Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (46 page)

“What about … er … all the people he killed?” I put in, uninvited.

The Stalinist waved me off philosophically. “Cut a forest and splinters will fly.” It’s a popular expression among Stalin apologists. We left the two of them grunting in agreement with each other (and most other Russians) about the country’s worst-ever leader—Gorbachev!—and once more braved the boulevards.

“Your
shlyopki
(flip-flops)!” yelled an orange-haired hippo from a bench. “People spit—and worse!—on the streets! Want a leg amputated?”

“But Moscow these days seems so
clean,”
I cravenly bleated, overwhelmed by how quickly my leisurely, nostalgic stroll had unleashed a present-day nightmare.

“Clean??” came the answer. “When
churki
are doing the cleaning?”

Churki
(logs) is a racial slur for Moscow’s nonwhite migrant workers from our former fraternal republics. Even on this gorgeous pre-Easter Saturday when the heart yearned to sing and Muscovites were buying Dom Perignon for Easter brunch, workers from erstwhile Soviet Central Asia were out in force, sweeping sidewalks, unloading trucks, handing out leaflets promoting sushi bargains. Brushstroke by diligent
brushstroke they were painting the historic pastel-hued mansions and the nouveau-riche antihistoric replicas. Suddenly I understood why Moscow center had the eerie fake sheen of a movie set.

Migrant workers in Moscow number anywhere from two to five million, possibly as much as a quarter of the capital’s ballooning population. They’ve been flocking here since the midnineties, fleeing the post-Soviet Disasterstans. To be underpaid, abused by nationalists, harassed by police.

Beyond the hippo on her bench, a young Tajik street cleaner leaned on her broom. She gave a smile at my toes. “Finally a beautiful day,” she sighed. “Last week when it snowed, my shift started at four a.m.” Born in 1991, the year the Imperium ended, she had two babies back in Tajikistan. Her brothers were drug addicts. Her parents, she said, remembered Soviet rule as paradise.

“Moskva—zloy gorod,”
she concluded. “Moscow—mean city.”

On Tsvetnoy, the last of the boulevards, finally it rose ahead, my sentimental journey’s destination—the Central Market. The charmed food fairyland of my childhood was now a viciously expensive new mall with edgy international brands, artily designed by a British architectural firm. “Very post-bling,” I’d been told.

Smiling stilettoed giraffes handed out outsize oranges by the entrance. “Visit our Farmer’s Market upstairs,” they cooed. Their gaze lightly brushed my toes and moved on.

Escalators ferried us aloft, past Commes des Garçons, Diesel, and Chloe, past puzzling conceptual art and hip displays of homegrown fashion genius.

The Farmer’s Market held nary a farmer.

The buzzy-bucolic name had been cooked up by a local restaurant group for their organically minded epicurean food hall. We wandered this New Russian arcadia, ogling hundred-dollar boxes of Italian chocolates, farmhouse French cheeses, newfangled sashimi, and Iberico hams, all arranged under the dramatic sweep of the
stainless-steel ceiling. Here was Moscow throwing down its Guccied gauntlet at storied food halls like Berlin’s Ka De We and London’s Selfridges.

A dewy-cheeked Kyrgyz Eve called out from a fruit aisle with a shiny red apple.

“
This
, dear madam, is honey-sweet,” she enticed. “Just arrived from Bordeaux. Or perhaps something tart—a Pippin from Britain? Or here,” she sirened on, “here’s our
own
little apple!”

A bumpy, mottled-green specimen of the native Semerenko variety now reposed in her delicate hand.

“Looks homely,” I muttered.

“Oh, but the heavenly taste will transport you
straight
to your dacha childhood,” our Kyrgyz lovely promised, smiling ethereally.

I chewed on a wedge and grimaced. The apple was sour. Around us cute Central Asian boys in retro flat caps slavishly steered shopping carts for
ekskluziv
patrons. Somehow the sight didn’t inspire old dacha reveries. And the whole au courant local-seasonal note rang hollow too—just another bit of imported post-bling bling. Not to mention that “our” apple was crazy expensive.

“
Anya
,” I said, noting the Kyrgyz Eve’s name tag. “We’re namesakes!”

“
Nyet
.” She suddenly went glum. “Aynazik is my native name,” she murmured. “But think anyone here would bother pronouncing it?

“Moskva—zloy gorod,”
she whispered, holding out an apple for the next passing customer. “Moscow—mean city.”

On the way out we received more free oranges, along with a lustrous onion from Holland. Boarding the trolley back to the flat, I felt extremely alienated from this new Moscow. I called Dad’s wife, Lena, on my cell to ask if there were any affordable food shops in this city of Cartier-priced pippins. “Not in the center, my dear!” Lena giggled. Non-elites no longer lived in the center. They sold or rented their flats and lived off the income in faraway suburbs rich in
diskaunt
outlets like Kopeechka (literally “Little Kopek”). “You can try taking a metro, then a shuttle bus to Kopeechka,” suggested Lena. “But their produce is often rotten.”

We found Mom in the
khi-rize
, prattling on three phones at once.

“Moscow,” she was saying to someone. “What a mean city.”

The Easter weekend’s unsentimental journeys were over; the work week was upon us.

So just what brought me—you might wonder by now—to Putin’s mean petro-dollar capital for an entire
month
? An incoherent jumble of motives, really. Seeing family. Resavoring flowering boulevards and dusty museums. Testing the scandalous scale of apple sticker shock. Fishing for socialist relics—my poisoned madeleines—amid the gleaming piers of Villeroy & Boch showrooms.

Beyond that? Beyond that I had one clear task on the agenda, and it was all Dasha’s doing.

