by John Mole
Gather in the mushrooms
We wanted to import as little as possible and that included equipment for the restaurant. All except the oven. I was under strict instructions from Malcolm that only a Blodgett from Vermont would do. I called on Mashinimpex, suppliers of ovens to the catering trade. Their offices and showroom were in the suburb of Yasenevo, south of the city at the end of the Yellow Line near the MKAD, the Moscow ring road. It was a pleasant place, right next to Bitsevsky Park, 20 square kilometres of natural forest. Since 1972, when it moved from the Lubyanka, Yasenevo has been the home of the SRV, the Foreign Secret Service, equivalent to the CIA’s Langley and MI6’s Vauxhall Cross, otherwise known as Langley-on-Thames. A change from the days of Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Co. when the old HQ in Curzon Street was known as the London Lubyanka.
It was a pleasant afternoon. To clear my head of pre-heat times, BTUs, inlet pressures, core temperature probes and other mystifying terms of art, I went for a walk in the woods before getting the metro back to the centre. On the fringes there were mainly mothers and babushkas with babies, and several solitary old men with walking sticks wandering round in suits adorned with rows of medal ribbons as if they had got lost from a parade.
I walked aimlessly along the winding paths, enjoying the golden sun, luminous sky, ripe fruit and new mulch, happy to have the company of mushroom hunters. From the middle of summer to the first frost of winter you are rarely alone in a forest. Sit quietly on a log and sooner or later you will hear a shuffling and scuffling through the leaves, glimpse a plastic bag, a stooped figure. Mushroom picking is not social like berry picking. Berry picking is mindless, instinctive, you let the fingers do the work while you chat or daydream. Mushroom picking is silent and solitary, even in company. You have to concentrate because they are not easy to spot. It is said that women are better at it than men because they have a more developed sense of shape and colour. Then comes the business of drying or salting or pickling at home for the winter. There are some classic dishes using fresh mushrooms, mainly in pies and soups, but most are preserved. Every family has its own mysteries and recipes.
As does every language, Russian has picturesque names for mushrooms: Caesar’s, the buttery, the Polish, the little fox, the little goat, the little pig, the stinky fly killer. The finest are the “whites”, the fragrant, meaty boletus that we know as cep or porcini. These have nothing to do with the Anglo-Saxon white mushrooms, the industrial variety otherwise known as champignons or button mushrooms, which in pizzas, pies and most other recipes can be substituted with slivers of polystyrene from the packaging they came in. Russian mushrooms, preserved or fresh, bear so little resemblance to our bland supermarket fungi, even the fancy ones, that I only think of them by their Russian name, greebi.
Greebi are a way of life, a part of Russian folklore and proverbs. Good people in folk tales are pictured with whites, bad people with toadstools. When Pushkin or Tolstoy wanted to show a character was a true Russian he had them prefer mushrooms to fancy foreign food. Anna Karenina is full of mushroom and mushroom-picking imagery. Mushrooms signify nature and vitality and hope for the future. For the exiled Nabokov, mushrooming is a symbol of his lost Motherland. Lenin is reputed to have been a keen mushroomer. One rainy day, so the myth goes, he was hurrying to the station when he spotted a clump of whites and stopped to collect them, in spite of the rain, the train and his wife’s protestations. Ahh, man of the people. Children learn to walk to a rhyme promising they will go mushroom hunting when they can. When I got excited about some hare-brained idea, Misha shut me up with If mushrooms grew in your mouth, it wouldn’t be a mouth but a kitchen garden. My favourite, when we had to arselick some apparatchik for a favour, was You can’t pick a mushroom without bowing.
Musing on such things, I didn’t notice how late it had become. The sun sank below the tree tops. Birds launched into their bedtime chorus. A chill evening breeze rattled the leaves. I was at a crosspaths and had no idea which of the four to take. I looked round for a walker or a mushroomer, but everyone else had gone home. Had I known then about the Bitsevsky Park Murderer, Russia’s most prolific serial killer, I would not have been so keen to ask directions. He confessed to 69 murders, starting his spree about a year before my little adventure. He preyed on solitary people, creeping up from behind and bopping them on the head.
