Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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^{PART III}
ANYA

^{My mother and me the evening before we emigrated, 1974}

_{CHAPTER SIX}

1960s: CORN, COMMUNISM, CAVIAR

The year I was born, 1963, is remembered by Russians for one of the worst crop failures in post-Stalinist history. War rationing still fresh in their memory, comrades found themselves back in breadlines with queue numbers scribbled on their hands in violet ink so indelible and so poisonous, the joke was that it infected your blood. All over Moscow adults enlisted schoolchildren to take their place in the line. For handing over as well the extra ration of bread they were allowed, some enterprising Young Pioneers made small fortunes charging ten kopeks per breadline.

Coarse and damp was the bread waiting at the end of the line. Not just damp, but often oozing weird greenish gunk: the flour had been stretched out with dried peas. Still, Moscow was hardly near starvation. In one of those savory ironies of socialist food distribution, some stores carried shrimp and crab from Vladivostok. But regular citizens didn’t touch these exotic pink Far Eastern crustaceans out of the pompous pages of Kniga. Regular citizens hadn’t a clue what shrimp were. People spat hardest at the fourteen-kopek cans of corn stacked up on store counters in Giza-scaled pyramids. All corn—no bread. That was everyone’s curse for Kukuruznik (Corn Man), the blabbering clown in the Kremlin who’d crowned this stupid, alien corn “the new czarina of Russian fields.”

“What does the 1963 harvest look like?” went a popular joke. “Like Khrushchev’s hairdo (bald).”

Things were going badly for Nikita Sergeevich. After a stretch of prodigious economic boom and scientific achievement, his career was belly flopping. There was the bungled Karibsky krizis (Russian for the Cuban missiles affair). His Virgin Lands scheme of planting grain en masse on the Central Asian steppes, promising initially, was ending in a cartoonish fiasco with millions of tons of topsoil simply blowing away. And his dairy and meat price hikes in 1962 had erupted in riots in the southern city of Novocherkassk. “Khrushchev’s flesh—for goulash!” railed a protest banner. The State responded with tanks, killing twenty-three rioters.

The massacre was concealed; but the Leader’s kukuruza (corn) disaster could not be. Enthralled by a visiting Iowa farmer in 1955, the Bald One had introduced corn as the magic crop that would feed Russia’s cattle. Corn was forced down human throats too. Khrushchev-look-alike chefs sang songs to the new corn in short propaganda films; animated rye and barley welcomed this new corn off the train in cartoons. “The road to abundance is paved with kukuruza!” went a popular slogan. Maize was planted everywhere—while American instructions for proper seeding and care were everywhere ignored. After a couple of encouraging harvests, yields plunged. Wheat, neglected, grew in even shorter supply. Bread lines sprouted furiously.

In 1961 at the Twenty-Second Party Congress Khrushchev had promised true communism. Instead there was kukuruza. Russians could forgive many things, but the absence of wheat bread made them feel humiliated and angry. Wheat bread was symbolic, sacred. On induction into Komsomol, students were asked to name the price of bread. Woe to the politically retarded delinquent who blurted out “thirteen kopeks.” The correct answer: “Our Soviet bread is priceless.”

Capitalizing in part on this popular wrath, in October of 1964 a Kremlin clique forced Khrushchev from power. For a while papers talked about his “subjectivism” and “hare-brained scheming,” about the “lost decade.” Then they stopped mentioning him. A previously obscure apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev, now general secretary, ushered the USSR into a new era. Stagnation, the era was later dubbed. The age of cynicism and “acquisitive socialism.” The age of bargains, contracts, and deals, of Brezhnev’s-eyebrows jokes and Lenin Centennial anecdotes—of empty store shelves and connivingly stuffed fridges.

The dissolution of my parents’ marriage mirrored Khrushchev’s fall.

A product of the Thaw Era, Mom still retains tender feelings toward Kukuruznik. But she can’t help blaming him and his corn and the breadlines for what happened with her and my father.

