Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (10 page)

“Lily was the most beautiful girl in town, but everyone despised her because she was born in prison. Her mother came from the Moscow intelligentsia and her father was an army officer, Polish I think. He was shot after the war as a cosmopolitan. After her release from jail Lily’s mother got a minus 20
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so she ended up in Astrakhan.

“Lily’s mother was a proud and defiant woman. The locals called her a prostitute. You know what it’s like - a single mother coming out of prison, and to make it worse she was a member of the intelligentsia. Lily was a tough kid, always hanging around with the boys and baiting the teachers. She would start a fight for the slightest reason. She often won too, despite her size.

“Soon after they locked me up Lily had our daughter, Sveta. When she wants to see me she comes to the camp, sets Sveta
down outside the Godfather’s office and runs away. Then she phones up and demands my release. Sveta screeches like a stuck pig, the guards can do nothing with her and in the end they give us a special visit. Then Lily takes Sveta away until the next time she decides she wants a visit. If he had the powers the Godfather would probably have released me by now.”

The library is separated from the camp schoolroom by a thin partition. School is compulsory for all those under sixty who have not completed the seventh class. Those who refuse have parcels and visits withheld. Teachers are civilian volunteers. The sound of these lessons keeps Oleg and me entertained as we work.

“Masha goes to the shop,” the teacher’s voice reads out.

Some wit remarks: “It’d be better if she came to see us.”

Ignoring him, the teacher’s voice continues: “Who can tell me which is the subject of the sentence?”

Silence.

“You, Kuznetsov, come up to the board, please.”

“What’s the point if I don’t know the fucking answer?” grumbles Kuznetsov, but we hear the scrape of his bench.

“Which word is the subject of the sentence?”

After some thought Kuznetsov answers: “Er, Masha?”

“Correct! and which is the verb?”

“Um, ‘shop’?”

“No. Anyone else?”

“Of course it is ‘goes’ but we would say: ‘staggers’” another voice pipes up.

“How do you mean ‘staggers’?” asks the teacher.

“Well, Masha’s obviously got a hangover and is going for a bottle.”

“No not, ‘staggers’ but ‘waddles,’ because of the huge arse on her.”

At that point everyone throws themselves into an impassioned discussion about Masha’s qualities and failings, her physique and her temperament.

When exams take place candidates spill out of the classroom into the library looking for us. Together we help them solve problems and correct their written mistakes. The teacher does not try to stop us. The more who pass the better it looks for him.

Our camp has a technical school which is supposed to give inmates skills that will deter them from the path of crime. The yard outside the school is full of farm machinery waiting to be repaired. It is protected from the weather by tarpaulin and guarded by an old man who was sentenced for killing his wife. In her death struggle she hit him so hard with an iron that he has a dent in his cranium the size of a fist. The blow altered his mind.

Oleg and I approach the old man one day. “Look here, Grandad,” says Oleg, “it’s a pity to sit here all day doing nothing. If you cut this tarpaulin into strips and sew them together you’ll be able to make a balloon. We’ll bring you some rope; you’ll tie your balloon to your chair, and then you’ll be able to float out of here. If you leave on a moonless night no one will see you. We won’t say anything. It’ll be a secret between the three of us.”

The old man is excited by the plan and for a whole month he busily sews together pieces of tarpaulin. He is eventually caught, but by this time he has taken to sewing. One day he turns up on evening parade in a marshal’s uniform, sewn from tarpaulin bleached white by the sun, and covered in stripes and tin medals made from old fish cans. We cheer as he smartly salutes the camp guards.

It is hard to get used to the camp regime, with endless searches and body counts. For hours we have to stand like sheep in the
rain or snow. The semi-literate guards line us up in fives; even so, they usually lose count and have to start again.

Those who want to get out of work cut their wrists or nail their scrotums to their bunks. A man in our cell slashes his wrists with a piece of smuggled razor. I want to call the guards. Oleg just shrugs and says: “Don’t be in a hurry; there’s not much threat of death when the world looks on.”

And it is true; no one dies of a few slashes across their wrists. They do it for show, out of hysteria.

A prisoner named Kuptsev is an exception. He’s always hiding somewhere in the basement or under the roof, slitting his wrists and waiting for someone to find him. He never seeks help himself. When I ask him why he does it he replies: “The sensation of blood draining out of my body is like nothing else in the world.”

