Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Viktor initially learned about the forbidding green dacha from his elderly mentor, a certain Vitaly Alexeevich (last name strictly secret), formerly one of Stalin’s personal chefs. On March 6, 1953, Vitaly Alexeevich dutifully reported for his shift. He was met on the dacha porch by Valechka, the Generalissimo’s loyal housekeeper and, possibly, mistress. She had a car waiting for him.

“Flee,” Valechka told him. “Now! Drive as far as you can. Disappear!!” Stalin’s death had just been announced.

The chef ran, while other dacha staffers perished at Beria’s orders. He returned to Moscow the day of Beria’s execution, and for the rest of his life laid flowers on the housekeeper’s grave.

“Vitaly Alexeevich was a cook ot boga (God’s talent),” sighed Viktor. “He’d sing to his dough to help it to rise.” I thought of Mom’s and my struggles to crack the mysteries of Slavic yeast dough for our kulebiaka. Crooning to it, as Stalin’s chef had done—was that the secret?

“So was it really haunted, the dacha?” I wanted to know, thinking of all the times I slinked past the green fence during kindergarten, my heart hammering.

Viktor shuddered again.

At the end of his first night catering at Blizhnyaya, he was sitting alone in Stalin’s old dining room. He leaned on the massively long wooden table, the one at which murderous Politburo men gathered for their nocturnal banquets four decades before. An eerie silence…. Suddenly Viktor heard footsteps… footsteps so ghostly, he bolted into the woods drenched in cold sweat. The same thing happened to the actor who played Stalin during a 1991 film shoot there. And when Stalin’s old dacha guard was invited back for a documentary, he suffered a heart attack. “His boot leather—” stammered the guard at the hospital. “I smelled it—his boot leather and the Karelian birch of his furniture!”

At this point we were summoned back inside. The TV cameras were ready for us.

The sight of Viktor’s table almost gave me a heart attack myself.

For our shoot—on Soviet cuisine—my partner had conjured up a Technicolor fantasia out of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food—Politburo dreambook edition. Dainty, open-faced rasstegai fish pies nestled inside Stalinist crystal; an elaborate beef roulade layered with a delicate omelet reposed on a Kremlin-issue porcelain platter. There was even a torte outfitted with caramel rockets, contributed by a generous ex-nomenklatura confectioner. Polyot (“flight”), the torte was called: a meringue relic from the sixties kosmos-mania era.

I stared transfixed at this culinary time capsule. At the jellied ham rolls under mayonnaise curlicues, in particular. Early September, 1974: Praga restaurant take-out shop. Me standing—for the very last time, I thought—in the gigantic line for our Sunday kulebiaka as Mom at home irons out final immigration formalities. I’m eyeing the jellied curlicued ham rolls my parents couldn’t ever afford, thinking desperately: Never in my life will I see them again.

And now I learn that pre-Kremlin, Viktor cooked at Praga!

My Praga.

Was there some profound meaning in all this coincidence? Had some god of Soviet Civilization sent Viktor my way to help me properly savor my childhood’s treasures and reveal its mysteries?

Arriving in Moscow this trip I’d been crestfallen to learn that my Praga was closed. One of the city’s last pre-Soviet great restaurants had been bought by the Italian designer Roberto Cavalli, to be converted, no doubt, into a post-bling elite playground. Seeing its iconic yellow facade disfigured by scaffolding at the head of Novy Arbat, I felt as if some dear old grandparent had died.

Viktor and I mourned the closure of Praga as the cameras rolled. “A-plus,” hooted our young director. “I’m loving you guys’ chemistry!” Feeling relaxed at last, I prattled on about stalking diplomats by Praga’s entrance and hawking Juicy Fruit gum at school. The mostly youthful, post-Soviet crew lapped up my socialist misadventures.

“More! More stories like this!” they cried.

When Dasha had originally suggested a show on Soviet cuisine—“The topic is hot”—I’d been bewildered.

“But isn’t Moscow full of people who remember the USSR a lot better than I do? I mean, I’m from New York!”

“You don’t understand,” said Dasha. “Here we have mishmash for our memory. But an émigré like you—you remember things clearly!”

After the lunch, and before the shashlik (kebab) grill shoot by his dacha backyard swimming pool, Viktor clued me in on his time at the Kremlin kitchens.

Supplies were from their very own teeming farms. So damn rich was Politburo milk, truckers would loosely set deep metal lids on the milk buckets, and by arrival the clattering lids had churned up gorgeous thick, sticky cream. For instant pilfering.

I was astonished. “You mean despite all the perks—elite housing, Crimean resorts, special tailors—Kremlin employees still stole?”

