Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (24 page)

“What is this,” thundered
Izvestia
, “a national exhibit of a great country or a branch of a department store?”

Cannily, it was both.

As a girl Mom had visited the socialist fairyland of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. Now, exactly two decades later, just a mile or so away in Sokolniki, here she was in the Potemkin village of consumer capitalism. Which was more overwhelming? Mom usually giggles and rolls her eyes when I ask.

Inside Bucky’s golden dome, seven giant screens positioned overhead by the designers Charles and Ray Eames flashed with their composite short film
Glimpses of the USA
. Mom stood open-mouthed, blinking hard as 2,200 still photos pulsed through a “typical” workday and Sunday in suburban America, closing on a lingering image of flowers.

“
Nezabudki
 …” Mom murmured along with the entranced crowd. “Forget-me-nots.”

Beyond the dome waited an empire of household stuff in the Glass Pavilion. Inside stood a model apartment, outside, a model home. A Corvette and a Caddie enticed oglers. There were abstract expressionist paintings to puzzle over, a book exhibit to filch from, Disney’s 360-degree Circarama travelogue of America to crane at. Fashion models ambled along runways while decadent jazz played and ever-smiling American guides answered all comers in fluent Russian. One of the guides was having a fling with Mom’s close friend Radik. My mother couldn’t get over this
amerikanka’s
non-Soviet directness and her fantastic big teeth.

In this setting, on press preview day, July 25, the spontaneous dialectic known as the Kitchen Debate erupted between Nikita and Nixon. Tension was still running high over the Western insistence on continued free access to West Berlin, surrounded as it was by East Germany. Khrushschev was agitated further by the U.S. Congress’s renewal of its annual “Captive Nations” Resolution to pray for Iron Curtain satellite countries. He carried a chip on his shoulder, vowing not to be overawed by America’s vision of bounty. Nixon in turn hankered for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. He had to look tough.

Cue the scenario at Sokolniki:

Secret polling later showed that Russians were equally unimpressed by the Miracle Kitchen. Voters rated it last. Jazz ranked first, along with Disney’s Circarama. But so what? To U.S. minds the exhibition was its finest cold war propaganda action ever, and it was pronounced so.

My mom didn’t vote in the poll. But to her surprise and dismay, she found herself among those underwhelmed by the kitchen. If anything, it left her feeling more lonely and down than before. She wanted to love the American exhibition, almost desperately she did. Had counted on it to be a vision of pure
zagranitsa
, to spirit her out of her socialist gloom, away from the deeper, more wounding gloom of her heartache. But for days afterward, she imagined cheery Yankee housewives trapped and frightened amid their sci-fi fridges and washing machines. She couldn’t picture herself—
ever
—cooking her “pot-au-feu”
shchi
in one of those blinding steel pots. This paradigm of happiness, fashioned from plastic tumblers, bright orange juice cartons, extravagantly frosted, unnaturally tall American layer cakes, seemed just as miserably phony as anything in the
Kniga
. It violated her intimate, private dream of
Amerika
. In any case, domestic bliss, whether socialist or capitalist, seemed more elusive than ever. She ate a slice of black bread with a raw onion ring now and then, that was all, and though it was August, buried herself under the scratchy beige woolen blanket with her blue-green volume of
Swann’s Way
. The Soviets had stolen the lovely Russian term for “companion” and “fellow traveler” and fixed it to a glistening ball of metal hurtling through darkest space. Sputnik. Swann, suffering at Odette’s infidelities, was Mom’s
sputnik
in misery. There was still no word from Sergei.

And then on a dank September day, crossing a pedestrian underpass near the Bolshoi, she ran into him. Sergei looked pale, defenseless, and shivery. Larisa handed him three rubles; he seemed badly in need of a drink. He took it and walked off, gaze averted.

A few weeks later the doorbell rang at her parents’ house in the Arbat. It was Sergei—returning the money, he said. Oh, and something else. “I’ve been running into all these ballerinas,” he mumbled, “so seductive and pretty in their bell skirts. But I have this short Jewish girl on my mind
 … you are the one.
”

This is how my father proposed.

Mom should have slammed the door right then and locked it and dived back deep under the scratchy beige blanket and stayed there. Instead, she and Sergei formalized their love on a gray December afternoon in 1959, after three months of living together.

