Chapter 8: 'The Booze Run'

Oleg Rautkin lived with his family in Ukraine and would visit us periodically. Every time, we celebrated the occasion with a proper send-off. Upon his return, we would organize an appropriate welcome. There was always this feeling that one day he would leave and not come back. Well, you never know... not that something might happen to him, but rather that he would just stay there, giving in to persuasions like: “That’s enough wandering for you, son, it’s time to settle down...”.

In early January 1988, after leaving on another trip, he was delayed for a long time. He was gone for over two weeks, and a genuine sense of anxiety for our fate began to brew within our group. Oleg returned at the end of the month, and we gathered at Dima Leontyev's apartment. Fortunately, he was young, single, and unmarried at the time, and his two-room apartment had already been converted into a studio: the small, slightly soundproofed room was the drum booth, while the large one served as the control room, functionally combined with a living room. A reception lounge, one of the walls of which was entirely taken up by equipment.

In the middle of the room, we assembled a makeshift "table". The band Autodafe showed up in full force, along with other musicians from various groups. Rostislav Dubinin, the president of our rock club, was there too – well, we couldn't do without him... he couldn't possibly pass up such an event. Everyone brought a little food, but buying something to drink in the city was highly problematic. Pooling our efforts, we managed to scrape together two bottles each of disgusting coffee liqueur and equally disgusting vanilla liqueur. You can imagine... Since it was all the same crap anyway, we took it all, poured it into a three-liter jar, and passed it around the circle.

We drank it quickly: wincing, grimacing, cursing, and spitting. It was a large group, so the jar was gone in no time. An absurd situation: a crowd of guys sitting around with their ladies, a table groaning under the weight of half-liter and liter jars filled with homemade delicacies and preserves... but absolutely nothing to drink. A short while later, the guests grew despondent; the situation needed to be saved. It seemed that jet fuel would have been far easier to get in the city than anything containing alcohol. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn't have even bothered, but this wasn't just any day... Oleg Rautkin returning from a long trip doesn't happen every day... I put forward the following proposal:

— Guys, over in Solombala, where the Culture House and the "Red Forge" plant are located, deep in the backwoods there's a place—some house or another (such spots were called "holes")—where, for double the price, and again, only with a recommendation, since they don't serve strangers, you could buy some booze.

This was a rather dangerous undertaking—it was run by the local criminal element, a pretty gloomy, unpredictable, and tough crowd. Going there involved certain risks: at best, you could lose your money... as the author of the idea, I volunteered and asked them to assign me a companion from those in need. Everyone around exchanged hopeful glances, and timid self-nominations began to emerge from the crowd... it would have been tempting if it weren't so scary... but Rautkin spoke up:

– Being the man of the hour, guys, who else should go but me? I'll go! – a proposal with which everyone present hastily agreed. I was glad, for there was no one closer to me than Oleg; at that moment, anyway, and vice versa, naturally.

We passed the hat around and collected quite a bit. We had some money on us, for the simple reason that alcohol wasn't sold, so what else was there to buy? Music stores sold barely any musical goods: dirt-cheap picks, strings for a ruble, recorders, harmonicas. In short, despite the doubled price of the drink, the quantity promised to be quite impressive.

It was winter. A polar winter. Our spirits were high: fortified by the effect of the sticky beverage, we marched briskly to meet our fate. It was around six o'clock, but the darkness in the sky was already pitch black, although the city center was quite bright thanks to the mirror-like reflection of streetlights off the pristine white surface of the packed snow on the sidewalks. But when we stepped off the bus, the mood changed abruptly. The Solombala district is an island, an industrial facility. The bus dropped us off on the outskirts, where a handful of streetlamps were still blinking in the wind, and we had to walk right into the thick of the buildings.

