Vodka (86 page)

“He refused to negotiate for your life,” Lev told Alice. “He tried to kill me in the White House. And now he puts us through this senseless farce. The fucker’s lucky they’re only giving me blanks.”

Another day drowned in the river beyond the battlements of the old fortress.

They went to a
banya
in the Kremlin. Lev lifted Alice over the threshold. When she looked quizzical, he
explained: “It’s an old superstition. Stillborn children are often buried underneath the
banya;
a man carries a woman inside so that their own kids don’t suffer the same fate.”

The steam and heat swarmed at them, tangible entities. They undressed in silence. Lev checked the fire under the rocks; the smoke smelled like Siberian cedar, one of the commonest
banya
woods, along with birch and pine—but never aspen, regarded as a sorrowful tree. Satisfied the logs were burning strongly, he tossed some water on the rocks, and Alice giggled as the steam hissed.

The attendants had left them some switches made of birch branches. Lev picked a couple up and soaked them in the hot-water bucket for a few moments, to make sure that the leaves were soft. When he took them out, he flicked through the branches carefully, checking for stray shrubs. “I’ve heard unhappy stories from people who’ve unwittingly added a sprig or two of poison ivy,” he said, and smacked one of the switches across Alice’s back.

“Ow!” she said. “That hurt!”

“It’s supposed to.” He handed her the other one. “Here, do it to me.”

She whipped the switch across his back, at first reluctantly; then, as she saw it was part of the ritual, with more confidence, driving the scalding steam deeper into Lev’s skin, seeing the crimson weals through his tattoos and the way sweat sprang from the marks.

“Here,” he said eventually, and guided her to one of the wooden benches. He reached into the small bag he’d brought with him and brought out a small container of milk, which he opened and poured over her, watching
the creamy streams part on the ridges of her shoulders and flow down both sides of her, front and back. She shivered, and not from cold.

“It collects the sweat,” he said. And it did too: little oily globules tumbled over each other toward her navel.

“It feels lovely.”

“You want some honey? It’s good for your skin.”

She looked at him with widening eyes. “Yes, please.”

Lev found the honey jar, dipped his fingers inside, and pulled them out trailing sticky golden tendrils which he smeared over her stomach, moving slowly upward in circles at first small and tight, becoming gradually wider, larger, right up to the underside of her breasts and, when she gave a little nod that came with a gasp, over them as well.

“Golden one,” he said.

“Use your tongue,” she breathed.

He knelt to her and began to lick, collecting stripes of honey on his tongue and tracing them back elsewhere on her body, and at last she found herself rising to him, catching the relief that her desire had not deserted her as she’d feared, and that she could still respond without needing the IV of vodka. Alice’s hair hung in a matted curtain around her face. Her tears sluiced down her neck and between her breasts to Lev, salt and sweet. He began to touch her with the very ends of his fingertips, light stroking that made her skin feel effervescent.

Now he was holding something against her; a nettle, she felt. He was pressing the plant’s hairs very gently onto her, brushing lightly to sensitize her skin and then pushing a little harder, sharp hot stings to excite her. Lev’s fingers ran lines over and inside Alice, spelling out
words of love incomprehensible and illegible. When he paused, it was all she could do to choke: “Don’t stop!” and she could tell by the shape of his mouth against her skin that he was grinning. It was at once familiar and new, letting him seduce her all over again, and she knew why she was at last allowing herself to give in.

She had armored herself in layers against him. She had wanted to hide. She’d felt shame and inadequacy, anxiety and anger, both inside and out. Now she yielded and gave herself up to him, gave herself
back
to him, soft and welcoming.

They were flushed pink in their nakedness, emerging reborn from the dark womb of the
banya
, free from impurities, refreshed and cleansed into their true selves after so much lying and deception.

They would build their own
banya
, he told her; and they’d make love there, and what they did when they’d finished would depend on the time of year. In the summer, they’d retire to a cooling room with wall-to-wall mirrors and a servant waving stork-feather fans. In the winter—well, in the winter, they’d jump into a frozen lake or tumble in the snow, there was nothing better. “You get so hot that you can’t stand it and all you want to do is get cold,” he said. “So you run outside and jump through the hole in the ice until you’re so cold you can’t stand it and all you want to do is get warm.” He thought for a moment. “It’s the kind of pleasure you experience when someone stops hitting you.”

It was time to leave. Alice pushed herself sharply upright, and immediately felt woozy. “Take it easy,” Lev said.
“Your vessels are all relaxed; the blood’s rushed down from your head.”

She clung to him until the sensation abated, and then moved to pick up all the stuff they’d brought in with them: the soap and the lye, nettles and milk and honey.

“Leave them,” Lev said.

“We should clear our mess up.”

“No. Leave them for the
bannik.
”

“The
bannik?”

“The spirit of the
banya.
He’s an old man with hairy paws and long nails, and he lives behind the stove or under the benches.”

“Fuck the stupid old
bannik.
”

“Shhhh!” He seemed truly concerned. “We’ve annoyed him enough by making love here.”

“We have?” She still wanted to treat it as a joke, but it was clear that Lev was serious.

“Sure. Bathers have lost their skin and had their bodies wrapped around the stove for less. Loud singing, talking, swearing, lying, boasting; the
bannik
can get you for all of those.”

“But we haven’t done any of those.”

“All the more reason to leave our stuff for him, just to make sure. An angry
bannik
can throw red-hot rocks and boiling water; he can even transform harmless steam into deadly coal gas. So—” He ushered her out the door.
“Da svidanya!”
Lev called to the
bannik.

Back in their room, overlooking the zoo, Lev pressed a small box into Alice’s hands.

“It’s not a marriage proposal,” he said, reading her face. “It’s more than that.”

