Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  It was Arkady’s turn, but he got lucky. He was assigned to a torpedo carrier in the Black Sea, off the coast of Crimea, already liberated. He finagled an assignment as a radio operator, a position that required additional training time in the rear. By the time he reported for duty, the war was nearly over. On the ship, it was more or less as it had been in first grade. He’d vanish to go dancing with girls on shore. When he came back, they sent him to solitary for three days. By the time he emerged, he was light-headed enough to sway in the wind.

  Then he got five solitaries in a row. His mother had sent him money, but the sailor in the mail slot said nothing had come. Arkady checked with the main mail station, which confirmed that it had come; so the sailor had taken it. When Arkady went back, the sailor said, “You’ll do without it, kike.” This time Arkady returned with a two-kilo dumbbell and mauled the guy so badly he got fifteen days. Eventually, his superiors got sick of him and discharged him early. (He’d gotten his navy tattoos voluntarily, though mostly to fit in. But he didn’t want his grandson thinking he was the kind of person who liked getting tattoos—in the Soviet Union, lowlifes got tattoos—so he pretended he had been “grabbed,” that is, hazed.)

  It was 1947. Minsk had been reduced to nearly nothing; German POWs were building it back. He hadn’t seen his parents in three years. His father, always reticent, now said almost nothing. Periodically, he stole out to the backyard with a small photo of Aaron and wept wordlessly into it. Arkady’s mother’s hair had gone entirely white. Arkady started seeing a girl whose father was in charge of the city’s alcohol distribution—in other words, the right kind of family to be attached to. But then, at a dance, a neighborhood girl asked for his help. An army officer had been courting her all night, and she needed help getting away without insulting him. Arkady went to the officer—they knew each other from the neighborhood also—clapped an arm around his shoulder, and thanked him for taking care of “his girl” while he talked business with some friends. The officer blanched—Arkady had boxed before the war and, in any case, wasn’t someone you wanted to argue with—blurted out an apology, and fled. The girl was an orphan, a single dress to her name, but Arkady found himself forgetting the alcohol heiress.

  Arkady and Sofia’s wedding drew only fifteen guests; Arkady’s side alone had lost more than a hundred people in the war. Arkady wore the fake collar. But for Sofia he had bought an expensive blue dress. Arkady’s mother wouldn’t forgive him. Sofia lived with them now, he said—she did more housework than anyone. You had no right to do it without asking us, his mother said. Before the war, she’d been a saleswoman in a food shop: She gabbed all day, struck deals on the side, and spent the income just as freely. After Aaron’s death, however, she had altered. But the Jewish parents of Minsk almost never welcomed new family members without suspicion. Even though my grandparents suffered from this, they gave my father his own taste of it thirty years later.

  Fine, Arkady said to his mother—we’ll move out and eat on our own. And sometimes, they didn’t. They needed money; lots of it. In this hunger, Arkady couldn’t have had a readier partner.

  From his barber’s chair at the salon by the train terminal, Arkady could see them through his window, his old tribe—the barber worked with a straight razor, and so did the pickpockets. There wasn’t a surname among them. Nikola the Lisp, Shurik the Elephant, Vovka the Mongol. Ivan and a Half because he was tall. Misha the Whisper because he spoke quietly. Zhorik the Professor because he thieved with a surgeon’s precision. Zhorik’s wife was even more deft—she could slice open a purse with a single flick of her wrist. Sometimes they worked in tandem. She went around with a doll that opened and closed its eyes and said “Mama!”—a novelty at the time. He would liberate the distracted, laughing passerby from his wallet.

  Others had other tricks. The Gypsy women who told fortunes paid confederates to accost them in view of unwitting marks and go on about the miracles they had performed on their wayward husbands, ailing parents, barren sisters, lame sons. There wasn’t a woman at that terminal who didn’t suffer from one of those problems, and they submitted to the Gypsy women in droves. While their eyes were closed, they lost their money and jewelry, if not their problems.

