On the first day of preschool, my father climbed a giant oak. From the upper branches, he could see directly into the classroom. My mother waited for news down below.
“Now he is holding the teacher’s hand.”
“Now he is lying down for his nap.”
They must have taken the day off.
My grandfather had ingratiated me with the school by getting hold of thirty small Persian rugs of which some consulate was disposing, and it was on these regally plush items that my classmates and I bedded down. I wasn’t much of a sleeper, though, even at night. My grandmother loved me past reason, but she must have found this lack of discipline galling. “If you don’t fall asleep,” she would warn me from the side of the bed, “the inspector will come.”
Overhearing her, my grandfather would rush into the bedroom: “What inspector? What are you talking about? You’ll frighten the child! He’ll become mentally ill!”
“Mentally ill?” she would give back. “You’re the one who thinks you’re going to have a heart attack every minute!”
“With everything I have to look after? Maybe I will!”
“Go have another glass somewhere! Go.”
And then I was really awake.
I preferred the bedtime stories my father invented: “Once upon a time, there was a boy. He came home from work, ate some food, then sat down to read a book. But the cover was ripped, and inside, the words were washed out—”
“Wait, wait,” I would interrupt. “Ripped how? Ripped, or curled back, or . . . ?”
My father would laugh. The housepainting work wore him down, and I had to touch his cheek to keep him from falling asleep as he invented the story.
In the summers, I was sent to fatten up in the woods. The property belonged to a cow and pig farmer who rented rooms in the countryside cottage he shared with his wife, and in several other constructions not used by the pigs. The wild and trackless forest from which his property had been hacked could outclass any Bavarian wood of fairy-tale density. (That’s why people wrote songs about them.) Russian has a word for “forest,” and then a separate word—pushcha—for forests like these. Because, as a teacher, my mother had summers off and was the next most pampered family member, she was forced to accompany me.
My mother hated the woods. As a child, she’d wept for hours after her parents left her at summer camp and sped away to the city. My grandparents disliked the countryside even more—it was the refuge of drunks and people without ambition, the fresh air its only redemption. Like them, my mother wanted the noise and pageantry of the city. Minsk was Houston—the fourth-largest city, with a similar population, two million, and something of its standing: solid but regional. Most of it—a thousand-year-old settlement—destroyed in the war, it was rebuilt in the monumental socialist style. The streets were as wide as a soccer field is long. But because of the fresh slate, it was also a relatively modern place. Things were clean and new; the circus was good, and so was the opera; supply chains were smoother, so people didn’t have to go to Moscow to get certain things. We lived on a quiet side street just outside the center, near a botanical garden that made my mother tear up—she had wanted to become a florist. (In an early instance of the decades-long ventriloquism to come, I absorbed her secret longing—it wasn’t a profession her parents would approve of—and developed a massive devotion to the solitary lilac tree that flanked our apartment building.) Nearby was a park with lots of warnings (citizens: observe cleanliness . . . citizens: observe silence), a playground of swings to make a boy think he could fly, and the steam baths I went to with my father, just as he had with his.
The summer I was three, the Jewish family with whom my mother and I shared the main summer cottage at the pig farmer’s had a son, too, with a fellow Jewish boy’s very black hair, and, though he was seven, we were closer in size than the numbers suggested. The reason for this became clear quickly: For breakfast I ate salmon roe on buttered bread; he had weak oatmeal and hot tea. Once, we saw his mother mixing a dollop of baked-salmon salad into farmer cheese so that her son had a red-looking meal, too, but my mother ruined it by trying to share the roe. One day, the boy put down his cheese sandwich and said, loudly enough for the whole kitchen, “Mama, why do they eat differently from us?” The room fell silent. “Please eat,” his mother demanded in a mortified voice. “I’ll explain.”
It was a tricky thing to explain to a boy: His father was an engineer, his mother a urologist; I came from a barber, a manicurist, a housepainter, and a docked chemistry teacher. But his mother did not seem resentful. Once, she cornered my mother with a urologist’s insider tip: It was now possible to give Jewish boys “cosmetic circumcisions”—all the health benefits, but hardly visible, “so they won’t laugh at your boy in the steam baths because he’s Jewish.”
