by Julie Powell
We chat back and forth for a couple of hours, Oksana, Vitaly, Andrea, and I, while Ira continuously putters about the kitchen. Last night she made, just for me, some beef-stuffed cabbage rolls, which should have been stodgy and Soviet-tasting, but instead were ineffably lovely, light and brightly flavored. They entirely made up for the way I began to feel like Miss Havisham in her rotting wedding dress, sitting there at the table by myself, being served by a woman I could not speak to, taking small bites to put off the moment when I’d finish my meal and there would be nothing left for me to do that evening. And this morning I got eight airy, crisp, tiny pancakes, with jam. Ira is cleaning up now, though the kitchen seems pretty much spotless to me; she’s one of those women who cannot bring herself to sit until she’s wiped every surface and offered every guest every possible pleasantry.
Andrea, it quickly becomes clear, spends a lot of time here. She’s nearing the end of her two-year stint in Kolimya, working at the same school Oksana’s boyfriend works at, and she could not be more ready to go. She doesn’t like Ukraine. She doesn’t like the people: “The women are all skanky and the men are all disgusting-looking misogynists—except for you guys, of course!” She doesn’t like the food: “Everything is so heavy, and there’s meat in everything. The only thing I like is Ira’s potato varenyky. I live off them.”
Oksana exchanges a glance with Ira over Andrea’s head that only I catch, and Ira speaks a few words to her in Ukrainian. With a wry headshake, Oksana translates for me. “Later,” she says, with a sort of cryptic smirk, “Ira will show you how to make the varenyky. They’re very good.”
The next day Oksana and I tool around Kolimya’s museums and shops. For lunch, at a café and beer garden that is charming even in the dripping chill, and that Oksana assures me is “where everyone goes” in summer, I eat borscht while she has something called banosh, a traditional western Ukrainian dish that looks rather like garlic cheese grits, that comforting staple back in Texas which I’ve not tasted in probably a decade. When Oksana lets me have a bite, I swear I will not rest until I learn how to make it.
Which I finally have done. And here it is!
UKRAINIAN BANOSH
2 cups or more sour cream
1 cup white or yellow cornmeal
2 tablespoons butter
Salt to taste
¼ cup crumbled goat’s milk feta (optional)
Place the 2 cups of sour cream in a small pan over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until hot but not yet boiling.
Gradually add the cornmeal, stirring often, not letting the mixture come to a boil. Cook for about 15 minutes. The consistency should remain somewhat liquid; if it begins to get too dense, stir in more sour cream, a couple of tablespoons at a time.
When you judge it to be about done, stir in the butter and salt to taste and take off heat. Let sit, covered, for 5 minutes.
Serve in four bowls with cheese crumbled on top, if desired. This dish is like a Ukrainian translation of your favorite childhood comfort food. It’s a good way of remembering that, mostly, we’re more alike than different.
As we linger over our meal, my tongue loosens in all the ways I always regret later. As I will write that night, in bed:
What is this thing I do, this popping myself inside out for random people all over the world? Wallowing in these filthy, heartbreaking memories of you and Eric both? Girths and proclivities, fights and tendernesses all microanalyzed over bad drinks with strangers. I don’t think it’s just the untapped oil fields of sympathy, no. It’s not comfort I’m looking for. It’s like pulling off a scab too early, or squeezing a cut to summon a few extra drops of blood. And maybe, too, it makes the enforced distance seem less pathetic than romantic. I like to think myself the subject of a tragic nineteenth-century novel rather than an Adrian Lyne potboiler about a man and his stalker.
“I think it’s more of a problem in America,” Oksana says decisively. She eats her banosh delicately, much more slowly than I have downed my spicy borscht.
“What is? Obsessive love affairs?”
“Infidelity. And confusion like this. In Ukraine, people get married, stay married. We don’t expect so much, maybe. Or we’re happier because we know what we want.”
“Maybe.” I take a slug off my second Czech beer. I wonder if this could really be true. Is Oksana just young, with the consequent confidence youth brings? Or could there actually be some particular circumstance of nationhood, of history and tradition and religion and persecution, that could result in a populace more inclined, as a whole, toward contentment? It seems doubtful, but who knows? It’s as valid an explanation for the capricious bestowal of happiness as any other.
