Текст книги "Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking"

Автор книги: Anya von Bremzen

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Naum Solomonovich Frumkin? Baltic intelligence chief? Could be anywhere.

Finally the desperation in Liza’s gray eyes moved a staffer to suggest she try Baltic Fleet headquarters at Kronstadt—nineteen miles away, in the Gulf of Finland. As it happened, a naval glisser, an ice-gliding hovercraft, was going there shortly. In fact a driver was about to take someone to the glisser that very minute. If Liza rushed…

My grandmother made the hovercraft, too weak and shaken to even hope. Someone brought her to the onboard cafeteria to scrounge for something to eat. A group of naval commanders was sitting at a table. And among them, who else? Naum. Smiling (of course), smelling of cologne. Lucky as ever, he had survived pneumonia and then escaped Zhukov’s execution threat by reporting the Shlisselburg mission to Voroshilov, who still retained a seat on the Soviet High Command—going around Zhukov, essentially. Instead of a firing squad, Naum got a medal.

“I SAW WAR, I SAW DEATH, I SAW BULLETS AND BLOOD!” Grandma would yell years later. “There I was, scratched up, starving, braids flying… and there he is, flashing his idiotic white teeth at me!”

“Lizochka!” Granddad famously greeted my grandma. “And what brings you here?”

The tale of finding Naum on the glisser has always been among my grandmother’s wartime chestnuts. My cousin Masha and I preferred the one about Liza returning to the family in Ulyanovsk and finding Larisa burning with scarlet fever. Every evening Grandma would trudge miles through the snow to the hospital carrying potato peel pancakes for Larochka. Until one night, caught in a blizzard, she fell through a snow slope into a trench and couldn’t climb out.

“I dozed half frozen inside the trench, leaning on some hardened tree trunks,” she’d tell us repeatedly. “At the morning’s first light I realized that those ‘tree trunks’ were…”

Amputated arms and legs! Cousin Masha and I would squeal the punchline in unison.

Of her monthlong hospital stay Mother herself remembers only the pancakes. Indeed, in her mind food dominates all other wartime recollections. For instance, the ration during her first school year in Ulyanovsk. Lunch was at 11:15 during grand recess. From a smudgy zinc tray children were allotted one bublik and one podushechka each. Bublik: a flimsy chewy bagel scattered with poppy seeds. Podushechka (little pillow): a sugar-coated pebble, green, blue, or pink, the size of a fingernail, with a center of jam. Eating them together was a ritual, a sacrament really. You stuck the candy under your tongue and sat without breathing as a pool of sweetened saliva collected on the floor of your mouth. A cautious oral maneuvering delivered a stronger sweet rush and the sublime coarseness of sugar grains against the tip of your tongue. Dizzy with desire you pressed the bublik hard against your face and inhaled for a while. Then you spat out the candy into your hand and took the first careful bite of the bublik; it tasted like the greatest of pastries in your candy-sweet mouth. A bite of bublik, a lick of podushechka. The pleasure had to last the entire fifteen minutes of recess. The hardest part was putting off the rapturous moment when the surface of the podushechka cracked and jam began to ooze from inside. Some stoic classmates managed to spit out the half-eaten candy for younger siblings. Mom wasn’t one of them.

My mother has impeccable manners, is ladylike in every respect. But to this day she eats like a starved wolf, a war survivor gobbling down her plate of food before other people at table have even touched their forks. Sometimes at posh restaurants I’m embarrassed by how she eats—then ashamed at myself for my shame. “Mom, really, they say chewing properly is good for you,” I admonish her weakly. She usually glares. “What do you know?” she retorts.

From her I do know that civilians distilled survival into one word: kartochki. They were printed on one large sheet of paper, these ration cards, a month’s worth of square coupons with an official stamp, the recipient’s name and signature, and a stern warning—CARDS NOT REPLACEABLE—because corruption and counterfeiting ran rampant. Lost your kartochki? Good luck surviving.

At seven years of age my mother was a kartochki veteran. She was the one dispatched to trade them at stores while Dedushka Yankel dug his trenches and Liza and Yulia minded baby Sashka. The most crucial kartochki were for khleb (bread). One morning long before opening time Larisa joined hundreds of puffy-eyed, red-nosed people outside the bakery door. She tried not to gulp and swallow cold air too hard when the bread truck arrived and two men carted the aromatic, thick-crusted dark bricks inside. Behind the counter severe women in splotchy blue robes over shapeless padded coats weighed each ration of bread to the last milligram. They stomped their feet to keep warm and wore fingerless gloves so they could easily snip off the right coupon.

