Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (26 page)

These scores of diapers couldn’t simply be bought at a store. In an economy where every shred and scrap was recycled, all twenty
pelyonki
were made at home, by cutting up and hand-hemming old sheets. During the day Mom soaked them in cold water with suds from a brown smelly soap bar she grated until her knuckles bled. At night she scalded them in a four-gallon bucket on the stove of a communal apartment kitchen lacking hot water, then rinsed all twenty under an icy stream from the rusted communal tap until her arms were falling-off frozen. The weight of maternal love came down on me with full force when I learned that each morning she then
ironed
the twenty
pelyonki
. Mom claims that she loved me so much, she didn’t mind the diaper routine,
which I guess makes her a Soviet martyr to Motherhood. After she told me about it, I went to bed lamenting what a burden I’d been, being born.

This was Dad’s sentiment, too.

Initially he rather enjoyed Soviet fatherhood. He helped with the
pelyonki
. Stood in breadlines after work. Arrived home “tired but joyful,” to use a cherished socialist-realist cliché, with heavy, doughy bricks of rye inside his string bag. Together he and Mom bathed me in a zinc tub, adding disinfectant drops that tinted the water pink. But after three months, this life no longer seemed so rosy and pink to Dad. One night he didn’t come home. Mom spent sleepless hours running to the single black telephone of the entire communal apartment at the far end of the endless unheated hallway. The phone was silent, as silent as the
alkogolik
Tsaritsin passed out by the kitchen. In the morning Mother put on the seductive lilac robe with tiny white checks, a gift from Clara, her American aunt, and she waited. She waited long enough to read me the entire volume of
Mother Goose
in both Russian and English. (Humpty Dumpty translates as “Shaltai Baltai,” in case you’re curious.)

A murky February dusk had already descended when Sergei returned. He had hangover breath and a look of aggressive guilt. It didn’t make sense, him having a family, he announced from the threshold. “This whole
baby
business …” He let it go at that. He had no real means to provide for the family, no energy to endure the breadlines, no real desire. He yanked off a quilted blanket covering the folding cot in the corner. Slowly, demonstratively, he unfolded the cot a safe distance from the marital bed and fell asleep right away. Mom says that he snored.

On occasion Sergei would come home after work, and reenter my mother’s bed. Or sleep on the cot. Often he wouldn’t come home for weeks. He never bathed me anymore but from time to time he’d pick me up and make goo-goo eyes. Mom’s life went on—a wrenching, demoralizing limbo that left her will broken and her heart always aching. In her wildest, most daring fantasies Larisa hoped for one thing now: a half-basement room of her own where she and I would have tea from
colorful folkloric cups she’d once seen at a farm market. Happiness to her was those cups, those artisanal cups of her own.

Mom’s purgatory lasted three years.

By the standards of the massive and perpetual housing crisis that pushed half the Soviet population into far more suffocating arrangements than ours, three years was a virtual fortnight. Anna Akhmatova, my genius namesake, was brought into a communal apartment at the Fountain House (formerly Sheremetev Palace) in Leningrad by her longtime lover, Nikolai Punin. His ex-wife lived with them. After the lovers’ breakup, both Akhmatova and the ex-wife remained in the flat, with nowhere to go, while Punin brought home new lovers. Following Punin’s arrest, Akhmatova continued to shuffle through a series of rooms at the same apartment (which now houses a tenderly curated museum). Memoirists recall how she and her ex-lover’s ex-family all sat at the dinner table, not talking. When Akhmatova’s son came back from the gulag he slept on a
sunduk
(trunk) in the hallway. At the Fountain House Akhmatova spent almost thirty years.

I too slept on a
sunduk
in the drafty hallway of my grandparents’ Arbat apartment when, in despair, Mom would run back to Naum and Liza. It was the same blue lightweight trunk that during the war saved Liza’s family from starvation. My grandparents’ two tiny rooms were already overcrowded with Mom’s brother and my three-year-old cousin, whose mother had her own marital difficulties. So Mom slept on a cot in the kitchen or next to me in the hallway. In the archaeology of Soviet domestic artifacts, the
raskladushka
—a lightweight aluminum and khaki tarp folding cot on which entire lives had been spent—ranks, perhaps, as the most heartbreaking and the most metaphoric. It also damaged millions of backs.

