Vodka (81 page)

“I don’t want to be anybody’s prisoner,” she said.

“Your choice, Alice.”

She was strong and independent, or at least that was how she’d always seen herself. She’d never asked for help before. Alice had never allowed herself to be truly naked in front of Lev before, not metaphorically. Yes, she’d told him everything about herself, but she knew that this process would expose her soul far more comprehensively than weeks of pillow talk could ever do. Would he love her less if he saw her flayed?

“Do whatever you like, Alice, whatever you need.” He’d read her mind, she was sure of it. “I love you, and my love can’t be made or marred by anything that you do. Nothing you confess could make me love you less.”

In the heart of every storm, there’s a quiet light.

“I smelled it on you,” he said, “the odor of an alcoholic. Not the actual fumes, but the emotional aroma, the way you weaved and ducked and blocked questions about alcohol. There was this deep, dreadful silence. I sensed that you didn’t want to talk about it, or even that you
couldn’t
talk about it, it was so forbidden to you. I just heard the silence, that mute shame, or denials that included a lot of explanations.”

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she said.

“Bad? Good? What do they mean, Alice? I know that people do things for reasons that may transcend notions of right and wrong. I believe that what I do is right, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that those who oppose me are wrong. Do you understand that?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Because it’s a very Russian thing to think.”

He could see her better than she could herself. It was one of Lev’s strengths, his ability to pinpoint other people’s attitudes, identities and state of mind, and equally one of his weaknesses that he was relatively incapable of doing this to himself.

It might be worse for a woman to be an alcoholic than for a man, Lev said, but it’s also easier for them to recover. Women don’t have the same problem with humility that men do. To recover, Alice would need to surrender. She would need to accept the way she was and what she’d done to herself. A man—especially a Russian man—would resist this spirit of humility, but even the strongest woman hasn’t been taught how to rescue
herself. The image of Prince Charming rescuing the damsel from the forest where she’s strayed is too deeply imbedded in the female psyche. And that is woman’s salvation.

Alice laughed when he told her this. It reminded her that all Russian men are chauvinists.

They picked up Lewis at lunchtime. It was very simple: a posse of 21st Century heavies walked into the Sklifosovsky and told him that Alice was safe and that Lev would like to speak to him. Lewis was so relieved at the first that he hardly gave it a second thought. He hadn’t bothered to chase after Alice when she’d left the Aragvi, assuming that she was simply being melodramatic and would return in her own time. When he’d still been sitting alone after ten minutes, he had, belatedly and with a rising sense of panic, gone out into the street. Of course by that time she’d been long gone. He’d called every police station and hospital in central Moscow, but no one had seen Alice.

Husband and lover, alone in a penthouse drawing room. Lev offered him a seat; Lewis said he’d rather stand. “Where’s Alice?” he asked.

“She’s safe, and she’s going to be all right, that’s the most important thing.”

“I’m her husband.”

“Alice is an alcoholic.”

“She’s not.”

“Alice is an alcoholic.”

“She has a drinking problem, sure, and I’d rather she drank less, but that doesn’t make her an alcoholic.”

“You’re a doctor, you must know better than anyone that she fits every medical definition. Alice is an alcoholic.
She knows exactly the time of her last drink. She has no control over alcohol. She can’t predict what’ll happen after the first vodka. Every day she says she’ll have just two drinks and go home, and every day there’s an excuse to have more—a work event, or she’s had a hard day, or she’s depressed, or angry, or celebrating, whatever. ‘Just this one time’—I’ve heard her say it, and you must have too: the most dangerous words in your language or mine, because that’s how you start not to notice. When have you ever heard her say ‘enough’?”

“Plenty of times.”

“No.
Never.
Alcoholism is a disease of more; enough is when you pass out.”

“I’ve tried to help her.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“How
dare
you?”

“You’ve done anything but help her. You’ve just mirrored her problem. Her addiction is alcohol; yours is her. You’ve cleared up after her, you’ve apologized for her, you’ve let her think this can go on indefinitely. Instead of making her see how much she’s been messing up her life, you’ve let her keep thinking that what she’s doing is normal. Your love for her is soft, when it needs to be tough.”

“You think I can’t see what you’re trying to do here?”

“I’m trying to help Alice.”

“No. You’re trying to pry her away from me. What do you think I’ll do? Throw up my hands and say, ‘OK, she’s all yours’? I married her for better or for worse, and I’m going to stick through both—that’s what marriage is about. It’s this shithole you call a city that’s done this to her. She made her vows to me, not to you. You’re in no position to tell me what to do.”

The gunpowder sparked in Lev. “I could have you killed in an instant if that’s what I wanted, and no one would be any the wiser. I brought you here because you’re Alice’s husband and it’s only fair that you know she’s all right. We both love the same woman, sure, but this isn’t a competition to see which one of us she prefers. She needs help from herself before she needs either of us, can’t you see that? Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why you don’t want to listen to me. But for Alice’s sake, consider the merits of my suggestion, not its provenance.”

