The Little Water The Little Water There used to be a game one could play in the cornfields of Haywards Heath with the lumbering combine harvesters that toiled there in summer. The drivers were unable to see anything on the ground, which invited a grim game that could be called a variation of African Chicken. We took turns swigging from a bottle of vodka stolen from our parents, drinking shots out of the metal cap. The Smirnoff tasted like fuel, like something scooped out of the bottom of an engine, but its little kick of heat at the end was addictive. We lay in the path of the combine harvesters, hidden in the wheat, then rolled away from the rotating blades at the very last minute. Lying there in the cool of the wheat stalks, totally out of your mind, you could hear the harvester approaching and could judge its distance aurally. Then, making a split-second decision, you rolled away as the blades whirled past.
Vodka made this possible. I looked up at the sky, and my mind dissipated into it, and I thought, I’ll be chopped to pieces, and I won’t feel a thing. It’ll be over in a second.
I think it was I who stole the vodka bottles. When I drink a vodka tonic now in any bar in the world, I think for some reason of my parents in their airy house on Summerfield Lane opening bottles of Canada Dry and mixing it with Smirnoff and little wedges of lemon. It is perhaps a mistake of memory, but I see them there anyway. They look extraordinarily merry.
The Smirnoff labels with their fake czarist chic can trigger such memories. “The little water” became a fashionable drink sometime in the early 1970s, largely because of the brilliant advertising campaigns of Smirnoff. Vodka was cunningly introduced into the global diet, far more successfully than wine or other spirits. It brought different qualities to the glass: Nordic cleanliness and purity, a steely exotic chic ruthlessly exploited by the men who invented the Swedish government product known as Absolut in 1979.
The biggest drinks globally are Bacardi, Smirnoff, and Absolut. Ninety-six million liters of Absolut alone are drunk every year, and its ad campaigns are the longest running in history. Absolut is what you dependably find in a bar in the Middle East, and it is sold in 126 countries—a market saturation with few equals. It’s an Absolut world, as their campaigns insist, and although the imams of Islam would disagree with this statement, the brand is ubiquitous wherever there is a bar.
I once was asked by Vogue to write a story about the two men who had invented Absolut, the entrepreneur Peter Ekelund and the master distiller Börje Karlsson. The two men had now invented another vodka, a vintaged potato vodka called Karlsson’s Gold, which is made from six genetic strains of new potatoes in the Bjäre Peninsula on the west coast of Sweden. They have fetching names: the Celine, the Hamlet, the St. Thora, the Princess, the Solist, and the Marine. Most important is the Gammel Svensk Rod, or Swedish Red, which is one of the few potato species whose genetic patent is not owned by Monsanto. They are harvested by a cooperative of fanatical farmers who clean each one by hand.
Bjäre is where Ingmar Bergman shot his film The Seventh Seal. Remote and windswept, it is considered the Bordeaux of vodka potatoes. Ekelund met me at one of the farms and encouraged me to man one of the potato-harvesting machines that cross the fields like chugging tanks. We then went into one of the hangars and met the farmers to eat some raw potatoes. It seems they all have different aromas and textures. I was asked to introduce myself to the gathering, and for a joke I announced myself as “America’s greatest vodka critic.” I expected them to laugh and slap their knees, but no, with grinding Scandinavian seriousness, they nodded and looked a little apprehensive.
“So,” one of them said, “you are the vodka critic for Vogue?”
Vodka for them was everything, and the idea of Vogue having a vodka critic seemed perfectly normal. I was bound to admit that I was. After which I was condemned to drink every sample of distillate on offer and make criticisms of them.
Karlsson’s vodkas have a scent of white chocolate, and they are the ones I always want in my vodka martini, though Professor Karlsson himself is horrified by the very idea of the vodka martini, as he told me when I went to see him in Stockholm. It was with him, in fact, that I learned to drink vodka neat through entire meals: the end result is a marvelous clarity. He looks a little like the elderly Ibsen, with his pipe and his white goatee, and there is a durable quality to him, a meditative capacity for merry silence that seems to have been bred by the distillation process itself. For the Father of Absolut is an even, measured drinker, with the manners and voice of a chess player who occasionally likes a risqué joke on the side. I asked him how it felt to have invented the world’s most universal alcoholic drink.
