Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (39 page)

The fifty-gram gulps of moonshine, the herring, the pickles, the toasts—shooting the shit in a five-meter Moscow kitchen shrouded in smoke from coarse Yava cigarettes—these were what reestablished a fragile bond between me and my father, in the snow-mantled capital of perestroika.

We’re back in December ’87 once again, our visitor fairy tale reanimated.

This bond with Dad was, and would remain, unsentimental, a friendship, masculine almost, rather than one of those histrionic, kiss-kiss Russian kinships. And in future years it would be oiled and lubricated with vodka and
spirt—samogon
, too. Because as an offspring of the USSR, how to
truly
know your own father—or Rodina?—until you’ve become his adult equal, a fellow co-bottler?

It didn’t take many hours of boozing with Dad to realize how wrong I’d been about him at Sheremetyevo Airport. I, a smiley American now, arriving from a country that urged you to put your money where your mouth was—I mistook Sergei’s sunken mouth for the sign of a terrible life of decay. He saw things differently. In the loss of his teeth he’d found liberation, it turns out—from convention, from toothpaste lines, from the medieval barbarism of Soviet dentistry. His first few teeth had been knocked out accidentally by his baby, Andrei; gum disease took the rest. With each new gap in his mouth my father felt closer and closer to freedom.

And women, they loved him regardless. Lena, the pretty mistress sixteen years his junior, waited five years while he “sorted things out” with his second wife, Masha. Masha and Dad drank well together but sucked as a couple. That marriage officially ended in 1982 after Masha hit Dad on the head with a vodka bottle. Whereupon Dad and Lena got hitched.

Better even than no teeth, Sergei had no real employment.

Not having to report daily for
sluzhba
—the dreaded socialist toil—
this
was the unholy grail of slacker intelligentsia males of his generation.

Three years after we emigrated Sergei was expelled from his prestigious and classified job at the Mausoleum Lab. It took that long for the thick resident KGB stool to realize that Dad’s first wife was a traitor to Rodina, and that Sergei co-bottled with dangerous dissidents. Under some innocent pretense Dad was summoned to the local militia office. The two KGB comrades greeted him warmly. With practically fraternal concern, they chided Dad for losing his footing in Soviet society. Hinted the hint: that all could be fixed if Comrade Bremzen agreed to inform on his dissident co-bottlers. My father declined. His nice mausoleum boss, teary-eyed, handed him resignation papers. Dad left the cadaver-crowded basement with a sense of dread, but also a certain lightness of being. He had just turned forty and no longer served Lenin’s immortal remains.

Subsequent, briefer stints at top research centers intensified Sergei’s disdain for socialist toil. At the Institute of Experimental Veterinary Science, the Ph.D.s got fat on bounty looted during collective farm calls. The head of the Bee Ailments section had amassed a particularly exciting stock of artisanal honey. Dad resigned again, though not before pilfering a Czech screwdriver set he still owns.

Full unemployment, however, was not a viable option in our righteous Rodina. To avoid prison under the Parasite Law, Dad cooked up a Dead Souls kind of scheme. A connection landed him fictitious employment at Moscow’s leading oncology research lab. Once a month he came in to collect his salary, which he promptly handed over to his boss on a deserted street corner, keeping a small cut for himself. His only obligation? The compulsory collective-farm labor stints. Together with elite oncology surgeons Dad fed cows and dug potatoes. The outings had their pastoral charms. The bottle of medical
spirt
made its first appearance on the morning bus to the kolkhoz. Arriving good and pulverized, the leading lights of Soviet oncology didn’t dry out for two weeks. When that “job” ended, Dad got another, better “arrangement.” His work papers now bristled with a formidable employment record; the
state pension kept ticking. All the while he luxuriated Oblomov-like on his homemade
divan
, reading novels, listening to opera, snagging a few rubles doing technical translations from languages he barely knew. While his devoted wives toiled.

My romantic mom defied the Soviet
byt
(daily grind) by heroically fleeing to
zagranitsa
. Dad beat it in his own crafty way.