About a year before my mother’s troubles began, she sat at a pedsovet, the pedagogical council of School No. 112, District 5. Another meaningless “agitational” propaganda meeting was about to begin. Mother felt queasy. The odor of sulfuric acid, potassium hydroxide, and teenage stress hormones hung in the air. The classroom they gathered in belonged to Comrade Belkin, the puffy-faced science teacher and font of communist consciousness.

For these endless, poisonous meetings Mom was partially to blame. She had spoken up at her very first “agitational” session. Recently hired as the school’s progressive young English teacher, she’d been eager to flaunt her dissident stripes. It was still the Thaw. Sincerity was the buzzword. Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Stalinist One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had just been published!

“Comrades!” my mother had begun in her best imitation Moscow Art Theater voice. “What have we actually learned from this meeting? Why have we sat here listening to Comrade Belkin read aloud the entire political section of Pravda? Aren’t piles of homework waiting? Don’t some of us have hungry kids to go home to?”

At the last sentence Mom’s oration trailed off. Nearing the Soviet grandmotherly age of thirty, she herself had no kid waiting hungrily. An ectopic pregnancy followed by barbaric Soviet gynecological care had left her in no shape to conceive, and “home” was a dumpy single room she shared with her husband and mother-in-law in a bleak communal apartment.

Tak tak tak. “So, so so,” said the troika: the Labor Union rep, the school’s Party functionary, and Citizen Edelkin, the principal. Tak tak tak; they tapped their pencils in unison. “Thanks for sharing your views, Comrade Frumkina.”

But the other teachers had been mesmerized by her words. Mom caught their grateful, admiring glances. Shortly afterward a sign had appeared in the principal’s office: FROM NOW ON: PROPAGANDA MEETINGS—COMPULSORY. The other teachers started avoiding my mother.

This new March session droned on and on. So much to discuss. Two Young Pioneers had been caught tying their scarlet scarves on a neighborhood cat. And what to do about Valya Maximova, the third-grader spied at gym class wearing a cross under her uniform? Confronted by responsible classmates, Valya had confessed: her babushka sometimes took her to church.

Valya’s teacher waved Exhibit A, the confiscated cross, on its neck string as if dangling a dead mouse by the tail.

“That pesky babushka,” said the science teacher Belkin in a loud whisper. “Under Stalin such types got twenty-five years.”

Stalin’s corpse had recently been evicted from Lenin’s mausoleum by Khrushchev, so as not to “corrupt” that noblest of cadavers. Invoking the pockmarked Georgian was uncool. But instead of protesting, everyone turned and peered at Larisa. Some weeks before, sacrificing her own Sunday, she’d taken her pupils to a cemetery, where innocent Pioneers had been exposed to crosses galore. She regarded it as a cultural lesson, a way of lifting the Soviet taboo around death for the kids.

“Some Young Pioneers report that during the trip you mentioned Jesus Christ.”

Edelkin pronounced this as if Valya’s religious babushka and Larisa were fellow opium pushers.

“Christianity is part of world culture,” Larisa protested.

Tak tak tak, went the troika.

Edelkin ended the meeting on an upbeat note. In the case of pupil Shurik Bogdanov there’d been serious progress. Poor Shurik Bogdanov—an A student, conscience of his class, and champion collector of scrap metal. Then he started getting Cs for “behavior.” His distraught mother stormed into Edelkin’s office and revealed the whole awful story: her husband had been cohabiting with a female colleague from his workplace. He intended to leave them. Poor young Shurik was traumatized.

“Could the Soviet school save a socialist family?” asked Edelkin with a dramatic flourish. Indeed, it could! The Party organization at Bogdanov père’s workplace had been contacted, a public meeting called. Shurik’s father and the female interloper had been instructed to cease their immoral cohabitation immediately.

