It was eleven, and we had one hour to find that elusive bottle, but we were not tempted to lay our quest to rest at the Persian restaurant of the Radisson. We went grimly back to the car. “One hour,” she said. “We have one hour to not be fucked for New Year’s.”
The reportedly hedonistic seafront boulevards of Qurm, a string of cafés and restaurants where Muscat’s beautiful people liked to parade themselves, yielded nothing but fruit juice. “They’re drinking fruit juice on New Year’s,” Elena gasped. “I’m in hell.” We came to a turnoff and took it, blindly hoping it would go back to the freeway. We stopped at one of the hotels and asked if they knew of any restaurants where we could get a drink at this late hour. The staff patiently looked up alternatives. Yes, they said, there was a Mexican place in the neighborhood of Madinat Qaboos, in a mall. They drew us a map. They looked dubious. Good luck!
It was one of those small, friendly malls the Omanis seem to love, with restaurants and pleasure gardens tucked behind the retail outlets. We parked and walked down a lane into a series of restaurant gardens hung with lanterns where Omani crowds were smoking their shish and perhaps looking at their watches as carefully as we were. We hurried. There was a large Omani place called Kharjeen with gardens filled with trees, and behind it the Mexican joint. It had saloon swing doors and piñatas hung in the interior gloom. We went in frantically. It was filled with drunken tourists and expats in Stetsons and Omani guys on the prowl, and we knew at once that we couldn’t do it. We retreated baffled into the alley, and there was a hysterical scene. It was ten to midnight, and we were to celebrate the hour dry. Our resolutions had come to nothing. There was little else to do but sit in the lovely gardens of Kharjeen and order shuwa marinated with pepper and turmeric with two tall watermelon juices. The moon rose over the garden, and the affluent Omanis did not look at their watches.
Elena had calmed a little, and when she had accepted the idea that we would not be drinking a bottle of champagne, she felt less hysterical, and we sipped the watermelon juices and waited. A great calm, suddenly. Midnight, and nothing happened. Everyone kept talking, eating, smoking, and no one even looked up. We kissed and wondered if we had miscalculated the time. The orgy of midnight never happened.
We toasted the New Year with fruit juice and then ordered apple shish pipes. The mania of the half-hour before midnight was forgotten, and we stayed in the garden for a long time, looking at the moon and smoking and saying very little. It was the first nonalcoholic New Year I had enjoyed since the age of thirteen. Here I was outside with the moon, smoking with the girl I adored, sober, clear, drinking kharwa coffee and not talking. The manic dialogues and monologues of alcohol absent. It was not bad. It was even preferable. We drove home very calmly, curiously contented, and amused ourselves half the night in our hotel bed, indifferent to the concept of a new year.
The following morning we got up early, hangover-free, and drove in the hard light to Qantab. The usual suspects were waiting for us, and we had a boat within minutes. The sea was calm and slightly menacing, as if hammerheads were waiting below.
We went to a new beach twenty minutes south. It was a narrow crescent of sand between two stone headlands that pushed out to sea like the prongs of a fork. The boatman left us in shallow water, and we waded ashore. He would be back at the end of the day. We climbed onto the sand, and within a minute we were alone. Behind us was a hillside of dry grasses and rubble, no road in sight. At the distant tops of the rock shelves, birds sat waiting.
We spread the towels and lay there in the gathering heat. I was glad now not to have a hangover. We had become saner as a result. However, looking up from my doze, I saw that Elena’s eyes were wide awake, and that she was biting her lip nervously. She sat up then and began to look up and down the beach as if she had heard something unusual.
“I heard a bee,” she said.
There are moments in every relationship when something is revealed that has never been seen before. I had never known that she had a fear of bees, or that bees occupied any place in her subconscious. Prolonged sobriety, perhaps, had begun to expose it.
“There’s a bee here,” she said then, getting up and standing there in the sunlight, magnificently Monica Vitti, tanned and blond and windblown, a girl who had been a dancer.
“There can’t be a bee,” I said.