Another man rips his stomach open. He stands smiling at the guards, with his dripping guts cupped in his hands. Stories of people who cut themselves up are usually told with a grin but they’re not funny. Everyone responds to cruelty and injustice in their own way.

In camp I find the lack of solitude even harder to bear than the loss of freedom. You’re always in a crowd. This is not so bad when you’re working during the daytime, but at night you sleep among hundreds of men whose faces you got tired of a long while ago. You start to hate your fellow inmates and they you.

At first I am surprised to see zeks turn on warders for no apparent reason, insulting them and getting punished for it. Then I start to do the same thing myself, just to gain some solitude in the isolator.

In the evenings we exercise by shuffling around a small square. By unspoken agreement the walkers do not disturb each other. If
you pace up and down for long enough you start to feel almost light-headed and detached from your surroundings. For a minute or two you can forget you are in a camp. Returning from one of these evening shuffles a tall Jew named Yura Kots approaches me and remarks casually: “Wine drinkers smell different in the morning.”

“So they do,” I reply, “but what makes you say so?”

“This is going to be the first sentence of the novel that I’ll write when I get out of here.”

“D’you know the joke about the madman who spent all day writing?”

“Tell me. I could do with a laugh.”

“A doctor comes up to him and asks: ‘What are you writing?’”

“‘A letter,’ he replies.”

“‘Who to?’”

“‘Myself.’”

“‘And what does it say?’”

“‘How should I know? I’ll find out when I get it.’”

“But I really am going to write a novel,” Kots insists.

“When?”

“When I leave here.”

After that Kots and I take our shuffles beside each other. Each month he receives a parcel of books which he passes on to me when he has finished. In the evenings we discuss our readings and study German together.

By profession Kots is a card-sharp, but he was sent to camp for theft. One day he lost to more experienced players. A card debt is a very serious matter. In order to repay it Kots robbed his former college. He was caught trying to make off with a tape recorder and given three years.

I am surprised to see that Kots subscribes to ‘Young Communist.’

“What’s up, need extra toilet paper?”

“No.”

“Then why do you order that rubbish?”

“There are a lot of things written here that you won’t find anywhere else.”

He shows me some notes on the last page about a debate between Sartre and Camus. This took place a few years ago but everything goes through the USSR like a giraffe’s neck and Kots has to keep up-to-date on western literature in order to maintain his pose as an intellectual.

Kots toured the country, presenting himself now as an architect, now as a doctor. He met his victims on long-distance trains or on the beaches of health spas. While he was swindling someone at cards he would remark casually to his victim: “Of course, Camus was not really an existentialist…”

Marcel Proust was Kots’ trump card, deadlier than a Kalashnikov in his hands. The credulous intelligentsia, who thought that culture was something you picked up with your university degree, were impressed. Kots would quickly empty his opponents’ pockets and then disappear.

Although I admire Kots and envy him his freedom I never think of following his example. A life of crime seems too complicated, and if I’m honest, I know it is beyond my capabilities. Besides, it will inevitably lead me back to prison. I have never held romantic notions about the brotherhood of thieves. They only band together when it is profitable to do so or when they are afraid. It’s not hard to give away what has been easily come by, so thieves are accustomed to dividing up their booty. But when it
comes down to parting with their last it is a very different story. When they are in difficulties thieves display as much solidarity as spiders in a jar.

No one in my family has been to prison before me. I don’t count my father. Those were different times. Besides, that was for a political ‘crime.’ Nowadays political crimes aren’t regarded as crimes at all, although on the outside people still try to keep their distance from former political prisoners, ‘to keep away from sin’ they say.

Even though I am not attracted to a life of crime I do not condemn my fellow inmates. After two weeks behind barbed wire I learn not to judge others. At first I hold myself a bit aloof. I figure that the other prisoners are probably inside for a reason while I was only put away through a misunderstanding. But I soon realise that most of them are just like me. If you exclude the murderers, bandits and professional thieves, I could stand in the shoes of any one of them. It is only by some happy accident that I haven’t been thrown into prison before. I could have been locked up just for all the spirit I stole from work.