I wonder what’s going on with you and Robert and the cats? “What news on the Rialto?” to quote Buffy quoting The Merchant of Venice. So, continuing this tome—God, this letter is becoming gargantuan—after lunch Oksana took me to the Easter Egg Museum, which is actually shaped like a giant Easter Egg. Inside, nothing but tens of thousands of intricately adorned eggshells—pysanka they’re called; you know what they look like, right? All these crosshatched designs, stripes and swirls, in yellow and red and black? From all over the country, there are eggs, different traditional styles from different regions. There’s an egg painted by Raisa Gorbachev; another one from Yulia Tymoshenko. We went to the Hutsul museum too, sort of a standard ethnographic museum that you’d have loved but that gave me museum fatigue. Then we went to Oksana’s parents’ house, as did her boyfriend, an American Peace Corps volunteer named Nathan.
Oksana has a dog that she keeps at her parents’ apartment, a Japanese Chin named Onka, which means, apparently, “smart-ass.” She is an adorable little thing that likes to fetch a stuffed animal that is nearly as big as she is. Oksana’s mother is also an adorable thing, cheerful and dark-haired and small like Oksana. As soon as she gets home from work, she sets to more work making us dinner, leftovers and store-bought things, fried chicken cutlets, potatoes, tomato-pepper salad, mushroom spread, cheese, pickles—a seemingly endless array of nibblies, which we eat with the bottle of champagne Oksana and I picked out before coming over.
We play with Onka for twenty minutes or so, until the doorbell rings and Oksana rushes to greet Nathan. Nathan’s Peace Corps term is also nearly up. He and Oksana are sort of hilarious together, and sort of sad. She is endlessly teasing him, she is smiling but prickly, affectionate but just a bit standoffish. After a glass and a half of champagne, she is also a little flushed. “Tomorrow Nathan is getting a… what do you call the haircut?”
Nathan is grinning. He has his arm around her. “A mohawk.”
“A mohawk.” She turns to her mother and speaks in Ukrainian, running a hand over the center of her head in explanation. “I told him I’m glad he’s leaving so I don’t have to look at him with stupid hair.”
He grins wider and tries to kiss her, but she pushes him off, laughing. Perhaps this is just how she is, but I’ve never, in the days I’ve gotten to know her, seen her so barbed, and I wonder if it’s because Nathan’s leaving soon. I feel sorry for him. I know that feeling of being peeled away, with however much good cheer, and, let me tell you, it is no fun.
The next day, Oksana takes me to Sheshory, a resort town up in the mountains. “It’s one of my favorite places,” she explains as we climb onto the bus that will take us there. “A real traditional Hutsul village. In the summer there’s a giant musical festival, and everyone goes. Old people, kids, long-haired, you know, hippies. Everyone camps or rents a cottage, and we swim in the river, the Pistynka River, and stay up all night.”
The bus is packed and slow as I guess public buses all over the world are. The drive takes more than an hour. From the valley where Kolimya lies, we move through fields and small villages, along winding roads into the Carpathians. It’s lusher up here, and chillier. Not truly cold, but brisk and with that mountain air that’s not really damp, just ever so slightly moist—somehow, green. We disembark at the side of a narrow road by a resta
urant and the tiny clutch of shops that make up the town “center.” Behind the restaurant, across a footbridge, one dirt road climbs a slope upon which are clustered small wood-paneled houses, painted white or bright summery pastels, their eaves adorned with elaborate punched tinwork. Another path follows the river.
We spend the afternoon wandering the bank, dipping our feet in the cold water, teetering across rocky rapids. I have to imagine what it must be like during the busy summer tourist season; for now the town seems almost entirely deserted. We eat at the one restaurant, a rich stew of grilled pork, and by the time we finish, the light is beginning to take on the cast of evening.
“We should head back, I think. I made an appointment tonight at my friend’s sauna. We shouldn’t be late.”
We walk out to the road, which seems as abandoned as the rest of the town. “It might be a while before the bus comes. It doesn’t come so often. Let’s walk. Then we can wave it down when it comes. Or we’ll find someone to drive us.”