I didn’t have a map, but I knew that north would take me further into the forest with about ten miles of wooded hills and the Bitsa River before I came to the Garden ring road. To the east was the suburb of Chertanovo, which had no metro station. South was less good as I would come to the MKAD, Moscow’s M25. Best was west, back to Yasenevo and the metro stations. But which way was west? The sun had gone so there was no fiddly Boy Scout stuff to be done with a watch as a compass. There were no stars yet and in any case the foliage overhead would prevent a decent sighting. Aha! Boys’ lost-in-the-wilderness adventure stories to the rescue. Moss grows only on the north side of tree trunks. So by keeping the moss on my left I would face west and get back to the station. That was the theory and in the absence of any other, it would have to do.
In practice it was less perfect. Some trees had no moss at all. Some had moss on all sides. Some had moss on the opposite side to their immediate neighbours. To make it worse, the paths were winding so you often turned counter-mosswise, then back again. But I pressed on, hoping the anomalies would cancel out and happily oblivious of the advice in serious survival guides that “it is a fallacy that moss only grows on the north side of trees. In dense woodland this method is especially unreliable.” As a method of navigation it was as much use as forecasting the weather from whether the cows are lying down. But, as in many other situations in life, truth brings despair and fallacy brings hope, so I pressed on through the gathering darkness.
Mine is the last generation to whistle, which I did to keep my spirits up. I wasn’t really worried. It was getting cold, but I wouldn’t freeze to death. Every good hike has a “God get me out of here and I’ll never do this again” moment, otherwise it’s just a ramble. When you have the right gear like a compass and a map, getting lost is fun. Getting out of a fog or a forest by dead reckoning is an exciting challenge. I would love the sport of orienteering if it wasn’t for the running. There is a deeply primitive satisfaction in navigation that we inherit from our hunter-gatherer past and that the GPS and the mobile phone have ruined for ever.
It had been dark for an hour and I was feeling my way uphill when I heard the sound of thunder. I stopped whistling and groped around for a waterproof bush to shelter under for the night, until I realized it was the noise of traffic. Hope flared. I came to the top of the rise and saw headlights strobing through the trees. So much for moss-I had come south to the MKAD. It took another half an hour of inching through the undergrowth before I staggered out of the trees into what looked like bonfire night. A score of articulated trucks were parked in a long lay-by carved out of the forest. Men stood round a massive brazier ten feet long and three feet wide or sat on logs around a camp fire.
I patted my hair and brushed twigs off my sports jacket and twills and took my tie off, so as not to look too much of a berk. Grimy, scratched and bedraggled, I sauntered to the fire, hands in pockets, a chap out for an evening stroll. When I felt the heat I realized how cold I was, which gave me courage to join the party. Stocky Russians with a leavening of Finns and Caucasians, Mongols and Tatars. Far from home, they had the brawny arms, spreading buttocks and low-slung bellies of truck drivers everywhere. They were drinking from litre jam jars refilled from metal jerry cans. They glanced at me for a moment and carried on eating and talking in mat, the obscene lingua franca of men.
They were having a barbecue. Lumps of meat were impaled on long spikes stuck into the ground and leaning at 45 degrees over the flames. These were no dainty cubes of meat but bloody chunks the size of a small joint. Tough meat for tough men - the Russian truck driver is no sissy. The long-distance ones travel in pairs, one to drive and one to ride
shotgun, or rather Kalashnikov.
A shaggy, pockmarked man was in charge. Sweating in wife-beater and jeans, he turned the meat and took it off the spikes when it was done. He hacked off replenishments with an axe from a carcase lying on the grass, which I trusted had fallen off the back of a lorry and not been run over by one. Like most minorities, I thought myself more interesting than the majority did and felt obliged to explain to the chef how I had got there, laying the English accent on thick.
