My “Tatyana” reference was to every Russian woman’s favorite scene in Pushkin’s verse novel, Eugene Onegin. Tatyana, the ultimate lyric heroine of our literature, meets up again with Onegin, the mock-Byronic protagonist who’d cruelly scorned her love when she was a melancholy provincial maiden. Now she’s all dressed up, rich and cold and imperious at a glamorous St. Petersburg ball. Encountering her after years, Onegin is the one who’s dying of love—and Tatyana is the one who does the scorning. The sad part? She’s still in love with Onegin! But she’s now married, has moved on, and the past is the past. The sadder part for Mom? It was Sergei who was married.
From my cot in the overheated darkness of my grandparents’ apartment I thought I heard my mother crying, ever so quietly. As the relatives from Odessa snored on.
CHAPTER NINE
1990s: BROKEN BANQUETS
Abysta, the bland Abkhazian cornmeal mush, comes alive with lashings of salty young local suluguni cheese. And so I tucked some suluguni into my Abkhaz gruel, then watched it melt.
It was Christmas Day, 1991—a bit before seven p.m.
In the kitchen of a prosperous house in the winemaking countryside, women with forceful noses and raven-black hair tended to huge, bubbling pots. My boyfriend, John, and I had arrived a few days before in Abkhazia—a breakaway autonomous republic of Georgia one thousand long miles south of Moscow. Primal, ominous darkness consumed Sukhumi, the capital of this palm-fringed subtropical Soviet Riviera. There was no electricity, no drinking water. On blackened streets teenage boys waved rifles and a smell of catastrophe mingled with the salty, moist Black Sea wind. We’d come during the opening act of Abkhazia’s bloody conflict with Georgia, unresolved to this day. But here, in the country house of a winemaker, there still lingered an illusion of peace and plentitude.
The women hauled platters of cheese bread into the room, where dozens of men crowded around a long table. Innumerable toasts in our honor had been fueled already by homemade Izabella wine. Not allowed by tradition to sit with the men, the women cooked and watched TV in the kitchen. I dropped in to pay my respects.
At exactly seven p.m. my spoon of corn mush froze midway to my mouth.
A familiar man occupied the screen. The man wore a natty dark pinstriped suit, but exhibited none of his usual autocratic vigor. He seemed tense, spent, his skin tone a loony pink against the gray backdrop with a scarlet Soviet flag on his left. The contours of the birthmark blotches on his forehead looked drawn with thick pencil.
“Dear fellow countrymen, compatriots!” said Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev. It was six years and nine months since he’d assumed leadership of Sovetsky Soyuz, the Soviet Union.
“Due to the situation which has evolved …”
The situation being as follows: that August, a coup against Gorbachev had been attempted by eight extremely dimwitted Party hard-liners (some obviously drunk at the time). The putsch collapsed almost straightaway, but the pillars of centralized Soviet power were cracked. Boris Yeltsin, fractious new president of the USSR’s Russian republic, went leaping in, emerging as resistance leader and popular hero. Gorbachev still hung on—barely: a wobbler atop a disintegrating empire.
“Due to the situation …”
My mouth fell open all the way as Gorbachev continued speaking.
Much had changed in my own situation since my first time back in Moscow in December of 1987. Returning to Queens, I’d sobbed uncontrollably, facedown on Mother’s couch. “There everyone loves us!” I wailed. “Here we have nothing and nobody!”
I had other reasons to cry. No wonder gadalka Terri, the fortune-teller, was mute about my future as an international keyboard virtuoso. My wrist had become painfully disfigured by a lump the size of a mirabelle plum. I could barely stretch a keyboard octave or muster a chord louder than mezzo forte. The more I tortured the ivories, the more the plum on my wrist tortured me.
A stern-browed orthopedist prescribed instant surgery.
But a pianistic trauma guru had a different prescription. Because my technique was ALL WRONG. Unless I relearned piano from scratch, she inveighed, my “ganglion” lump would just return. I postponed my Juilliard MA exam and signed up for her rehabilitation course. I’d been playing since I was six, starting on our Red October upright piano in Moscow. Into the sound I produced—my sound—I’d poured my entire identity. Now, at twenty-four, I was relearning scales with my plum-lumpy wrist. I still remember my face reflected in the guru’s shiny Steinway. I looked suicidal.
