Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  They walked past the pizza parlor where he used to buy his wife a slice. She had cirrhosis of the liver, so she wasn’t supposed to—all that salt and fat. They always got the pizza bianca—ricotta was healthier, right? It looked healthier. In his pizza pidgin, Arkady would ask the Italian to heat it up less—too crispy was too rough on the roof of her mouth. She pulled at the soft dough with her lips, a moment in heaven, as he pleaded with her to eat slowly, it’s hot. It was the only thing she craved from an American kitchen. Back in Minsk, Sofia’s chicken schnitzels were such that the next-door neighbor would stumble out onto their shared balcony and bang on their door. And even though he was a bit of a drinker, how could you refuse him one of those chicken steaks fried to a golden crisp in their airy egg batter?

  At the fishmonger’s, the carp was still $1.99. The Chinese man in the bloodstained apron behind the counter had no English, only a sharp cleaver in his nicotine-stained fingers. He smiled toothlessly at the Russian man with the round belly—he was like a Buddha. Arkady stuck out his index finger to mean one; then nine of the ten fingers twice to say “ninety-nine”; then he jabbed the finger at the fish and waved it back and forth: “No!”

  The fishmonger laughed and pointed up—to indicate his boss? God’s will? The Russian’s index finger turned admonitory—he wanted to impress his new home attendant with his bargaining skills or, failing that, his outrage. But eventually he gave in—“Okay, fish, yes.” The fishmonger smiled—he could have been twenty or eighty—and yanked the carp, with its stunned mouth, from the display.

  Now the old Russian swiped his index finger across his throat. Was he threatening the man’s life? For God’s sake, Oksana would pay the difference. But Arkady meant he wanted the carp weighed without the head. He got his wish, and then—because rewards come to the far-seeing—he insisted the head go into his bag anyway, because what was the guy going to do with a carp head? Meanwhile, Arkady’s home aide could use it to make stock. He got the head and, because he got it for free, a lower average price on the buy after all.

  “You belong on the stage,” Oksana said, marveling. “Can I buy some things for lunch? I want to make something fresh.” She was still smarting from the mixed reaction to the millet. “And then we’ll buy a second fridge on the way home.”

  “You can buy whatever you want,” he said.

  While Oksana picked beets for borshch, cabbage for salad, and kidney beans for her kidney-bean patties, Arkady went to the flower stand and came back with a single rose for Oksana. When they checked out, the pair of young cashiers broke into applause at the gallant gesture and insisted the rose would be free. They knew him here, too.

  “Where next?” she said when they were outside.

  “I wanted to go to the cake store for my birthday,” he said. “But I’m ready for home.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “A little nap, that’s all. Tell me a good story and we’ll be home quickly.”

  “I don’t have any stories like you do. My stories are sad. I’d rather you told me a story.”

  He stopped. “A woman like you? No.”

  “A woman like me, yes,” she laughed mirthlessly. They walked for a block. Finally Arkady said, “So you’re alone?”

  “You know what it is, Arkady Kharitonovich?” She used his patronymic—the respectful form of address. “When you grew up—on the one hand, it was the Soviet time, it was bad, right? But things feel uglier now. Even though there’s no war. Even though everyone’s free.”

  He liked being addressed as an authority. He shrugged modestly.

  “I was seventeen years old,” she said. “This young man walks into the store—he’s in the oil-and-gas department at the college, they’re done with exams, he wants champagne and chocolates for their celebration. I was in the back; he got impatient and plopped his champagne bottle on the scale. Nearly broke it. I came out and gave him a piece of my mind. I guess he liked it—he came back in the evening. ‘I’m glad they make you work a long shift,’ he says. ‘The hours are on the door,’ I said. ‘I know,’ he says, ‘I checked on my way out before.’ A regular Romeo! He walked me home; we started seeing each other. Soon after, we had to go to a wedding on my mother’s side. Somehow, they forgot the onions—can you imagine a Ukrainian table without onions? So he got in his car, drove to his village, and came back with twenty kilos of onions. My mother’s heart was his for eternity.”

  “Smart man,” Arkady said.