“You want to eat?” was all he was interested in. “Five hundred roubles.” I gave him a dollar and received in return a jam jar of piss-coloured liquid and a chunk of meat on a hunk of black bread on a bit of newspaper. I took this primitive takeaway to a vacant packing case among other patrons round the fire. I did not recognize the beverage. It was certainly fizzy home brew, but of what it was hard to say. It might have been beer or kvas or something else entirely. The sour metallic taste could have come from the ingredients or foultasting Moscow water. Although it tasted nasty, it was very nice. There should be a word in gastronomy equivalent to the French jolie-laide, which describes a woman who is ugly yet attractive. Guinness, pumpkin pie and haggis are inherently disgusting but delicious. “An acquired taste” is too poncey. Nice-nasty will have to do.
Under the stars, in the flickering firelight, search-lit by the headlights of thundering rigs, gnawing at a charred chunk of roadkill, slugging down an unidentified nice-nasty beverage, I felt brave and lucky, like a lone wanderer on the steppe, stumbling across a nomad encampment. One of my dining companions, a tough little man with a bald head and hairy knuckles, took a swig of his jar, wiped his greasy fingers in his armpits and slapped his palms on his knees.
“Ho, Englishman! Who am I?” he bellowed over the noise of the traffic. “Famous Englishman!” He rolled his eyes and contorted his mouth into a leer and wriggled his fingers as if he was threatening to tickle a toddler. The others chortled and pointed and stamped their feet at the impersonation, but I was stumped. What Englishman could he possibly know?
“Vinston Tzertzill?” I hazarded.
“Nyet” they roared.
“Tzemz Bornd?”
“Nyet” they roared. The little man stood up and ran to and fro, knees bent, rolling his eyes and wiggling his fingers. The others laughed and clapped their hands and chanted “aketizak aketizak”. Thank God I twigged at last.
“Benny Kheell!”
“Da,” they roared. My jam jar was refilled, I was clapped on the back, I basked in reflected comic glory. This was my cue. The song “Gather in the Mushrooms”, immortalized by Benny Hill, is my party piece for Christmas, birthdays, every family singsong. My children, nephews and niece loathe it and shout me down, so it always fills me with warm feelings of nostalgia, especially when I am alone and far away.
“Gather in the mushrooms, put them in a pot, Pop ‘em in the oven an’ serve ‘em piping ho-ot.”
I treated them only to the chorus, as my Russian was not up to translating the subtlety of the verses. I explained that mushrooms was the theme and substituted greebi in the lyric. They were ecstatic. Unlike my family, they demanded encores. The impersonator snuggled up to me on my packing case and demanded private tuition. They sang other songs, which I did not recognize but were evidently of the same genre. Happy to have made a contribution I nibbled what I could of my food, threw the rest behind me into the bushes and, in a lull in the singing, announced it was time for me to go. One of the drivers kindly offered to take me the mile or so along the ring road to the metro station. As I climbed into his rig I heard the impersonator’s fruity baritone.
Gyedder in de greebi, pootem inner port
Poppem inna orven en sierem paipin hort
Since the dawn of civilization culture has spread along trade routes. Who knows how far Gyedder in de Greebi has spread along the motorways through Russian-speaking lands, how many generations will hand it down? From tiny spores great mushrooms grow. It’s nice to give something back.
If you don’t grease you don’t travel
The Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, announced that only the Cyrillic alphabet was to be used on public signs and logos. McDonald’s had to become and Pizza Hut . And Jackets? . We were relying on foreigners to fuel our launch. McDonald’s and Pizza Hut had recognizable logos, but Jackets? How would a foreigner ever recognize How would they know it was Western? And what would entice affluent Russians to taste a bit of England in a place that looked like it was named after a factory town in the Urals?
Misha, who was on a visit from Rome, Oleg and I sat round our world headquarters in the bedroom plunged into gloom. Like 1920s Bolsheviks we bemoaned Russian chauvinism, bourgeois nationalism, the death of internationalism. What is to be done? Who is to blame?
