Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (34 page)

Such linguistic calibrations didn’t concern Mother much. After all, she’d spent most of her adult Soviet life as a spiritual émigré, yearning for the imaginary Elsewhere she envisioned as
her
own true Rodina. Occasionally she’d admit to missing the tart-green
antonovka
apples, a fairly neutral Nabokovian gesture. And once, only once, when she heard a song about Arbat, our intimate old Moscow neighborhood, she burst into tears.

Myself, I had neither accepted nor rejected our socialist state. Instead I constantly played the angles, with its values and countervalues, its resonances. From this all-encompassing game I’d created my childhood identity. So now, along with the unmentionable Rodina I was mourning the loss of a self.

My name, for example.

Anna, Anya, An’ka, Anechka, Anyuta, Nyura, Niusha. What a menu of nuanced social meanings and linguistic attitudes available within my own single name. And now? I wasn’t even Anna (my official passport name). I was a Philly-accented
Ee-ya-nna
—the sonorous, open Russian “A” squished and rubberized like the Wonder Bread of our exile.

Bread. I missed Moscow bread.

Standing at the fridge, dragging a slice of Oscar Mayer bologna onto a slice of spongy whiteness, I’d mentally inhale the voluptuous sourdough tang of our neighborhood bakery by the tree-lined Tverskoy Boulevard. There, manipulating in my small grip a giant two-pronged fork attached by a grimy string to the wall, I’d poke and press, testing for freshness, the dark burnished loaves arranged on their tilted worn-wood shelves under a slogan:
BREAD IS OUR SOVIET WEALTH
—
DON
’
T BUY MORE THAN YOU NEED!

We had arrived in Philadelphia on November 14, 1974. A few weeks later, we noticed people appearing downtown in drab uniforms, singing and clanging bells beside red buckets under puzzling signs for a “Salvation Army.” To this day, “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World” pierce me as the soundtracks of émigré dislocation.

I had stopped believing in Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) when I was six and we still lived in Davydkovo. My neighbor Kiril and I stayed up past midnight waiting for the promised arrival of our Soviet New Year’s version of Santa in his long flowing robe. I had on a tiara of snowflakes and a satiny costume gown Mom fashioned for the occasion from an old dress of hers. The doorbell rang at last. Ded Moroz himself swayed on our threshold, majestic and glassy-eyed. Then all six feet of him collapsed face-first into our
khrushcheba’s
tiny foyer. The next morning he was still there, snoring, still in his robe but with his beard now detached and crumpled under one cheek. A dead-drunk Ded Moroz wasn’t the worst. The really awful ones screwed up the gifts parents had given them in advance—delivering rubber-smelling inflatable beach balls, for instance, to the family who’d bought expensive East German toy sets.

But I loved Soviet
novy god
(New Year’s) anyway. The harsh scent of pine on our balcony where our tree awaited decoration. My small mom teetering on a tall wobbly stool to reach the high closet for the box of our New Year’s ornaments, swaddled in coarse pharmacy cotton. By the last week of December, the State dumped long-hoarded delicacies onto store counters. From Praga Dad carried home the white box of its famous chocolate layer cake; Mom’s
avoska
bulged with sharply fragrant thin-skinned clementines from Abkhazia. And eagerly we awaited Baballa’s holiday
zakaz
, the elite take-home package of
defitsit
goods from Gosstroy. You never knew what each year would bring. I prayed for the buttery
balik
(smoked sturgeon) instead of the prestigious but disgusting canned cod liver.

Philadelphia had no snow our first December. Worse, fellow émigrés gravely warned one another against putting up Christmas trees,
since Jewish-American sponsors liked to drop in on their charges to deliver mezuzahs or bags of used clothes. Our generous sponsors went ballistic at the sight of an evergreen, sometimes even reporting the blasphemous refugees to Jewish Family Services. Many ex-Soviet citizens didn’t realize that their Jewishness was now a religion, not simply the “ethnicity” declared in the fifth entry of their surrendered red passports. The sponsors in turn had no clue that Christmas was banned in the USSR—that the trees, gifts, Ded Moroz, and general cheer were the secular socialist hooray to the new year.

Obediently Mom lit the alien Hanukkah candles on the menorah we’d been given. On the plywood shelf around it she heaped candies gooey with vile peanut butter, and charcoal-black cookies filled with something white and synthetic. A charcoal-black cookie! Would
anyone
eat such a thing? The candies remained unsucked, the cookies unwrapped. My eyes grew duller and more vacant each day—and Mom relented and bought a
yolka
, a holiday tree, from the five-and-dime store. Barely twelve inches tall, made of rough plastic, and decorated with out-of-scale red and green balls that cost nineteen cents a package, it didn’t make me any happier.

