Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (3 page)

“It’s possible,” I pipe up.

She peers at me over her glasses. “How?”

“Perhaps he had TB.”

The class giggles.

“Out!” roars the teacher. I run past her and soon I’m walking in the spring sunshine, happy to think of the others bending over their books.

I run down to the railway line, climb the embankment and march along the tracks, keeping my eyes fixed on them in the hope of finding a spot where an American spy has undone the bolts. I’ll become a hero by running towards an oncoming train waving a red scarf on a stick. But I have nothing red. I wish I hadn’t left my Pioneer scarf at school. A character in a book would cut his arm with a piece of glass and soak a handkerchief with his blood. It’s a pity handkerchiefs are bourgeois-intellectual relics and I blow my nose with my fingers.

A long-distance train charges past, as though it cares nothing for our town and our lives. The faces flashing by must belong to the happiest people in the world. In the wake of the train I search for empty books of matches. Their town of origin is stamped on rough cardboard:
Vladivostock, Tomsk, Khabarovsk
. The names make my head swim.

At dusk I make my way over to the workers’ barracks. Throwing open the outer doors I yell: “Hurrah!” and charge down the corridor, punching the long-johns and bras that dangle overhead. Outside the door of my friend Victor’s room I whistle our pirate signal.

“Who’s there, friend or foe?”

“Crusoe.”

Victor’s parents sit at the table eating rye bread and potatoes. His grandparents snore in their bed above the stove and his baby brother bawls unheeded in the corner. Victor and I wrestle on the floor until his parents scream at us to stop. Then Victor picks up his accordion and we sing old folk songs and sea shanties. Even
the grandfather gets up from the stove to join in the chorus. I’m so out of tune he laughs: “Eh, Vanya, a bear must’ve farted in your ears.”

Victor and the other boys who live in the barracks used to make fun of me because my parents are Party members and we have a home-help. But they’re not malicious and soon grow tired of teasing me. I feel comfortable with them for they aren’t ashamed of poverty and have no pretensions.

Some of the barracks’ families are so poor the children have only one pair of shoes between them. In bad weather they take it in turns to go to school. I don’t want to stand out from the rest so when I leave our flat in the morning I run down to the basement, take off my shoes and hide them behind the hot-water pipes. But I come home from school to find my shoes have gone; my trick has been discovered. My step-father Dobrinin rages while my mother asks why I did it.

“To be like the rest.”

“Vanya, there is nothing admirable about poverty. There is no shame in working hard for a better life.”

But it is my mother I am ashamed of. She struts through the town like a film star in high heels and expensive dresses. Local children jeer as she passes by with her nose in the air: “There’s shit on your shoes, Madame!” They parade in her wake, holding their noses and wiggling their bottoms until they collapse into the mud, hooting with laughter and whistling at her disappearing back. My mother pretends not to hear. She despises the barrack dwellers as only someone who comes from that background can.

***

My step-grandparents live in a dacha at Studioni Avrag, a settlement further up the Volga. Before the revolution the
Dobrinins were members of the nobility. Now they’re ‘former people’ and receive no pension. They survive by growing flowers. Their neighbours say that flowers are useless and that they should grow tomatoes and cucumbers instead. But Granny loves her gladioli and asters. Her fingers are bent and clawed and in the evenings she complains of back ache. After supper she puts on her night-cap and gown and retires with her French novel. She keeps a porcelain chamber-pot under her bed, for nothing will make her visit the earth closet at night.

Grandad is a quiet man but when he speaks it’s to the point. He’s always busy in his garden. I help look after his two goats, making sure they don’t jump over the wall to nibble the neighbours’ apple trees. Sometimes they escape and then we hear the neighbour woman chasing them, shouting: “Hey, you Americans, hooligans, get out of here!”

My grandparents have a daughter, Ira. Although she’s my stepfather’s sister Ira isn’t like him at all. Tall, strong and fearless, she rows Granny and me across the Volga for a picnic one day. My mother swims after the boat. She is a good swimmer, but to tease me Granny asks: “Aren’t you afraid your mother will drown?”

