Vodka (80 page)

She knelt down by the river of vodka and drank deeply, trying to drown herself.

She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, she was alone in the cold and the dark. There was a weight on her chest, which she felt was a rough, heavy coat; someone must have left it for her, seeing how she was so unsuitably dressed. Beside her was a bottle of
vodka.
Drink me
, it whispered to her, sweetly seductive, and she knew that if she did, she’d die, either of alcohol poisoning or exposure. Her job was gone, and now her husband too. Would it be so wrong to open up the hemlock? All she’d have to do was stay here and let death come; it wouldn’t be long before he found her.

Alice was in that nonmaterial world on the borderline between sleep and wakefulness, where her surroundings consisted of visions and thoughts that momentarily arose and dissolved in consciousness; a transitional woman in a transitional nation.

There was a man in uniform standing over her, and then all was black.

Thursday, March 19, 1992

W
hen Alice woke again, the acrid smell and the drying dampness around her groin let her know even before she’d opened her eyes that she’d soiled herself, and badly. For one horrifying moment, she thought she was back in captivity again, but the voices she could hear were female and Russian, not Chechen. When she forced her eyelids apart, she found herself looking at a vision of hell: a room full of harridans, their faces drunken, torpid and unwomanly, their clothes thick with dirt, all of them expectorating staccato bursts of foul language in between hysterical giggles.
Alice didn’t know where she was, or what time it was; she’d lost all those senses, and if she wasn’t careful she’d lose herself too.

With the special tenderness and patience that a Russian feels for a drunkard, someone had placed a pillow under Alice’s head and some sheets of newspaper under her legs.

A young woman in jeans and a sweater came over. Her black hair was streaked with gray and cropped close to the skull; her front teeth were askew, and her nose was so wide that her small oval glasses could hardly make it over the bridge. It was not a pretty face, but it was a kind one.

“Where am I?” Alice asked.

“You’re in the aquarium,” the woman said, then, seeing Alice’s baffled expression: “one of the sobering-up centers. I’m a volunteer here. My name’s Nadhezda.”

“Nadhezda” meant hope. Alice looked around the room again. Hopeless would have been a more appropriate name. “Who are all these people?” she asked.

Nadhezda pointed to five women in quick succession, going right to left. “That’s Ivana Babushkina. She’s twenty-seven, a technical assistant; she was found in the middle of the street, unable to walk unaided. The one next to her was lying in the doorway of an apartment building; the one next to
her
was sleeping in a market gateway; that one”—she indicated a woman of pensionable age, still clutching a dog in her arms—“was brought in from the outskirts; and the worst of all, that one in the corner, well, she was drinking away her own son. Cute kid, four years old, and she was offering him to anyone who’d give her a bottle of vodka.”

Alice screwed her eyes shut, as though when she next opened them she’d be in her own bed, safe and
clean and warm. “I don’t belong here, you know,” she heard herself say.

“Oh, but you do,” Nadhezda replied simply. “Everyone’s equal when they come here.”

Alice opened her eyes again. The harridans were still lined up in front of her.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said.

Stomach empty and throat raw, she asked Nadhezda how she’d gotten there.

“A policeman brought you in. Not before time, either. A few more minutes out there and you’d have been gone.” A policeman; Alice vaguely remembered a man in uniform standing over her. “Oh!” Nadhezda’s mouth formed a perfect circle. “He said to give you his name. I told him it didn’t matter, but he was insistent.” She inserted two fingers into the pocket of her jeans—they were too tight for her to get a whole hand in—and pulled out a slip of paper.

“Uvarov, Grigori Eduardovich,” she read. “Said you’d saved his ass, and now you’re even.”

It was the first time Alice had seen the underbelly of Russia, warts and all. On the wall above her was a poster of a woman facedown in a puddle, her untied shoelaces spelling out the message
Know Your Limit.
Next to the poster, a bulletin board was speckled with the recipes of some of the concoctions drunk by the inmates there. Alice read them with horror. There was Canaan Balsam—three and a half ounces of meths, seven ounces of milk stout, and three and a half ounces of clear varnish; Spirit of Geneva—one and a half ounces of White Lilac toilet water, one and a half ounces of
sock deodorizer, seven ounces of Zhiguli beer, and ten ounces of spirit varnish; The Tear—one half ounce of lavender water, one half ounce of Verbena, one ounce of Forest Water eau de cologne, 10 ounces of mouth-wash, and ten ounces of lemonade; and finally, spectacularly, Dog’s Giblets—three and a half ounces of Zhiguli beer, one ounce of Sadko the Wealthy Guest shampoo, two ounces of antidandruff solution, one third ounce of superglue, one ounce of brake fluid, and two thirds ounce of insecticide.

Moscow has scores of these “aquariums”—overnight holding stations into which the police toss drunkards—but only one of them is for women only. This rarity, Alice realized, reflects the Russian belief that it’s worse for a woman to be an alcoholic. A man can get away with heavy drinking, but a woman can’t. A female alcoholic has failed as a woman, though a male alcoholic hasn’t necessarily failed as a man; men prove their virility through vodka, just like the man who sleeps around is a stud where his female counterpart is a whore.

A female alcoholic is polluted, and as such is seen to reject her identity as a woman, the symbol of moral purity. In Russia, women are not only emotional carers, carriers and copers; they’re also custodians, champions, caretakers and guardians of society’s morals. If a woman falls from social grace, she falls harder and further than a man.

Nadhezda took a Polaroid of Alice and gave it to her. Had Alice not watched the picture being taken, she’d scarcely have believed the image was her own. Her face was lumpy and swollen; bruises rose from her skin like foothills stained mauve by the setting sun.

