Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (17 page)

My legs are tired after drinking for the whole morning. The woman who sells pies on the sea front has shut her stall and gone off to lunch. I park myself on her stool. Holiday-makers stroll past on their way to the beach. A lad detaches himself from his group: “What you sellin’ here, uncle?”

“Jokes!”

“How much you charge?” he asks in an exaggerated peasant accent.

“Roub’ each,” I answer in the same tone.

“So much!”

“Why, I’m almost giving them away. Roub’ if you don’t know the joke and I’ll give you a roub’ if it’s already grown a beard.”

“Go on then!” The group gather around my stall. I am heavily under the influence of Bacchus and quickly earn 15 roubles, not because my jokes are so good but because the youths are in high spirits and pleased to be entertained.

The next day, after drinking my hair-of-the-dog, I go to collect the baggage I left behind in spring. Much to my surprise, the man who was looking after it has not sold all my things, although he hasn’t left much. He gives me a small rucksack in exchange for my suitcase. Into this I put underwear, photographs, two novels and a cloth-bound exercise book in which I write the crosswords that I like to devise during my sober periods.

I set off for Central Asia, where work is easier to find. Luckily
most trains run at night so I’m able to sleep on them and spend the days wandering around Sukhumi, Samtredia, Tblisi and Kirovbad. I travel without tickets. Although I have money I think it’s as crazy to pay for a ticket as it would be to drive my own Mercedes.

Baku reminds me of Central Asian cities, with its cafes serving black tea in tiny narrow-waisted glasses. But I’m not interested in tea. From first thing in the morning I’m drinking beer and the local Agdam fortified wine.

After quenching my thirst I lean against a wall to watch the local people. A passer-by stops to pick up a crumb of bread from the ground. The man presses the crumb to his lips and places it on top of the wall. “So the birds can reach it more easily,” he says, seeing my astonishment, “in Azerbaijan we respect bread, my friend.”

In the bazaar I make the acquaintance of some local tramps and together we earn 15 roubles loading a trailer with oranges. Learning that I have nowhere to spend the night they invite me to come with them. “We have a splendid place. Safe as a tank and warm as a bathhouse. The police don’t check – it’s in the basement of the officers’ flats.”

We buy several bottles and take the tram across town to our lodging place. Going down to the basement, we open a thick steel door and scramble over the central heating pipes, so hot they turn spit into steam. The shelter is as dark as the Pharaoh’s tomb. My new friends light candles and drink themselves to sleep.

I spend the whole night awake, sitting in total darkness after the candles gutter out. I haven’t had enough to drink; it takes a lot to give me a couple of hours’ oblivion. In this state I daren’t
even close my eyes or the nightmares will begin. The air around me is heavy with foreboding. I feel like an animal who senses an earthquake approaching. My new acquaintances snore happily while I goggle into the darkness. Rats scurry past. They are not part of my nightmare, for one of my sleeping friends wakes with a yelp: “Bastards! We’ll have to bring some sausage tomorrow or they’ll grow too bold altogether!” He drops off again.

It seems as though the night will never end. When a radio in the flat above us begins to broadcast morning exercises I feel as joyful as if I’d seen the second coming of Christ. We crawl out of the basement and I part company from my acquaintances forever. “Lads, if that basement were stacked with vodka and it was thirty degrees below outside you’d only get me back in there under armed escort.”

“What did you expect? The Astoria?”

“But it’s full of rats!”

“So what? Did they eat you alive?”

“Who knows what was on their minds. I’m not hanging around to find out.”

I wander off to the port. Sailors stand by the gangplanks of Caspian ferries scrutinising tickets. They turn me back a couple of times as I try to sneak aboard. An Azerbaijani notices my unsuccessful attempts: “Do you want to earn the price of a bottle?”

“What must I do for it?”

“Carry these two suitcases on board this ferry. Your hands will be full so you can tell the controller that someone behind you has your ticket.”

But the two suitcases seem too large for me to carry.

“Pick them up, give them a try,” urges the Azerbaijani, seeing me hesitate.

The cases are extraordinarily light. “What’s in them, cotton wool?”

“Walnuts.”

The Azerbaijani has been kicked out of Baku by the local police after they stung him for 50 roubles for illegal trading. I pick up the cases and board the ship without any trouble.

When we dock at Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan I help the man unload his cases. As we step ashore cops surround us. The Baku police must have radioed ahead to their Turkmen colleagues who have now come to collect their bribe. Ignoring me, they take the Azerbaijani to the station, leaving me with the cases. After waiting several hours for him I go to the market and sell the walnuts for 80 roubles. My lucky day.