As her turn in the line neared, Mom felt a slight panic. Back in the house a power outage had prevented her from sorting through the ration books. It was the first of the month. All the coupon sheets—for grain, sugar, bread, meat for each family member—sat folded in the pocket of the blue princess coat Naum had brought from Sweden. Now she could barely feel them there; she couldn’t even feel her own hands from the cold.

Why did she put all the cards on the counter when her turn came? But how else to sift through the rationing sheets with people behind pushing and barking? Why panic so completely, so utterly at the invasion of arms? Arms, hands, mittens and gloves, smelly coat armpits, anxious breath. Fingers swarming the counter like tentacles—gnarled, blackened digits; gaunt fingers with white anemic nails; red swollen fingers. The kartochki were gone from the counter. The saleslady gave a bleak grin and a wag of a nail-bitten finger.

Standing outside the bread store, Mother imagined what she’d always imagined ever since she remembered imagining anything. She saw Naum coming back home. He’d be dressed in the gray civilian suit he wore at the station for Leningrad; she could almost smell the lavanda cologne on his cap. “Lizochka, I’m home!” he would shout, peering at the thin, shoddy figures in the warehouse room. Then he’d spy them. Arms open, he’d rush over. And what would he find? Liza, Dedushka, and Sashka—and Larisa and Yulia, pale and majestically beautiful in their identical fur-trimmed princess coats. All silent and motionless on their striped mattress, like Katya’s small baby. Dead, all of them.

Dead is what happened to people who lost their rationing cards on the first of the month. Dead from golod (starvation), from thirty whole days without kasha or bread or the tiny ration of milk for the baby. Would Naum wail like Dasha their neighbor did when she opened her funeral letter? Or would he find a new wife, one who didn’t shriek and convulse in hysterics like Liza surely would when Larisa came home without bread and without rationing cards.

Going home wasn’t an option. And so Mother went to the only place in the city where electricity always shone brightly and where a sprit of cozy, prosperous happiness wafted through every beautiful room. She went there often, to that traditional wooden two-story house up the street from their warehouse. She came to escape from the sight of her pitiful dedushka peeling warty potatoes, from the catastrophic Voice on the radio. The house was untouched by all this. Here the mother, Maria Alexandrovna, never yelled at her children. She played the grand piano while everyone had tea from a samovar in the living room. There were six kids in the house, but the apple of everyone’s eye was a boy called Volodya. Larisa liked to examine his baby picture, a brim of blond curls fringing his high, stubborn forehead. As a student Volodya had a proud, focused expression and a shrewd direct gaze. He got the best grades in his class. He never lied to his parents. He fought for justice and truth. Volodya’s attic bedroom with its patterned beige wallpaper was where Mom often sat daydreaming in the wooden chair between the boy’s small, neat desk and his bookshelf filled with volumes by Pushkin, Turgenev, and Gogol. Lucky Volodya got to sleep alone in bed, unlike Larisa and Yulia. He had such a nifty map of the world on his wall. The green lamp on his desk was so hypnotic, so peaceful.

“Devochka, little girl, wake up, time to go.” Someone was clutching Larisa’s shoulder, shaking her gently.

“The Lenin House Museum closes at five,” said the attendant.

Back at her own house Larisa sat with her arms closed around Liza, stroking the sharp shoulder blade under her mother’s coarse woolen dress. They sat like this a long while. About the lost kartochki Liza said nothing. She remembered too well her own childhood loss of a ration in the twenties: a loaf of bread yanked out of her hand by a bearded giant who gorged on the entire half pound in front of her eyes.

Salvation came from Katya, of all people, the prostitutka and black marketeer.

“Liza, you fool—you have the sunduk!”

So every few days Liza and Katya went to the black market on the outskirts of Ulyanovsk to trade Naum’s spiffy shirts, suits, and ties from inside the blue trunk. His best suit went for a sack of millet that they ate for the rest of the month. Millet for thin, watery breakfast gruel. Millet soup for lunch, flavored with herring heads. Best was millet baked for supper in a cast-iron pot inside the clay Russian stove in their warehouse. Russian war survivors fall into two categories: those who idolize millet and those who can’t stand it. But they all agree: millet was life.

The Nazi invasion caught Stalin’s Soviet Union with yet another food supply crisis looming. Two years of below-average harvests had combined with the drain of the 1940 war with Finland and mammoth defense spending. But if the Soviets had scant grain reserves, they had even scantier strategies for handling wartime supply problems.