  The pickpockets rose early—they had to catch the morning rush at the terminal. By the time the barbershop opened, they had enough to pay for a hundred hot-towel shaves. Arkady took goods as payment and fed them a liquid breakfast in the break room (cognac and vodka). This he traded with the commerce coming off the night trains—that was how the city got its food in those years, and the people transporting it always needed freshening up in the morning. These goods Arkady swapped later with regular customers who lived “to the left,” the Russian version of “under the table.” In this way, a morning’s bracelet or crate of grapes became, by nightfall, a profitable acquaintance with the chairman of a collective farm that raised minks. My grandparents had such confederates at the food depots that supplied only the political people, at the clothing stores, in hospitals (God forbid), at the offices that dispensed vouchers for vacations in state sanatoriums. And that’s why we lived well.

  That wasn’t only why—Arkady fenced cars and carpets; peddled special tables with compartments that hid foreign currency, handy during searches; smuggled gold. The lattermost almost ended it—the smuggling ring had five men in it; the other four were arrested but, even under threat of execution, did not give up his name (and executed they were). Not out of nobility—they knew they would gain nothing other than sending a fifth man to his death. The KGB was on Arkady’s tail after that for a while. They even sat him down for a basement interrogation. Lack of evidence hardly made the KGB pause, but this time they let him go.

  What if they hadn’t? What if he had not forged his identity card in 1941? What if his father, who was a POW in World War I, had remained in Germany, as some Russian POWs did, and my grandfather had been born a German Jew instead of a Belarusian one? Would he have managed to escape the concentration camps, too? I want to imagine he would have—his nose smelled ten steps ahead. Where would he have fled to? South America? South Africa? Palestine? As he talked that first night, I thought about the alternate lives—German, Italian, Argentinean, Israeli—that could have been mine. In that humble Brooklyn living room, they couldn’t have seemed more exotic. Perhaps I fell into that reverie because the way he spoke about Minsk—“After they kicked me out of first grade, I went to the school on Myasnitskaya Street, right below the prison on Volodarskaya, and then sometimes I would go for a walk on Respublikanskaya”—made me realize in a sharp way just how native, how “his,” Minsk had been, a sense of belonging I’d never found in New York, no matter how fluently I navigated it, no matter that I was welcomed in it so much more than he had been in Minsk.

  When I returned home the night I found him cooking for Oksana, I looked in my books for mentions of ukha. It wasn’t even a fish soup to begin with, nine hundred years ago—ukha comes from ukho (“ear”), and that’s what went in, along with lips, innards, and anything else that was soft. (Whatever it was, it made soup—on Russian tables, spoons predated forks by four hundred years.) It became a fish broth later, maybe because meat was proscribed for religious reasons more than half the year, but the broth didn’t have to be clear until the nineteenth century, when the French said so. It turned out that the Pokhlebkins were just repeating the French, and it was my grandfather, who took his country for all it was worth, whose method happened to be honoring the original Russian way.

  Ukha—His and Hers

  Time: 1 hour each

  Serves: 6–8

  Two nearly identical recipes, with quite different outcomes. The salmon, though meatier, should produce an impossibly delicate, almost refreshing broth in Arkady’s version—if it comes out right, you’ll want to sip it cold. The pike, in Oksana’s, though tender, lends a stronger taste. (The salmon is also less bony.) The short boiling time means your vegetables should stay firm and flavorful—this is also the reason to cook the
carrot whole and dice it only at the end. No Russian would think of eating ukha anything other than piping hot, but there’s no reason this soup can’t bring the temperature down on a hot day.

  His

  1 large carrot, peeled

  1 medium onion, peeled

  2 celery stalks, diced

  4 Idaho potatoes, peeled, 2 diced and 2 left whole

  11/2 pounds salmon steak

  Kosher salt, to taste

  3 garlic cloves, halved

  1/2 bunch parsley, chopped

  Bring 10 cups of well-salted water to a boil and throw in the carrot, onion, celery, and potatoes. Return to a boil, lower the heat to medium, cover most of the way, and let cook for 20 minutes.