The farmer’s pigs had it best. There was a summer camp next door. These Young Pioneers may have been firm in their resistance to imperialism, but they were children and therefore fickle in diet, and the man had somehow managed to get their castoffs for free. The pigs ate buttery potatoes with fried fish, millet with preserves, polenta with eggs sunny-side up, and hot tea. This also meant they grew fast, so that he had to slaughter them all the time. Gallantly, he waited till nightfall, when all the renters were in, but there was nothing to do while he waited, so he was profoundly drunk by the time he tried to find the pig’s heart with his knife.
For hours, the cottage colony listened to the death squeals of one pig after another. One morning, my mother timidly inquired whether the man might consider other means of destruction. He was being paid for woodsy quiet, after all. He heard her out, then announced, delphically, “There will be you—and there will be them.” But from then on, he drove his pigs to the woods. He was still drunk, though, and it turned out to be hard to load a pig into the trunk of a sedan. Once he finally managed, he swerved down a woodland road until he reached a spot that was never far enough as he hunted for the heart, and missed, over and over.
After the carnage was finished, he feasted. From a pig he kept, he carved a giant square of well-marbled meat from the lower part of the shoulder—the brisket, or most of a boned-out picnic ham—which he fried up in butter until it glistened like gold. This he placed on garlic-rubbed black bread from a special loaf nearly the size of the brisket. Then he poured himself an eight-ounce glass of vodka. These items he carried from the shared kitchen to a little brick shed on the edge of the property that he never rented out—it was cooler there, and his wife didn’t bother him. As he walked, the renter population gathered at the windows in dismay and reproach: Just look at that degenerate. I felt guilty in my dissent: The scent from the plate in his hands was so far-reaching and fine that it seemed to merit forgiveness of all, or at least a postponement of judgment. Once the degenerate had reached the shed, he lowered himself onto the cot that was the only thing in it and ate down the brisket with vodka. Then he collapsed and slept for twenty-four hours.
Only my father, who came up on the weekends, joined me in thinking there wasn’t anything wrong with the man. In fact, my father wanted his life. For some reason, the original brick of the farmer’s sleeping shed had been encased in concrete that had then been painted white, so my father the housepainter offered to repaint the white into a brick pattern, at least. The farmer readily agreed, and an unexpressed camaraderie existed between them after that.
Sometimes my father brought the pot in which my parents’ matrimonial sardines had been made so we could sneak in a campfire picnic. (Faina had not parted with it eagerly. When she and I played cards, she ignored every wordless, raised-eyebrow admonishment from a passing adult to make sure to lose to the child, and demolished me every time. But even she wasn’t impervious to generosity as defined by Regular People.) The pot—bulbous, scuffed, heavy, and forty—made me think of a slightly inactive uncle, laid up from arthritis or drink but taking in everything keenly all the same. It was not going to be a large family. My mother’s parents had overruled my father’s des
ire for another child because it was time to get back to work and earning sweet rubles. My mother acquiesced.
I couldn’t tell you, as a five-year-old, why I preferred to eat out in the woods with my father “when there was a normal kitchen right there,” but, as an adult, I’ve wondered how much of it may have had to do with the fact that it gave me a father as serene—as opposed to contained—as I’d ever seen him. Around that campfire, it was an understanding of nature that fed you, not the clandestine connections that did in the city.
After we ate, I slept the sleep of the young, dead, and well fed—my mouth open and my arms crossed at my chest, the way my father did sometimes.
He had been a retiring person since childhood—more like his father than Faina. When boys taunted him about being Jewish, he walked away. At recess, he played by himself. He liked silence and disliked crowds—he distrusted the falsehood that usually went with them. When, every October, young “volunteers” were conscripted to help with the countryside harvest, my grandfather bribed the necessary people to save my teenage mother from two weeks bent over potato fields. It was my father’s favorite time of the year.
