Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (4 page)

There’s a blackish crust of dried blood where her nose should be. I turn away, curling up on the seat and hugging my knees. I wish I had something to give her.

I enjoy walking around the city with my uncle, meeting up
with his friends and laughing at their jokes. At the end of the day we return to Chapaevsk with our empty pail. As we walk down the muddy lane that leads to her house Granny’s voice reaches us: “That puffed-up little tart! Her own mother not good enough for her! Well Nyurochka, what does your fancy man get up to when you’re on night shift? Don’t come crying to your old mother then!”

Granny is in the throes of her weekly drinking spree. Her padded jacket is torn and her headscarf has fallen off into the mud.

Two policemen are stumbling around in the mud trying to catch her. Nimbly, she dodges their grasp, spins around and launches herself at the nearest man: “Fuck you! Parasite!”

She pushes the policeman so hard that he staggers backwards and sinks up to his knees in a rut. Granny laughs and lies down in the deepest puddle. “Come and get me you old goats!”

Guessing that they won’t want to soil their uniforms, she relaxes, shuts her eyes and breaks into a dirty song. Volodya goes up to her. I hang back behind him.

“Come on, Ma, let’s go home.”

Granny allows him to pull her up and she meekly follows him to the house. Once indoors Volodya takes off her muddy clothes and makes up her bed. Soon she is snoring peacefully. Volodya sits down to scrape the mud off her boots. I take my leave.

Although my mother forbids me to visit Granny I like to call on her. I sit on the wooden bench by her door and wait for her to come back from the market. She stops at the gate, looking at me tenderly with a jug of her famous milk clutched to her breast. “Ah, shit of my shit, when you’re a big boy you’ll give your old Granny three kopecks for her hair-of-the-dog.”

My grandmother is very good-natured when sober. She never bothers me about my homework or my performance at school; she’s simply sure that I do better than all the rest. When I tell her about my quarrels with my stepfather she curses him and my mother but she doesn’t approve of my attempts to run away. She always sends me back home at night.

Perhaps it is because of Granny that I like neither drinking nor drunks.

My first drinking party is on New Year’s Eve at Victor’s house. We lay out a feast of bread and herring and prepare ten litres of home-brew from sugar I filch from home. Someone brings a bottle of vodka. Victor’s parents watch our preparations with amusement. The next day we feel so terrible we don’t want to repeat the experiment for a long time.

By the time I reach fifteen I’ve been drunk no more than a dozen times. I don’t yet have the taste for alcohol, though I will join my friends if they’re drinking. Besides, it’s unwise to come home with spirits on my breath because I have an informer sleeping in my room. Marusya is our home-help. A country girl who can barely read or write, she was born during the famine of 1920 when babies ran the risk of being stolen and butchered by their starving neighbours. But Marusya survived both the famine and collectivisation. When war broke out she escaped her farm by going to work in a munitions plant. There was a shortage of labour so they didn’t ask for her passport.
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Marusya poured mustard gas into shells on a conveyor belt. A partition separated the workers, so that an exploding shell would kill
only one person. You don’t have to be literate to understand the dangers of such a job and Marusya was happy to come to work for my parents. Smallpox has blinded her in one eye and left her face pitted and scarred. I call her Cyclops.

With peasant cunning Cyclops notices that I have no one on my side, so she tries to ingratiate herself with my mother by getting me into trouble. But she goes too far when she accuses me of stealing her purse. My mother tells her to be careful.

“My son may be a hooligan but he’s not a thief.”

A few minutes later Cyclops is feigning surprise at finding her purse under a pile of clothes.

“As I went out in the summer morn to see my lover off to war…” she sings as she makes pies. I snigger at the thought of that old maid having a lover. The phone rings. Cyclops thunders out of the kitchen shouting “I’m coming!” as though the caller can hear her. It is Uncle Volodya for me.

“Come to the football match this afternoon. Bersol are playing Kuibyshev Metallurgists.”

