Keeping the Feast (6 page)

Three days later (unaware that Warsaw shoppers tended to patronize private farm stands for their fresh produce) I walked into the state-run produce shop not far from our new home in the Polish capital. Cramped, dreary, and grimy, the shop reeked of decaying vegetables, stale cigarette smoke, and ammonia. Two bored clerks did their best to ignore their customers and their surroundings. Most of the meager offerings of vegetables and fruit looked bruised, battered, tired, old. Considering it was still high summer, the offerings seemed so shockingly meager that I began to wonder if I had missed some declaration of war.

The shop was selling only a handful of items, virtually all of them root vegetables: dirt-encrusted potatoes; stubby, dirt-encrusted carrots; bunch after bunch of muddy beets; dirt-encrusted parsnips, celery root, horseradish, and onions; a few heads of exhausted lettuce; bright red salad radishes, nearly the only dirt-free item on offer; and plastic containers filled with fat cabbages, the only thing in the shop that looked as if it had been picked within recent memory. The fruit, if anything, looked even worse than the vegetables: battered brown-skinned apples, bruised green pears.

Roman housewives are extraordinarily particular about each ingredient they buy for the family pot. Haranguing the occasional vendor who might try to slip a less-than-perfect tomato into their sack is an art form of elevated nature. Had Roman housewives been transported to Warsaw en masse after the war, I thought, they surely would have staged violent, impromptu revolutions at their local greengrocers and the Communists might have been turned out of power decades earlier.

 

 

 

 

O
ur last night in Rome before the move, our closest friends organized a small, going-away dinner on the Gianicolo, a steep, verdant hill that overlooks the city spread out at its feet. We ate at one of our favorite outdoor restaurants, a large, noisy eatery set under vine-covered terraces whose vast array of antipasti alone was enough for a meal. We ate and drank, ate and talked, ate and laughed, ate and joked. My Greek-American friend, Eleni, was the only one who cried. Married to an Italian and unlikely ever to leave, she wept that she was being abandoned yet again by another peripatetic friend whom she had hoped would stay forever.

Around midnight, we all walked down the hill and across the Tiber to the Trevi Fountain, the very spot where I so happily started my life in Rome four years earlier. With our backs to Neptune and the leaping cascades of water through which he drives his imaginary chariot, John and I threw the prescribed coins over our left shoulders into the foaming fountain to ensure our return to Rome. Both of us knew the gesture was overkill; there was no question but that we would be back.

 

 

 

 

W
e stepped off our Alitalia flight to Warsaw the next day with suitcases slung over our shoulders and potted herbs in our hands. I carried the rosemary bush that had flavored so many of our Roman meals. John toted a terra-cotta pot of foot-high basil, planted specially that spring and coddled over the summer so that we could bring the taste of our old home to our new one.

We were still descending the plane’s metal stairway to the tarmac when Warsaw suddenly seemed a very long way from Rome. It was not just the cold, blustery summer rain drumming down, the type of weather that might occasionally blow into Rome in late November. Our two-and-a-half-hour flight seemed to have carried us over decades as well as miles, to some twilight period just after the war, a war that Italy clearly had won. It was a war that Poland just as clearly had lost, or that forty years later was somehow still dragging on, history be damned. Suddenly I was relieved we had decided to lug the herbs.

The air itself gave off a peculiar smell, an acrid, smoky sulfuric stink I had never smelled before. It came from the cheap, soft brown coal, full of sulfur and other pollutants, that heated homes, factories, and water from Vladivostok to the Fulda Gap. But there was more than a stink to the air. Weariness and resignation hung there, too, both more palpable than any chemical smell.

It took some months for me to realize that our move to Warsaw was more than a shift from West to East, more than a change from democracy to communism, more than a descent from first world to second. Moving from
bella Roma
to Warsaw was essentially a move from a world of sunny, golden
abbondanza
to a darker, drabber world of
nie ma.
From abundance to want, in one short flight.