  In the meantime, rinse the salmon and pat dry. Using a sharp knife, cut into 2-inch pieces. This will expose some bones; pull them out with your fingers or tweezers. Season with salt and set aside.

  When the water and vegetables have been going for 20 minutes, lower the heat to the lowest setting and add the salmon and the garlic cloves. With the lid slightly ajar, cook for about 30 minutes, until the salmon looks done.

  Remove and dispose of the onion. Remove and dice the carrot, and return it to the broth. Remove the two whole potatoes, mash them, and return the mass to the broth, stirring it in gently. Taste for salt and crown with the fresh parsley.

  Hers

  1 parsley root, peeled, with greens (or substitute 1 parsnip)

  1 large carrot, peeled

  1 medium onion, peeled

  3 Idaho potatoes, peeled and diced

  1 medium-size (about 1 pound) pike, or similar fish

  Kosher salt, to taste

  3 garlic cloves, halved

  1/2 bunch parsley, chopped

  Sources: You’ll be able to find wild pike online from retailers such as Citarella.com; workable substitutions are walleye, branzino, and porgy, in order of preference. Pike is quite bony, so unless you enjoy picking out bones the way a Slavic person does, you might fish the pieces out after cooking and enjoy the pike mainly as a flavoring agent.

  Bring 10 cups of well-salted water to a boil and throw in the parsley root, carrot, onion, and potatoes. Return to a boil, lower the heat to medium, cover most of the way, and let cook for 20 minutes.

  In the meantime, rinse the pike, snip off the fins and tail (scissors are handy), cut off the head, and cut up the rest into 11/2-inch pieces. Season with salt and set aside.

  When the water and vegetables have been going for 20 minutes, lower the heat to the lowest setting and add the pike and the garlic cloves. With the lid slightly ajar, cook for 20–30 minutes, until the pike looks done.

  Remove the parsley root, dispose of the wilted greens, cut the root into disks, and return the disks to the broth. Remove and dice the carrot and return to the broth. Remove and discard the onion. Taste for salt and crown with the fresh parsley.

  Chapter 11

  2009

  People talk about growing up Jewish in Brooklyn . . . and they always dwell on the dark side. . . . It makes for good drama, makes good writing, and it makes good intellects. . . . Well, [in Los Angeles] we didn’t have nothing to do with all that—no dark side, none of that struggle—everything was just a flow.

  —Robert Irwin

  It had seemed like a good idea. There was a place where the sun shone all the time. Where you did not have to walk around with your insides coiled up the way you did in New York. New York, where there was always a surcharge if you didn’t look carefully, where the radio always reported “more traffic than usual”—did it still qualify as the usual if always there was more?—where, except for two weeks in spring and two weeks in fall, you lived in an inferno of wet heat or slush and spitting rain; where everyone was always so busy and rushed. There was a place, only two hours by plane, where they didn’t rush (in fact, they were exasperatingly slow); where, outside of high summer, it was always like those four magic weeks in New York; where there were fewer people and cars; where it was no less expensive, but here the turquoise ocean glimmered all around. The anniversary of our arrival in the States had just passed; my grandfather’s birthday was approaching. I had been saving, and my gift would be five plane tickets. I was going to fly us all—Oksana, too—for three days to South Beach. “All” did not mean Alana; she and I were on a “break.” These had become more regular than the relationship itself. Even if we were together, I had as hard a time imagining her wanting to spend a weekend somewhere with me as with my family.

  “I’m surprised you’re so interested in the date,” my mother had said, meaning the occasion for the trip.

  “It’s the day we came here,” I said.

  She shrugged. “None of the other children think of it. Or the adults, really.”

  She was right—I’d never paid attention to the date. I’d always envied people with generations behind them in America—all that compound achievement. Encountering someone like that was like setting eyes on a beautiful person, a rush of dopamine followed by regret and wobbliness at not possessing the same. Even those boys and girls who had emigrated from the USSR at my age, and even later, had made perfectly serene American landings, struggling with neither side of themselves. Perhaps that’s why they felt no need to mark the day they’d arrived.

