane society in which he lived.

  The vampire wasn’t to be found in Moscow, Irk thought bitterly; the vampire was Moscow.

  Irk returned to the Khruminsches’ apartment, past houses that sported dead cats and dogs on their thresholds in the belief that the vampire would have to stop and count every hair on the animals’ cadavers, which would take it until dawn, when it would have to flee.

  The vampire: Rodion.

  Nelli had been killed a month ago. The tracks were visible beside her body. Irk could have stopped it then, ended the murders, taken Rodya into custody. He’d failed.

  Svetlana and Galina were back at the apartment. They didn’t know where Rodya was. Rodya, Irk thought. My friend, my enigma—my quarry. Irk had seen the ease with which Rodion moved among children. Young people see clearly; they know with one look, and those poor boys and girls who’d gone with Rodion had done so because they’d seen who he was: a victim.

  What option did he have, given the circumstances, but to surrender to the dark side, and to his addictions: vodka, death, life, blood … The innocent and pure blood of the children, which he knew would be untainted by vodka. That was why Rodya had chosen children, Irk realized. None of the victims had drunk vodka; they’d been scared that it would stunt their growth, or they hadn’t yet gotten used to the taste. Rodion got drunk to commit the crimes, and the drunker he got, the more he feared his blood was turning to vodka, and so the more he needed to go out and kill.

  The children were dead and he was alive. Indeed, they’d died so that he might live. But what kind of life was this? Rodion was already halfway to the other side. He’d lost his soul in Afghanistan, and what was a man without a soul? Rodion was neither dead nor alive, but living in death. How fearful a destiny is that of the vampire who has no rest in the grave, but whose doom it is to come forth and prey upon the living. Can a man be victim and fiend at the same time? All too easily. Rodion was driven and constrained to endless, fruitless repetition. With no way out, he could have ended it all—but what a waste that would have been, when he’d survived everything else. He was afraid of dying. Rodion wanted to live.

  Rodya was due home at seven. At half past eight, he phoned: there was trouble down at the orphanage, he’d spend the night there. It was Galina who spoke to him; Irk gestured that he wanted a word, but Rodya had hung up before Irk reached the phone.

  “I have to go,” Irk said.

  “Where to?” Sveta asked.

  “Back to Petrovka.” It was halfway true: Petrovka would be his first stop.

  He rounded up a dozen policemen and went down to the orphanage. “We’ve come to see Rodion Khruminsch,” he explained to the 21st Century man on the door.

  “Rodya? Went home hours ago.”

  “He’s just phoned from here.”

  “He left at six. Haven’t seen him since.”

  Irk’s stomach began to twist like a moray eel. “He said there was some trouble here.”

  The gatekeeper gestured toward the building. “Go ahead and look, if you want. You won’t find him.”

  He was right. They didn’t.

  86

  Tuesday, March 17, 1992

  There was a whole list of things Rodion couldn’t do before he went on a mission. He couldn’t use the word “last,” or shave, or shake hands, or be photographed. That was how it had been in Afghanistan; that was how it was now.

  He’d been in the sewers all night looking for a target, without joy. Now he was aboveground, hidden in the flat morning shadows, and he was still. He could wait as long as he needed. The bloodlust never really started until he was committed to the attack, though when it did he couldn’t hold it. Even knowing the price of exposure—the Chechens were no longer going to be the fall guys—he hadn’t been able to hold it.

  A crocodile line of children passed on their way to school, singing jauntily:

  “Marushka met her lover; she asked him where he lived;

  His dark eyes merely laughed at her; no answer would he give.

  So on his shining button she looped a piece of thread,

  Unwound it and then followed where it led

  It led her out the village through a grove of silver birch,

  It led her to a bolted doorway at a silent church.

  Up upon a ladder through a window she did peer,

  And watched a scene that chilled her heart with fear.

  Upon the church’s altar, a rustic coffin lay;

  Within it was a dead man, his skin as cold as clay.

  Leaning o’er the body, the man whom she would wed

  With hungry gulps was eating up the dead.”

  There was a boy at the back, five or six paces behind the rest. People hurried this way and that on their way to work, but none of them would suspect him. No one ever did, not when he was half a man and so good with children. “Hey!” he hissed.

  The boy turned, and Rodion winked. “Give us a hand, would you?”

  The boy glance
d at the retreating backs of his classmates.

