Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (49 page)

Something in me snapped. I wanted to howl, bang my head against the shiny Soviet-style table, flee from this insane asylum where history has been dismantled and Photoshopped into a pastiche of victims and murderers, dictators and dissidents, all rubbing sentimental shoulders together.

I did howl after Asya finished.

“Ladies!” I burst out. “Have you lost your marbles? Akhmatova’s testament to suffering … here under STALIN’s mustaches?”

I finished, mortified at my outburst. How could I be haranguing these frail survivors of a terrible era? What right did I have to wag my finger at women who’d endured and outlived the Soviet century? My lips were shaking. I wanted to cry.

The ladies seemed unoffended by my outburst. Asya Vasilievna’s dark eyes flickered with some sly wisdom I couldn’t grasp. Her half-smile was almost mischievous. Inna Valentinovna patted me warmly on the shoulder.

“Iz pesni slov ne vykinesh,”
explained Inna Valentinovna, proffering an old Russian chestnut. “You can’t yank words out of a song.”

Meaning: the past was the past, just as it was.
Without executioners there would be no victims or poems
.

“What kind of logic is that?” I protested to my mother later. She pressed her hands to her temples and shook her head.

“I’m glad I’m leaving soon,” she said.

Our time in Moscow was drawing to a close. Mom was headed back to New York; Barry and I would leave a couple of days after her on
a two-week magazine assignment in Europe. I looked forward to life again as I knew it: breathing Stalin-less air, perusing restaurant menus without going green at the prices, trundling around proud and free in my flip-flops.

Mom finally flew off. Without her prattling on three phones at once and feeding streams of ravenous visitors, the
khi-rize
felt lonely and empty. Mom, I realized, had been my moral compass in Russia, my anchoring narrative. Without her Moscow had lost its point.

Except for one last mission. The mission I’d been dreaming about most of the forty-plus years of my life—one of my secret reasons for coming here. Something I could never do with Mother around.

“Mavzoley?
Mausoleum?”

“
Da
,
nu? Mavzoley,”
said the brusque voice answering the phone. “Yeah, what of it?”

The voice sounded so disrespectful and young, I almost hung up in confusion.

“Da! Nu?”
demanded the voice.

“Are, you … um, um … 
open?
” I asked nervously, since some tourist websites suggested the V. I. Lenin Mausoleum was now closed on Sundays, and Sunday
—today
—was our last chance.

“Scheduled hours,” the voice snapped sardonically.

“What’s the admission charge?”

“In Russia we don’t charge for cemeteries!” cackled the voice. “
Not yet!”

The mausoleum line was the shortest I’d ever seen it, a scant 150 meters long.

Lenin clearly wasn’t enjoying Stalin’s cachet; his days inside his
eleet
and
ekskluziv
Red Square real estate were numbered, I reckoned. Two-decades-old talk of burying him had flared up again. A prominent member of Putin’s United Russia Party noted, almost ninety years after the fact, that Lenin’s family had opposed mummification. Asked to vote
at
goodbyelenin.ru
, 70 percent of Russians favored removal and burial. Only the Communist Party leadership yawped in outrage.

We lined up between a skinny Central Asian man and a gaggle of noisy Italians in cool high-tech nylon gear. Our Central Asian neighbor flashed us a pure gold smile. In Soviet days, I recalled, brothers from exotic republics put their money
right
where their mouths were, installing twenty-four-karat teeth instead of trusting
sberkassa
(the state savings offices).

Roughly my age, the man introduced himself as Rahmat. “It means ‘thank you’ in Tajik—ever heard of Tajikistan?”

Mr. Thank You proved to be a font of flowery, heavily accented Soviet clichés. His city, Leninabad, bore the “proud name of Lenin!” To visit the mausoleum had been his “
zavetnaya mechta
—cherished dream.”

“My dream, too,” I admitted, earning a round of twenty-four-karat smiles and ritual handshakes.

On entering the mausoleum’s grounds you were made to surrender the works—wallets, cell phones, cameras. Photos were strictly forbidden.

Which was unfortunate.

Because something wildly, improbably, heart-stoppingly photogenic was taking place out in the center of cordoned-off Red Square. I heard bugles, drumbeats. Kids in white and blue uniforms were drawn up in ranks for their Young Pioneer induction ceremony. A big woman in polka-dots moved along the rows, tying scarlet kerchiefs around their necks.

“ARE YOU READY?” roared a loudspeaker.

“ALWAYS READY!” cried the kids, giving the Young Pioneer salute. Was I hallucinating? Or were the girls really wearing the big Soviet white bows in their hair?

“Vzeveites’s kostrami sinie nochi
 …”

The relentless choral cheer of the Young Pioneer anthem filled Red Square. A scarlet myth blazed once more in the distance.

“My pioneri deti rabochikh,”
Rahmat and I sang along. “We’re Young
Pioneers, children of workers!” With no anti-Soviet mother there to tug at my sleeve, I sang at the top of my lungs.

“Frigging Young Pioneer Day,” a guard was explaining to someone nearby. “Every frigging year, the frigging communists with this … Look! Zyuganov!” The brick-faced current Communist Party leader was up on the makeshift podium.
“Queridos compañeros,”
someone began shouting in accented Spanish. “Welcoming comrades from shithole Havana,” grimaced the guard. “And for this freak show, they close Red Square!”