“The father is now back in the family fold,” reported Edelkin, almost smirking with pride. Socialist values had triumphed. Would comrade teachers chip in for a bottle of Sovetskoye champagne for the couple?

Mom gasped for air as he finished. The chemical stench of the classroom, the intrusion of the kollektiv into some hapless comrade’s love life, the bleakness of her own situation… Next thing she knew, the entire pedagogical council was fanning her with pages of Pravda and splashing her with cologne. She had fainted.

That week the doctor confirmed the impossible: she had fainted because she was with child. The troika at school suggested that she needn’t bother to return after maternity leave.

My mother was pregnant, unemployed, and euphoric.

Mom remembers pregnancy as the happiest time of her life. She didn’t understand why most Soviet mamas-to-be hid their bellies in shame under layers of baggy rags. Even at eight months she waddled down the street as if floating on air—belly forward. Inside her was a girl, she was sure of this. It was the girl she’d been dreaming about ever since she herself was a schoolgirl. The girl she imagined playing the piano, painting watercolors, learning languages in foreign countries, and—who knows?—maybe even riding a shiny brown Arabian horse on some verdant British estate. It was the girl she intended to guard like a tigress from the counterfeit Soviet happiness, from that rotten, demoralizing split-consciousness, from toska, the anguished, alienated anxiety of her own Stalinist childhood.

Apparently Mom also wanted to shield me from Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and Belka and Strelka, the adorable black and white mutts who flew into space. My mother hated the kosmos; that preposterous futuristic final frontier of Soviet imperialism. At age five I was forced to hide my profound crush on Yuri Gagarin from her and weep in secret when the smiley kosmonavt died in a plane crash at the age of thirty-four. But I’m grateful Mom didn’t name me Valentina, after Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. I look nothing like Valentina. Mom named me instead after one of her favorite poems by Anna Akhmatova.

“At baptism I was given a name—Anna, Sweetest of names for human lips or hearing.”

Anna, Annushka, Anya, Anechka, the irreverent An’ka. The peasant-vernacular Anyuta and Anyutochka, Nyura and Nyurochka. Or Anetta, in a self-consciously ironic Russified French. Or the lovely and formal Anna Sergeevna (my name and patronymic)—straight out of Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” The inexhaustible stream of diminutive permutations of Anna, each with its own subtle semiotics, rolled sweetly off my mother’s lips during pregnancy.

Her baby daydreams usually reached fever pitch in the food lines. Surrounded by disgruntled citizens muttering Khrushchev jokes, Mother drew up imaginary lists of the foods she would feed to her little Anyutik. Unattainable foods she knew only from her reading. Omar. Lobster. So noble-sounding, so foreign. Definitely pizza and pot-au-feu. And when the child was just old enough: Fleurie. Everyone swigged it in the novels of Hemingway, that most Russian of American writers. Yes, yes, definitely carafes of Fleurie, with snails dripping garlicky butter and parsley sauce. Followed by cakes from her beloved Proust. Madlenki, Mom called them in Russian, with the clumsy proprietary familiarity of someone who lived and breathed Proust but still thought madeleines were a species of jam-filled pirozhki.

Occasionally Mom would get lucky in the lines. She still talks of the day she victoriously lugged home five kilos—ten pounds—of vobla to last her the entire final trimester. Have I mentioned vobla before? It’s the rock-hard, salt-encrusted dried Caspian roach fish. Rock-hard vobla sustained Russians through the revolutionary teens and twenties, the terrible thirties, the war-torn forties, the liberating fifties, and the rollicking sixties—until the Caspian was so depleted that in the stagnant seventies of my childhood vobla became a sought-after delicacy. Vobla brings out that particular Russian masochism; we love it because it’s such a torment to eat. There’s the violent whacking against a table to loosen the skin, followed by the furious yanking of the petrified leathery flesh off the skeleton. There’s self-inflicted violence, too—a broken tooth here, a punctured gum there—all to savor that pungently salty, leathery strip of Soviet umami. Vobla was the last thing my mother ate before being rushed to Birthing House No. 4. This might explain why I’d happily trade all Hemingway’s snails and Proust’s cakes for a strip of petrified fish flesh.

