Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (35 page)

In the Russian vernacular the early eighties are known as the “pompous funeral era.” Or “the three-coffin Five-Year Plan.”

“Got your funeral pass?” went a Kremlin guard joke.

“Nah,” replies the attendee. “Got a season ticket.”

Most of the doddering Politburo were pushing seventy. The death of Alexei Kosygin, the sometime reformer, kicked off the decade. Dear
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev followed on November 10, 1982, three days after he’d been seen looking his usual self—a fossilized turtle—at the sixty-fifth anniversary of the revolution parade.

On Leonid Ilyich’s death day, Soviet TV turned true to form—mysteriously weird. A droopy Tchaikovsky symphony instead of a much-anticipated hockey match? A didactic Lenin flick in place of the Militia Day pop concert?

The following morning, “with great sorrow,” the Kremlin announced the passing of the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee and chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.

Nobody wailed.

Dear Leonid Ilyich, seventy-five, was neither feared nor loved. In the last of his almost twenty years ruling the 270-million-person socialist empire, he was a decrepit pill-popper who washed his sedatives down with
zubrovka
, a vodka flavored with buffalo grass. He’d survived strokes, a clinical death, and a jaw cancer that made mush out of his five-hour-long speeches. He still gave them—often. His
rezhim
clanked along, just as sclerotic as he, resuscitated somewhat by hard currency from soaring oil and gas prices.

This domino player had a nice life for himself. His cartoonish extravagance held a perfect mirror to the kitsch materialist epoch he led. Brezhnev adored foreign cars and bespoke jackets of capitalist denim. Right before dying he indulged in his favorite sport, killing boar at the Zavidovo hunting estate, where choice prey were brought in from all over the USSR and fattened on fish and oranges. The Politburo hunting party fattened itself on caviar straight out of sturgeons, steaming crayfish soup, and spit-roasted boar
au plein air
. It was an age of crony banquets and hyperelite food allocations, and Dear Leonid Ilyich was the empire’s first epicure, with a habit of sending culinary souvenirs—a pheasant, a rabbit, a bloody hunk of bear—to favored friends. By many accounts he was a harmless, fun-loving man. Too bad about the Prague Spring, the torture of dissidents in psychiatric wards, the war in Afghanistan.

Above all Brezhnev loved baubles—which presented a peculiar
funeral problem. Protocol required each medal to be borne behind the casket on its own velvet cushion. But Dear Leonid Ilyich had amassed more then two hundred awards, including a Lenin Prize for Literature for a fabricated ghostwritten autobiography. Even with several medals per cushion, the award-bearing cortège consisted of forty-four men.

Mom and I during all this sat glued to our TV in New York. But any wild flicker of hope from the
gadalka
Terri’s prediction died when they announced the successor.

Yuri Andropov, the ex-KGB chief, a hunter of dissidents, was definitely
not
a nice man.

But though his heart was hard, Andropov’s kidneys barely functioned. Thirteen months later men in shiny mink hats once again followed a coffin out of the mint-green and white Hall of Columns to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march.

Andropov’s successor’s health was summed up by another joke: “Without regaining consciousness, Comrade Konstantin Chernenko assumed the post of general secretary.” He lasted just over three hundred days.

“Dear Comrades,” went a mock news announcement, “don’t laugh, but once again with great sorrow we inform you …”

In March 1985 a barely known agricultural secretary who had been Andropov’s protégé became the Soviet Union’s newest leader. Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was only fifty-four, vigorous, with functioning organs, a law degree from Moscow State University, a thick southern Russian accent, a pushy wife, and an emphatic manner that instantly seduced the Western media. Initially Russians didn’t joke
too
much about the South America–shaped blotch on his bald scalp. The venom came later. Gorbachev was the sixth—and last—general secretary of the country known as the USSR.

It’s become fashionable in Russia these days to glance backward through a mist of rosy nostalgia, particularly at the Mature Socialism of Brezhnev.

“We stole to our heart’s content …”

“Oh, but still we were so
honest
, so
innocent
 …”

“Families were
closer
 … the ice cream more wholesome.”

From the Gucci-ed and Prada-ed to the miserably pensioned, Russians wax fondly today about lines; recall
defitsit
jokes; praise the flavor of the Stagnation Era kolbasa. I’m no different here in Queens. Is it not a special privilege, really, to possess such a rich, weird past? To have worn the Young Pioneer tie in that scarlet Atlantis known as the USSR? To savor such a bittersweet lode of socialist madeleines?

Then, over a couple of days in 2011, the violence of the historical reality bears down on me—
really
, for the first time in my adult life.

I’m sick and keeping to bed. Instead of the new Boris Akunin thriller, I have at my bedside an enormous squishy blue plastic bag Mom has lugged over from her apartment. The blue bag holds letters—two decades of correspondence from Russia from the seventies and eighties. Mom has kept it
all
, it turns out, crammed helter-skelter into folders, manila envelopes, shoeboxes. Despite the thirty-odd years that have passed, the USSR-issue graph paper and square envelopes with hammer-and-sickle airmail logos and sixteen-kopek stamps saying
Mir
(Peace) are barely frayed or yellowed. There are birthday cards with garish Soviet roses, and New Year’s greetings featuring the snowy Kremlin we were certain we’d never see again.