“Sounds good.”
“You will love the sauna. It is very healthy. Keeps you from getting sick. We won’t use the veniki, though.”
“Veniki?”
“Uh-huh.” She grins sideways at me and makes a vigorous whipping motion. “Tree branches. Birch? You’re supposed to beat against your back.”
“Huh. What’s that supposed to do?”
“It’s very healthy. Makes you strong. But don’t worry, we won’t do that.”
“Probably for the best.”
We walk for twenty-five minutes. The bus never catches up to us, and hardly any other cars drive by. Oksana tries to hail a few of the ones that do, but at first she isn’t successful. At last, though, just as we’re getting nervous that we’re not going to be able to get back to Kolimya in time, a blue Mercedes pulls up beside us, its window rolling down to reveal an older man with a paunch, an expensive-looking leather jacket, and a helmet of gray hair. Oksana sticks her head in the window, smiling in a way that on a young American hitchhiker would seem riskily flirtatious, but here just looks like a woman getting something done. She chats with him for a bit, then looks over her shoulder at me. “Get in. He’s going to take us.”
The man leans forward, looking at me over Oksana’s shoulder, gesturing with his hand. “Yes, yes. Come in!”
I open the rear door and slide in.
The man’s name is Misha. He and Oksana chatter in Ukrainian for a few minutes. I idiotically paste a wide-eyed listening look on my face, as if I can understand a word that’s being said. Then Oksana gives a gasp and laughs. She turns back to face me from the front seat. “Misha raises pigs! No… not pigs. Um…” She asks Misha something.
“Boar,” he says to me in English. “Like in the woods?”
“Really? For food?”
“No, no, no… my pets.”
“But—” Oksana is looking very excited. “He makes sausage. He has a sausage factory!”
“Really?!”
I’ve never hitchhiked in my life, unless you want to count the time when I was nine and my brother was six and I put him and our next-door neighbor, pretty little Misty McNair with the perfect bows in her long blond hair, out by the side of the road in the yard, taught them how to stick out their thumbs for a ride, then left them there while I went to the kitchen for a snack. And now, the first time I get picked up, on the outskirts of a tiny resort town in western Ukraine, a thousand miles from my life, from Fleisher’s, and, by God, it’s a sausage maker.
We make plans to tour his facilities first thing the next morning.
We arrive at the sauna, which is really just a small wooden outbuilding in Oksana’s friend’s backyard, just in time for our appointment. I’d been expecting some vast tiled public bath full of naked middle-aged women and bad Soviet lighting, but instead it’s just a tiny suite of rooms that Oksana and I have to ourselves—a bathroom with cubbies for our clothes, a pile of towels, plastic clogs, a resting area with bottles of water, a small fridge, and a table with four chairs, and the sauna itself. It’s about the size of a very good New York City walk-in closet, lined in wood, with two tiers of benches and an oven in one corner. It is hotter than anywhere I have ever been in my entire, entire life. Unbelievable, the heat, like a fist squeezing us. Wrapped in our towels, we sit on the benches, or lie on them, or lean against the wall, trying to talk but mostly not being able to manage it. There is a pail of water with a scoop in it so that we can pour some over the hot top of the oven, but we do it once and feel like we might actually die from the steam, so after that we just sit in our sweat.
The thermostat says 110 degrees… centigrade. Healthful? This? It can’t be. But my one-upmanship gene kicks in, I guess, because as long as Oksana stays in there, I’m not budging either. We stay for maybe thirty-five minutes, our first round. When she says, “I’m going to take a break now,” I nearly leap out of the sauna with her. Just standing up leaves me dizzy and feeling a little sick. We retire to the other room, where we drink water for five minutes, wipe off some of the thick sheen of perspiration. When words return, I ask what’s next.
“We go back in. We’re supposed to keep going back in until we stop sweating. That’s when we’ll know all the poison’s been flushed out of our bodies.”
“Ah, okay, well, we’ll see. I’m warning you, though, if that’s the goal we could be here all night. I don’t really stop sweating, as a general rule. Too much to flush, maybe.”
