Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (33 page)

At customs we were prodded and questioned, our puny luggage turned inside out. They confiscated Mom’s letters from Lucien, along with a green spray can of Jazmin, a classy imported deodorant.

“
That’s
your luggage?” said the feral blond passport official, eyeing our two dwarf suitcases.
“Veyz mir,”
he taunted in a mock Yiddish accent.

I walked backwards for a few steps, waving to Dad, who stood on the other side of the chrome barrier. He was making a “write me” sign with his hands. On the stairs leading up to the departure gate I caught another glimpse of him through the glass. He seemed small and hunched, suddenly, desperately gesticulating to Mom. I tugged at her sleeve but she just kept marching up—a five-foot, hundred-pound elf looking like a miniature sergeant in her hand-sewn khaki skirt suit. I
thought of Orpheus, how he glanced back and screwed everything up, and I stopped looking at Dad.

On the plane I was on my ninth plastic tumbler of free Pepsi when they made the announcement. “We have just left Soviet territory.” I wanted to sit there with Mom and ponder the moment, but my bladder was bursting.

Six months later. The elfin woman trudges along the edge of a highway, ahead of her girl, who’s just turned eleven and is now the taller of the pair. Fordi, Pon-ti-aki, Chev-ro-leti. Woman and girl have been learning the names of the different cars that go roaring past, only catastrophic inches away. Apparently there are no sidewalks in Northeast Philadelphia. At least not on the road that leads from the Pathmark as vast as Red Square to their drab one-bedroom on Bustleton Avenue, its ceiling even lower than a
khrushcheba
’s, its wall-to-wall carpet the murky, speckled gray of crushed hope.

It’s an obscure, foggy night—humid although it’s almost December. The woman has on a flimsy hand-me-down parka, courtesy of her school friend Irina, who helped sponsor her American visa. The girl wears a little-old-lady-style belted coat with sleeves way too short and a bedraggled synthetic fur trim. Both woman and girl are panting, hugging the guardrail as they laboriously trudge. Their arms clutch a paper grocery bag each. Occasionally they put the heavy bags down, slump on the guardrail, and shake their tired arms. Lights glare poisonously through the fog. It starts drizzling. Then raining. The girl struggles with her coat to shield her grocery bag, but it breaks anyway. Squishy loaves of white bread and trays of thirty-nine-cent chicken parts tumble onto the road’s edge. Cars slow down, honk—offering rides? The girl—me—is silently crying. For so many reasons, really. But my mother—the woman—stays cheerful, unperturbed, scrambling to snatch a box of blueberry Pop-Tarts from the oncoming traffic and stuff it into her bag, which is still holding up, miraculously. Clasping the grocery bag with one arm for a moment, she shoots an awkward wave back
at the honking cars, shaking her head “no” to a ride. They can’t see her smile in the dark.

“Come, isn’t this an adventure, Anyutik?” she exclaims, trying to cheer me up. “Aren’t Americans
nice
?”

At this particular sodden moment, of the multitude of things I so sorely miss about Moscow, I miss our
avoska
bag more than anything else.

And the precious trusted mayonnaise jar—the one we bore to Vienna, then Rome, then Philadelphia? I’ve been missing it, too. Because that Mature Socialist totem has vanished from our lives forever, after Mom, almost straight off the plane, rushed me to see a world-renowned scleroderma expert.

The fancy American hospital where he worked turned out to be barren of diversions and character: no instructive syphilis posters, no patients carrying matchboxes with stool samples and Provansal vessels with urine—along with chocolates and Polish pantyhose—to the bribe-expecting receptionist. No nurses screaming
“Trakhatsa nado menshe
!” (You should screw less!) at gonorrhea sufferers.

The scleroderma expert was himself an immigrant from far-away Argentina. When Mom detailed our desperate Soviet medical odyssey to him, he shocked her. By laughing. He even summoned his colleagues. The nurse, the new resident, the head of Dermatology—everyone shook with laughter, asking my bewildered mom to repeat again and again how Soviet doctors treated my scleroderma with penicillin and
moomiyo
goo and healing mud from gaudy Odessa.

Baring his big horsey teeth, the guffawing doc explained at last that childhood scleroderma was an entirely harmless version of this normally fatal disease. It required no treatment at all.

“Welcome to the free world!” the doctor congratulated my now-laughing mother and me as he escorted us to the foyer. When we stepped back out onto the humid Philadelphia sidewalk, Mom was still laughing.
Then she hugged me and sobbed and sobbed. The mayonnaise jar, our indispensable socialist artifact, went into an outsize American trash can. Ahead of us was an era of blithely disposable objects.

And Pathmark.

My First Supermarket Experience was the anchoring narrative of the great Soviet epic of immigration to America. Some escapees from our socialist
defitsit
society actually swooned to the floor (usually in the aisle with toilet paper). Certain men knelt and wept at the sight of forty-two varieties of salami, while their wives—smelling the strawberries and discovering they lacked
any
fragrance—cried for opposite reasons. Other emigrants, possessed by the ur-Soviet hoarding instinct, frantically loaded up their shopping carts. Still others ran out empty-handed, choked and paralyzed by the multiplicity of choices.