“That’s nothing to do with—”

“I’m taking charge of Alice’s recovery,” Lev said with finality. “I’m going to help put her back on her feet. After that, as ever, she’s free to choose.”

“No.”

“You’ve had years of marriage to make it better, and you haven’t done so. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. If you really love Alice, you owe it to her to let someone else have a try.”

Alice had braced herself for hell, and hell was what she got. The symptoms began to start in the evening, less than twenty-four hours since her last drink and before the alcohol had completely cleared her system—a sign of reasonably severe dependence. She felt uncomfortable, even trapped, in her own body. If she could have, she’d have climbed out of her skin like the rhinoceros in Kipling’s
Just So Stories.
Her hands were shaking, she was anxious and so nervous that even the slightest sound, a door opening or a window creaking, made her start.

Lev took her temperature and frowned. It was up to a hundred and two degrees, and beads of sweat seemed
to sizzle on her forehead. Her pulse felt giddily high, and her veins thrummed with hammering blood. When he left again, she tried to sleep, and gave up after half an hour wriggling irritably from one side of the bed to the other. She tried to eat, and managed half a piece of toast before feeling as nauseously satiated as after an eight-course meal.

Each symptom came in on top of the one before, a symphony introducing each instrument of the orchestra in turn. Above them all was the haunting voice of the soloist: “Get out of here, have a drink, get away from this place.”

A drink, that was all she wanted, a measly hundred grams of vodka. It was the one thing that would help. It was the one thing she couldn’t have. Lev had cleared the place of every drop of alcohol, down to the toiletries in the bathroom. There was nothing that contained even trace amounts of alcohol—no mouthwash and no toothpaste, no aftershave and no eau de cologne. Bad breath and rich armpits were a small price to pay, he said.

“I want a drink,” Alice said.

“No.”

“One drink, just to take the edge off it.”

“No.”

“Lev, give me a drink, please.”

“No.”

“I hate you! Give me a fucking drink!”

“No.”

She clung to his hand like a little girl afraid of being lost in a crowd. He wiped the sweat from her with dry lips and whispered into her ear. “Take me into your darkest hour,” he said, “and I’ll never desert you.”

Friday, March 20, 1992

S
abirzhan had taken over Lev’s office at Red October, though he looked small and shrunken in the vor’s outsize chair, like a small boy playing at his father’s desk. There was much to do before Sabirzhan would feel secure in his position, even though—on the surface, at least—things seemed to be progressing as normal. He was confident, however, that everything would work out his way in the end. Yes, the workers had loved Lev, but he’d taken them for the mother of all rides. They would take time to get used to a new boss, but they’d love him in the end.

There was a knock on the door, which he liked to keep closed. “Come in!” he shouted, settling back in the chair and steepling his fingers under his chin as though pondering questions of infinite import. The door opened, and Galina walked in. It was the first time Sabirzhan had seen her in days—she’d not been in to work since Rodya’s death—and the change in her was shocking. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles of fatigue, and she walked as though the very act of movement demanded all her effort.

Sabirzhan was on his feet instantly. “Galya. Are you all right?”

She blinked at him. Perhaps she was offended by the speed with which he’d usurped Lev.

“I need your help,” she said.

Alice had hoped that things would start to get better, that the first part had been the hardest, and that the pain would begin to slide away. In fact, it was becoming worse. One sleepless night on, all the existing symptoms had been augmented and intensified. Her sweats now came in torrents rather than beads, smelling vile as the poisons crawled from her; it was not normal body odor, but the kind of smell associated with corpses or chemical dumps. The shaking was no longer confined to her hands; her arms trembled all the way from fingertips to shoulders so that she couldn’t hold a glass of water or a cup of weak tea without spilling half of it on the bed. When she started to suffer miniature seizures, the panic clawed at her through momentary paralysis.

Let me see you through, Lev said, let me see you through. I’ve seen the dark side too.

The hallucinations came next, though at least she understood them as such. They felt benign, amusing even, as a dream does when you know you’re dreaming. The vegetarian Tolstoy with his padded coat and fake silver beard was standing there. “Look,” Alice heard herself say, “you’re sweating as much as I am.” Tolstoy was holding Surikov’s
The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy
, and as she watched he morphed into the Lenin impersonator she’d seen sometimes on Red Square.

Alice had always thought she dreamed of things that had made a particularly strong impression on her, but now she felt it could just as easily be the opposite. Her hallucinations were, often as not, things to which she’d paid relatively little attention at the time: vague thoughts she hadn’t bothered to think out to the end,
words spoken without feeling and that had passed more or less unnoticed, and that now returned to her clothed in flesh and blood, as if to force her to make up for having neglected them in her sentient hours.