Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

And love, that picnic of love, the Khrushchevian Woodstock.

Sveta fell for a seven-foot-tall red-haired American. La bella Katya, translating for a delegation of Italian soccer players, had one of her inamoratos threaten suicide as they parted. In farewell, the distraught Romeo tossed her a package out of his hotel window.

“So I unwrap it at home,” cries Katya. “Panties! Transparent blue panties!”

Mom’s guests rock with laughter. “Remember our Soviet underpants? Two colors only: purple or blue, knee length. Sadistic elastic!”

Larisa, too, fell in love with an International Youth Festival foreigner. And he with her.

Lucien was petite and deeply tanned, with chiseled features and dark, lively eyes. He wore a dapper short leather jacket and suede loafers so pristine and comfortable-looking, they instantly betrayed him as ne nash—“not ours.” Born in Paris, raised on Corsica, Lucien ran a French lycée in the Moroccan town of Meknes, a cultural cocktail Mom found intoxicating. In my mother’s cracked vinyl photo album, the fortnight’s worth of pictures of him outnumber the ones of my dad three to one.

It was their mutual interest in Esperanto that brought the lovers together. Lucien sat next to Mom at the Festival’s first Esperanto plenary session, and when two days later, under one of the behemoth Stalinist facades on Gorky Street, he put his arm around her, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Lucien radiated charm and goodwill. In all her life Mom, then twenty-three, had never had a suitor who expressed his attraction with such disarming directness, such sweetness. Somehow her three words of Esperanto allowed her to communicate her innermost feelings to Lucien where Russian had failed her before.

Which makes sense. For all the Thaw talk of sincerity, Soviet Russian wasn’t suited for goodwill or intimacy or, God knows, unselfconscious lyrical prattle. As our friend Sasha Genis the cultural critic wrote, the State had hijacked all the fine, meaningful words. Friendship, homeland, happiness, love, future, consciousness, work—these could only be bracketed with ironic quotation marks.

“Young lady, how about we go build Communism together” went a popular pickup line in the metro. Girls found it hysterical.

Here’s how the coyly convoluted Soviet mating ritual went: Igor meets Lida at a student dorm or party. They smoke on a windowsill. Igor needles Lida admiringly, she needles back coquettishly. Walking Lida home, Igor flaunts his knowledge of Hemingway, maybe mentions that he just happens to have sought-after tickets to the Italian film festival at the Udarnik Cinema. He lingers on her apartment landing. With studied nonchalance he mutters something about her telefonchik (ironic diminutive for phone number). After several weeks/months of mingy carnation offerings, aimless ambling along windswept boulevards, and heated groping in cat-piss-infested apartment lobbies, a consummation takes place. In some bushes crawling with ants if breezes are warm. Lida gets knocked up. If Igor is decent, they go to the ZAGS, the office that registers deaths and marriages. Their happily-ever-after involves moving into her or his family “dwelling space,” which is overcrowded with a father who drinks, a mother who yells, a domineering war widow grandmother, and a pesky Young Pioneer brother. The Young Pioneer likes to spy on newlyweds having sex. From there, married life only gets jollier.

By the time I was nine, I already suspected that such nuptial bliss wasn’t for me. I had a different plan, involving zagranitsa. A foreign husband would be my ticket out of this “dismally-ever-after” to a glorious life filled with prestigious foreign commodities. More romantic by nature, Mom belonged as well to a generation more idealistic than mine. Her zagranitsa dreams did not feature hard-currency goods. Instead, into this single loaded term she distilled her desperate longing for world culture. Or, I should probably say, World Culture. After the collapse of the Stalin cosmology and her drift away from her ur-Soviet parents, culture replaced everything else in her life. It became a private devotion.

When Lucien talked of Morocco, Mom imagined herself inside some electric Matissian dreamscape. His offhand mentions of visiting his grandmother in the French countryside fired up her Proustian reveries. She could almost touch the fine porcelain teacups in la grand-mere’s salon, hear her pearls rattling gently. Lucien’s tiny gifts—such as a leather Moroccan change purse embossed with gold stars—were not mere commodities but totems of distant, mysterious freedoms. “A souvenir from the free world to someone locked up in a prison cage,” she now puts it.

