Caroline Walton - Smashed in the USSR

I close my eyes and wait for night. Alarms wail in the distance. Cement mixers roar up and down the road. A sharp pain jabs through my leg; I sit up in time to see a devil running across the floor, squealing and brandishing his fork. I yell and Grisha hurries out of the kitchen with a bottle in his hand. Cradling my head in his arm, he wedges a pen between my teeth, unscrews the bottle cap and puts the neck to my lips.

Ivan’s funeral is held at a North London crematorium. His friends want a Russian Orthodox priest to officiate, but none can be found. In the end a Greek priest comes from Kentish Town. Sunlight streams through the windows, illuminating the blue and gold of the priest’s robes. Incense burns. We hold candles while St John of Damascus is read. In turn we step up to speak. One woman, Elena, can hardly force words out through her tears: “Why did such a lovely, generous man have to suffer so cruelly?”

When Father Constantine hears Ivan’s story he returns his fee.

Forty days after Ivan’s death Elena invites me to his pominki — his wake — in a flat on the North Peckham Estate.

I take the bus from Elephant and Castle to Camberwell Green, and then walk through back streets, past posters of the missing and the wanted.

Elena lives in a low-rise seventies building. She buzzes me in through metal security gates at ground level and again on her walkway. My path is blocked by a track-suited woman leaning over the railing: “They throw their chicken bones over the balcony,” she yells at someone on the ground: “I’ve told the council but they do fuck all. They want evidence. I’ll show them fucking evidence…” I squeeze past her backside to reach Elena’s door.

She leads me into a room full of books and plants. A table is piled with salads in cut glass bowls. Solemn guests are seated around it. I recognise them from the funeral –Tatiana, Irina, Slava, Andrei, Vadim — young Russians whom Ivan did his best to help.

A teenage boy lumbers in. Elena introduces him as her son. He sports a black eye. He says he got beaten up at school for being Russian. “And they murdered a black kid, Damilola Taylor.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“Everyone knows who did it; the police know, but they haven’t got evidence. The killers walk around like kings.”

I wonder if this place is really worth leaving Russia for.

Ivan’s photo sits on the mantelpiece. I recognise it as one I took on the day we visited his beloved Cutty Sark together. The finest ship ever built, he said.

“He was extraordinarily handsome as a young man,” sighs Elena, “he showed me a photo once.”

“I keep thinking I see Ivan in the street, out of the corner of my eye,” says Irina.

“It happens to me too,” I say. I catch myself peering hopefully at short, grey-haired men with walking sticks.

“He was so kind,” Elena wipes away a tear, “like a grandfather to my boy.”

“To Ivan,” Slava proposes. We raise our glasses.

Mine contains water. Alcohol no longer has the desired effect and I know it never will again.

Slava sits opposite me. I marvel as he drinks his wine then refills his glass with orange juice.

A debate starts over Ivan’s ashes. The women say they should go to his sister in Chapaevsk so that they can be placed beside those of his parents and brother; the men say he would have wanted them scattered over the sea. The women win.

“Are you going back to North London?” asks Vadim, a serious young man in glasses and a grey suit who works in software design. “I’ll walk with you to the bus.”

It is dark now and I am glad to have a companion. We set off through the estate to Camberwell Road. On the way Vadim explains that he comes from Moscow. He is in the UK on a work visa. He lives in the London suburbs — zone six. A world away from Ivan.

“Do you know that during one of his drinking bouts Ivan decided he was betraying his Motherland by claiming asylum here? He asked the Home Office to return his documents.”

“Oh God, he didn’t? I never heard about that.”

“It was probably before you met him. When he sobered up he went down to Croydon. Andrei accompanied him — he was doing his legal training then. They explained that Ivan was drunk and didn’t know what he was saying. They accepted his reapplication.”

We step off the pavement as a group of hooded youths surge past.

“I doubt he’d have got away with it these days,” I say.

“He got away with a lot in his life.”

“How do you think he would have fared if he’d stayed in Russia?”

“I don’t think he would have lasted so long — it’s much tougher these days.”

“I must say I’m amazed how understanding the Soviet system was of its drunks — holding their jobs open and trying to offer treatment. And Georgia was virtually a tramp’s paradise…”

“Yes, but today’s Russia is not a kind place for people like Ivan. If you don’t shape up you’re fired. There’s no room for the vulnerable. I hate to think what could have happened to him if he’d stayed, he might have been murdered on the streets…”

We reach the bus stop.

“Are you going to the Elephant?” asks Vadim

“Yes.”

“I’ll come up with you, take the tube from there.”

He flashes a sudden, shy smile. “Ivan told me about you. At first I was surprised that he was telling his story to an English person, but he said you’d lived out there.”

“I did. I knew where he came from…”

The number 68 lurches towards us. We board and head off northwards.

I would like to thank Ben Yarde-Buller, my agent Peter Buckman, G.K. Darby, Conn McAfee, Paul Daly, Amy Spurling and Andrei Walton for their appreciation of Ivan’s story; also Lana Feldman for introducing me to the brilliant Natalia Vetrova. Above all, I am grateful to Ivan for telling his story to me.

First published in 2013

by Old Street Publishing Ltd

Trebinshun House, Brecon LD3 7PX

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Caroline Walton and Ivan Petrov, 2013

The right of Caroline Walton and Ivan Petrov to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–1–908699–23–7

Little Tenement on the Volga (Garrett County Press).

The Cheka were the Soviet political police formed by Lenin shortly after the October revolution in 1917.

From To the Young Poet , by Valerii Bryusov (1873-1924).

Peasants had no passports, so that they were effectively tied to their collective farms.