Savage Feast Read online

  Not only was every vehicle parked in the station lot a Mercedes, but the minivan that would convey us to our hotel also bore the three-pointed star. Perhaps cleaning women also drove Mercedeses here! However, the Germans had not designed for political refugees—not one row in the minivan was large enough for even one of our jumbo suitcases. But then our minder yanked a latch and the row of seats . . . fell away to lie flat. A man acquainted with the darkest recesses of the Soviet black market, another who had immunized himself to sincerity outside the safety of his household—they gaped like children too young to be embarrassed about their enthusiasm, and like men who had to wonder about just how many years they’d squandered on that place.

  The setup that awaited us at the Pension Rose, where we would lodge until our documents were in order and we could go on to Rome, was equally wondrous: separate rooms for the families (what had been one family would henceforth be two); a private backyard with benches, flowers, and trees; if a shared bathroom, then a spotless one; and from every scrubbed corner an aroma of some kind of soothing, herbaceous detergent—all this in an establishment of only two stars. Only the communal kitchen on every floor was familiar.

  There my grandmother went, leaving, over the next weeks, only for showers and sleep. The first meal of our new lives used up the last of the old: hard-boiled eggs, salami, cutlets, and beef tongue. A young fellow-traveling couple contributed fried liver with buckwheat, and a young man named Ilya who’d been sent on alone—my grandmother found this inexplicable and placed herself in charge of his feeding—contributed a jar of jam made by his mother. But there was no more bread. My father was chosen to go out into the city. My grandfather questioned the wisdom of using Yiddish in a German-speaking city—in truth, he was afraid to go out there—whereas my father had memorized the odd English word on the way.

  That morning, for the first time in memory, my family ate without bread: My father had vanished. When he finally appeared, two hours after he left, everyone began shouting with relief and reproach. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I lost my mind.” He had gone only a block. The supermarket door had slid open by itself, whereupon he nearly toppled the tiny old Austrian woman coming out, her scream loud enough for the other shoppers to stare with cold shock at the bearish man who had accosted Frau Fichter. But this my father, ready for error and penalty, only imagined: Frau Fichter did exclaim—but then smiled. Smiled! Like an idiot, my father smiled back. No one smiled socially in the USSR. They didn’t have automatic sliding doors there, either.

  Inside he found grapes from Chile (Chile?! How about the moon!), rose-rumped chickens, tortes too pretty to touch, and a machine that produced what he could only conclude was fresh-squeezed orange juice. At checkout, these goods were placed inside plastic bags, on which my father had never laid eyes, either. Soviet shoppers used “perhaps” bags: netted string bags named after a word that meant, vaguely, “and maybe I will,” an incantation of hope for luck on the shelves. Because my grandfather had regular access to such luck, he couldn’t use a see-through “perhaps” bag; he had a special “definitely” bag, with handles to withstand concrete. “His arms live below his knees,” people said about him as he carried his load, admiringly and not.

  That evening, we went on a walk and saw what my father had. Only my grandmother wouldn’t go out—she couldn’t handle the sound of German. She would make dinner from the bounty my father had hauled home, and wait at the Rose. But her waiting was disappointed again.

  This was not a place you could walk through quickly, the tidy Austrians striding past, the lindens swaying in the light breeze of early September, the blaring lights from every imaginable shop. On one corner, we came upon a cart with bratwurst. Street food didn’t exist in the USSR—it was considered primitive, unhygienic. But everything in Vienna looked as if licked clean. I looked up expectantly from below, like a cat. Hands reached for the dowry of shillings that sat heavily in our pockets; each of us received a subsidy of a hundred per day—only seven dollars but, between five people, enough to feast over and over.

  The bratwurst man tonged one into a paper boat and incised it, whereupon a pungent melted cheese gushed out over the herb- and fat-studded meat. Into the gash he poured a stream of grainy, olive-colored mustard, moving his wrist back and forth the way my father did when he painted with a brush instead of a roller. He extended it to my mother, the woman, but she nodded gratefully and pointed at me, in whose wavering hands the boat finally landed. The man pointed at his mouth—hot—but I couldn’t wait and incinerated my tongue. I was on my last bite when, sheepishly, I looked up to find three adults looking down with envy and love. It had not occurred to me they wouldn’t get one, or three, for themselves.