Marriage never came up between them. Lucien stayed for all of two weeks. But simply having the non-Russian softness of his palm against hers, Mom felt her lifelong alienation blossoming into a tangible shape, an articulated desire: to break physically free of Soviet reality. On the hot August day in 1957 when Lucien departed, giving her a volume of Zola’s Germinal with a passionate Esperanto inscription, she knew that she too would leave. Until it happened, almost two decades later, Mom imagined that she existed in her own fourth dimension outside the Soviet time-space continuum.

“I was anti-Soviet,” she says. “But at the same time a-Soviet: an internal émigré cocooned in my own private ‘cosmopolitan’ microcosm.” Her own fairy tale.

To fill in a void left by Lucien and the Festival, Mom plunged back into cooking—but now her kitchen fantasies took a new tack. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food had been retired in scorn. Zagranitsa was the new inspiration. What did this imaginary Elsewhere actually taste like? Mom hadn’t a clue. While she could at least mentally savor the kulebiakas and botvinya so voluptuously cited by Chekhov and Gogol, Western dishes were mere names, undecoded signs from alternative domestic realities. The absence of recipes provided a certain enchantment; you could fill in these alien names with whatever flavors you chose.

Always stubbornly cheerful and good-natured about the paucity of ingredients in stores, Mom turned her parents’ kitchen once more into a dreamer’s home workshop. She may well have been the first woman in Moscow to make pizza, from a recipe “adapted” from a contraband issue of Family Circle lent to her by a friend whose father once worked in America. Who cared if her “pizza” bore a resemblance to a Russian meat pirog, only open-faced and smothered in ketchup and gratings of Sovetsky cheese? No ingredient, really, was too dreary for Mom to subject to a tasty experiment.

“Today I’ll make pot-au-feu!” she’d announce brightly, eyeing a head of decaying cabbage. “I read about it in Goethe—I think it’s soup!”

“Tastes like your usual watery shchi,” her brother, Sashka, would mutter.

Mom disagreed. Just renaming a dish, she discovered, had a power to transfigure the flavor.

Every couple of weeks a letter from Lucien would arrive from Morocco. “Mia kariga eta Lara—my dearest little Lara,” he always began. “My heart is wrenched,” he wrote after a year. “Why doesn’t kariga Lara answer me anymore?”

By then kariga Lara was madly in love with somebody else. Somebody named Sergei, somebody she thought looked uncannily like the French film heartthrob Alain Delon from Rocco and His Brothers, which she’d seen at an Italian film festival.

My mother and father met at the end of 1958. She was twenty-four; he was three years younger. My parents met in a line, and their romance blossomed in yet another line, which I guess makes me the fruit of the Soviet defitsit (shortage) economy with its ubiquitous queues.

Your average Homo sovieticus spent a third to half of his nonworking time queuing for something. The ochered’ (line) served as an existential footbridge across an abyss—the one between private desire and a collective availability dictated by the whims of centralized distribution. It was at once a means of ordering socialist reality; an adrenaline-jagged blood sport; and a particular Soviet fate, in the words of one sociologist. Or think of the ochered’ as a metaphor for a citizen’s life journey—starting on the queue at the birth registry office and ending on a waiting list for a decent funeral plot. I also like the notion of ochered’ as “quasi-surrogate for church” floated in an essay by Vladimir Sorokin, the postmodernist enfant terrible whose absurdist novel The Queue consists entirely of fragments of ochered’ dialogue, a linguistic vernacular anchored by the long-suffering word stoyat’ (to stand).

You stood? Yes, stood. Three hours. Got damaged ones. Wrong size.

Here’s what the line wasn’t: a gray inert nowhere. Imagine instead an all-Soviet public square, a hurly-burly where comrades traded gossip and insults, caught up with news left out of the newspapers, got into fistfights, or enacted comradely feats. In the thirties the NKVD had informers in queues to assess public moods, hurrying the intelligence straight to Stalin’s brooding desk. Lines shaped opinions and bred ad hoc communities: citizens from all walks of life standing, united by probably the only truly collective authentic Soviet emotions: yearning and discontent (not to forget the unifying hostility toward war veterans and pregnant women, honored comrades allowed to get goods without a wait).