  “Only that was the last decision he ever made. He got me, and he didn’t want to try hard ever again. I was the go-getter. Also, he cheated on me. I guess he needed to feel like a man.”

  Arkady walked silently, and Oksana worried that she’d spoken vulgarly. But then he said, “I can’t make sense of it. And now, no one?”

  “Six years ago, I met someone else. I was thirty-eight, I thought it would look strange if I was without a husband. But again, I was the husband. The earnings were mine, I brought in the food, the apartment I paid for. It’s fine, I didn’t need material things—all I wanted was someone stronger than me. ‘Strong woman’ is a foolish notion—I wanted a real man. He and I were walking by the river once, and he was complaining again, and I remember looking at the water and praying, ‘God, please grant me a green card to America.’ And God heard me.”

  They were in front of Arkady’s building. “Sad talking makes quick walking,” she said. “Let’s go up—you take a nap, I’ll make lunch.”

  “What’s for lunch?” he said.

  “It’s a surprise—you can dream about it.”

  “I want a gogol-mogol,” he said. It was the Russian version of eggnog, only that among Russians it counted as a cold remedy and all-purpose aid.

  “Can you have all that sugar?” she said. “I’ll adjust it.”

  The adjustment, once the refrigerator came to look like the last train out of Paris before the Germans rolled in, was hot milk with buckwheat honey: no sugar, no egg yolks.

  “It’s a hardship regime,” the client complained. He’d changed into pinstriped pajamas.

  She laughed. “Very. I’ll take some of those peppers and marinate them in this honey.” She puckered her hands in front of her lips the way she had seen Italians do. “Gorgeous!”

  “Okay, gorgeous,” he said. He declined his head obediently and downed the hot milk. “Don’t be lonely. I won’t sleep long.”

  While he napped, Oksana cooked. She worked handicapped: no caramelized onions and carrots in the borshch, because of the amounts of oil required; no sugar in the salad dressing. Only the kidney-bean burgers could keep to the original recipe: semolina flour, a little sour cream, nothing terrible. If she had to spare oil and fat, she’d get her flavor from spice: the borshch would get parsnip, potatoes, and—you wouldn’t find the housewives at home using it—jalapeño. She’d made other discoveries in the New World: basil, cumin, curry. At home, it was all root vegetables.

  When the client emerged from the bedroom, the ash-colored hair that had been neatly parted now up in a coxcomb, the borshch was “breathing” on the stove and Oksana was at the dining table writing. It would be a late lunch.

  “Writing up a report?” Arkady said, and he produced a long, satisfied yawn.

  She swiveled in the chair and threw the paper in her purse. “It’s nothing. Let’s go, it’ll be three soon! What a day.”

  “There’s a sweater in the bedroom,” he said. “Little dots all over. Can you get it?”

  When she walked out, he went to her purse and pulled out the piece of paper. It had a line down the middle—one side said “good,” the other “bad.” Under “good,” it said: “1) children, 2) Mama, 3) health.” Under “bad” was written a female name—it must have been the old woman she looked after—and then “love” and then “no English.”

  He heard her approaching and tossed it back into the purse. “I couldn’t find the one with dots,” she said. “I got you another.”

  “I must have got rid of it,” he shrugg
ed.

  At the table, she held her breath as he slurped the borshch. He kept rotating his shoulder—maybe he didn’t sleep well? Maybe, God, he liked watery chicken soup!

  He lifted his head. “Won’t you eat?”

  “No one less hungry than a cook,” she said. “Tasting and trying as you go.” She added suggestively, “You want to know how it came out, you know.” She waited. “Oh, Arkady Kharitonovich, I can’t keep on like this. I see you eating like it’s homework. Don’t you like it?”

  His eyes became big. “Don’t I like it? I love it!”

  “You’re a flatterer—tell the truth. What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s good! Oksanushka, it’s fine!”

  She was touched by the diminutive. “It’s not fine,” she said.

  “It’s a little lean, that’s all,” he said. “Good for me,” he said unconvincingly.

  “But what could I do?” she said. “It’s like dancing without legs, this cooking. A Ukrainian dish without salt, without caramelized onions?” She shook her head.