  “You can spare a moment for a man with no legs, my friend,” Rodion said.

  The boy took a step closer, and then paused again. His eyes were large under his school cap.

  One on one, Rodya and the boy; that was how it always was, that was how it had been in Afghanistan.

  When you found a mine, everything suddenly became very still, as if someone had turned the volume right down. Like when a violinist has just taken his bow from the strings, and the final note hangs dying in the auditorium, only the note faded inside you rather than outside.

  A minesweeper had to work alone—even if the mine you were working on exploded, the others still had to check the road ahead. You worked in sixty-degree fields with a fifty-five-yard arc; no one else was allowed in that zone. It was just you and the mine, one on one, each trying to second-guess the other. Sometimes you’d be concentrating so hard that you didn’t notice how much your hands were bleeding from where you’d scraped them. And if the mine went off—well, there’d be nothing left but your head, still intact inside your helmet. If it did go off, you hoped it was a big one and it killed you and killed you quick, because all the tension came not from the thought of being killed, but of being maimed and surviving.

  Do you wonder that we took all the help we could get? Sheep, cows, horses, dogs—we’d throw food for them into any area we suspected of being a minefield, then wait to see if they set anything off when they went to get it. And yes, we used children too. A handful of candy, thrown high in the air, and they’d be off and running before your hand was back by your side. You’re shocked. Even children? Especially children. For every child that stepped on a mine, that was one less to grow up and hunt us down in years to come. Because everyone was the enemy there. They’d smile at you before putting a bullet in your back or a mine under your car. That’s the way it was; there were no borders between civilian and military, hard and soft, legitimate and illegitimate. They were all guerrilla fighters and it was us or them.

  “I’ve got to go,” said the boy, and he was running after his friends even as Rodion’s hands closed into claws of impotent frustration.

  Gorky Park was full of people—the place was free, after all. Traffic fumes faded into the burned sugar smell of cotton candy; despite the temperature, a man clad only in a loincloth marked “Tarzan” was performing bungee jumps from the top of a crane, yodeling and beating his chest on the way down. Alice dodged sad rows of hawkers posing morosely chained animals for snapshots with giggling adolescents, and she was still beating off the hucksters when she came face-to-face with a colossal German beer hall, every one of its two thousand seats empty. Whatever else the Soviet Union had lacked, Alice thought, there’d always been hope, but here even that seemed to have gone.

  Snow was piled car-high on the verges, and the paths were littered with malevolent gray chunks of ice. Beyond tracts of whitened grass and shrubs wrapped in burlap against the winter, skaters glided serenely on the ice rink. Recognizing Lewis and the others waiting in line to rent skates, Alice went to join them.

  Alice had always been a good skater—figure skating, of course, not speed skating, because to be a good speed skater you need thighs that can kick-start a Concorde. For Alice, skating was virtually the only method of human propulsion that wasn’t in some way ungainly, and when she got it right she felt as if she were soaring.

  They took to the ice with varying degrees of grace and success: Harry was surprisingly good, Christina unsurprisingly bad, and there was nearly an international incident when Lewis managed to stop by the simple but antisocial method of plowing straight into the nearest old woman. One by one they retired to sit beside the rink and eat their picnic, leaving Alice to skate alone, her thoughts turning in circles with her blades.

  Lev was gone, her job was gone. Should she leave Lewis or stay with him, leave Moscow or stay here, stay in finance or try journalism—or just keep on skating, drinking, spiraling, until she’d eliminated every course but one?

  Alice skated on. Her nose and lips were cold and doubtless turning purple, but the rest of her felt warmed by all the vodka she’d drunk. She imagined her insides pulsing like the core of a reactor. Hadn’t one of the early privatization proposals she’d received been from a company wanting to make “Thermonuclear” vodka?

  Her eye was suddenly caught by a man pushing himself along on a trolley. He had no legs, she saw, but he was amazingly sure-footed—well, sure-wheeled—riding over the iced ruts rather than through them. It was Rodion, she realized, pumping away with his massive arms.

  “Rodya!” She skated over to the side of the rink. “Rodya!”

  He slowed and smiled at her. “You skate well. I saw you.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  “You’re certainly well equipped.” He pointed at her clothes—skates, fur coat, gloves, fur hat—and then looked past her to Josh. “Yours?”

  Alice indicated Bob and Christina. “Theirs.”

