Aimless, Rootless Immigrant

Viktor Ananievsky is a tall, wiry man with red hair. He tells me he's 36, but his seamed face looks about 10 years older. That might be due to the White Horse whiskey and weed he consumes in massive quantities. We sit talking in his basement in Sheepshead Bay with a bottle of scotch and several packs of Marlboro reds on the little scarred wooden table. The scotch is in lowball glasses. Clouds of tobacco smoke hang in the air.

Viktor was born and raised in Sirdarya, Uzbekistan, a remote city on the Central Asian steppes, about 40 miles from the capital, Tashkent. A large percentage of the population is, like Viktor, ethnic Russian, but the majority is Uzbek. As Viktor was growing up, racial tension was always present.

"We called them zveri," he says of the Uzbeks. Zveri means beasts, or animals, in Russian.

Viktor spent high school in gang fights with Uzbeks and Russians. Upon graduation he was conscripted into the Soviet army and shipped to Afghanistan. He's reticent about his time there. When I ask him what he thinks of the current war, he stays quiet for a few seconds. "It's only the beginning," he finally says.

After finishing his service in the Army, Viktor found work as an engineer on refrigerated freight trains, a critical feature in Central Asia due to the regionwide deficit in fresh produce. He soon learned to take advantage of his new environment.

"Anything you wanted, you could get by trading your cargo," he says. "Cigarettes, anasha [weed], alcohol, anything. Then you could sell it at the next station for twice what you paid for it. We made loads of money. Had a few close calls with the cops, but they're people too, they like to get some money and a few bottles of vodka like anybody else..."

Viktor tells me about spending four days in the middle of the desert, 40 miles from the nearest population center, waiting for a repair crew when his train broke down. "We ran out of food on the second day. And this is the desert, nothing to eat at all. But we noticed these turtles. They'd come out for an hour after sunrise and an hour before sundown. So for three days we lived on turtle soup."

Another thing he remembers is the locals.

"We stopped at this village in the middle of Kazakhstan once, to trade some vegetables for anasha. And in the middle of this village is a 6-foot-tall bong, about 3 feet around. The bowl is about the size of a soup bowl. Three hoses come out of the top, and these three ancient Kazakhs are sitting around it, sucking down smoke like vacuum cleaners. I took one hit, and passed out for three hours."

A year ago, Viktor won the green-card lottery and came to America. He now works as a day laborer, mostly construction, and spends his spare time and money on weed, alcohol and hookers. His wife, who came here with him, divorced him after three months. His parents are dead back in Uzbekistan. You can tell he's bored with life here but doesn't want to go back. A rootless man, with no plans or purpose in his life.