Few of the young faces on the early train to the village shared his enthusiasm. They were supposed to be the Soviet Union’s first bourgeois generation; if their parents had found a way to believe, they were past the question. They wished to work in offices, shop for the clothes that were newly available, listen to Beatles bootlegs, sit late and gossip in one another’s apartments, and fall in love without caution. (A literary figure of the time, allocated a precious new apartment, said, “Now . . . we must pray to God there won’t be a revolution” to take it all away.) They didn’t wish to break their asses helping with the harvest because the old village men were asleep with the bottle and the young ones had escaped to the city.
At the rural train platform, as everyone stamped their feet and waited for a truck to the village, my father stood aside. He didn’t wear a hat, nor gloves, and his jacket was too thin. He balled his fists in his pockets and gazed across the silent web of the rails, the air so still he imagined noise—a branch cracking, a bird beating its wings.
Grandma Daria, to whose hut he was assigned one such October, along with several boys, had a furnace the size of a bed. Out of it came crispy quartered potatoes, dusted with dill before being slathered with sour cream; bowlegged, hand-lumped pork sausages; “eye-melets”—eggs sunny-side up—sizzling and spitting after a quick fry-up in the pork fat. Rough hunks of bread filled out the plate, as did chipped enamel mugs of boiling-hot black tea with honey. The potatoes were freshly dug up; the sour cream came from the cows in the field, morosely observing the encroachment of winter; the eggs from the chickens prancing around the yard; the sausages from the season’s first hog slaughter (a little early, but there were guests); the honey from the village bees; the bread from its rye. Only the black tea came from the store—again, guests. Sometimes Grandma Daria had just the hot water with honey.
Thus fortified, the boys headed off on a back-crushing jumble over a rutted road to the fields. Some of the girls ran field kitchens—milk-softened pork, potato pancakes, cabbage still speckled with dirt, washed down with a mead-like fermented beverage called kvass or that morning’s milk. The air felt scored like crystal. The river was some other kind of blue. The grass rustled endlessly in the wind—here no one mowed.
By the end of their shifts, Grandma Daria’s boys felt mind-numbing hunger. In went hunks of pork belly braised with carrots, onions, and scallions from the garden. In went roasted beets. In went rye bread pinned by slabs of hard cheese. The boys’ cheeks burned—from the wind, from the furnace. The coiled cots into which they collapsed could have been clouds. Grandma Daria rose in the night and covered them with rough blankets stuffed with billows of cotton; she didn’t want to burn precious firewood.
On Sunday, their day off, the boys heard Grandma Daria whispering in their ears: “Sonny, it’s the last week to pick plums—I’m not tall enough and I can’t carry Timofey’s ladder all by myself.” Or: “Someone has to move the hay. I’m an old woman . . .” And so, before heading off to the steam baths, where they washed off the week, the boys, many of whom had never thought to help their mothers at home (and whom the mothers hadn’t bothered to ask), picked the plums and moved the hay. Two plums into the box and one in the mouth. My father proudly handed Grandma Daria box after box of plums and was stunned when she emptied half into the pig trough—she couldn’t afford the sugar to turn them all into preserves.
In the end, even the other boys didn’t want it to be over—for two weeks they smoked, flirted, and drank, away from the eyes of their parents. And they learned how to do things. That country, with its chronic breakdowns and shortages, made resourceful improvisers out of the clumsiest hands. A quarter of a century later, at family gatherings in San Francisco and Omaha and Chicago and New Jersey and Brooklyn, we children had to marvel at the hands of our fathers: small, rough with work—sometimes cracked with it—the thumbs squat and broad. Whether molecular biologists, programmers, or taxi drivers, they could dismantle radios, singe potatoes in firepits, swim to the other side of the lake—oh, how these tense men untensed at the sight of a rural body of water—get a chandelier to hang from the ceiling, and strum a guitar. They still wore the mustaches and trimmed beards of their youth, and they were beyond the reach of American fashion. To us, their Americanized children, these men were rigid, frightened, and withdrawn. But you had to love their hands.