“And how!” chuckled Viktor. Soon after taking over he raided his employees’ lockers and turned up sixty kilos of loot. “And that was before noon.”

There beneath the twenty-five-foot ceiling of the main old Kremlin kitchen he made other discoveries too:

A war-trophy forty-eight-burner electric stove belonging to Goebbels.

A massive mixer from Himmler’s country house.

Czar’s dog bowls from 1876.

Ivan the Terrible’s former torture tunnel. With a slanted floor—to drain blood.

“Ready for the poolside shashlik!” announced the director.

After we wrapped and the crew headed home, I sat around with Viktor and his wife, eating leftovers. I was dazed by what I’d learned at his fantasy table. It was akin to discovering that Santa Claus was somehow, after all, real. The Soviet myth of plenty that my latter-Soviet generation had scoffed at? That fabled abundance so cynically, even existentially scorned?

How spectacularly it had flourished on Kremlin banquet tables.

The Politburo loved to stun foreign guests with Soviet opulence. Train convoys from all over the empire carried sausage from the Ukraine in porcelain tubs, lavish fruit from Crimea, dairy from the Baltic republics, brandies from Dagestan. Seven pounds of food per person was the official banquet norm. Black caviar glistened in crystal bowls atop “Kremlin walls” carved from ice tinted with red beet juice. Lambs were boiled whole, then deep-fried; suckling pigs sported mayonnaise show ribbons and olives for eyes. Massive sturgeons reclined majestically on spotlighted aquarium pedestals aflutter with tiny live fish. Outside, we queued up for wrinkled Moroccan oranges in subzero winters; inside the Kremlin, there were passionfruit, kiwis, and, as Viktor put it tenderly, “adorable baby-bananchiki.”

“Just imagine,” waxed Viktor. “The colorful lights at Georgievsky Hall in the Grand Palace are finally lit, the Soviet anthem starts up, everyone’s awestruck by all that glimmering china and glittering crystal…”

Putin’s protocol guys dustbinned the glitter and glimmer.

I suppose in a city with the world’s thickest swarm of billionaires—where a Pilates studio is never far away and sashimi is flown in daily from Tokyo—there wasn’t much call for gastronomic Potemkin villages anymore. So the staged fairy tales of abundance had finally been retired—along with all that crystal and nonsustainable caviar. Instead of fifteen zakuski, Kremlin banquets now featured bite-size pirozhki, and small bowls of berries sat where receptacles piled with glowing fruit once towered triumphant.

Fairly recently Putin added a wrinkle: USSR nostalgia. “Herring under fur coat,” meat brawn—current Kremlin chefs now served communal-apartment dishes in dainty individual portions alongside foie gras and carpaccio. Which struck me as a perfect expression of the New Russian pastiche.

Today’s streamlined service made sense, Viktor conceded as he poured us a rare Masandra Port from Crimea. But he missed those days of yore, I could tell. Who wouldn’t miss actually living inside a socialist fantasy? Me? Misty-eyed, I told Viktor that his table was the closest I’d ever come to the skatert’ samobranka, the magic tablecloth of Russian folklore.

Viktor left the Kremlin after his heart attack and now ran a catering company and a restaurant. He headed the association of Russian restaurateurs, trying to promote native cuisine. That battle was lost, though, he thought.

“Young Russian chefs can do pizzas—but who remembers how to cook our kasha?” And he sighed a heartfelt sigh. He who had presided over the gleam of Kremlin walls carved out of red ice.

Back at the khi-rize I was reviewing my notes—Gorbachev, per Viktor: Ate little. Drank even less. Left banquets after forty minutes. Yeltsin: Loved lamb chops. Lousy dancer—when my email pinged. It was a message from another world, from El Bulli near Barcelona.

The world’s most magical and important restaurant was about to close forever, and Ferran (the chef) and Juli (co-owner) wanted me to attend a farewell dinner. I’d known the two of them since 1996. Their Catalan temple of avant-garde cooking was an intimate part of my professional history. My first visit fifteen years before had transformed everything I thought and wrote about food. “You’re family,” Ferran always told me. And now here I was, stuck in mean, alien Moscow, ungrounded in past or present, fumbling with madeleines. My visa was single-entrance, so I couldn’t even slip out to say a hurried farewell.

I slumped in my chair, stung by loss from my real life. Queridos Amigos! I started to type, Estoy en Moscu cruel, muy lamentablemente no puedo… A strange rumbling from below interrupted my Spanish. There was something world-devouring and cataclysmic to it, as if a tsunami were approaching. My desk began to vibrate.

We all ran to the windows. Way down below us tanks slowly rolled through the rainy night along deserted Novy Arbat. Missile launchers came prowling after them, then troop carriers, artillery.

