Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (27 page)

One Soviet ruble comprising one hundred kopeks; that crumpled beige note with a hammer and sickle encircled by an extravagant wheat wreath. Mom spent it wisely.

“Not
too
rotten please, please,” she beseeched the pug-faced anti-Semite Baba Manya, at the
dereviashka
(“a little wooden one”), our basement vegetable store with its achingly familiar reek of Soviet decay.
A discolored cabbage there set you back eight kopeks; likewise a kilo of carrots. The potatoes were equally cheap and unwholesome. Mom filled our general grocery needs at the
stekliashka
(“a little glass one”), a generic nickname for glass and concrete sixties service constructions. The store lay across a scrappy ravine. On her way she nervously fingered her change. Thirty kopeks for a liter of milk, she was calculating, and a fifteen-kopek refund for the bottle. Thirty-two kopeks for ten eggs, three of them usually broken, which could last us a week.

A few coins remained for animal proteins from a store invitingly named the Home Kitchen. This was a lopsided wooden hut left over from Davydkovo’s past as a village, a dystopian apparition that sat teetering in a garbage-strewn field. Whichever direction you came from you trudged through the garbage. It was like going into combat. Tall rubber boots; iodine in Mom’s pocket in case a rusted can slashed through my footwear. In winter, alcoholics “graffitied” the snow around the Home Kitchen with piss, spelling out the word
khui
(dick). Just so you know: pissing letters while under the influence requires great skill.

At the Home Kitchen, Mom handed over twenty-four kopeks for 125 grams of “goulash” meat. The store also carried kotleti with a meat-to-filler ratio that recalled another Khrushchev-era joke. “Where does the Bald One hide all the bread? Inside the kotleti.” Mom didn’t buy them; we were poor but proud.

In our own five-meter home kitchen I assigned myself the task of inspecting the goulash and alerting Mom to its blemishes. The multicolored universe of imperfections contained in a single chunk of beef was endlessly fascinating to me. If the beef had been frozen, refrozen, and thawed again, the crosscuts offered an eye-pleasing contrast of bloody purple and gray. Sinew and fat practically shimmered with an ivory palette. The bluish spots on beef that had sat around for too long acquired a metallic glow; if the light hit them right you could see an actual rainbow. And the seal—how I loved the bright violet State seal of “freshness” stamped on some lumps of flesh.

Trimming away imperfections reduced the four-ounce beef package by half, but Mom was resourceful. Perched on a white stool, I watched
her slowly turn the handle of the awkward hand-cranked meat grinder she screwed onto the windowsill. My heart went out to her. In other families fixing the meat grinder in place was the husband’s job. Mom’s always wobbled in that defenseless feminine way. More often than not she ground the goulash with onions and bread into
frikadelki
, tiny meatballs she’d then float in a broth fortified by a naked soup bone. When a romantic mood struck her, she’d add cabbage and call the soup pot-au-feu, explaining how she’d read about this dish in Goethe. I rather preferred this Weimar pot-au-feu to the stew she prepared with the goulash and a frozen block of
guvetch
, the vitamin-rich vegetable mélange from Socialist Bulgaria with a slimy intervention of okra. I harbored a deep mistrust of Socialist Bulgaria.

On Sundays Mom invariably ran out of money, which is when she cracked eggs into the skillet over cubes of fried black sourdough bread. It was, I think, the most delicious and eloquent expression of pauperism.

We were happy together, Mom and I, inside our private idyll, so un-Soviet and intimate. She saved her kopeks to leave lovely, useless gifts on my bed every few days. A volume of Goethe’s
Faust
in a purple binding, for instance. (I was four years old.) Or a clunky weaving loom, which I never once used. For my fifth birthday, there was a recording, in Russian, of Oscar Wilde’s
The Nightingale and the Rose
. It was just the two of us celebrating. Mom splurged and made roast duck stuffed with sauerkraut. She turned off the light, lit the candles, put on the record. A heartbreaking voice droned: “The Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn … and a fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death.”

By the end of it I was hiccupping with birthday sobs.

I too lavished my mother with presents, usually paintings that tactfully avoided Soviet themes: nothing with a CCCP logo, no Yuri Gagarin grinning from his space helmet. I wasn’t so blatant as my friend Kiril, whose entire painterly opus revolved around desirable East German toy railway sets. My artworks were subtler. I specialized in princesses, generic but always modeling feminine imported outfits and outsize nylon
bows in their braids. My antimaterialist mom didn’t budge. She continued to dress me in shabby boy’s clothes and cut my hair in the shape of a bowl. She thought this looked charming.

“My Anyuta!” she’d coo to her friends. “Doesn’t she look just like Christopher Robin from my beloved E. H. Shepard illustrations?”

In my mind I devised excruciating tortures for Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh, but I didn’t hold anything against Mom. As I said, we were happy together, basking in mutual adulation like besotted newlyweds in our
khruscheba
nest. Until Mom’s compulsive hospitality syndrome went and interfered.

The mud outside had dried, and fragrant May breezes rattled the skinny apple trees below our third-floor window when Oksana and Petya showed up on our doorstep.

Mom spotted them in the goulash line at the Home Kitchen and liked them immediately. She’d never seen them before, but overhearing their conversation filled her with compassion. The pair was temporarily homeless and intended to spend the night in the train station. Mom swiftly offered our house.

The doorbell rang the next day. There stood a man with a droopy mustache and bluish circles under his eyes. His entire lower half was obscured by a vast Saint Bernard.