  The next block offered a cart that sold ice cream. In this country, the sausages melted like ice cream, and the ice cream came wrapped at the ends with striped twine, like cured sausage. Again, only I got one—the reason, I was assured, was that my grandmother was waiting with dinner. The ice cream was only vanilla, but the vanilla and cream were in perfect matrimony, and platonically suspended between solid and liquid, though I did my part by licking so hard that the ice cream hardly had time to think about melting.

  My grandmother had made chicken-under-a-brick, one of those broilers with asses like the cheeks of a teenage girl after a snowfall (Crimean Victor’s expression had worked its way into our lexicon), butterflied and pan-fried in oil infused with garlic (and cayenne and coriander she had found in a cupboard) under a plate held down by a drill my father had brought to sell in Italy. My parents and grandfather covered for me. Whenever my grandmother turned away, a fork appeared over my plate, stabbed a drumstick, and vanished. Every plate was cleaned to the last shred of garlic—the walk had left the adults with a remarkable appetite. We finished with a plum strudel that the young couple who had contributed the fried liver earlier had ferried from home. Young Ilya sliced it, because he had somehow managed to smuggle an enormous knife—a scimitar, really—past customs. I felt what I had two nights before, when out of the bedlam of our suitcases my grandmother had conjured a meal that looked exactly as it had at home. I wished I could be hungry again.

  The next morning, we went for our medical screenings—the gravely ill and mentally unfit would not qualify for America. Chernobyl had blown up two years earlier. The wind had blown north that day, away from nearby Kiev and toward Minsk, two hundred miles away. It had been raining, but my mother and I had gone for a walk. The puddles on the ground were oily and yellow, but that was pollen from the flowering lindens. The next day, my mother received a call from a boy she’d passed over when she was younger, now a cyberneticist at the Academy of Sciences. “Close your windows, and don’t go outside,” he said; as someone closer to government information, he knew. “Why?” she said. “I can’t tell you,” he said, and hung up. Several days later, on May 1, we were made to march for Labor Day as if all was normal. Since then, no one in the immediate family had developed symptoms, but there was no telling what European X-ray technology would discover. (I did have a second cousin who had been born without hair.) My mother wasn’t sure whether to mention the earache still tormenting her—who knew what these people considered gravely ill.

  She felt deranged. She had cried most of the way to Vienna and had resumed shortly after settling at the Rose. She joked sourly that she would be singled out, but for the mentally unfit category. She took a chance with the physician, pointed at her ear, and made an expression of pain. He examined her, then brought a jar of pills with a childproof safety feature that he had to show her how to overcome. Then he drew a picture of an ear, a mouth, and one of the pills. He circled the pill, drew an arrow from it to the mouth, then crossed out the ear: Put the pill in the mouth, not the ear. In the Soviet Union, earaches were treated with alcohol-soaked overnight compresses kept in place by a scarf wrapped like a war bandage. After enough émigrés had tried to put the pills in their ears, the doctor had decided he needed a diagram.

  The following day, we
went to the synagogue: A Jewish organization was sponsoring us, after all, and it was September’s march of Jewish holidays that had extended our magic stay in Vienna. (You couldn’t work on these, it was explained.) The HIAS van dropped our group off on a canyon-like street concealed from the sun by tall residential buildings. We looked around but saw nothing. Admittedly, no one knew what to look for, never having seen a synagogue.

  “They call these streets the Bermuda Triangle,” the guide declared—they were winding and narrow; one was guaranteed to get lost. He pointed to a building indistinguishable from its neighbors except for the Hebrew script above its entry. When it was built, he said, the facades of non-Catholic houses of worship could not look out into the street, so the Stadttempel was made to look like the homes it was next to. This saved it during Kristallnacht—you couldn’t burn it without burning the neighbors. No other Viennese synagogue survived the war.

