Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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A demonic hospitality possessed Mom to invite people she barely knew to visit us in America. Because now they could.

“I’ll send you a visa, stay with us a month, we’ll show you our New York!”

I kept pinching her under the table. Our New York was a small one-bedroom in Queens that Mom and I shared with my antique Steinway grand and my six-foot-three boyfriend, a haughty British poststructuralist.

“That first visit,” Aunt Yulia confided recently, “we found you so adorable, so American in your fancy fur coats. And more than a little demented!” She giggled. “How you loved everything about our shabby, shithole Rodina! Perhaps because of the snow?”

True. A fairy-tale white had camouflaged all the sores and socialist decay. To our now-foreign eyes Moscow appeared as a magical Orientalist cityscape, untainted by garish capitalist neon and billboards. Even my mother the Rodina-basher found herself smitten. With everything.

The store signs: RYBA. MYASO. MOLOKO. (Fish. Meat. Milk.) These captions formerly signifying nothing but empty Soviet shelves and unbearable lines were now to Mom masterpieces of neo-Constructivist graphic design. The metro stops—those teeming mosaic and marble terrors of her childhood, now stood revealed as shining monuments of twenty-four-karat totalitarian kitsch. Even the scowling pirozhki sales dames berating their customers were enacting a uniquely Soviet linguistic performance.

Mom for her part very politely inquired what coins one might use for the pay phones.

Grazhdanka, she was snarled at. “Citizen, you just fell from Mars?” Me in my vintage raccoon coat? I was branded as chuchelo, a scarecrow, a raggedy bum.

In retrospect 1987 was an excellent year to visit. Everything had changed. And yet it hadn’t. A phone call still cost two kopeks, and a three-kopek brass coin bought you soda with thick yellow syrup from the clunky gazirovka (soda) machine outside the maroon-hued, star-shaped Arbat metro station. Triangular milk cartons still jumbled and jabbed in avoska bags; Lenin’s bronze outstretched arm still pointed forward—often to Dumpsters and hospitals—with the slogan YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT PATH, COMRADE!

At the same time, perestroika announced itself at every turn. I marveled at the new fashion accessory: a chain with an Orthodox cross! Mom couldn’t get over the books. Andrei Platonov (Russia’s Joyce, unpublished since the twenties), Mikhail Bulgakov’s previously suppressed works, collections of fiery contemporary essays exposing past Soviet crimes—all now in handsome official hardcovers, openly devoured on the bus, on the metro. People read in lines and at tram stops; they read as they walked, drunk on the new outpouring of truths and reassessments.

Along newly pedestrianized Arbat Street, we stared at disgruntled Afghan war vets handing out leaflets. Then gaped at the new private “entrepreneurs” selling hammer-and-sickle memorabilia as ironic souvenirs. Nestling matryoshka dolls held a tiny Gorbachev with a blotch on his head inside bushy-browed Brezhnev inside bald Khrushchev inside (yelp) mustachioed Stalin—all inside a big squinty-eyed, goateed Lenin. We bought lots.

Back at the Davydokovo apartment, we sat mesmerized in front of Granddad’s Avantgard brand TV. It was all porn all the time. Porn in three flavors: 1) Tits and asses; 2) gruesome close-ups of dead bodies from war or crimes; 3) Stalin. Wave upon wave of previously unseen documentary footage of the Generalissimo. Of all the porn, number three was the most lurid. The erotics of power.

And there was another phenomenon, one that reverberated deep in our imagination: Petlya Gorbacheva (Gorbachev’s Noose). The popular moniker for the vodka lines.

They were astonishing. Enormous. And they were blamed entirely on the Party’s general (generalny) secretary, now dubbed the mineral (mineralny) secretary for his crusade to replace booze with mineral water. Even the abstemious leader himself would later amusedly cite a widespread gag from that very dry period.

“I’m gonna go kill that Gorbachev motherfucker!” yells a guy in the vodka line. Hours later he comes slumping back. “The line at the Kremlin to kill him was even longer.”

The joke barely conveys the popular wrath over Gorbachev’s antialcohol drive.

At a mobbed, shoddy liquor shop near our former Arbat apartment, Mom and I watched a bedraggled old woman with the bluish complexion of a furniture-polish imbiber. Theatrically she flashed open her filthy coat of fake fur. Underneath she was naked.

