My sister tells me there is some furniture left from our parents’ house that she wants to sell.
“Keep the money,” I tell her, “all I want is enough for a ticket out of this hell-hole.”
“Where are you going?”
“Who knows? Fiji maybe.”
And I really am thinking how good it will be to leave the country. Preferably forever.
Just before I leave Chapaevsk I run into a couple of old drinking acquaintances who are wending an unsteady way back from the cemetery. “Poor old thing,” they say, after exchanging greetings with me: “They let us join the wake so it’d look as though she had someone to mourn her. We only knew her by sight; she died in the old people’s home.”
“Who was it?”
“Marusya Timofeyevna. Perhaps you knew her. She used to live in Bersol.”
The dead woman was our old home-help, Cyclops. I pity her now, for her life turned out to be even more wretched than mine. After she left my parents she looked after children in other Party families until she became too old and infirm. She never married. The war left millions of surplus women and Marusya was last in the queue. Having no one to care for her, she entered the old people’s home. It is the oldest building in town and worse than any strict-regime prison. The staff steal all the food and leave the inmates to decay in their own filth. As you pass the home you can see the old people standing outside on metal balconies, gazing forlornly at a world they have already left.
And that is where I’ll end up if I stay in Chapaevsk, providing I don’t drink myself to death first.
12
London
The 1990s
I have no reason to stay in Chapaevsk so I return to Georgia. The theatre takes me back as a watchman and I manage to stay sober for a while.
Change is in the air. Georgia no longer wants to be part of the Soviet Union. Civil war looms. My friends at the theatre fix me up with Georgian papers and take me with them on tour to the UK. I claim political asylum. I’ll start life afresh.
At first I’m excited by my new surroundings. Like every naive Russian visitor I marvel at the shops. ‘You could cover our walls with their toilet paper,’ I write to my sister. It doesn’t take me long to discover that vodka is cheaper than eau de Cologne. There’s no need to drink substitutes when you can afford the real thing.
I discover too, that our propagandists didn’t lie about the decadence of the West. People go around in clothes that would shame a Zestafoni tramp — and not only the poor: one day I see a young man walk out of an expensive restaurant in a bushlat — a padded grey Soviet prison jacket.
It shocks me to see a teenage girl put a bottle of beer to her lips. Back home even tramps rarely stoop that low; we keep personal drinking vessels. In any Russian park, if you look carefully, you’ll see a glass under a hedge or bush, covered over with twigs to protect it from dirt. But perhaps we’re more concerned with practicalities than appearances, for when your hands are shaking like death it is impossible to lift a bottle to your mouth. Besides, to spill a glass is a misfortune; to spill a bottle a tragedy.
But I soon get tired of the emptiness of the West. Here, people turn their lives into a ceaseless scramble for money. Most are rich beyond the dreams of a Chapaevsk citizen yet they are never content with what they have. Their system is a treadmill, not freedom.
All the same, I settle into life here, with my own room and a small pension. My furniture comes from the streets: chairs, mattress, sofa, vacuum cleaner, TV and a video that I repaired myself. At night I like to wander around my neighbourhood, seeing what I can pick up. Looking through people’s rubbish, I learn a lot about them — what they read and what they eat, whether they’re drinkers and whether they’re ashamed of what they drink.
From time to time new arrivals from Russia come to stay with me while they get settled. They remind me of myself when I left home all those years ago. These young people expect the streets to be paved with gold, but they can only find illegal work as washers-up or cab-drivers. Some give up and go home again, tired of being treated as less than human.
I have begun a new career as an actor; some film students invited me to work with them. And I went to a studio and had my voice recorded for the new James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. They wanted a Russian speaker to curse like a sailor. I let rip, but in the end they only allowed me to use the mildest words.
Outside of work I hardly mix with local people. At my age it’s hard to learn a new language. Even if I could communicate we wouldn’t understand each other. I’m not lonely; on the contrary, I sometimes long to go away from this city to a quiet village by the seashore, where I know no one at all.
Mostly I occupy myself by thinking about my past, trying to make sense of it. Like the disgraced teachers and engineers of Toliatti’s market-place I always held the Soviet system responsible for my downfall. Throughout my life I felt plagued and persecuted by Komsomolists, bosses, judges and camp Godfathers. This isn’t to say that when I poured myself a glass of wine in the morning I did it as an act of protest against the system. Of course not. But it consoled me to think that if I drank too much it was because I had no choice.
Now this old line of defence has fallen away. I am free from Komsomolists and Godfathers but I still drink. At least I know that whatever I have done, however deeply I have degraded myself, I shall pay for it. The thought cheers me slightly.
Despite everything I sometimes thank God that I became an alcoholic and took to the road instead of spinning out my days in Chapaevsk, talking of nothing but work and how many potatoes my allotment has yielded. I’ve broken through walls that confine the normal human being. I’ve discovered that things I once feared hold no terrors at all. Prison doesn’t worry me; I can live by begging. I can live without a home, possessions or human companionship.
I’ve learned too, that there is no limit to how far a man can fall. Every so often you reach a barrier. No, you say, you have some pride left, you won’t quaff furniture polish or drink in the street; you’ll never hold out your hand and ask for money. But you do. People are like electric currents: they follow the path of least resistance, and it’s easier to move downwards. The most terrible thing of all is that you get used to your degradation. Human beings can adapt to anything. And if ever a shadow of guilt or self-disgust darkens your door — alcohol soon chases off such unwelcome guests.
So I’ve discovered that my early fears were not so terrifying after all. Yes, I’m dependent on vodka, but that renders me independent of my surroundings, albeit temporarily.
Do I miss Russia? Perhaps not, yet still images haunt me of my past, particularly those days in the forest looking after the beekeepers’ hives. I even feel nostalgic for the patter of raindrops on my tent roof and the sharp scent of herbs hanging up to dry.
But I haven’t severed all my ties with the past; I even receive occasional letters from Olga. She never remarried. When my sister told her I had emigrated she started to entertain hopes, perhaps thinking I’d come off the bottle at last. Well I soon dashed those expectations; I told her that the West has given me no reason to stop drinking. Then she wrote back: Come home Vanya, let us show you how to live.
Her arrogance makes me angry. After all these years she still can’t understand what led me to drink in the first place. I was not interested in becoming the ideal Soviet family man. The truth is, I just wasn’t ready for a family at all. Yet at the same time her letter arouses feelings of guilt, especially towards my daughter, who is now ill.