Savage Feast Read online

  Blurry with travel and drink, eventually I was dispatched to the guest room—Oksana, possessed of some supernatural energy (she hadn’t slept on the train) or simply the adrenaline of reaching home after a year away, would clean up. Before I collapsed, I looked out the window, past the concrete balcony where Oksana kept a “winter garden” that survived even Misha’s neglect: enormous tracts of empty, snow-covered ground that eventually dead-ended in squat, Soviet-era residential construction. It looked like what I’d imagined one of those industrial Siberian cities would—factories, housing blocks, boundless snow. Only the ocher brick and gold cross of a cathedral broke up the view. And yet, for some reason, it didn’t depress me. Maybe because at least it didn’t resemble the many places around the world—New York, Berlin, Mexico City—parts of which had come to seem interchangeable. Or maybe because it was familiar—a place where a little went a long way, where people knew lack and valued things in a different way when they had them. Even if this lack sometimes also made them primitive and crude, and though I knew they would kill—sometimes literally—to live where and how I did. Maybe I could feel what I felt only because I knew I could leave.

  I hadn’t been back to this part of the world in thirteen years—I thought I’d never be back. In 2000, high on Turgenev and all the Russian literature I was reading in college, I’d listened to no one, not even my terror—my mother had all but laid herself across the doorstep—and gone to Moscow for ten weeks for an internship at the U.S. embassy. Smell is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus and goes straight to the cortex, so that scents absorbed early become magnetic whether they’re appealing or not. So you couldn’t say whether the escalator lubricant in the Moscow metro—the same they were using in Minsk when we left—smelled good or bad; but it did smell, ineluctably, like home. That was all I could say—otherwise, the experience defied language. Even the light fell across a doorway from a sconce differently than in America, and this way of falling was the home way. In my best American moments, I had not experienced this kind of completeness: every part of oneself in alignment.

  But that turned out to be only part of the story. My own was also no longer my own. Constantly, I was singled out as a Jew. Addressed without a fraction of the civility, even if empty, I’d come to take for granted in America. I was embarrassed by the way people around me blamed America for all their problems, then copied everything about it. I took a night train to Minsk and found the apartment building in which I’d grown up. The yard where I spent so much time, that I recalled being as vast as an ancient wood—as the world itself—appeared tiny. I came back to the States a week early. My parents gloated. That experience began my drift away from the Russian part of me. South Brooklyn made it easy.

  But since then I’d made my way back to south Brooklyn. They were medieval and maimed, my people—you couldn’t take them anywhere. But I wasn’t as ashamed of this as I used to be. I was like that myself.

  I wondered often whether the end of my relationship with Alana, eighteen months earlier, had released me into an acceptance of that. The thought had occurred to me only recently, because I had only recently emerged from the pall that set in when she ended it, in the fall of 2011. By then we had taken so many “breaks” that one had to be in epic denial to be surprised that this was finally it. But I had wanted so badly for us to succeed, and we had found reason to come back from so many breaks, that I didn’t believe it was possible. I pleaded with her to reconsider. She burst into tears, but resisted.

  The loss was made worse by the fact that she quickly met someone else. I went to my couch with a bottle of Tito’s and a carton of American Spirits. We still mattered to each other and, every several months, came together to try to shift to a friendship. Each time, we dissolved into recriminations. A year after we split, she moved in with her boyfriend in Brooklyn, a borough I’d urged on her but which she had refused with all the fervor of a girl whose first love was Manhattan. I moved, too—back to the couch.

  And yet, I kept reaching out to her. Why? Because I refused to accept the truth, my friends said. But I couldn’t believe that our kindredness was a fraud. (Also, simply, I missed her.) I felt helpless—when I didn’t feel crazy. I was thirty-four. I was supposed to be figuring my life out.

  One day shortly before I went to Ukraine, in the midst of yet another argument, I said, “What if we never talk about the past again?” She said, “I’m in.” The desire had been expressed on a thousand occasions. But this time, for unknown reasons, it kept. Where we had looked for divergence, we became loving. Desperately grateful for the reprieve, we became fiercely protective of it. Again, we were doing the one thing that we always did so well: talk. One of the things I loved most about her having become available to me once more, this was when, perhaps not coincidentally, I finally fell out of love with her.

  I woke less than five hours later, my head burning but my eyes unable to close. It was 4 a.m. I tried to write in a notebook, the crisp linen sheets under me twisting—Ukraine did not do fitted sheets. Then I saw a shelf of light under the door. I opened it to find Oksana in the kitchen, trying to be as quiet as I’d been trying to be in the bedroom. Probably, she had woken not from jet lag, but a long list of tasks. Later that morning, there would be a church service—her mother had passed away a year before—after which the mourners would come to her living room. Her in-laws were due from their smaller town, 150 miles away, with reinforcements from their farm, but Oksana would have to make most of the dishes. She already had several recipes clipped to small clothes hangers hung over the kitchen cabinet knobs; she did it that way in Brooklyn as well.

  “Zavtrak?” she said, by way of greeting.

  Though the previous night’s meal was still with me when I’d woken, suddenly I was hungry. “Zavtrak,” I said.

  She was about to ask whether one veal sausage or two, then answered herself. When they were done, she dropped two eggs into the runoff, which started to sizzle and pop. I hadn’t heard that sound in years. Everyone I knew cooked their eggs in a careful amount of oil, and I saw my grandfather, and her, only in the evenings—I hadn’t listened to eggs frying in a long time.

  It came upon me in a hazy, swollen, jet-lagged rush that I was in a cramped kitchen in regional Ukraine in the middle of the night with a woman who had, through the years, come to feel more and more like family, but that was in Brooklyn, once a week. We were in Ivano-Frankovsk, in the darkness, with no one else in this three-bedroom apartment.

  “Are you happy to be home?” I blurted out, afraid of the silence. It was 4:45 a.m.—more sparkling efforts at conversation would have to await the instant coffee for which Oksana was boiling the water.

  She half turned back to me, half nodded, half smiled. “Yes, of course—it’s home.” She waited. “But something’s missing. I keep thinking about Brooklyn. But when I’m in Brooklyn, I want to be here.”

  “So you’ve become one of us,” I said. I climbed into the semicircular banquette that surrounded the small kitchen table. “I envy my parents—they’re so far away from American life, they don’t have to ask themselves do they belong. They know they don’t, but it’s a firm answer, and that makes life easier, actually.”

  She nodded, her back to me. “Last year, I was heartbroken—my mother died so quickly I couldn’t come in time. But it’s a good thing. Here, if you don’t have money to bribe your way to a good doctor, you better hope to die quickly.” She fell silent, pushing the eggs around with a spatula. Finished, she deposited them and the sausages onto a plate, wedged a piece of buttered bread into the pile, filled my coffee with white sugar and milk, and set it all down before me.

  “And you?” I said through a mouthful. I hadn’t seen her eat since we left JFK.

  She banged the kitchen table absentmindedly with a knuckle. “When I was a little girl, I slept on a table exactly like this one. We’d scraped together enough to move into the city, but the apartment was so little, I had to sleep on the kitchen table.”

  “Did y
ou roll off?” I said.

  “Probably,” she sighed. “Otherwise, I would’ve made better decisions.”

  “After we came to America,” I said, “I barricaded myself in bed every night with all the chairs from the kitchen, backs in.”

  “You were playing?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I had the same dream over and over—this big forest at dusk, gray and green. And a castle in ruins, open walls, the wind coming through. No people. Over and over.” It occurred to me that in the novel I was trying to write, everything always happened at dusk.

  “Sure, that happens,” she said in that vague, banal way she resorted to sometimes. Its best version was some kind of proverb, its worst this flattening of what I’d offered into nothing.

  “I think it was about—all of a sudden, I had to do everything for us,” I said. “All the time, I lived in terror I’d get something wrong, and it would be the end. The end of what? No one specified. And the ripped-up house—I guess that’s obvious.”

  “You’re so hard on them,” she said. “I’m sorry—it’s none of my business.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said. I wanted us to keep speaking. Even if she didn’t agree, it felt different to speak about it with her than with my parents or friends. My parents were my blood but didn’t understand, and my friends understood but weren’t my blood.

  “I admire you for the way you live your life,” Oksana said. “You try to make something happen. You have to continue doing that at all costs.” She stared past me, the spatula still in her hand. “Parents want something to brag about.”

  “By that logic,” I said, “only someone who isn’t family can accept the truth about you.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “There are probably things Misha needs to hear that he can hear only from somebody else.” She sighed. “What to do? How to live?” This was one of the proverb responses. It was as far as Oksana went in showing her worries. If she was feeling playful, she said, “And what will be, we’ll see.” Or: “Let’s keep thinking—because there’s plenty to think about.” Or: “I don’t know what will be, but I know what is, and I know what used to.” But when she was upset, she said, “What to do? How to live?”

  At the sink, she was scrubbing the grease from the frying pan. She said, “I was on Facebook before we left. I came across a young man, from here in Ukraine. He had thrombosis in his legs. And they amputated them. That’s the kind of country we have. If you have thrombosis, they amputate your legs. His wife left him and took their child. He moved in with his parents and started sewing icons from beads to make money for prostheses. I don’t know what came over me. I wrote him and asked for his phone number. We spoke. And you can see—he’s one of the good ones. A nice boy, hasn’t drunk himself half to death. I sent him two hundred dollars.” A woman who walked to save the bus fare had sent this stranger two hundred dollars. I listened to dishes clanking in her hands. “Let Misha sweep the street if that’s what it comes to,” she went on. “Just let him do it in one piece.” She was briefly silent. “You two were born the same month, did you know that? Same year, same month.” She said no more, and I wondered how she meant it: She saw me as a surrogate son and wished me as well as she wished him? Or “Lucky you, unlucky him,” with all the resentment such unfairness surely conjured?

  She turned off the water. “Talk, talk, talk,” she said, “and I’ve got two dozen people coming for lunch.” She was wearing an expression that said: Nothing is different, the world is shit, but I still have to do this, and I might as well wear a smile while I do. “I should have made the borshch last night, it’s better on the second day. I just couldn’t stand up another minute. I cooked the beets, at least. It helps them keep their color. Beets saved Chernobyl, you know. Their roots go really deep, and there’s less radiation down there. Beets and potatoes both. Beans, buckwheat—the roots are too shallow.”

  “How did you learn to cook?” I said.

  “When we were in the village, my grandmother cooked for weddings,” she said. “In the city, my mother worked three shifts, so my sister and I divided the house. I got the kitchen. My father was home for lunch every day, but he only had a little time, so I learned to be quick. Dumplings, soup, cornmeal in sour cream. It’s no mystery. You just do it over and over.”

  I could cook only from recipes, and with regular enough failure to keep my hands humble. And God help me if I understood how a sauce came together, or how exactly one got all that rich liquid out of a soup made from water. I asked if I could make the borshch with her.

  “The borshch? Quit it—go rest!”

  “I’d like to. I don’t understand how the water becomes borshch.”

  She squinted at me, as if at an idiot. “Fine. I’ll boil—you get the vegetables.”

  While I peeled and cubed, she diced onion and grated carrot. Periodically, she called out to ask if I didn’t want to drop it and go rest after all. But I liked being there and doing that with her. It was only when I noticed that she had already fried the onions and was about to add carrots—I had just dropped the vegetables into the water, after it had boiled again and again—that it occurred to me that she was politely trying to get rid of me. I was slowing her down. First I had invited myself into her home, and now I would fuck with her cooking. How much would I like it if another set of hands offered to write my novel with me? Not very much.