“Pila, pyu i budu pit’!” she howled. (I drank, I drink, I will drink!)

On the faces of fellow vodka queuers I noted that existential, sodden Russian compassion.

The trouble in the alcoholic empire had started in May 1985. Just two months in office, Gorbach (the hunchback) issued a decree entitled On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism. It was his first major policy innovation—and so calamitous that his reputation inside the Soviet Union never recovered.

The mineral secretary was of course right about Soviet drinking being a social catastrophe. Pre-perestroika statistics were secret and scant, but it’s been estimated that alcohol abuse caused more than 90 percent of the empire’s petty hooliganism, nearly 70 percent of its murders and rapes, and almost half of its divorces—not to mention the extremely disturbing mortality rates. Perhaps a full-scale prohibition would have had some effect. Instead, Gorbachev promulgated the typical half measures that ultimately made him so reviled by Russians. In a nutshell: after 1985 drinking simply became more expensive, complicated, and time-consuming.

Vodka factories and liquor stores were shut, vineyards bulldozed, excessive boozing harshly punished. The sclerotic state sorely needed cash—among other things, to clean up the Chernobyl disaster—but it gave up roughly nine billion rubles a year from alcohol sales. Such sales, under the mineral secretary, took place only after two p.m. on workdays. Meaning the hungover workforce had to maneuver more skillfully than ever between the workplace and the liquor line.

Not the most efficient way to combat alcohol-related loss of productivity.

We had arrived in Moscow in late December. Getting booze for the holidays ranked at the top of everyone’s concerns. New Year’s festivities were about to commence, but store shelves were barren of that Soviet good-times icon: Sovetskoye champagne. Baking, too, was a wash: yeast and sugar had completely vanished, hoarded for samogon (moonshine). Fruit juices, cheapo pudushechki candies, and tomato paste had evaporated as well. Resourceful Soviet drinkers could distill hooch from anything. Kap-kap-kap. Drip-drip-drip.

Trudging around snowy, parched perestroika Moscow, Mom and I kept dropping into liquor lines to soak up alcoholic political humor. The venom poured out where vodka didn’t.

At the draconian penalties for consuming on the job: The boss is screwing his secretary. Masha, he whispers, go open the door—wide—so people don’t suspect we’re in here drinking.

At the price hikes: Kid to dad: On TV, they’re saying vodka will become more expensive, Papa. Does it mean you’ll drink less? No, son, says Papa, it means you’ll eat less.

At the effect of the antialcohol drive: Gorbach visits a factory. See, comrades, could you work like this after a bottle? Sure. After two? Yup. All right, five? Well, you see we’re working!

To properly grasp the social and political disaster of Gorbachev’s Noose, you have to appreciate Russia’s long-soaked, -steeped, and -saturated history with vodka. So allow me to put our blissful family reunion into a state of suspended animation—befitting our fairy-tale visit—while I try to explain why our Rodina can only really be understood v zabutylie (through a bottle).

Booze, as every Russian child, man, and dog knows, was the reason pagan Slavs became Christian. With the first millennium approaching, Grand Prince Vladimir of Rus decided to adopt a monotheistic religion. He began receiving envoys promoting their faiths. Geopolitically, Islam made good sense. But it banned alcohol! Whereupon Vladimir uttered his immortal line, “Drinking is the joy of the Rus, we can’t go without it.” So in 988 A.D. he adopted Byzantine Orthodox Christianity.

The story might be apocryphal, but it puts a launch date on our Rodina’s path to the drunk tank.

Originally Russians tippled mead, beer, and kvass (a lightly alcoholic fermented refreshment). Serious issues with zeleny zmey (the green serpent) surfaced sometime in the late-fourteenth century when distilled grain spirits arrived on the scene. Called variously “bread wine” or “green wine” or “burnt wine,” these drinkables later became known as vodka, a diminutive of voda (water).

Diminutive in name, a permanent spring flood in impact.