  Services were in progress, so the guide called us away, but my grandfather hadn’t been brought all this way to look at a door. He split off and went for the entrance, my hand in his. Carefully, he opened the door and we slid in our noses. It looked like an opera house. In the middle of the great hall, men shrouded with fringed, striped garments, their heads covered with skullcaps and their ears hung with sidelocks, pitched themselves forward and recoiled while chanting, the place humming like an apiary. My grandfather twisted his finger into his temple—the Soviet gesture for crazy. “Fanatics,” he shrugged, and closed the door.

  My grandfather was young enough to have had a grandmother who spoke only Yiddish and observed the Jewish holidays and dietary restrictions. But we, like most Soviet people, genuinely regarded religion as mindless cultism. The activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain who fought so hard for our release were impelled by the injustice of the discrimination people like us endured no matter how much we tried to blend in. But we weren’t emigrating for the freedom to worship. Ours was a “salami immigration,” as people called it—all we wanted was the freedom to make money.

  At the Rose, my grandmother, who had declined to join the synagogue outing with an authority none of the rest of us thought we possessed, was pounding the last of dinner together: chicken stuffed with prunes, apples, and apricots, summer’s last bounty at the market. During those first days in Vienna, she was periodically pleaded with to relent and to rest, but she missed her sister beyond language and could bury it only at the stove—in the unambiguous goodness of feeding people. If she needed a butcher cut, she called over Ilya with his scimitar, and sometimes they spoke, like two orphans.

  All the adults were beside themselves with the dislocation of what they were going through, but my grandmother’s was of a different order. She had been separated from a sister who was her sole living connection to a family lost in the Holocaust. None of us had ever strayed from one another—ordinary people in the Soviet Union almost never traveled outside of it, and hardly even within it. But our genes also carried generations of anxiety about safety as Jews—if we went to the wrong place, or left the relative safety that came with community, the panic that set in was as intense in the person leaving as in the people being left. (My father left behind his brother and mother, but they weren’t as close as my grandmother had been with her sister.) There must be no one for whom this is less natural to comprehend than Americans, whose country enshrines mobility as a national virtue—unless you ask African Americans about their elders, perhaps. It isn’t only that Americans don’t fear going from one place to another; it’s also that they don’t fear letting each other go there and don’t use guilt to discourage it, while those who go don’t feel ashamed for wanting to.

  That night, there was an unfamiliar body at the dinner table. From behind, he looked like Sharansky, the dissident: same height, same bald pate, though the leather jacket was expensive. No, it was Sasha from Moscow. Sasha had been part of an earlier immigrant wave, had looked around Vienna and thought: Why not here? The Austrians didn’t mind, even put him on social assistance. He padded his income by reselling to the locals what the émigrés brought. That night, after wiping the chicken fat from his mouth and all but kneeling before my grandmother, he gave my grandfather $250 and left with a blue-on-white Chinese rug we had hauled with us. He returned the next night to buy more. He made sure to arrive right before dinner.

  Roast Chicken Stuffed with Dried Fruit and Apples

  Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

  Serves: 6

  12 dried apricots

  1 whole chicken, 5–6 pounds (a larger chicken means a larger cavity for stuffing)

  Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

  12 pitted prunes

  3–4 Granny Smith apples, cut into eighths and seeded

  In a heatproof bowl, cover the apricots with boiling water and let soak until softened, about 20 minutes.

  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. (The high heat will give the skin a nice crispness.) Rinse the chicken and pat dry. Season generously, inside and out, with salt and pepper. Drain the apricots and stuff inside the cavity, along with the prunes. Close the skin flaps around the dried fruit as much as possible so it doesn’t fall out during cooking. Lay the chicken down gently in an oven-worthy pan (make sure there’s room in it for the apples—see step 3), breasts down so they absorb the dripping juice and the fat of the thighs. Cook for 10–12 minutes per pound, until the juices from the thigh run clear when pricked with a fork.

