Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (32 page)

My glee was so extravagant because my previous relations with Lenin had been so anguished. As Mom fought to exorcise him from my young mind, I furtively adored Ilyich at home, only to gag on him at the kindergarten, where Lenin-mania was crammed down my throat along with black caviar. The situation was tormenting, paralyzing; it had me throwing up almost daily. Until the populist carnival of jubilee humor liberated me from the schizophrenia of Lenin’s conflicting presence. Laughter magically shrank the whole business. Imagining Lenin’s squinty, beardy visage trapped inside a milk chocolate bonbon—instead of a raisin or cashew!—was somehow empowering. And how I delighted in seeing the local drunks slap a Lenin centennial ruble on a filthy liquor store counter, muttering: “My pocket ain’t no mausoleum. You ain’t lying around in there for long.”

As I grew older, the symbology of our Rodina began to resemble not a fixed ideological landscape but a veritable kaleidoscope of shifting meanings and resonances. By the time I was in third grade and seriously
playing around with the various significations of my Young Pioneer tie, I’d made further peace with Soviet split-consciousness. Rather than a debilitating scourge, it seemed like a healthy Mature Socialist mind-set.

You didn’t embrace or reject Power, I’d realized: you engaged and
negotiated
.

At school I was also busy chasing after the most crucial Mature Socialist commodity: social prestige. I accomplished this by forging my own deep relationship with the mythical
zagranitsa
. We lived, after all, in a Moscow district swarming with embassy foreigners. Shamelessly I stalked their children. Sheyda from Ankara, my very first target, became my best friend and I enjoyed weekly sleepovers at the Turkish embassy on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, the embassy row near my house. I got myself in, too, with Neema and Margaret, daughters of the ambassadors of Ghana and Sierra Leone, respectively. Ghana—what a world superpower! So I thought to myself, slipping past the dour guard and into a private elevator that deposited me right in the Ghanaian ambassador’s sumptuous living room.

My life as diplomatic socialite left me flush with prestigious imported goods. Ballpoint pens, Donald Duck stickers, Smarties, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, and Turkish Mabel gum with a picture of a be-turbaned belle on a shimmery wrapper. Myself, I barely touched this stuff. Instead, in my own modest way I contributed to the massive Brezhnevian shadow economy. I sold, bartered, traded imports for services and favors. For three stale M&M’s, Pavlik, the most glamorous boy at my school, two years my senior, slavishly carried my knapsack for a week. With profits from selling Juicy Fruit in a girls’ bathroom at school, I treated myself to meals at House of Scholars, the elite Academy of Sciences clubhouse, where Mom sent me for dance lessons on Wednesdays. I skipped the silly ballet and made a beeline straight to the extravagantly marbled dining room. Once Mom came to pick me up early and the dance teacher reproachfully motioned her toward the restaurant. There I was, a proper black marketeer, at my regular corner table under a gilded mirror, enjoying a personal cocotte pan of wild mushroom “julienne.”

A romantically mysterious illness, social prestige, a thriving black
market career—to say nothing of hopscotch on the ruins of an ideology. This is what my mother proposed to take me away from. But I loved her. And so for her sake I said an insincere Brezhnevian “yes” to her emigration plans.

In May 1974, Mom resigned from her job to avoid compromising her colleagues and handed her emigration papers to an OVIR clerk. The clerk was an anti-Semitic Slav with a luridly ironic surname: Israeleva.

Mom was not optimistic. The big problem was Naum—him and his fancy “intelligence worker” past. “You’ll never be allowed out!” thundered Dedushka, apoplectic at her announcement that she wanted to emigrate. He wasn’t bluffing. Applicants with far fewer “classified” relatives nevertheless joined the ranks of
otkazniki
(refuseniks), those bearded social outcasts (and dissident heroes) who were denied exit visas and thereafter led a blacklisted life with no work, no money, and a nonstop KGB tail. On the required “parents’ consent” form Mom had forged Naum’s signature; when asked to describe his job, she put down a vague “retired.”

