“Meet Rex,” said Petya. “Go ahead, hug him hello.”
It was like an invitation to cuddle a delivery truck. Overwhelmed by the dog, I hadn’t noticed the boy lurking behind Petya. He was a pudgy teenager with a gloomy expression, a sickly complexion, and arms weighed down by two cages. The bigger cage contained a white owl. Inside the second cage, mice, also white, scurried and squeaked. “Oleg,” said the gloomy boy. I couldn’t tell whether it was his name or the owl’s. “Don’t be afraid of the mice,” he said reassuringly. “Oleg will soon eat them.”
Plodding steps on the concrete staircase below announced Oksana’s arrival. She was out of breath and disheveled, a Jewish beauty with cascades of frizzy black hair falling wildly over a large glass box she hugged in her arms. “A terrarium,” she panted. “Ever seen a real terrarium?” I had, at the Moscow Zoological Park. But never a python slithering this close to my face. Igor, the serpent was called. Oleg and Igor, as if from a medieval Slavic epic.
“Igor and Oleg eat the same mice,” announced the boy, suddenly smiling.
Gogol’s play Inspector General ends with a famous silent tableau called the “mute scene.” At the news of the arrival of the real inspector general, the entire cast freezes in horror. This was approximately how Mom greeted the unexpected menagerie.
“You … you didn’t mention you had a, um, son,” was all she could muster.
“Who, him? It’s Oksana’s bastard,” replied Petya, with a jovial wink.
For the following five months, living arrangements in our two-roomer were as follows: The gloomy youth lived on a cot in the five-meter kitchen. Big Rex, as the largest and most pedigreed member of our strange kollektiv, had the run of the premises, sometimes leaping onto the lightweight aluminum cot in my room where Mom now slept. For fear of being crushed by the canine truck, Mother stopped sleeping. Or perhaps she didn’t sleep because Oksana and Petya, taking after their owl, led a mysterious nocturnal lifestyle. Most of the day they dozed away on Mom’s ex-bed in the living room. At night they rumbled in and out of the kitchen, brewing tea and cursing when they bumped against the teenager’s cot. “Their tea,” as Mom called their brew, contained an entire packet of loose Georgian tea leaves for one mug of hot water.
My innocent mom. She had no idea that this was the hallucinogenic chifir that got inmates high in the gulags. She didn’t know either that the grassy-sweet smell that now mingled in our apartment with the animal odors was anasha, a Central Asian hashish. Violent arguments followed the couple’s intake of anasha and chifir. The whole building quaked from the pounding of neighbors on our walls, floor, and ceiling. The couple and the owl took turns disturbing the sleep of hardworking socialist households. The owl’s guttural screeching curdled the blood.
But the biggest dilemma was getting in and out of the house. Because Igor the serpent lived in the hallway. Anyone entering and exiting was treated to the sight of a python devouring albino mice procured by the youth from Medical Institute No. 2, where Oksana’s cousin worked in a lab. I spent most of the five months barricaded inside my room. The only person who still visited us was the double bassist upstairs; he enjoyed borrowing Igor to frighten his mother-in-law. Baba Alla, my grandmother, schlepped her bags of chicken and other tasty tokens of grandmotherly love all the way to Davydkovo and left them down on the doorstep. Usually Rex ate the chicken.
It was Dad who finally ended all this. He missed having a family. Hinted that if Mom cleared the coast, he’d come stay, at least on weekends. My father was, and would remain, my mother’s only true love. Oksana, Petya, Rex, Igor, Oleg, and the gloomy boy were exiled immediately, a sullen departing procession of people and cages and four thudding paws leaving behind a stench of zoo and hashish. Every flat surface of our brand-new dwelling space was scarred by burn rings from their kettle. I now acquired a semi-father in place of a python and an owl, one who delivered high-quality weekend offerings from a store called Dieta, a prestigious purveyor of cholesterol-laden items meant for the young and the infirm. Every Friday evening I listened impatiently for the turn of Dad’s key in the door, leaping into the hallway to greet Dieta’s buttermilk jellies and rich, crumbly cheese sticks. Recently Mom asked me whether I ever felt my father’s abandonment. Flashing back to the cheese sticks and especially to the white, quivery, scallop-edged jellies, I had to say no.