Sipping lemon tea, I reach in.

Razluka
. The faintly folkloric Russian word for “separation” engulfs me.

This is the third new year we greet without you
, my aunt Yulia’s anarchic hand protests.
How long can this all last?

In the slanted scrawl and sweetly screwy old person’s grammar of my grandma Liza: litany upon litany of small daily laments to cover the existential pain of losing her daughter to exile.

Navsegda
—forever. What was our emigration but death with the concession of correspondence?

But from Granddad Naum not one line in the crowded blue bag. Yulia recently told me that after Mom departed, he morally and mentally shriveled, his face a stony mask of Soviet-intelligence-worker denial. A
longtime pal denounced him to the authorities, so that Naum, having escaped war bullets and Stalin’s gulags, faced arrest for his daughter’s “treason to Rodina.” He was saved by Admiral Tributs, the World War II hero. Mother found this out much later and wept.

My beloved little swallow who flew away from me
 …

The words are Grandmother Alla’s, a few days after we’d left her on a bench by our Moscow apartment. The biggest cache of letters is hers. Her round, emphatic script brings back her hoarse, tobacco-y laugh; as I read I can almost see her, there by her dim bedroom mirror, forcing metal hairpins into her bleached blonde bun.

Raw despair brims in her letters. A woman in her fifties who, after neglecting her son, poured all her latent maternal love onto a child who “flew away.”

My last hope has been crushed
, she writes—after months of fresh pleading with the OVIR visa office have ended yet again with the denial of a visit permit.
I have nothing to live for
 …

In November 1977, not long after Grandma Alla’s sixtieth birthday, there’s a four-page letter from my dad.

I can barely lift a pen to write about what has come to pass
, he begins.

Alla had been staying over with him when she felt a terrible burning in her chest. She moaned, threw up.
The ambulance took forty minutes to arrive. A haughty, very young doctor examined her. She was histrionic and the doc decided she was a hysteric—informed me so directly
. He injected her with a tranquilizer and left.

The next evening Sergei found his mother facedown on the floor.
This time the ambulance came fairly rapidly. But it was all over
. He sat the rest of the night stroking his mother’s hair.
Her face was calm and beautiful
.

The autopsy showed an embolism: a piece of arterial plaque had torn off and gradually blocked the blood flow over twenty-four hours. In any other country Grandma Alla could have been saved.

Babushka loved you with total abandon, Anyuta
, I read, blinking away the stabbing tears.
She lived for your letters, leaping twice a day to the mailbox
. She died in Brezhnev’s Moscow on a Friday. On Sunday, Dad found my last letter to her, from 4,700 untraversable miles away in Philadelphia.

There are other letters from Sergei, but not many. Barely two dozen in the thirteen years we were apart. Another memorable one dates from May 1975. My first Philadelphia spring was in full, saturated azalea bloom. When Mom came home from work, her eyes were red, and it wasn’t from hay fever. She’d opened Dad’s letter at lunch.

After a bit more Masha explaining, he announces:
God willing, in October we will have a child, and these circumstances force me to apply for a divorce
.

But apparently divorcing an émigré is extremely complicated. So would Larisa help by sending by registered mail, asap, a letter to the Soviet international court stating she has no objections?

My mother did object. She objected passionately. She’d been secretly hoping all along that Sergei would eventually join us. But being my proud, overly noble mom, she mailed the registered letter the following day.

Folded in Dad’s letter I find now a response that was never sent. It’s from a betrayed eleven-year-old—me:

Sergei. This is the last time you will hear from me. OK, you got married, but only a scumbag could write such a mean cynical letter to Mother
. Then a coda in my still-shaky English.
OK, gud-buye forever. PS. I dont’ have father any more. PPS. I hope your baby will be stupid and ugly
.

A year after Dad’s treachery, a trickle of contact eked back between me and him—if
contact
applies to a very occasional letter and an annual birthday telephone call. Those static-tormented transatlantic conversations ruined the day for me. Dad sounded not entirely sober, both cocky and timid, tossing off thorny little insults. “I got the tape with
you playing Brahms. Hmm, you have a long way to go.” He fancied himself a classical music critic.

By the time I was finishing high school, Grandma Liza wrote to say that Sergei had left his second family—for a much younger woman. And that Grandma had gotten a call from Masha, the scorned second wife, warning that his secret plan was “to reunite with his
first
family.”

At this news, Mom just gave a snide giggle. She had by then moved on with her life.

And the Rodina we’d left behind forever?

It appeared in dreams.

I dreamed all the time I was in the Arbat by our gray building there at the corner of Merzlyakovksy and Skatertny Lanes. A low, ominous sky loomed. I gazed up yearningly at our corner window, seeing the black space where I’d once broken the glass. Somebody would let me inside. I’d take the elevator to the fifth floor and push open our door. Ghostlike, I’d sneak along to our old multicornered balconied kitchen … where a strange woman stood pouring tea from our chipped enameled kettle into Dad’s orange polka-dot cup. It was the kettle that had me waking up in a cold sweat.