From Birthing House No. 4 Mom brought home a jaundice-yellowed infant swaddled tight as a mummy into totalitarian submission. Awaiting her were the glories of Soviet socialist motherhood. Cribs as elegant as a beet harvester. Pacifiers made of industrial rubber you sterilized in a water bath for two hours while you hand-copied the entire volume of samizdat Dr. Spock. And pelyonki (diapers), twenty per day per Soviet child—not including nine flannel over-diapers, and a mountain of under-diapers fashioned from surgical gauze.

These scores of diapers couldn’t simply be bought at a store. In an economy where every shred and scrap was recycled, all twenty pelyonki were made at home, by cutting up and hand-hemming old sheets. During the day Mom soaked them in cold water with suds from a brown smelly soap bar she grated until her knuckles bled. At night she scalded them in a four-gallon bucket on the stove of a communal apartment kitchen lacking hot water, then rinsed all twenty under an icy stream from the rusted communal tap until her arms were falling-off frozen. The weight of maternal love came down on me with full force when I learned that each morning she then ironed the twenty pelyonki. Mom claims that she loved me so much, she didn’t mind the diaper routine, which I guess makes her a Soviet martyr to Motherhood. After she told me about it, I went to bed lamenting what a burden I’d been, being born.

This was Dad’s sentiment, too.

Initially he rather enjoyed Soviet fatherhood. He helped with the pelyonki. Stood in breadlines after work. Arrived home “tired but joyful,” to use a cherished socialist-realist cliché, with heavy, doughy bricks of rye inside his string bag. Together he and Mom bathed me in a zinc tub, adding disinfectant drops that tinted the water pink. But after three months, this life no longer seemed so rosy and pink to Dad. One night he didn’t come home. Mom spent sleepless hours running to the single black telephone of the entire communal apartment at the far end of the endless unheated hallway. The phone was silent, as silent as the alkogolik Tsaritsin passed out by the kitchen. In the morning Mother put on the seductive lilac robe with tiny white checks, a gift from Clara, her American aunt, and she waited. She waited long enough to read me the entire volume of Mother Goose in both Russian and English. (Humpty Dumpty translates as “Shaltai Baltai,” in case you’re curious.)

A murky February dusk had already descended when Sergei returned. He had hangover breath and a look of aggressive guilt. It didn’t make sense, him having a family, he announced from the threshold. “This whole baby business…” He let it go at that. He had no real means to provide for the family, no energy to endure the breadlines, no real desire. He yanked off a quilted blanket covering the folding cot in the corner. Slowly, demonstratively, he unfolded the cot a safe distance from the marital bed and fell asleep right away. Mom says that he snored.

On occasion Sergei would come home after work, and reenter my mother’s bed. Or sleep on the cot. Often he wouldn’t come home for weeks. He never bathed me anymore but from time to time he’d pick me up and make goo-goo eyes. Mom’s life went on—a wrenching, demoralizing limbo that left her will broken and her heart always aching. In her wildest, most daring fantasies Larisa hoped for one thing now: a half-basement room of her own where she and I would have tea from colorful folkloric cups she’d once seen at a farm market. Happiness to her was those cups, those artisanal cups of her own.

Mom’s purgatory lasted three years.

By the standards of the massive and perpetual housing crisis that pushed half the Soviet population into far more suffocating arrangements than ours, three years was a virtual fortnight. Anna Akhmatova, my genius namesake, was brought into a communal apartment at the Fountain House (formerly Sheremetev Palace) in Leningrad by her longtime lover, Nikolai Punin. His ex-wife lived with them. After the lovers’ breakup, both Akhmatova and the ex-wife remained in the flat, with nowhere to go, while Punin brought home new lovers. Following Punin’s arrest, Akhmatova continued to shuffle through a series of rooms at the same apartment (which now houses a tenderly curated museum). Memoirists recall how she and her ex-lover’s ex-family all sat at the dinner table, not talking. When Akhmatova’s son came back from the gulag he slept on a sunduk (trunk) in the hallway. At the Fountain House Akhmatova spent almost thirty years.