Poles endured shortages of just about everything then: meat, gasoline, furniture, chocolate, and in jam-making season, a staple as basic as sugar itself. If communism were to conquer the Sahara, the old joke went, a shortage of sand was destined to follow. Poles stood in long lines to buy just about everything: from such basics as bread or sanitary napkins—boxes of Western tampons, like bottles of Polish vodka, greased the wheels of fortune during the Communist days, the most desired of bribes—to treats such as bananas or lemons, whose occasional appearances, in a country that tends to drink its tea with lemon, always provoked crowds eager to buy. Poles put up with frequent blackouts, hopeless telephones, gritty drinking water, wiretapping of private homes, and general government harassment of its supposed enemies, both local and Western. Even the colors of daily life seemed wrong: tap water was slightly brown, milk was slightly blue, children’s faces, except in high summer, were wan.

Once John and I finally got through the chaos of immigration and customs—always fraught during the cold war years—we headed straight to the New York Times house, an oversize, frumpily grand villa built by a well-off railroad engineer in the 1930s, well before the Communist takeover. We set the rosemary and basil plants in the sunniest spot we could find, on the sills of the enormous windows that lined the south side of the living room and overlooked a big, wraparound veranda. Pear, cherry, apple, and apricot trees filled the tiny bit of garden that the Communists had not seized after the war.

It was a Sunday, so attic offices of the
Times
were uncharacteristically silent. The rain, cold and steady, was nothing like the occasional hot summer deluges that Romans pray for, a momentary respite from months of unending heat. It was only August but I was soon rifling my suitcase, looking to see if I had thought to bring a warm sweater on the plane. Both of us started rummaging around the kitchen until we found a canister of tea, and we made a big pot, hoping its heat and warmth would chase away the case of jitters that had settled over us after our footsteps started to echo in that empty house.

The truth was that neither of us was totally prepared for the new life together we had so eagerly awaited. Until the day we arrived in Warsaw, I had seen John cry from happiness, not sadness. Now his mood plummeted when he thought about Peter and Anna back in West Germany with their mother, and the weeks he would have to wait before they could visit us. I watched the tears pour down his cheeks and felt derailed: there was nothing I could do to stop him missing his children. He was fretting too about how long it would take for his Polish to become good enough for him to work on his own, and I was worrying about trading religious news, which I loved, for political news, which had always left me vaguely cold.

That first evening in Warsaw, we pulled ourselves out of our afternoon funk and headed downtown for our first meal together in our new home city. We checked out the restaurants on the main historic square and chose the one that looked most inviting. A pleasant waiter brought over enormous menus, with dozens of possibilities. Jitters at bay, we were eager to begin trying to decipher the menu, offering by offering. After a certain amount of head scratching and consulting of a pocket dictionary, we each decided what we would eat. When the waiter returned to take our order, he responded to each of our requests with the same staccato response:
“Nie ma”
—There isn’t any—one of the few Polish phrases I already knew. We were getting our first lesson in Polish-style communism, that restaurant menus were basically a charade—long lists of fantasy meals that the management might have liked to serve had the ingredients been available.

We ended up eating the only dishes the kitchen could provide that rainy Sunday night: clear beet broth with tiny mushroom-filled pierogi (excellent), followed by duck roasted with apples (good, but fatty), and a salad of grated carrot and celery root fixed in a cream dressing (ghastly). It was a meal that filled our stomachs but offered little to our souls, good enough in its own way, but after our Roman experience, certainly unremarkable. We had no idea that we would eat that identical restaurant meal scores of times during our years in Poland; it was as if the Communist bureaucracy had ruled long before that those three dishes, along with the occasional herring or roast pork or turkey breast with canned pineapple, were the only culinary possibilities throughout the land.