To come up with her weekly wad of crisp bills I took translating gigs, using Italian mustily recalled from our refugee layover in Rome. A cookbook as hefty as a slab of Etruscan marble landed one day on my desk. Instead of andante spianato and allegro con brio, my life was now to be occupied by spaghetti al pesto and vitello tonnato. Glumly I transcribed recipes onto index cards, while in the same room John, my boyfriend, was finishing his Ph.D. thesis—so rife with Derrida-speak that it was, to me, Swahili.
John and I had met in the mideighties when he arrived in New York on a Fulbright. Cambridge-haughty, he wrote for trendy Artforum and deconstructed obscure Brit punk bands. Me, I brooded over my Schumann and lived with my mom in an immigrant ghetto. But somehow we clicked, and soon he was colonizing my bedroom in Queens. The Derridarian, Mom christened him—a being from a mystifying other planet. “And what do you do?” condescended John’s post-structuralist pals. I stared at the floor. I labored at scales and translated recipes.
The idea came out of nowhere, a flicker that lit up my dismal brain.
What if … I myself wrote a cookbook? Russian, of course. But embracing more so the cuisines of the whole USSR, in all its multiethnic diversity? My resident Derridarian magnanimously volunteered himself as coauthor, to help with my “wonky” immigrant English.
I remember our fever the day our proposal went out to publishers.
And their icy responses. “What, a book about breadlines?”
Then, stunningly, a yes—from the publisher of the cookbook of the burgeoning new foodie zeitgeist, The Silver Palate.
Contract signed, I was drifting down Broadway when a heckler piped up in my dizzied head.
“You fraud! What’re your credentials? Zero, a big fat Russian nol’!”
Sure, I’d learned some recipe-writing from my Italian job, cooked enthusiastically with my mom, occasionally even gawked at overpriced chevres at Dean & Deluca. But watching Julia or Jacques on TV or leafing through the glossy layouts in Gourmet, I felt the same émigré alienation that had gripped me during my first bleak Philadelphia winter. Some capitalists were boning duck for a gala to which I wasn’t invited. This eighties “foodie” world of pistachio pesto and mushroom duxelles—I was a rank outsider to it. A class enemy, even.
But in my floppy handbag rested our signed contract and the chicken I’d already bought for recipe testing.
By the time I finished the opening chapter, on zakuski, the lump on my wrist had disappeared. By chapter two—soups—my guru-directed fingers were effortlessly tossing off octaves. But somehow the desire was gone. The bombastic Rachmaninoff chords felt hollow under my hands. My sound wasn’t mine. For the first time in my adult life, plumbing the depths of late Beethoven no longer claimed my heart. Well into salads I played my Juilliard MA exam (adequately), shut the lid on my Steinway, and have hardly touched the ivories since.
The all-consuming passion that sustained me all these years had been supplanted. By a cookbook.
I realize, gazing back across my Brezhnevian childhood, that two particular Moscow memories propelled me on my food- and travel-writing career. Two visions from the socialist fairy tale of abundance and ethnic fraternity.
A fountain. A market.
The fountain was golden! Druzhba Narodov, or Friendship of Nations, it was called—and it glittered spectacularly inside VDNKh (Exhibition of National Economic Achievements), that sprawling totalitarian Disneyland where in 1939 my five-year-old mother saw Eden.
Grandma Alla a
nd I liked to sit on the fountain’s red granite edge, cracking sunflower seeds as sparrows peeped and the water jetted fantastically among sixteen larger-than-life golden statues. They were of kolkhoz girls in ethnic costumes, set in a circle around a baroque eruption of wheat. The fountain was completed right after Stalin’s death, and gilded (so people whispered) at Beria’s orders. “National in form, socialist in content”—a spectacle of the happy family of our Socialist Union republics. How could I ever confess to my anti-Soviet mom that I, a cynical kid exposed to samizdat, was utterly mesmerized by this Soviet imperialist fantasy? That in their wreaths, tiaras, hats, ribbons, and braids the golden maidens were my own ethnic princesses?
The friendship of nations …
The hackneyed phrase was one of the most powerful propaganda mantras of the Soviet regime. Druzhba narodov: it celebrated our empire’s diversity. Compensated us for our enforced isolation from the unattainable zagranitsa. What comrade, went the official line, needed crap capitalist Paris when more than 130 languages were spoken inside his own borders? When to the east he could behold the tiled splendors of Samarkand; enjoy white, healthy lard in Ukraine; frolic on pine-fringed Baltic sands? Your typical comrade didn’t make it past sweaty Crimean beaches. But oh, what a powerful spell the ethnographic myth cast over our Union’s psyche!
