Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (23 page)

My mother and father met at the end of 1958. She was twenty-four; he was three years younger. My parents met in a line, and their romance blossomed in yet another line, which I guess makes me the fruit of the Soviet
defitsit
(shortage) economy with its ubiquitous queues.

Your average
Homo sovieticus
spent a third to half of his nonworking time queuing for something. The
ochered’
(line) served as an existential footbridge across an abyss—the one between private desire and a collective availability dictated by the whims of centralized distribution. It was at once a means of ordering socialist reality; an adrenaline-jagged blood sport; and a particular Soviet
fate
, in the words of one sociologist. Or think of the
ochered’
as a metaphor for a citizen’s life journey—starting on the queue at the birth registry office and ending on a waiting list for a decent funeral plot. I also like the notion of
ochered’
as “quasi-surrogate for church” floated in an essay by Vladimir Sorokin, the postmodernist enfant terrible whose absurdist novel
The Queue
consists entirely of fragments of
ochered’
dialogue, a linguistic vernacular anchored by the long-suffering word
stoyat’
(to stand).

You stood? Yes, stood. Three hours. Got damaged ones. Wrong size
.

Here’s what the line wasn’t: a gray inert nowhere. Imagine instead an all-Soviet public square, a hurly-burly where comrades traded gossip and insults, caught up with news left out of the newspapers, got into fistfights, or enacted comradely feats. In the thirties the NKVD had informers in queues to assess public moods, hurrying the intelligence straight to Stalin’s brooding desk. Lines shaped opinions and bred ad hoc communities: citizens from all walks of life
standing
, united by probably the only truly collective authentic Soviet emotions: yearning and discontent (not to forget the unifying hostility toward war veterans and pregnant women, honored comrades allowed to get goods without a wait).

Some lines, Mom insists, could be fun, uplifting even. Such were the queues for cultural events in Thaw-era Moscow—culture being a
defitsit
commodity, like everything else. Thanks to Khruschev’s parting of the Iron Curtain, Moscow was flooded with cultural exports back then. Scoffield as Hamlet, Olivier as Othello, the legendary Gérard Philipe doing Corneille; Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble led by his widow … Stokowsky, Balanchine, Bruno Walter—Mom devoured it all. And that’s not counting domestic treasures: Shostakovich performing his piano quintet or the balletic comet Galina Ulanova. “I stood in line so much, I had barely a moment to eat or inhale,” Mom likes to boast.

Like lines for cars and TV sets that could last months, years even, the Cultural Queue moved according to a particular logic and order. A whisper or a formal announcement of an upcoming tour set the wheel turning. A “line elder”—a hyperactive high-culture priest—would spring into action by starting the
spisok
(list). Still an eternity away from the ticket sale, friends took turns guarding the box office, day in and day out, adding newcomers to the all-powerful
spisok
, assigning numbers. Many of Mom’s friendships formed at the roll calls requiring everyone’s presence. These resembled intelligentsia parties but were hosted on freezing sidewalks where the cold cracked your boots, or in gusty May when winds unleashed torrents of white poplar fluff.

“AHA! Here comes treacherous Frumkina!” cried Inna, the dark-haired “line elder,” when Mom, once again, was unforgivably late for the French ballet roll call.

“AHA! Treacherous Frumkina!” mocked a stranger, so skinny, so young, with green liquid eyes offset by a vampiric pallor. Mother glared at him. But that night she kept thinking about how much he resembled Alain Delon.

In the end, the French ballet canceled. But Mom now kept noticing Sergei in different lines, finding herself more and more drawn to his shy cockiness, his spectral pallor, and most of all to his cultural queuing cred. In that department, Dad was a titan.

Sergei, my father, grew up neglected. Alla had him young, at nineteen. When he was a teenager, she was still stunning, a six-foot-tall bleached blonde war widow with a penchant for vodka, swearing, billiards, and cards, besides a busy career (city planning) and an even busier love life. During her assignations—married men usually—at their one room in a nightmarish communal apartment, Alla shooed Sergei out of the house. Dad spent most days on the streets anyway, a typical post-war fatherless youth, apathetic, cynical, disillusioned. One day he walked out of his squalid building and went rambling past the grand columned facade of the Bolshoi Theater with its chariot of Apollo rearing atop the Ionic portico. Dad was whistling. A five-ruble bill was in his pocket, a fat sum at the time, a gift from a rich uncle for dad’s fifteenth birthday. Sergei was strolling in sweet anticipation of how he could spend it when a scalper sidled up.

Five rubles for one fifty-kopek seat to
Swan Lake
at the Bolshoi—tonight.

