Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (20 page)

Sidorov continued to offer his saw for six years. In the end people got to know him and he grew careless, accosting officers when he was already drunk. Finally he was arrested and sent to camp. But he was a born actor and the way I saw it he earned his drinks.

Like Sidorov and Kalinin, plenty of beggars earn their money
through guile, but most play on pity. It is simpler and yields good results. I know that almost every human being is capable of feeling pity – perhaps even Cannibal – but I can’t bring myself to exploit this feeling.

For my part, I admit I often earn my drinks through wit. I try to entertain, even when I don’t feel like it. I survive by making people laugh. In a way my crippled leg helps because no one feels threatened by me.

Yet there is a difference between singing for your supper and holding out your hand for it. I fear begging as a way of life. It might be too easy. If I drop anchor outside some church or bazaar I might never return to a normal existence. And I still entertain hopes in that direction. Hope is the last to die and I clutch at it, sustained by memories of the past.

The evening is dark and rainy. When Borya arrives we take shelter in a half-constructed building near the park. I gather some rubbish and make a small bonfire. We spread newspapers on the cement floor and sit talking. I get completely pissed but Borya drinks nothing. He has a hot-water bottle tied to his thigh and urine trickles into it almost constantly. This embarrasses him so he tries not to drink, even refusing water.

Borya tells me more about his life. “Once I went to a public library in Leningrad to try to read something on begging, but I was disappointed. No one writes the truth. They slide over the surface of the question. Perhaps because they never write from the point of view of the beggar. Not even Dostoevsky. As for Tolstoy, he was a great sham. He went out punctually every day to give alms but before he would part with a kopeck he took away the beggar’s very soul with his nosy questioning.

“The truth is, when I beg I inspire pity, and pity is always a
blessing, no matter how dirty the soul in which it springs,” Borya concludes.

“I can’t agree with you,” I say. “Pity is a good and natural emotion, but do you remember Yesenin’s lines:
arousing tears in my heart is like throwing stones at the glass of my watch
? Only a wretch would deliberately try to awaken a person’s compassion. It’s a cheap thing to do.”

Yet I can’t criticise Borya for I realise that my way of life is essentially no different to his. The only distinction between us is that I don’t see myself as a person who does good to others. Anyone who does good becomes a slightly better person himself, but if you plan in advance to do good then the deed loses all its grace. If I do good, then let it be by accident. Most likely I do no good at all in this world, and I certainly won’t do so by begging.

Our divergent views spring from a more fundamental difference. “Borya,” I observe, “you believe in God, but I don’t. If there was a God there would be justice, and as there’s none in this world, so there can be no God.”

Borya objects: “But you can’t judge God by your own standards of right and wrong. It is impossible to comprehend God. You simply have to believe.”

“I can’t ‘simply believe’ when life is so unfair. Why was I born here, now, in a country where it makes no difference which side of the barbed wire you are on? Why did you fall under a train?”

“Humanity doesn’t yet have the wisdom to test whether there is justice or not,’ Marcus Aurelius said that almost twenty centuries ago.”

“Well that was 2,000 years ago.”

“That only proves his point – the time has not yet come.”

Borya and I arrange to meet the following evening but we miss each other and I never see him again.

I board the No. 5 tram on Klara Zetkin street. A man offers me his seat but I shake my head. When the tram moves I take off my beret and turn to the passengers.

As I finish my verse the passengers burst out laughing. The words strike home, because no one can afford to live on their pay, not even the police. A woman holds out a 20 kopeck piece and asks: “You’ll be getting yourself a beer with that, I suppose?”

“Not only beer but vodka too!”

She puts the coin back in her purse, finds a rouble and gives it to me. When I’ve worked the whole tram I get off, board the next one and repeat the performance. By the time I reach Collective Farm Square I have nearly 20 roubles. Some people grumble that I am just collecting money for my hair-of-the-dog, but I’m not offended. It’s up to them whether they give or not. I’m not greedy. Having collected a little money I throw in the towel, buy a bottle and continue to drink throughout the day, inviting anyone who wishes to join me. I have no shortage of companions.

