Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (36 page)

Mom was tormented by the classic Soviet-émigré anxiety dream. Not about going back and being trapped behind the Iron Curtain. No, the one about finding herself back in Moscow with her family—
empty-handed
, with nary a single present for them. She’d wake up seared with guilt and send more money, more gifts to Russia. Our fellow émigrés bought row houses, then semidetached houses, then split-level private houses with patios. Mom to this day owns nothing.

It was the 1987 New Year’s card from Grandma Liza that sounded the first genuine hope.

Consulted the OVIR about processing your invitation to Moscow. They don’t anticipate any problems!!!

By then perestroika (restructuring), glasnost (openness), and the now-forgotten early-Gorbachev term
uskorenie
(acceleration) had become the new Soviet slogans.

“You wouldn’t
believe
what’s being said on TV,” breathless relatives cried in their crackly calls. “But shhh … 
it’s not for telephone conversation!”

Even my mom, bitterly wised up by the demise of the Thaw and cynical about any USSR leadership, was suddenly buying the Gorbachev optimism. The Radiant Future—perhaps it
was
finally coming. For real this time! Once again a utopian, fairy-tale Russia beckoned, where store shelves would groan with bananas, wheat bulge in the fields, and the borders swing open.

And the borders did open.

In the early fall of 1987, thirteen years after our departure from Moscow, shortly before my twenty-fourth birthday, Mom came home from the Soviet consulate in New York. “Your
gadalka
Terri, the fortune-teller …” she muttered, shaking her head in wonderment. She displayed our blue American passports. Affixed to each was the official visitor visa to Moscow.

My mother’s nightmares of returning to Rodina empty-handed set off a frenzy of gift buying, as though she were trying to pack all her years of guilt at leaving her family into the suitcases we were lugging back to the USSR.

What unbeautiful suitcases they were.

Four monster discount-store duffel bags, each resembling a lumpy black refrigerator on wheels. In the chaos of buying and packing I kept flashing back to our lean exodus with barely twenty pounds apiece. “Madam Frumkin, you’re a very wise woman,” a refugee greeter had complimented Mom in Rome in 1974.

Now we were hauling back half a warehouse.

What do you take to a country entirely deprived of consumer commodities? Seventeen packets of two-for-a-dollar panty hose, nude and black, as “just in case” presents; instant coffee; eight batons of salami; ballpoint pens; wristwatches; garish flashing cigarette lighters; heart
medicine; calculators; shampoo—and anything with any American logo, for kids.

The specific requests from Moscow were simultaneously maddeningly particular and vague.
Hooded
terrycloth robes,
must
be
blue
. Two jumpsuits for a 125-centimeter-long baby of the nice
nomenklatura
physician treating Grandpa Naum. Knitting yarn—red with some golden thread—for a friend of a friend of someone who might one day help with admission to an exclusive health sanatorium. Door locks—because apparently perestroika unleashed criminals all over Moscow. Disposable syringes. Because Russians had now heard of AIDS.

Requests for parts for Ladas and Zhigulis (Soviet autos) made Mom groan and gnash her teeth.

I for my part insisted that Dad get no presents. Mom counterinsisted on something neutral yet classy. She settled on a lavishly illustrated book about Proust.

Meanwhile, intent on a grand entrance to the country that scorned us for leaving, I outfitted myself with an extravagant vintage forties raccoon coat.

“Going back to visit
Soyuz
(the Union)?” asked the owner of the ninety-nine-cent store we’d emptied in Queens. He had a wise smile, a guttural Soviet-Georgian accent.

“How many computers you taking with?” he inquired.

None, we told him.

“You’re allowed two!” he said brightly. “So you’ll bring
one
IBM!”

Which is how we got involved in a shady Georgian’s black market transaction, in exchange for three hundred bucks and a ride to Kennedy Airport from his cousin. The broad-shouldered cousin arrived promptly in a dented brown Chevy. He clucked approvingly at our monstrous duffel bags.

A few miles along the Long Island Expressway he announced: “First time on highway!”

It started pouring. We drove in tense silence. Then our dented, baggage-heavy Chevy skidded on the slippery road and, as if in slow motion, banged into a yellow cab alongside us. We felt our limbs; nothing seemed broken. The cops arrived and discovered the cousin had no
driver’s license and an expired American guest visa. The word
deportation
was uttered.

How we got to JFK I can’t recall. I remember only the check-in lady at Delta informing us that while
we
might still catch the flight, our
bags
certainly wouldn’t.

“My nightmare,” Mom bleated in a very small voice.

“They’ll put the bags on the next plane,” a fellow returnee reassured us. “Of course, Soviet baggage handlers slash bags. Or if your lock is shitty-discount they just stick a hand in. Anything valuable by the surface?”

Mom stayed awake the ten hours of the flight nervously trying to remember what exactly she’d put near the surface inside our duffel bags.

“Salami,” she finally said.

And what is it like to be emigrants returned from the dead? To be resurrected in glasnost-gripped Rodina?