In and out we go, for slightly shorter periods each time, for nearly two hours. By the end, my legs are noodles and I think I could sleep for days. It’s true, though—I’m sweating almost not at all. We rinse off in the shower, dress, and get into the cab that Oksana’s friend has waiting for us outside.
Back at the bed and breakfast, Oksana and I wave our hellos and good-nights to whomever is in the kitchen. It’s Ira and Vitaly. Ira lights up when we walk in.
“My mother is ready to explain how to make varenyky,” Vitaly says. “They are like, you know?” He holds up his thumb and forefinger to make a pinching gesture. “Little potato dumplings.”
I literally think I could fall asleep standing up. My skin feels strange, buzzy, under my clothes. But I’m leaving Kolimya soon. Leavin’ on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again. “Oh! Great, thanks!”
Oksana, who must be exhausted herself, stays to translate as Ira, with an efficiency and delicacy and utter sense of comfort that I’ve never seen the like of among home cooks, shows me, step by step, how to make:
POTATO VARENYKY
2 medium russet potatoes
cup finely chopped salt pork, rinsed
½ cup finely chopped onion
1¾ cups flour (or more if necessary)
2 large eggs
Pinch of salt
Peel the potatoes, quarter them, and boil them in salted water until soft, maybe half an hour. Meanwhile heat the salt pork in a skillet, and when the fat is rendered out, lift the golden brown cracklings with a slotted spoon and set aside in a bowl. Sauté the onion in the rendered fat until golden brown. Set aside.
Drain the potatoes and mash them thoroughly, stirring in the onion mixture.
(Here Oksana raises her thin, arched eyebrows at me, and says something to Ira in Ukrainian that makes her laugh. “I told Ira she’s been tricking Andrea for two years.” “Love it. ‘Honey? You know why Ira’s varenyky are so good? One hint—it ain’t the potatoes.’ ”)
Set aside until ready to fill the dumplings.
Using your hands, mix together the flour, eggs, and pinch of salt with about a cup of water, adding more flour if it’s too sticky to handle. Turn the mixture out onto a floured board and, adding flour as necessary, knead until you have a stretchy dough. Divide the dough into two balls.
Roll out half the dough on the board until it’s pretty thin—an eighth of an inch or less—but not so thin that it’s in danger of tearing. Cut into rounds about two inches in diameter. If you don’t have a cookie cutter handy, you can also jus
t cut them into squares.
To fill the dumplings, put two to three teaspoons of the potato mixture on top of each round and squoosh it flat with the back of a spoon until it covers most of the piece of dough, leaving a clean edge all around. Form the round into a half-moon and pinch the edges closed. Repeat this process with the second half of the dough.
Then just drop the dumplings into a big pot of salted, boiling water. They will sink to the bottom at first, then float to the top after about three to five minutes. Once most or all of the dumplings have risen to the surface of the water, that means they’re done. Drain them and rinse them with hot water from the tap.
Toss dumplings gently in a bowl with the cracklings and any further fat that has rendered off them. Makes enough dumplings for four. Serve with a scoop of sour cream or crème fraîche on top.
It takes me a long time to make these varenyky, but then, I am not Ira. Her nimble fingers stuff and fold and pinch the dough at a flying pace. Oksana translates quickly, but as Ira demonstrates she and I begin to outpace the words, Ira answering my questions directly. Of course we don’t exchange actual words, but with a single gesture, a mimed pinching motion or a finger point and questioning eyebrows, she can see what I’m after, can nod her head yes or shake it no. I’m not the cook Ira is, but I’m a cook just the same. It’s like with the butchers I’ve met; though I can’t understand the words she’s saying, we share a language. By ten o’clock we are all sitting together at the dinner table eating potato dumplings with pork cracklings and sour cream. They are divine.
Upstairs I get ready for bed. Pen and notebook are on the nightstand, and though my eyelids are drooping aggressively, I take a moment to write Eric a good-night.
So after the sauna, I have this disturbing rash I see spreading across my arms and shoulders, a sort of latticework of red lines, like perhaps my blood has been boiled to the surface. Oksana says that the sauna’s “flushing out the poisons,” but this can’t be good, right? Maybe the poisons are better off unflushed. Well, if I die in my sleep, I guess we’ll know why.