The Reich, however, had a strategy: Hungerplan, the “Hunger Plan.” Brainchild of corpulent, gourmandizing Hermann Göring and the Reich’s Food Ministry, the Hunger Plan was possibly history’s most sinister and cynical blueprint. The “agricultural surplus” of the Ukraine—which the Nazis intended to capture immediately—would be diverted to feed only Wehrmacht soldiers and Germany’s civilians. Thirty million Russians (a sixth of the population), mainly in cities, would be left without food. In other words: genocide by programmatic starvation.

By late fall of 1941, Hitler controlled half of the Soviet grain acreage. Crucially, however, he had not yet achieved the lightning victory he was so sure of. Despite staggering initial losses and blunders, the Soviet forces resisted. Moscow shuddered, bled, but didn’t yield. Russian generals regrouped. Instead of swollen Ukrainian granaries and willing slave labor, the advancing Wehrmacht usually found only burnt crops and demolished farm equipment, as per Stalin’s scorched earth policy. (“All valuable property, including non-ferrous metals, grain, and fuel which cannot be withdrawn, must without fail be destroyed,” instructed the Leader in early July.)

Then winter descended and it was the Germans whose poor planning was brutally exposed. Counting on three months of blitzkrieg at most, the Reich hadn’t provided warm clothes to the men at its front. The war lasted four long years, much of the duration bitterly cold.

Soviet citizens got their first rationing cards in July of 1941. Average kartochki allotments, though symbolic and crucial, were nowhere near adequate for survival. Daily, it was only a bit more than a pound of bread; monthly, about four pounds of meat and under three pounds of flour or grain. Substitutions became the norm: honey for meat, rotten herring instead of sugar or butter. Under the slogan “All for the Front, All for the Victory,” supplies and rail transport were prioritized for the Red Army, which often fought in a state of near-starvation. How did Stalin’s state manage the food supply for civilians? By temporarily encouraging near-NEP conditions. Economic ideology was suspended and centralization loosened, meaning local authorities and citizens were left to fend for themselves. Schools and orphanages, trade unions and factories, all set up ad hoc green plots. Even in cities, people foraged, learning to digest birch buds, clover, pine needles, and tree bark. At the front, chronically hungry soldiers ate not just fallen horses but saddles and straps—anything made of leather that could be boiled for hours with some aromatic twigs to stun the tar smell.

“Naum’s clothes and Aunt Clara’s sunduk saved our lives!” Grandma Liza used to say, gravely nodding at the blue trunk still in her hallway during my childhood. Indeed. Markets of every shade from white (legal) to black (illegal) were central to daily survival. With rubles almost useless, food itself, bread especially, became currency.

Diaries from the Leningrad Siege leave bone-chilling details of the economics of starvation. Ushanka (flap hat) = four ounces of bread; men’s galoshes = five ounces of bread; used samovar = two pounds of bread. Families hid the deaths of relatives so they could continue using the deceased’s monthly bread kartochki. The cost of an individual grave = four and a half pounds of bread plus five hundred rubles.

Starvation was nowhere as horrifying, as extreme, as it was in Leningrad, during those nine hundred days. But for any Russian who suffered hunger contractions at all, a wartime food glossary was etched in his or her memory:

Balanda: An anorexic sham “soup.” Flavored with anything from a horse bone to herring tail. Thickened with crushed rusks or a handful of millet. Also a term used for gulag fodder.

Duranda: Hard cakes of linseed or other seed hulls left over from oil processing. Peacetime cattlefeed.

Kombizhir (literally “combined fat”): Hydrogenated oil, usually rancid and greenish.

Khleb (bread): Heavy loaves, claylike inside. Baked from rye flour stretched out with oats or duranda and/or sawdust.

Tushonka (tinned pork): At the start of 1942 a new class of edibles began appearing in Russia. Vtoroy front (“second front”) was the nickname for American lend-lease foodstuffs. The most coveted and iconic of Yankee delicacies was tushonka tinned in its fat in Iowa to exact Russian specifications. Tushonka far outlasted the war. Even during my childhood it was the cherished sine qua non of hiking trips and dacha summers.

Shokolad.

Of all the gifts that made their way from Naum during those days, one struck Mother right in the heart. It made her delirious. Not just because it was shokolad in war-torn Russia. Not even because it tasted far better than the chalky American lend-lease stuff. No. It was because of the dark-eyed young man on the wrapper: prodigious of nose, young and steely of glare, with a gloriously embossed collar. The crush Mom developed on this chocolate hero was instant and hopeless. His swoony Orientalist name matched his fiery looks. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—crowned shah of Iran in 1941 after his father was forced into exile by occupiers Soviet Union and Britain.