And we are not so different from those beyond the barbed wire. Everyone in the Soviet Union steals. Wages are calculated on the expectation that people will do so – if only for their own survival. Collective farmers work for years without seeing any money at all; they would die out like the mammoth if they didn’t steal.

This is no accident. Every member of a gang has to dirty his hands with a crime so our government deliberately pushes people towards committing them. If someone then turns round and complains about the system who’s going to listen to him if his hands are already dirty?

In fact most prisoners are in jail not for what they have done, but for the time and place of their appearance on this earth. I have to thank God that I was born in 1934 and not 15 years earlier. My wagging tongue would certainly have earned me a bullet in the head during the repression of the 1930s.

I am released in December, after exactly a year. Oleg has to stay inside for another three months. We arrange to keep in touch. His mother and sister meet me at the camp gate and see me off on a flight to Kuibyshev. I don’t intend to go back to my wife. I can’t forgive her for 365 days and nights behind barbed wire.

“Ahh, Christ just walked barefoot through my heart!” Ivan Shirmanov sighs as he knocks back his first drink of the morning. We are toasting my freedom with a renewed sense of brotherhood.

“Thousands of books have been written about prisons,” says Ivan, “but everyone’s experience is unique, especially their first. It’s been likened to first love, but in the case of love there are doubts: will there be a second? In the case of prison there are no doubts. There will be another and another…”

We finish the bottle and wander down to the market-place, picking up more vodka on the way. There are a few alkashi
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gathered there. Beaming all over his moonlike face, Ivan offers them a bottle. He watches them drink with an expression as tender as that of a mother spooning porridge into her child’s mouth.

Ivan introduces me to one of the group: “This is our Levanevsky who is nothing like his famous namesake.
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You can always trust him with cash to go and buy a bottle.”

Levanevsky only takes one glass from us.

“Have another?” I offer.

“I don’t want any more,” he replies. “God is no lovesick swain blinded by his passion. He sees everything. So long as he knows I’m trying he’ll give me another chance to sort myself out.”

I know that in an hour he’ll be shaking like death.

In the market we come across Sedoy the Poet of All Russia. He is standing on an old lady’s sunflower seed stall and declaiming to passing shoppers:

“Sedoy was once a teacher,” explains Ivan, “a head of department. He was so strict his students nicknamed him Crocodile. Then he took to drink. Now his mother looks after him. Every day you see him in the market in a clean shirt and freshly-pressed trousers.

“There are a lot of alkashi like Sedoy. As former members of the intelligentsia they blame society for their condition. They think it owes them something.” Ivan puffs up his chest. “A worker like me would be ashamed to beg or steal; I’ll take any portering job I can find.”

Amongst the alkashi I meet former teachers, doctors, and engineers. No one respects them for their education; respect is earned by not stealing drinks and not always having your
hair-of
-the-dog at another’s expense. When a person trembles from a hangover it is no great sin to cadge a drink, but the man who
does this every morning soon annoys his companions. When alkashi notice that someone is trying to take advantage of them they spit in his face and drive him away. Outcasts can be seen hanging around the fringes of the group, usually sporting black eyes.

Nonetheless, the majority of alkashi try to live at the expense of those around them. ‘There are enough fools in this world to be taken advantage of,’ is their attitude, and the more people they con the better pleased with themselves they are. Even more degraded are those who see no meaning in life at all. They live from one drink to the next. If you send them for vodka they’ll disappear; if you drink with them they’ll go through your pockets when you pass out and probably treat you to a bottle over the head as well. One man does this to me and then has the front to come up the next day, look into my eyes and ask: “How come we lost each other yesterday?”

Perhaps he really remembers nothing. Besides, I couldn’t swear it was he who hit me. I was too drunk myself to catch him by the hand to look into his face.

The pay I collected from camp soon runs out and I have to look for a job. That means sobering up. I know that if I carry on sleeping at Ivan’s I’ll be led into temptation, so I go to an old friend’s flat. Igor Gorbunov comes from the northern Urals where the people speak so fast it’s hard to understand them. Like me, he loves reading, but unlike me he is no drunkard, and in the past he has helped Olga extricate me from drinking parties.