“It’s not a bad vodka,” he said. “But it’s not a great vodka like my Gold.”
“Did you think it would conquer the entire planet?”
“I think we were aiming to conquer Sweden mainly.”
There seemed to be an element of repentance, of contrition, in his devotion to this small-scale, handcrafted vodka that would never make its way to the average hotel bars of Dubai. It was indigenous, introspective, a truly Swedish vodka that stood as a rebuke to all the two hundred vodka brands that come on the market every year.
Ekelund, too, that tireless alcohol tycoon, seemed a little embarrassed by the monumental success of Absolut. When I tasted his pure distillates at his farmhouse in Bjäre, he said that what had surprised him making Gold was the greatness of vodka when it respected its place of origin. Each sample of potato distillate did indeed taste different. Each year of Karlsson’s Gold does indeed taste subtly but markedly different, yet this kind of discrimination has nothing to do with the success of vodka outside middle-class Sweden and upper-end bars in five or six cities elsewhere. People love to think they are discerning vodka drinkers, hence the success of the mediocre Grey Goose, which has marketed itself as a cut above other brands when it is nothing of the sort. Even James Bond, alas, mistakenly asserts that a grain vodka is invariably superior to a potato one.
“No,” Ekelund admitted. “It’s just a fashion. But what it’s a fashion for, I am not sure. Absolut became a party drink. It became a drink for the young. Gay men.”
Absolut carefully made itself hip to gay drinkers in the 1980s. But no one knows all the reasons why vodka itself became so indispensable. This water-ethanol mix became dominant worldwide in the last thirty years and has eclipsed Scotch, gin, and wine as a drink of choice by units sold and swallowed. It has become perhaps the most successful man-made drug of all time. It is surprising, to my mind, that is has not attracted a fatwa all for itself: the vodka fatwa.
Absolut, meanwhile, may have become a drink for the young, but I remember it as the drink of my Polish father-in-law, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1986. A writer convinced of the addictive evil of alcohol might have asked Ekelund and Karlsson about this, but Tomasz, I believe, had his own reasons for destroying himself, reasons that cannot be laid at the door of the two men who invented his drug. They did not, after all, invent vodka itself, let alone distilled alcohol. Tomasz was forty-four when he died, a brilliant violinist and conductor who had won the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood and had been André Previn’s understudy. At sixteen he had been the lead violinist of the Warsaw Philharmonic. The great Polish composer Penderecki composed a concerto for him. He was a prodigy, a valuable asset of the Communist regime—and then he left for New York.
He was in his twenties when he emigrated to America with his wife, the singer Ewa Dubrowska, and their infant daughter, my ex-wife Karolina. They settled in New Jersey and then on campus at Ithaca, New York.
They were successful. She sang at the Met; he conducted all over the world. They got a place on Central Park West. He was a volatile, highly strung man, haunted by the Second World War. His family was from Kraków. When he was a small boy, he was picked up with his violinist father by the Germans on the streets of the city and transported to Auschwitz a few miles into the countryside. It was part of the random sweeps the Germans visited upon the local populations. Inside Auschwitz, however, his father was quickly recognized as a prominent violinist, and they were released. The Germans killed three million Catholic civilians in Poland, but on that day Tomasz and his father survived because they were not Jews. He never forgot it.
As his career ascended, he began to drink. Being Polish, it was vodka, but also Scotch. There were heartbreaking performances, one at Carnegie Hall, during which he lost his way in the score and his mind wandered. His career began to fall apart.
