Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (31 page)

Finally, where would Soviet medicine be without this all-important receptacle?

COMRADES WOMEN, BRING YOUR PREGNANCY TEST SAMPLES IN MAYONNAISE JARS PREVIOUSLY SCALDED WITH BOILING WATER
, instructed signs at gynecological clinics. And it wasn’t just pregnant women: anyone having a urinalysis—routinely required for most polyclinic visits—had to deliver their specimen in the container from the tangy Provansal mayonnaise.

My poor mom. She was forced to contribute half her meager salary to the Soviet mayonnaise industry. My affliction was the reason.

The trouble began when I was eight. My life had actually turned fairly rosy by then. I excelled in second-grade Spanish at School 110, which my mom had also attended. I devotedly practiced piano for my weekly lessons at the prestigious Moscow Conservatory prep school near our Arbat house. I even acted in Soviet films on the side, not that my celluloid career was anything glamorous. Mainly it involved perspiring for hours in thick makeup and polyester costumes from fashion-forward Poland while waiting for an inebriated cinematographer to be fished out of a drunk tank. On the elaborate period set of Tolstoy’s
Childhood
, however, the costumes were gauzy and gorgeous, and the cameraman was fairly sober. But there was another problem: the entire juvenile cast became disfigured by boils—caused, they said, by a viral mosquito gorging itself on young flesh within Ostankino TV Film Studios. The casting director herded the children to the Union of Cinematographers dermatologist. As the doc examined our boils, I decided to show him as well an oddly discolored patch on my right ankle that had been alarming Baballa.

The doctor sent me home with a note. On it was a single word, which sent Mom and Baballa rushing in past the bearded statue of Ilyich outside the Lenin Library.

“Scleroderma.”

I’m not sure exactly how the
Soviet Medical Encyclopedia
described it. But I do remember the conversation between Mom and Dr. Sharapova, Moscow’s most in-demand dermatologist, to whom she immediately hauled me.

Sharapova: “Is Anechka an only child?”

Mom: “Yes.”

Sharapova, in a treacly voice: “Larisa Naumovna! You are young. There will be other children.”

Mom didn’t want other children. Besides, her reproductive system had already been ravaged by socialist gynecology. So began our epic battle with scleroderma, which, it became quickly apparent, baffled and defied Soviet medics. Vitamin A and vitamin E; massage and physiotherapy; a ferociously expensive elite herbal goo called
moomiyo
used by
Olympic athletes and cosmonauts; daily penicillin injections; weekly cortisone shots; mineral-rich mud from the gaudy and piratical Black Sea port of Odessa. All were deployed randomly, in hope of defeating this potentially fatal autoimmune disease—one that would most likely spread, so Mom was informed in whispers, from my leg to my vital internal organs, and shut them all down. We spent the next two years on a grinding merry-go-round of doctors, always clutching test samples in a trusted mayonnaise jar. While Mom endured yet more shrugs and compassionate frowns in their offices, I gaped at the public health posters in grimy hallways of dermatological clinics, which conveniently doubled as venereal wards.

RELIGION IS THE OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE. SHARING A COMMUNION CUP CAUSES SYPHILIS!

Gnawed-away chins, crumbled noses, cauliflower-like growths—the syphilitic faces on those posters are still etched in my memory. Syphilis terrified me far more than my scleroderma, since nobody had informed me about the “fatal” part. About syphilis, however, I’d heard plenty from our homeroom teacher, a squat brunette with a clenched perm and a taste for corporal punishment. “Syphilis is contracted by sharing chewed gum and accepting sweets from foreigners,” she never tired of proclaiming. Guilty of both, every day I’d examine my face in the mirror for cauliflower-like buds. In the meantime, my scleroderma kept creeping up my left leg. When one day the doctor noticed a fresh spot on my other leg, Mom plonked into a chair and covered her face with both hands.

Mom’s other heartache was losing her friends.

Partly in response to Western pressure over human rights, partly to purge “Zionist elements,” the “compassionate” Soviet State began loosening the emigration quota for its Jews at the start of the seventies. By mid-decade about 100,000 had managed to leave. “Reuniting with family in Israel” was the official qualification. Some Soviet Jews genuinely headed for their “historic homeland.” The majority left on Israeli exit visas and then in Vienna, the first refugee transit point, declared
their desire to immigrate elsewhere, to the New World mainly. These “dropouts” were carted on to Rome to await American refugee visas.

Citing my illness, and her visceral hatred of Rodina, Mom herself began contemplating the move at the end of 1973.

A
vyzov
(invitation petition) from a chimerical great-uncle in Israel had been already secured. The paper with its suggestive red seal sat in Mom’s underwear drawer as she pondered our future. Newspapers of the day freshly railed against the “Zionist aggressors” (the Yom Kippur War had just ended). We attended clandestine Hebrew classes and endless farewell open houses for departing friends, their flats stripped down to bare yellow-stained mattresses. People squatted atop packed suitcases. Cried, smoked, guzzled vodka from mismatched borrowed mugs, scooped salat Olivier straight from the bowl. We left these gatherings loaded with practical tips—for example,
thoroughly lick
the stamps for your exit visa petition—and tantalizing snippets of news of the already departed. Lida’s daughter was loving the kibbutz; Misha in Michigan had bought a used Pontiac, green with only two dents. At home I looked up Tella Veef and Sheekago on my globe as Mom weighed the pros and cons of Israel (honor) versus America (comfort, old friends, a renowned scleroderma expert).