It was absolute horror there—just imagine: a massive, sprawling village with an incredible number of narrow little streets, alleyways, dead ends of all sorts, crooked fences, snowdrifts as tall as a person, and a complete absence of any streetlights. No people around, no cars—just pitch-black wilderness. On top of that, we didn't really know where we were going. Looking carefully around, just above the fences and roofs of the single-story wooden houses, we spotted the main landmark in our town—the television tower. It stood over on our side, in the center, on our bank of the river, but at that moment, it didn't inspire much optimism—we were surrounded by a biting, polar darkness.

"Maybe screw it?" I said. "Should we just head back?" To which Oleg firmly objected: "Oh, come on, what are you talking about? The guys are waiting, the money's in our pockets, we made the trip—how could we?" And so we pressed deeper, toward a solitary store surrounded by a constantly milling crowd of shady characters. Inside, of course, there was nothing but meager food: endless rows of fruit juice dusty with the ages, large tin cans of squash caviar thickly slathered in sticky anti-corrosion coating; on the postmodern-style counter of the dairy section, "Baby" brand cartons grinned endlessly, while the glass display case, scratched up from coins, harbored the sorrowful gaze of delicate ocean fish of god-knows-what kind of smoking... A shadow of discrete times rested upon all the counters.

Two men in coats were smoking by the exit, with army ushanka hats pulled down right over their eyes. We tried asking them where we could find what we were looking for. Armed with the appropriate passwords, I listed off who had sent us and what we were after. Otherwise, they could have sent us in entirely the opposite direction. The two men looked us over, gave us the proper directions, and we set off, following the course they had indicated. Oleg tried to launch into a grand speech about how all hardships are nothing in the face of a determined drive to overcome them, but I was still consumed by anxious thoughts: I had a feeling our real adventures were still ahead of us...

As we moved further from our starting point, the landscape around us grew gloomier and gloomier. Every now and then, I would glance back at the solitary lamppost illuminating the store's facade, which shrank alarmingly as Oleg and I walked away, while an intrusive thought cowardly drilled into my imagination: "Damn, maybe we should just go back, maybe we should just go back?!" But looking at Oleg, who trusted me unconditionally and followed me as confidently as if I were Ivan Susanin, I pulled myself together: alright, screw it, since we're already in this deep—let's see how it ends...

We made it to the first address we were given and knocked on the window. Behind the curtain lay a twilight; the ceiling shadows cast by someone moving in the light of the oil lamps flickered nervously, and a blurry figure appeared at the window, a questioning furrow forming on their forehead. I flashed the telltale combination of a thumbs-up and an extended pinky, clicking my tongue loudly. The curtain drew shut, and the mysterious figure stepped out onto the porch to meet us. "I'm completely out," he says, "they're out over there too, and nearby here as well, so you'll have to go to the furthest 'hole'." That was the exact place I had been dreading going, vainly clinging to the hope of a quicker result. I asked if there were any other options, to which he replied that if we really wanted to score, we had to go exactly there, because it was already evening, and everything nearby had been cleaned out by midday. Nothing to do about it... we went.

After wandering for about half an hour, repeatedly emerging at the exact same spot from different directions, we finally approached the "coveted" house; coveted, and that's in very big quotation marks... we spotted it from afar; looming among the surrounding single-story buildings, it rose like a large, gloomy cliff. It was two stories tall and stood slightly set back on an empty lot. Light burned in the windows, and a thin wisp of smoke drifted from the chimney—life was ticking away inside the house, but it gave off a vibe such that the closer we got, the more noticeably we slowed our pace, and the less desire we had to approach it, let alone go inside... My mood rubbed off on Oleg; we moved in silence, and only the crunch of the snow beneath our feet felt louder and louder: the creeping dread subjectively amplified its volume. We reached the doors. I rang the bell. It didn't work. I knocked:

– It's open! – a muffled roar of a wild beast, which alone was enough to chill me to the bone. It seemed as if the log supports themselves were emitting this roar; it felt as though the house itself had opened its belly... I went in first, followed by Oleg. A low-frequency din filled the room, produced by a large number of grown men, but the moment we crossed the threshold, a dead silence fell. The sight before us made me completely regret coming here. In the stiflingly hot room sat half-naked men smoking, and from the blueness they radiated, it made our eyes blur. On the table, alongside various marinades and pickles, stood such a diverse array of alcoholic beverages that I had never in my life seen outside of a dream. The bluish smoke hanging over this gastronomic magnificence, while cutting down the visual depth of the "still life," lent it a murky mystery: whenever someone sitting further back leaned away, their silhouettes dissolved into the blue haze.