The Jewish Family Services office where we collected our meager refugee stipend resounded with food stories. The stories constituted an archive of socialists’ misadventures with imperialist abundance. Monya and Raya complained about the flavor of American butter—after smearing floor wax on bread. The Goldbergs loved the delicious lunch meat cans with cute pictures of kitties, not suspecting the kitties were the intended consumers. Vovchik, the Odessa lothario, slept with his first American
shiksa
and stormed out indignant when she offered him Triscuits. Desiccated cardboard squares! Why not a steaming bowl of borscht?

Mom, who was smarter than Orpheus and never once looked back after heading up the ramp at Sheremetyevo Airport, roamed Pathmark’s acres with childlike glee. “She-ree-ohs … Ri-seh-rohonee … Vel. Vee. Tah …” She murmured these alien names as if they’d been concocted by Proust, lovingly prodding and handling all the foodstuffs in their bright packaging, their promiscuous, throwaway
tara
.

Meanwhile, I steered the supermarket cart behind her like a zombie. I hated the Pathmark of Northeast Philadelphia. It was the graveyard
of my own
zagranitsa
dream, possessed of a fittingly funerary chill and an otherworldly fluorescence. Shuffling the aisles, I felt entombed in the abundance of food, now drained of its social power and magic. Who really wanted the eleven-cent bag of bananas if you couldn’t parade it down Kalinin Prospect inside your transparent
avoska
after standing in a four-hour line, basking in envious stares? What happened when you replaced the heroic Soviet verb
dostat’
(to obtain with difficulty) with the banal
kupit’
(to buy), a term barely used back in the USSR? Shopping at Pathmark was acquisitioning robbed of thrills, drama, ritual. Where did
blat
come into play, with its savvy maneuvering of social ties, its camaraderie? Where was envy and social prestige? The reassuring communal
ochered’
smell of hangovers and armpits? Nobody and nothing smelled inside Pathmark.

A few weeks into our Philadelphia life, I began to suspect that all those cheery disposable boxes and plastic containers piled on Pathmark’s shelves were a decoy to conceal the dark truth. That American food—I hesitate to say it—wasn’t exactly delicious. Not the Pop-Tarts that Mom served cold and semi-raw because nobody told her about the toasting part. Not American sosiski, hot dogs sour from nitrates. Definitely not the yellow-skinned thirty-nine-cent chicken parts bandaged in plastic. These made me pine for the bluish, Pravda-swaddled chicks Baballa brought back from her elite canteen at Gosstroy. Those had graphic claws, a poignant comb, sad dead eyes, and stray feathers Grandma burned off with her clunky cigarette lighter, filling the house with a smell like burnt hair. We enjoyed the chicks once a month, as a
defitsit
treat.

When our Jewish Family Services stipend ended, Mom worked cleaning Philadelphia houses, a job she pronounced “fascinating!” Then she landed work as a receptionist at a hospital, which required her to ride three separate buses. Her shift began at noon and brought her home past ten, when I was already in bed. Tactfully she spared me the details of standing in all weather at unshielded bus stops. I, in turn, never told her how I felt coming back to an empty, ugly apartment from the dreaded
Louis H. Farrell Elementary School, with only our hand-me-down grainy black-and-white TV for company. When Dinah Shore came on, I wanted to howl. She was the human equivalent of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that came with my free refugee school lunch. All squishy, pseudofolksy whiteness, with an unnatural, cloying coupling of sugar and salt.

I spent most of my first afterschool hours slumped on our shared mattress, nose in books from the two boxes of them Mom had had slow-mailed from Moscow. The bottle-green Chekhov, the gray Dostoyevsky—breaking off from their color-coordinated collected works, I tried to practice Tchaikovsky’s
The Seasons
on the battered secondhand piano Mom had bought for me with a handout from Clara, her American aunt. But the notes under my fingers produced only tears, the wrenching reminder of our old Arbat life. And so I paced in dazed agitation, from the bedroom, past the TV to the piano, to the kitchenette and back. And yet not even in my worst homesick moments could I admit to missing Rodina with any
sincerity
. Sincerity, it seemed, had been bled out of us by the cynical Brezhnevian seventies. Which added a layer of denial to homesickness.

Rodina-Urodina
. A Motherland that rhymed with “ugly hag.” A scarlet-blazed myth that flipped into an ironic gag. Historically the word—denoting one’s birthplace, from the root
rod
(origin/kin)—had been the intimate, maternal counterpart to
otchizna
(fatherland), that resoundingly heroic, martially tinted noun. The Bolsheviks banned Rodina, suspicious of its folkloric entwining with nationalism. Under Stalin it resurfaced in 1934, aligned now with official
Soviet
patriotism. In World War II it was mobilized full force—feminized further—as
Rodina-Mat’
, literally “motherland-mother,” to be defended to the last by its sons and daughters. Grassroots patriotism swept the nation. But by my childhood, like all “meaningful” words, Rodina had acquired a cartoonish bathos. Even if treason to the motherland was a criminal offense.

Come to think of it, there wasn’t a single word for the country we’d never see again that I could use with any authentic nostalgia. Soviet Union? Pining for anything with
Soviet
in it was politically incorrect
since the word evoked the lumbering carcass of the official regime.
Rossiya
(Russia)? That too was tainted with the saccharine kitsch of state-certified nationalism: all those swaying birch trees and troika sleds. And so I resorted to
sovok
or
sovdep
—bitterly sarcastic slang for the land of the
Homo sovieticus
.