We filed by the Kremlin Wall burial tombs where rest the noble remains of Brezhnev, Gagarin, the American John Reed, and, yes,
Himagain
.

“Us! Walking this holy ground!” Rahmat apostrophized behind Barry and me. “This holy ground at the very center of our socialist Rodina!”

Such was his childish awe, I didn’t have the heart to remind him that the “proud four letters: CCCP” had been busted up twenty years ago, that in no way was Moscow
his
rodina.

“Scared?” I whispered to him as we descended into the mystery of mysteries of my childhood—the mausoleum burial chamber.

“Of what? Lenin isn’t scary,” Rahmat assured me serenely. “He is
svetly
(luminous) and
krasivy
(beautiful) and
zhivoy
(alive).”

Our face time with Vladimir Ilyich was barely two minutes, maybe less. Stony-featured sentries every ten feet in the darkness goaded us on a tight circuit around the glassed-in sarcophagus, where Object No. 1 lay, glowing, on heavy red velvet. I noted his/its polka-dot tie. And the extreme luminosity achieved by cunningly spotlighting his/its shining baldness.

“Why is one fist clenched?” Barry whispered.

“No talking!” a sentry barked from the shadows. “Keep moving toward the exit!”

And then it was over.

I emerged into the Moscow Sunday confused and untransfigured.
All these years … for what? Suddenly it felt deeply, existentially trivial. Had I really expected to howl with laughter at the ritual kitsch? Or experience anything other than the faintly comical anticlimactic creepiness I was feeling right now?

Barry on the other hand seemed shaken. “That was,” he blurted, “the most fascist thing I’ve ever experienced in my life!”

Red Square had reopened by now, and freshly minted Young Pioneers streamed past us. With profound disappointment I realized that the girls’ big white Soviet bows were not the proper white nylon ribbon extravaganzas of my young days but small beribboned barrettes—fakes manufactured most likely in Turkey or China.

“I remember my pride at becoming a Young Pioneer,” Rahmat beamingly told a blonde squirrel-faced girl. She sized up his gold teeth and his third world pointy-toed shoes, then my flip-flops, and shouted, “Get lost!”

We milled around with Rahmat for a while. He’d arrived in the capital just the day before and clearly hadn’t yet learned the “Moscow—mean city” mantra. He intended to look for construction work but, knowing not a soul, had come straight to the mausoleum to see Lenin’s “kind, dearly familiar face.” We smiled and nodded some more, with the vigorous politesse of two strangers about to part after a fleeting bond on a bus tour.

Two aliens, I reflected, a migrant worker and an émigré from her past, wandering Red Square beneath the gaudy marzipan swirls of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

Finally Rahmat went trudging off to pay his respects to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I felt a deep pang of sadness as I watched his slumped, lonely figure recede. My cell phone rang. It was Mom, calling at jet-lagged dawn from New York.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Just walked out of the mausoleum,” I said.

For a while there was silence.

“Idiotka,”
Mom finally snorted, then made a kiss-kiss sound and went back to bed.

Fish, Rice, and Mushrooms in Pastry

O
ur decadent, farewell-to-the-czars fish kulebiaka layered with
blinchiki
(crepes) was probably the most spectacular thing Mom and I have ever made in our lives. And so time-consuming that I can’t really recommend you try it at home. Instead, I offer here a far less laborious version—minus the complicated layers and blinchiki—that will still leave your guests gasping with awe. The sour cream in the yeast dough (Mom’s special touch) adds a lovely tang to the buttery casing. Inside, the flavors of wild mushrooms, dill, and two types of fish all mingle seductively. Serve the kulebiaka for special occasions with a green salad and lemon-flavored vodka. Lots of it.

KULEBIAKA

Serves 6 to 8

1.
MAKE THE PASTRY:
In a medium bowl stir together the milk, yeast, and sugar and let stand until foamy. Whisk in the raw egg, ½ cup sour cream, and the salt. In a large bowl, combine the 8 tablespoons of cut-up butter with the flour. Using your fingers, work the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse bread crumbs. Add the yeast mixture and stir well with your hands to make a soft dough. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

2. Bring the dough to room temperature, about 1 hour. Grease a mixing bowl with a little butter or oil. Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead, adding more flour as needed, until smooth and no longer sticky, about 5 minutes. Transfer the dough to the greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and leave in a warm place until doubled in size, about 2 hours.

3.
MAKE THE FILLING:
In a large skillet heat the oil and 2 tablespoons butter over medium-high heat. Add the salmon and cod and cook, turning once, until fish just begins to flake, about 7 minutes. Transfer the fish to a large bowl. Return the skillet to medium-high heat and add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter. Add the onions and cook until light golden. Add the mushrooms and cook until they are golden and the liquid they throw off has evaporated, about 7 minutes, adding more oil if the skillet looks dry. Transfer the mushrooms and onions to the bowl with the fish. Add the remaining ¼ cup sour cream, the hard-cooked eggs, rice, dill, parsley, vermouth, lemon juice, stock, and nutmeg. Mix everything well with two forks, stirring gently to
break up the fish. Season with salt and pepper. Let the filling cool to room temperature.