I suppose OVIR was missing some teeth on its fine-toothed comb. In July, Mom and I came back from the polyclinic in the drenching rain to find Dad holding an opened OVIR envelope.

“September,” he blurted out. “They say you’re to leave by September!”

For once, Dad looked shaken. When the rain stopped he took me to an ugly, overlit shishkebab restaurant where a band blasted even at lunch. He told me not to forget him, to write. His unsardonic tone jolted me. Embarrassed by this sudden expression of fatherly sentiment, I silently wrestled with the tough, sinewy meat.

The next two months unfolded as a stagnant slog through red tape. How they tortured us pitiful would-be refugees! Lines to unregister from your “dwelling space,” lines to notarize every legal scrap of your former life. And the money! In a final stroke of extortion and humiliation, the State charged a huge tariff to relinquish Soviet citizenship. All told, emigration expenses amounted to the equivalent of two years’ salary. Mom scraped together the cash by selling art books sent by Marina,
her school friend now in New York. This was a loan—she’d pay Marina back later in dollars.

Fra Angelico, Degas, Magritte: they financed our departure. “Imagine, Anyutik!” Mom would exclaim, lugging the high-priced volumes to a dusty secondhand book shop. “Soon—soon we will see the originals!”

The exit-visa process had transformed Mother, I noticed.

Anguished tears, sorrowful regrets—she wasn’t interested. Her vision of departure was not so much a sad, extended farewell as a curt removal; an amputation, surgical and painless, of her forty years as a citizen of our glorious Rodina.
Amputation
might even be too grand: maybe she regarded her past as a Soviet wart that would simply fall off. Or imagined a quick death by injection and a resurrection in another future and dimension, the unimaginable
tam
(there) where she’d felt she belonged ever since Lucien of Meknes held her hand during the International Youth Festival. Even I, the cynical black marketeer in the family, couldn’t fathom how a woman so delicate, who unfailingly wept at the exact same passage of
War and Peace
, and fainted—literally fainted—at my dad’s infidelities could show such resolve in so tragic a circumstance. I don’t think I saw Mother cry once.

This severing of the past included its physical remnants.

The spiteful Brezhnevian Rodina allowed us three suitcases per person. Mom took two tiny ones for the both of us: a semisvelte black vinyl number and a misshapen eyesore resembling a swollen, decaying brick. Studiously she ignored the detailed “to take” lists circulating among Jewish traitors to Rodina. Things for personal use; things to sell while at the transit points of Vienna and Rome. The latter included handcrafted linens, Zenit cameras,
matryoshka
dolls, and wind-up toy chickens that apparently enjoyed enthusiastic demand at flea markets in the Eternal City. Also hammer-and-sickle souvenirs, for which sentimental Italian communists forked over decent lire.

And generally: “Everything dear to you.”

Our mini-luggage held: one little blanket, two sets of cutlery, two bedding sets, two bowls with pink flowers made in Czechoslovakia, and by way of a “dear object,” one terra-cotta Georgian flower vase of massive ugliness. We owned barely any clothes, and no boots; I had
outgrown mine, and Mother’s leaked badly. But she didn’t forget an empty mayonnaise jar—the
tara
for my urinalysis. What if they didn’t have suitable glassware at American clinics?

“Anything dear to
you
?” Mother asked.

I wasn’t sure.

There was my collection of imported chocolate wrappers that I groomed and smoothed out with my thumb and kept inside Giliarovsky’s
Moscow and Muscovites
. But why bother toting along these capitalist totems when I’d be residing where many, many more could be had? I adored Dedushka Naum’s clanky medals, but he’d never part with them, and neither would customs allow them through.

To my surprise, I thought of my reviled school uniform. Brown, thigh-length, woolen and scratchy, worn under a black pinafore. The dress was dry-cleaned once a year, if at all. But every week, in a domestic ritual replayed across each of our eleven time zones, Soviet moms unstitched the white lace collar and cuffs and sewed on fresh ones. My mother always did this on Monday nights, simultaneously stitching and chattering away on her black
telefon
. We’d sit in my parents’ room around the low three-legged Finnish table. Dad was usually gluing together the broken tape on his reel-to-reel
magnitofon
. I watched Vremya, the TV evening news. “Turn it down,” Mother would hiss as Donbas metallurgical workers dutifully overfulfilled Five-Year Plans, and rye sprouted lavishly in the Ukraine, and bushy-browed Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev locked in eternal embrace with bushy-cheeked Fidel.