Some lines, Mom insists, could be fun, uplifting even. Such were the queues for cultural events in Thaw-era Moscow—culture being a defitsit commodity, like everything else. Thanks to Khruschev’s parting of the Iron Curtain, Moscow was flooded with cultural exports back then. Scoffield as Hamlet, Olivier as Othello, the legendary Gérard Philipe doing Corneille; Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble led by his widow… Stokowsky, Balanchine, Bruno Walter—Mom devoured it all. And that’s not counting domestic treasures: Shostakovich performing his piano quintet or the balletic comet Galina Ulanova. “I stood in line so much, I had barely a moment to eat or inhale,” Mom likes to boast.

Like lines for cars and TV sets that could last months, years even, the Cultural Queue moved according to a particular logic and order. A whisper or a formal announcement of an upcoming tour set the wheel turning. A “line elder”—a hyperactive high-culture priest—would spring into action by starting the spisok (list). Still an eternity away from the ticket sale, friends took turns guarding the box office, day in and day out, adding newcomers to the all-powerful spisok, assigning numbers. Many of Mom’s friendships formed at the roll calls requiring everyone’s presence. These resembled intelligentsia parties but were hosted on freezing sidewalks where the cold cracked your boots, or in gusty May when winds unleashed torrents of white poplar fluff.

“AHA! Here comes treacherous Frumkina!” cried Inna, the dark-haired “line elder,” when Mom, once again, was unforgivably late for the French ballet roll call.

“AHA! Treacherous Frumkina!” mocked a stranger, so skinny, so young, with green liquid eyes offset by a vampiric pallor. Mother glared at him. But that night she kept thinking about how much he resembled Alain Delon.

In the end, the French ballet canceled. But Mom now kept noticing Sergei in different lines, finding herself more and more drawn to his shy cockiness, his spectral pallor, and most of all to his cultural queuing cred. In that department, Dad was a titan.

Sergei, my father, grew up neglected. Alla had him young, at nineteen. When he was a teenager, she was still stunning, a six-foot-tall bleached blonde war widow with a penchant for vodka, swearing, billiards, and cards, besides a busy career (city planning) and an even busier love life. During her assignations—married men usually—at their one room in a nightmarish communal apartment, Alla shooed Sergei out of the house. Dad spent most days on the streets anyway, a typical post-war fatherless youth, apathetic, cynical, disillusioned. One day he walked out of his squalid building and went rambling past the grand columned facade of the Bolshoi Theater with its chariot of Apollo rearing atop the Ionic portico. Dad was whistling. A five-ruble bill was in his pocket, a fat sum at the time, a gift from a rich uncle for dad’s fifteenth birthday. Sergei was strolling in sweet anticipation of how he could spend it when a scalper sidled up.

Five rubles for one fifty-kopek seat to Swan Lake at the Bolshoi—tonight.

On a lark, Dad handed over the fiver. Mainly because even though he passed the Bolshoi almost daily, he’d never been inside. A massive red velvet curtain inlaid with myriad tiny hammers and sickles rose slowly into the darkness. By the time it went down and the lights came on, Dad was hooked. Back in those days Moscow worshipped at the exquisite feet of Galina Ulanova, the soaring sylph regarded as the twentieth century’s most heartbreakingly lyrical ballerina. The entire performance Sergei felt as if he himself were floating on air. And so Dad became a professional Ulanova fan, seeing everything else at the Bolshoi and at the Moscow Conservatory for good measure. He soon scalped tickets himself. Dated long-necked swan-ettes from the Bolshoi corps de ballet.

His science studies, meanwhile, passed in a blur. Arrogant by nature, bored with mechanics and physics, he kept dropping in and out of prestigious technical colleges. Right before the exams in his final year, Alla was home after surgery and she roped him into an intense three-day vodka-fueled card game. Sergei never showed up for the exams, didn’t graduate, didn’t care. The Cultural Queue was his life and his drug. He did literal drugs, too, codeine mostly, hence his vampyric complexion. Upon checking into a clinic, he was advised by helpful Soviet doctors that the best way to kick a drug habit was to drink. A lot. Which he did.