“Fight or fall?” Nadhezda asked.

“Sidewalk sickness.” Fell over.

Nadhezda’s eyes betrayed her thoughts: they all said that, even the ones battered by their husbands. “How much did you drink?”

“A horse’s dose.” A large amount.

“Here—” Nadhezda handed Alice a clipboard with a questionnaire pinned to it and a pen hanging from a string. “There are eight questions here. Answer them honestly—your instinctive reaction, mind, not what you think you should write. OK?”

Alice nodded. She gripped the pen, watching it shake between her fingers, and began.

Are you always thinking about the next opportunity to have a drink?

Do you drink alone?

Do you drink for effect rather than taste?

Do you use alcohol to calm your nerves or help you sleep?

Do you protect your alcohol supply?

Do you use more alcohol than planned?

Do you have a higher tolerance than other people of the same age and gender as you?

Do you have blackouts?

It was only when she’d gotten to the bottom that Alice realized she’d checked “yes” to every one.

It was the first time Alice had ever been left without her props. All the things she’d quoted to differentiate herself from alcoholics—that she had a fantastic job, she always
looked good, she was always organized, she never slept in the gutter—no longer applied. She was no better than what she’d despised. She was just like her mother, no matter how much she’d pretended otherwise.

It was the first time she’d been totally honest with herself when it came to drinking. Simple questions, simple answers. It wasn’t that hard, if you didn’t fight it.

It was the first time she’d ever cleared her throat and said the words that had hitherto stuck in her craw.

“I’m an alcoholic,” she told the room.

Alice felt lighter the moment she’d said it. She’d broken through the looking-glass of her final deception. The realization that she no longer loved Lewis had come some time ago, but her mind had allowed her to handle only one massive revelation at a time.

It was as though her perspective, which had been so warped, had suddenly been flipped back to normal. She saw in a rush that all her problems stemmed from vodka rather than the other way around. She’d started drinking heavily because she was unhappy, a physical solution to an emotional problem; but, as her drinking had become ever heavier, the cure had become the disease, and the equation had been reversed. Now she was unhappy because she was drinking.

Alcoholism is a parasite that destroys everything in its path—hope, trust, honesty, love and relationships—and which is utterly arrogant in its demand for total control, determined to have the answers in any discussion, determined to make everyone else feel helpless, angry, frustrated and isolated. It was as though Alice had been possessed, and even as she shrank from so melodramatic an analogy she knew it was accurate. She had to exorcise
this strange beast that was living inside her and intertwining itself with her personality.

There was no longer any alternative. She couldn’t cut down or drink only on certain days, she had to stop altogether. Alice knew she was on an elevator that only went down. She could get off at any time, but if she didn’t, she’d end where the elevator did: six feet under. The cure would be long and painful, and there was no guarantee of success, but recognizing the problem was the first step to solving it. Wasn’t she the woman who relished challenges? And what was this if not just another one?

One was too many. A million wasn’t enough.

There were Western AA groups meeting in the Anglican Church on Voznesensky Lane, Tuesday through Sunday—why not Monday, Alice thought, when that was the worst day for alcoholics? There were Russian AA groups all over the city. She didn’t want either. They’d all be full of men, and she’d have to spend too much time and energy dealing with their shit to concentrate on herself. Nor would she feel comfortable about unburdening herself to strangers. The abduction had unnerved her to the point where she could not endure the company of friends, let alone strangers, without several drinks inside her. The memory of what it felt like to be stripped and humiliated—knowing all the while that her ordeal was being filmed—made it impossible for her to consider exposing that corner of her innermost self that had remained private to public view.

No. She’d do this herself, the hard way, cold turkey, and she’d take help from one source and one source only: the only man strong enough to deal with her.
She’d been conducting twin illicit affairs, with Lev and with the vodka bottle, and she’d finally confirmed one to her husband at the same time as she’d confessed the other to herself. It seemed only logical that she should use one to defeat the other.

She saw that Lev’s love for her was unconditional. That was why he’d wanted her to sort herself out, and that was why he’d been prepared to alienate her. Lewis would go on protecting and protecting until the end of time, because he’d do anything to avoid the confrontation. Two men, very different from each other, both of whom loved her; but only one of them would deal with it in the right way, for her at least.

Healing could occur only in the heart of the wound itself. Alice had to go to the wound and examine why she drank, what she was like when she drank, and what part of herself she was losing. If she was to heal and truly recover, she must first take a good look at herself, and that meant finding something she could use to get over the hate, the contempt, the denial of the good she had in herself. Her marriage was gone, her friends and job too. The self-love would come from the one person she knew could give it to her.

Nadhezda showed Alice to the phone, and she called Lev.

He didn’t seem at all surprised to hear from her. When she told him what had happened, he said nothing. When she told him the clinic’s address, he laughed. “I know that place.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. We run it.”

“You do
what?
”

“The 21st Century runs the clinic.”

“You’re a vodka gang, and you run a drying-out clinic?”

“Sure. Having people get shitfaced doesn’t make sense, socially or economically. Most of the women in there have moved beyond vodka to those vile cocktails listed on the boards there.” Sell people drink and then help them recover; only a Russian could read that sentence without seeing a contradiction.

“You’ll help me?”

“Of course. But only if you trust me, only if you do whatever I say.”

“Put my life in your hands?”

“If you want to see it that way, yes.”

“What are you going to do—sew in a torpedo?” A torpedo was an anti-alcohol pellet implanted beneath the skin. “I don’t want any chemical shit.”

“No, no torpedoes. But you must believe in me; you must trust me to be fair even when I’m being cruel.”