Vodka’s revenue potential caught the czars’ eyes early. By the mid-seventeenth century the state held a virtual monopoly on distilling and selling, and for most of the nineteenth century, one third of public monies derived from liquor sales. Then came the First World War. The hapless czar Nicholas II put his empire on the wagon, fearful of the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War a decade earlier, a humiliation blamed on the sodden state of the military. Bad move. Nikolai’s booze ban starved Russia’s wartime coffers; the resulting epidemic of illicit moonshining destabilized the crucial grain market. Grain shortages led to hunger; hunger led to revolution. (Perhaps the mineral secretary in the twilight of his own crumbling empire might have paid closer attention to history?)

Even so, the Bolsheviks were no fans of vodka, and they initially kept up prohibition. Lenin, who occasionally indulged in white wine or a Munich pilsner while in exile, insisted the Russian proletariat had “no need of intoxication,” and deplored his utopian State trading in “rot-gut.” The proletariat, however, felt differently. Deprived of vodka, it got blasted into oblivion on samogon supplied by the peasantry, who preferred to divert their scarce, precious grain and bread reserves to illegal distilling rather than surrender them to the requisitioning Reds. The samogon flood overwhelmed the sandbags. By the mid-1920s a full state liquor monopoly was once again in effect.

The monopoly’s most ardent advocate? One Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. “Socialism can’t be built with white gloves,” he hectored diffident comrades at a 1925 Party congress. With no other source of capital, liquor sales could and should provide a temporary cash cow. The “temporary” ran on and on, financing the lion’s share of Stalin’s roaring industrialization, and later, military defense.

World War II descended; Russia boozed on. A classic fixture of wartime lore was the “commissar’s 100 grams”—the vodka ration for combatants (about a large glass) prescribed by Grandpa Naum’s Leningrad protector, the bumbling commissar of defense, Klim Voroshilov. On the home front, too, vodka kept flowing. Despite massive price hikes, it provided one sixth of state income in 1944 and 1945—the beleaguered empire’s biggest single revenue source.

By Brezhnev’s day our Rodina was in the collective grip of “white fever” (the DTs). Or, to use our rich home-brewed slang, Russia was

kak sapozhnik—“drunk as a cobbler”

v stelku—“smashed into a shoe sole”

v dugu—“bent as a plough”

kosaya—“cross-eyed”

na broviakh—“on its eyebrows”

na rogakh—“on its horns”

pod bankoy—“under a jar”

vdrebezgi—“in shatters”

By this time national drinking rituals had long been set, codified, mythologized endlessly. The seventies were the heyday of the pollitra (half-liter bottle), priced at 3.62 rubles, a number with a talismanic effect on the national psyche. There was the sacramental granenniy stakan (the beveled twelve-sided glass); the ritual of chipping in na troikh (splitting a pollitra three ways); the obligatory “sprinkling” to celebrate anything from a new tractor to a Ph.D.; and the “standing of a bottle” (a bribe) in exchange for every possible favor, be it plumbing or heart surgery.

Vodka shimmered in its glass as Russia’s poetry, its mythos, its metaphysical joy. Its cult, religion, and signifier. Vodka was a liquid cultural yardstick, an eighty-proof vehicle of escape from the socialist daily grind. And well, yes, a massive national tragedy. Just as significantly, before—and especially during—Gorbachev’s antialcohol push, the pollitra served as a unit of barter and currency far more stable than the ruble, which was guzzled away anyhow. Vodka as cure? From the common cold (heated with honey) to hypertension (infused with walnut membranes) to whatever existential malaise afflicted you. In the bottom of the vodka glass, Russians found Truth.

And this Truth Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was taking away.

To his credit, statisticians later established that male life expectancy rose during the mineral secretary’s temperance drive. Then it plummeted. Between 1989 and 1994, well into Yeltsin’s vodka-logged rule, death rates among males ages thirty-five to forty-four rose by 74 percent. But as Mayakovsky said: “Better to die of vodka than of boredom.”

Boredom meaning… the clutches of sobriety. At a research institute where Dad worked-slash-imbibed before he joined the Mausoleum Research Lab, he had a sobutilnik (“co-bottler,” the term for that crucial drinking buddy), a craggy old carpenter named Dmitry Fedorovich. After the first shot, Dmitry the Carpenter always talked of his brother. How this brother was near death from a kidney ailment, and how Dmitry Fedorovich had lovingly sneaked into the hospital with “medicine”: a chetvertinka (quarter liter) and a big soggy pickle.