I too slept on a sunduk in the drafty hallway of my grandparents’ Arbat apartment when, in despair, Mom would run back to Naum and Liza. It was the same blue lightweight trunk that during the war saved Liza’s family from starvation. My grandparents’ two tiny rooms were already overcrowded with Mom’s brother and my three-year-old cousin, whose mother had her own marital difficulties. So Mom slept on a cot in the kitchen or next to me in the hallway. In the archaeology of Soviet domestic artifacts, the raskladushka—a lightweight aluminum and khaki tarp folding cot on which entire lives had been spent—ranks, perhaps, as the most heartbreaking and the most metaphoric. It also damaged millions of backs.

My mother was fortunate to have her marriage collapse in 1964.

In the late fifties, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, best known for epic symphonies, scored Moskva, Cheryomushki, a rollicking operetta pastiche satirizing the housing shortage. In 1962 it was turned into a film. Sasha and Masha, its young protagonists, have a marital crisis that is the inverse of my parents’ mess: they’re recently wed but forced by the dreaded “housing issue” to live apart, each with his or her family. My favorite bit is the campy Technicolor dream sequence when Sasha and Masha go waltzing through their imaginary new digs—private digs!—singing “Our hallway, our window, our coat hanger… Nashe, nashe, nashe: ours ours ours.” In the film’s socialist Hollywood ending, corrupt housing officials taste defeat and the lovers finally nest in their ugly new prefab flat—nashe nashe!—in the Cheryomushki district.

Cheryomushki in southwestern Moscow was, in fact, quite real, the country’s first mass development of private apartments. Similar housing blocks went shooting up in the sprawl of other outlying mikrorayoni (micro-districts). They were the Bald One’s low-cost revision of the Soviet domestic fairy tale: an escape from the hell of forced communality. At long last the nuclear family had a promise of privacy.

It’s hard to overestimate the shift in consciousness and social relations brought about by this upsurge of new housing. Initiated by Khrushchev in the late fifties, the construction continued well beyond him, into the eighties. It was the country’s biggest lifestyle transformation since the 1917 revolution, and represented probably the Bald One’s greatest social achievement.

By 1964 close to half the population—almost 100 million people—had moved into the new, bare-bones units slapped up quick and shoddy from prefab concrete panels. Soviet stats boasted that the USSR was churning out more apartments per year than the USA, England, France, West Germany, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland combined. Who doesn’t remember those endless housewarming bashes where we sat on the floor and ate herring off a newspaper, garnished with enticing whiffs of wallpaper glue? The prefabs put an end to the era of ornate, lofty-ceilinged, elite Stalinist housing. No longer just for nomenklatura and Stakhanovites, material well-being (such as it was) was now touted as a birthright for all. Khrushchev wanted to offer us a preview of the promise of full communism, shining bright just beyond Mature Socialism. And like Iosif Vissarionovich before him, Nikita Sergeevich bothered with the details. The Mustachioed One sniffed the soap. The Bald One tested and approved the standardized unitaz (toilet).

It was not large, this unitaz. Private dwellings were in no way meant to provoke bourgeois aspirations or rampant individualism. The vernacular name for the new prefabs, after all, was khrushcheba, a contraction of Khrushchev and truscheba (slum). What’s more, the new egalitarian residential spirit expressed itself in crushing architectural uniformity. Boxlike elevatorless blocks, usually five stories high, held multiple tiny dvushki (two-roomers). Ceiling height: two and a half meters. Living room: fourteen square meters. Bedroom: always the same eight square meters. For cooking, eating, talking, guzzling vodka, sipping tea, chain-smoking, doing homework, telling political jokes, playing the seven-string Russian guitar, and generally expressing yourself, the now-legendary “five-metrovki”—shorthand for the minuscule fifty-square-feet kitchens—fondly remembered later as incubators of free speech and dissent. The expression “kitchen dissident” entered the lexicon from here. Dissidence was an unintended but profound consequence of Khrushchev’s housing reforms.