My parents’ generation, the generation of the Thaw, scoffed at white dresses and bourgeois parties. Mom and Dad’s uncivil non-ceremony took place at a drab ZAGS registry office near the Tretyakov Art Gallery. Outside, a wet snow was falling.

Under her shapeless coat with squirrel trim, Mom wore her usual blue hand-sewn poplin blouse. Sergei yet again looked pale and disheveled; he’d knocked back a hundred grams—rubbing alcohol, was it?—with buddies at work. But my parents’ spirits were good. Everything amused them in the dingy reception area. Pimply sixteen-year-olds waiting for their very first Soviet internal passports. Non-sober families, and a war invalid with his accordion serenading nervous couples reemerging from their assembly-line knot-tying. On this occasion Mom didn’t even mind the institutional smell of galoshes and acrid disinfectant that had nauseated her ever since her first elections in 1937.

A tiny head peeped out of the marriage hall area.

“Next couple!”

My parents passed through a vast hollow room beautified by a pair of forlorn chandeliers into a smaller room, this one bare save for a giant
portrait of Lenin thrusting an arm out and squinting. The arm pointed conspicuously in the direction of the toilet. Behind a crimson-draped table sat a judge fringed by two dour clerks. The wide red ribbons draped across their gray-clad chests gave them the appearance of moving banners.

The judge cast a suspicious glance at Mom’s homemade blouse. Her small face resembled a
vydra
’s (an otter’s), squished below a towering hairdo.

“ON BEHALF OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION”—the
vydra’s
petite mouth suddenly boomed like a megaphone at a parade—“WE CONGRATULATE THE …”

Mom clenched her jaw tight. She looked up at the ceiling, then over at squinting Lenin, then at Sergei, then exploded with hysterical laughter.

“STOP THIS DISGRACE, COMRADE BRIDE,” thundered the
vydra
, “OR YOU WILL BE ESCORTED FROM HERE IMMEDIATELY!”

“DO YOU PROMISE TO RAISE YOUR CHILDREN,” she resumed, “IN THE BEST TRADITIONS OF MARXISM AND LENINISM?” Mom nodded, fighting the next eruption of laughter.

“RINGS!!!” shouted the
vydra
.

Mom and Dad had none.

“WITNESSES—WHERE ARE YOUR WITNESSES?”

Ditto the witnesses.

The
vydra
didn’t bother with further felicitations. My parents didn’t seem worthy of the customary wishes of good luck in creating a new socialist family.

“SIGN HERE, NOW!”

The
vydra
shoved a stack of documents across the red table.

Mom picked up the heavy blue fountain pen with a sharp, menacing metal tip. The
vydra
snatched it away and whacked it across my mother’s knuckles.

“GROOM SIGNS FIRST!”

Three months after being assaulted with a fountain pen, Larisa moved into her mother-in-law’s communal apartment, where eighteen families shared one kitchen.

CHAPTER SIX

T
he year I was born, 1963, is remembered by Russians for one of the worst crop failures in post-Stalinist history. War rationing still fresh in their memory, comrades found themselves back in breadlines with queue numbers scribbled on their hands in violet ink so indelible and so poisonous, the joke was that it infected your blood. All over Moscow adults enlisted schoolchildren to take their place in the line. For handing over as well the extra ration of bread they were allowed, some enterprising Young Pioneers made small fortunes charging ten kopeks per breadline.

Coarse and damp was the bread waiting at the end of the line. Not just damp, but often oozing weird greenish gunk: the flour had been stretched out with dried peas. Still, Moscow was hardly near starvation. In one of those savory ironies of socialist food distribution, some stores carried shrimp and crab from Vladivostok. But regular citizens didn’t touch these exotic pink Far Eastern crustaceans out of the pompous pages of
Kniga
. Regular citizens hadn’t a clue what shrimp were. People spat hardest at the fourteen-kopek cans of corn stacked up on store counters in Giza-scaled pyramids.
All corn—no bread
. That was everyone’s curse for Kukuruznik (Corn Man), the blabbering clown in the Kremlin who’d crowned this stupid, alien corn “the new czarina of Russian fields.”