The kidney sufferer partook and instantly died.

“And to think that if I hadn’t gotten there on time he’d have died sober,” the carpenter sobbed, shedding tears into his beveled vodka glass. His co-bottlers cried with him.

To die sober. Could a Russian male meet a more terrible end?

Like all Russian families, mine has its own entanglements with the green serpent, though by the Russian definition of alcoholism—trembling hands, missed workdays, full-blown delirium, untimely death—only my uncle Sashka truly qualified. As an alkogolik—a.k.a. alkash, alkanaut, alkimist—he was a figure of awe even among the most sloshed members of Moscow’s intelligentsia. His status derived chiefly from the Accident, which happened when Mom was four months pregnant with me.

One day, Dad, who’d been mysteriously disappearing, telephoned Mom from the Sklif, Moscow’s notorious trauma hospital.

“We wanted to spare you in your state,” he mumbled.

At the Sklif, Mom found her then twenty-two-year-old baby brother unconscious, every bone broken, a tube sticking out of his throat. The walls and ceiling were splattered with blood. She almost miscarried.

Several days before, Sashka had lurched up to the door of Naum and Liza’s fifth-floor Arbat apartment, blind-drunk. But he couldn’t find his keys. So he attempted the heroic route of alky bohemian admirers of Yulia, my femme fatale aunt. To win her heart they’d climb from the landing window to her balcony—a circus act even for the sober.

Not knowing that the busy balcony railing was loose, Sashka climbed out from the window.

My uncle and the railing fell all five floors to the asphalt below.

He landed right at the feet of his mother, who was walking my little cousin Masha. When the hospital gave Grandma Liza his bloodied clothes, the key was in his pocket.

After six horrific months at the Sklif, Uncle Sashka emerged a half-invalid—one leg shortened, an arm semiparalyzed, speech impaired—but with his will to drink undiminished.

When we moved to our Arbat apartment, Sashka would often be dragged home unconscious by friendly co-bottlers or kind passersby. Or Mom and Dad would fetch him from the nearby drunk tank. He spent nights in our hallway reeking so badly, our dog Biddy ran away howling. Mornings after, I sat by his slumped body, wiping blood from his nose with a wet rag, waiting for him to come to and teach me a ditty in his rich and poetic alcoholic vernacular.

I particularly remember one song charting the boozer’s sequence, its pungency alas not fully translatable.

 
In a day we drank up all the vodka
Then we guzzled spirt and sa-mo-gon!
Down our throats after which we poured
Politura and o-de-kolon!
 

From Dad I knew that two-hundred-proof industrial spirt (ethyl alcohol) was best drunk on the exhale, nostrils squeezed shut lest you choke on the fumes. Samogon I knew also from Dad, who sometimes distilled it in our small kitchen using Mom’s pressure cooker and high-tech lab paraphernalia pilfered from Lenin’s Mausoleum Lab. Politura (wood varnish) was clearly far grimmer stuff, and odekolon (cheapo eau de cologne) wasn’t exactly fruit compote either.

Sashka and his ilk drank many other things besides, in those lushy pre-Gorbachev years. Down the hatch went bormotukha (cut-rate surrogate port poetically nicknamed “the mutterer”), denaturat (ethanol dyed a purplish blue), and tormozok (brake fluid). Also BF surgical glue (affectionately called “Boris Fedorovich”), ingeniously spun with a drill in a bucket of water and salt to separate out the good stuff. Like all Soviet alkanauts, Sashka massively envied MIG-25 pilots, whose airplanes—incidentally co-invented by Artem Mikoyan, brother of Stalin’s food commissar—carried forty liters of the purest, highest-grade spirits as a deicer and were nicknamed the letayushchy gastronom (flying food store). That the planes crashed after pilots quaffed the deicer they’d replaced with water didn’t deter consumption.

As a kid I found nothing deviant or unpleasant about Sashka’s behavior. The best and brightest of Soviet arts, science, and agriculture imbibed likewise. Far from being a pariah, my limping, muttering uncle had a Ph.D. in art history, three gorgeous daughters, and a devoted following among Moscow intellectuals.

Our Russian heart, big and generous, reserved a soft spot for the alkanaut.