I meet Volodya at the triumphal entrance arch to Chapaevsk’s stadium. It has no stands and no fence separating spectators from the pitch. The teams play with as much gusto as we boys do. Everyone throws himself into the attack and no one bothers about defence. Just before full time a penalty is awarded to the Kuibyshev side. The spectators rush onto the pitch and stand around the penalty area yelling abuse at the striker. It works. The shot is so weak our keeper saves it with ease. The referee tries to clear the pitch but the crowd threatens to turn him into soap and someone punches him.

Volodya and I stream happily away from the ground with the other men and boys. Some are taking nips from bottles stuffed
into their pockets. The autumn air smells of damp birch leaves and bonfires. Smoke rises from bathhouses by the river where people are making
samogon
.

We run into Victor who produces a bottle of
Spirol
from his pocket. This is an alcohol-based medication that is rubbed on the head to cure dandruff. You can buy it cheaply at any chemists. Like many local men, Victor’s father drinks
Spirol
. He also knows prison recipes for preparing alcohol from paint-thinner, furniture polish and glue.

Volodya refuses the
Spirol
and goes home to look after his mother. It’s her drinking day. Victor and I tackle the bottle. The oily potion tastes disgusting, making me want to throw up. But at the same time a warm feeling spreads through my head and chest. I feel invulnerable. “Victor! I know why people drink!” I burst out laughing and think I’ll never stop.

Dobrinin watches me like an eagle, waiting for an excuse to explode. My mother and sister eat in heavy silence. Unable to bear the tension any longer, I balance my knife on the salt pot and spin the blade. Dobrinin leaps to his feet, banging the table with his fist.

“You see! You see that little bastard?” he turns to my mother, “I feed him, put shoes on his feet… Get out! Leech!”

I run out of the house to my friend Gelka Kazin’s. I hope he’ll have enough for a bottle of
Spirol
or
Blue Danube
, but that day he has other things on his mind.

“Vanya, I have to get away from this damned place. The neighbours say Ma’s a prostitute, just because men come here. I’m always getting into fights over it.”

Gelka has no father. To make ends meet his mother takes in
sewing. She mends jackets and runs up shirts and trousers so it shouldn’t be surprising that men come to her room. People in the barracks can’t live without gossip.

Gelka’s mother is always kind to me. When she comes in I tell her about my trouble with Dobrinin.

“Of course he’s only my stepfather. My real father is working as a secret agent in a capitalist country. He’s not allowed to contact us.”

I still hope that he’ll turn up one day, when the judges in Moscow realise their mistake. Or perhaps Stalin himself will hear of the miscarriage of justice and grant him a pardon.

“Oh they must have shot him years ago,” says Gelka casually.

“No!” I make a headlong rush at Gelka, forgetting that he is our school boxing champion. He pushes me back into the corner. His mother leaps up and slaps his face.

“Get out!” she screams. “Take no notice, Vanya. I’m sure your father is doing valuable and patriotic work.” She speaks firmly, but she has tears in her eyes.

Gelka and I patch things up and decide to leave town together. We’ll become sailors. Grandfather Dobrinin writes to the Moscow naval ministry for a prospectus of all the academies in the USSR. We decide the Archangelsk academy will suit us best. It is on the open sea, unlike Baku or Astrakhan, and will be cheaper to reach than Vladivostock. Most important, we know that there’ll be less competition than for Odessa or Leningrad. A top student in Chapaevsk is not the same as a top student in Moscow.

My parents tell me not to be in a hurry to leave, but I’m sure they’ll sigh with relief when I finally walk out of the door.

“How well he plays the balalaika!” we shout as the boy from Tula wakes up, howling and shaking his hands. Gelka slipped lighted strips of paper between his fingers while he slept.

Boys from all over the country have come to the Archangelsk Naval Academy to sit the entrance exams. Our dormitory is as noisy as a stack of nesting gulls. Gelka and I team up with three lads from Chelyabinsk to guard each other at night.