My mother was fortunate to have her marriage collapse in 1964.

In the late fifties, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, best known for epic symphonies, scored
Moskva, Cheryomushki
, a rollicking operetta pastiche satirizing the housing shortage. In 1962 it was turned into a
film. Sasha and Masha, its young protagonists, have a marital crisis that is the inverse of my parents’ mess: they’re recently wed but forced by the dreaded “housing issue” to live apart, each with his or her family. My favorite bit is the campy Technicolor dream sequence when Sasha and Masha go waltzing through their imaginary new digs—private digs!—singing “Our hallway,
our
window,
our
coat hanger … 
Nashe, nashe, nashe: ours ours ours.”
In the film’s socialist Hollywood ending, corrupt housing officials taste defeat and the lovers finally nest in their ugly new prefab flat—
nashe nashe
!—in the Cheryomushki district.

Cheryomushki in southwestern Moscow was, in fact, quite real, the country’s first mass development of private apartments. Similar housing blocks went shooting up in the sprawl of other outlying
mikrorayoni
(micro-districts). They were the Bald One’s low-cost revision of the Soviet domestic fairy tale: an escape from the hell of forced communality. At long last the nuclear family had a promise of privacy.

It’s hard to overestimate the shift in consciousness and social relations brought about by this upsurge of new housing. Initiated by Khrushchev in the late fifties, the construction continued well beyond him, into the eighties. It was the country’s biggest lifestyle transformation since the 1917 revolution, and represented probably the Bald One’s greatest social achievement.

By 1964 close to half the population—almost 100 million people—had moved into the new, bare-bones units slapped up quick and shoddy from prefab concrete panels. Soviet stats boasted that the USSR was churning out more apartments per year than the USA, England, France, West Germany, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland combined. Who doesn’t remember those endless housewarming bashes where we sat on the floor and ate herring off a newspaper, garnished with enticing whiffs of wallpaper glue? The prefabs put an end to the era of ornate, lofty-ceilinged, elite Stalinist housing. No longer just for
nomenklatura
and Stakhanovites, material well-being (such as it was) was now touted as a birthright for all. Khrushchev wanted to offer us a preview of the promise of full communism, shining bright
just beyond
Mature Socialism. And like Iosif Vissarionovich before him, Nikita Sergeevich
bothered with the details. The Mustachioed One sniffed the soap. The Bald One tested and approved the standardized
unitaz
(toilet).

It was not large, this
unitaz
. Private dwellings were in no way meant to provoke bourgeois aspirations or rampant individualism. The vernacular name for the new prefabs, after all, was
khrushcheba
, a contraction of Khrushchev and
truscheba
(slum). What’s more, the new egalitarian residential spirit expressed itself in crushing architectural uniformity. Boxlike elevatorless blocks, usually five stories high, held multiple tiny
dvushki
(two-roomers). Ceiling height: two and a half meters. Living room: fourteen square meters. Bedroom: always the same eight square meters. For cooking, eating, talking, guzzling vodka, sipping tea, chain-smoking, doing homework, telling political jokes, playing the seven-string Russian guitar, and generally
expressing
yourself, the now-legendary “five-
metrovki
”—shorthand for the minuscule fifty-square-feet kitchens—fondly remembered later as incubators of free speech and dissent. The expression “kitchen dissident” entered the lexicon from here. Dissidence was an unintended but profound consequence of Khrushchev’s housing reforms.

The unrelenting sameness of the
khrushchebas
weighed heavily on the Soviet soul. “Depressing, identical apartment buildings,” wrote Alexander Galich, a well-known bard and singer of the time, forced into exile. “With identical roofs, windows, and entrances, identical official slogans posted on holidays, and identical obscenities scratched into the walls with nails and pencils. And these identical houses stand on identical streets with identical names: Communist Street, Trade Union Street, Peace Street, the Prospect of Cosmonauts, and the Prospect or Plaza of Lenin.”