With the pig farmer’s antics finally deemed too much to bear, we spent the summer I was five in Lithuania, in the Baltics. Everything that was made there, so close to the West, was made better, and I was outfitted in turtlenecks, sailor shirts, jeans, overalls, ski hats, leather jackets, and tailored school uniforms that actually held together. It was all new, and itched me horribly; like my father, I hated having on more than I needed. When my mother’s best friend came over with her daughter, the girl cast longing looks at my clothes, and I at all the food she left on her plate.
It was after the following summer, when I was six, in Crimea, on the Black Sea coast in Ukraine, that things changed, that it came time for knowledge. It’s the first summer I recall with my own memory, instead of through stories told by my parents about some other boy with my name. Crimea was fabled: the Soviet Riviera. They had peaches down there, cherries, apples, and pears good enough to ship home. The seawater was like velvet. My grandfather had been stationed in Crimea in the 1940s, and my parents had honeymooned there in 1975, if you could call a month in a shed a honeymoon. But even this wasn’t easy to come by: A friend of my grandfather’s—also named Arkady, so they were Arkady the Black and Arkady the Red, for the color of their hair—knew someone who knew someone. And you paid these people directly, a forbidden private transaction that increased the sensation of being away from the norm.
In 1975, my parents had gotten more than the shed. The female half of the couple that owned it worked as a cashier at a café on the beach. My parents would try to pay, but she would wave them off: “It’s a drop in the sea.” And she would point to the sea outside the window: the black, silky sea that was as luxurious as everything around it was humble. Her husband delivered dairy products, and never failed to unload some of his burden at home. For the honeymooners, he saved the delicacies known, for lack of better translation, as glazed quarklets: small rectangular bundles of tvorog—a firmer version of quark cheese—infused with vanilla extract, then dipped in chocolate. The little things were quick to sweat in the heat; there being no refrigeration, my parents had no choice but to eat them at once.
In the decade since, Crimea had not changed its balance of plenty and want. The sea was so clement—not too cold, not too warm, with pockets of both—that I lived in it, once I no longer feared going in. But the summer quadrupling of the population strained the city’s supply networks so badly that there was hardly any food in the stores. Only an official sanatorium for the employees of a military hardware factory
(free massages, mud baths, mineral water treatments) was well stocked. We could hear the clamor of knife and fork from the outdoor café behind its raised walls. Word was they even had a dietitian on staff.
Mortal people—even my grandfather couldn’t get us into that sanatorium—sent ahead nonperishables from home in slatted wooden boxes. This was called “savage leisure”—vacation the primitive way. The same boxes returned home filled with southern fruit.
The compound that enclosed our rental had a great olive-green gate, a massive red star at its middle. When we pulled up, we found a woman in a long, dark skirt and shawl, lengths of gray hair gathered above her sun-creased face—she could have been a hundred, or a hundred and twenty—sitting on a rickety foldout chair trying very hard not to move. “Hot,” she declared. She rapped on the gate, and the red star snapped in half. Within, we were besieged by a herd of squealing pigs; it was our fate to spend summers in homes owned by men who kept swine. But Victor, the owner, did not slaughter his—he fed them peaches from the trees on his property.
Victor never wore shoes, and rarely pants, showered in the sea, and left the fraying, graying cloud of his hair to dry in the briny air without the aid of a comb. His wife was just as slim and attractive, and if they were slightly leathered by the year-round sun, they also shone with it, a bizarre, life-lived-outside vitality you would have had to assume was a foreigner’s until they opened their mouths and Russian came out. Victor also grew cherries and grapes, from which he fermented wine, which, in the name of science and progress, he constantly sampled. In a month, we never encountered him sober—but never drunk, either. Just as we never saw his gray-haired, long-skirted mother anywhere but sitting sentinel by the gate, as if diamonds were concealed in the careless impasto of its paint job. “Hot,” she said when we passed.
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