“No,” I reply. “I have Auntie Ira.”

My grandparents complain that the new dam being built across the Volga will harm our natural environment, that animals will be driven away and fish will disappear from the river. I know they’re wrong. The dam will give electricity to everyone and bring us closer to communism.

Studioni Avrag is a summer resort for professors and doctors. I play with their children. Each year, as August draws to a close, we bid each other farewell until the next summer. But one year,
just after the end of the war, few of my playmates return. In their place young and beautiful newcomers arrive in shining black
Emka
limousines. They wear well-cut uniforms and laugh loudly. Through the fence I glimpse lithe figures leaping to catch volley balls. The adults speak about the newcomers in whispers.

I am a white raven amongst these people, for I come from godforsaken Chapaevsk and I tend goats. I have to prove myself. I’m no good at football but I can dive off the river ferries. When the boats tie up at the dock I climb their sides to the third deck and launch myself into the air like a swallow. Last year a boy dived under the ferry’s paddle and was killed. Now the sailors keep a strict watch, so it’s even more exciting to sneak past them. Finally they catch me and slap tar all over my body. It takes days to clean the tar off, and I get into big trouble at home.

***

An old man is fishing from the quay. He calls me over and points across the Volga. “You see some strange fish in these parts, my lad. Over there is a place called Gavrilova Field. That is where prisoners go to die, full of dysentery and pellagra. They send them from camps all over the country. They’re already goners by the time they reach Gavrilova Field.”

I run away from the man. For a long time after that I try not to think about the place across the river.

***

I hide behind the latrine with a rock in my hand. Auntie Praskovya waddles through the mud clutching her squares of newsprint. She’s a bad-tempered old lady who chases us boys out of her yard because she says we stop her chickens laying. Wood creaks. A sigh. Burying my nose in my collar I lift the trapdoor and hurl my brick into the cess-pit. It splashes. There’s a loud shriek. I run off, glancing back to see Auntie Praskovya pulling up her drawers. “Ivan Petrov, you’ll be an alcoholic when you grow up!”

I laugh at her prediction. I don’t like alcohol, although I know it’s the joy of adult life. I’ve seen them get drunk often enough. Most people drink meths or some other vodka substitute because the real thing is expensive and hard to get hold of. Besides, you can never tell what has been added to it; everyone knows someone who’s died from adulterated vodka.

We call methylated spirits
Blue Danube
. It’s sold for lighting primus stoves and is in great demand. It is even drunk at weddings, with fruit syrup added to the women’s glasses. My mother usually drinks surgical spirit which she steals from her factory, adding burned sugar to improve the flavour. She sneers at the ‘arse-washing’ water of the barracks’ families, which is home-brew made from hot water, sugar and yeast. Every room has a tub of this muddy liquid bubbling away under a blanket in the corner.

On birthdays and holidays the adults give us children glasses of beer. Knowing what’s expected of us we stagger about, clutching at walls. They laugh, but I know the adults also exaggerate their drunkenness. Victor’s father once spent a night in the police cells for pissing against a statue of Lenin. “Lucky I was drunk,” he said afterwards. “If I’d been sober I’d have got ten years.”

***

“Get washed, Vanya,” my mother orders. “We have company today.”

“But I want to go to Victor’s.” I hate it when my parents drink.

“Enough! You will stay here.”

The visitors arrive.

“Oh Anna Konstantinova, what a marvellous spread!” cries our lady guest.

Ma smirks: “
Quantum satis!
” She has laid out a meal on her best crockery, which Dobrinin brought back from Germany after the war, along with three guns, a cutthroat razor and a radio. He was not an important man and carried away only two suitcases of war trophies, but that’s not the impression he gives. According to him, he rode into Berlin on a tank, and he hints that he had the ear of Marshal Konev himself.

At table, Dobrinin dominates the conversation, beginning with his wartime feats before moving on to even more unlikely subjects: “Anton, Anton Pavlovich that is, always said he preferred vodka to philosophy as a hangover cure.”

