Caroline Walton - Smashed in the USSR

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 [21] Alkash (plural: alkashi): street-drinker, wino. 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. [22] In the 1930s a Soviet pilot called Levanevsky disappeared while flying over the newly-opened Arctic. His plane was never discovered. It became customary to say ‘he’s done a Levanevsky’ when someone disappeared without trace. 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.”