Igor has visitors and they are preparing to go camping in the forest. I decline an invitation to join them as I know they’ll be taking bottles with them. They set off, leaving me alone in the
flat. I sit on the balcony with a book. Across the street is a vodka shop. Troikas are forming at the entrance, pooling their money and sending in one of their number to buy a bottle. It’s nearly closing time and sales are speeding up. I need cigarettes so I go down to the shop and join the surging crowd of men around the counter. Elbowing through, I hold out my money amongst the forest of hands.

“Cigarettes!”

“How many?” the assistant asks.

“Two packets.”

She frowns at the note I hand her and moves towards the till for change. To save her the journey I involuntarily add: “And three bottles.”

I could leave the bottles on the counter but that would look foolish in front of all those people. ‘Well, I can always give them to an acquaintance outside,’ I reason to myself, but I don’t know any of the men who are milling around the shop. So I return to Igor’s flat armed to the teeth, put the bottles in his fridge and sit down on the balcony with my book. I try to read but the image of those bottles keeps floating into my mind, breaking my concentration. Almost without thinking, I put the book aside, stand up, go through the living room into the kitchen, and open the fridge door.

The first glassful is hard to swallow. I retch. Holding my breath, I manage to force it down. After a while my throat relaxes and the mouthfuls flutter down like tiny birds. Having seen off the first bottle I feel the need of an audience. I could call on Igor’s neighbours but that might be unwelcome, even with two bottles. They hardly know me. Instead I wander down to the yard. I recognise the metal spaceship in the children’s play-area.
It has been remodelled from the Decembrist bottle that used to stand at the factory gates. A drunken tune emanates from the spaceship, calling to me like a siren song. Next morning I wake up in the dust without money, documents or shoes.

Olga opens the door: “I’ve been expecting you.”

I enter without a word and clean myself up. For a few days we barely speak and I keep out of her way. Finally she can’t bear it any longer.

“Vanya, it’s my fault you went to prison, but you can’t feel sorry for yourself all your life. Make up your mind. Either we divorce, or you put it all behind you.”

My resentment boils over. “Thanks to you I was stuck in that hole for a year. Can you imagine the endless searches and body counts, or what it’s like to sit down to dinner with a man who’s murdered his mother and another who has raped a three-
year-old
girl? To have the biggest idiot in the province shout at you for no reason when you can’t answer back? And you know what the worst thing about camp is? That you’re never alone for one minute. Sometimes I felt like committing murder myself.

“You put me through all that and now you want me to behave as though nothing happened. And don’t threaten me with divorce. I know you have nowhere to go. You won’t humiliate yourself again by going back to your parents.”

“All right, I made a mistake, but you can’t use that to justify your behaviour forever. You blame me because it gives you an excuse to drink, but in truth you drink because you’re a coward. You can’t face work, or me, or even poor Natasha. If you can stop blaming me I’m willing to support you until you get paid.”

But prison has put an unbridgeable gulf between us. I feel as
though I’ve crossed a boundary beyond which there can be no return to normal life. Olga will never understand what I’ve been through, and she’s mistaken if she thinks I can rebuild a life with her as though nothing has happened.

The factory tells me I can start in the new year. I fill in the time by hanging around with my alkashi friends, who listen to my camp stories with sympathy and even admiration. Their attention fuels my self-pity and I begin to enjoy my role as sufferer. The realisation of this fact does not make me proud of myself, so I submerge myself in drink.

One morning I crawl home to find the flat empty. Olga has taken almost everything that belongs to her and Natasha. I figure she’s trying to teach me a lesson and so I refuse to chase her. A week passes. I phone her work. They tell me she’s resigned. I’m shocked. They must be lying to me. She has nowhere to go.

Olga left no money so I sell the furniture, including my precious East German bookcase. I haul it downstairs at five in the morning, tie it to Natasha’s sledge and drag it to the market. Alas, while I’m taking a smoke-break the wind turns my bookcase over and its beautiful glass doors smash. With great difficulty I convert it into a bottle, which my customer helps me drink.

In the end I sell the only living thing left in the flat, Natasha’s hedgehog Yashka. The poor thing is hungry as there is no food in the house. I take it to the shop
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, not really hoping for money. I think that at least someone might take it home for their children, but the shop assistant gives me one rouble and seventeen kopecks for Yashka. She knows the price of a bottle.