Dasha Hubova was a professor of cultural anthropology turned TV producer. We’d met by chance at a three-star chefs’ conference in Madrid. I had read her article on the oral history of the 1932 Ukrainian famine. It was gut-wrenching stuff about the death of infants, cannibalism. Imagine my shock in Madrid when I learned that this very Dasha now ran Telecafé, the twenty-four-hour digital food channel owned by Russia’s media giant, Channel One. From famines to round-the-clock food porn—such a New Russian trajectory, I thought.

Little realizing where that trajectory would intersect with mine.

“Come to Moscow, we’ll give you a show,” tempted Dasha after filming me a bit in Madrid. She even agreed to a separate gig for my mother when I glowingly flacked Mom’s credentials. (“Ace at historic meals! Chirps like a nightingale in lilting Russian, uncorrupted by post-Soviet Americanisms!”)

Mom was ecstatic. Her luggage to Moscow held photogenic wardrobe ensembles and a thick folder of notes for her six-part show-to-be on historic cuisines. Sixty years after failing her drama school exams in Stalin’s Moscow, my
mamochka
, Larisa Naumovna Frumkina, was finally getting her close-up. And her cooking had gotten it for her.

Each of us was assigned a chef and filmed in his kitchen. Mom’s
partner was Alexander Vasilievich, from a restaurant called CDL (the Russian acronym for Central House of Writers), part of the old Writers Union. One of Moscow’s most flagrantly historic locations, its Gothic-romantic 1889 mansion was where Soviet literary elites gathered for legendary dinners and readings—all inaccessible, of course, to us mere mortals. Here the devil dined in Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita
.

And here now, dropping in on Mom’s shoot, I heard a director shout:
“Svet na geroinyu
—more lights on
the heroine!”

Mom beamed, glowing, ever the “heroine.” Her chef sidekick, on the other hand—middle-aged, painfully shy Alexander Vasilievich—seemed to want the floor to open and swallow him up.

I left them and headed to a retro-Soviet candy shop across the street. I had in mind an experiment. Under thick glass were arrayed sweets by the Red October Chocolate Factory—the pet confectionary of the food commissar Anastas Mikoyan, still in operation though now owned by a German concern. Earlier, among the nostalgic Little Squirrel and Mishka the Clumsy Bear chocolates, I’d spotted the
ananas
—object of my dread, shame, torment, and triumph in kindergarten. Now I bought myself a candy and sucked on the crunchy chocolate shell, slowly licking toward the center,
exactly
as I had four decades before. I was trying, I confess, to manufacture a madeleine-esque moment. But the filling, so excruciatingly luscious to me once with its synthetic-exotic flavor of pineapple, now tasted simply … synthetic. Something feebly tried to stir in me, then faded. With a sigh, I went tramping back to the
khi-rize
as Moscow scowled at my flip-flops.

That night, I reluctantly changed into semi-stilettos—for dinner with oligarchs. Russia’s nouveau riche are not the smug-faced gangsters in maroon velvet jackets they used to be. Now entering their post-bling stage, they send their kids to Oxford, donate to the arts, sometimes even forsake ritzy Petrus for old, noble Barolos.

And
who
of all people had become the biggest fan and friend of the oligarchs? My pauperist, antiestablishment mom! For some time, rich
Russians had been falling madly in love with her when she squired them around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She responded with affection. “They’ve become
cultured,”
she claimed. Occasionally she even entertained oligarchs at her cramped immigrant quarters in Queens. “A hundred
million
dollars?” repeated one very nice oil man to my question about what constituted wealth in Russia. He chuckled good-naturedly, full of Mom’s borscht. “A hundred million’s not even
money.
”

Now, in Moscow, our hosts were a charming fiftyish couple, veterans of my mother’s tours of the Met. They had a family bank. We dined at a panoramic Italian restaurant at the newly renovated Hotel Ukraine; it was visible through binoculars from our
khi-rize
. From our roof terrace table we could almost touch the mammoth stone Stalinist stars and hammer-and-sickles at the base of the hotel’s refurbished spire. Mr. Banker wore a Pucci-esque shirt; Mrs. Banker,
flat
shoes. She laughed heartily at my flip-flop adventures.

“No onions,” Mr. Banker told the waiter. “No garlic or hot peppers.”

“You’re … Buddhist?” I gasped.

“
Da, da
,” he acknowledged, ever so modest. “We converted during the 2008 financial crisis. The stress.”

“Twenty years,” murmured Mrs. Banker into her forty-dollar garlic-free pizza. “Twenty years since the USSR.
How
we’ve changed.”

Barry joked about all the Land Rovers and Bentleys in Moscow. Everyone laughed.

“Actually we have a
Range
Rover,” confessed Mr. Banker.

“And also a Bentley,” confessed his wife.

“What’s a Bentley?” asked Mom.

With Mom’s TV shoot done and mine yet to come, we went for a family reunion out in Davydkovo. My cousin Masha lived there now, in our former
khrushcheba
apartment. Exiting the metro, I suggested a quick pre-reunion stroll in the woods. The Davydkovo pine woods, where Stalin’s dacha still lay. Brooding, mysterious.

Him again.

The Father of All Nations had at least a dozen government dachas. But the one behind the thirteen-foot green fence in Davydkovo by my ex–Central Committee kindergarten was his actual home for more than two decades. From the Kremlin to here was a twelve-minute trip in the Leader’s armored black Packard. Hence the dacha’s nickname, Blizhnyaya, the “nearest one.”

A few years earlier, photos of the inaccessible Blizhnyaya started popping up on the Internet. I pored over the images of the neo-modernist green country house—all straight-lined functionality denounced by Stalinist ideologues but apparently privately favored by the Boss. Weirdly disturbing, his personal coat hanger; his dark, monastic bathrobes with the shortened sleeve for his withered left arm.