Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (22 page)

“To Stalin’s death!” hoots Katya after I’ve poured out the vodka. “Let’s clink!”

Inna is shocked.

“But, Katiush, it’s a bad omen to clink for the dead!”

“
Exactly!
We must clink so the shit may rot in his grave!”

March 5 has arrived. Outside my mother’s windows in Queens, rain hisses down as we celebrate the snuffing of Stalin’s candle. Katya, Musya, Inna—the octogenarian ladies at Mom’s table pick at the showy crab-salad platter amid fruit cornucopias and bottles of Sovetskoye bubbly. Sveta arrives last—slight, wan of face. Many moons ago, when she was a Moscow belle, the great poet Joseph Brodsky would stay with her on his visits from Leningrad. The thought touches me now.

“I
went
,” Sveta boasts, grinning, “to Stalin’s funeral!”

“Mishugina,” clucks Katya, making a “crazy” sign with her finger. “People were killed!”

As the monstrous funeral procession swelled and mourners got trampled, Sveta hung on to her school’s flower wreath—all the way to the Hall of Columns.

“The lamb, a little tough, maybe?” says Musya, assessing Mother’s chanakhi tribute to the oppressed Georgians. I pile insult on injury by slyly noting the connection to Stalin’s dacha feasts. Mom flashes me a look. She leaves for the kitchen, shaking her head.

“Here we are, girls,” Inna muses. “Arrests, repressions, denunciations … Been through
all that …
and still managed to keep our decency.”

Mom reappears with her intelligentsia-frugal pirozhki. “So enough with Stalin already,” she implores. “Can we move on to
ottepel
?”

Less than a year after Stalin’s death, Ilya Ehrenburg, a suave literary éminence grise, published a mediocre novella critiquing a socialist realist hack artist and a philistine Soviet factory boss. Or something like that; nobody now remembers the plot. But the title stuck, going on to define the era of liberalization and hope under Khrushchev.

Ottepel
. Thaw.

By 1955, after an intense power struggle—Stalin hadn’t designated any heir—Khrushchev was assuming full leadership of our Socialist Rodina. Except that nobody called the potbellied gap-toothed former metal worker Mountain Eagle or Genius of Humanity. Father of All Nations? You must be kidding. Politely, they called him Nikita Sergeevich, or simply Nikita, a folkloric Slavic name that contrasted starkly with Stalin’s aloof exotic Georgian otherness. But mostly comrades on the street called the new leader Khrushch (beetle), or Lisiy (the bald); later, Kukuruznik (Corn Man) for his ultimately self-destructive penchant for corn.

Referring to our leader with such familiar terms—that in itself was a tectonic shift.

“My elation was unforgettable, the early Thaw times—as intense as the fear during Stalin!” Inna leads off. She was working in those heady days at Moscow’s Institute of Philosophy. “Nobody worked or ate, we just talked and talked, smoked and smoked, to the point of passing out. What had happened to our country? How had we allowed it to happen? Would the new cult of
sincerity
change us?”

“The Festival!”
Katya and Sveta squeal in unison. The memory has them leaping out of their seats.

If there was a main cultural jolt that launched the Thaw, it was “the Festival.” In February 1956 Khrushchev made his epochal “secret speech” denouncing Stalin. Seventeen months later, to show the world the miraculous transformation of Soviet society, Komsomol bosses with the Bald One’s encouragement staged the Sixth International Youth Festival in the freshly de-Stalinized Russian capital.

For Muscovites that sweltering fortnight in July and August of 1957 was a consciousness-bending event.

“Festival?
Nyet
 … 
skazka
(a fairy tale)!” Sveta croons, her pallid face suddenly flushed.

Skazka
indeed. A culture where a few years earlier the word
inostranets
(foreigner) meant “spy” or “enemy” had suddenly yanked open the Iron Curtain for a brief moment, letting in a flood tide of jeans, boogie-woogie, abstract art, and electric guitars. Never—never!—had Moscow seen such a spectacle. Two million giddy locals cheered the thirty thousand delegates from more than one hundred countries in the opening parade stretching along twelve miles. Buildings were painted, drunks disciplined, city squares and parks transformed into dance halls. Concerts, theater, art shows, the street as an orgy of spontaneous contact. That internationalist summer is credited with everything from spawning the dissident movement to fostering Jewish identity. (Jews flocked from all over the USSR to meet the Israeli delegation.) More than anything else perhaps was this: the first real spark of the all-powerful myth of
zagranitsa
—a loaded word meaning “beyond the border” that would inflame, taunt, and titillate Soviet minds until the fall of the USSR.

And love, that picnic of love, the Khrushchevian Woodstock.

Sveta fell for a seven-foot-tall red-haired American. La bella Katya, translating for a delegation of Italian soccer players, had one of her inamoratos threaten suicide as they parted. In farewell, the distraught Romeo tossed her a package out of his hotel window.

“So I unwrap it at home,” cries Katya. “Panties!
Transparent
blue panties!”

Mom’s guests rock with laughter. “Remember our Soviet underpants? Two colors only: purple or blue, knee length. Sadistic elastic!”

Larisa, too, fell in love with an International Youth Festival foreigner. And he with her.

Lucien was petite and deeply tanned, with chiseled features and
dark, lively eyes. He wore a dapper short leather jacket and suede loafers so pristine and comfortable-looking, they instantly betrayed him as
ne nash
—“not ours.” Born in Paris, raised on Corsica, Lucien ran a French lycée in the Moroccan town of Meknes, a cultural cocktail Mom found intoxicating. In my mother’s cracked vinyl photo album, the fortnight’s worth of pictures of him outnumber the ones of my dad three to one.

