To fill in a void left by Lucien and the Festival, Mom plunged back into cooking—but now her kitchen fantasies took a new tack. The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food had been retired in scorn. Zagranitsa was the new inspiration. What did this imaginary Elsewhere actually taste like? Mom hadn’t a clue. While she could at least mentally savor the kulebiakas and botvinya so voluptuously cited by Chekhov and Gogol, Western dishes were mere names, undecoded signs from alternative domestic realities. The absence of recipes provided a certain enchantment; you could fill in these alien names with whatever flavors you chose.
Always stubbornly cheerful and good-natured about the paucity of ingredients in stores, Mom turned her parents’ kitchen once more into a dreamer’s home workshop. She may well have been the first woman in Moscow to make pizza, from a recipe “adapted” from a contraband issue of Family Circle lent to her by a friend whose father once worked in America. Who cared if her “pizza” bore a resemblance to a Russian meat pirog, only open-faced and smothered in ketchup and gratings of Sovetsky cheese? No ingredient, really, was too dreary for Mom to subject to a tasty experiment.
“Today I’ll make pot-au-feu!” she’d announce brightly, eyeing a head of decaying cabbage. “I read about it in Goethe—I think it’s soup!”
“Tastes like your usual watery shchi,” her brother, Sashka, would mutter.
Mom disagreed. Just renaming a dish, she discovered, had a power to transfigure the flavor.
Every couple of weeks a letter from Lucien would arrive from Morocco. “Mia kariga eta Lara—my dearest little Lara,” he always began. “My heart is wrenched,” he wrote after a year. “Why doesn’t kariga Lara answer me anymore?”
By then kariga Lara was madly in love with somebody else. Somebody named Sergei, somebody she thought looked uncannily like the French film heartthrob Alain Delon from Rocco and His Brothers, which she’d seen at an Italian film festival.
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.