Oil. Petroleum was the reason the Frumkin children were getting Pahlavi Jr. chocolates.

The second summer of war marked the Soviet low ebb of the conflict: six million soldiers killed or captured, most of Ukraine occupied, Leningrad faltering under blokada, Moscow unfallen but vulnerable. As the Germans headed southeast, Naum had yet again been transferred, this time to Baku, the hot, windy, uneasily quiet capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. This vital Caucasian republic, bordering Iran on the Caspian Sea, pumped the majority of Russia’s oil. It was oil Hitler coveted for himself. Launching Operation Blau at the Caucasus in June 1942, the Fuhrer aimed to take Baku by September. His overconfident generals presented him with an extravagantly frosted cake with a sign that said KASPISCHES MEER (Caspian Sea). Film footage shows Hitler smiling suavely as he takes the slice labeled BAKU. But the Luftwaffe left Baku alone: its vast petroleum infrastructure had to be delivered intact. The Fuhrer wanted to eat his cake but have it too.

Iran, meanwhile, occupied but still nominally neutral, simmered with international intrigue. Tehran was thick with German agents and operatives. Shuttling between Baku and the Iranian capital, Naum was back in the familiar world of cloak-and-dagger. So highly classified was his work that he never confided its details to any of us—aside from bragging about having met the dashing young shah on the chocolates.

From Baku, Naum dispatched Ivan Ivanych, his intelligence aide, to Ulyanovsk to bring the family south. Gray-eyed and sinewy, Ivan looked the part of an elite GRU spy guy—lend-lease black leather coat, tall boots, a pistol, plus a mysterious attaché case he watched like a hawk. The journey to Baku lasted three nightmarish weeks, or maybe six, Mother can’t remember. Mostly they bivouacked for days at train stations on layovers between hopelessly delayed, crawling teplushki, the wartime cattle freights overcrowded with orphaned children and wounded combatants whose bandages undulated with black swarms of lice. At one point Ivan dozed off on a station bench and someone snatched his attaché case. Mom watched the GRU hero chase down the culprit and whack him on the head with the butt of his gun. The police intervened, the attaché case sprang open, and to her utter astonishment, Mom saw watches—big clunky watches!—tumble out onto the pavement. Larisa was little, but not too little to smell a black marketeer, even though Granddad later insisted that the watches were “crucial intelligence tools.” (Who knew?) For the final leg of the journey there was a boat at a filthy port in Turkmenistan where women in headscarves hawked quince and men with Turkic features rode atop camels. For several days everyone vomited crossing the Caspian during a storm.

Naum met the family on a pier in Baku with an armful of tangerines. An oily Caspian darkness smothered the city. Mom could barely make out Naum’s features, but the overwhelming aroma of citrus made her weep. The family was together again. Their luck had held.

Compared to hungry Ulyanovsk, Baku was a different planet, a lush Orientalist dreamscape similar to the magical pavilions Larisa had encountered at Moscow’s agricultural exhibition back in prewar 1939. At the bazaars men with splendiferous mustaches not unlike Comrade Stalin’s whistled at Liza as she bartered her bread rations for fuzzy porcelain-looking peaches, sun-dried figs threaded on strings, and tubs of Azeri yogurt, piercingly tart. There were swims in the polluted Caspian Sea; mouths and fingers stained from climbing mulberry trees. Local Caspian Flotilla dignitaries hosted rice pilaf feasts aboard destroyers and cruisers. Only the foul smell from the oil rigs marred Mother’s happiness.

Once in a while Naum’s family even got a taste—literally—of his intelligence work. A few of his “boys” would haul a big table into the courtyard of the house where they shared one narrow closetlike room, but with a balcony and a view. On the table lay a sturgeon the size of a man, or a small whale. Fishing was the cover for Naum’s spies in the Caspian. The sturgeon was split open, glistening caviar scooped from its belly. For weeks after, the family ate sturgeon pickled, brined, dried, and minced into kotleti. To this day Mother can’t look at sturgeon or caviar, still riven, she says, by the guilt of eating those delicacies while the rest of the country was starving. During the entire eighteen months they spent by the Caspian, Mom couldn’t shake the sense that she was hallucinating. She was dazed and overwhelmed by her family’s luck—their improbable luck.

