Vodka (90 page)

“If you think you can do it better, Kolya, just try,” Borzov had gurgled, the hemorrhaging drowning him from within. “Take care of Russia,” he said, the lights of the Sklifosovsky reflected in his dying eyes.

Monday, March 30, 1992

A
lice had been given a private waiting room. She’d clenched her hands so tight, dug her nails so deep into her palms, that she’d drawn blood, dripping reddened globules onto the white leather sofas like rose petals on snow.

Lewis came to see her at breakfast. “We’ve gotten rid of most of the bullet and bone fragments,” he said, “and those still left there aren’t doing any particular harm. But his vital signs are seriously impaired.”

He walked with her into the intensive care unit, where Lev had been taken after the operation. The even rise and fall of Lev’s chest offered Alice the only reassurance that he was still alive. His head was bandaged, and his blackened eyes and white cheeks were frightening in their absence of color. Alice bent to Lev and whispered in his ear. There was no response.

“There’s very little brainwave activity,” Lewis said. “That mechanical ventilator is the only thing keeping him alive.”

“What are his chances of recovery?”

“None.”

“None?”

“Not to any life outside this bed. We can keep him going on the ventilator indefinitely, but the brain damage is too deep.”

The television was showing old footage of Arkin performing martial arts;
sombo
, to be precise, a mixture of judo and wrestling that places a premium on quick moves, a calm demeanor, and the ability to keep oneself from showing emotions or uttering a sound, no matter how intense the struggle or the pain. As Arkin fought, hard but fair, his judo teacher was being interviewed. “Nikolai Valentinovich is not a wrestler of physicality,” the teacher was saying, “but more of intellect—a smart wrestler. He always does the unexpected, because he’s versatile, very strong, so the speed of the fight is intense.”

As if on cue, Arkin ended the fight with his favorite move, a swift attack that knocked his opponent off his feet. The beaten man picked himself up off the mat. He and Arkin bowed to each other, then clasped hands and shared an unheard joke.

Arkin would need more than judo to save Russia, Alice thought; he’d need voodoo.

She sat in the waiting room all day, refusing food or company. Lev was in a coma, and he’d almost certainly never come out of it. She’d nurse him, of course, if that was what he needed, she’d nurse him day and night, feed him and empty his catheter and watch over him with all the love in the world; but whatever that existence would represent for her, it would be no life for him.

Night fell, and with it came the darkness in her soul.

Tuesday, March 31, 1992

A
lice left the waiting room and went back to the intensive care unit. Lewis was there, looking silently at Lev. Alice came up beside Lewis and rested her head against his shoulder. They stood like that for a moment, husband and wife, both looking at Lev as the ventilator opened and closed his lungs; both facing the enormity of what they’d lost.

“Turn the ventilator off,” Alice whispered.

In the depths of his soul, way deeper than anything that man’s machines could detect, Lev felt the world slipping
from him. There was to be no miraculous recovery, and that was only fitting; the reason why none of Russia’s great novels have happy endings is because Russians wouldn’t know what to make of them if they did.

Lev thought once more how grateful he was that he’d lived long enough to love Alice. “Good-bye, goodbye,” he said to himself; “good-bye my only love, my love forever lost, until we meet again in the next world.” He was Lev, and he was dying, and yet he wasn’t Lev, because Lev was the name he’d been given as a
vor
, and how could he still be a
vor
when he’d broken so many of their rules? How could he still be a
vor
when he’d have given everything up to be with a woman? He’d lived his life in the brotherhood, and right at the last he’d chosen to forsake it; his love for Alice was too great.

Lev saw images that seemed strange and unfamiliar: him in a church, holding hands with a woman in white; him splashing in a brown ocean under a blazing sun, somewhere hot; him in a large hospital, and he couldn’t work out why until he heard a baby fill its lungs and yell out a life-affirming squawk, and he knew. Lev had always thought his life would flash before him when he died, but he didn’t remember any of these things. Then he realized that what he was seeing was not his life past but his life future, all the things he was meant to have done with Alice and now would never have time to.

How appalling it is, how terrifying, to stand up and face death, to run toward death rather than away from it. How terrible it is to die before your time. Lev wanted to stay alive. He’d already resigned himself to fate, but this desire was stronger than any thought. This desire was so vast that nothing could be compared to it; it could not be measured.

It was not enough.