Lying dead drunk on the street he was pitied by women, the envy of men. Under our red banner he replaced Slavic Orthodoxy’s yurodivy (holy fool) as a homeless, half-naked prophet who roamed the streets and spoke bitter truths. (Bitter—gorkaya, from gore, meaning grief—was the folk synonym for vodka.) For abstainers, on the other hand, our big Russian heart had nothing but scorn. They were despised, teased, goaded to drink, regarded as anti-Russian, antisocial, antispiritual—Jewish, perhaps!—and altogether unpatriotic.

And theirs was the poisoned cloak Gorbachev chose to march forth in.

The last time I saw Sashka was in the early nineties, when he came to visit us post-Gorbach in Queens. He spent his fortnight inside our Jackson Heights apartment, afraid to go into Manhattan lest skyscrapers fall on his head. During his stay, Grandmother Liza died. When he heard, Sashka guzzled the entire bottle of Frangelico hazelnut liqueur Mom had hidden in a cupboard, except for the bit I managed to drink too. He and I sat sobbing until Mom came home from work and we told her the news.

He died prematurely a few years later, age fifty-seven, a true alkash.

“Are you NUTS?” demanded the Moscow morgue attendant, when his daughter Dasha brought in the body. “Who brings in such unsightly cadavers? Beautify him a bit, come back, and then we’ll talk.”

My grandma Alla was a happier drunk.

Alla drank beautifully. She drank with smak (savor), iskra (spark), and a full respect for the rituals and taboos surrounding the pollitra. She called her pollitra trvorcheskaya—the artistic one—a play on palitra, the painter’s palette. I was too young to be a proper co-bottler, but I was hers in spirit. I soaked up vodka rituals along with grandmotherly lullabies. We were a land in which booze had replaced Holy Water, and the rites of drinking were sacramental and strict.

Imbibing solo was sacrilege numero uno.

Lone boozers equaled antisocial scum or worse: sad, fucked-up, sick alkogoliks.

“Anyutik, never—never!—have I drunk a single gram without company!” Alla would boast.

“Alla Nikolaevna!” Mom would call from the stove with deep parental reproach in her voice. “Any reason you’re telling that to a four-year-old?”

When Alla drank with her girlfriends, she’d pour limonad into my own twelve-sided glass before apportioning vodka among real co-bottlers in exact fifty-gram rations. Glaz-almaz (eye sharp as a diamond)—the co-bottlers congratulated her pour.

Following their cue, I’d stare lovingly at my glass and bark an anticipatory nu (so) before the toasting commenced. Toasting was mandatory. Anything from an existential “Budem” (We shall be) to flowery encomiums for every dead relative. People from the Caucasus particularly excelled at encomiums.

Like the adults I’d exhale sharply—then tilt back my head. Down it all in one gulp, aimed right at the tonsils. Yelp “Khorosho poshla” (it went down well) and purposefully swallow an appetizer before properly inhaling again.

Drinking without a zakuska (a food chaser) was another taboo. Cucumber pickles, herring, caviars, sharp crunchy sauerkraut, garlicky sausage. The limitless repertoire of little extra-savory Russian dishes seems to have been created expressly to accompany vodka. In the lean post-war years Alla and the teenage Sergei grated onion, soaked it in salt, and smothered it in mayo—the zakuska of poverty. Men tippling at work favored foil-wrapped rectangles of processed Friendship Cheese, or a Spam-like conserve with a bucolic name: Zavtrak Turista (Breakfast of Tourists). Foodless altogether? After the shot you made a show of inhaling your sleeve. Hence the expression zakusit’ manufakturoy (to chase with fabric). Just one of the countless untranslatables comprehensible only to those who drank in the USSR.

Silence, finally, was also a despised drinker no-no. The Deep Truth found in a glass demanded to be shared with co-bottlers. In one of Alla’s favorite jokes, an intelligent (intellectual) is harangued by two allkogoliks to chip in to make three. (Rounding up strangers to split a pollitra was customary; co-bottling always required a quorum of three.) To get rid of the drunks, the reluctant intelligent hands them a ruble, but they insist that he drink his share. He does. He runs off. His co-bottlers chase after him halfway around Moscow.

“What… what do you want from me now?” he cries out. “A popizdet’?” Obscene slang roughly translatable as “How about shooting the shit, dude?”

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.