The unrelenting sameness of the khrushchebas weighed heavily on the Soviet soul. “Depressing, identical apartment buildings,” wrote Alexander Galich, a well-known bard and singer of the time, forced into exile. “With identical roofs, windows, and entrances, identical official slogans posted on holidays, and identical obscenities scratched into the walls with nails and pencils. And these identical houses stand on identical streets with identical names: Communist Street, Trade Union Street, Peace Street, the Prospect of Cosmonauts, and the Prospect or Plaza of Lenin.”

Most of the above applied to the long-awaited new home we finally moved into in 1966. With a couple of major exceptions. Our street was called Davydkovskaya, not Lenin, Engels, Marx, or, God forbid, Mom’s dreaded Gagarin. Full address: Davydkovskaya, House 3, Fraction 1, Structure 7. At first, yes, Mom and I wandered forever trying to find it among identical blocks surrounded by pools of mud. But the neighborhood—Davydkovo, part of the Kuntsevo district—wasn’t depressing. It was rather charming, in fact. A former village in the western reaches of Moscow, it was a twenty-minute drive from the Kremlin along a wide, arrow-straight road. In former times Davydkovo was known for its bracing air and for the nightingales that sang from the banks of a fast-moving, shallow river called Setun’. A short walk from our Khrushchev slum rose a beautiful forest of fragrant tall pines. The pines shaded a massive green fence surrounding the closed-up dacha of a certain short, pockmarked Georgian, deceased for over a decade and rarely mentioned.

Mom swears we owed our khrushcheba joy to a ring and a miracle. It all began with a whisper—someone, somewhere, tipping her off to a waiting list for apartments that moved surprisingly swiftly. But there was a catch: the flat was a co-op requiring a major down payment. Which is where the ring and supposed miracle enter the picture. An art nouveau folly of dark-yellow gold in the shape of a graceful diamond-studded bouquet, the band was a post-war present to Liza from Naum, celebrating their survival. Babushka Liza lacked bourgeois instincts; I’ve always admired that about her. Having worn the ring once or twice, she tossed it into her sewing box. She was mending socks when Mom told her about the impossible down payment. The ring—so Mother swears—glinted at Liza with magical force. Miraculously a buyer materialized, offering the very seven hundred rubles (six monthly salaries) needed for the down payment. The entire family took it as an omen, and nobody was upset when they later learned that the ring was worth at least five times that price.

And so, here we were.

Our sauerkraut fermented under a wooden weight in our very own enameled bucket on our mini-balcony. From our windows hung our curtains, sewn by Mom from cheapo plaid beige and brown linen. Our shoe-box-size fridge, which Boris, the drunken plumber, had affixed to a wall because there was no space in the kitchen. The fridge beckoned like a private hanging garden of Babylon. Falling asleep every night in the privacy of her own four walls, my mother felt… Well, she felt she was still living in a Bolshevik communal utopia.

Our walls were cardboard khruscheba walls. Ukrainian Yulia next door wailed at her husband’s philandering. Prim Andrei upstairs rehearsed plaintive double bass passages from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony to the guttural ostinato of Uzbek arguments on the ground floor. The worst tormentors, Colonel Shvirkin and his chignoned wife, Nina, were quiet as mice, but such unacceptably paradisiacal smells of fried baby hen wafted from their kitchen that the entire building wanted to collectively lynch them.