For our first New Year’s in America, instead of champagne Mom served the sticky-sweet Manischewitz wine our sponsors had urged on us. And she gave our celebratory salat Olivier a thorough Pathmark makeover! Mercifully, Mom didn’t tamper with the potatoes and eggs. But she replaced the proper fresh-boiled diced carrots with canned ones, swapped our
canned
peas for the bright-green frozen variety, devoid of the requisite mushiness. For protein, some evil force propelled her toward the gristly, vinegary Hormel’s pickled pig’s feet. Worst of all was the mayo. Instead of our loose, tangy-sharp vanished Provansal, it was Hellmann’s now smothering Mom’s Olivier in a cloyingly fluffy, infuriatingly sweet blanket.

At eleven p.m. Mom scooped the Pathmark Olivier into the two Czech bowls with pink flowers—the scant remnants of our past lives we’d carried inside our two tiny suitcases.

The bowls had been Baballa’s present to us for our last Moscow New Year’s. That night, right before suppertime, she’d stormed into
our Arbat apartment, furiously stomping snow off her green wool coat, swearing in a voice raspy from cigarettes and cold. “Your
present
,” she snorted bitterly, handing Mom a misshapen, rattling parcel inside an
avoska
. It
had
been a very desirable Czech dinner set. Except that after standing in line for it for most of the day, Baballa had slipped on some ice on her way over. We sat on the floor under our festive Soviet tree, picking through a wreck of broken socialist china. Only two bowls had survived intact. At the dinner table Baballa drowned her regrets in vodka, topping up my glass with champagne when Mom wasn’t looking. After dessert and the turning-of-the-year tumult, she led us all out for a walk to Red Square.

It had just stopped snowing outside and the temperatures were plunging to minus twenty. And I was drunk. For the first time in my life. On Red Square! Thanks to the cold, the alcohol coursed through my bloodstream slowly, caressingly, warming my limbs as we tramped along. Beneath the floodlit tropical marzipan domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, we uncorked another bottle of Sovetskoye bubbly. It was 1974, the year of our emigration. My parents kissed on the lips while Grandma sang patriotic songs in disharmony with the other drunks on the square. Squealing with pleasure like a collective farm piglet, I rolled around in the fresh powdery snowdrifts, sending up silvery showers twinkling and dancing against the floodlights.

In Philly, as the clock struck 1975, Mom and I picked at our Pathmark salat Olivier and sipped the bubbleless Manischewitz from hand-me-down mugs. Far away, eight hours earlier, in another land, Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had once again adjusted his reading glasses, rattled his medals, thunderously cleared his throat, and then shuffled his papers in a desperate scramble to locate the first line of his New Year’s address to the Rodina.

“Dear Compatriots!” The phrase no longer included us.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
t the start of the eighties, less than a decade into our American exile, I went to a
gadalka
, a fortune-teller.

Trudging up to her fifth-floor lair in New York’s Little Italy, I murmured curses at every landing. This
gadalka
, Terri by name, charged a whopping ninety bucks for her readings—and I didn’t even trust fortune-tellers. But an attack of professional angst had driven me there.

“I hear music.”

The
gadalka
Terri announced this on her threshold in a thick Italian New Yorkese.

I stared at her, panting and amazed. My angst involved my piano studies at Juilliard. How’d she know I was a musician?

But from here the reading went nowhere. Terri, in her thirties, sipped tea from a chipped
I Heart NY
mug, squinted and strained, conjured trivialities.

“Your cousin doesn’t love her husband … In your mama’s life there’s a person named Bennett …” I nodded along. I felt the ninety bucks evaporating in my pocket.

Then came her big finale. “Soon,” exclaimed Terri, waving her tea mug, “soon you’ll see your papa and the rest of your family!”

I handed over the cash and tramped back downstairs fuming, my angst unaddressed, my real question—
Will I become a famous pianist?—
unanswered. Outside I went and consoled myself with a jumbo cannoli.

My mother had by then followed me from Philadelphia to New York, where we shared a one-bedroom on a drab street in the mostly Colombian enclave of Jackson Heights, Queens. But still. After the doldrums of Philadelphia, immigrant multiculti New York felt like home. I loved how our hallway smelled of garlicky
pernil
and stewed beans. Salsa and cumbia blasted from every apartment, while our own was filled with the lofty, competing sounds of Beethoven and Brahms. Despite my career angst, generally, life was okay. Mom taught ESL at a nearby elementary school, and what’s more, she’d rekindled her Moscow lifestyle of concerts, theaters, and endless ticket lines. She was even happier seeing
me
worship at the altar of High Culture. Ever since I at thirteen had begun taking the train up from Philly to attend Julliard’s pre-college program—and then the college proper in 1980—I’d lived and breathed piano. The keyboard completely took over my life, sustained me through years of immigrant dislocation, repaired my fractured identity.

“So? What did the
gadalka
say about your piano?” Mom wanted to know. I shrugged. I asked if she knew anybody named “Bennett.” Mom nearly fell out of her chair.

“Mrs. Bennett? She’s our Board of Education comptroller—I just saw her today!”

Amid the Bennett hue and cry I almost forgot Terri’s last bit about our family reuniting. Mom slackened to a wistful smile when I remembered. It was her turn to shrug. Oh well … The Soviet State was eternal, intractable. Reunions just weren’t in the cards.

And then they all began dropping dead.