No wonder, then, that on the rare occasions when John and I would be in Warsaw at the same time we ate mainly at home or at the home of the same few close friends. Long overseas assignments tend to turn friends into ersatz family. So whenever our jobs weren’t pushing us to socialize—at diplomatic dinners and receptions, at private dinners or over drinks with opposition leaders—we relaxed at home with our pretend relatives, a few reporter couples who felt like family. We usually congregated at the Los Angeles Times house, whose resident border collie, Oomba, having no sheep to herd, happily herded us instead. Oomba liked to keep us together, in a huddle around the dining room table, eating, talking, and laughing.

I loved those evenings, when Chuck Powers, the
L.A. Times
reporter, would barbecue us freshly butchered pork loins that he might have found on his last trip to the countryside; when his wife, Cheryl Bentsen, would throw together a salad; when John or I would cook a saffron risotto or spaghetti Bolognese to start the meal; when the Associated Press or
Washington Post
couples would bring some homemade dessert. When we would finish one of those lazy suppers and finally leave the table, Oomba would bark, twitching with worry for our safety, until he had efficiently herded us, his human flock, into a snug corner of the living room.

But our best memories of Warsaw stem from real family visits: when Anna, seven, who attended German schools, learned to count and add in English by playing endless games of Monopoly with Peter, John, and me; when we took the children on a weeklong tour of northern Poland so far from established tourist routes that we bunked in a vacation resort meant for Communist business managers, where a large family of mice noisily gnawed on the sofa stuffing all night long; when John’s brother, Paul, brought his family the very week that the Communists were voted out of power.

Both John and I worked flat-out that week in July 1989, trying to capture the sense of history being made, the first Soviet satellite slipping out of its postwar Russian orbit. Each night that Paul, Chan, Drew, and Emily were there, dinner got served later and later, until the night of the election itself, when we didn’t even get to the table until long after midnight. That night we ate, and toasted ordinary Poles, who after nearly half a century of oppression had finally bested the Communist usurpers.

Many of our friends in the opposition were accustomed to unemployment, dead-end jobs, jail, and threats against them and their children. Suddenly they were about to become Poland’s new leaders: government ministers, ambassadors, newspaper editors, television executives. It was one of those rare, giddily momentous turns of history that provoked emotional goose-flesh, akin to watching Barack Obama sworn in as the first black president of the United States. Long after all of us had left Poland, I realized Oomba’s innate need to herd and guard us had been sound. We all needed watching over as the old life began to teeter before the fall.

W
hen I was born, and my father’s mother learned that I was to be christened Paula, she railed at the heavens and told my parents she would never accept the idea that her first grandchild would carry a name that sounded for all the world to her like
pollo
, the Italian word for chicken.

I never heard this story until I was ten or eleven, when my mother, out of my father’s hearing, whispered to me that Angelina had always hated my name. The story rang true: my grandmother never called me anything but Piccinin, which means “little one” in her Venetian dialect. My mother’s whisperings also made me realize that my father’s curious pet name for me—Chicken—whose history I had never questioned, was not just an idle nickname but his own brand of quiet determination to name his firstborn whatever he and my mother wished. Angelina had been dead for a couple of years before we learned just how determined she had been to christen me Rita.

I was twenty-one and visiting Italy for the first time when I learned from my father’s relatives in Verona that they had had no idea who I was when they got my letter saying I was coming to meet them. I understood only the simplest phrases in Italian then, and they spoke no English. To make sure I understood what they were trying to say, they brought out a box of old photos sent from my grandmother over the years. There were snapshots of my baptism, first communion, high school graduation, and numerous photos of me standing near the magnolia tree in my grandparents’ front garden. Cousin Marisa turned the photos over so I couldn’t help getting the point: each was marked “Rita” in my grandmother’s neat hand. Though I found my grandmother’s lie little short of monstrous at the time, I have over the years developed a perverse soft spot for the dauntless strength of her will, perhaps because I suspect I inherited a certain useful stubbornness of my own directly from her. In any event, it seems I had always been a different person in Italy than I was in the United States, even before I’d ever been there.