My mother couldn’t afford baby hens. After several years of maternity leave she still refused to rejoin the workforce. Relatives chided her, but she insisted she had to spend every second with her little Anyutik. And so we lived essentially on Dad’s forty-five-ruble alimony, less than half of the pitiful Soviet monthly wage. Occasionally Mom added a pittance by giving an English lesson to Suren, an Armenian youth with fuzz on his lip and a melon-bosomed mother with fuzz on her lip. “Larisa Naumovna! I understood everything!” Suren would bleat. “Except this one strange word everywhere. T-k-he?” Which is the Russian pronunciation of the.

After utilities and transportation, Mother had thirty rubles left for food. Nowadays she recounts our ruble-a-day diet with glee. It’s the same girlish giddiness that lights up her face whenever she describes cleaning houses for a living in our first year in America. In those early dissident days, poverty—or I should rather say pauperism—carried an air of romance, of defiance.

One Soviet ruble comprising one hundred kopeks; that crumpled beige note with a hammer and sickle encircled by an extravagant wheat wreath. Mom spent it wisely.

“Not too rotten please, please,” she beseeched the pug-faced anti-Semite Baba Manya, at the dereviashka (“a little wooden one”), our basement vegetable store with its achingly familiar reek of Soviet decay. A discolored cabbage there set you back eight kopeks; likewise a kilo of carrots. The potatoes were equally cheap and unwholesome. Mom filled our general grocery needs at the stekliashka (“a little glass one”), a generic nickname for glass and concrete sixties service constructions. The store lay across a scrappy ravine. On her way she nervously fingered her change. Thirty kopeks for a liter of milk, she was calculating, and a fifteen-kopek refund for the bottle. Thirty-two kopeks for ten eggs, three of them usually broken, which could last us a week.

A few coins remained for animal proteins from a store invitingly named the Home Kitchen. This was a lopsided wooden hut left over from Davydkovo’s past as a village, a dystopian apparition that sat teetering in a garbage-strewn field. Whichever direction you came from you trudged through the garbage. It was like going into combat. Tall rubber boots; iodine in Mom’s pocket in case a rusted can slashed through my footwear. In winter, alcoholics “graffitied” the snow around the Home Kitchen with piss, spelling out the word khui (dick). Just so you know: pissing letters while under the influence requires great skill.

At the Home Kitchen, Mom handed over twenty-four kopeks for 125 grams of “goulash” meat. The store also carried kotleti with a meat-to-filler ratio that recalled another Khrushchev-era joke. “Where does the Bald One hide all the bread? Inside the kotleti.” Mom didn’t buy them; we were poor but proud.

In our own five-meter home kitchen I assigned myself the task of inspecting the goulash and alerting Mom to its blemishes. The multicolored universe of imperfections contained in a single chunk of beef was endlessly fascinating to me. If the beef had been frozen, refrozen, and thawed again, the crosscuts offered an eye-pleasing contrast of bloody purple and gray. Sinew and fat practically shimmered with an ivory palette. The bluish spots on beef that had sat around for too long acquired a metallic glow; if the light hit them right you could see an actual rainbow. And the seal—how I loved the bright violet State seal of “freshness” stamped on some lumps of flesh.

Trimming away imperfections reduced the four-ounce beef package by half, but Mom was resourceful. Perched on a white stool, I watched her slowly turn the handle of the awkward hand-cranked meat grinder she screwed onto the windowsill. My heart went out to her. In other families fixing the meat grinder in place was the husband’s job. Mom’s always wobbled in that defenseless feminine way. More often than not she ground the goulash with onions and bread into frikadelki, tiny meatballs she’d then float in a broth fortified by a naked soup bone. When a romantic mood struck her, she’d add cabbage and call the soup pot-au-feu, explaining how she’d read about this dish in Goethe. I rather preferred this Weimar pot-au-feu to the stew she prepared with the goulash and a frozen block of guvetch, the vitamin-rich vegetable mélange from Socialist Bulgaria with a slimy intervention of okra. I harbored a deep mistrust of Socialist Bulgaria.