  Josh, perpetually inquisitive, was already on his way over, chewing extravagantly on a piece of toffee. “All those candies.” Alice tutted in mock disapproval. “Won’t your ass get stuck shut?”

  Christina was talking loudly about how Moscow was no place for children, not really, not American children at any rate; she made Josh sit under a sunlamp every other day, she said, to counteract the lack of sunlight and vitamin D.

  Whenever Alice worried that she was a bad person, she was reassured to discover that Josh loved her as much as ever. Children were clear-sighted judges of good and evil, weren’t they? Malice can deceive the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it may be hidden, a child will sense it and be repelled by it. Alice might have been wrong-headed, muddled, out of control, confused, all that—but malicious and deliberately hurtful, definitely not. Quite the opposite, in fact. What had all her lying to Lewis been about, if not to keep him from being hurt?

  Josh was chatting to Rodion as if he were a favorite uncle. Rodion grinned at him and began to sing in a deliberately absurd falsetto and Josh clapped his hands and laughed. Rodion asked if he could have a candy, and when Josh gave him one, he pretended to swallow it and then magicked it out of Josh’s ear.

  “What’s going on, Alice?” Christina shouted.

  “We’re fine,” Alice replied, resisting the urge to flip Christina the finger.

  “You’ve got another one in your ear,” Rodion told Josh.

  Josh felt inside both ears. “Have not.”

  “Have too.” Rodion leaned forward and plucked the candy from his ear again.

  “More!” Josh cried. “More!”

  Rodion ducked out of the sling he used to carry his belongings, hopped off his trolley and, placing his hands flat on the ground, slowly turned his head and trunk through a full circle, like a gymnast on the rings. Then he began somersaulting down the path, Josh tumbling end over end to keep up with him, all the way to the nearest corner, and all the way back.

  “Auntie Alice,” Josh said, “will you give me a piggyback? On the ice?”

  “Sure.”

  There was a pile of vodka bottles—all empty, of course—heaped against the edge of the rink. Alice took eight bottles, four in each hand, their necks between her fingers, and set them out in a line on the rink, each one a couple of paces from the next. Then she squatted down, let Josh climb onto her shoulders, and gripped his legs under her armpits as she straightened up.

  “Alice, what are you doing?” Christina said.

  “Aw, Mom, we’re fine,” Josh replied.

  “You tell her, Josh,” Alice giggled. She skated once around the perimeter of the rink, minutely but constantly adjusting her balance as Josh shifted on her shoulders, before approaching the row of vodka bottles at speed and passing through them in an expert slalom.

  “Yeah!” Josh shouted. “Way to go, Auntie Alice! Again!”

  She turned and made a second approach run, except this time she spun around at the last moment and took
the line backward, crossing and uncrossing her legs for each alternate bottle.

  “Do be careful,” Christina said. “That looks awful dangerous.”

  The vodka hummed in Alice’s brain; she felt invincible. She squeezed her upper arms tighter against Josh’s legs. “Ready for a jump and spin?”

  “Yeah!”

  “OK, here goes. Katya Witt, eat your heart out.”

  Alice hadn’t done a jump in years, but she could remember the basics: speed and confidence, speed and confidence. She took long strides to get herself moving, feeling her quadriceps stretching as her legs extended, and then shorter steps to maintain the velocity. One deep breath as she gathered herself, and up they went.

  It was all wrong, Alice knew that the moment her skates left the ice. Her balance was hopelessly off, and Josh’s weight above her shoulderline was making it even worse. She was falling backward, and if she landed on her back then Josh would hit the ice hard—and she couldn’t have that. But if she managed to twist herself so she was falling forward instead, his knees would take both her weight and his, and she couldn’t have that either. All these thoughts came pinging through her head in fractions of a second, as did the solution. And so Alice ducked her head and flipped Josh over the top of it, still holding him, so that she would hit the ice first and he would land on top of her.

  The impact didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it would. She was drunk enough to be reasonably limp, and the padding of her jacket and hat helped cushion the blow. A moment after she’d landed, she caught a mouthful of downy parka as Josh landed on her face. But he was all right, and so was she. He bounced off her with high-pitched squeals.

  “Great! Let’s do it again, Auntie Alice! Let’s do it again!”

  Alice lay still for a moment, her eyes filled with the unrelenting gray of the Moscow sky, and then she began to laugh hysterically.

  “Josh! Josh!” It was Christina. “Are you OK?”