“There’s a bee. I can hear it.” She began to sweat. “It’s looking at me. I can feel it looking at me.”
“I can’t be looking at you.”
“It’s after me. Where is it?”
She began to wring her hands, then to pace back and forth. She began to cry. Then, suddenly she took off down the beach, screaming and waving her arms at an imaginary pursuing bee. She ran all the way down to the end of the little beach and began to dance about, battling phantom beasts. With a cry, she jumped into the water.
“I have cultivated my hysteria,” Baudelaire once wrote, “with pleasure.” I lay there not knowing what to do. I got up. At that moment a bee flew over my head and meandered its way down to the water’s edge, but at the opposite end of the beach. Its indifference to us was obvious. I walked down the beach, wondering what I should say to comfort her. Now I wished we had a bottle of vodka to share. It would have made everything better. As I came up, she glared at me and demanded to know where the bee was. I lied that there was no bee.
“There’s hammerhead sharks in there,” I said.
She jumped out of the water back onto dry land and stood shivering, wildly looking around for signs of an attacker with little wings. I gave her the towel and told her to swat the air around her to keep the bees at bay. She seized the thing and did just that. We walked back to our place. Elena swatted the air around her, and soon she began to enjoy the swatting in itself. I lay down, and she paced up and down, swatting and then doing a few dance moves. It was a phobic trance.
Soon she was doing a full-blown number, leaping up and down, pirouetting on the sand, the towel flapping around her to keep off the bee. It became a performance, and the deep strangeness of the scene was offset by its sheer prettiness. At that moment an Arab fishing boat came into view slogging its way across the open water. It came halfway across the cove, and then it stopped, as if stupefied by what the crew had seen. A blond girl of obvious loveliness prancing about naked and capable of professional moves and waving a towel in one hand. I could see the hands raised to shade their eyes. Infidels, there was no end to their weirdness.
I thought about this all the way back to Dubai. We never had a drink in Oman, and the whole voyage had been alcohol-free from the first moment to the last. Its atmosphere had been unforgettable. There was something missing, some romantic plumpness of mind was not there, and we had felt lean and sincere and too exposed. I had felt subtly accountable, like a charlatan who has been forced to take a lie detector test.
Back at the Four Points in Dubai, I went down alone to the bar and ordered my usual vodka tonic. I was relieved to see the eastern European tarts and to see the dartboard on the wall. Elena was asleep upstairs, the incident of apiphobia long forgotten, and I was mentally free to rejoin the great brotherhood of drinkers. I sank the vodka into my throat and sang a silent hallelujah. Vodka: it is like an enema for the soul. The word means “the little water,” and I drank three Bong and tonics one after the other, not thinking, not talking, just concentrating on my reelevation into normalcy. And yet there was a thread of sadness in this return, a nostalgia. That word in Greek simply means “the pain of returning.”
The Little Water
There used to be a game one could play in the cornfields of Haywards Heath with the lumbering combine harvesters that toiled there in summer. The drivers were unable to see anything on the ground, which invited a grim game that could be called a variation of African Chicken. We took turns swigging from a bottle of vodka stolen from our parents, drinking shots out of the metal cap. The Smirnoff tasted like fuel, like something scooped out of the bottom of an engine, but its little kick of heat at
the end was addictive. We lay in the path of the combine harvesters, hidden in the wheat, then rolled away from the rotating blades at the very last minute. Lying there in the cool of the wheat stalks, totally out of your mind, you could hear the harvester approaching and could judge its distance aurally. Then, making a split-second decision, you rolled away as the blades whirled past.
Vodka made this possible. I looked up at the sky, and my mind dissipated into it, and I thought, I’ll be chopped to pieces, and I won’t feel a thing. It’ll be over in a second.
I think it was I who stole the vodka bottles. When I drink a vodka tonic now in any bar in the world, I think for some reason of my parents in their airy house on Summerfield Lane opening bottles of Canada Dry and mixing it with Smirnoff and little wedges of lemon. It is perhaps a mistake of memory, but I see them there anyway. They look extraordinarily merry.