Some Union, ours. To telescope rapidly: Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the newly aggregated Transcaucasus formed the initial Soviet fraternity, bonded by the 1922 founding treaty. Soon after, Central Asia supplied five fresh socialist –stans: Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. Come the midthirties, the Transcaucasus was split back into Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All the carving and adding wasn’t entirely neat, though. Samarkand, a predominately Tajik city, was given to Uzbekistan. The Christian Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh got trapped in Muslim Azerbaijan. The nasty seeds of future un-friendships were being sown across the map. By 1940 the Soviet family reached fifteen members when the three Baltic republics and Moldavia were dragged in, courtesy of the treacherous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. My gilded fountain’s enigmatic sixteenth maiden? She was the happy Karelo-Finnish Union Republic, later demoted to a subrepublic of Russia.
So there we were: the world’s largest country by far, one sixth of the planet’s land surface; a seeming infinity pitched within 37,000 miles of the border, reaching from the Atlantic to the Arctic to the Pacific Oceans. Fifteen full Union republics—all founded, please note, on ethno-national principles, from behemoth Russia (population almost 150 million) to teensy Estonia. In addition: twenty autonomous subrepublics, dozens of administrative “national” units, 126 census-recognized “nationalities” (Sovietese for ethnicity)—more than fifty languages spoken just in the Caucasus.
Such was the bomb of diversity that began to explode in the last decade of the twentieth century.
Back in my childhood, though, the Party talk was all SOLIDARITY. Profound RESPECT for ALL republics. The great Soviet COMMITMENT TO ETHNIC EQUALIZATION! (Prolonged stormy applause.) The Bolshevik fathers created nations. Stalin for his part deported them. Under Brezhnev, the Union’s original vision of federalism and affirmative action had been revived—as institutional kitsch. The Mature Socialist celebration of ethnic friendship produced a never-ending costume carnival of Dagestani metalwork, Buryat archery skills, Moldavian embroidery. As a kid I lapped it all up. And the barrage of state-sponsored multiculturalism left me in a tizzy of perpetual hunger for the “cuisines of our nations.”
So I acquired the second of my Moscow memories—of the two-storied Central Market on the Boulevard Ring, in the company once again of my hard-living Babushka Alla.
The Tsentralny Market was the friendship of nations come to throbbing, screaming, haggling life. Instead of golden statues, shrill Uzbek melon matrons wiped juice-stained fingers on striped ikat silk dresses, while Tajik dames hovered witch-like over banks of radishes, their heavy eyes kohl-rimmed, their unibrows a sinister line. I wandered the market aisles, ravenous, addled by scents of wild Uzbek cumin and Lithuanian caraway. After the greenish rot of state stores, the produce here radiated a paradisiacal glow. Kazakhs hustled soccer ball–size crimson apples (Kazakhstan’s capital was Alma-Ata: “Father of Apples”). Fast-talking Georgians with Stalinist mustaches whistled lewdly at my blond grandma and deftly formed newspaper cones for their khmeli-suneli spice mixes, tinted yellow with crushed marigold petals. I was particularly agog at the Latvian dairy queens. The Baltics were almost zagranitsa. Polite, decked out in spotless white aprons, these lady-marvels filled Grandma’s empty mayonnaise jars with their thick, tangy smetana (sour cream). In contrast to state smetana, theirs was a quality product: undiluted with buttermilk-diluted-with-milk-diluted-with-water—the usual sequence of Soviet dairy grift.
I gushed, and gushed, about the Central Market—as spectacle, as symbol—in the introduction to our cookbook.
In the friendship of nations spirit, the very first recipe I tested was my dad’s Georgian chicken with walnut sauce (with the bird from my handbag on Broadway). Georgia was the Sicily of the Soviet imagination—a mythic land of inky wines, citrus, poets, tree-side philosophers, and operatic corruption. I followed with Armenian dolmas, then on to Baltic herring rolls, Moldavian feta-stuffed peppers, Byelorussian mushrooms.
Even pre-revolutionary Russian cuisine reflected the span of the empire. With Mikoyan’s 1939 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, this diversity got Sovietized. As the decades progressed, our socialist cuisine merged into one pan-Eurasian melting pot. Across the eleven time zones, the state’s food service canon included Ayzeri lulya kebab and Tatar chebureki (fried pies). In Moscow you dined at restaurants named Uzbekistan or Minsk or Baku. And singularly Soviet hits such as salat Olivier and the proverbial “herring under fur coat” lent socialist kitsch to Uighur weddings and Karelian birthday parties.