At the head of the table sat a larger-than-life character. A mountain of a man with a face that reminded me of Shere Khan the tiger. Next to him was Tabaqui, and all around were the Bandar-log...

"And why are we so hairy?" Shere Khan's rough question came flying at us. I should mention that by biker standards, Oleg and I didn't even reach average hairiness, but against the backdrop of the completely hairless, shaved skulls present... the tone of Shere Khan's rhetoric promised absolutely nothing good.

"They're nonconformists," Tabaqui meowed. Everyone cracked up.

"No, really," I said, "what are you talking about... we're just musicians..."

"Metalheads, or something?" Tabaqui showed off his vocabulary. The room once again erupted in a rolling, Bandar-log roar.

"Well, to some extent, yes," I found my words. "We work at the Red Forge."

This was a successful half-truth—Rautkin didn't work there, but their faces noticeably softened.

This was their turf—the plant in Solombala, so anyone who worked there was considered one of their own.

"At the Forge?" Shere Khan asked. "And what shop are you from?"

"The power shop," I replied.

"Ahhh..." Shere Khan nodded at someone in his crew. "Sivyi, your brother works there, right?"

"Agghh," Sivyi growled in confirmation.

"Do you know Seryoga Spiridonov?" Shere Khan turned halfway toward us.

"Yeah, of course I know him, he's in our electrician crew, my shift partner."

We were offered a seat, but anxiety still gripped us: it was sketchy and terrifying to end up in the den of the "contingent." It all reminded us of that famous movie by Govorukhin about the "Black Cat" gang, where the musician hero, while serving in the police, pretended to be a hardened criminal. The company poured themselves drinks. They drank—and had a bite to eat.

– So, what brings you here? – the ringleader asked.

– Well... we were looking to buy some vodka...

– Vooo-dka, the gang drawled in unison, and everyone cracked up. I could hear some very bad vibes in that laughter.

– Well, if not vodka, maybe some wine... – at this, they laughed in an even more sinister way. Crap,  I thought, maybe I said something wrong...

– And do you actually have any money? – Tabaki sniffled.

– We've got money.

– Rea-lly? – everyone looked at us with the kind of interest a pack of winter wolves shows a stray, free-roaming ungulate.

I figured: yeah, they could just take the money and let us go in peace, and to hell with them. They exchanged glances, followed by the command: "Show us." Oleg and I looked at each other. Well, what could we do? I reached into my pocket, pulled out the entire sum the guys had chipped in, and showed it to them.
– Alright, and what do you want?

– Well, we'd like... – and I listed off what we were after.

– Not enough cash... but whatever, we'll get to that. Now, you guys are musicians, right? Come on, play us something. A completely thrashed guitar—I almost said it was covered in tattoos—glued back together a hundred times, was passed around the crowd, and some bald guy shoved it at me, since I was the one leading the negotiations, which meant it fell to me to answer for us. I took it, twirled it around in my hands, inspected it from all sides, sat there—what should I play? I had no idea what to play. I'd never played anything in group settings anyway, let alone in this kind of company,  so I just sat there,  racking my brain...

– Come on, belt something out, why'd you stop? You're a musician, right?!

Intimidated, I gathered my courage and started playing a medley, or rather, the solos from all my own songs. My fingers flew across the fretboard like they owned the place. Tearing quickly through our own riffs, I switched to Deep Purple, then to Led Zeppelin. Glancing at Oleg, I saw a glazed look on his face and realized—not right, not right, damn it... and I stopped to catch my breath.