After our exams we wander the wooden streets of Archangelsk waiting for our results. Although I do well in the exams the Academy rejects me. My father is an Enemy of the People, and that is on my records. The navy does not want me in its ranks.

Term starts and we have to leave the Academy. My friends and I find an abandoned sea hunter moored near a timber yard. We move in, building bonfires on deck, drinking vodka, baking potatoes and singing pirate songs far into the night. In the daytime we earn cash loading wooden planks on the docks. When the police turn up we explain we’re waiting for money from home. They leave us alone. Gelka’s mother wires his return fare and he goes back to Chapaevsk. I’m determined to avoid
that fate. I’ve tasted freedom for the first time since running away to the Front with Slavka.

Snow begins to fall. It is too cold to stay on our ship. I cross the Dvina to Solombala island, which is the real port of Archangelsk, and find a place in a seaman’s hostel.

“There are foreign sailors here,” the hostel’s Party instructor tells us. “You must be very careful. If anyone from a capitalist country approaches you, report it immediately. Do not pick up anything you see in the streets.
Agents provocateurs
put chocolates and attractive magazines in bins so that they can take photos of Russians rummaging through rubbish.”

I wonder if our newspaper photos of American scavengers are taken in the same way.

Despite the warnings we nod and grin at the foreign sailors. Mainly Norwegians, they’re simple lads like us, interested in drinking and girls.

I come across
The Wave
, a pre-revolution coal ship, in dry dock in Solombala and on an impulse ask the skipper to take me on as ship’s boy. I’m not yet sixteen but I plead my love for hard work and the sea. In the end he agrees. A few days later we set sail down the Dvina, bound for Spitzbergen.

“When will we see the sea?” I keep asking.

“Your father will reach the gates of hell first, lad,” the sailors laugh, “don’t be in a hurry.”

As we cross the Arctic Circle my shipmates baptise me in a tub of sea water. The cold takes my breath away but they revive me with tumblers of vodka.

The Barents sea is always choppy. Water sprays onto the ship and freezes. From morning till night I break ice on the deck, spars and rigging. The worst task is cleaning up after coal has
been loaded. The sailors like their ship to shine so I have to swill coal-dust off the decks and then wash it out of every nook and cranny with the point of a wet cloth. The incessant rain soaks my oilskins and weighs me down as I work.

“If you don’t pull your weight, boy, you’ll be off at the next port,” the bosun growls. He turns to the other sailors: “Anyone who makes fun of this lad will get a punch in the face. Understood?”

We sail to the Spitzbergen port of Barentsburg, where there is a Soviet mining concession. Convicts work the mines. Barentsburg is foreign territory and therefore off-limits to a son of an Enemy of the People. When the other sailors have gone ashore for the evening I stand on deck looking at the stars and the lights from the port. Only the distant bark of a dog or a drunken shout breaks the silence. It seems that somewhere below the horizon a fire is burning, shooting flares into the heavens. Bars of green light stripe the sky, bending into weird forms. I feel sorry for the prisoners: their camp floodlights will blot out these northern lights.

Archangelsk is already cut off by the frozen White Sea so on our return voyage we unload our coal at Murmansk. The port is surrounded by logging camps. “Be vigilant,” warns the
Wave
’s political instructor before we disembark. “The camps are full of criminals and Enemies of the People.”

“Convicts slip letters between the logs,” the bosun whispers to me. “Sometimes one of them cuts off a hand and nails it to a log. They hope that someone abroad will see it and make a fuss.”

I’ve heard these camp stories before; they surprise me as little as night following day.

Our next voyage is to Igarka in Siberia. We sail via Franz Josef Land, taking supplies to the meteorologists who work
on Rudolf Island in the far north of the archipelago. The shore is surrounded by ice floes which crash against each other so violently we can’t land. We unload our cargo onto an ice sheet and the meteorologists come to fetch it on dog-sleds. They wave and shout greetings, happy to see their first visitors for months. I envy them. The Arctic seems exciting and romantic; people have only been living there for the short time I have been on this earth.