This was the story I wanted to tell in our book.
Please to the Table came out at the end of 1990. With four hundred recipes on 650 pages, it was heavy enough to whack someone unconscious.
A couple of months after publication, a phone call startled John and me in the dead of an Australian night. (We’d moved to Melbourne, where my Derridarian taught art history.) It was our editor in New York, very excited. Please to the Table—if you please—had just won a James Beard Award.
The news was doubly shocking to me.
Because who could ever imagine a more ironic moment for a fat, lavish book celebrating the culinary friendship of our Soviet nations? It was the spring of 1991, and our happy Union was coming apart at the seams.
For a principal pair of reasons, arguably. One was Gorbachev’s disastrous handling of ethnic conflicts and secessionist passions in the republics. The other: the piteous mess he was making of the Soviet economy, which left stores barren of almost everything edible.
“Ha! Better publish it as a USSR tear-off calendar!” my Moscow friends had joked two years earlier, while I was still researching Please to the Table.
The first salvos were erupting from our brotherly republics.
Down with Russian imperialism! Russian occupiers, go home!
Thousands of pro-independence demonstrators marched under these sentiments in Tbilisi, Georgia, in early April 1989. The protests lasted five days. That summer John and I went recipe-collecting in the romantic, mountainous Caucasus. Reaching Tbilisi, we found the histrionic Georgian capital still reeling in shock. On April 9, Moscow’s troops had killed twenty protesters, mostly young women. Everywhere, amid balconies jutting from teetering houses and restaurants dug into cliffs around the Kura River, Tbilisians seethed with opulent rage, calling down terrible curses on Moscow. The Kremlin, meanwhile, blamed the massacre on local officials.
Our hosts in town were a young architect couple, Vano and Nana, I’ll call them—flowers of a young liberal national intelligentsia. Their noble faces convulsed with hatred for Kremlin oppression. But to us Nana and Vano were Georgian hospitality personified. A guest thereabout
s is revered as a holy creature of God, to be bathed in largesse. In our honor, kvevri, clay vessels of wine, were dug out from the ground. Craggy wands of churchkhella—walnuts suspended in grape must—were laid out in piles. Cute baby lambs had their throats cut for roadside picnics by the crenellated stone walls of an eleventh-century Byzantine monastery. We became more than friends with Nana and Vano—family, almost. I cheered their separatist, righteous defiance at the top of my lungs.
One evening we sat under a quince tree in the countryside. We were full of dark, fruity wines and lavash bread rolled around opal basil and cheese. I felt at home enough to mention Abkhazia. Formally an autonomous republic of Georgia, Abkhazia was making its own moves to secede—from Georgia. We’d all been laughing and singing. Suddenly Nana and Vano froze. Their proud, handsome faces clenched with re-ignited hatred.
“Abkhazians are monkeys!” sputtered Nana. “Monkeys down from the hills! They have no culture. No history.”
“Here’s what they deserve,” snarled Vano. He crushed a bunch of black grapes savagely in his fist. Red juice squirted out between his elegant knuckles.
It was a preview of what lay ahead for Gorbachev’s Soyuz (Union).
What lay ahead also was the furious rumbling of stomachs.
In trying to reform the creaking, rusting wheel of the centralized Soviet system, Gorbachev had loosened the screws, dismantled a part here, a part there, and ultimately halted the wheel—with nothing to replace it. Typical Gorbachevian flip-flops left the economy floundering between socialist planning and capitalist supply and demand. Deficits soared, output stagnated, the ruble plummeted. The economy was collapsing.
Starting in 1989, John and I began living part-time in Moscow and traveling around the USSR—this for another book now, one my Derridarian was writing himself. It was to be a dark travel picaresque about the imploding Imperium. We stayed during the winter months mainly, during his Aussie summer vacations. I loved our first arrival, after a twenty-hour flight from Melbourne, to Dad’s and Grandma Liza’s welcome spreads, touchingly, generously, improbably conjured out of thin air. Our second arrival a year later was different. In December 1990, Babushka Liza had only diseased boiled potatoes and sauerkraut. I remember the anguished embarrassment in her eyes. The “foreigners” were at her table, and she had only this to offer.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 26