In the evening I catch a train to Tashkent, slipping the carriage conductor some money. Like all conductors in Asia he regards the railway as his personal fiefdom, except when it comes to cleaning; then it belongs to the state.

Beyond the windows there is nothing but desolation. The desert may be lovely in spring, but this is winter and there is nothing but an expanse of grey dunes stretching between horizons, unrelieved by grass or bushes. Occasionally the train halts by a few wretched clay hovels with mangy camels tethered behind them.

Ashkhabad may mean beloved city, but it doesn’t deserve the name. In the autumn of 1948 it was destroyed by an earthquake so severe that only one building remained undamaged. The town was built afresh, with buildings no higher than three stories. They look as though they were hatched from the same incubator. The
streets are only slightly less depressing than those of Krasnovodsk; some are lined with trees but, this being December, it makes little difference.

At the station buffet I fall in with a local alkie called Kerya. Together we banish our hangovers with a bottle of wine then go down to the Tekinskii bazaar. The stock exchange, as the bazaar is called, is a lively place where local alkies congregate. It is easy enough to earn a couple of roubles hauling baskets of apples. As soon as we have a few coins in our hands we take care of our drinking requirements. Only after that do we think of food. We help ourselves to apples, capsicums, Chardzhou melons, and dip our dirty paws into great barrels of marinated garlic.

Kerya shows me a bunch of keys in his possession. “These open all 64 flats in a new apartment block,” he says with pride. “It was built by Bulgarians in an international friendship project. I stole the keys from a drunken builder. It’s still empty. I’ve already slept a few nights there. Come home with me. You’ll sleep like a lord.”

The ‘Bulgarian’ building protects us from the 20-degree frost outside, but I grow sick of Kerya’s company. Drink is his only topic of conversation.

“Where do the other tramps sleep?” I ask. “Do the cops make up feather beds for them in the railway station?”

“Not likely. If they catch you sleeping there they give you a good going over, and if the same cop catches you twice you get a month for sure.” Kerya narrows his eyes like a contented cat. “I had to sleep in a basement for nearly three months before I got hold of these keys!”

He reminds me of the legendary Volga tramp who found himself a place under an upturned boat on the beach. Graciously inviting another tramp to come in and doss down beside him, he placed a pile of dog ends before the man: “Have a smoke, brother, don’t be shy. I was in your position myself not so long ago.”

“Where did you sleep before you got the keys?” I ask, wanting to prolong this rare conversation.

“Like me to show you?”

“Why not? There’s nothing else to do.”

Off we go, picking up a few bottles on the way with the remains of my walnut money. Kerya takes me to a shabby block of flats and leads me down to the basement. Although it is night, the scene below is as bright as day, lit by a bonfire of burning tyres. A group of people are sitting around the fire, women as well as men. Their faces are covered in hideous weeping sores produced by a tropical disease that is rife in Turkmenia. The filth in which the tramps live spreads the infection. When the sores heal they leave a deep scar. It is hard enough to behold children suffering from the disease but the tramps look truly repulsive.

Nevertheless, I am pleased at the thought of company so I sit down and produce my bottles. The basement dwellers welcome me as though I was Santa Claus. I’m already three sheets to the wind and after a top-up I feel such a sense of brotherhood that I invite all the tramps over to our Bulgarian house. Kerya drops into a few more basements on the way back. Soon we are about fifty people. We stock up as we go, from every street-corner, bottle-peddling pensioner.

Our Bulgarian house is soon blazing with light and rocking with noise like a Caribbean cruiser gone off course in the night. Some of our guests sing; others recall old offences. Glass windows shatter and curses echo through the rooms. The police arrive before anyone is killed. They drive us out of the building,
whacking us enthusiastically with their truncheons as we go. However, they seem reluctant to arrest us, probably through fear of contagion. In the confusion I manage to slip off and make my way back to the station. I’ve had enough of Ashkhabad.

As the train slows to a halt between Artik and Dushak I ask a soldier on the platform: “Can I get off for a smoke?”

With a bored gesture, he points the barrel of his Kalashnikov towards the door. However, as soon as my feet touch the ground he shouts: “Stop! I’m arresting you for breaching frontier regulations.” He points a revolver at my head.

A sergeant comes running up and helps escort me to a separate carriage. There is another man already inside it. The soldiers lock us in and leave. I pull two bottles of wine from my rucksack and give one to my companion. We drink quickly before the soldiers return.

Border guards are recruited from the keenest Komsomol activists, the type of person who will happily inform on his colleagues. Someone must have told an officer that we got drunk after our arrest. At Dushak the interrogating officer is very persistent about this. The soldier who arrested me stands by his side looking so miserable that I take pity on him and say that I was already drunk when I stepped off the train.