– Shee, – Tabaki drawled. – Enough of your plucking, come on, play something real. I was completely lost...

– Hey, Sivy, come show him how it's really done.

The guy finished his cheap cigarette, stubbed it out in a saucer, took the guitar, strummed an A minor, and started singing some very old, universally known song in a nasal voice, the title of which I still can't remember to save my life. *Jeez*, I thought, I really would have been better off pretending to be a master electrician; that would have been way less stressful. Sivy finished playing, everyone looked at me, and I realized that was it... what they expected of me—I couldn't do, didn't know, and had never played... I don't know what would have happened if it hadn't been for Oleg Rautkin, his quick wits, and his repertoire.

Taking the guitar, he pushed his chair back, sat down, leaned against the backrest, and crossed his legs. Adjusting his grip and tuning up, he strummed a few prison chords... everyone fell silent. Rautkin held a theatrical pause for exactly as long as necessary, not a millisecond longer. And then he started belting it out:

A bullet flew and struck me in the chest,
But I'll escape upon my trusty steed.
The commissar got me with his saber,
Bathed in blood, I collapsed upon my horse.

Hey! Oh, my raven-black steed,
Hey! And the sawed-off steel,
Hey! And the thick, thick fog,
Hey! Oh, father, the ataman.

I have to say, with his voice, in complete silence, completely unexpectedly... you had to see it. We belted out the chorus together. When the sound of the final chord faded, a deathly silence hung over the room at first, and then instantly, as if on command, everyone started shuffling around and speaking in low voices, saying things like, well why didn't you say so right away... man, you guys are something else.

The effect was simply staggering. Thanks to Andrei Panov, who probably saved us without even knowing it. The effect was likely amplified by the fact that, fundamentally, no one expected anything worthwhile from us anyway, and everyone had already mentally passed their judgment on us. But we knocked them dead. They immediately demanded an encore, all the bottles were opened in front of us, and the glasses were poured. Sivy even asked Oleg to write down the chords for him. Once everyone had learned the song, they asked for something else in the same vein. But there just aren't any more songs like that, or anything similar... and Rautkin went all out. He recalled the standard songs for this kind of crowd; I hadn't even known my friend was so well-versed in this repertoire. Starting with "The Perilous Quagmire", he belted out another dozen similar songs of the most brutal prison content, doing it so convincingly that you'd think if you shaved his head right then and gave him a few tattoos, it would seem like he had never left that world and had always sat right there alongside them...

I caught myself noticing that, after a little while, we were surrounded by perfectly lovely, nice people. Absolutely non-threatening, lively human faces. Perhaps it was the languid relaxation that had replaced the state of having our knees knock from the shaking, or maybe it was the effect of the long-forgotten alcohol taking its toll. A complete emotional serenity reigned around us. Routkin was already spinning yarns, I was listening to an earnest story from a young thief, and I felt a complete harmony, merging seamlessly with the outside world. Several hours passed this way. We had practically assimilated, and people had stopped paying attention to us altogether. The group had split into smaller circles, stories were being swapped, and we lost track of time. Oleg was already exchanging phone numbers, while I was making my way through the snacks placed before us. We were told to make ourselves at home and help ourselves to "everything on the table"...

Routkin and Sivoy organized a "musical duel" – the guitar was passed back and forth, and every song in the world came to mind. The pristine peace of the Solombala surroundings was shaken by Oleg's powerful voice, which seemed to penetrate every window and every house in the area. This went on for several hours. It was nearing midnight, and we had stepped out around six in the evening. Oleg was no longer passing the guitar to Sivoy – songs from "our" crowd flowed endlessly from him, surprising me more and more. Where did he know them from? "What depths of consciousness reveal themselves sometimes..." I thought.