The TV weather report, set to a bittersweet pop tune, would last an eternity. In Uzbekistan, a sunny twenty degrees centigrade. In Kamchatka, a snowstorm. Leningrad region, intermittent precipitation. Vast was our Socialist Rodina!

How could I ever confess to my parents that I felt secret pangs of pride at this vastness? That it stung me now, the thought of going to bed for the rest of my life not knowing if it was going to rain in the Urals?

I went into my room and unfolded my school uniform. It was too small. A new school year had just started but I, newly minted Zionist enemy, wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to my friends. I pressed the dress
to my face, inhaling its institutional reek. I didn’t despise the smell as Mom did. From one pocket I fished out a fragment of Juicy Fruit in silvery foil. From another, my crumpled scarlet Young Pioneer tie.

Propelled by a sudden nostalgic patriotism I turned toward the door, ready to announce to Mom that I wanted to take the tie—but then stopped. Because I knew what she’d say.

Nyet
, she’d say plainly.

Mom also said
nyet
to a farewell open house. And she wouldn’t allow relatives at the airport—only Sergei. The plan was to bid goodbye to close family at my grandparents’ house two nights before leaving and spend our last evening with Dad.

At our farewell dinner in Davydkovo, the Frumkin clan was in fine form. Babushka Liza had cooked her usual gloppy food for two days; Uncle Sashka got drunk, Aunt Yulia was late, and Dedushka Naum, well, he bellowed and he raged—on and on.

“My own daughter—a traitor of Rodina!”

Then, shifting from accusation, he wagged an ominous finger:
“Nostalghia—
it’s the MOST HORRIFYING emotion known to mankind!”

Naum had apparently confessed Mom’s treason to his benefactor, the venerated Baltic commander Admiral Tributs. The World War II great man was reassuring: “When she’s over
there
, starving and cold,
begging
us for forgiveness, we will help her to return!”

Dedushka relayed this with glee.
“You’ll come crawling back,”
he shouted,
“on your knees, across our Soviet border! You’ll kiss our beloved black Soviet earth!”

Cousin Masha and I kicked each other under the table: everyone knew that heavily armed men and snarling German shepherds patrolled the Soviet border. No, there was no crossing back.

Marring our intimate family tableau was a houseguest, Inna, a distant relative from Chernovtsy. Sixteen and pimply, Inna had two enormous black braids and a lofty desire to work for the KGB when she graduated from high school. As Dedushka calmed down and tears coursed along Babushka Liza’s doughy cheeks, the KGB wannabe, who
despite her ambitions was on the slow side, suddenly gasped in comprehension. She leapt to her feet and proclaimed that she could
not
share the table with a traitor! Then she barged out the door, braids swinging. On our way down we saw her on the landing, being groped by a non-sober neighbor.

But the true heartache was Baballa.

Mom concealed our departure from her until the very last month, and when Babushka Alla finally heard, she went pale as a ghost.

“All my life I’ve lost those I love,” she told Mom very quietly, lips trembling. “My husband in the war, my grandma in the gulags. When Anyuta was born I got my joy back. She’s the only thing I cherish in life. How can you take her away?”

“To save her life,” Mom replied gravely.

To avoid more heartbreak, Mother pleaded with Baballa not to see us off on our departure morning. Baballa was there all the same. She sat on a bench outside our apartment house, wearing her usual blue pencil skirt, striped blouse, and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was fifty-seven, bleached blonde, six feet tall, and gorgeous. Hugging her, I caught her familiar whiff of Red Poppy face powder and Belomor cigarettes. Shyly she pressed a bottle of vodka and a tin of black caviar into Mom’s hands.

As our taxi drove off I saw her sink onto the bench. That was my last image of her.