Vodka (58 page)

“Of course I’m crying, Lewis. I’m turning my life inside out.”

“How long has this been going on?” Exactly four weeks, she thought, though it seemed like four years. “What are you doing, Alice? Looking for excitement? Glamour and glitz, is that what seduced you? Because you want to live dangerously?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Of course it is. I can see it all, Alice, I know you. I’m too dull for you, is that it? Too boring, too dependable? Just remember this: the problem with being swept off your feet is that you tend to land damn hard on your ass.”

“Lewis,
you
couldn’t sweep a damn floor. He makes me feel—”

“Don’t blame
me
for this, Alice. Blame it on—oh, I don’t know, those crazy hours you’ve been working, or my shifts at the hospital. We’re displaced, Alice, both of us. We haven’t given enough time to our marriage. We can change that, starting now. I’ll take a few months off, we’ll talk about it. We’ll thrash things out, clear the air, start again, sort out your drinking. That’s what has brought all this on—drinking and lying.”

“What lying?”

“Screwing someone behind my back—that’s not lying? It’s the drink—”

“Don’t say it!”

“Alice, you have a drinking problem. That’s why you’ve taken up lying—that’s what people with drinking problems do. They compartmentalize, and they lie. You’ve lied so much that you no longer know which way is up.”

“Lewis, stop looking for excuses. It’s too late. Yes, I feel guilty about lying and hurting you. Yes, I feel responsible. But I don’t love you.”

“And you love him?”

“Yes.”

“I’m
your husband, and
I
love you.”

“Love!” she said. “You don’t know what it is, Lewis. The love I have with Lev is something you’ll never understand.”

Bob, Christina and Harry would all side with Lewis. They were already on their way over to console him. Alice’s friendship with Galina was dead. She went back to Lev. He was all she had.

Saturday, February 22, 1992

F
or Lewis, it wasn’t the first few hours that were the worst; it was the morning after a sleepless, solo night, with the shock wearing off and reality beginning to bite. He went to the hospital, driving without consciously seeing the roads. He wasn’t due on shift for another twenty-four hours, but if he couldn’t help himself, the least he could do was help others.

Lev and Alice spent the day cooped up in the Kotelniki penthouse, trying to shut themselves off from the world. They were riding out the storm, what else could they do? They’d both done as Borzov had asked, as had Arkin. The government was denying everything, Red October’s workers had been pacified, and the West had been reminded what realpolitik was all about.

“This place is bad for me,” she said.

“This place is in your blood. You love the drama of it all.”

“It’s still bad for me. If it wasn’t for you, I’d leave.”

“Alice, you’d stay here even without me.”

“Would I?”

She was lying on her stomach, naked. He took her right foot in his hands, cradling the heel in one palm while rubbing the other down the length of her sole, her soul, slowly pulling each toe toward him in turn, smiling as she shuddered at the touch. When he’d done the same with her other foot, he began to kiss all the way up the
backs of her legs, around the orbs of her buttocks, lingering at their summits, then the downy hair at the base of her spine, feeling for it with the dryness at the very tip of his tongue.

Alice rolled onto her back and reached for him. Her head hung over the side of the bed, hair sprayed on the carpet, her pleasure magnified as the blood rushed to her head.

“Yes,” Lev said as they lay flushed and panting afterward. “You would.”

He offered her some Smirnoff Black, just about the best vodka in Russia. It’s made from the highest quality neutral grain spirit, distilled in a copper-pot still to preserve the grain’s natural mellowness and flavors before being filtered through Siberian silver-birch charcoal. Alice tasted tones of light rye overlaid with creamy charcoal and the slightest hint of acetone, tanginess ending with a brief sharp burn.

“You’re my vodka,” she told him.

“How so?”

“How many ways do you want? No matter how much I see of you, I always want more; too much is not enough. I count the time between when I last saw you and when I’m next going to see you. You drip-feed life back into me. It’s the way you make me feel, up here”—she pointed to her head—“and in here.” She indicated her heart. “The way you make me glow, the way you make me forget my troubles…”

“Even though I’m the biggest trouble of all?”

“Even though you’re the biggest trouble of all.”

Sunday, February 23, 1992

I
t was Defenders of the Motherland Day, originally declared in memory of a Russian victory over German forces at St. Petersburg on that date in 1918, now the second most important militarist holiday after Victory Day itself. From his office in the Kremlin, Borzov looked down at the Red Square crowd through blue-tinted bulletproof windows. The color-staining, installed to protect the Kremlin treasures from sunlight, made the world outside look even colder and bleaker than it really was. The bulletproof glass bulged and refracted; seen through this lens the crowd seemed to repeat itself, the distortion a mocking, physical manifestation of the ways in which the man up here was out of touch with those down there. Borzov wondered what he’d unleashed.

Red Square was packed. Above a sea of fur hats and flat caps swayed banners in the stark colors of protest: communist red, the nationalist blend of black, silver and gold. It was hard to tell who’d have been more stunned by this unlikely pairing of far left and far right, the Romanovs or the revolutionaries who’d murdered them.