Mom and I never did recover our intimate idyll. In 1961 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had passed a law branding as “parasites” any citizens who refused to engage in socially meaningful labor. Punishment: up to five years of exile or internment in camps. The law acquired some notoriety in the West in connection with Joseph Brodsky, the dissident poet convicted of parasitism and forced into international exile. Although she was still technically married, with a young child, and thus exempt from the law, Mom felt afraid and uneasy about not working. And so finally, on a brittle December day in 1968 when I was five years old, she reengaged in socially meaningful labor. She began a job teaching English at the Ministry of Merchant Marines, and I went to my very first Soviet kindergarten. I don’t remember all that much of the place, only that it was located across desolate train tracks from our khrushcheba, and that on my first morning there I soiled myself, I guess from separation anxiety, and for the entire day nobody attended to me. Mother discovered my shame on the way home. I still retain an image of her crying on the train tracks.
It never got any better. My fellow kindergarten inmates began falling ill from the spoiled meat in the borscht. Then on the bus Mother overheard my teacher instruct a younger colleague on how to reduce class sizes: “Open the windows—wide.” It was minus thirty degrees outside, and gusting.
Reluctantly, Mom turned to her father.
By the time I knew him, Colonel Naum Solomonovich Frumkin, my granddad the spy, looked nothing like the dapper, dark-eyed charmer we met in the 1940s chapter. Now long retired, Dedushka Naum had scant hair and heavy black-framed eyeglasses, and did morning calisthenics to patriotic songs. And he bellowed—he bellowed all day.
“I SALUTE YOU AND I CONGRATULATE YOU!!!!” he would thunder into the phone. “My dear, esteemed Comrade … [insert name of appropriate admiral of Soviet fleet].”
It amazed me how Granddad always found reasons to congratulate somebody—until I discovered the squat tear-off calendar he kept by the phone. Each new page announced a fresh, bright Soviet day, a new joyous occasion. Aviation Day, Baltic Fleet Day, Transport Policeman’s Day, Tank Driver’s Day, Submarine Officer’s Day. And let’s not forget the all-out lollapalooza of Victory Day on May 9, which Granddad began observing with his customary barrage of salutations in April.
The bombastic Brezhnev-era myth of the Great Patriotic War and its cult of the veteran animated Dedushka’s retirement. When he wasn’t shouting felicitations, he was bustling about on some all-important veterans’ business. Much of this bustle involved Richard Sorge, the half-German, half-Russian master spy we left two chapters ago, betrayed by Stalin, hanged in Tokyo, and long since forgotten—until a fluke led to his miraculous resurrection. In the early sixties the French made a feature film about Sorge’s story and tried to sell it to Russia. The Soviet Ministry of Culture deemed the whole thing a malicious falsification, but Khrushchev’s bodyguard tipped his boss off to the film. The Bald One demanded a screening.
“This is how all art should be made!” pronounced the excited Khrushchev when the lights came up. “Even though it’s fiction, I was on the edge of my seat.”
“Um … Nikita Sergeevich,” he was told, “Sorge wasn’t, um, fiction, he was, um, actual.” Khrushchev instantly rang the KGB. They confirmed both Richard Sorge’s actuality and his intelligence record. Without further ado, Khrushchev anointed him a posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union and ordered that he be celebrated as Soviet Spy Number One.
Sorge books, Sorge scholars, long-lost Sorge relatives, Sorge films, Sorge buttons and postal stamps … Granddad was in the eye of this never-ending Sorgian typhoon. A few times I accompanied
Dedushka Naum in his uniform and medals to his Sorge talks at rest homes or trade union concerts. Granddad was usually stuck on the entertainment program between an amateur folk songstress in a cornflower wreath wailing about the unrequited love of a factory girl, and, say, an amateur illusionist. People stayed for the cornflower lady, left to smoke when Naum came on, then returned to see the illusionist.
“Disgraceful! Nobody respects the veterans!” some bemedaled audience member would grumble. My palms would grow sweaty and my face would turn the color of summer tomatoes.
In approaching her father for help, Mother faced a moral dilemma. Despite only narrowly escaping arrest during the Purges—to say nothing of General Zhukov’s threat of execution for insubordination—Granddad remained an idealistic communist of the old Bolshevik school. Exploiting Party privileges for personal gain offended his principles; by nomenklatura (Communist elite) standards he and Grandma lived modestly. Mom’s principles were offended for different reasons. This was 1968, the year Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, crushing all liberalizing hopes in a consolidation of Brezhnevian might. The Thaw was well over. Mother’s anti-Soviet dissident zeal was at its peak, matching Granddad’s fervent loyalty to the system. So explosive was their relationship, so profound her disgust for the State Granddad represented, that she with her sister and brother even threw out his archives. Among the things lost was an autographed edition of Mao Zedong’s military writings and, yes, some significant Sorge memorabilia.