  Arkady put his spoon down. Her eyes followed him to the liquor cabinet, from which he withdrew a bronze-colored bottle and two shot glasses. These had narrow necks, but for pouring his hand was steady. She watched him, uncertain.

  “Oksanushka,” he said, “let me introduce myself again. I’m Arkady—you can call me Arkady, don’t bother with the patronymic.” He waited for her to raise her glass, clinked it, and drank in one gulp. “And Arkady,” he said, giving her that coquettish look again, “can have whatever he wants.” She couldn’t believe she was about to drink on the job, but it was a strange day; she drained her glass. The warmth went right to her head. It was good cognac.

  “They said diet food,” she said.

  “And do I look like the rest of them?”

  “And what about that?” She pointed at the ropy scar on his chest.

  “So what the hell did they clean them out for?” he said, pointing at his arteries.

  “Then I disown this table,” she said. “Let me do it again.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll read the newspaper.”

  “Read out loud,” she said. “I feel like a worm who’s been down in the soil. It’s always bad news at home. Here, I feel like it varies.”

  An hour later, the kitchen deep in a new round of cooking that would have to become dinner, he was reading out proverbs and humor from the newspaper when the doorbell rang. They looked up. The doorbell was tricky for Soviet people. It rarely meant something good.

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I’m not expecting anyone.”

  Oksana cast a parental look at the ribs in her pan—she had to keep the braising liquid from getting too low. At the door, they discovered an old man in blue workout pants and Fila slippers over brown socks. It was Yasha, the neighbor.

  “Excuse me, people,” he said. “I’m out for my exercise, but who can exercise with these smells floating around? I’ve been sniffing doorways for ten minutes.”

  “Yasha does stairwells before dinner,” Arkady said. “Fitness fanatic.” Yasha was of medium height like Arkady, but he didn’t have Arkady’s belly. But Arkady’s hair had stayed gray, whereas Yasha’s had gone white. These men compared these things—out loud when the comparison favored them, to themselves when it didn’t.

  “So if it smells good, come in,” Arkady said. He turned to Oksana. “What do we have?”

  “Crispy potatoes, stewed chicken—and dry ribs if I don’t run back to the kitchen.”

  Yasha slapped his hands together. “I knew I knocked on the right door.”

  “Here, I know your favorite appetizer,” Arkady said, and filled a new shot glass.

  They drank, they screwed up their faces, they chased with lemon slices. “You got any quarters?” Arkady said. Yasha was the super’s assistant and got paid in laundry quarters, so his pockets were always drooping with coins.

  “Of course I have quarters,” Yasha said. “You need for the laundry?”

  “Wait, wait.” Arkady left the living room. He returned with a pink plastic pig.

  “You’re obsessed with that pig,” Yasha said.

  “I’m a collector, what do you want?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen your clowns.”

  “Just change me a twenty.”

  “You’re going to change a twenty into eighty quarters to dump into that piggy,” Yasha said, “so you can take it to the bank and enjoy getting a twenty back. Your dementia’s starting.”

  “Who cares—change it. I’ll give it to my grandson. He’s too proud to take money, but trifles like coins, he might give in. I’ll tell him the pig’s too heavy, can’t he help?”

  Yasha started dropping quarters onto the oilcloth; Arkady arranged them in piles of four.

  “Better to count quarters than pills,” Yasha said.

  “Fifty-six,” Arkady announced.

  “I’ll bring the rest down after dinner. Or you want some fish next time I go to the pier?”

  “What’s the best fish?” Arkady said. “A piece of meat. And what’s the best meat?”

  “A sockful of cash,” Yasha finished for him.

  “So here’s the twenty dollars, and you bring up the rest after dinner. I don’t eat fish from the river.”

  “And where do you think the Chinese get it? Deep in the ocean?”

  Arkady shrugged and poured another thimble. “It’s all bullshit,” he said.

  “It’s all bullshit,” Yasha confirmed.

  Eventually they gave up on forks and gnawed on the ribs until it was too much for dentures. The chicken stew was so good that Yasha asked forgiveness and just drank the broth straight from the bowl, dodging bones. When he returned it to the table after a satisfied belch, two carrot shavings remained on his nose, almost a cross.

  “Her food is so good, she converted you,” Arkady said.