The Smirnoff labels with their fake czarist chic can trigger such memories. “The little water” became a fashionable drink sometime in the early 1970s, largely because of the brilliant advertising campaigns of Smirnoff. Vodka was cunningly introduced into the global diet, far more successfully than wine or other spirits. It brought different qualities to the glass: Nordic cleanliness and purity, a steely exotic chic ruthlessly exploited by the men who invented the Swedish government product known as Absolut in 1979.
The biggest drinks globally are Bacardi, Smirnoff, and Absolut. Ninety-six million liters of Absolut alone are drunk every year, and its ad campaigns are the longest running in history. Absolut is what you dependably find in a bar in the Middle East, and it is sold in 126 countries—a market saturation with few equals. It’s an Absolut world, as their campaigns insist, and although the imams of Islam would disagree with this statement, the brand is ubiquitous wherever there is a bar.
I once was asked by Vogue to write a story about the two men who had invented Absolut, the entrepreneur Peter Ekelund and the master distiller Börje Karlsson. The two men had now invented another vodka, a vintaged potato vodka called Karlsson’s Gold, which is made from six genetic strains of new potatoes in the Bjäre Peninsula on the west coast of Sweden. They have fetching names: the Celine, the Hamlet, the St. Thora, the Princess, the Solist, and the Marine. Most important is the Gammel Svensk Rod, or Swedish Red, which is one of the few potato species whose genetic patent is not owned by Monsanto. They are harvested by a cooperative of fanatical farmers who clean each one by hand.
Bjäre is where Ingmar Bergman shot his film The Seventh Seal. Remote and windswept, it is considered the Bordeaux of vodka potatoes. Ekelund met me at one of the farms and encouraged me to man one of the potato-harvesting machines that cross the fields like chugging tanks. We then went into one of the hangars and met the farmers to eat some raw potatoes. It seems they all have different aromas and textures. I was asked to introduce myself to the gathering, and for a joke I announced myself as “America’s greatest vodka critic.” I expected them to laugh and slap their knees, but no, with grinding Scandinavian seriousness, they nodded and looked a little apprehensive.
“So,” one of them said, “you are the vodka critic for Vogue?”
Vodka for them was everything, and the idea of Vogue having a vodka critic seemed perfectly normal. I was bound to admit that I was. After which I was condemned to drink every sample of distillate on offer and make criticisms of them.
Karlsson’s vodkas have a scent of white chocolate, and they are the ones I always want in my vodka martini, though Professor Karlsson himself is horrified by the very idea of the vodka martini, as he told me when I went to see him in Stockholm. It was with him, in fact, that I learned to drink vodka neat through entire meals: the end result is a marvelous clarity. He looks a little like the elderly Ibsen, with his pipe and his white goatee, and there is a durable quality to him, a meditative capacity for merry silence that seems to have been bred by the distillation process itself. For the Father of Absolut is an even, measured drinker, with the manners and voice of a chess player who occasionally likes a risqué joke on the side. I asked him how it felt to have invented the world’s most universal alcoholic drink.
“It’s not a bad vodka,” he said. “But it’s not a great vodka like my Gold.”
“Did you think it would conquer the entire planet?”
“I think we were aiming to conquer Sweden mainly.”
There seemed to be an element of repentance, of contrition, in his devotion to this small-scale, handcrafted vodka that would never make its way to the average hotel bars of Dubai. It was indigenous, introspective, a truly Swedish vodka that stood as a rebuke to all the two hundred vodka brands that come on the market every year.
Ekelund, too, that tireless alcohol tycoon, seemed a little embarrassed by the monumental success of Absolut. When I tasted his pure distillates at his farmhouse in Bjäre, he said that what had surprised him making Gold was the greatness of vodka when it respected its place of origin. Each sample of potato distillate did indeed taste different. Each year of Karlsson’s Gold does indeed taste subtly but markedly different, yet this kind of discrimination has nothing to do with the success of vodka outside middle-class Sweden and upper-end bars in five or six cities elsewhere. People love to think they are discerning vodka drinkers, hence the success of the mediocre Grey Goose, which has marketed itself as a cut above other brands when it is nothing of the sort. Even James Bond, alas, mistakenly asserts that a grain vodka is invariably superior to a potato one.