But he wasn’t simply a crafty do-nothing sloth, my dad.

The dinner invitation that December 1987 sounded almost like an awkward, weirdly formal marriage proposal.

“I would like to … er … 
receive
you,” Sergei told Mom on one of our walks. He meant to infuse the stilted “receive” with his usual irony, but his voice shook unexpectedly.

Mother shrugged. “We can just drop by for tea sometime.”

“
Chai
wouldn’t do,” my dad pressed. “But
please
give me a few days to prepare.” The anxiety in his voice was so palpable, I accepted on Mom’s behalf with a grinning American “Thank you.”

“Amerikanka,”
Father said, touching my raccoon coat with something approaching paternal affection. Ah yes, of course:
Russians
never dispense grins and thank-yous so easily.

For the visit Mom wore much more makeup than usual. And she too smiled, prodigiously, flashing a perfect new dental crown. At Dad’s doorstep she managed to look ten feet tall.

Sergei had long since moved from our Arbat apartment to an atmospheric lane across the cement-hued Kalinin Prospect. His snug thirty-five-meter one-bedroom overlooked the Politburo Polyclinic. From his window I peered down on the lumbering silhouettes of black official Chaika cars—hauling infirm
nomenklatura
for some quality resuscitation.

I stared at the Chaikas to avoid the sight of the blond, Finnish, three-legged table. It was a relic from our old life together. Familiar to the point of tears, there was a scratch from my eight-year-old vandalism, and a burn mark from Mother’s chipped enameled teakettle—the kettle
of my American nightmares. On the heavy sideboard sat the pewter antique samovar Mom and I had found in the garbage dump one rainy April, carried home, lunging over the puddles, and polished with tooth powder. My insipid childhood watercolors were up on Sergei’s walls as if they were Matisses. I noted one particularly anemic still life. The faux-rustic vase filled with bluebells had been painted by Mom.

“I think he constructed a cult of us after we left,” she hissed in my ear.

As Dad scurried in and out of the tiny kitchen in his slippers, his wife, Lena, prattled in a clear, ringing Young Pioneer voice. Unsettlingly, she had the same build and short haircut as my mother, but with a turned-up nose, far less makeup, and pale eyes of startling crystalline blue. In those crystalline eyes I saw flashes of terror.
She
was here: the dread First Wife. Resurrected from exile, returned in triumph, and now semireclining on Dad’s maroon divan in the pose of a magnanimous Queen Mother.

“Lenochka,” Mother said to her,
“can’t
you persuade Sergei to get dentures?”

We’d already unloaded the gifts. Proust for Dad, choice nuggets of ninety-nine-cent American abundance for Lena, plus an absurdly expensive bottle of Smirnoff from the hard currency store, where there were no enraged mobs.

To our swank, soulless booze my toothless father replied with home brews of staggering sophistication. The walnut-infused amber
samogon
, distilled in Mom’s ancient pressure cooker, suggested not some proletarian hooch but a noble, mysterious whiskey. In another decanter glimmered shocking-pink
spirt
. Steeped in sugared lingonberries, it was known (I learned) as
nesmiyanovka
(“don’t-laugh-ovka”) after Alexander Nesmiyanov, Russia’s leading chemist, at whose scientific research facility the recipe had been concocted by his savvy associates. Miraculously the lingonberries softened the hundred-proof ethyl harshness, and in my stomach the potion kept on—and on—blossoming like the precious bud of a winter carnation.

“The canapés—weren’t they your favorite?” cooed my dad, handing Mom on her divan a dainty gratinéed cheese toast.

“Friendship Cheese, cilantro, and, what,
adzhika
(spicy Georgian chili paste)?” she commented coolly.

“Made the
adzhika
myself,” noted Dad—humbly, almost abjectly—as he proffered another plate, a wonder of herring and egg thingies.

His next salvo was borscht.