At night I open a bottle to see me through till morning. As I swallow my wine I am struck by guilt over the way I’ve earned it. The cycle of self-recrimination spins round my head as I try to fall asleep. ‘What are you living for?’ I wonder.

Next day I go to work on the tram again, and the next. Begging becomes a way of life that I no longer stop to consider. The police catch me a couple of times, but they either laugh at my verses or throw me off the tram.

Begging is not always as easy as it was that first day. Sometimes the trams are so packed I can’t move among the passengers; sometimes they’re too empty to be worth boarding. Then it rains for nearly three weeks. I freeze and fall ill. For a while I sleep at the top of a lift shaft in an eight-storey block of flats. I crawl up after midnight but I am eventually discovered by a resident who threatens to call the police.

My clothes are filthy and ragged, my shoes split, and I never have enough money for a new pair. I am desperately tired of spending the whole day on my feet. I long for a good night’s sleep but the cops drive me out of the railway station and it’s impossible to take a nap on the short Tblisi underground. Thank God for the bathhouse. It allows me to reheat my bones, but I can’t linger for too long or they might throw me out and bar me from future visits.

Although I’m drinking a lot, alcohol is having less effect on me. Soon I need two or three bottles of fortified wine just to see me through the night, otherwise I can’t even drop off for half an hour. When sleep comes it is crowded with nightmares.

There is a slope between the road and the river where townspeople tip their rubbish. In this place of unimaginable filth I can sometimes find unbroken bottles. The wine shop exchanges these for a bottle of Rkatseli.

At the top of the slope there is a small overhang. It gives me shelter and I’m unseen from the road. Here I huddle at night. The rubbish below me reeks of rotten meat and excrement, but
the smell hardly bothers me. I lean back against the earth, with an open bottle between my legs, smoking and taking a swig of wine as soon as I start to feel bad. For months I have derived no pleasure at all from alcohol, but I need it to ward off the dt’s.

When I’ve emptied my bottle I drag myself out of my lair and shuffle down to Klara Zetkin street. There, in a courtyard behind a little gate, is the ‘fountain of life,’ open 24 hours a day for the suffering and the greedy. When I open the gate the house-dogs barely stir; they must be used to night-time callers. I stumble through the courtyard and up a couple of steps to a veranda. Inside the veranda is a table with a three-litre jar of chacha on it. Beside it is a tumbler and a plate of bread and spring onion. An old woman sleeps on a huge bed beside the table – or at least she gives the impression of sleeping.

I lay my coins on the table. They are sweaty and crusted with tobacco. A withered hand shoots out from the bed, grabs the coins and stuffs them somewhere among a heap of rags. Having drunk my glass I slink out of the courtyard, shaking and trying not to throw up.

The devil only knows what those Georgians mix with their chacha. I break out in large boils like soft corns which itch and sting. I try not to squeeze them as I know that will make them worse, but when a boil the size of a walnut grows on my heel I have to burst it before I can get my shoe on. By the end of the day I can hardly walk for the pain. There are no bandages in the chemist. I go to Mikhailovski hospital but they throw me out because of my disgusting state. Finally the blood donor clinic where I occasionally earn a few roubles gives me a bandage. I rinse the wound under a tap in the street and bind up my foot.

After that I feel better and I’m able to do a little work on
the No 5 tram. I’m not collecting much money these days, probably because I smell so bad that people turn their heads at my approach.

In the morning I grit my teeth and rip the bandage off my raw skin. I rinse it under a courtyard tap but can’t wait for it to dry as I have to get to work. The damp bandage picks up dust and filth from the street. By dusk the wound is itching unbearably but I take that as a sign that it is healing. A few nights later I unwind the bandage to find a mass of worms writhing in the open flesh. I guess it will only be a matter of time before gangrene sets in. I fall into a stupor, staring at my foot as though it belongs to someone else.