Then the officer points to my notebook of crosswords. “What are these?”

“Crosswords, I make them up.”

“Why?”

“It passes the time. I sent one to
Smena
once,” I babble, “but they rejected it with apologies. They said one of my words was derived from Church Slavonic.”

“Hmm… Why were you trying to cross the Soviet border?”

“Who me? Do I look like a madman? I don’t know a word of Farsi and I can’t run.”

The officer glances at my leg. I sense that he does not believe I’m guilty. But once the wheels of justice are in motion there is no going back.

‘Let’s hope no one trod on the judge’s foot in the bus,’ I think to myself on the morning of my trial. The length of my sentence will depend on the judge’s mood. It’s obvious I’m not an Iranian spy, but I am a vagrant and idleness is a crime against the very foundation of the Soviet state.

My trial lasts a few minutes. I refuse my right to a final word and this probably pleases the judge, allowing him to get away to his lunch. He gives me a year of strict-regime prison with compulsory treatment for alcoholism. There is no hope of remission. I am not overjoyed with this sentence but neither am I tearing my hair out. By this time I know I can survive camp. I only have to remember not to think myself smarter than the others or get mixed up in other people’s business. If I share my tobacco down to the last roll-up and refuse to give way to
self-pity
then prison life will be tolerable. Still, I feel apprehensive as I await my transfer, wondering what my fellow inmates will be like.

The prisoner we call Death Number Two glares at me: “Hey, slurper! Are you from Kolyma or what?”

I shake my head. The way you drink your chefir reveals your camp history. ‘Kolyma’ drinkers swallow their chefir in three gulps; ‘Norilsk’ drinkers in two.

“Never mind, let’s have another brew,” Death Number Two picks up his teapot and runs over to the Titan boiler in the corner of our workshop. He rinses the pot, pours in some hot water, sprinkles in a large heap of green tea and runs back to his bench to put the lid on before the tea cools. We huddle together in a circle, smoking rough tobacco rolled in newspaper while we wait for the chefir to brew. The anticipation is even better than the chefir itself. When it is ready Death carefully fills a bowl and pours it back into the teapot, so that the leaves settle and do not get into our mouths.

“Have a punch in the liver, Vanya,” Death hands me a cup.

I have to dope myself with chefir or I won’t be able to do a day’s work. I feel like death myself when I awake in the morning. My head and muscles ache, my guts churn and my skin crawls. After a few mouthfuls of chefir I return to life. I team up with a group of fellow chefirists, for only the very strong or the completely
despised can survive on their own.

The huge workshop buzzes like a million beehives. Dust and tobacco smoke hang so thick you can see no further than ten metres. The midday heat rises to 45 degrees so everyone strips to the waist. Bodies gleam with sweat as they bend over their sewing machines.

I work on my own machine, making gloves. This is almost freedom as it saves me from the production line. I can work at my own pace and it is not hard to meet the quota of 72 pairs a day. My pay goes straight to the camp for my keep. The few roubles I earn for exceeding the quota pay for tobacco and tea. Prisoners with wealth and influence buy their quota from other zeks. Freed from the obligation to work, they lounge about smoking opium and hashish.

Most of Ashkhabad’s 1,500 inmates take opium. It is brought in by visitors, delivery-men or sometimes thrown over the fence at a pre-arranged spot. Even the guards will bring in drugs for a large enough bribe. Indian hemp grows in the camp yard. As soon as the buds appear they are picked, dried and smoked in joints.

You can buy drugs in the camp bazaar along with anything else you need. Zek traders set up stalls outside the barracks and sell envelopes, stamps, tobacco, tea, socks and even tomatoes, potatoes and rice. Some of the Turkmen zeks never use the canteen, preferring to cook their own pilaus on bonfires outside the barracks. You can always supplement your diet with cans of condensed milk, traded for opium by tubercular addicts who have climbed over the fence from the hospital zone.

The Turkmen and Uzbeks swallow their opium with green tea. Sometimes they spear a ball on some wire and heat it over
a flame. Then they put their heads under a newspaper funnel to inhale the smoke. When a powerful Turkmen is due for release he cooks up a big pilau and stirs in opium and hashish. Friends take their turns with the spoon in strict pecking order.

