Andrei Makine - A Hero's Daughter

The waiter brings the beer, sets the glasses down amid the moist streaks on the table. Suddenly, completely clearly, as it might occur to someone who has drunk nothing, a question rings out in Ivan's head: "But where on earth can he be now, that little sailor? And that curly-haired accordionist?" And suddenly he is seized with pity for both of them. And, without knowing why, with pity, too, for his drinking companions. His chin begins to tremble and, half lying across the table, he holds out his arms to embrace them and can no longer see anything through his tears.

Before leaving, they drink the third bottle of vodka and go staggering out into the street, holding one another up. The night is full of stars. The snow crunches underfoot. Ivan slips and falls. The signalman picks him up with difficulty.

"It's nothing! It's nothing, Ivan! Don't worry. We'll take you home. You'll get there, don't worry…"

After that something strange occurs. Nikolai turns off through a gateway. The signalman sits Ivan down on a bench, goes off in search of a taxi and never comes back. Ivan stands up with difficulty. "I'll get there on my own," he thinks. "There's a store next, then the District Committee, and after that I turn left…"

But on the corner, instead of seeing the four-story apartment building and its familiar entrance gate, he sees a broad avenue with cars driving along it. He stops, baffled, leans against the wall of the house. Then he retraces his steps unsteadily, in retreat from this broad avenue that does not exist in Borissov. Yet these snowdrifts certainly exist in Borissov. He needs to skirt around them. And this bench and this fence also exist. Yes, that's it, all he has to do now is to cross this courtyard… But at the end of the courtyard an improbable apparition rears up – a vast skyscraper, like a rocket, illuminated by thousands of windows. And once more he retraces his footsteps, slips, falls, picks himself up again, holding on to a tree covered in hoarfrost. Once more he heads for the familiar snowdrifts, and the bench, without realizing that he is not in Borissov but in Moscow wandering around Kazan Station, where he got off the train this morning.

Two vehicles pulled up almost simultaneously beside the snowdrift where Ivan lay. One of them, from the militia, was collecting drunks to take them to the sobering-up station; the other was an ambulance. The first of these was doing its midnight rounds, the second had been summoned by a kindhearted pensioner, who from his window had seen Ivan lying on the ground. His shapka had flown off five yards away when he fell. None of the passersby out late at night had taken a fancy to it. Who needs a truck driver's battered old headgear? As he fell, Ivan had grazed his cheek on the edge of the bench, but the cold blood had solidified without even staining the snow.

A drowsy militiaman got down from the cabin of the van; a young nurse sprang out of the ambulance, with a coat thrown on over her white blouse. She bent over the prostrate body and exclaimed: "Oh! This isn't our responsibility. What's the point of calling us? He's a drunk! Any fool can see that. But they call you up and say 'Come quick. There's someone on the ground, in the road. Maybe knocked down by a car. Or else a heart attack…' A likely story! You can smell him a mile off."

The militiaman bent over as well, picked up the body by the collar and turned him over on its back.

"Well, we're not going to take him, that's for sure. There's blood all over his face. A boozer? Sure he's a boozer. But there's a physical injury… It's down to you to treat him. It's not our job."

"You've got a lot of nerve," cried the nurse angrily. "Treat him! He's going to throw up all over the ward. And who's going to clear up after him? It's hard enough finding cleaners as it is…"

"Well, picking up people with physical injuries isn't our job, I'm telling you. He may croak in the van. Or under the shower. He could bleed to death in there."

"What do you mean 'bleed to death'? Don't make me laugh. From that little scratch? Here, take a look at it, this physical injury…"

The nurse crouched down, extracted a little vial of alcohol and a cotton pad out of her satchel and wiped the scratch on Ivan's cheek.

"There. There's your 'physical injury,'" she said, showing the militiaman the cotton wool lightly stained with brown. "It's not even bleeding."

"Fine, fine. Since you've started treating him, you'd better finish the job. Pick him up and let's call it a day."

"No chance! Picking up drunks is your job. Otherwise what's the point of having all your sobering-up stations?"

"What's the point? If we take him in now with his mug all bloody, tomorrow morning he's going to be howling: 'The cops worked me over.' Everyone's wised up these days. At the smallest bit of trouble, wham! you get a story in the paper: 'Violation of socialist legality.' Sure thing! We've got glasnost now… Thanks to Gorbachev, the whole place is swarming with rabble-rouseirs. Under Stalin they'd soon have put you where you belonged. If that's how it is, write me a certificate testifying that he's got a bloody head. Otherwise I'm not taking him."

"But I don't have the right to make out a medical certificate until he's been examined."

"Go ahead then. Examine him…"

"No chance. We don't have anything to do with drunks!"

The argument dragged on. The driver got down from the ambulance; the second militiaman emerged from the yellow "Special Medical Service" van. He poked the body with his foot as it lay there and muttered: "Why are you wasting your breath? He may have kicked the bucket already. Let me have a look."

He bent over and brutally applied pressure behind Ivan's ears with two fingers.

"Hey, you should remember this little dodge." He laughed, winking at the nurse. "It's better than all your smelling salts. This'll wake the dead."

In response to intolerable pain, Ivan opened wild eyes and gave a dull groan.

"Alive!" chuckled the militiaman. "It'll take more than that to finish him off. He looks like he's lying under the streetlight to get a tan. All right, Seryozha, I suppose we'd better pick him up. There's no way we can leave this guy in the hands of these quacks. They do in more people than they cure."

"And you're plaster saints, I suppose!" retorted the nurse, glad to have won her battle at last. "I tell you, there was an article on sobering-up stations in Pravda the other day. When they bring a drunk in they empty his pockets. They steal his pay, his watch. They take everything…"

"All right, that's enough of that," the militiaman cut in. "We've had a bellyful as it is, what with Gorbachev and his speeches. Him and his perestroïka are a pain in the neck…"

The nurse jumped into the ambulance, slammed the door, and the vehicle drove off.

They lugged Ivan into the van and let him fall on the floor. One of the militiamen got behind the wheel, the other unbuttoned the top of Ivan's coat, searching for his papers. He took out a battered service record, held it up to the light and began to decipher it. Suddenly he uttered a whistle of surprise.

"Oh my God, Seryozha, he's a Hero of the Soviet Union! And those goddamned medics wouldn't take him off our hands! So now what are we going to do?"

"Well, what can we do? It's all the same to us if he's a Hero of the Soviet Union or even a goddamned cosmonaut. Our job's simple: we find him, we pick him up, we take him back, that's all. And at the station it's up to the officer to decide. Okay, let's go. Close that fucking door, my feet are frozen already."

Ivan had taken to drinking immediately after his wife's death. He drank a lot, fiercely, without explaining it to himself, without repenting, without ever promising himself to stop. Borissov is a small town. Soon everyone knew about the Hero turned drunkard.