It goes without saying that Mother was loath to ask Granddad for any favors involving his Party blat (connections). But there was simply no other way to resolve my situation.
And so Mother swallowed her principles and pleaded with Granddad. He swallowed his principles and dialed a certain admiral’s phone number.
The next day I was enrolled at the kindergarten for the offspring of the Central Committee of the USSR.
Upon hearing that the kindergarten’s boarding setup meant I’d be staying over Monday to Friday, day and night, I shrieked with a five-year-old’s anguish. Mother herself looked ashen. She was relieved, yes, to save me from dysentery and pneumonia. But she would miss me crushingly.
And then there was the dreaded nomenklatura angle. The idea of a privileged Soviet caste and its coddled offspring enjoying politically incorrect delicacies was appalling to her. We spent half our lives queuing up for gristly goulash or tinned sprats. They dispatched their chauffeurs to “closed supply depots”—those unmarked warehouses that dispensed sevruga and sturgeon and tongue, and instant coffee, that most elusive of luxuries. Or at least we imagined so. In a society that guaranteed equality for all, the dining mores of the ruling elite were concealed from the rest of us. To Mother and her dissident intelligentsia friends, nomenklatura flavors fairly reeked of complicity.
“Shhh about the food at the kindergarten,” Mother warned me as we trudged through the snow. “And don’t learn any Lenin songs.”
The Central Committee kindergarten, boxy and light-bricked, sat behind a tall wire enclosure in the thick, dark, resinous Kuntsevo woods. Close by, hidden behind a sixteen-foot green wooden fence, brooded Stalin’s dacha. It was heavily guarded, mysterious, and had been locked up since he died there on March 5, 1953. Although the Brezhnev regime was making moves to rehabilitate him, in the popular imagination Stalin’s name remained fraught, a semi-taboo. The entire neighborhood knew nevertheless that the tall pines had been put there in 1933 on personal orders from the nature-loving Generalissimo. His orders had brought about the hills surrounding the forest, too—so uncharacteristic of pancake-flat Moscow. Did the dacha really have a secret underground bunker with a tunnel leading straight to the Kremlin? everyone wondered. Kerchiefed babushkas hawking potatoes on roadsides whispered to customers that he had been poisoned by the Jews. Local alcoholics, meanwhile, didn’t dare take their bottles into the woods, spooked by rumors of a restless mustachioed ghost, and by truer tales of uniformed comrades shooting at trespassers.
On the way to the kindergarten I wept uncontrollably, fearful of fences and ghosts (though secretly pleased, I admit, with the lyrical icicles that my tragic tears formed on my cheeks).
Inside, everything reeked of prosperity and just-baked pirozhki. The Lenin’s Corner was particularly resplendent, with its white gladioli arrangements beneath Ulyanov family photos arranged like icons on a crimson velvet bulletin board. On a panoramic veranda facing the haunted woods, nomenklatura offspring snoozed al fresco, bundled like piglets in goose-feather sleeping bags. I had arrived during Dead Hour, Soviet for afternoon nap.
“Wake up, Future Communists!” the teacher cried, clapping her hands. She grinned slyly. “It’s fish-fat time!” I thought she meant fish oil, a bane in a brown bottle administered daily at all kindergartens with cubes of salt-rubbed black bread. Instead, a towering nanny named, I still recall, Zoya Petrovna approached me with a vast spoon of black caviar in her hand. It was my first encounter with sevruga eggs. They smelled metallic and fishy, like a rusty doorknob.
“Open wide … a spoonful for Lenin,” the elephantine caretaker implored, pushing the spoon at my locked lips. “For Rodina—for the Party!” she wheedled, her voice rising, fish eggs glistening right under my nose. I started to gag.
“You little bedbug!” she bellowed. “Don’t you dare throw up! Or I’ll make you eat every drop of your puke!”
Between the two I chose caviar. But it didn’t seem like much of an improvement on vomit.
It soon became apparent that I wasn’t going to fit in, not at all. I had my estranged father’s non-Russian name; my baggy hand-me-down Romanian coat; my nausea, which was constant; and my antiestablishment mother, who recklessly tried to shield me from indoctrination by forbidding me to read the beloved Soviet children’s writer Arkady Gaidar or memorize Lenin hymns. I know Mother meant well, but really: what was she thinking, bringing me up as an ideological eyesore? Didn’t she know that in the USSR “happy” was, and always would remain, a mandatory modifier of “childhood”? That for a sad-eyed kid like me, the kindergarten had an official term: “non-friendly”—Soviet code for dangerously antisocial.