The day before ticket sales started, the Cultural Queue climaxed in a raucous marathon of actual standing all the way to the finish line. It could last twelve hours, sometimes eighteen, all-nighters that left Mom physically drained but charged with adrenaline. The final push! One morning at the end of May, Larisa and Sergei staggered from the box office window like a couple of triumphant zombies. Tickets to all five performances of Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, still months away, were nestled in their pockets. Mom bought a green-capped bottle of buttermilk and kaloriynie bulchoki, feathery buns studded with raisins, and they collapsed on the long, arching bench by the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Its neoclassical bulk gleamed custard-yellow in the morning sun. Mom and Dad kissed for the first time under the statue of a seated Tchaikovsky summoning his music. Men with lumpy briefcases were plodding to work. Burly women in kerchiefs hawked the season’s first lilacs.

For a few weeks Larisa and Sergei were inseparable. Then he cooled. He behaved like a smug, mysterious cat, appearing and then vanishing, passionate one minute, listless and disengaged the next. By July he was gone. The cultural season was over. Days turned into weeks with no news of him, summer was passing, and Mom’s insides twisted in a knot when someone whispered that Sergei was involved with Inna, the line elder. Inna with her glossy black hair, luminous skin, and a rich father.

All of Moscow, meanwhile, stood in another line, not as epic and devastating as the lines at Stalin’s funeral, but as long and tedious as the ochered’ at Lenin’s mausoleum. They were standing to taste Pepsi-Cola at Sokolniki Park. Even my despondent mom was among them.

Well before the official opening of the American National Exhibition, Muscovites streamed to Sokolniki in the north of the city to see what was up, or, rather, what was going up. Amid the raw greenery, U.S. construction workers were helping to erect Buckminster Fuller’s spectacular geodesic dome, all thirty thousand golden, anodized aluminum square feet of it. Even the workers’ colorful hard hats provoked wild curiosity.

To urban intelligentsia, Amerika, imagined from novels and music and movies, loomed as a fervently desired mythical Other. Khrushchev, too, was obsessed with Amerika. Nikita Sergeevich displayed the typical H. sovieticus mix of envy, fascination, resentment, and awe. (He would impetuously tour the United States later that year.) While “churning out missiles like sausages,” as he liked to boast, the verbose, erratic premier simultaneously blathered on about “peaceful coexistence,” promising to beat capitalist frenemy number one nonviolently—“in all economic indicators.” Dognat’ i peregnat’ (catch up and overtake), this was called—the long-standing socialist slogan now recast to target the mighty Yanks. As in, “Let’s catch up and overtake America in dairy and beef production!” Comrades on the streets knew the score, though. “We’d better not overtake,” went a popular wisecrack, “or the Yanks will see our bare asses!” Less cynical Americans, meanwhile, stocked their shelters against Red ICBMs and had nightmares about brainwashing.

In such a heated context, Russia floated a temporizing gesture: a first-ever exchange of exhibitions of “science, technology and culture.” The United States said yes. The Soviets went first. At the New York Coliseum in June 1959, three glistening Sputniks starred with their insectlike trailing filaments and a supporting cast heavy on models of power stations and rows of bulky chrome fridges.

A month later in Moscow, on about a third of the Soviets’ budget, the Yanks retorted with consumerist dazzle—acre upon acre of it at Sokolniki Park. Almost eight hundred companies donated goods for the exhibit.

“What is this,” thundered Izvestia, “a national exhibit of a great country or a branch of a department store?”

Cannily, it was both.

As a girl Mom had visited the socialist fairyland of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. Now, exactly two decades later, just a mile or so away in Sokolniki, here she was in the Potemkin village of consumer capitalism. Which was more overwhelming? Mom usually giggles and rolls her eyes when I ask.

Inside Bucky’s golden dome, seven giant screens positioned overhead by the designers Charles and Ray Eames flashed with their composite short film Glimpses of the USA. Mom stood open-mouthed, blinking hard as 2,200 still photos pulsed through a “typical” workday and Sunday in suburban America, closing on a lingering image of flowers.

“Nezabudki…” Mom murmured along with the entranced crowd. “Forget-me-nots.”

