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 nei
ghborhood—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.
On Sundays Mom invariably ran out of money, which is when she cracked eggs into the skillet over cubes of fried black sourdough bread. It was, I think, the most delicious and eloquent expression of pauperism.
We were happy together, Mom and I, inside our private idyll, so un-Soviet and intimate. She saved her kopeks to leave lovely, useless gifts on my bed every few days. A volume of Goethe’s Faust in a purple binding, for instance. (I was four years old.) Or a clunky weaving loom, which I never once used. For my fifth birthday, there was a recording, in Russian, of Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose. It was just the two of us celebrating. Mom splurged and made roast duck stuffed with sauerkraut. She turned off the light, lit the candles, put on the record. A heartbreaking voice droned: “The Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn … and a fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death.”
By the end of it I was hiccupping with birthday sobs.
I too lavished my mother with presents, usually paintings that tactfully avoided Soviet themes: nothing with a CCCP logo, no Yuri Gagarin grinning from his space helmet. I wasn’t so blatant as my friend Kiril, whose entire painterly opus revolved around desirable East German toy railway sets.
My artworks were subtler. I specialized in princesses, generic but always modeling feminine imported outfits and outsize nylon bows in their braids. My antimaterialist mom didn’t budge. She continued to dress me in shabby boy’s clothes and cut my hair in the shape of a bowl. She thought this looked charming.
“My Anyuta!” she’d coo to her friends. “Doesn’t she look just like Christopher Robin from my beloved E. H. Shepard illustrations?”
In my mind I devised excruciating tortures for Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh, but I didn’t hold anything against Mom. As I said, we were happy together, basking in mutual adulation like besotted newlyweds in our khruscheba nest. Until Mom’s compulsive hospitality syndrome went and interfered.
The mud outside had dried, and fragrant May breezes rattled the skinny apple trees below our third-floor window when Oksana and Petya showed up on our doorstep.
Mom spotted them in the goulash line at the Home Kitchen and liked them immediately. She’d never seen them before, but overhearing their conversation filled her with compassion. The pair was temporarily homeless and intended to spend the night in the train station. Mom swiftly offered our house.
The doorbell rang the next day. There stood a man with a droopy mustache and bluish circles under his eyes. His entire lower half was obscured by a vast Saint Bernard.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 17