Your plane touches down right after a late-December snowstorm. There’s no jetway or bus. You descend and tramp along the white-muffled tarmac toward the terminal. You tramp very slowly. Or so it seems, because the clock freezes when you enter another dimension.

The northern darkness and the sharp chill awaken a long-buried sensation from a childhood that suddenly no longer feels yours. For thirteen years you haven’t smelled a true winter, but you’re inhaling it now through the cloudy, warm cocoon of your breath. You keep tramping. In the eerily slowed time you hear your pulse throbbing in your temples, and the squeaking of snow amplified as if Styrofoam were being methodically crushed by your ear.

You glance at your mother; her face looks alien in the poisonous yellow of the airport lights. Her lips are trembling. She’s squeezing your hand.

With each loud, squeaky step you grow more and more terrified. Of what exactly you’re not quite sure.

Normal time resumes in the chaos of the passport control lines.

The uniformed kid in the booth stares at my photo, then at my raccoon coat, then back at the photo, frowns, goes to consult with a colleague. I catch myself hoping that we’ll be sent back to New York. But he returns, stamps my American passport, and asks, in Russian:

“So … you missed Rodina?”

I detect a familiar sarcasm in the way he says Rodina, but I muster my best American smile and nod earnestly, realizing as I do that everything I’ve missed will probably have vanished. The loss of the imaginary Rodina. Was that what terrified me in the snow on the way to the terminal?

From the baggage area through the glass pane, a distant heaving wall of greeters waves, gesticulates.

“Papa!
” Mom shrieks.

“Dedushka Naum?
Where … where?
”

And then I spot them—Granddad’s thick dark glass frames peering above a bouquet of mangy red carnations.

Wild with excitement, Mom is now waving frantically to her brother and sister. Standing next to them, also waving, is a man with a mane of gray hair and vaguely familiar features.

Something more familiar comes looming along the baggage carousel. They have arrived with us—our four epic duffel bags, with the Georgian’s IBM carton trailing behind. Each bag sports a neat slash near the zipper.

“The salami …” murmurs Mom.

In the frenzy of hugging, crying, touching, I finally recognize the man with the thick gray hair. It’s my father. But not the father I’d imagined from across the Atlantic—a romantically nihilist Alain Delon look-alike who abandoned us with cruel matter-of-factness.

The man now kissing me awkwardly is heavy and old, with polyester brown pants, shabby, square shoes with thick rubber soles, and a collapsed, sunken jaw.

This is Sergei, my father
, I’m thinking.
And he has no teeth
.

“The salami, they stole our salami!” Mom keeps repeating, laughing madly, to Sashka, my gimpy uncle who wears a spiffy, furry karakul cap and seems jarringly, uncharacteristically sober.

“
Chudo, chudo
—miracle, miracle.” My aunt Yulia is wiping tears onto my raccoon coat.

Glancing sideways at Dad’s toothless mouth, I realize this: I have forgiven him everything.

The anguished nights back in Davydkovo with Mom, waiting for his key to turn in the lock, the divorce letter, the horrible birthday calls. Because while Mom and I have prospered, even flourished, my father’s life and his looks have been decaying. And I’m pretty sure this is true about Rodina generally.

A triumphant mini-armada of two Lada cars delivered us to our former apartment in Davydkovo. The squat USSR-issue Fiats, resembling soap dishes on wheels, proudly bore our epic duffel bags on their roofs. Their socialist trunks weren’t designed for ninety-nine-cent U.S. abundance.

“The rich, they have their own ways …” snorted the pimply traffic cop who stopped us to extract the usual bribe.

The forty-meter
khrushcheba
apartment where Liza and the entire family tearfully awaited wasn’t designed for our epic duffel bags either. Especially since my grandparents had invited two elephantine Odessa relatives to stay with them
while
we visited.

And then we were there, thirteen years after our farewell dinner, back around Liza’s laden table.

Nobody missed our eight stolen batons of New York salami. We didn’t realize this at the time, but 1987 was virtually the farewell year for the
zakaz
, the elite take-home food package Granddad still enjoyed, thanks to his naval achievements. Very soon the
zakaz
would vanish
forever, along with most any sort of edible and, eventually, the USSR itself. I could still kick myself for not making a photo documentation of Babushka Liza’s table. It was straight out of the 1952
Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
. There were the vile, prestige cod liver conserves under gratings of hard-boiled eggs, the buttery smoked sturgeon
balik
, the Party-favored tongue, the inescapable tinned
saira
fish in tomato sauce—all arrayed on Stalinist baroque cut-crystalware my grandparents had scored as fiftieth wedding anniversary gifts.

“Black bread!” Mother kept squealing. “How I missed
our
black bread.” She squealed too about the
sushki
(dried mini-bagels), the
zefir
(pink rococo marshmallows), and the
prianiki
(gingerbread). That night, through my fitful sleep as we all bivouacked on cots in my grandparent’s boxy living room, I heard the fizz of Mom’s Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving in water, drowned out by the droning legal soap operas of her deaf aunt Judge Tamara, up from Odessa.