Vodka (82 page)

She watched as a fuchsia-pink banknote wafted across the ceiling: five hundred rubles, once so enormous, now so risibly worthless. Voices bounced off the walls: Borzov adamant that “we’re not going to lose hope—hope we do have”; Borzov again, quieter but even more insistent, “there are always eighteen drops of vodka left in a bottle.
Always.”
Mirages bloomed in the room. There was a plank laid across a bench, to signify that the roof above was being cleaned, and when she looked up it was snowing, or at least that was what she thought, until she looked closer and saw that the snow was in fact fluffy white flakes of poplar pollen that came down in June, she’d always wanted to see the summer snow, and when these flakes settled on the floor they formed rows of business cards with which people were playing poker, and the people were Lev and Bob and Harry, and here came the tax police brandishing thick wads of demands for umpteen tariffs, and the wads had dollars on the outside and cut-up newspapers inside, and Alice was saying, “You’ve fallen for the oldest trick in the book”—that was her voice, those her feet banging on metallic gangways as she ran, and Borzov again, chortling as he said, “Anatoly Nikolayevich fears you’ve been sleeping with your head in the West.”

Things were becoming ever worse. The shaking in her arms and legs had turned to twitching, great jerking jackknives that sent her sheets scurrying halfway down the bed. When she staggered to the bathroom, the floor
seemed to slide beneath her feet, first one way and then the other. Her heart was palpitating, bouncing around in her chest; chairs, sofas, television sets all seemed to zoom in and out.

Worst of all, the hallucinations were no longer quixotic reverie; they’d become fused, and she believed that they were real, not benign or amusing but terrifying and armed with chains and clubs and knives and baseball bats and brass knuckles. Lev’s suite was now the Terem Palace in the Kremlin, covered with angels and demons, knights and maidens, all soaring across the ceiling and swooping down the walls. Electric tralloy lines exploded in small blazes above her, and the floor was carpeted with candle stands glowing like softly burning trees. Arkin was by her bed, jabbing at her with his stiletto blade, and she flung up her hands to protect herself as a mushroom-colored Borzov, clad only in a tiny pair of swimming trunks obscured at the front by the pendulous overhang of his belly, clambered dripping over her prostrate body; she felt his weight on her stomach, and he was followed by a Japanese family moving in splashes of mauve and lime and throwing books at her as they passed; Alice batted away Agatha Christie and James Bond, computer manuals and analyses of the USSR’s collapse, translations of Smith, Keynes, Hayek and Galbraith, Bibles, books on yoga and meditation, Sakharov’s autobiography.

Lenin’s bust was on the bedside table, spinning around as though it had seen
The Exorcist
one too many times. Then it stopped, abruptly, as Sabirzhan disconnected it from the wall, clicking his tongue as he bemoaned the shoddy wiring and then laughing as Galina rubbed her hands over his ass. Galina cooing
mockingly at Alice, “You’re so
glamorous
, Alice, I’d be you if I could be anyone else,” as she took groceries from Lewis’s arms and smeared them over Alice—Marmite, Ribena, Cadbury creme eggs, corned beef—and Alice dived under the covers as Lewis came back into the room with a hunting rifle and started blazing away around the room, she heard glass tinkling and it was Uvarov smashing his baton into her headlight, the high-pitched shattering segueing into a falsetto human voice, Rodya singing “Along Peterskaya Street” before he lunged at Alice to snatch a candy from her ear, and as she turned her head away he went for her fur hat instead and sprang no-legged from the room.

Lev smoothed her hair from her forehead; it stuck to his fingers in damp tendrils. “Alice?” It was like looking at a waxwork. “Alice?”

She started shaking again, all over, as though wired up to the city grid.

Delirium tremens can be fatal if left untreated. Lev knew that Alice needed immediate hospitalization; he knew equally that the best place in Moscow was the Sklifosovsky, where Lewis worked. He didn’t even hesitate. He called his bodyguards and they drove in convoy, Mafia-style. They couldn’t have gotten there quicker if they’d taken police outriders with them.

Lewis wasn’t on duty, and even if he had been he wouldn’t have been allowed to look after a patient in whom he had an emotional investment. A Russian doctor took charge of Alice, and he was quick and efficient. He linked her to an IV, rehydrating her with intravenous physiological fluids, including vitamin B;
and he gave her a loading dose of diazepam, a long-acting sedative-hypnotic drug. She passed out. She was nothing but a repository expelling bad chemicals and ingesting good ones.

Lev rang Lewis at home and told him what had happened.

Saturday, March 21, 1992

M
orning came and went with Alice still unconscious. Her condition had stabilized, however, and the doctor was not worried. Her vital signs—temperature, blood pressure and respiratory rate—were all fine. She was still relatively young, and her constitution was sturdy, she’d get through this, no problem.

That was where the doctor’s expertise stopped. He made no comment on the unusual sight of two men in the corridor outside her room, one of them his colleague and the other instantly recognizable throughout Russia; both clearly ill at ease with each other, both desperate to know what news he could give them.

When the doctor had gone, they sat together in silence, lover and husband. What could they say? Perhaps in other circumstances there might have been some kind of accommodation, an understanding that what had happened was not the other’s fault and that the blame lay mainly with the slender figure in the bed
beyond the door. But how could that be, when their love for her was so raw?

Lev turned his head away from Lewis before smiling, less for fear that Lewis would see than that he would misunderstand. It would have been very Russian, Lev was thinking, to have come this far and then die from renouncing something because you knew that in the end it would kill you.