That night on the rubbish dump I settle down with two bottles of Rkatseli to keep me going till dawn. I prop myself up against the bank, dropping off for a second, waking with a start and swallowing a couple of mouthfuls of wine. I keep a strict watch over the level of liquid in the bottle. Hold on, I tell myself, it’s not evening yet! Reflecting on my situation I laugh out loud: “Look at you, my boy!” I even mumble a verse that comes into my head:

I do not know whether I’ll live till dawn, but I don’t care too much either way. Let death come tonight. It’ll put an end to life’s torments once and for all. But I do fear the dt’s. I fear I’ll lose control and do something very bad. And I’m deeply ashamed
of my filthy, festering body. I haven’t been to the bathhouse for weeks; I can’t use the communal pool because of my wound and I can’t afford a private cabin. I’m filled with shame as I imagine the state my body will be in when it’s found in the morning.

But I do not die on that Tblisi rubbish dump. In the morning I manage to drag myself out of my lair, gather some empties and limp over to the wine shop. I come out clutching a litre of fortified wine in each hand. As I cross Mardzhanishvili Square I trip and fall, instinctively flinging up my arms to save the bottles. My face slams into the asphalt, but by some miracle the bottles remain intact. With a groan of relief I pass out.

I awake to find myself lying on the pavement with a crowd gathered about me.

“We’ve called an ambulance,” a voice says.

Thank God the police won’t be involved, I relax and let myself be carried off to hospital. I don’t care that my nose is broken and my eyes so swollen I can barely see; I fear only the dt’s, which are fast approaching. Believing that I’ve witnessed a dreadful crime and the police want to interview me, I try to hide. I am also convinced that the perpetrator of the crime is tracking me down in order to kill me. In mortal terror of every living soul, I leap out of bed and run around the hospital, squeezing into dark cupboards and cowering under beds.

The staff finally catch me, put me in a strait-jacket and pack me off to ‘Happy Village,’ a large mental asylum in the mountains. There I’m cared for by an unusually kind young doctor who pays no attention to my repulsive appearance. She even suggests I go to a special clinic to have my nose repaired but I decline: “I’m not planning to become a film star; I need a psychiatrist not a surgeon.”

The doctor orders me to be tied to a bed and then she injects me with Sulfazine.
36
With fiendish strength I tear off the sheets that bind me and run away. Although the staff have removed the handles of the ward doors I manage to prise them open with a dinner spoon. I run out of the hospital and down the road. Orderlies catch me two blocks from the clinic, drag me back and tie me up again. I get another shot of Sulfazine. My temperature soars. For two or three days I lie motionless, soaked in sweat. Gradually I return to my senses. When I admit to the doctor that no one wants to kill me she takes me off the Sulfazine and orders me to be untied.

Soon I am cracking jokes with the doctor and making her laugh. Through her contacts she finds me a job as a night watchman in a Tblisi theatre. With a roof over my head I’m able to keep off the drink for several months. One day, however, I run into Tolik, an old friend from Zestafoni who’s trying his luck begging in the capital. He has nowhere to sleep. I can’t recommend the cavern so we agree that after the theatre performance has ended Tolik will tap on my window and I’ll let him in for the night. He sleeps curled up on some newspaper in a corner, refusing my offer of the couch: “No, no, Vanya, I piss myself after I’ve had a bottle or two.”

Despite his alcoholism Tolik is so sharp he only has to look at a few lines of
Pravda
to arrive at conclusions we hear a month later on Voice of America. He tells me that something is changing in the USSR.

“But what difference will it make to our lives, Tolik?” I ask. “What happens in Moscow might as well take place on the moon.”

The theatre management know about my weakness and try to keep me away from the bottle. However it seems churlish not to accompany Tolik when he pours his wine at night. Early in the morning he sneaks out, taking the empties with him. He spends the day begging and I give him some money from my pay to buy bottles for the night.

It’s not long however, before we overdo it. The director arrives in the morning to find me sitting among the scenery as drunk as wine itself. Centre stage, Tolik strikes the pose of a Roman senator as he declaims Bezimensky’s
Tragedian Night
. All around us roll empty bottles. We are puffing away like the
Battleship Potemkin
, although smoking is strictly forbidden in the theatre. They throw my friend out and call an ambulance for me. I am taken back to Happy Village and this time the doctor is not so kind.