Vodka (91 page)

Headstones were engraved not simply with names but with pictures and sculptures too. She saw gold eagles, outsize boxing gloves and maple leaves; a winding road commemorated a woman killed in a car crash. Husbands and wives bumped each other in little oval portraits, the men dignified and the women strict, hairstyles as flattened as their expressions. Pine needles were gathered in wreaths, bright flowers bunched in bouquets.

When Alice had first arrived in Moscow, she’d have found these decorations tacky and corny; because she’d have looked at them with Western eyes trained to abhor gaudy sentimentality. Now she found them moving; she understood them.

A freight train tooted a mournful refrain as it chugged slowly past the cemetery’s north wall. Alice found Lev’s grave and sat down. It was just the two of them now.

She rummaged in her bag and brought out a bottle—mineral water, of course. Vodka had been her lover before she’d found her real lover, and her real lover had saved her from the traitorous vodka; he’d pledged to stand by her, and he’d not let her down. He’d have been proud of her today, standing there with her bottle of water. He’d have been proud that she’d not drunk yesterday, that she was not drinking today, and that
she’d not drink tomorrow. That was how she was getting through it, a day at a time, and she’d keep her eyes on the road in front and never dare lift them to the summit for fear it would seem too daunting. It was hard by the yard, they said, but it was a cinch by the inch.

Now, finally, when she’d renounced vodka, she understood why the Russians love it so deeply. No other spirit is half as compatible with their soul. The subtle lithesomeness of wine, best taken in the open air with fine cheese and warm bread, is a bad fit with Russia’s long winters and short growing seasons. But vodka, so pure and purposeful, so ideal for warming the despondent soul in February or for cooling passions in August, is a feast-or-famine sort of drink, and Russia is a feast-or-famine sort of place.

Alice wondered how everyone else was spending their Victory Day. Arkin was still interim president, and stood a good chance of making the job his permanently in the elections next month. She’d stuck to their agreement, regardless of what had happened to Lev. Arkin had told her he was the best man for Russia, and Alice agreed, he was. She’d seen Irk in the street the other day, and chatted with him briefly; Canute-like, he was still trying to stem the tide of lawlessness. When she’d asked about Sveta and Galya, he’d wiped his hand across his face and shaken his head. Lewis had gone back to the States, as had Bob and Christina. Harry was still there, and still pestering her to set up a business with him. Perhaps she would, in time. She didn’t need to work for a while, she still had plenty of money from her days on Wall Street. She hoped they were all happy, but she was no longer for them, nor they for her.

She’d chosen the design of Lev’s memorial herself. The tombstone was black and white, as Khrushchev’s was, reflection of the light and dark that had existed side by side in Lev. He’d been dangerous, emotional and irresponsible, and yet haunted by conscience; he’d been cruel, yet fundamentally childlike. He’d been broad yet narrow, reckless yet cautious, tolerant yet censorious, independent, docile, tough, malleable, kind, hateful, naive, cynical … Most of all, he’d been Russian, and what are Russians if not human beings writ large? There’s duality in everyone, it’s the most universal of human characteristics, and though this isn’t unique to the Russians, they take it to greater extremes than other peoples.

Most people experience love without noticing that there’s anything remarkable about it. To Alice and Lev—and this was what had made them unusual—the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence were moments of revelation, greater understanding of life and themselves.

Maybe she’d known all along that he was doomed, maybe that was why she’d fallen so deeply for him. A famous Russian fairy tale tells of a princess made of ice who knows how she’ll die; one day she’ll meet a mortal man, their passion will last a day and a night, and then she’ll melt and expire. What was the story of Lev and Alice if not that very fairy tale in reverse?

But does life stop with death? No, she thought, of course it doesn’t. A man is not dead until he’s forgotten, and Alice would never forget Lev. When someone you love dies, Alice thought, they take a piece of you with them; but equally they leave a piece of themselves with you. She felt a stirring deep inside her. It was nothing so
prosaic as a biological changing; it was a feeling, a hunch, rooted in nothing more than the absence of a monthly occurrence and the sure knowledge of herself and him, and therefore as irrefutable as a mathematical proof. She was already at the disposal of the future she carried within her; she was no longer only herself, she was Lev too, and another, a fusion of them both, and one day she’d sit her son down and tell him everything about his father; that this, truly, had been a man.

She’d been at his grave for some time. The sun was burning down the west, and the skies were darkening. The twilight above Lev’s gravestone seemed to rearrange itself momentarily in the shape of his grin, hanging in the air as it had always seemed to—and then the apparition was gone, his soul spiraling upward toward its judgment, and she was alone.

Alice walked back through the cemetery, past a shed where green-stained copper tongues lolled from the mouths of drainpipes and where two old grave diggers were playing chess with vodka bottles as pieces. Whenever one player took a piece, he had to drink the contents; judging by the state these particular combatants were in, this game had been going on for quite a while. Each man was left with a king, a queen and a rook—a gangster, his moll and their bodyguard, perhaps—and these figurines chased each other endlessly around the board, white on black, black on white, radiating lines of force and magnetism, attraction and repulsion, permission and interdiction, from and to and across every square. The chessboard is a haven of precision and clarity, Alice thought, and as
such it’s an inaccurate reflection of the world. There’s no black and white in real life; there’s only gray.

The grave diggers saw Alice watching them, and greeted her cheerily. She pointed to the bottles and laughed. “You’d better watch it. They’ll be the death of you.”

“Well, vodka’s a poison that kills slowly,” said the man playing white.

“And as it happens,” Black added, “I’m in no hurry.”

She laughed again. “Who’s winning?”

“He is,” said Black.

“No, he is,” White said. “We both want to play with black, that’s the problem.”

“Surely that’s a disadvantage? Doesn’t white have the first move?”

They shrugged. Maybe so, but that was how it was; black was white, white was black, a disadvantage was an advantage. It all made sense if you stepped through the looking-glass and surrendered yourself to the peculiar principles of logic that held sway in Wonderland. Alice had never felt more Russian than then, when she’d gone teetotal and forsworn the very soul of Russia itself, and if
that
wasn’t a Russian thing to think, then she didn’t know what was.

“You’d stay without me,” Lev had said; and he’d been right, she would.

Alice paused a moment at the gate, orienting herself by the embers of the setting sun, and then began to retrace her way through the streets of Moscow at dusk, the great city hanging suspended in all its contradictions: halfway between day and night, past and future, east and west, sanity and madness, picturesque and squalid, good and evil.