“Meet Rex,” said Petya. “Go ahead, hug him hello.”

It was like an invitation to cuddle a delivery truck. Overwhelmed by the dog, I hadn’t noticed the boy lurking behind Petya. He was a pudgy teenager with a gloomy expression, a sickly complexion, and arms weighed down by two cages. The bigger cage contained a white owl. Inside the second cage, mice, also white, scurried and squeaked. “Oleg,” said the gloomy boy. I couldn’t tell whether it was his name or the owl’s. “Don’t be afraid of the mice,” he said reassuringly. “Oleg will soon eat them.”

Plodding steps on the concrete staircase below announced Oksana’s arrival. She was out of breath and disheveled, a Jewish beauty
with cascades of frizzy black hair falling wildly over a large glass box she hugged in her arms. “A terrarium,” she panted. “Ever seen a
real
terrarium?” I had, at the Moscow Zoological Park. But never a python slithering this close to my face. Igor, the serpent was called. Oleg and Igor, as if from a medieval Slavic epic.

“Igor and Oleg eat the same mice,” announced the boy, suddenly smiling.

Gogol’s play
Inspector General
ends with a famous silent tableau called the “mute scene.” At the news of the arrival of the real inspector general, the entire cast freezes in horror. This was approximately how Mom greeted the unexpected menagerie.

“You … you didn’t mention you had a, um,
son
,” was all she could muster.

“Who, him? It’s Oksana’s bastard,” replied Petya, with a jovial wink.

For the following five months, living arrangements in our two-roomer were as follows: The gloomy youth lived on a cot in the five-meter kitchen. Big Rex, as the largest and most pedigreed member of our strange
kollektiv
, had the run of the premises, sometimes leaping onto the lightweight aluminum cot in my room where Mom now slept. For fear of being crushed by the canine truck, Mother stopped sleeping. Or perhaps she didn’t sleep because Oksana and Petya, taking after their owl, led a mysterious nocturnal lifestyle. Most of the day they dozed away on Mom’s ex-bed in the living room. At night they rumbled in and out of the kitchen, brewing tea and cursing when they bumped against the teenager’s cot. “Their tea,” as Mom called their brew, contained an entire packet of loose Georgian tea leaves for one mug of hot water.

My innocent mom. She had no idea that this was the hallucinogenic
chifir
that got inmates high in the gulags. She didn’t know either that the grassy-sweet smell that now mingled in our apartment with the animal odors was
anasha
, a Central Asian hashish. Violent arguments followed the couple’s intake of
anasha
and
chifir
. The whole building quaked from the pounding of neighbors on our walls, floor, and ceiling. The couple and the owl took turns disturbing the sleep of hardworking socialist households. The owl’s guttural screeching curdled the blood.

But the biggest dilemma was getting in and out of the house. Because Igor the serpent lived in the hallway. Anyone entering and exiting was treated to the sight of a python devouring albino mice procured by the youth from Medical Institute No. 2, where Oksana’s cousin worked in a lab. I spent most of the five months barricaded inside my room. The only person who still visited us was the double bassist upstairs; he enjoyed borrowing Igor to frighten his mother-in-law. Baba Alla, my grandmother, schlepped her bags of chicken and other tasty tokens of grandmotherly love all the way to Davydkovo and left them down on the doorstep. Usually Rex ate the chicken.

It was Dad who finally ended all this. He missed having a family. Hinted that if Mom cleared the coast, he’d come stay, at least on weekends. My father was, and would remain, my mother’s only true love. Oksana, Petya, Rex, Igor, Oleg, and the gloomy boy were exiled immediately, a sullen departing procession of people and cages and four thudding paws leaving behind a stench of zoo and hashish. Every flat surface of our brand-new dwelling space was scarred by burn rings from their kettle. I now acquired a semi-father in place of a python and an owl, one who delivered high-quality weekend offerings from a store called Dieta, a prestigious purveyor of cholesterol-laden items meant for the young and the infirm. Every Friday evening I listened impatiently for the turn of Dad’s key in the door, leaping into the hallway to greet Dieta’s buttermilk jellies and rich, crumbly cheese sticks. Recently Mom asked me whether I ever felt my father’s abandonment. Flashing back to the cheese sticks and especially to the white, quivery, scallop-edged jellies, I had to say no.

Mom and I never did recover our intimate idyll. In 1961 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had passed a law branding as “parasites” any citizens who refused to engage in socially meaningful labor. Punishment: up to five years of exile or internment in camps. The law acquired some notoriety in the West in connection with Joseph Brodsky, the dissident poet convicted of parasitism and forced into international exile. Although she was still technically married, with a young child, and
thus exempt from the law, Mom felt afraid and uneasy about not working. And so finally, on a brittle December day in 1968 when I was five years old, she reengaged in socially meaningful labor. She began a job teaching English at the Ministry of Merchant Marines, and I went to my very first Soviet kindergarten. I don’t remember all that much of the place, only that it was located across desolate train tracks from our
khrushcheba
, and that on my first morning there I soiled myself, I guess from separation anxiety, and for the entire day nobody attended to me. Mother discovered my shame on the way home. I still retain an image of her crying on the train tracks.

It never got any better. My fellow kindergarten inmates began falling ill from the spoiled meat in the borscht. Then on the bus Mother overheard my teacher instruct a younger colleague on how to reduce class sizes: “Open the windows—wide.” It was minus thirty degrees outside, and gusting.

Reluctantly, Mom turned to her father.