Finally I go to my wife’s sister Ludmila, who tells me that Olga and Natasha are fine. They’re living in a small mining town, they’ve found a flat and Natasha is going to a modern
kindergarten. Ludmila has promised not to disclose their whereabouts. That is the only information I can glean, but I feel calmer. Any decision I take will have to be made with a sober head and so I go home to sleep.

For two days I do not leave the house. Although there is a bottle of vodka in the kitchen I leave it untouched. As each hour passes I feel worse. I can’t sleep for a minute. The radio bothers me so I switch it off. I lie down and try to read. A snow-storm howls outside; the wind rattles the window. On the third night I hear breaking glass. ‘Bad luck,’ I think. Someone must have forgotten to shut their ventilation window and it’s blown open and shattered.

The doorbell rings. I go to answer it. On the threshold stands my neighbour Voronin in his underpants. He is holding a gun, a 16 calibre rifle.

“Was it you who broke my window?” he growls.

“What? Are you crazy?”

“Show me your balcony,” he demands, and pushes past me into the living-room.

Our balcony is next to his bedroom window. He tries the glass door but it won’t open because of the snow piled against it.

“I thought you’d gone out onto your balcony and broken my window with a mop.”

“What would I want to do that for?”

“Who the hell knows what goes on in your mind, you’ve been pissed for two months,” he snaps, and goes home.

If I had stepped onto the balcony there would have been footprints in the snow, and there are none. Something isn’t right. Why would I break his window? I scarcely know Voronin. He is the head doctor in the clinic where Olga works. We exchange
greetings on the stairs and his wife sometimes borrows matches. There’s no quarrel between us. After thinking hard about the incident I go to fetch some six-inch nails and a hammer. I nail the balcony door shut. Let them say what they like now! But the business still worries me. And a gun!

The more I think about it the more convinced I am that some sort of dirty trick is being played on me. Voronin knows that I have just come out of camp. He probably knows that Olga has left. He knows that I drink. Perhaps he wants to provoke me into some sort of criminal action. But why? What have I ever done to him? I can find no answer. The simplest solution would be to have a drink and forget it all but I decide not to succumb.

The next day I feel just as bad. It’s my third day without drinking. Nor have I eaten anything. I go into the kitchen and listen to the noises in the building around me. Voices come from the landing. I stand by the front door with my ear to the crack but all I can hear is babble, punctuated by whistles and shrieks.

I lie down to read again, but I can’t concentrate on my book. The lines dance before my eyes without making sense. I put the book down and lie waiting for nightfall, hoping for sleep to bring relief.

The acrid stench of burning cotton wool annoys me. Earlier in the day I threw my quilt into the stove to warm the room, and now I want to open a window but do not dare after the business with Voronin. I listen to noises outside. The wind has abated and the street roars with cement-mixers driving to the building site down the road.

I hear my name from the other side of the wall. Taking my metal mug, I place it against the door to listen, as I learned in prison. Bloody hell, they are discussing how to get me sent to jail!

“It didn’t work last night,” says Voronin.

“You must do something to get rid of that parasite.” I recognise the voice of a woman who lives on the floor above me. “How can I bring up my children decently with him around?”

“His poor wife,” says another, “no wonder she left him. Did you see the low-life he brought in last week?”

‘Hypocrites!’ I think, ‘You bitches aren’t averse to the bottle yourselves and when you’re drinking the whole block has to know about it.’

I consider jumping out on them but decide this might also be some sort of provocation. If they can accuse me of starting a fight I’ll go back to camp for sure.

Judging by the noise everyone in our block is assembled on the landing. Then I hear Voronin address his eldest son: “Dimka, go down into the street and throw stones at the windows. Then there’ll be material evidence to have Petrov arrested.”

I rejoice. They do not know that I’ve nailed up the balcony door. But they are many and I am one. I know the disposition of the police well enough. They don’t need proof. Once they have their denunciations everything will proceed as smoothly as a knife through butter.

I turn off the light in order to see what’s happening in the street. Dimka walks about below, his eyes on the ground.

Hah, he won’t find any stones. The snow’s too deep.

Dimka begins to gather compressed lumps of snow thrown up by the cement mixers. He throws them at the windows of the block. Fortunately the lumps disintegrate before they reach the third floor.