On a lark, Dad handed over the fiver. Mainly because even though he passed the Bolshoi almost daily, he’d never been inside. A massive red velvet curtain inlaid with myriad tiny hammers and sickles rose slowly into the darkness. By the time it went down and the lights came on, Dad was hooked. Back in those days Moscow worshipped at the exquisite feet of Galina Ulanova, the soaring sylph regarded as the twentieth century’s most heartbreakingly lyrical ballerina. The entire performance Sergei felt as if he himself were floating on air. And so Dad became a professional Ulanova fan, seeing everything else at the Bolshoi and at the Moscow Conservatory for good measure. He soon scalped tickets himself. Dated long-necked swan-ettes from the Bolshoi corps de ballet.

His science studies, meanwhile, passed in a blur. Arrogant by nature, bored with mechanics and physics, he kept dropping in and out of prestigious technical colleges. Right before the exams in his final year, Alla was home after surgery and she roped him into an intense three-day vodka-fueled card game. Sergei never showed up for the exams, didn’t graduate, didn’t care. The Cultural Queue was his life and his drug. He did literal drugs, too, codeine mostly, hence
his vampyric complexion. Upon checking into a clinic, he was advised by helpful Soviet doctors that the best way to kick a drug habit was
to drink
. A lot. Which he did.

The day before ticket sales started, the Cultural Queue climaxed in a raucous marathon of actual standing all the way to the finish line. It could last twelve hours, sometimes eighteen, all-nighters that left Mom physically drained but charged with adrenaline. The final push! One morning at the end of May, Larisa and Sergei staggered from the box office window like a couple of triumphant zombies. Tickets to all five performances of Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, still months away, were nestled in their pockets. Mom bought a green-capped bottle of buttermilk and
kaloriynie bulchoki
, feathery buns studded with raisins, and they collapsed on the long, arching bench by the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Its neoclassical bulk gleamed custard-yellow in the morning sun. Mom and Dad kissed for the first time under the statue of a seated Tchaikovsky summoning his music. Men with lumpy briefcases were plodding to work. Burly women in kerchiefs hawked the season’s first lilacs.

For a few weeks Larisa and Sergei were inseparable. Then he cooled. He behaved like a smug, mysterious cat, appearing and then vanishing, passionate one minute, listless and disengaged the next. By July he was gone. The cultural season was over. Days turned into weeks with no news of him, summer was passing, and Mom’s insides twisted in a knot when someone whispered that Sergei was involved with Inna, the line elder. Inna with her glossy black hair, luminous skin, and a rich father.

All of Moscow, meanwhile, stood in another line, not as epic and devastating as the lines at Stalin’s funeral, but as long and tedious as the
ochered’
at Lenin’s mausoleum. They were standing to taste Pepsi-Cola at Sokolniki Park. Even my despondent mom was among them.

Well before the official opening of the American National Exhibition, Muscovites streamed to Sokolniki in the north of the city to see what was up, or, rather, what was going up. Amid the raw greenery, U.S. construction workers were helping to erect Buckminster Fuller’s spectacular geodesic dome, all thirty thousand golden, anodized aluminum square feet of it. Even the workers’ colorful hard hats provoked wild curiosity.

To urban intelligentsia,
Amerika
, imagined from novels and music and movies, loomed as a fervently desired mythical Other. Khrushchev, too, was obsessed with
Amerika
. Nikita Sergeevich displayed the typical
H. sovieticus
mix of envy, fascination, resentment, and awe. (He would impetuously tour the United States later that year.) While “churning out missiles like sausages,” as he liked to boast, the verbose, erratic premier simultaneously blathered on about “peaceful coexistence,” promising to beat capitalist frenemy number one nonviolently—“in all economic indicators.”
Dognat’ i peregnat’
(catch up and overtake), this was called—the long-standing socialist slogan now recast to target the mighty Yanks. As in, “Let’s catch up and overtake America in dairy and beef production!” Comrades on the streets knew the score, though. “We’d
better
not overtake,” went a popular wisecrack, “or the Yanks will see our bare asses!” Less cynical Americans, meanwhile, stocked their shelters against Red ICBMs and had nightmares about brainwashing.

In such a heated context, Russia floated a temporizing gesture: a first-ever exchange of exhibitions of “science, technology and culture.” The United States said yes. The Soviets went first. At the New York Coliseum in June 1959, three glistening Sputniks starred with their insectlike trailing filaments and a supporting cast heavy on models of power stations and rows of bulky chrome fridges.

A month later in Moscow, on about a third of the Soviets’ budget, the Yanks retorted with consumerist dazzle—acre upon acre of it at Sokolniki Park. Almost eight hundred companies donated goods for the exhibit.