An old Turkmen is brought into our cell. As soon as the guards have left he shuffles into a corner, squats down and begins to sing endless plaintive dirges. As he sings he rocks back and forth on his heels, sometimes so violently that he keels over onto the floor. He seems to be a lunatic, but we begin to suspect that the old Turkmen
babai
is in fact as high as a kite. Everyone racks their brains trying to work out how he got hold of his drugs. He would have been carefully searched so he couldn’t have brought them in from the outside. We keep a close watch on the old man and notice that every so often he breaks off his lament, chews on the sleeves of his caftan, then rolls his eyes heavenwards and resumes his keening. After hours of questioning he confides in another Turkmen zek that he was forewarned of his arrest and so he prepared himself by boiling up opium and soaking his clothes in the solution.

When the rest of the cell discovers the secret of the
babai
they tear off his caftan, rip it to shreds and eat it. Everyone is off their heads for the next two days. I try a bit but it has little effect on me; I have not acquired a taste for opium.

“Death,” I remark, “it seems the Turkmen can sing for 24 hours a day and about anything at all. If he sees a camel train passing, he’ll sing,

“When the whole train has passed he sings,

“I have never heard one cheerful song. They’re all mournful.”

“Ah,” replies Death, “people say the Italians are the songbirds of the world, but they’re nothing compared to the Turkmen. They don’t speak much; their philosophy is all in their songs.”

Most of Ashkhabad’s inmates have been sentenced for
drug-related
crime. Almost every Central Asian adult smokes hashish but there are far fewer addicts among them than amongst the Russians and other Europeans. For centuries the locals used hashish and raw opium but widespread addiction only appeared with the Russians.

As most of Turkmenistan is desert, drugs are brought in from Kyrgyzia, which has a more favourable climate for hemp and poppies. Whole villages are devoted to their cultivation. Smugglers also bring in drugs from Iran and Afghanistan. The mafia who control the narcotics trade don’t usually take drugs themselves and mostly employ outsiders as couriers. Although the police are astonishingly inefficient, they have to catch a few smugglers, which makes it a dangerous business. You get five years for a small quantity and 15 for larger amounts. You might even be shot.

A man called Lazarev works on a machine near me. Although
he comes from a family of Old Believers
35
he’s been a tramp and an alcoholic for much of his life. Lazarev tells me how he ended up in camp. “One day a guy came up to me at a beer stall and bought me some drinks. We got talking and he asked if I wanted to make some money.

“‘Sure,’ I said, ‘how?’

“‘Take a suitcase to Frunze. We’ll give you your ticket and the key to a locker in the station. There’ll be 1,000 roubles inside.’

“Of course I had a pretty good idea what was in the case but I asked no questions. I hoped that the money would help me clean up and go back home to my wife. The man bought me a new suit of clothes and took me to the barbers. I reached Frunze without being stopped by the police. When I opened the locker I found only 200 roubles and a kilo of opium. I thought I could at least try to sell the opium, so I left the suitcase in the locker and walked out of the station. The police were waiting for me around the corner and I got eight years. The mafia have to throw them a fish now and again.

“It would’ve been worse for me if I’d held on to the suitcase. I didn’t know then that the courier is always tailed, like in a spy story. There’s a lot of money at stake. If a courier runs off he’s followed onto a train and when he goes out to the open platform for a smoke he’s pushed off. The blind Chechen in hut number four had his eyes gouged out. He tried to double-cross the mafia. After they’d finished with him they handed him over to the police.”

Listening to Lazarev I realise I could easily have been tricked in the same way. In Baku I agreed to carry walnuts onto the ship
without looking inside the cases. I took tomatoes from Margilan to Tashkent for the price of a ticket. I’ll be less naive in future.

Inside the camp the unfortunate Lazarev became addicted to opium. He needs two balls each day, but he can never earn enough on the sewing-machines to buy them. In his spare time he makes syringes from small glass tubes taken from light-bulbs. The plunger is a wooden stick and the stopper made of rubber cut from the soles of his boots. He buys needles from craftsmen who make them from tin cans in the metal workshop. Syringes are scarce in the camp and Lazarev is in demand. Several times a day an addict comes up to him to prepare a fix. First they put a ball of opium in an empty penicillin container, fill it with water and boil the mixture over a burning wick. When the opium dissolves the needle is inserted and the solution sucked up into the syringe. As the drug is mixed with coffee, clay and all sorts of impurities it is filtered through a piece of cotton wool. Lazarev collects the cotton-wool filters, boils them up and injects himself, weeping in frustration as he stabs the needle into his ruined veins.

Conditions in the camp are so filthy that drug users drop like flies. Addicts share needles with syphilitics and TB sufferers. A night never passes without some deaths. In one night eighteen prisoners die from injecting adulterated drugs. The supplier is never discovered but we all know that the tragedy occurred because the dealer was in debt. Addicts know the risks they run but almost no one comes off the needle.

