“Bersol.”
“You’re kidding!”
“What’s the point of lying? The train’s about to leave and we’ll never see each other again.”
“Wait,” he says, “what street do you live on?”
“Clinic street.”
“Do you know anyone on Short Street?”
“Lyokha Pop”
“What about Lyuska Trepalina?”
“Everyone knows her.”
Lyuska is the local whore. She hangs around the hostel where I lived. I’ve only spoken to her a couple of times but that’s enough for the conductor to let me on board.
The train departs and I settle down in a window-seat. The endless steppe slides past, as smooth as bone, broken only by a dry shoreline that was once lapped by the Aral Sea. When we stop at desolate towns the conductor, whose name is Yura, does a roaring trade selling vodka and cigarettes to crowds on the platform.
“There’s no alcohol or tobacco in their shops,” he explains. “I have to give a cut to the station-master and chief conductor but I make enough. Have a drink.”
My friend Oleg from the Astrakhan camp asks me to come and stay with him. I sell some blood to help the Vietnamese victims of American aggression and buy a ticket on the steamer Sergei Uritskii, an old man of the Volga built in 1912. It stinks of dried Caspian roach and the over-ripe melons that are piled high in baskets on the upper deck blocking everyone’s way. It is pleasant to sit on the passenger deck in old wicker chairs under a canvas canopy. Cream silk curtains flap like sails through open windows. For two days and nights I gaze at the shoreline, mesmerised by the gleam of distant cities and hydro-electric power projects.
In Astrakhan I find Oleg living in a district built in the popular Cheryomushki style. Although he has an official job checking shop burglar alarms he earns his money in billiard halls. We settle into a routine. I take over his rounds while he goes off to play. After lunch I join him.
Pretending not to know Oleg, I bet on the outcome of the game. With a prearranged signal he lets me know how it will end. That way we always win. If he loses I collect money for backing his opponent; if he wins our takings are doubled. No one knows me in the town and we do not broadcast our friendship. All the same we don’t win much, just enough to feed ourselves and the family.
Oleg is on the wagon which is fortunate as drinking and billiards do not go together. Fights in billiard halls are common and so is cheating. When an apparently stronger player loses there’s always a post mortem which rarely ends peacefully. The winner often has to beat the money out of the loser. It is forbidden to play for money so Oleg and I have to be careful. If caught making bets we’d go straight back to prison.
Life would be fine apart from problems on the domestic front. Oleg and his wife Lily fight day and night. Their punches, slaps and screams end in no less violent reconciliations. The police have long since stopped responding to neighbours’ complaints. They know that by the time they arrive the combatants will be locked in such a tight embrace it will be impossible to prize them apart. If they manage to arrest Oleg then Lily will turn on them like a tigress. Once when they try to arrest her, Oleg dangles their daughter out of the window until the police let her go.
It is impossible to live in this atmosphere so after a month I decide to return to Chapaevsk. Before I leave, Oleg takes me to a village near the sea where we buy 1,000 dried bream for a fantastically low price. In Kuibyshev these fish are in great demand as an accompaniment to beer. I can sell them for enough money to support me for several months.
As luck would have it the Sergei Uritskii is waiting in dock. I manage to buy a ticket for a place on deck and board just at the last minute. As I am arranging my bags I hear a familiar voice.
“Vanya! Going back already? Didn’t you find your friend?”
It’s one of the waitresses, Asya, who I got to know on the journey down.“I did,” I reply, “but a husband and wife make one devil. I felt uncomfortable in the middle of their quarrels. I’m going home now to sell my fish.”
“But you have so many bags and no berth.”
I smile: “I’m alright. I’ll sleep under the stars again.”
Shyly Asya asks me to share her berth.
As the ship approaches Kuibyshev I ask for her address. She shakes her head. “It’s better not to raise hopes. They are too easily crushed.”
Asya is one of those rare women who are untouched by the filth of this world. I could have arrived home not only without the bream but without trousers, money or documents. Robbing me would have been as easy for Asya as spitting.
Back in Chapaevsk I decide not to sell my fish to the thieves and swindlers who run the market. Instead I give them to my uncle Volodya in return for an advance. By the end of the week I’m back on the bottle again and have forgotten all about the bream. As luck would have it I bump into Yura the conductor and am able to thank him properly for the ride.
I move into another hostel. It is built like pre-war barrack housing except it’s made of brick and has an indoor toilet. All day long snotty children play in the corridor under lines of grey underwear. Everyone knows which pair of underpants belongs to whom. If a brassiere falls on the floor you can pick it up, examine it and identify its owner by the way it is patched. Then you knock on her door: “Auntie Dusya, here’s your bra. The kids were using it as a football.”
Domestic rows blow up with boring regularity. Every family drinks. The noise only abates in the early morning when the bottles are empty and the shops still shut.
Each morning my hangover gets me out of bed, just as if I was going to work. I gather together bottles from the night before and go next door to shop No. 28 to exchange the empties for a glass of cheap fortified wine. This disgusting brew helps me control myself until ten o’clock when the spirits section opens.
In the morning my hands shake so much that I can’t hold a glass without spilling it over myself. If I have a companion with me he pours the wine down my throat; if not I use a belt. I wrap one end round the hand that holds the glass and pass the other around my neck, pulling on it until the glass reaches my lips.
On the days when the shop is out of wine we have to look for eau de Cologne or aftershave lotion. These are hard to drink on an empty stomach. Furniture polish is the worst — that is real poison and always makes me puke. However, once I’ve lined my stomach with a hair-of-the-dog I can drink whatever comes my way.
Alkies from the whole district congregate in my room. It’s warmer than the street. I open the day’s session by banging my fist on the table:
“What’s the fucking use of thinking?
Fill your glasses and start drinking!”
Each person takes a bite from a stale hunk of bread on the table as they pass the bottle around. If a new face appears at the door I shout: “Come in! Welcome to the communist state. Don’t worry about a thing. Put on what you like and sleep with who you like. In the morning we sort out clothes and girls.”
I try to avoid my former workmates. They are all drinkers too, but unlike me, they don’t comb the shops for lacquer and varnish. Occasionally I see my mother in the streets and then I have to duck out of her sight. Unfortunately ours is a small town, and local gossips inform her of my descent into street drinking. When she comes down to shop No. 28 and bundles me into a taxi I resign myself to the inevitable. My mother has a bag already packed. We drive out to a hospital at Rubezhnoye, a former country estate where Catherine the Great’s lover, Count Orlov, kept thoroughbred horses. After the revolution the house was converted into a hospital, but 50 years of Soviet power have brought it to a state of collapse.
The director turns a blind eye if patients get drunk on occasion; the most important thing is to repair the place. A condition of treatment is that each patient has to work four hours a day without pay. They paint and plaster walls and build the director’s dacha in the grounds. My job is to watch the hospital’s water tank, making sure it never overflows or runs dry.