Every problem is an opportunity. Because Jackets did not have a brand presence outside South London, we were not shackled by it. There was nothing to stop us changing to a euphonious and compelling name that would appeal to both Russians and foreigners. But what? Look carefully at the Russian names above. Some letters you would have no idea how to pronounce unless you deduced them from the context. X for example, or or Others look familiar but are deceptive: Russian H is our n, C is s and X is h. As any stamp collector will tell you, the Russian for USSR is CCCP - three s words followed by an r. If you can bear to look at those junk-food names again without feeling nauseous, you will see five letters that look the same and sound the same in Cyrillic and Roman.
“AKMOT,” I shouted. “That’s our answer!”
“AKMOT? Is this a name for a restaurant? It does not sound too tasty to me.” In Russian it is pronounced AKMORT, which is even more sinister.
“It is so meaningful. So symbolic. It’s what we have in common, the bridge between two languages, two cultures. In these five letters is the meeting of East and West...”
“We are selling potatoes, not world peace.”
“All we have to do is make up a name with these letters and put it in lights.”
After some discussion, and bowing to the wisdom of a Western marketing expert and entrepreneurial consultant, they came round to the idea, which, like many such ideas, was more exciting in concept than in practice. We soon exhausted the anagrammatical possibilities of using each letter only once. In theory there are 120 combinations of five letters but only 28 were pronounceable. None of them was very catchy. “Let’s go out for a MOKTA” didn’t sound appetizing in Russian or in English. We tried using any four of the five letters, which added 32 potential names, all of which sounded more like acronyms for trade unions than a lifestyle choice. We relaxed the rules again to allow one letter to be repeated. This was more promising, producing words like TATO, which got closer but meant nothing in Russian. For potato they use the German word, Kartoffel. Oleg, who was of a mathematical bent, calculated that there were 720 possibilities, minus the unpronounceable. We each took a different starting letter and a piece of paper and laboured over the various combinations. Misha favoured KAKA, which summed up his opinion of the whole project.
Olga called us to the samovar in the kitchen. We explained what we were doing as she passed round the glasses.
“There must be people all over Moscow doing what you are,” she said.
I don’t remember who first had the brainwave. It may have been a collective inspiration, synapses firing in unison to produce a cerebral tsunami. All we had to do was come up with the best names, register them at City Hall as our own, and wait for international companies to come crawling to buy them off us. It was the sort of thing people do with internet domain names and car number plates. We had to move fast. It was such a great idea that we would surely have competition.
“Do you know how to register the names?” asked Olga, ever practical.
“I suppose we go to City Hall and ask. There must be a procedure,” I said.
How they laughed. When you need to do anything legal or official the first thought is not “Where do I go?” or “What time do they open?” or “Where d
o I get the forms?” but “Who do I know there?”
“Znachet,” said Misha, “we will find someone to bribe.”
Trembling with entrepreneurial fever, we went back to work. We did not underestimate the challenge. If we allowed two letters to be repeated the permutations were even more promising with words like TOMATO, but there were 5760 of them. Allow three letters to be repeated and you get French-sounding brands like TAMTAM and MAK-MAK. To find all of them you would have to trawl through more than 45,000 combinations. With pencil and paper it would take us weeks. Undaunted, Oleg said we should write a computer program.
Russian computers were inferior to American and Japanese. To compensate for this, and because their maths education is better than ours, Russians are leaders in software. So it was child’s play for Oleg to sit down at the computer to knock off a program that would permutate and sift AKMOT according to our rules. As one who has sympathy with those who hunt for the “any” key on the keyboard, I went into the kitchen to watch television with Olga while she sewed French labels into Bangladeshi sweaters.
“You work very hard.”
“We have to pay bills. Next week I go to Dubai for the first time.”
“You’re a shuttler! Well done! What happened to your boss?”
“She was killed. She cheated her roof.” Roof is slang for protection by the mafia from the mafia.”
“Aren’t you frightened?”
“I must do it. Somebody must make money.”
“Oleg works hard.”
“He dreams of Spain. Misha makes him work”
“They have big plans.”
“Yes, big plans. Men have the best ideas. Men control everything. Women’s path is from the stove to the door.” She smiled and poured tea.