The security forces had bickered about who was supposed to do what, so they’d been woefully unprepared when the protesters had arrived and the cordon erected to protect Red Square had been broken with embarrassing ease. Now the police, the OMON and the army troops could do little but form a sullen ring around
the protesters and try to ignore the chanting and taunting. Their eyes darted nervously under ill-fitting helmets; when they banged their truncheons against cracked riot shields, it was more to lift their own spirits and keep warm than to intimidate the demonstrators.

Borzov’s meaty, ruddy face creased with a sly smile. The combination made him look tipsy even when he was absolutely sober, scheming when he was at his most open and menacing when he was at his friendliest—none of which applied at this precise moment.

“The president will address the people personally,” he said. “It’s time to show those ungrateful bastards who’s boss.”

There was a time when Borzov had worked crowds like a pro, chatting to everyone within range. Charm had flowed from him like liquid gold. Haughty and heroic in repose, his face had seemed transformed into that of a mischievous boy when he smiled. “Let’s have a question-and-answer session,” he used to say. “No holds barred.” No Russian politician had ever done this, and Borzov’s spontaneous openness had won him the admiration and affection of the people. Counselor, confidant, faith healer—they had told him their problems, and he had listened. When they were desperate for truth and hope, Borzov had given them both; in return they’d given him adoration.

No more. Puffy-faced and enclosed within a phalanx of bodyguards and officials, Borzov seemed to have aged a decade. Cocooned from the world by a wall of muscle and deference, he no longer had that precious connection with the people. Now he stood atop Lenin’s mausoleum and preached capitalism.

“When the distillery is privatized, and the reactionaries have seen the benefits and no longer rail against those who’d make this country better, then Red October can produce a people’s vodka. A high-quality vodka that the man in the street can afford.” He puffed out his chest. “People of Russia, Anatoly Nikolayevich pledges this to you as your president: you will drink in comfort and safety. Anatoly Nikolayevich’s name will be on the label, and above that his picture, so that the factory worker in Yekaterinburg, the salesman in Irkutsk, the football coach in Vladivostok, the soldier in Kazan—they’ll all give thanks to their president every time they take a hundred grams.”

The audience laughed and Borzov smiled, unwilling or unable to appreciate that the laughter was
at
him rather than
with
him. Protesters jeered and chanted. They held posters portraying Borzov as a vulture picking at a carcass, and his administration as Jews with yarmulkes, long beards, wide lips and hooked noses, all crammed inside a synagogue.

The deprivations Russia was suffering were serious, but hardly unprecedented. Now that Western levels of prosperity were seemingly around the corner, however, they
felt
more severe than before. De Tocqueville identified a similar phenomenon during the French Revolution: the most dangerous moment came not when the people were at their poorest, but when their expectations of significant improvement were raised only to be frustrated.

The protesters began to chant. “Borzov, go now!” With every repetition it spread and lifted until the entire multitude had taken it up. Behind the voices came a metallic banging, tuneless and yet somehow orchestral: it was the sound of thousands of empty pots and pans,
symbolizing the protesters’ hunger, clanging in unison.

Around Red Square, the police flinched, the OMON snarled, the troops twitched.

More noise and yet more, as loud as it could go and louder. This was taking on a primal momentum of its own. Policemen and soldiers retreated behind their riot shields and backed up against their vehicles. Some of the men were scared, some sympathetic, others intolerant and itching for a scrap; a shot rang out as a panicky finger pulled a trigger—there was no way he’d have heard an order over this noise—and then it was all going off, the familiar rattling of gunfire, protesters recoiling and surging forward, old women trying to escape and skinheads rushing to the action, flurries of skirmishing limbs, tear-gas canisters tracing arcing clouds through the air, people choking and flailing and trampling. And somehow the television cameramen held themselves steady and trained unblinking lenses on the fighting.

The din carried to the Yauza River and through the thick windows of Lev’s penthouse. Alice ran into the living room and turned on the television. Channel One, the government channel, was showing an Uzbek film; Channel Two, more supportive of the protesters, was carrying live coverage. Sounds from outside mingled with the broadcast in eerie, staggered echoes.

“Jesus Christ, Lev, come quickly.”

Alice had never seen so many abominably twisted faces, so much odium and animosity. They really hated what she stood for, what she was hoping to do for them. She rocked back on her haunches and stood up, still staring at the screen.

“We’re trying to
help
you, for fuck’s sake,” she cried.

This wasn’t just Defenders of the Motherland Day; it was also the forty-eighth anniversary of the Chechen deportations, when Russian troops had rounded up women and children, and those men who weren’t away at the front, fighting the Nazis. According to folk belief, the day had been predicted by tribal elders who forecast that there would be snow at their backs—and indeed, though it was spring, a sudden snowfall had completed the fulfillment of the prophecy.