  About 25 minutes before the chicken is done, scatter the apple slices in the pan around the chicken. Return to the oven for the remaining cooking time.

  That night, the Rose was in disarray—Meyer, an old émigré, had gone for a pre-dinner walk and vanished. The table was set, but who could eat. Sasha tried to tell stories about Vienna, but no one listened. Then he proposed to call on some people—what did Meyer look like?

  “What kind of people?” he was asked.

  “People who find people,” he said.

  Meyer had looked old since boyhood—all wrinkles. Wore a cap. Other than that, even his son couldn’t say. Sasha was about to make a call when the doorbell rang downstairs. The whole party rushed down, young Ilya reaching the door first. On the other side stood two policemen and old Meyer, short as a child between them. He’d gotten turned around and, on sighting the law, jammed a finger into his sternum and begun shouting, “Ya Moskva! Ya Moskva!”—“I am Moscow! I am Moscow!” Everyone knew where the Soviet people were staying.

  Meyer’s recovery was toasted with cognac. Were there more bottles, Sasha wanted to know? “Depends on the price,” my grandfather said. That evening, Sasha left with two, and the next night with three more. It was The Thousand and One Nights immigrant style—with short, bald Sasha instead of Scheherazade and, in lieu of tales, cognac, cameras, wind-up toys, and locksmith equipment.

  When Sasha found out my grandfather cut hair, he submitted himself to the maestro. Hair sprouted only from the sides of his head, but what he had, he wanted to have looking nice. Done and dashing, he gave my grandfather a handful of shillings.

  “Dollars,” Arkady said.

  “What do you want with over there so badly?” Sasha said.

  “You’re asking me why I want to go to America?” my grandfather said.

  “Look around yourself,” Sasha said. “What else do you want? What is it with all of you, stampeding over there like a herd?”

  My grandfather stared at Sasha—a little man working the black market and living off social assistance. He was comparing Austria to America?! And Sasha stared at my grandfather—what did this know-it-all know about America? Sasha shook his head and paid in dollars.

  The next day, we finally made our appeal to the Americans. This was a formality—the official interview would take place at the American embassy in Rome, after the medical results and the rest of the information gathering had come in.

  “What do you mean, ‘information gathering’?” my grandfather asked the Russian-speaking staffer at the American consulate.

&nb
sp; “Membership in the Communist Party, that type of thing,” the man said. “Drink or smoke, any of you?”

  “Holidays only,” my father joked. Vienna had released in him something that had been constricted in Minsk. He neither smoked nor drank.

  The man peered at him. “You’re making a joke?”

  My father’s smile vanished. “Yes, just a joke.”

  “Don’t joke that way in Rome. I’ll put down ‘no.’”

  The travel authorizations to Rome came through soon after that. Sasha invited us to celebrate our last evening—there was an organ concert at the cathedral in our neighborhood; we passed it every time we went to the metro.

  “We’re saving our money, Sasha,” my grandmother said.

  “So that’s why you’ve got me,” Sasha said.

  Even my grandmother came. My grandfather pulled out his striped silk shirt and gray blazer. My father agreed to tie the arms of a sweater around his neck so he looked like a rich American. My grandmother wore a sleeveless dress of overlapping bright circles cinched by a tan belt, and wedge heels. My mother got into a below-the-knee skirt and a wool cardigan. I was resettled into the checked shirt that had fooled Soviet customs, the top button that had been used to conceal the gold unbuttoned this time.

  For some reason, Sasha made us wait outside while the Austrians, their dress neither as festive nor as motley as ours, streamed in. When they opened the door, I caught glimpses of a thousand-foot ceiling, stained-glass windows sparkling in the hall’s low light. The clock was at 8 p.m., but Sasha said to keep waiting. Then the light in the vestibule went off, the doors closed for good, and he summoned us. He slid the door open slightly and slipped through, motioning us to follow. We crept through the dark until we reached the last pews, which were empty. “Your Majesty,” he bowed to my grandmother. She sneered at him, but sometimes she flirted that way.