At the mouth of the Yenisei we take a navigator on board to steer us around the river’s islands and shallows. We follow the river for hundreds of kilometres down to Igarka. Our political instructor again warns us to be vigilant as prisoners from the Norilsk camps work in the town. When I go ashore however, I find it hard to tell the difference between convicts and ordinary people. Some men come up and politely ask us to post letters for them so they can avoid the censor. We all agree. Later I drop four letters into a box in Archangelsk.

We sail back up the foggy Yenisei, through the Kara sea, and past the tip of Novaya Zemlya to Nar’ian Mar, where we have to deliver a
Victory
car to the local Party chief. The car drives us all mad. It gets in my way when I sweep the deck and its tarpaulin cover keeps wrenching loose and flapping like a dirty flag. When I try to fasten it down it resists me as though it were alive. Everyone is happy to see the last of the vehicle at Nar’ian Mar. It’s a mystery where the Party boss will drive, for there are no roads in the region.

The
Wave
leaves me behind at Archangelsk. It’s bound for the British Isles so they can’t take me. The night it sails I go to a bar and get as drunk as a piglet’s squeal. I wake up feeling sick but I have to get up and look for another post before the sea
freezes over. As I drag myself out in the morning I see a sign in the hostel foyer:
Radio-operator training college in Riga seeks applicants. Fare paid
. I write and they accept me.

The boys travelling with me to Riga come from villages deep in the countryside. They’ve never seen a train before and are nervous of the iron horse. I laugh at the quaint way they speak: “Yesterday we were to a bar going, vodka drinking, with a soldier fighting.”

The Riga train amazes us with its clean toilets and polite conductresses. There aren’t even any cigarette butts on the floor. But beyond the window, war has left its traces in a desolate landscape of ruined buildings. We pass countless wrecks of German tanks. The people, in their grey padded jackets, look like the convicts of Igarka.

We can’t afford restaurant car meals so we buy baked potatoes and cucumbers from old ladies on station platforms. Some potatoes are still raw in the centre. The country boys are shocked. It would never enter their heads to cheat in this way. People from the north are more honest than us, perhaps because they never had serfdom. In Central Russia people are still afflicted with the slave mentality and will try anything on if think they can get away with it, even when there’s no point.

The outskirts of Riga are scarred with bombed factories; its centre is pitted with burned-out wooden buildings. We are surprised to find our college undamaged by war. It’s a six-storey former hotel with
Anno 1905
embossed on its facade.

I quickly settle into the institute and soon enjoy the liking and respect of my fellows. The college is a friendly place. When a master punishes a boy by withholding his dinner the rest of us
tip our dishes of porridge over the tables. Then we pick up our bread and walk out of the dining room. Perhaps not everyone wants to go along with this protest but they keep quiet in the face of our collective decision.

My best friend is a boy called Victor Rudenko. He comes from Kotlas, where his parents have been exiled as kulaks.
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Victor has picked up criminal jargon and likes to show off by calling out to the other boys: “You over there with rickets!” or “You ugly bastard!”

Rudenko’s bravado backfires, and he becomes known as ‘Rickets.’

There are one or two petty dictators amongst the second year boys. Those of us who don’t have the sense to keep out of their sight are constantly sent out for cigarettes or to take messages to girls at the bookbinders’ college. I notice that some lads – most of them insecure boys from collective farms – actually enjoy this treatment. “For them life without servitude would be like life without cake,” says Rickets.

Rickets and I make friends with a Rigan, Valerka Polenov. Valerka is small and his shoulders are raised as though shrugging in bewilderment. He dresses carelessly with his cap pulled down over one ear. His hero is Lord Byron. Half the time Valerka is in a different world. He’s not even aware that people respect him. I never found out how he ended up in our college; he probably only comes because it’s next door to his house.