The intimate Proustian fantasies of my mother collided with the scarlet, trumpet-filled socialist epic of a shared Radiant Future, leaving me in a state of perpetual dazed alienation. My mom’s desire to keep me from ever experiencing her Soviet split-consciousness resulted in my developing my own, reverse case. At home I dared not confess to her that I’d memorized the Lenin songs, by accident, simply by dint of hearing them so many times at rehearsals. Even to myself I could scarcely admit my enchantment with the forbidden red universe populated by the happy grandchildren of Lenin. “Lenin is always with us,” I sang softly into my pillow at home on weekends, cringing from shame. “Lenin is always alive … In your each joyous day. Lenin is inside you, and inside me.”
“Anyutik, we don’t bring that gadost’ (muck) home,” Mom said curtly when she overheard me one time.
Every weeknight at kindergarten, I was, of course, gripped by the opposite longing. Not daring to make even a peep in the fearsome presence of Zoya Petrovna, I noiselessly hummed Mom’s favorite songs to myself. Like the Schubert one about Gretchen and her spinning wheel: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I will find it never and never more …”
“On your right side—NOW! Arms straight, above the blanket!”
Like a sergeant inspecting her platoon, Zoya Petrovna surveyed the neat rows of beds in the dormitory to make sure we didn’t engage in any individualistic, anti-Soviet activity. Scratching, for instance, or getting up to go to the bathroom. The right side suited me fine. This way I could peer out the window at the lights of the brand-new nine-story apartment block twinkling in the night’s inky distance. The building was part of Brezhnev’s slight improvement on the khrushcheba model: nine or thirteen stories instead of five, plus elevators and garbage chutes. I lay quietly humming my songs, mentally visiting the cozily lit domestic worlds where mothers poured tea into orange polk
a-dot cups before kissing their daughters good night. The women of my imagination always had my mother’s short dark hair but not exactly her features. I stayed up for hours, counting and recounting the windows remaining illuminated. As each light was extinguished I felt a pang that gathered finally into a wave of lonely desolation when the building went altogether dark. The windows were lighthouses that shone to me from the world outside our tall wire fence.
In the mornings, more heartache. I didn’t care much for my peers, but there was a blond, straight-nosed boy with expressive blue eyes, Victor, whose dad, also named Victor, was a famous TV personality. I didn’t have the same heroic crush on little Victor as I had (furtively) on Yuri Gagarin. It was more like a sympathy, a bond of hidden mutual sadness. Victor and I barely spoke, but one time when I threw up and everyone teased me, he quickly touched my hair, to buck me up.
Victor had his own unfortunate issue: he wet his bed. In the morning, Zoya Petrovna would yank his blanket off and inspect the sheet, then tug him to his feet, pull down his white underpants, and drag him to the far end of the dormitory. She then lined up the rest of us to march past him. Each kid was instructed to slap the bed wetter’s bare bottom. “I hope you didn’t slap him,” Mom would say, horrified by the story. But what could I do? As my turn approached, my heart pounded. I could neither disobey Zoya Petrovna nor be among Victor’s abusers, as he stood there impassively, eyes glassy, with a strangely absent expression. I still remember my panic and the sight of his pale flesh as I mock raised my arm high, as if for a slap, then gently swiped my hand across his buttocks.
It astounded me how Victor could recover by breakfast and gleefully polish off his farina and tea. Me, I sat gagging at the white puddle of cereal on which squatted a cold yellow square of elite Vologda butter that refused to melt.
It was during mealtimes that my alienation gripped me most profoundly. My struggles worsened with each new politically indigestible, delicious morsel I desperately wanted to eat but knew would horrify Mother. I threw up. I contemplated going on hunger strike, like a Tatar dissident she’d told me about. Then a desperate inspiration came to me. Next to my table was a radiator, an old-fashioned ridged one with enough of a gap to the wall to fit a whole week’s worth of discarded provisions. And so, when no one was looking, I started dumping the Party elite delicacies behind it. First went the veal escalopes sauced with porcini mushrooms picked by our own young hands under fragrant Stalinist pines. Next, the macaroni, which unlike our coarse pasta at home was fine and white and lavished with gooey cheese imported from the glamorous (though occasionally not-so-friendly) homeland of Marshal Tito. Away went the prestigious cod liver pate, away went the wholesome, farm-fresh cottage cheese pudding with lingonberry kissel.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 18