The phone rang. “Watching Victory Day rehearsal?” my dad chortled almost merrily. “The tekhnika (hardware) should be passing you now—right under the big billboard for that movie Malchishnik Dva (Hangover 2)!”

“Tanki i banki, tanks and banks,” grumbled my mom. “Welcome to Putinland.”

The great celebrations of Victory Day—May 9—drew closer. Putinland’s officious militaristic patriotism went into overdrive. To judge from the hype, the lollapalooza promised to out-wow even anything we’d seen under Brezhnev.

The airwaves overflowed now with the Great Patriotic War (VOV in abbreviated Russian). Forties black-and-white films, close-ups of blokada bread, piercing footage of a little girl playing piano with frozen hands in besieged Leningrad—suddenly there was no escaping them. On buses old people and migrant workers hummed along to war songs piped over the sound systems. Helpful ads enticed cell phone users to dial 1–9–4–5 and get a free VOV tune as a ringtone.

In Brezhnev’s time the State had co-opted the mythic traumas and triumph of the Great Patriotic War to reinfuse ideology into a cynical young generation. Russians had grown a lot more cynical since. In today’s society, one so desperately lacking an anchoring national narrative, the Kremlin was once again exploiting the cult of VOV to mobilize what was left of national patriotism, to bring generations together in a tightly scripted rite of remembering. “My narod pobeditel” (We, nation victorious)—I now heard it ad nauseam, just as I had in my childhood. Unheard: the catastrophic official blunders costing millions of lives, the brutal post-war deportations of ethnic minorities. In case anyone misremembered? A “Commission for Countering Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of the Interests of Russia” had been established in 2009.

And who was it that had led Russia to its May 9 Victory?

Perhaps I’d finally slid into obsessional fantasy. The run-up to Victory Day appeared to my inflamed mind as a veritable Springtime for Stalin.

Men with rotten teeth and sour breath hawked sundry Staliniana at street stalls on cheesily pedestrianized Arbat Street, and even respectable bookstores did a brisk business in Stalin fridge magnets. The Kremlin had been careful about an open endorsement. Vernacular opinion, however, told a different story. Nearly half of all Russians polled saw Stalin in a positive light. A notorious 2008 TV survey had the Generalissimo rated third for “most important Russian in history”—barely edged by Prince Alexander Nevsky of Eisenstein film fame, and Pyotr Stolypin, a reformist early-twentieth-century prime minister noisily admired by Putin. But everyone believed the results had been cooked to suppress the controversial truth.

I noticed that in the popular imagination his figure seemed split. The bad Stalin was the orchestrator of the gulags. The good Stalin was an ur-Russian brand projecting power and victory.

It was deeply distressing.

A mid all this ideological ghoulism and ahistorical mishmash the khi-rize became my refuge, the haven of my own pre-post-Soviet innocence. What a perfect comfort it was, easily idealized and yet so authentic. I got a lump in my throat every time I entered the woody, cozily modernist lobby. I loved the achingly familiar USSR reek of cat spray and acrid cleaning detergent. Loved the coarse blue oil-paint trim and the rotating gallery of very Soviet concierge babushkas.

Inna Valentinovna, my favorite babushka, was one of the khi-rize’s original residents. She had scored her prestige apartment during the late sixties for her scientific achievements and now whiled away her bustling, bossy retirement by concierging part-time. As May 9 drew nigh, she transformed our lobby into a maelstrom of veteran-related activity.

“How our veterani love this!” she enthused, showing me the forlorn state gift packages of buckwheat groats, second-rate sprats, and emphatically non-elite chocolates.

“Dusty buckwheat,” groused Mom. “Putin’s thank-you to those who defended his Rodina.”

Among our khi-rize VOV vets, I was particularly eager to meet a woman named Asya Vasilievna. She’d just completed a memoir, so Inna informed me, about her mentor and friend Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet of our sorrows after whom I was named. “Wait,” Inna kept admonishing me in her lobby stronghold. “Wait for her here!” But elderly Asya Vasilievna never appeared.

Victory Day dawned.

We watched the Red Square parade on TV. The Kremlin midgetry, Medvedev and Putin, commemorated the world’s largest catastrophe (a.k.a. VOV) wearing vaguely fascistic black overcoats. Vigorous octogenarians shingled in medals surrounded them on the podium. “Arise, Our Vast Country,” the solemn 1940s VOV anthem, blared as elite guards began the old Soviet-imperial goose step—dressed in weirdly czarist-looking uniforms thick with blingy gold braid.

“PPP,” scoffed my mom. “Putin’s Patriotic Pastiche.”