Valerka’s father is an administrator at the circus. In his spare time he makes records from x-ray films, engraving them with the songs of Vertinsky and Vadim Kozin. If you hold a disc up to
the light you see a broken bone or vertebra. I drop in on Valerka’s father to borrow some of these records. To reach the offices I have to walk through the circus dwarves’ quarters. Seeing them
close-up
, I can’t understand why we laugh at them. Without make-up, in the middle of their family quarrels, swearing, drinking and fighting, the dwarves are just like the people in our barracks at home. They are no different to anyone else; you might as well look in the mirror and laugh.

I like college, but the place where I really feel I belong – for the first time in my life – is the town’s yacht club. When I see a notice in the papers appealing for new members I take a tram out to Lake Kish and present myself. They put me to work scraping paint and collecting rubbish. I throw myself into my tasks, hoping that my dedication to the job will prove my love for the sea. Everyone is busy preparing for the summer, cleaning and painting their yachts, which look like fragile, pretty toys. The friendship of the club is different to that of the institute; you don’t have to use your fists to win respect.

When he finds out about my visits to the yacht club our college director phones to tell them I am skipping lessons. He must know I’m jumping the tram to get there and so he wants to stop me going. The club tells me they’re sorry to lose me and that I should come back in a year’s time.

I am furious, but there is nothing I can do without being expelled from the institute. After that I fill up my spare time by drinking with Rickets. The institute’s political instructor warns us that the town is full of bourgeois elements and the older boys say that the Latvian Forest Brotherhood has been known to catch lone Russians and strangle them. Despite these warnings, Rickets and I take every opportunity to slope off together
through the dark streets. A stroke of luck secures us an evening job unloading potatoes from railway wagons, so we have cash to spend. We usually go to the
Reindeer Antlers
, a back-street joint popular with soldiers and sailors. Walking down the steps and throwing open the door of the little basement bar is like crossing into another world, one of warmth and comradeship.

I mix my cocktail of vodka, beer, salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar. “Down the hatch!” I empty the glass in one. I learned to do this back in Chapaevsk by watching my friends’ parents. I practised with water until I mastered the technique.

Regular fights break out in the
Reindeer Antlers
, but are usually stopped before serious injury occurs. Not to be outdone, Rickets and I fight each other at least once a month. It’s a ritual between us and means nothing. Other customers try to pull us apart but the harder they try the more tightly we grapple with each other. Finally we stagger back up the basement steps and roll home with our arms about each other, roaring pirate songs into the damp night air.

The rich kids of Riga call themselves
stilyagi
. They listen to jazz and dance the boogie-woogie. They wear tight trousers and jackets with shoulder-pads as wide as the Pacific Ocean. I like western music too but these
stilyagi
are spoilt brats. You have to have a father in Party headquarters or a mother in a department store to dress as they do. The Komsomol paper denounces the
stilyagi
as ‘spittle on the mirror of our socialist reality’; we just beat them up whenever we get the chance. They’re pampered kids and useless at fighting.

In summer we are sent out from the college to work on the
Beria
collective farm. I’ve never seen such dereliction and misery. The mud is even worse than at home. There’s no mechanical farm
equipment; only worn-out horses. Our overseer spends his days drinking with the farm chairman. We sleep on straw in a shed and share the farmers’ meals of potatoes and rye bread which is half raw and full of chaff. We skive off to help old people and single women with their private plots in return for food and home-brew. Samogon is the only consolation of farm life. Everyone distils it so no one denounces their neighbour. Besides, the local policeman is a villager too.

I can’t understand why people live on this hopeless farm, why they don’t run off wherever the wind blows. I am so relieved when our forced labour ends and we return to college that I don’t even miss the constant supply of alcohol.

Did you cry when Stalin died? Does the world seem different now?
writes Olga, one of my former classmates in Chapaevsk, in a letter to me that March. Stalin’s death in 1953 produces an odd feeling in us all. For some reason everyone starts to speak in whispers, as though his corpse were lying in the next room. I take my place in the guard of honour by his portrait. We assemble in the sports hall to listen to the funeral broadcast. Some boys cry. I feel sad too and strangely insecure. Then Rickets starts a game of push and shove in the back row and I cheer up.