By early 1943, Russia’s luck, too, was changing at last. Hitler’s lunge for the Caucasus oil fields had collapsed. It collapsed because it started so well that the Fuhrer split his forces to grab for another prize simultaneously: the strategic city on the Volga named after Stalin. The fate of the Reich was cast. Operation Blau (for the blue of the Caspian) was sucked into what the Germans now called the “War of the Rats” in the freezing rubblescape of bombed-out Stalingrad. Over the course of more than six months, Hitler’s forces, commanded by Field Marshal Paulus, were annihilated by the combined power of the Russian winter, hunger, and the Red Army under bloody Zhukov and General Vasily Chuikov. It was the first and the worst Nazi defeat since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. Germans killed and wounded numbered some three-quarters of a million. The Russians suffered more than a million casualties (a figure that exceeds the total World War II losses for both the United States and Britain). But with Paulus’s surrender in February 1943, the momentum had swung. Come May 1945, Zhukov and Chuikov’s Red banner would wave over Berlin’s ruins.

As for Naum, he stayed on in Baku even after Stalingrad and the passing of the Caucasus oil threat. In autumn of 1943 the Azeri capital became the hub of technical and logistical support for the Soviet presence at the Tehran Conference. Yalta and Potsdam might be more famous, but Tehran was the grand rehearsal, the first time the “Big Three”—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill—came together around a table. Stalin himself arrived in Baku by train in November, from there flying to Tehran. The plane ride was another first: the phobic Wise Helmsman had never been airborne before.

On a notably balmy afternoon on November 29, midconference, the Big Three and their aides sat down to a white-tablecloth late lunch in the Soviet embassy’s snug living room. Stalin was desperate for a second front in Europe, and the menu was part of his charm offensive. The lunch card featured zakuski (appetizers), clear bouillon with pirozhki, then steak followed by plombir ice cream. To drink: wines from the Caucasus, and the ever-indispensable Sovetskoye brand champagne, Stalin’s pride. In Leningrad the Siege wouldn’t be lifted for another two months yet, and close to a million had perished from hunger. In Tehran, as waiters passed around vodka, Armenian brandy, and vermouth, Marshal Stalin rose to offer a welcoming toast. No longer the abject gray-faced figure of June 1941, our Vozhd acted the part of the Nazi vanquisher of epic Stalingrad.

Not all the Soviet attendees showed Stalin’s poise. The Vozhd’s ravenous interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, was caught with a mouthful of steak just as Churchill began to speak. There was awkward silence, tittering, laughter. Stalin’s eyes flashed. “Some place you found for a dinner,” he hissed at the hapless Berezhkov through clenched teeth. “Look at you stuffing your face. What a disgrace!” (Berezhkov survived to record the incident, and the meal, in his memoirs.)

But mainly Stalin waxed gastronomic to his Allied invitees. He invoked the subtleties of his spicy native Georgian cooking. FDR revved up his own charm, praising the inky Caucasian wines and enthusing about Sovetskoye Shampanskoye—shouldn’t this “marvelous wine” be imported to the United States? A Pol Roger aficionado, Churchill tactfully chose to admire the Armenian brandy. No one mentioned the epidemic looting and black marketeering of American lend-lease food supplies, or that Soviet wine-bottling plants were mostly producing containers for Molotov cocktails. (Sovestkoye Shampanskoye? Among Russian troops this was the nickname for an explosive blond concoction of sulphur and phosphorus.)

To cap off the lunch, Stalin arranged for a pescatorial showstopper. Four stout uniformed men trailed by a pair of Filipino chefs trailed by a U.S. security guy carried in a giant fish, again as big as a man or a small whale. No, it wasn’t one of Naum’s spy-cover belugas, but a salmon freighted in from Russia.

“I want to present this to you, Mr. President,” Stalin announced.

“How wonderful! I’m touched by your attention,” said FDR graciously.

“No trouble at all,” said Stalin, just as graciously.

Reboarding his plane, the lunch host had what he wanted: a commitment to a European second front, Operation Overlord (D-Day), for early 1944; and the eastern slice of Poland as lawful property of the USSR.

Tastier pieces of European cake would follow at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. And a much fancier banquet proper. As the country still reeled from starvation, a grandiose Potemkin village resort was set up for the Big Three in the war-devastated Crimea in just under three weeks. Suddenly there appeared two service airports, lavish fountains, sixty-eight remodeled rooms across three czarist palaces, ten thousand plates, nine thousand pieces of silverware, and three kitchens fueled with masses of firewood magically transported along paralyzed railway networks. At the main feast—white fish in champagne sauce, Central Asian quail pilaf, kebabs from the Caucasus—the host and soon-to-be Generalissimo was reported by attendees to be “full of fun and good humor,” even “smiling like a benign old man.” And why not? He’d gotten himself de facto the rest of Poland and the keys to most of post-war Eastern Europe.