The most powerful zeks always find out in advance when the son of a Party family is coming in. They wait eagerly for the young innocent, ready to envelop him with care and attention. When he arrives they ply him with tobacco and tea and allow him to win at cards. They stage situations where he is threatened
by thugs so that they can step in and save him. They fill him with drugs until he’s convinced of his invulnerability. Then everything comes crashing down around his ears. He loses heavily at cards and his comrades insist he pays up. He writes home pleading for money to be sent in. As long as he can pay he survives. When they have wrung all they can from their victim the criminals leave him without drugs or protection, and he’s lucky if they don’t rape him into the bargain.

The Ashkhabad Godfather needs neither the SVP nor
stool-pigeons
. When he wants information he puts two or three of the more powerful addicts in the isolator and keeps strict watch to make sure no drugs get in. In two days he knows everything. As long as the Godfather knows who’s dealing no one is touched. The authorities get their bribes and everything is under control. As soon as anyone steps out of line they are punished. This happens, for example, when someone tries to do a bit of dealing on the quiet and doesn’t give a percentage to the guards.

“I want nothing more to do with drug addicts,” I tell Death Number Two. “I’ve seen enough of them in here.”

The addicts act as though they’ve discovered some divine secret beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, as though drugs have opened their eyes and shown everything in its true light. Yet in fact they are even more degraded than us alcoholics. They are capable of any treachery to get hold of their ball of opium.

I am not trying to justify alcoholism. I know men who have drunk away their families, their homes and their jobs. I see one of them in the mirror every time I shave. But a drug addict would sell his mother and introduce his sister to the needle so that she has to prostitute herself to buy drugs. The difference between
us is that an alkie who sells his last shirt for a bottle wouldn’t hesitate to give a glass to a friend; a drug addict would never do the same. Alkies can leave a bottle in someone’s care for a while, knowing it won’t be touched. No addict would let even his best friend look after his drugs. They hide their stuff away and begrudge their friends even a tiny piece. In the camp they grow their nails long, hoping to get an extra scraping themselves, all the while eyeing their friends’ nails with suspicion. No, there can be no comradeship among addicts, whereas an alcoholic will always find someone at the beer-stall to tie his belt to his glass for him, to steady his hand, or tip the glass to his trembling lips.

If I’m honest I have to admit my first prison sentence was due to my pill habit, but I don’t consider myself a drug addict. My passion for alcohol is enough. I would have to take up crime to be able to afford drugs and I’m not capable of that. Vodka, on the other hand, is always around, it’s cheap, and if the worst comes to the worst I can go without it.

Many alcoholic zeks drink ‘chimirgess’ which is distilled in the joinery shop from enamel paint. They mix it with water and then strain it to obtain a clear liquid. Anyone who drinks it goes completely off his head but if he’s taken to hospital and breathalysed there’ll be no reaction at all. In fact there’s not a drop of alcohol in chimirgess, and so I’m not attracted to it.

There’s a Gypsy in our work brigade called Pashka Ogli. He’s so skinny we call him ‘Death Number One.’ Pashka is not like the other Gypsies who are proud and keep to themselves. Everyone laughs at Pashka for his strange ways. Hearing that once upon a time aristocrats used to drink champagne from ladies’ slippers, he fills one of his stinking boots with chimirgess and drinks it down. “As pure as tears,” he sighs and collapses in a corner.

Pashka stands by my machine, turning gloves inside out so I can sew them more quickly. He never meets his own quota but I pay him for helping me.

“Vanya,” he remarks one day. “You know they watch us all the time in here. They even check the books we borrow from the library.”

“Don’t be stupid. Maybe in some political prisons but not in ours. They’re not interested.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He shows me volume 18 of Lenin’s
Collected Works
, which he has tucked into his waistband. When an officer comes into view Pashka opens his Lenin. Taking a pencil from behind his ear he starts to underline and make exclamation marks in the margins. He buttonholes the officer and plies him with idiotic questions on Marxist-Leninism. Soon even the camp’s political instructor is giving Death Number One a wide berth. Everyone thinks Pashka an idiot, but I am not so sure.

“See him over there?” Death Number One points to a
bull-necked
man working in the next row from ours, muscles bulging as he pushes gloves through his machine. “He’s known as ‘Cannibal.’ He escaped from a Kolyma camp in the 1950s. He and his mate took a fatted calf with them. They fed up the young lad before their escape and then killed him when their supplies ran out. Can you imagine them, patting him on the shoulder in encouragement in order to feel the extra flesh on him. How can a man be so cynical?”