  After Yasha left, the living room gained a slight mournfulness—the daylight gone, the meal gone, Oksana’s shift almost gone, too. Oksana had never been mournful about the end of a shift; so life still had surprises for her. When she was cooking—the potatoes blistering, the ribs braising—it was all ahead. A meal went too quickly.

  “Excuse me for a minute,” Oksana said.

  Arkady remained at the table, pushing around crumbs with his pinkie. He was thinking about Oksana, and about his wife, and about nothing at all. Finally he rose and went toward the pillbox—less box than chest—in the bedroom. His evening friends awaited him: Toprol and Ranexa and Plavix and Flomax. Passing the bathroom, he stopped. She was crying in there. Had he done something? He tried the door—open—and pushed.

  “Oh, goodness,” she said. “Forgive me.”

  “But what is it?” he said.

  “Nothing! Just silliness.”

  “I won’t let you be—please tell me.”

  “Oh, Arkady Kharitonovich. Arkady—” She was drying her eyes with the shelf of her hand. “A pig without manners, to cry like this.” Finally she turned to him. “In eight months in this country, not one person has asked me half of the things you asked me today. That’s all.”

  He smiled, proud of himself but embarrassed that she’d been treated without courtesy and frustrated that she was around just for the day, not enough time for him to fix it. He reached out and gently touched a clump of her hair. “What’s on your head?” he said. “I’ve wanted to ask all day. You look like a tree and someone’s lopped off the branches.”

  “Somebody in Detroit practicing,” she said. “They did it for free. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Let’s go,” he said. “My equipment’s in the living room.”

  “You still cut hair?”

  “On special occasions.”

  “Cognac doesn’t loosen your touch?”

  “Steadies it.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “Stop it, please. You want to be looked after, let people look after you.”

  It was true—he hadn’t cut hair in a l
ong time. After the trading post into which he’d turned his Minsk barbershop, working in So-and-so’s salon on Avenue J for pocket change held no appeal. So he barbered the occasional head in his building, but since Sofia’s death almost no one.

  When he finished, Oksana looked in the mirror and gasped. “You’ve taken ten years.” He knew men’s hair better, so the cut he’d given her was a touch boyish, but she liked it.

  They embraced and wished each other good health. The Tupperware in Oksana’s plastic bag was as full of grechanniki as it had been that morning. Otherwise, the bag bulged with half the fruit and vegetables Arkady had bought. The rose he’d given her sat among them; she arranged it so that it peeked out past the bag handles. She wanted them to see in the street.

  Grechanniki (Buckwheat Burgers)

  Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

  Serves: 6–8

  11/3 cups buckwheat groats

  2 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus additional for cooking the patties

  1 large onion, chopped

  1 large carrot, grated

  Kosher salt, to taste

  1 tablespoon tomato paste, plus additional to taste

  1 bay leaf

  Crushed red pepper, to taste

  3/4 pound ground chicken

  3/4 pound ground pork

  1 egg

  1/2 bunch fresh dill, roughly chopped

  2 cloves garlic, put through a garlic press

  1 tablespoon ground coriander

  1 tablespoon curry powder

  1 teaspoon black pepper

  1/4 cup flour

  Inspect the buckwheat for black groats and remove. They’re bitter.

  Dump the groats into a fine-mesh strainer and rinse with cold water, riffling through them with your fingers.

  In a pot, cover the groats with 22/3 cups of water, add salt, and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down and let simmer, a lid on most of the way, till the water has evaporated, 15 to 20 minutes. Set aside to cool. Alternatively, you can cover the buckwheat with the 22/3 cups of water and let it soak overnight—it will be “cooked” by morning.

  Meanwhile, in a large, deep sauté pan, heat the 2 tablespoons of oil over medium heat. Add half the chopped onion and cook, stirring frequently, until golden brown, about 10 minutes. Add the carrot and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Salt to taste. Add 2 cups of water (or use vegetable or chicken stock if you prefer), the tomato paste, bay leaf, and crushed red pepper. Bring to a gentle simmer. Taste and add more tomato paste if you like and season lightly with salt. Turn the heat down to its lowest setting and cover the pan (to keep it warm while you prepare the patties).