“Govorit Moskva”—Moscow Speaking. Later that spring of 1945, the radio man Yuri Levitan made one of his most operatic announcements. In a steely, officious baritone, he announced that Soviet forces had concluded the destruction of Germany’s Berlin divisions. “Today, on the Second of May,” he continued, his voice rising, gathering force, “they achieved total control… of the German capital… of the city… of BEAR-LEEEEEEEEEEEN!!!”

Without understanding Russian you might think he was a South American soccer commentator shouting out news of a goal. The iconic image of the Soviet Victory Banner on the roof of the Reichstag, however, is unambiguous.

On May 9, 1945, at 2:10 a.m., Levitan read the German Instrument of Surrender, and everything inside my mother froze. She couldn’t help it. Dread and terror. She felt them, without fail, every time she heard Levitan’s voice and the words “Moscow Speaking.” It no longer mattered that for months now the Voice had been bringing good news, that following its announcements of the Soviet retaking of each new Russian city, fireworks and artillery salvos boomed through the center of Moscow, where the Frumkin family had been reunited for more than a year now. To this day the thought of Levitan’s baritone paralyzes my mother.

Mom remembers as vividly the spontaneous, overwhelming outpouring of orgiastic relief and elation that swept the capital on May 9. More than two million revelers streamed toward Moscow’s old center. An undulating sea of red carnations and white snowdrops. Soldiers tossed into the air. Delirious people—hugging, kissing, dancing, losing their voices from shouting OORAAAA (hooray). That night powerful strobes flashed on the Kremlin’s towers, illuminating the visage of Stalin, seemingly floating above Red Square, and the fireworks were extravagant: thirty blasts fired from one thousand mortars.

Among the celebrants was a reed-thin, six-foot-tall beauty with green sirenlike eyes and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was in her late twenties, yanking along a recalcitrant eight-year-old boy. The louder everyone cheered, the harder the woman sobbed. Andrei Bremzen, her husband, my paternal grandfather, was one of the eight million men who didn’t return from the front.

If one adds civilian deaths, the Great Patriotic War (as we officially called it) took 27 million lives, although some estimates are far higher. In Russia it left tragedy and devastation unprecedented in history, unfathomable in its scale. For four uninterrupted years war had camped on Soviet soil. There were 25 million citizens homeless, 1,700 towns and more than 70,000 villages reduced to rubble, an entire generation of men wiped out.

By war’s end my mother was eleven, a bookish daydreamer with two thick black braids who’d graduated from Hans Christian Andersen to Hugo’s Les Miserables in its mellifluous Russian translation. Really, any book permeated with romantic tragedy attracted my mother. The first post-war summer found her family at a cozy dacha on the outskirts of Pushkino, a town north of Moscow where Naum was now directing a spy-training academy. “Counterintelligence, counterintelligence!” Granddad kept correcting, brows furrowed, when anyone blurted out the “spy” word. Later that year he’d be in Germany to debrief Hermann Goering amid the ruins at the Nurenberg Trials.

Swatting flies and picking at gooseberries, Mom read her sad books and contemplated what was happening to Russia. What to make of the crippled men now thronging stations, begging and playing the accordion? How to grieve for the fathers of her friends who hadn’t come back? Strangely, no one else in her family shared these thoughts. Liza plunged herself into household chores; Naum, who anyway never really talked to the kids, was busy with his steely-eyed spy colleagues and their coiffed wives, who boasted of the furniture their husbands scored in Berlin. Yulia quoted Generalissimo Stalin so often now, it made Mother nauseated. And so Larisa started a diary. Carefully she selected a small book with glossy white pages and a gold-embossed cover, a prewar Scandinavian present from Naum. She dipped her pen in the inkpot and paused for so long that ink drops ruined the page and she had to tear it out.

“Death,” she then wrote, pressing hard on the pen so it squeaked. “Death inevitably comes at the end of life. Sometimes a very short life.” She thought a bit and continued. “But if we are meant to die anyway, what should we do? How must we live that short hour between birth and death?”

To these questions Mom had no answers, but simply writing them down she felt relief. She thought some more about such matters out on the grass by the house, sucking on a sweet clover petal as dragonflies buzzed overhead.