Beyond the dome waited an empire of household stuff in the Glass Pavilion. Inside stood a model apartment, outside, a model home. A Corvette and a Caddie enticed oglers. There were abstract expressionist paintings to puzzle over, a book exhibit to filch from, Disney’s 360-degree Circarama travelogue of America to crane at. Fashion models ambled along runways while decadent jazz played and ever-smiling American guides answered all comers in fluent Russian. One of the guides was having a fling with Mom’s close friend Radik. My mother couldn’t get over this amerikanka’s non-Soviet directness and her fantastic big teeth.

In this setting, on press preview day, July 25, the spontaneous dialectic known as the Kitchen Debate erupted between Nikita and Nixon. Tension was still running high over the Western insistence on continued free access to West Berlin, surrounded as it was by East Germany. Khrushschev was agitated further by the U.S. Congress’s renewal of its annual “Captive Nations” Resolution to pray for Iron Curtain satellite countries. He carried a chip on his shoulder, vowing not to be overawed by America’s vision of bounty. Nixon in turn hankered for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. He had to look tough.

Cue the scenario at Sokolniki:

MODEL ON-SITE RCA TV STUDIO. MIDDAY.

Straw-hatted NK (Nikita Khrushchev) hectors RN (Richard Nixon) that Russia will soon surpass America in living standard. Waggles his fingers “bye-bye” as if overtaking the U.S., guffaws for cameras.

PEPSI-COLA KIOSK. AFTERNOON.

RN leads NK over for a taste test of the sole product the U.S. has been permitted to give out as a sample. Pepsi will eventually be the first American consumer item available in the USSR. “Very refreshing!” NK roars. Guzzles six Dixie cupfuls. Soviet men ask if Pepsi will get them drunk. Soviet women pronounce Russian kvass tastier. Some skeptical comrades compare the smell to benzene—or shoe wax. Over the next six weeks “disgusted” Soviets will gulp down three million cups. Country babushkas toting milk buckets will stand in line multiple times—to the point of fainting—to bring a taste of flat, warm pepsikola back to the kolkhoz. Like everyone else, Mom will keep her Dixie cup as a relic for years.

SPLITNIK KITCHEN. SAME AFTERNOON.

NK and RN relock horns at GE’s streamlined kitchen in the prefab tract house nicknamed “Splitnik” (for the walkway put in for the show). Behold the sleek washing machine! The gleaming Frigidaire! The box of SOS soap pads!

NK (lying): You Americans think the Russian people will be astonished to see these things. The fact is, all our new houses have this kind of equipment.

RN (lying): We do not claim to astonish the Russian people.

In the debate’s iconic photo, the accompanying throng includes the hawk-nosed Mikoyan, who had tried to wangle Coke’s recipe back in the thirties, and a young bushy-browed bureaucrat, one Leonid Brezhnev.

RCA WHIRLPOOL MIRACLE KITCHEN. THAT EVENING.

After an early dinner and toasts with California wine, the debaters view a second, hyper-futuristic deluxe hearth. The dishwasher is movable and scoots on tracks. The robotic floor sweeper is remote-controlled.

NK (scoffing): Don’t you have a machine that puts food in your mouth and pushes it down?

Secret polling later showed that Russians were equally unimpressed by the Miracle Kitchen. Voters rated it last. Jazz ranked first, along with Disney’s Circarama. But so what? To U.S. minds the exhibition was its finest cold war propaganda action ever, and it was pronounced so.

My mom didn’t vote in the poll. But to her surprise and dismay, she found herself among those underwhelmed by the kitchen. If anything, it left her feeling more lonely and down than before. She wanted to love the American exhibition, almost desperately she did. Had counted on it to be a vision of pure zagranitsa, to spirit her out of her socialist gloom, away from the deeper, more wounding gloom of her heartache. But for days afterward, she imagined cheery Yankee housewives trapped and frightened amid their sci-fi fridges and washing machines. She couldn’t picture herself—ever—cooking her “pot-au-feu” shchi in one of those blinding steel pots. This paradigm of happiness, fashioned from plastic tumblers, bright orange juice cartons, extravagantly frosted, unnaturally tall American layer cakes, seemed just as miserably phony as anything in the Kniga. It violated her intimate, private dream of Amerika. In any case, domestic bliss, whether socialist or capitalist, seemed more elusive than ever. She ate a slice of black bread with a raw onion ring now and then, that was all, and though it was August, buried herself under the scratchy beige woolen blanket with her blue-green volume of Swann’s Way. The Soviets had stolen the lovely Russian term for “companion” and “fellow traveler” and fixed it to a glistening ball of metal hurtling through darkest space. Sputnik. Swann, suffering at Odette’s infidelities, was Mom’s sputnik in misery. There was still no word from Sergei.