Most of the above applied to the long-awaited new home we finally moved into in 1966. With a couple of major exceptions. Our street was called Davydkovskaya, not Lenin, Engels, Marx, or, God forbid, Mom’s dreaded Gagarin. Full address: Davydkovskaya, House 3, Fraction 1, Structure 7. At first, yes, Mom and I wandered forever trying
to find it among identical blocks surrounded by pools of mud. But the neighborhood—Davydkovo, part of the Kuntsevo district—wasn’t depressing. It was rather charming, in fact. A former village in the western reaches of Moscow, it was a twenty-minute drive from the Kremlin along a wide, arrow-straight road. In former times Davydkovo was known for its bracing air and for the nightingales that sang from the banks of a fast-moving, shallow river called Setun’. A short walk from our Khrushchev slum rose a beautiful forest of fragrant tall pines. The pines shaded a massive green fence surrounding the closed-up dacha of a certain short, pockmarked Georgian, deceased for over a decade and rarely mentioned.

Mom swears we owed our
khrushcheba
joy to a ring and a miracle. It all began with a whisper—someone, somewhere, tipping her off to a waiting list for apartments that moved surprisingly swiftly. But there was a catch: the flat was a co-op requiring a major down payment. Which is where the ring and supposed miracle enter the picture. An art nouveau folly of dark-yellow gold in the shape of a graceful diamond-studded bouquet, the band was a post-war present to Liza from Naum, celebrating their survival. Babushka Liza lacked bourgeois instincts; I’ve always admired that about her. Having worn the ring once or twice, she tossed it into her sewing box. She was mending socks when Mom told her about the impossible down payment. The ring—so Mother swears—glinted at Liza with magical force. Miraculously a buyer materialized, offering the very seven hundred rubles (six monthly salaries) needed for the down payment. The entire family took it as an omen, and nobody was upset when they later learned that the ring was worth at least five times that price.

And so, here we were.

Our
sauerkraut fermented under a wooden weight in
our
very
own
enameled bucket on
our
mini-balcony. From
our
windows hung
our
curtains, sewn by Mom from cheapo plaid beige and brown linen.
Our
shoe-box-size fridge, which Boris, the drunken plumber, had affixed to a wall because there was no space in the kitchen. The fridge beckoned like a private hanging garden of Babylon. Falling asleep every night in
the privacy of her own four walls, my mother felt … Well, she felt she was still living in a Bolshevik communal utopia.

Our
walls were cardboard
khruscheba
walls. Ukrainian Yulia next door wailed at her husband’s philandering. Prim Andrei upstairs rehearsed plaintive double bass passages from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony to the guttural ostinato of Uzbek arguments on the ground floor. The worst tormentors, Colonel Shvirkin and his chignoned wife, Nina, were quiet as mice, but such unacceptably paradisiacal smells of fried baby hen wafted from their kitchen that the entire building wanted to collectively lynch them.

My mother couldn’t afford baby hens. After several years of maternity leave she still refused to rejoin the workforce. Relatives chided her, but she insisted she
had
to spend every second with her little Anyutik. And so we lived essentially on Dad’s forty-five-ruble alimony, less than half of the pitiful Soviet monthly wage. Occasionally Mom added a pittance by giving an English lesson to Suren, an Armenian youth with fuzz on his lip and a melon-bosomed mother with fuzz on her lip. “Larisa Naumovna! I understood
everything
!” Suren would bleat. “Except this one strange word everywhere.
T-k-he?
” Which is the Russian pronunciation of
the
.

After utilities and transportation, Mother had thirty rubles left for food. Nowadays she recounts our ruble-a-day diet with glee. It’s the same girlish giddiness that lights up her face whenever she describes cleaning houses for a living in our first year in America. In those early dissident days, poverty—or I should rather say pauperism—carried an air of romance, of defiance.