She opened the box onto a gold ring in the shape of the infinity symbol, forever curling around on itself. The two holes fit perfectly over her third and fourth fingers, pinning them together.

“As you and I will always be with each other,” he said. “We can never escape; we whirl around in an endless dance, independent and interdependent. Our love binds us together as this ring binds your fingers together, and like this ring our love goes on forever.”

Saturday, March 28, 1992

S
tripped to the waist, Borzov was unconscious on his bed. His stomach, as large and slack as a sack of sand, had spread across itself and down his flanks, as a basset hound’s ears flop to the sides of its head. A IV ran from the inside of his right elbow to a transparent bag bulging thick red; the president was being sobered up by the simple method of changing half his blood.

There was a single prerequisite for those soldiers wishing to serve in the presidential guard, the Kremlin’s private army: they all had to have blood type AB, the same as the president’s. Borzov received a blood transfusion before virtually every major occasion; it was the only way to be sure of having him halfway sober when it mattered. The medical staff had initially tried keeping a quantity of frozen plasma on the premises, but it had
soon become apparent that they’d need a walk-in freezer to cope with demand, and it had been deemed easier to have a large supply of donors permanently on-site.

The presidential suite at the Kremlin is magnificent, of course. Around Borzov were walls hung with silk of vermilion and pearl, beneath him a sheened floor of marble, above him a ceiling fresco that twirled and whirled to infinity. An anteroom overflowed with gifts; it seemed as though half the country had given Borzov a present. Huge floral arrangements covered a conference table; a mountain bike with a yellow bow tied around the handlebars rested against a wall. The floor was littered with rose petals. There were skis, boots, poles, suits, stereo systems and video recorders, Moroccan carvings and Mexican sculptures. In pride of place was the famous picture of Lenin conferring with his advisers, though here Lenin had been repainted in Borzov’s own image.

Russia’s elite spend a million dollars on a birthday present for a helpful politician—and none come more helpful (at least potentially) than the president—as casually as they send him a card. Those further down the scale are less expansive but no less heartfelt; they give to demonstrate their loyalty and keep themselves in the frame for future favors. So many petitioners had wanted to prove their devotion today that the staff had been obliged to organize visits in waves: twenty minutes for the vodka distillers, twenty minutes for the political correspondents, twenty minutes for the precious-metals faction.

And the most absurd thing about this grotesque feeding frenzy was that the recipient couldn’t have given two shits. This grotto of bounty and largesse, right next to his bedchamber, was entirely lost on him. He
wouldn’t use a single one of these items. Rapacious underlings would remove half of them; the remainder would be given away or simply left to rot.

Borzov had put the Kremlin wardrobe at the disposal of Lev and Alice, and she at least had made full use of it. Her outfit was relatively simple—an unfussy black dress, a pearl choker, gold and silver bracelets, and a bronze butterfly in her hair—but somehow the effect far outweighed the constituent parts. She’d seen it in the reaction of those through whose presence her beauty had rippled: Lev, as he’d stood behind her and watched them both in the mirror; the sentries whom they’d passed on their way to the ball; and the other guests who made minute and perhaps even unconscious changes in their positions so they could see her better. Tonight she was a traffic stopper, and even the most beautiful can’t manage that at will.

The ball was being held in the three imperial palaces that cluster around a courtyard in the southwest corner of the Kremlin, and the guests were to be taken from palace to palace as the evening progressed: drinks in one, dinner in another, dancing in the third, each more beautiful than the last. They began in the Terem Palace, the oldest building in the Kremlin. Waiters hovered against the gilded stucco with trays outstretched: some offered lanky champagne flutes and stubby tumblers of vodka, others caviar blini and devils on horseback, each of them urging Alice with a smile to indulge, indulge, whenever would this happen to her again? She smiled through gritted teeth, shaking her head at the waiters with their poisonous flutes and tumblers, and she stuck to mineral water and orange juice.

All of Moscow’s great and beautiful were here, pulsing beneath the painted vaultings and between the elaborately gilded stoves. Every time Alice turned she saw someone she recognized: a cabinet minister adjusting the collar beneath his chins, a ballerina dropping kisses like confetti, a tycoon moving like a lizard through the crowd. She laughed at the reactions of those who saw her and Lev there, after everything that had happened. When she realized that all these people had absolutely no idea what would happen later, she laughed harder.

Lev and Alice stood in the lower of the Terem’s two medieval churches and lost themselves in the iconography. The pillars spread up to the roof like spring flowers in bloom, and not a square inch was left uncovered: angels and demons, knights and maidens, all soared across the ceiling and swooped down the walls. It was like being inside the head of a tattooist.

At eight o’clock sharp, the guests were politely but firmly taken out past the Church of the Deposition of the Robe and into Sobornaya Square, from where they’d ascend the Red Staircase to the diamond-patterned Hall of Facets. Borzov and his wife were standing at the top of the staircase like a modern-day czar and czarina, the comparison underscored by the imperial double-headed eagles that perched on the arches above their heads. The guests clapped and cheered, and Russia’s first couple—for tonight, its royal couple—clapped back and beckoned for the guests to come up and join them. As Alice climbed between stone lions, the light from the arc lamps brushed the steps beneath her feet, and she remembered that this staircase had once run with blood; it was down these treads that Peter the Great had tossed his mutinous relatives in 1682.

Above the Kremlin, Borzov’s face had been projected demigod-like onto the clouds.

Dinner was served in the banqueting hall where Ivan the Terrible had treated foreign ambassadors to roast swan and elks’ brains, and where more recently Gorbachev had entertained Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. A single massive pillar in the center of the room supported the vaults, as though Atlas himself had stopped by and had the place built around him.