Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (15 page)

Seeing Mom’s handiwork, Liza flailed a dishrag at her, but without her usual vigor. That day, and for days after, she kept looking for the key to Naum’s desk. She was trying to decide if now was the time to read Larisa and Yulia the letter he had written and locked in a drawer. The letter that urged his children to love him, love their mother, and love their
Rodina
—no matter what might suddenly have happened to him.

CHAPTER FOUR

O
n the weekend of June 21, 1941, in honor of the official arrival of summer, Liza finally switched from listless hot winter borscht to the chilled summer version. Tangy and sweet, the soup was alive with the crunch and vitality of the season’s first cucumbers and radishes. Following a short cold spell, Saturday’s weather was heartbreakingly lovely. Sun beamed on the lipstick-red tulips and dressy white lilies at the Pushkin Square flower beds; petunias scented the Boulevard Ring. Girls in their light graduation dresses floated past couples embracing on the Moskva River embankment. Summer plans, stolen kisses, blue and white cans of Mikoyan’s condensed milk packed for the dacha. Even the babushkas who hawked fizzy water with cherry syrup at parks somehow looked decades younger. The happiness in the air was palpable, stirring. Or so it seemed to my mother on her Saturday stroll with Yulia and their father.

Naum was back with them—for a brief while at least. Ever since his alarming disappearance in 1939, when Liza thought him arrested or dead, his absences had gotten more prolonged and frequent. One morning Liza sat on the narrow cot that Mom shared with Yulia and explained Papa’s job.

“Soviet spy?” Mom squealed with glee.

“Nyet, nyet!
Razvedchik
(intelligence worker).”

That too sounded thrilling. To protect their dad’s secrets from enemies of the people, Mom and Yulia took to stealthily eating his papers. They’d tear them into confetti, soak them in milk, and dutifully chew, handful by handful. This felt heroic—until Naum threw a fit after they swallowed his
sberkassa
(savings bank) documents.

The girls now learned to put the names of foreign countries to his absences; they learned where their presents were coming from. The Russo-Finnish war of that winter in 1940—a hapless bloodbath that sent Russians home badly mauled but with a strategic chunk of the chilly Ladoga Lake—yielded Larisa and Yulia a festive tin box of Finnish butter cookies. Bright yellow neck scarves of fine flimsy cotton were the girls’ trophies from the ugly Soviet occupation of Estonia in July of 1940. From Naum’s intelligence missions in Stockholm came sky-blue princess coats with fur trim. Scandinavia and the Baltic were Naum’s specialties. He never mentioned the ugliness.

There were six of them now sharing two communal rooms in the house of composers. Liza’s widowed dad from Odessa was living with them, snoring in the living room where the girls slept. Dedushka Yankel was obliging and doleful. A retired old Jewish communist shock-worker (pre-Stakhanovite uberlaborer), he hated the Talmud and detested the Bible. Mom liked to tug at the wispy clumps of hair on his temples as he sat in the kitchen copying
The Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party
into his notebook over and over and over. He knew it by heart, Stalin’s Party catechism.

Sashka, their new baby brother, was noisier. Liza had him in May while Naum was in Sweden, and her heart nearly broke in the maternity ward when she saw the nurse carry a huge bouquet of pink roses to some other lucky new
mamochka
. “For you,” said the nurse, smiling. “Look out the window.” Below, Naum waved and grinned. Since the baby was born he hadn’t left Moscow.

Sashka wasn’t crying and Dedushka wasn’t snoring late on Saturday, June 21. Still, Mom couldn’t sleep. Perhaps she was overexcited at the prospect of seeing the famous chimp Mickey at the Moscow Circus the next day. Or maybe it was the thunderstorm that broke the still, airless sky after ten. Waking up often from her uneasy slumber, Mom noticed
Naum in the room, crouched by his Latvian VEF shortwave radio. The radio’s flashing green light and the non-Russian voices—
Hello
 … 
Bee Bee See
—finally lulled my mother to sleep.

Naum had his ear to the radio, fists clenched. Damn VEF! Were it not for the sleeping girls he’d have smashed it to pieces. It was shortly after dawn on Sunday. A static-crackly foreign voice had announced what he and his superiors had been warning about for months with desperate near certainty. His small suitcase had been packed for a week. Why wasn’t headquarters calling? Why did he have to crouch by the whining, buzzing radio for information when intelligence had been so overwhelming, when he himself had reported menacing activity at the new Soviet-Baltic border for more than a year? Top-level defense professionals had been aghast at the TASS news agency statement of June 14, which dismissed as base rumor the possibility of attack by Russia’s Non-Aggression Treaty cosigner—Nazi Germany. But the directive for the TASS pronouncement had come from the Vozhd (Leader) himself. Certain top commanders left for vacations; others went to the opera.

Meanwhile, early the previous evening, a small, somber group had gathered nervously in Stalin’s Kremlin office. Among those present was Naum’s uberboss, naval commissar Admiral Kuznetsov. He’d brought along Captain Mikhail Vorontsov, a longtime acquaintance of Granddad’s (and his direct boss some months later). Vorontsov had just landed from Berlin, where he was Soviet naval attaché. Hitler would invade at any hour, he warned. Stalin had been hearing these kinds of detailed alarms for months. He rejected them with contempt, even fury. Tellingly, the meeting started without his new chief of military staff, General Georgy Zhukov.

The signs, however, were too ominous to dismiss. The Dictator was noticeably agitated. General Zhukov rang at around eight p.m. from the defense commissariat: a German defector had crossed the border to warn that the attack would start at dawn. After midnight he rang again: another defector said likewise. Stalin grudgingly allowed a High Alert
to be issued—with the bewildering caution not to respond to German “provocations.” He also ordered the latest defector shot as a disinformer.