It was their mutual interest in Esperanto that brought the lovers together. Lucien sat next to Mom at the Festival’s first Esperanto plenary session, and when two days later, under one of the behemoth Stalinist facades on Gorky Street, he put his arm around her, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Lucien radiated charm and goodwill. In all her life Mom, then twenty-three, had never had a suitor who expressed his attraction with such disarming directness, such sweetness. Somehow her three words of Esperanto allowed her to communicate her innermost feelings to Lucien where Russian had failed her before.

Which makes sense. For all the Thaw talk of sincerity, Soviet Russian wasn’t suited for goodwill or intimacy or, God knows, unselfconscious lyrical prattle. As our friend Sasha Genis the cultural critic wrote, the State had hijacked all the fine, meaningful words.
Friendship, homeland, happiness, love, future, consciousness, work
—these could only be bracketed with ironic quotation marks.

“Young lady, how about we go build Communism together” went a popular pickup line in the metro. Girls found it hysterical.

Here’s how the coyly convoluted Soviet mating ritual went: Igor meets Lida at a student dorm or party. They smoke on a windowsill. Igor needles Lida admiringly, she needles back coquettishly. Walking Lida home, Igor flaunts his knowledge of Hemingway, maybe mentions that he just happens to have sought-after tickets to the Italian film festival at the Udarnik Cinema. He lingers on her apartment landing. With studied nonchalance he mutters something about her
telefonchik
(ironic diminutive for phone number). After several weeks/months of mingy carnation offerings, aimless ambling along windswept boulevards, and heated groping in cat-piss-infested apartment lobbies, a consummation takes place. In some bushes crawling with ants if breezes are warm.
Lida gets knocked up. If Igor is decent, they go to the ZAGS, the office that registers deaths and marriages. Their happily-ever-after involves moving into her or his family “dwelling space,” which is overcrowded with a father who drinks, a mother who yells, a domineering war widow grandmother, and a pesky Young Pioneer brother. The Young Pioneer likes to spy on newlyweds having sex. From there, married life only gets jollier.

By the time I was nine, I already suspected that such nuptial bliss wasn’t for me. I had a different plan, involving
zagranitsa
. A foreign husband would be my ticket out of this “dismally-ever-after” to a glorious life filled with prestigious foreign commodities. More romantic by nature, Mom belonged as well to a generation more idealistic than mine. Her
zagranitsa
dreams did not feature hard-currency goods. Instead, into this single loaded term she distilled her desperate longing for world culture. Or, I should probably say, World Culture. After the collapse of the Stalin cosmology and her drift away from her ur-Soviet parents, culture replaced everything else in her life. It became a private devotion.

When Lucien talked of Morocco, Mom imagined herself inside some electric Matissian dreamscape. His offhand mentions of visiting his grandmother in the French countryside fired up her Proustian reveries. She could almost touch the fine porcelain teacups in
la grand-mere’s
salon, hear her pearls rattling gently. Lucien’s tiny gifts—such as a leather Moroccan change purse embossed with gold stars—were not mere commodities but totems of distant, mysterious freedoms. “A souvenir from the free world to someone locked up in a prison cage,” she now puts it.

Marriage never came up between them. Lucien stayed for all of two weeks. But simply having the non-Russian softness of his palm against hers, Mom felt her lifelong alienation blossoming into a tangible shape, an articulated desire: to break physically free of Soviet reality. On the hot August day in 1957 when Lucien departed, giving her a volume of Zola’s
Germinal
with a passionate Esperanto inscription, she knew that she too would leave. Until it happened, almost two decades later, Mom imagined that she existed in her own fourth dimension outside the Soviet time-space continuum.

“I was anti-Soviet,” she says. “But at the same time a-Soviet: an
internal
émigré cocooned in my own private ‘cosmopolitan’ microcosm.” Her own fairy tale.

To fill in a void left by Lucien and the Festival, Mom plunged back into cooking—but now her kitchen fantasies took a new tack.
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
had been retired in scorn.
Zagranitsa
was the new inspiration. What did this imaginary Elsewhere actually taste like? Mom hadn’t a clue. While she could at least mentally savor the kulebiakas and botvinya so voluptuously cited by Chekhov and Gogol, Western dishes were mere names, undecoded signs from alternative domestic realities. The absence of recipes provided a certain enchantment; you could fill in these alien names with whatever flavors you chose.

Always stubbornly cheerful and good-natured about the paucity of ingredients in stores, Mom turned her parents’ kitchen once more into a dreamer’s home workshop. She may well have been the first woman in Moscow to make pizza, from a recipe “adapted” from a contraband issue of
Family Circle
lent to her by a friend whose father once worked in America. Who cared if her “pizza” bore a resemblance to a Russian meat
pirog
, only open-faced and smothered in ketchup and gratings of Sovetsky cheese? No ingredient, really, was too dreary for Mom to subject to a tasty experiment.

“Today I’ll make pot-au-feu!” she’d announce brightly, eyeing a head of decaying cabbage. “I read about it in Goethe—I think it’s soup!”

“Tastes like your usual watery
shchi
,” her brother, Sashka, would mutter.

Mom disagreed. Just renaming a dish, she discovered, had a power to transfigure the flavor.

Every couple of weeks a letter from Lucien would arrive from Morocco.
“Mia kariga eta Lara
—my dearest little Lara,” he always began. “My heart is wrenched,” he wrote after a year. “Why doesn’t
kariga
Lara answer me anymore?”

By then
kariga
Lara was madly in love with somebody else. Somebody
named Sergei, somebody she thought looked uncannily like the French film heartthrob Alain Delon from
Rocco and His Brothers
, which she’d seen at an Italian film festival.