In the afternoon Inna Valentinovna shepherded us to a neighborhood parade on Arbat Street. The local vets looked much frailer than the heroes on Putin’s podium. Some could barely walk under the weight of their medals; others wheezed and coughed in the wind. Muscovites watched the shuffling throng of veterans with indifference, whereas Ayzeri men in black leather jackets whistled and clapped with great feeling.

Inna Valentinovna pushed me toward one tall, sloped-shouldered, medal-hung nonagenarian. He had fought in the Baltic navy at the same time as my granddad. His gaze remained serene and absent even as schoolkids shoved big thorny roses into his leathery hands.

“I’m from New York,” I stammered, feeling suddenly shy. “Perhaps you knew my grandfather—chief of Baltic naval intelligence Naum Solomonovich Frumkin.”

After an uncertain pause, a glimmer animated his pale, ghostly features.

“New York,” he quavered. “Not even the Nazis matched the enemy we faced after the war. New York! Vile imperialist America!”

And with great dignity he walked away from me.

The reception was warmer in the bitterly cold shadows by Arbat’s hulking Vakhtangov Theater, where Inna Valentinovna beckoned us over to a cordoned-off vets’ VIP area of outdoor tables. A mock field kitchen was dispensing convincingly unappetizing wartime kasha from a fake cauldron and weak tea from a fake kettle. But the breaths around our wobbly plastic table reeked with reassuring eighty-proof authenticity. Our Styrofoam cups of tea were emptied and filled with vodka. A pickle materialized. Despite the droning, officious speeches, despite the sad spectacle of impoverished vets paraded around like stuffed dolls instead of receiving long-overdue benefits, a glow blossomed inside me. How precious, co-bottling in the cold with this crowd. How little time with them we had left.

I soggily proposed a toast to my granddad. Tears of remorse ran down my cheeks as I recalled how Mom and Yulia threw out his Sorge memorabilia, how Cousin Masha and I giggled when, for the umpteenth time, he reminisced about debriefing Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. Now there were only fraying cardboard boxes of his medals and a yellowed German magazine cover on which Dedushka’s high forehead and ironic eyes hovered over the puffy-faced Hermann Goering.

Next morning in the lobby I finally encountered the elusive Asya Vasilyevna.

The memoirist friend of Anna Akhmatova had dark, quick, intelligent eyes and sported a smart vest. Overwhelmed, I kept holding and stroking her ancient hand.

Asya Vasilievna met Akhmatova during their VOV evacuation in Tashkent.

Vets got to make free phone calls on May 9, and Asya had spent hers talking to the granddaughter of Nikolai Punin, Akhmatova’s lover in the twenties and thirties. Punin brought Akhmatova into the Fountain House in St. Petersburg. There, in a dismal communal apartment carved out of a wing of that former palace, Akhmatova resided for almost three decades.

I once visited Akhmatova’s movingly curated museum at the Fountain House. A copy of Modigliani’s sketch of her hung on the wall of the monastically sparse room she once occupied. In this room Akhmatova had her epic all-night encounter with a young Isaiah Berlin from England, for which she was denounced by the state, her son sent back to the gulag. It was her bronze ashtray that brought me to tears. Knowing the apartment was bugged, Akhmatova and her friend and biographer, Lydia Chukovskaya, would utter loud trivialities—“Autumn is so early this year”—while the poet scribbled a new poem in pencil and Chukovskaya memorized the lines. Then they’d burn the page in the ashtray.

“Hands, matches, an ashtray,” wrote Chukovskaya. “A ritual beautiful and bitter.”

Now in our khi-rize lobby, unbidden, Asya Vasilievna launched into Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem,” dedicated to the victims of purges. She began with the blood-curdling preface: In the dreadful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad…

She spoke as if in a trance, mimicking the low, slow, mournful recitation I knew from Akhmatova’s recordings.

 
The stars of death stood above us,
and innocent Russia writhed…
 

“Let’s go sit so you’re more comfortable,” interrupted Inna Valentinovna, ushering us into a special vets’ room—a tiny pink-walled cubbyhole off the lobby, plastered with photos of VOV heroes.

 
…and innocent Russia writhed
beneath the bloody boots
 

My gaze drifted across the gallery on the wall as Asya declaimed on. Marshal Zhukov. Voroshilov. Dashing Rokossovsky. And presiding over all, squinting his yellowish feline eyes…

HIM? AGAIN?

 
…beneath the bloody boots
And the Black Marias’ tires…
 

In Germany you’d be arrested for displaying the visage of Hitler, I thought. Here? Here a woman recited a searing dirge to those crushed in the purges—right beneath the executioner’s portrait!

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.