I needed proper medical help. Dad evidently needed us out of his hair. He seemed bored once again with family life. “
Da, da
,” he’d agree, almost gleeful, whenever Mom brought up
zagranitsa
. “Go, I might join you later once you are settled.”

And yet Mother kept stalling—torn between the dead-end “here” and a future “there” that she couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Navsegda
—forever. Emigrating without the right of return. It would be a kind of dying.

Our country’s tragic shortage of
tara
was what tipped Mom finally toward the OVIR, the State Office of Visas and Registrations.

A luxurious late-spring day in 1974. The monumentalist capital of our Socialist Rodina was veiled in the yellow-green leafy crochet of its birch trees. But inside our regular grocery store, nuclear winter reigned. Besides the familiar rot, a greenish-white slime adhered to the beets; strange mutant growths sprouted on the potatoes. Normally oblivious
to such things, my mother stormed off without her usual makings of soup, holding back tears. At the Three Piglets corner shop, an even grimmer landscape awaited: the counter was bare, save for bloodied hunks of unidentifiable flesh.

“Udder and whalemeat!” barked the button-nosed salesgirl. Her scowl was like frostbite.

With two mouths to feed, Mom swallowed hard and asked for a half kilo of each, trying not to look at the crimson trails left on the scale. “Open your bag,” grunted the girl, shoving the purchase toward Mom. Mom informed her that she’d forgotten her
avoska
. Humbly, abjectly, she begged for some wrapping paper. “A newspaper,
anything
—I’ll pay you for it.”

“Citizen!” scolded the girl with her scowl. “You think
everything
in our country can be bought and sold?”

Whereupon Mom exploded with everything she thought about the udder and whale and the salesgirl’s scowl and our stinking bounteous Rodina. She took the meat anyway, bearing the lumps along home in her naked hands, forensic evidence of the State’s remorseless assault on her dignity.

I was just back from school, practicing “February” from Tchaikovsky’s
The Seasons
, when Mom stormed in. She summoned me to the kitchen.

Her hands were still bloody. The conversation was brief.

She had had it with the USSR, she announced. She was finally ready to apply for an exit visa—but only if that was
my
earnest desire as well.

“If
you
want to stay,” she said, “we will stay!”

Called away just like that from my Red October upright piano to pronounce on our entire future, I shrugged. “Okay, Mamulya,” I replied.

Zagranitsa
would be an adventure, I added cheerily.

To be honest, I only feigned a chipper nonchalance to appease Mom.

Personally I had no reason to emigrate, and no bitter grievances with our Rodina. Even my sickness wasn’t that much of a drag, since
the frightened doctors excused me from going to school whenever I wanted. I was now ten years of age, and my past as a sad-eyed bulimic was behind me. I was, at long last, enjoying a happy Mature Socialist childhood.

A couple of words about Mature Socialism.

My grandparents had idealistically embraced the regime, whereas the urban intelligentsia of my parents’ Thaw generation of the sixties rejected it with equal fervor. We, the kids of
zastoi
(Stagnation), experienced a different relation with Rodina. As the first Soviet generation to grow up without ruptures and traumas—no purges, no war, no cathartic de-Stalinization, with its idealizing of sincerity—we belonged to an age when even cats on the street recognized the State’s epic utopian project as farce. We, Brezhnev’s grandchildren, played
klassiki
(Russian hopscotch) on the ruins of idealism.

Happiness? Radiant Future?

In the cynical, consumerist seventies, these were embodied by the holy trinity of
kvartira
(apartment)-
mashina
(car)-dacha (country cottage). An imported sheepskin coat figured in too; so did
blat
, that all-enabling network of connection so scorned by Naum and Larisa. A popular Stagnation-era gag sums up what historians dub the Brezhnevian social contract. Six paradoxes of Mature Socialism: 1) There’s no unemployment, but no one works; 2) no one works, but productivity goes up; 3) productivity goes up, but stores are empty; 4) stores are empty, but fridges are full; 5) fridges are full, but no one is satisfied; 6) no one is satisfied, but everyone votes yes.

In return for the “yes” vote (at pseudoelections), the Kremlin gerontocracy kept commodity prices unchanged and guaranteed nominal social stability—steady employment that “pretended to pay” while comrades “pretended to work.” It also turned a semiblind eye to alternative economic and even cultural practices—as long as these didn’t blatantly violate official norms. As one scholar notes, by socialism’s twilight the only classes that took ideology at face value were professional Party activists and dissidents. They were an overwhelming minority. Everyone else eked out a daily life in the holes and crevices of the creaking machinery of power.

My own transformation from an alienated, shadow-eyed mess in my kindergarten days into a scheming, duplicitous junior
Homo sovieticus
occurred during Lenin’s jubilee year. In 1970 beloved Vladimir Ilyich was turning an immortal one hundred inside his mausoleum, and Rodina was celebrating with such unrelenting kitsch pomp, all the force-fed rejoicing produced the reverse effect on the popular psyche.

Having just moved to the Arbat, smack in the center of Moscow, we were besieged by a never-ending stream of tea-guzzlers. In the airy, multicornered kitchen that once belonged to my grandparents, people came and went, eating us out of the house—and treating us to a feast of jubilee jokes. The “commemorative Lenin products” series sent me into a paroxysm of private rejoicing. Items in the series: