From my cot in the overheated darkness of my grandparents’ apartment I thought I heard my mother crying, ever so quietly. As the relatives from Odessa snored on.

_{CHAPTER NINE}

1990s: BROKEN BANQUETS

Abysta, the bland Abkhazian cornmeal mush, comes alive with lashings of salty young local suluguni cheese. And so I tucked some suluguni into my Abkhaz gruel, then watched it melt.

It was Christmas Day, 1991—a bit before seven p.m.

In the kitchen of a prosperous house in the winemaking countryside, women with forceful noses and raven-black hair tended to huge, bubbling pots. My boyfriend, John, and I had arrived a few days before in Abkhazia—a breakaway autonomous republic of Georgia one thousand long miles south of Moscow. Primal, ominous darkness consumed Sukhumi, the capital of this palm-fringed subtropical Soviet Riviera. There was no electricity, no drinking water. On blackened streets teenage boys waved rifles and a smell of catastrophe mingled with the salty, moist Black Sea wind. We’d come during the opening act of Abkhazia’s bloody conflict with Georgia, unresolved to this day. But here, in the country house of a winemaker, there still lingered an illusion of peace and plentitude.

The women hauled platters of cheese bread into the room, where dozens of men crowded around a long table. Innumerable toasts in our honor had been fueled already by homemade Izabella wine. Not allowed by tradition to sit with the men, the women cooked and watched TV in the kitchen. I dropped in to pay my respects.

At exactly seven p.m. my spoon of corn mush froze midway to my mouth.

A familiar man occupied the screen. The man wore a natty dark pinstriped suit, but exhibited none of his usual autocratic vigor. He seemed tense, spent, his skin tone a loony pink against the gray backdrop with a scarlet Soviet flag on his left. The contours of the birthmark blotches on his forehead looked drawn with thick pencil.

“Dear fellow countrymen, compatriots!” said Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev. It was six years and nine months since he’d assumed leadership of Sovetsky Soyuz, the Soviet Union.

“Due to the situation which has evolved…”

The situation being as follows: that August, a coup against Gorbachev had been attempted by eight extremely dimwitted Party hard-liners (some obviously drunk at the time). The putsch collapsed almost straightaway, but the pillars of centralized Soviet power were cracked. Boris Yeltsin, fractious new president of the USSR’s Russian republic, went leaping in, emerging as resistance leader and popular hero. Gorbachev still hung on—barely: a wobbler atop a disintegrating empire.

“Due to the situation…”

My mouth fell open all the way as Gorbachev continued speaking.

Much had changed in my own situation since my first time back in Moscow in December of 1987. Returning to Queens, I’d sobbed uncontrollably, facedown on Mother’s couch. “There everyone loves us!” I wailed. “Here we have nothing and nobody!”

I had other reasons to cry. No wonder gadalka Terri, the fortune-teller, was mute about my future as an international keyboard virtuoso. My wrist had become painfully disfigured by a lump the size of a mirabelle plum. I could barely stretch a keyboard octave or muster a chord louder than mezzo forte. The more I tortured the ivories, the more the plum on my wrist tortured me.

A stern-browed orthopedist prescribed instant surgery.

But a pianistic trauma guru had a different prescription. Because my technique was ALL WRONG. Unless I relearned piano from scratch, she inveighed, my “ganglion” lump would just return. I postponed my Juilliard MA exam and signed up for her rehabilitation course. I’d been playing since I was six, starting on our Red October upright piano in Moscow. Into the sound I produced—my sound—I’d poured my entire identity. Now, at twenty-four, I was relearning scales with my plum-lumpy wrist. I still remember my face reflected in the guru’s shiny Steinway. I looked suicidal.

To come up with her weekly wad of crisp bills I took translating gigs, using Italian mustily recalled from our refugee layover in Rome. A cookbook as hefty as a slab of Etruscan marble landed one day on my desk. Instead of andante spianato and allegro con brio, my life was now to be occupied by spaghetti al pesto and vitello tonnato. Glumly I transcribed recipes onto index cards, while in the same room John, my boyfriend, was finishing his Ph.D. thesis—so rife with Derrida-speak that it was, to me, Swahili.

John and I had met in the mideighties when he arrived in New York on a Fulbright. Cambridge-haughty, he wrote for trendy Artforum and deconstructed obscure Brit punk bands. Me, I brooded over my Schumann and lived with my mom in an immigrant ghetto. But somehow we clicked, and soon he was colonizing my bedroom in Queens. The Derridarian, Mom christened him—a being from a mystifying other planet. “And what do you do?” condescended John’s post-structuralist pals. I stared at the floor. I labored at scales and translated recipes.

The idea came out of nowhere, a flicker that lit up my dismal brain.

What if … I myself wrote a cookbook? Russian, of course. But embracing more so the cuisines of the whole USSR, in all its multiethnic diversity? My resident Derridarian magnanimously volunteered himself as coauthor, to help with my “wonky” immigrant English.

I remember our fever the day our proposal went out to publishers.

And their icy responses. “What, a book about breadlines?”

Then, stunningly, a yes—from the publisher of the cookbook of the burgeoning new foodie zeitgeist, The Silver Palate.

Contract signed, I was drifting down Broadway when a heckler piped up in my dizzied head.

“You fraud! What’re your credentials? Zero, a big fat Russian nol’!”

Sure, I’d learned some recipe-writing from my Italian job, cooked enthusiastically with my mom, occasionally even gawked at overpriced chevres at Dean & Deluca. But watching Julia or Jacques on TV or leafing through the glossy layouts in Gourmet, I felt the same émigré alienation that had gripped me during my first bleak Philadelphia winter. Some capitalists were boning duck for a gala to which I wasn’t invited. This eighties “foodie” world of pistachio pesto and mushroom duxelles—I was a rank outsider to it. A class enemy, even.

But in my floppy handbag rested our signed contract and the chicken I’d already bought for recipe testing.

By the time I finished the opening chapter, on zakuski, the lump on my wrist had disappeared. By chapter two—soups—my guru-directed fingers were effortlessly tossing off octaves. But somehow the desire was gone. The bombastic Rachmaninoff chords felt hollow under my hands. My sound wasn’t mine. For the first time in my adult life, plumbing the depths of late Beethoven no longer claimed my heart. Well into salads I played my Juilliard MA exam (adequately), shut the lid on my Steinway, and have hardly touched the ivories since.

The all-consuming passion that sustained me all these years had been supplanted. By a cookbook.

I realize, gazing back across my Brezhnevian childhood, that two particular Moscow memories propelled me on my food- and travel-writing career. Two visions from the socialist fairy tale of abundance and ethnic fraternity.

A fountain. A market.

The fountain was golden! Druzhba Narodov, or Friendship of Nations, it was called—and it glittered spectacularly inside VDNKh (Exhibition of National Economic Achievements), that sprawling totalitarian Disneyland where in 1939 my five-year-old mother saw Eden.