It was nothing like Mom’s old flick-of-the-wrist vegetarian version, that small triumph coaxed out of tired root vegetables and a can of tomato paste. My mother was a flighty, impulsive, dream-spinning cook. My deadbeat dad turned out to be a methodical, determined master craftsman. He insisted on painstakingly extracting
fresh
juice from carrots and beets for his borscht, adding it to the rich rounded beef stock, steeping the whole thing for a day, then flourishing a last-minute surprise of pounded garlic and
shkvarki
, the crisp, salty pork crackling.

Dad’s
satsivi
, the creamy Georgian walnut-sauced chicken, left me equally speechless. I thought of the impossible challenge of obtaining a decent chicken in Moscow. Of the ferocious price of walnuts at the Central Market near the Circus; of the punishing labor of shelling and pulverizing them; of the multiple egg yolks so opulently enriching the sauce. With each bite I was more and more in awe of my father. I forgave him every last drop there was still left to forgive. Once again, I was the Pavlovian pup of my childhood days—when I salivated at the mere thought of the jiggly buttermilk jellies and cheese sticks he brought on his sporadic family visits. This man, this crumple-mouthed grifter in saggy track pants, he was a god in the kitchen.

And wasn’t this dinner his way of showing his love?

But all the juice-squeezing and pulverizing, the monthly budget blown on one extravagant chicken dish—it wasn’t for me. It was not into
my
face Dad was now gazing, timidly seeking approval.

The living-slash-dining room suddenly felt stifling and overcrowded. I slipped off to the kitchen, where Lena was glumly chain-smoking Dad’s Yavas. Her glass held pink lingonberry
spirt
. Unwilling to let her commit the cardinal sin of drinking alone, I offered a dog-eared toast.

“
’Za znakomstvo!”
(Here’s to getting to know you!)

“Davay na brudershaft?”
she proposed. Drinking
na brudershaft
(to
brotherhood) is a ritual in which two new friends interlace arms, gulp from each other’s glass, kiss, and thereafter address each other as
ty
(the informal, familial form of you). We emptied our shot glasses, kissed. Lena’s cheek had a gullible, babyish softness. We were now co-bottlers, Dad’s new wife and me.

Pals.

Back in the living room I found Sergei murmuring away at Mom’s side. “In
those
days,” I overheard, “food tasted better to me …”

Mom smiled the same polite but regal smile. It never left her face the whole evening.

We drank the last, parting ritual shot. “
Na pososhok.”
(For the walking staff.)

“Marvelous dinner!” Mom offered in the cramped hallway as Dad longingly draped the pseudomink rabbit coat over her shoulders. “Who knew you were such a
klass
cook?” Then, with it’s-been-nice-seeing-you American breeziness: “You
must
give me your recipe for that beef stew in a clay pot.”

“Lariska!” muttered Dad, with barely concealed desperation. “It was
your
recipe and
your
clay pot. The one I gave you for your birthday.”

“Da? Really now?” said my mother pleasantly. “I don’t remember any of this.”

And that was that. Her empty Americanized smile told him the past was past.

“Bravo, Tatyana!” I growled to her in the elevator. “Stanislavsky applauds you from his grave.” Mom in her makeup gave a worn, very Soviet grin involving no teeth.

My “Tatyana” reference was to every Russian woman’s favorite scene in Pushkin’s verse novel,
Eugene Onegin
. Tatyana, the ultimate lyric heroine of our literature, meets up again with Onegin, the mock-Byronic protagonist who’d cruelly scorned her love when she was a melancholy provincial maiden. Now she’s all dressed up, rich and cold and imperious at a glamorous St. Petersburg ball. Encountering her after years, Onegin is the one who’s dying of love—and Tatyana is the one who does the scorning. The sad part? She’s still in love with Onegin! But she’s
now married, has moved on, and the past is the past. The sadder part for Mom? It was Sergei who was married.

From my cot in the overheated darkness of my grandparents’ apartment I thought I heard my mother crying, ever so quietly. As the relatives from Odessa snored on.

CHAPTER NINE