Lewis showed Alice which button on the ventilator to press, and she did so without fuss or ceremony. The machine’s humming wound down to silence, Lev’s chest ceased its endless rise and fall, and on the monitor at the head of his bed, the spiky line of his heartbeat smoothed to the flatness of a spirit level.

“What’s life, if you live it on a flat line?” Lev had told her once. “No great downs, true, but no great ups either. You might as well be dead. Ups and downs are proof that you’re alive. Flatlines are what happen to patients in the hospital when their bodies give out on them.”

The body in the bed was so unlike Lev that Alice concluded he simply wasn’t there. His sufferings were over; he was free. But the extinction of the last, faintest hope that he might recover had intensified her agony even further. She felt the world becoming darker and darker; it must have been the unbearable pain in her soul that was dissolving the boundary between her inner existence and the real world.

The lights in the room flickered briefly, fading before burning strongly again. “Fluctuation in the power supply,” Lewis muttered, “it happens all the time,” but Alice shook her head; she knew better. It was Lev’s soul on its way out, and the motes of the air stirred and rearranged themselves as it went.

Lev’s soul came to visit Alice, as she’d known it would. It was not a sensory manifestation—she didn’t see or hear him, let alone smell or taste or touch him—but rather an indefinable sense of his presence. She walked the streets for hours in the watery sunshine, visiting all the places they’d been together; she stood outside the gates of the
distillery and sat down on the steps of the Kotelniki, she walked around the Kremlin and sat at the bar of the Vek restaurant, letting the tears fall into her mineral water. Lev was in all these places as surely as if he’d been standing next to her.

The prospect of the soul’s journey—for death is the beginning of a voyage, undertaken either by boat or in a sled drawn by a troika of wild horses—is a dreadful one, a reckoning and a test. The soul isn’t alone, for its guardian angel accompanies it, but the companionship is not necessarily consoling. The angel isn’t simply benign, a good fairy by another name; its task is to reveal to the astonished soul the true meaning of its lifetime’s deeds and choices, however terrible they might appear. The prayers that mourners offer for the soul’s peace at this time are in deadly earnest, for few can contemplate this kind of truth, unmediated, without fear.

The journey is in three stages. Firstly, the soul remains on earth for three days and three nights, visiting the places where it spent most of its mortal hours. Next, it ascends to heaven to meet its god, where it stays for six days. On the ninth day after death, it is taken down to hell for a month. After a total of forty days traversing the regions inhabited by various demons who tear asunder a consciousness infected by sin comes the moment of individual judgment, when everything the soul has learned on its journey becomes real, when it begins to face the consequence of actions it might have chosen to forget, and when it faces the genuine prospect of torment stretching onward to the end of time.

This was what the future seemed to hold for Alice. Eternity retreated before the agony of her lost love.

Saturday, May 9, 1992

V
ictory Day is the biggest holiday in the Russian calendar. Deliverance from the Nazis is a celebration that will always endure, no matter what political system is in place. Bemedalled old women and bowlegged ex-cavalrymen in archaic uniforms reminisced, wept, sang and danced to accordion music. Almost everywhere, it seemed, people recalled the autumn of 1941.

Off the Stalinist squares and avenues, the back streets were deserted, a mellower Moscow of courtyards and lanes in every hue of crumbling brick and stucco; a city of hidden charms. The sun was warm, and pedestrians strode purposefully in shirtsleeves; the mud and slush had finally receded, and the first dandelion leaves were pushing through the concrete sidewalks. Moscow is seen as a city of endless winter, but this is a myth. Yes, it has to endure six months of snow, but no sooner has the thaw begun than the race for summer is on. Days lengthen and begin to simmer, nights are fire and smoke. The heat obliterates all memory of the cold that has been and is yet to come.

It was the fortieth day since Lev’s death, the day on which his soul would return from its wanderings and face the final judgment. Alice wanted to get to Lev’s grave as quickly as possible, but he stilled her:
Hush, my love, hush, we have all the time in the world.
So she slowed her pace and looked around. She was a Russian now, and as such she should appreciate the way in which her people deal with death.

Feeling as though the legions of dead were watching her, Alice walked through thickets of tombstones, staggered by their variety and artistry. In a country where everyone was dying, cemetery space was so tight that husbands and wives were sometimes buried on top of each other. Perhaps that was where Alice would end up too, on top of Lev; she thought briefly of the times they’d made love, her above him, him above her.