“No,” Ekelund admitted. “It’s just a fashion. But what it’s a fashion for, I am not sure. Absolut became a party drink. It became a drink for the young. Gay men.”
Absolut carefully made itself hip to gay drinkers in the 1980s. But no one knows all the reasons why vodka itself became so indispensable. This water-ethanol mix became dominant worldwide in the last thirty years and has eclipsed Scotch, gin, and wine as a drink of choice by units sold and swallowed. It has become perhaps the most successful man-made drug of all time. It is surprising, to my mind, that is has not attracted a fatwa all for itself: the vodka fatwa.
Absolut, meanwhile, may have become a drink for the young, but I remember it as the drink of my Polish father-in-law, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1986. A writer convinced of the addictive evil of alcohol might have asked Ekelund and Karlsson about this, but Tomasz, I believe, had his own reasons for destroying himself, reasons that cannot be laid at the door of the two men who invented his drug. They did not, after all, invent vodka itself, let alone distilled alcohol. Tomasz was forty-four when he died, a brilliant violinist and conductor who had won the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood and had been André Previn’s understudy. At sixteen he had been the lead violinist of the Warsaw Philharmonic. The great Polish composer Penderecki composed a concerto for him. He was a prodigy, a valuable asset of the Communist regime—and then he left for New York.
He was in his twenties when he emigrated to America with his wife, the singer Ewa Dubrowska, and their infant daughter, my ex-wife Karolina. They settled in New Jersey and then on campus at Ithaca, New York.
They were successful. She sang at the Met; he conducted all over the world. They got a place on Central Park West. He was a volatile, highly strung man, haunted by the Second World War. His family was from Kraków. When he was a small boy, he was picked up with his violinist father by the Germans on the streets of the city and transported to Auschwitz a few miles into the countryside. It was part of the random sweeps the Germans visited upon the local populations. Inside Auschwitz, however, his father was quickly recognized as a prominent violinist, and they were released. The Germans killed three million Catholic civilians in Poland, but on that day Tomasz and his father survived because they were not Jews. He never forgot it.
As his career ascended, he began to drink. Being Polish, it was vodka, but also Scotch. There were heartbreaking performances, one at Carnegie Hall, during which he lost his way in the score and his mind wandered. His career began to fall apart.
I met him first when
he visited us in Paris in 1985, a year before his death and just after his grandson was born. He was jovial and mildly domineering, a scholar of the Second World War. He stayed with us two nights, and I noticed that he rose early and had worked his way through half a bottle of vodka or Scotch by noon, sometimes a whole one. To drink late at night is one thing; to hit the bottle in the early morning is something else altogether. His hands would be shaking during lunch, his eyes watered down and wandering, as if turning inexorably inward. In such a sensitive and gifted man, it was an unnerving effect. He talked quite volubly, as alcoholics do, and his hand resting on the table in front of him seemed to vibrate. I thought at the time that a man’s vodka addiction could be roundly regretted by those who surrounded him, but it was not exactly the subject of outright scandal. It was half-accepted, by law and by custom. And yet he was spiraling out of control.
I went with him one day to the Café Saint-Jean on the Place des Abbesses near our apartment in Montmartre and sat with him at a terrace table to have a get-to-know-you chat. We ordered drinks. I think he ordered a vodka tonic, and I ordered a demi. By the time I got past the foam at the top of the beer, he was on to a second vodka tonic. Halfway down the beer glass, and he was on to number four. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I can take it. I’m used to it.” He wanted to know if I had any prospects as a writer and would be able to look after his daughter. None, I said. He ordered a fifth. By the time we walked back to the apartment, he was completely steady, able to walk in a straight line, and yet totally stoned. In the evening, he went through another half bottle neat.
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