At his dacha the Leader, an insomniac usually, must have slept deeply that night. Because Zhukov was kept waiting on the line for a full three minutes when he telephoned just after dawn.

“The Germans are bombing our cities!” Zhukov announced.

Heavy breathing on the other end of the line.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” asked Zhukov.

Upon returning to the Kremlin, Stalin appeared subdued, even depressed, his pockmarked face haggard. Refusing to address the nation himself, he delegated it to Molotov, who was then foreign commissar and stuttered badly. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in the history of warfare, comprising more than three million German troops augmented by Axis forces, and ranging from the Baltic to the Black Sea, had been allowed to commence in effective surprise.

In the early light of June 22, lying in bed with her eyes half closed, Larisa saw her father pull her mother to his chest with a force she’d never witnessed before. The embrace—desperate, carnal—told her that the circus was off even before Naum’s one-word announcement: war.

At midday they all stood among panicked crowds under the black, saucer-shaped public loudspeakers.

“Citizens of the Soviet Union!… Today, at four a.m.… German troops … have attacked our, um um, country … despite … a treaty of non-aggression …”

Mercifully, Comrade Molotov didn’t stutter as much as usual. But his halting speech was that of a clerk struggling through an arcane document. “Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten,” concluded the world’s worst public speaker.

“What does
perfidious
mean?” asked children all over Moscow. What happened to Stalin? wondered their parents, joining the stampedes for salt and matches at stores.

At two p.m. that afternoon, amid the wrenching chaos of departures
at the Leningradsky railway station, Mother couldn’t help but admire Naum’s spiffy gray civilian suit.

“Please, please, take off that hat!” Liza yelled, running after his train. “It makes you look Jewish—the Germans will kill you.”

The Father of all Nations finally spoke on July 3.

“Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! I am addressing
you
, my friends!”

It was a moving speech. The brothers and sisters line went down in history as possibly the only time Stalin called out to Russians in such an un-godlike familial fashion. Stalin had been even less godlike in private, though that was not known until years after his death.

“Lenin left us a great legacy and we shitted it away,” the Vozhd had blurted dismally a few days before his speech, after a frantic session at the defense commissariat where the ruthless General Zhukov had fled the room sobbing.

Indeed. By the time Stalin spoke to the nation, the Germans had swept some four hundred miles into Soviet territory along three fronts. By late October they counted three million Russian POWs. The tidal roar of the Wehrmacht with its onrushing Panzer tanks, Luftwaffe overhead, and SS rear guard would not begin to be turned until Stalingrad, a year and a half away.

After Naum’s departure, though, life in Moscow seemed to Mom almost normal. Except that it wasn’t. People carried home masks resembling sinister elephant trunks. Women with red swollen eyes clutched the hands of their husbands and sons all the way to conscription points. Dedushka Yankel glued X-shaped strips of tape on the windows and covered them with dark curtains, as officially required. The wails of the air raid sirens awoke in Mom the familiar sensations of alarm and
toska
, but now with an edge of adrenaline.
Strakh
(fear) was more tolerable somehow than
toska
. Falling asleep fully clothed, a rucksack packed with water and food by her bed for the frantic run to the bomb shelter—it was terrifying and just a little bit thrilling.

In the dark, freshly plastered shelter beneath the house of composers, familiar faces were fewer with each air raid. Loudspeakers urged
remaining Muscovites to evacuate. “Nonsense,” Liza kept murmuring. “Haven’t they said the war’s almost over? Why go?” Following one particularly long mid-August night on the concrete shelter floor, they came back to the house. Liza opened the curtains. Her hollow scream still rings in Mother’s ears after seventy years.

The entire panorama of shingled Moscow roofs Mom so loved stood in flames in the gray morning light.

The telephone call came at seven a.m. The evacuation riverboat was leaving that day. Someone from Naum’s headquarters could collect them in a couple of hours.

Liza stood in the living room, lost. Scattered around her were the cotton parcels and pillowcases she’d been distractedly stuffing. She was five feet tall, as thin as a teenager at thirty-one years of age, still exhausted from childbirth, fragile and indecisive by nature.

Sergei’s baritone jolted her out of her stupor. He was their driver. Everything ready? One glance at Liza’s flimsy parcels sent him into a tornado of packing.

“Your winter coats. Where are they?”

“Winter?
Please
, the war will be over by then!”

“Whose clothes are these?”

“My husband’s—but don’t touch them. He doesn’t need them—he’s fighting.”

Sergei now swung open the
sunduk
in the hallway. It was a lightweight blue trunk that had once belonged to an aunt who’d fled long ago to America, where she ran a chicken farm. It still held her stuff. The smell of mothballs wafted into the air as Sergei wrenched out Aunt Clara’s old petticoats and filled the blue
sunduk
with Naum’s dandyish suits, his dazzling white shirts, and the ties he wore on his intelligence missions. Dedushka’s old sheepskin coat. Liza’s fuzzy Orenburg shawl. The girls’
valenki
boots. Done packing, Sergei picked up both girls at once and tickled them with his breath. He had a wide smile and honest Slavic blue eyes. He also had a raging case of TB he’d pass on to the children.

The building manager came to seal off the apartment per regulations.
Approaching the riverboat station, Liza screamed: they’d forgotten little Sashka. Sergei raced back to the house while the family waited on board, sick with anxiety. Smiling broadly, Sergei made it back with the baby.