And then on a dank September day, crossing a pedestrian underpass near the Bolshoi, she ran into him. Sergei looked pale, defenseless, and shivery. Larisa handed him three rubles; he seemed badly in need of a drink. He took it and walked off, gaze averted.

A few weeks later the doorbell rang at her parents’ house in the Arbat. It was Sergei—returning the money, he said. Oh, and something else. “I’ve been running into all these ballerinas,” he mumbled, “so seductive and pretty in their bell skirts. But I have this short Jewish girl on my mind … you are the one.”

This is how my father proposed.

Mom should have slammed the door right then and locked it and dived back deep under the scratchy beige blanket and stayed there. Instead, she and Sergei formalized their love on a gray December afternoon in 1959, after three months of living together.

My parents’ generation, the generation of the Thaw, scoffed at white dresses and bourgeois parties. Mom and Dad’s uncivil non-ceremony took place at a drab ZAGS registry office near the Tretyakov Art Gallery. Outside, a wet snow was falling.

Under her shapeless coat with squirrel trim, Mom wore her usual blue hand-sewn poplin blouse. Sergei yet again looked pale and disheveled; he’d knocked back a hundred grams—rubbing alcohol, was it?—with buddies at work. But my parents’ spirits were good. Everything amused them in the dingy reception area. Pimply sixteen-year-olds waiting for their very first Soviet internal passports. Non-sober families, and a war invalid with his accordion serenading nervous couples reemerging from their assembly-line knot-tying. On this occasion Mom didn’t even mind the institutional smell of galoshes and acrid disinfectant that had nauseated her ever since her first elections in 1937.

A tiny head peeped out of the marriage hall area.

“Next couple!”

My parents passed through a vast hollow room beautified by a pair of forlorn chandeliers into a smaller room, this one bare save for a giant portrait of Lenin thrusting an arm out and squinting. The arm pointed conspicuously in the direction of the toilet. Behind a crimson-draped table sat a judge fringed by two dour clerks. The wide red ribbons draped across their gray-clad chests gave them the appearance of moving banners.

The judge cast a suspicious glance at Mom’s homemade blouse. Her small face resembled a vydra’s (an otter’s), squished below a towering hairdo.

“ON BEHALF OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION”—the vydra’s petite mouth suddenly boomed like a megaphone at a parade—“WE CONGRATULATE THE…”

Mom clenched her jaw tight. She looked up at the ceiling, then over at squinting Lenin, then at Sergei, then exploded with hysterical laughter.

“STOP THIS DISGRACE, COMRADE BRIDE,” thundered the vydra, “OR YOU WILL BE ESCORTED FROM HERE IMMEDIATELY!”

“DO YOU PROMISE TO RAISE YOUR CHILDREN,” she resumed, “IN THE BEST TRADITIONS OF MARXISM AND LENINISM?” Mom nodded, fighting the next eruption of laughter.

“RINGS!!!” shouted the vydra.

Mom and Dad had none.

“WITNESSES—WHERE ARE YOUR WITNESSES?”

Ditto the witnesses.

The vydra didn’t bother with further felicitations. My parents didn’t seem worthy of the customary wishes of good luck in creating a new socialist family.

“SIGN HERE, NOW!”

The vydra shoved a stack of documents across the red table.

Mom picked up the heavy blue fountain pen with a sharp, menacing metal tip. The vydra snatched it away and whacked it across my mother’s knuckles.

“GROOM SIGNS FIRST!”

Three months after being assaulted with a fountain pen, Larisa moved into her mother-in-law’s communal apartment, where eighteen families shared one kitchen.