A few mornings ago, as I rushed to the metro, I spotted a man slowly making his way across the busy street in front of my apartment building. That normally wouldn't strike me as unusual, except for the fact that he was crossing at a tortoise like pace...on his hands and knees.
The first thought that blasted my conscious was to rush out there and help him to his feet. The morning traffic, as usual in Moscow, was bordering on aggravated violence, and the guy was bound to end up underneath the wheel of a Land Rover. But just as quickly as this samaratorious act passed through my mind, I realized the guy was on zapoy. The closest direction translation in English is alcoholic bender, but that doesn't quite encapsulate the nuances as explained to me. For a zapoy is a period of time, sometimes lasting for weeks, when a Russian, usually male, goes away for awhile.
Sometimes literally, like the old man I met on the commuter train who went to his dacha for a couple of weeks, consumed so much cheap beer and vodka that at first I mistook him for the most down-and-out homeless guy I'd ever seen. When my fiancee and I boarded the train in Vidnoe, he was sprawled on his side across one of the benches that normally seats three people. A plastic litre of beer rested on the floor, his hand still territorially wrapped around its contents. He awoke after about twenty minutes, blinked several times like a new born glimpsing the world for the first time, rubbed his eyes with his fists so hard I thought he might permanetly blind himself, and asked my fiancee if this was the train to Moscow. His question exposed a broken row of jagged teeth, with several missing altogether, yellowed by years of nicotine. His graying hair jumped from his head in a tough springy mass and his skin looked like a mountain top scraped bare of all vegetation. He then smiled and asked sheepishly how he looked. My fiancee seemed at a loss for words, before tactifully saying that maybe he would look better after a shower. The window caught his reflection and when he turned to appraise himself there was a visible physical reaction, as if he'd just spotted a terrifying looking man, hovering like a translucent being, peering in at him through the window of the moving train. He made a futile effort to mat his hair down, abadonded the cause effort a few moments, and turned his attention back to us. He said to my fiancee that he'd heard us talking in his semi-conscious inebriated state a few minutes before and asked if I was English. She told him close but I was in fact American. At which point, he grew animated, and began listing off the words in English he could remember from his school days. Which as far as I could tell consisted of the word "yellow" and the number "five.
He left us in Vlikino, the station before the Moscow terminus, waving at us through the window, dissapointed that we couldn't accompany him to his apartment for a longer chat, but understanding, what with our jobs and all.
And sometimes figuratively, allowing a few bottles of vodka to transport the drinker to perhaps imagined taiga forests and the crystalline waters of Lake Baikal.
The man on his hands and knees, in the soiled pair of blue jeans and a powder blue tracksuit top, appeared to be on a figurative zapoy. After all, no one would be insane enough to take their actual holiday in Moscow. As he passed the center yellow line of the road, the traffic that had stopped to let him pass began slowly moving. Now in the opposite direction, cars and trucks began backing up for about 500 meters. But strangely none of the first few cars in the line, the ones which the drivers had a clear view of the guy, honked their horns, yelled at the guy, or displayed any visible traces of irratation. It reminded me of a long string of cars waiting patiently as a mother duck led her brood across the highway. The sight of a grown man in such a state of drunkenness (at 7 am!) didn't appear to ruffle the feathers of the drivers. Everyone, after all, needs a zapoy from time to time.