  Shame is a powerful stimulant. You fall apart, or you start moving faster. Oksana was only finishing the carrots when I had the beets skinned, diced, and ready; a tablespoon of tomato paste ready to add to her onions and carrots; two garlic cloves pressed to finish the mixture; the spices—bay leaf, coriander—set out and ready; and the remaining ingredients—sugar, vinegar, salt, dill, and more garlic—lined up in a kind of mise en place.

  “It never occurred to me to have all of it ready and waiting like that,” she said. She didn’t seem to be saying it out of politeness.

  By the time the sun rose, a large enamel pot of burgundy-colored borshch was “breathing” on the stove, and I knew how water becomes borshch. They say Russian astronauts eat borshch for breakfast, as my grandmother Faina had—one American doctor who spent half a year in orbit with Russians nearly went mad from it—and Oksana and I, having passed a somewhat otherworldly morning of our own, followed their example. Oksana kept reminding me it would taste better later, once it had had some hours to sit. Then this Jew dressed for church.

  Inside the church, a crowd of mourners watched from a distance as a priest chanted commemorative liturgy before two ritual tables, one laid with buckets of white flowers and a gold cross with a pinned Christ, the other heaped with loaves of kalach, a ritual bread—its circular shape stood for eternity, its three braids for the Holy Trinity, et cetera.

  I had always remained untouched by the rituals the living performed for the dead; it was like running after an airplane that had already lifted off. My grandfather visited my grandmother’s grave every week, chanting some kind of DIY prayer in Yiddish (addressed to her, not God). I made myself go, too, but felt nothing, and had to force up my most vulnerable memories, sometimes having nothing to do with her, so that tears would come. At the front of the church, the priest said something that made most of the attending fall to their knees. I took it as my cue, and slipped out. I needed a very large infusion of very strong coffee. It was only 9 a.m., but I felt as if I’d already lived most of a day. I’d made a vat of borshch already, for God’s sake.

  It was March—cold, but blindingly bright. I spotted a small grocery across the road—it looked like one of those slatted wooden shacks from a Slavic fairy tale that might sprout chicken legs and hop off. Inside, I found the same supermarket scene Oksana must have left nearly a decade before: women in uniform aprons and paper-boat hats behind glass vitrines offering meats and cheeses, baked goods, desserts, grains, and breads. The walls had an odd, sickly green color, but the ceilings were tall and the windows wide, so that, despite the odds, the place exuded an air of threadbare grand
eur.

  “Do you have coffee?” I said in Russian. “Not packaged—right now.” In parts of western Ukraine, they refused to answer you if you spoke Russian. Ivano-Frankovsk, Oksana’s hometown, was deep in the west, but not so far that they didn’t tolerate it. (It was Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukrainian, and I made sure to at least call it that.)

  “Yes, of course,” the young woman behind one of the counters said gravely. I must have looked different enough, and not many different-looking people made it this way. Maybe I was an inspector. She pointed to a press-button machine. I looked at her helplessly. I meant by this only that I’d hoped for something less prefabricated, but she mistook it for a plea for help, emerged from behind her counter, and bustled around the coffee station until I had in my hand an espresso’s worth of instant coffee in a tiny ribbed cup. She was pretty in that tentative Eastern European way—soft cheekbones, soft jaw.

  “Might you potentially . . . have bigger cups?” I said.

  “Just if you want one of ours,” the woman said, pointing weakly at her counter and, presumably, a little private station behind it.

  Was she joking? Then again, she’d used the formal version of “you.” Then again, Russians did that sometimes, to accentuate the ridicule. Then again, I wasn’t in Russia. I made myself stop my tailspin: I would make do. Then I took five little plastic cups from their column and pressed the button once into each of them. These six would cost less than half a cup of drip coffee back home. (“Back home”—the meaning switched depending on where I found myself.) By now, the entire staff and all the patrons were watching me. Did these people not drink coffee? When I was finished dumping into my cuplets white sugar from a clay jar of the kind you would have found in somebody’s home, the saleswoman materialized with a piece of cardboard I could use as a tray.