I met him first when he visited us in Paris in 1985, a year before his death and just after his grandson was born. He was jovial and mildly domineering, a scholar of the Second World War. He stayed with us two nights, and I noticed that he rose early and had worked his way through half a bottle of vodka or Scotch by noon, sometimes a whole one. To drink late at night is one thing; to hit the bottle in the early morning is something else altogether. His hands would be shaking during lunch, his eyes watered down and wandering, as if turning inexorably inward. In such a sensitive and gifted man, it was an unnerving effect. He talked quite volubly, as alcoholics do, and his hand resting on the table in front of him seemed to vibrate. I thought at the time that a man’s vodka addiction could be roundly regretted by those who surrounded him, but it was not exactly the subject of outright scandal. It was half-accepted, by law and by custom. And yet he was spiraling out of control.
I went with him one day to the Café Saint-Jean on the Place des Abbesses near our apartment in Montmartre and sat with him at a terrace table to have a get-to-know-you chat. We ordered drinks. I think he ordered a vodka tonic, and I ordered a demi. By the time I got past the foam at the top of the beer, he was on to a second vodka tonic. Halfway down the beer glass, and he was on to number four. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I can take it. I’m used to it.” He wanted to know if I had any prospects as a writer and would be able to look after his daughter. None, I said. He ordered a fifth. By the time we walked back to the apartment, he was completely steady, able to walk in a straight line, and yet totally stoned. In the evening, he went through another half bottle neat.
Tomasz and Ewa separated, and Tomasz and his new mistress moved into a house in Ocean City, New Jersey, from where he took charge of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, based at Newark Cathedral. It was an ironic choice of abode: Ocean City is dry. Immortalized in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, it replaces drink with ice cream, which is widely and freely available. There is not a single bar for miles around, unless you cross the proverbial railway tracks.
From Paris we heard stories of his accelerated drinking. Ewa died of breast cancer while living with us there, and after her death the stories of his drinking became alarming. His current girlfriend was unable to apply the brakes to him; terrified and baffled, she sent us back the reports of mad drinking sprees that lasted for days. During these sprees his mind would seem to take leave of his body. At the beginning of the summer, we finally received the call we had dreaded: incapacitated and dying of cirrhosis, Tomasz was in a hospital in Newark. We had hours to see him before he died.
We arrived at Newark with the baby and rushed from the airport to the hospital. It was over a hundred degrees: a heat wave. We arrived there just after midnight, exhausted. The staff at the hospital at first had no idea who he was. Then we were given a room number. I offered to go up first with the baby so that he could see his grandson before he died. Karolina was twenty that summer, barely an adult herself, and she had begun to realize that when he died, she would be orphaned in the world.
I went up in the elevator and exited into a long corridor of closed doors. His room was at the end. I knocked, and there was no answer. I pushed open the door, holding the baby, and went into a semidarkened room occupied at its center by a bed. In the bed was a shriveled old man with a dozen tubes stuck into him. I apologized and withdrew, then checked the room number again. It was certainly the room number they had given me. I went back in. It was Tomasz. The cirrhosis had made him literally unrecognizable. High on morphine, he stared at me without any idea who I was. I stepped closer and spoke to him, but he was gone into his delirium.
He died half an hour later. Stunned, we went to the Manchester Hotel in Ocean City in a taxi. For the next few days we went through his affairs, his large house filled with expensive clothes and musical scores. During the day we sat on the sands of Ocean Beach and went to the ice cream parlors. We ate ice cream because we couldn’t drink, and we needed at that moment to share a few drinks, which we could only do when we went into New York for the evening. Otherwise we ate at the Manchester and took the baby around Ocean Beach’s gelato joints. Sometimes, however, I went out by myself after eleven and walked across the town as far as the railroad tracks hoping against hope that I would stumble upon some hidden bar that the town vigilantes had overlooked. But no—Ocean Beach is as dry as a town in Saudi Arabia. I roamed through it with Tomasz’s thirst, suddenly desperate for a drink. It was unthinkable that he had chosen this place to live; but then again perhaps it had not been entirely his own idea. A dry town for a wet man, a cure for an addict.