At some point, I suddenly realized that the guys were waiting for us, and that we had stayed far too long – it was well past midnight. I figured our friends had probably buried us by now: we had no cell phones, and there was no way to let them know that we felt fine, and more than that, absolutely fantastic. I started tugging at Oleg's sleeve. Whatever the circumstances, spending the night at that house didn't appeal to us. People were waiting, so we had to start heading back.

Noticing our agitation, Sherhan asked what our plans were and what exactly we wanted. I explained that we had been delegated right from the table, exactly as we had been six hours ago, and that people were waiting for us, making it completely awkward by now, and public transport was about to stop running, while we had completely forgotten why we had come here in the first place. Concepts like looking out for loved ones were something they deeply respected. I replied that we wanted to buy booze with all our money, to which Sherhan advised us to get some port wine.

– Guys, – Sherhan said, – basically, if you guys have any problems in Solombala, come straight to us. We'll bury anyone for you, just in case.

In the end, with all the money we had, we bought 12 bottles of port wine, and the crew threw in a half-liter of vodka for free. They didn't charge us double;  they let everything go at cost. That's the power of great art for you!

– You guys are cool, even if you are hairy. Good job!

A few glasses of vodka switched us onto autopilot. A very happy autopilot, at that. The thugs walked us all the way to the taxi stop, flagged down a car, and ordered the driver to get us safely right to our front door. This was followed by a touching farewell, with vows of eternal friendship.

During the ride downtown, Oleg and I drained the bonus bottle of vodka gifted to us by the Solombala natives, repeating over and over what seriously awesome guys these Solombala locals were, and how great it was that we had actually gone to see them. We had completely forgotten about the people waiting for us. We arrived, said goodbye to the taxi driver. The elevator, naturally, wasn't working, but we flew up to the ninth floor as if on wings and began frantically ringing the doorbell and pounding on the door... silence at first. We exchanged glances, and then heard some shuffling behind the door. The lock clicked... standing in the hallway was literally everyone who was in the apartment, their faces pale... a silent scene. As if we had returned from the dead—risen from hell—happy, drunk, our faces red, with the bottoms and necks of green bottles sticking out of every pocket. Everything wouldn't fit into the bag, and we had tried to jam as much as possible into our clothes so that, heaven forbid, we wouldn't forget anything in the car.

This went on for a minute, two, or three, but then everyone suddenly started cracking up, jumping, hugging, squeezing us, and so on... that's probably how they would welcome cosmonauts returning from Venus. But, to be honest, we couldn't care less anymore—with a sense of duty fulfilled, we stumbled inside... and that was it. All our resources were completely depleted, and all the fun that immediately started and probably didn't end for a long time passed us by. Like fallen warriors, we crashed to the floor in the drum room on the mattresses that had been laid out in advance. They covered us with blankets, put decorative sofa pillows under our heads, but we didn't hear any of it, as we slept the sleep of the dead, or perhaps of children, or maybe even of legendary heroes until morning. We didn't hear what was happening behind the wall; we didn't hear the fired-up musicians turn on their equipment deep into the night and start furiously using it; we didn't hear the drummer step over us to get to his drums and blast through his standard set; we didn't hear the arrival of two police squads...

Rubbing my eyes, I took a long time to figure out where I was and who was next to me. I tried to find out by feel. Something was strongly in the way... in an attempt to check who was beside me, I bumped into something completely solid... Oleg opened his eyes in a daze and started darting them around, awakened by my investigations, and having no idea where he was, who he was with, or what time it was – day or night. He half-rose, recognized me, and his roaming eyes froze in shock, seeing in my hands something utterly unimaginable... a bottle that some caring, gentle, and tender hand had thoughtfully slipped under my pillow, and I was holding it.

– Where from? Who brought it?? – Oleg asked me wildly. His breathing quickened... which is understandable: Rautkin lived permanently with his family in Ukraine, and simply could not get used to the all-consuming alcohol craze that reigned in Arkhangelsk.

Recorded by Alexey Vishnya
For Spetsialnoe Radio

July 2006