There was a television in the corridor, and they watched the news together. A former army colonel had robbed a bank and held the cashiers hostage after his life savings had been wiped out. Seduced by the siren songs of Russia’s new capitalists, the colonel had taken his hidden stash of cash, what the Russians called his ‘independence fund,’ and invested in the Eynabejan Bank, a newly established outfit that had promised phenomenal rates of investment return. When it had collected millions of dollars, mainly from its clients’ life savings, the Eynabejan Bank had simply disappeared. Only then did a TV reporter covering the story realize that Eynabejan, spelled backward, read
najebanye
—“fuck you.”

The colonel had needed the money to pay for an operation to save his wife’s sight. The policemen who’d talked him into ending the siege gave him vodka and looked after him. The officers from the Ministry of Finance shrugged their shoulders and said they’d added the names of the Fuck-You Bank’s board members to a wanted list already several thousand strong. Eynabejan was hardly the first bank to swipe easy cash and run off, nor would it be the last.

“Look at that shit,” Lewis said. “What kind of place
is it where people are reduced to that? Damn country—it’s going to the dogs, whoever’s in charge.”

Alice regained consciousness later in the day, and when she did, it was Lev for whom she asked. He went in to see her with no sense of triumph, outward or inward. He held her and told her what had happened, where she was, and that Lewis wanted to see her; then he left the room so that Alice could have time alone with her husband, for Lewis’s sake if not for hers.

Alice was discharged that afternoon. Lewis came to the main entrance to see her off. She climbed into the back of Lev’s Mercedes 600, and didn’t look back once as the convoy eased out into the traffic and headed toward the Kotelniki.

Lev’s love was a bubble that kept Alice safe. He understood that she was missing the structure of addiction, the way drinking rituals had marked her time. To keep this framework filled, he made sure that she always had something to do, no matter how minor. They drank tea, they watched videos, they read to each other—the usual bottlenecks through which sands trickled.

There was still a void at the heart of her, of course. Her physical cravings were slowly dwindling, but the mental ones remained as strong as ever. Her existence felt stale and colorless, and she panicked that she’d cut herself off not only from people, but from life itself. Only now that she was eschewing alcohol did Alice realize how much her existence had revolved around it. She was scared that everything she prized—fun, intimate conversations, hammering out grandiose plans for social transformation—would be denied her forever, because they were all soaked with vodka.

She remembered why she used to drink: to turn herself into someone she liked. Alice Mark II seemed boring and unattractive in contrast; emotionally naked, walking on eggshells and worrying about panic attacks. Without her liquid protector, everything seemed different and scary. Alice kept finding herself twitching for the warm and comforting option of vodka rather than the cold and threatening one of abstinence. The one thing that could give her courage was the very thing she was forbidden.

With anxiety and insecurity came anger, forking and sparking at diffuse targets: at being singled out by the disease, at being unable to achieve the control she’d fought so hard to obtain, at being forced to accept defeat and go into recovery, at having to face up to issues she wanted to forget and make amends. She shouted and beat her fist into the pillows; she cried, sobbing so much that she almost felt herself shrinking. At dinner, when one of her tears fell to the table, Lev tenderly drew a heart with it. There wasn’t quite enough liquid for him to finish the down slope; she laughed through her tears, and the shaking of her head released another drop, perfectly completing the shape.

Lev was infinitely patient. She was having to remaster life itself, he pointed out. She’d rejoin the human race only if she reversed all the beliefs that alcoholism had fostered. Her disordered sense of self had made it hard for Alice to see that anyone could love her for her own merits. She’d been concentrating on her own demerits to such an extent that she’d been living a lie. It was what the Russians had been told when the old system had collapsed, he said; they’d all been living a lie, they simply had to accept that and change their lives accordingly.

Yes, she replied; and look how well they were managing
that.

He made her keep the Polaroid that Nadhezda had taken in the clinic, to remind her of what alcohol had done to her and would do again if she gave it half a chance. Like the soldiers in Afghanistan or the men in the gulag, Alice had to take life twelve hours at a time, her next goal never further away than the next sunrise or sunset. The moment she projected too far into the future, the daunting scale of the task would become all too clear, and she would almost certainly relapse. Recovery would take a lifetime. The quicker she tried to go, the quicker she’d ruin it.

Lev brought in Oligarchy—a local version of Monopoly. “‘The object of the game,’” Lev said, reading from the instruction manual, “‘is to acquire as much money as possible through legal and illegal means, to control commerce and the press, to bankrupt your opponents, and finally to seize the entire board.’”

In concept, Monopoly perfectly suits the Russian mentality; its problem is that it has too many rules and too many scruples. Oligarchy changed all that. Players’ progress around the board was still marked with little silver emblems, but they were no longer hats, irons, boots and dogs; instead, they were Mercedes 600s, TT pistols, cell phones and Armani suits. The “GO” square had been renamed “US Aid”; “Free Parking” was now a Swiss bank account; property holders demanded bribes rather than rent from those who landed on their squares; railroads and utilities had been replaced by ministers, who were just as easily bought, of course; and
chance cards and community chest had been replaced by
kompromat
and presidential decrees respectively.

Lev chose the Mercedes 600, Alice the Armani suit. Even in this prosaic, workaday aspect of her being, disheveled and with her sleeves rolled up as she kissed the dice for luck and shook them extravagantly between her hands, she almost frightened him with her beauty. They played long into the night, and no amount of laughter and joking could disguise the vigor of their competitiveness. There was a vast, churning intensity to everything they did; they’d never just simply been together, doing not very much, the way she’d managed with Lewis, even when things were going wrong.

To sit in companionable silence is one of the joys of being a couple, but with Alice and Lev such downtime felt like a dereliction of duty, a waste of the energy that crackled between them. She’d once likened him to vodka, and she saw now that the comparison hadn’t been idle. Just as she’d always remembered when and where and what her last drink had been, so Alice could always recall when she’d last seen Lev, what he’d been wearing, what they’d talked about or what they’d done, how they’d made love…