‘Chekhov died the year before you were born,’ I think to myself, ‘not that our guests will say anything. It won’t even occur to them that you might not have known him personally. They’re too impressed by your aristocratic origins. They wouldn’t dream of questioning you.’

Our guests present Dobrinin with a bottle of vodka for the toasts. My stepfather goes to the dresser and rummages around, finally laying his hands on the neck of a cut-glass decanter pillaged from some Prussian farmhouse. As he pulls out the vessel there is a gasp and a giggle. I bolt for of the door.

An egg lies in the bottom of the decanter, the result of one of my experiments. I had heard that eggs lost their shape when soaked in strong vinegar. I tried it and it worked. I rolled the softened egg into a sausage and dropped it into the decanter. Then I poured in cold water and the egg returned to its normal shape, but of course I couldn’t retrieve it. I pushed the decanter to the back of the dresser and forgot about it.

I stay out until very late. When I come in Dobrinin is snoring on the sofa and my mother is in bed. In the morning my stepfather begins to recall the outrage of the day before. I run out of the door before he can hit me.

I go to my grandmother’s. Granny Nezhdanova lives with her son Volodya in a wooden house built on a pile of slag beside the sulphur plant. Long ago Granny and her husband fetched soil from the steppe to spread around the house but gradually the groundwater rose and poisoned all their plants. Only
goosefoot
grows as tall as my head. The water from their well is yellow and tastes of TNT. Granny and Volodya live on potatoes, salted cabbage, bread and milk baked in the oven. My mother is ashamed of her family and rarely visits or sends them money. Granny’s husband died when I was a baby. She survives by buying needles and thread from a local policeman and selling them in the market.

Uncle Volodya is home and to cheer me up he suggests I come into the city with him. My uncle is only six years older than me. He started work when he was fifteen, but he studies at night school and won a Stalin scholarship to Kuibyshev polytechnic. Volodya is very cheerful and sharp-witted. I’m proud to go out with my tall uncle, even though he always wears felt boots, winter and summer, to work and to dances.

We trot off to the station, swinging a pail of baked milk between us. The local train lurches in and we board without tickets. The carriage is packed with passengers squeezed onto wooden benches, all smoking rough tobacco or nibbling sunflower seeds. The floor crunches as we walk. At a stop further down the line we jump off and run to a carriage that the conductors have already checked.

At each station beggars scramble aboard and shuffle through the carriages, telling stories or singing rhymes. Most are war invalids, missing arms or legs; some have been blinded or burnt in tanks. “I returned half-dead from the Front to find a lieutenant’s cap on my peg,” says a shabby beggar, holding out his hand. A legless man rolls through on a trolley, rattling a tin.

I saw it all, I took Berlin,

I wiped out thirty Hun,

I filled buckets with blood,

So give me something for a drink!

The beggars have escaped from invalid homes where they rotted with hunger and boredom. They sleep in stations and cold entranceways, with nothing to do but drink to forget their grief. The most unfortunate are the ‘samovars,’ who lost both their arms and legs. You see them gathered outside markets and stations, begging from their little trolleys. They appeal to their ‘dear brothers and sisters,’ echoing the words of Stalin during the German advance.

As the train pulls into a suburb of Kuibyshev hideous screams and curses come from the platform. A group of homeless women are fighting their way aboard. They stink of drink and sweat; their bloated faces are bruised. They thrust scrawny babies at passengers as they beg. One of them grabs my arm. “Little son, for the love of God give me something for the baby!”

Other books

Update On Crime by Carolyn Keene
The Year of Billy Miller by Kevin Henkes
Crazy For You by Cheyenne McCray
The Miracles of Prato by Laurie Albanese
The Queen and the Courtesan by Freda Lightfoot
For Her Son's Sake by Katherine Garbera - Baby Business 03 - For Her Son's Sake
The Butterfly Storm by Frost, Kate
Lost In Place by Mark Salzman


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024