  That year, however, it occurred to me that we’d spent a generation’s worth of years in America. Not an actual generation, because I was past thirty and all but single, but it felt like there was a little root in the soil, and I wanted to celebrate. Celebrate that and celebrate actually wanting to go on vacation with my family.

  “What if we went somewhere?” I had said to my mother on the phone. I had fought a long but delicate war to work us down from several phone calls a day to several a week, and so many of our conversations at this time began with her exclamation “And look who it is!” But eventually, we got onto a straight road. Was there somewhere she wanted to go? She and my father had nearly never used their vacations in the country where they actually lived.

  “Anywhere you want,” she said. “As long as we’re together.”

  After we hung up, I ordered the guidebooks. Mexico, I proposed to her several days later—warm, inexpensive, rich culture, good food. “I don’t know,” she said. “Isn’t it dangerous?” Los Angeles, I offered next. “Isn’t it far for him to fly?” (There was only one “him.”) Arizona? “Maybe, maybe,” she said, not meaning it, and I didn’t bother asking why. Then she said: “You don’t want to go to Chicago?” I stared through the phone darkly, the desire for time together draining away. All along she’d known what she wanted; she felt she owed a visit to my uncle and aunt in Chicago. (Owed. She didn’t want to go.) But she had wanted to be accommodating. “Miami,” I said through clenched teeth. “Warm, and safe, and close enough he won’t flip out.”

  At least she really wanted to go somewhere. Nearly every time I visited, my grandfather slapped the table and said, “You remember Paris and Israel? What a trip! Let’s go somewhere. I’m paying for it.” Suicidally, I agreed and lost myself in trip research. Italy. Or back to Minsk. Or more Israel. Eventually I would bring him the options, planned down to the airport transfers.

  “I don’t know,” he would say. “What do you think? Let’s say something goes wrong. I don’t want to ruin your vacation.”

  He wasn’t going anywhere.

  I never learned my lesson.

  He said it again about Miami. I looked him in the eye and said, “You’re going.”

  “Mama’s going?” he said.

  “Everyone.”

  “She doesn’t like flying,” he said hopefully.

  “She said she doesn’t mind it this time, because we’re all going together. If the plane goes down, we don’t have to feel bad about not being together.”

  He didn’t get my joke.

  My father had other questions. How would we reach the airport? Would we drive or take a taxi? If we drove, where would we park? How much would that cost? He had to work his graveyard shift
, in Manhattan, before we flew off; my mother was in New Jersey; I was on the Lower East Side; and Oksana and my grandfather were in Brooklyn—how would everyone meet? What was the weather in Miami? What if we didn’t make the flight? What if there was an issue with the off-site parking? What if there was a problem finding each other after his shift? How would he get home a day earlier than everyone? (He had to work on Sunday.) What if that flight was delayed? What if the original flight was delayed? What should he say to his boss? How much earlier should he ask his morning change-up to come? What if it snowed the night before we were supposed to go? What if it was raining when we met? What if the weather was bad in Miami? What if the hotel was no good? Where would we eat?

  Maybe he’d always been like this. I noticed it only as a teenager. He wanted to know everything in advance. I spent a lot of time trying to understand why. (Asking him would get me nothing—as with his own father, for whom I was named, I could ask all the questions I wanted, but the answers I’d get would be like water slipping through fingers.) Mistakes cost more in this country; maybe that was why. Or maybe he felt less in control here. Maybe it was the Soviet resistance to spontaneity. I never found out. But it always fell to me to organize things, so if anything went awry, I got the glare, the weary shake of the head at my naïveté for thinking it could all go well.

  At 6:49 a.m. on the appointed morning, my forehead wet with worry—I’d told him we would be there at 6:45—I slammed to a halt outside the Upper East Side apartment building where he worked. I was lucky—he didn’t emerge for three more minutes. He was steaming, but about the morning guy, who’d promised to come at 6:45 but came at 6:50. I thought about pointing out that the man was doing my father a favor by starting early at all—the doormen tended to trade minutes with the precision of Olympic timekeeping devices—but instead thanked him silently for saving my ass.