by Ragen, Naomi
Everyone leaned forward a little in their seats, placing their utensils down so as not to make a single sound that might obscure the answer.
“Oil! Oil bizness. You heard of Turdistan? You khear what happen to oil after communists? All people get certificates, oil certificates in Turdistan. Every family have certificate. But don’t need certificate. Need—” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “So me and brother, ve buy certificates. Ve get friends to buy certificates. Now ve own oil company. Now ve drill, make oil company bigger. Ve sell certificates. Our friends, all very rich. Like Sultan of Brunei!”
“Can others buy these oil certificates? Is it like stocks and bonds?” Stuart asked eagerly.
He tilted his head, then shook it. “Is very difficult. Need to organize. Only Russian peoples who lives in Turdistan can buy. Is almost impossible for people like you to buy. You buy bears!” He looked around the table, smiling. No one smiled back. “Vhy so serious, you Americans? Ah, yes, I know vhy.” He looked around the table expectantly.
“Viktor, are you looking for something?” Chaim asked.
“Vodka! Ve make toast!”
Delilah ran to get the bottle out of the liquor cabinet, together with the shot glasses.
“Varm vodka?” Viktor bellowed. “In Russia, vodka cold, like Kremlin in vinter!” He filled his shot glass and raised it aloft. “Ten years ago I go to Moscow on buziness. Vladimir vent, also Yuri.” He turned to his wife. “You remember Yuri? The vun vit daughter Galina, who haff trouble vit kidneys from eating bad pork, vun vit small face, vun who married police captain? . . . In Russia, very important to have relative police captain, very khelpful to many buzinesses; also bear buziness, also oil buziness. Ve did veil, so ve vent into restaurant to celebrate. They don’t know how to fix kebab, but bread and soup and pirochki vas excellent. Ve make big buziness. Ve sign big contract. Ve become very, very rich. And ve move here, to America. I find vife in America. I have my beautiful daughter Natasha in America. Ve build house in America. In America, you can be Jew. I bring my son to live in America. I vant Bar Mitzva. I don’t know khow to make Bar Mitzva. And now I meet Rabbi Chaim, and khe vill khelp me make Bar Mitzva for my son. And all you my friends, my American friends, you vill come to my son’s Bar Mitzva. I velcome you to my khome, as you velcome me to your khome in America. I raise glass to Rabbi Chaim.” He poured everyone a drink. Then he threw back his head and downed it, wiping his lips across his sleeves. “And now, raise glasses, drink to Svallo Lake, to friendship!” He poured another round.
Delilah signaled to the serving girl to start clearing off the table and to bring the next course. Her head was already swimming from the pure alcohol now coursing through her veins. She walked into the kitchen to supervise.
And then she spied something. It was a little container. She lifted it. CRéME FRAÎCHE, it said. “Hello? Where did this come from?” she asked the chef.
“I bring it avec moi from Paris, Madame.” He gave her a superior and knowing smile. “C’est impossible to find decent crème fraîche in America.”
“You were told specifically not to bring in any food!” Her head swam. “What’s in it?”
His lips thinned with insult. He looked down his nose. “Just ze cultured cream. It make ze sauces very smooth, very riche”
“Cream? Cream! In all the sauces? Don’t tell me you put this in the duck salad sauce, and the sauce that went over the squab, and into the profiteroles!”
He drained his glass of wine and poured himself another, finishing off the bottle. “But of course!” His brow wrinkled in displeasure. “In France, zis is well known.” He shrugged, that go-to-hell French shrug of nasty waiters and impatient shopowners.
She clenched her fists. “But none of the recipes you showed me even called for cream!”
“Recipes!” he mocked. “Who writes zis? Ze little cook, ze New York Times. Ze great chef? We do not read zeez silly instructions.”
“You nincompoop! I told you, I’m a rabbi’s wife! We are Orthodox Jews! All our guests are Orthodox Jews, you French nitwit. We don’t mix meat and milk. I told you that!”
His whole body stiffened with offense. He bowed. His hand waved over the kitchen dramatically. “Pardon, madame, but I do not see ze meat here. Only ze duck and ze chicken!”
“I’m going to kill you!” She lunged at him. He picked up the carving knife and moved back, waving it at her. Delilah grabbed the hired girl and hid behind her. He started swearing very rapidly under his breath in French, the word Juifs appearing again and again, in what was apparently not a paen of praise to David Ben-Gurion or Moses. Then he threw down his apron and walked out the kitchen door, slamming it behind him.
She leaned against the wall, trembling.
She thought of the religious men and women sitting around her table, the synagogue-owned table in the house of the community’s spiritual leader, its rabbi. And she was his helpmate, the person who sat by his side, who was supposed to help the congregants keep God’s commandments.
She had, it seemed to her, a clear choice. She could go in and tell them what had happened, insulting Joie and Viktor, whose chef, after all, had managed to screw up, sending everyone home early with nothing to eat. Chaim would make her throw out all her dishes, after he berated her with a million I told you sos. Solange and Mariette would arch their brows and nod at each other at the debacle. And who knew what the decision would be, the next time the board took a vote?
Or, she could . . .
She looked at the delectable squab already arranged on the plates, covered in sauce. She searched the pans to find a piece that had not yet been plated and doused. There was only one left. She took out a clean plate and placed the squab on it, adding the vegetables. “I’ll take in this one. You take in the rest,” she told the girl.
Then she reached for the almost empty container of crème fraîche, opened the garbage can, and buried it deep inside, covering it with debris. She picked up the plate and carried it into the dining room, placing it in front of her husband.
“Ah, I get special service. A true woman of valor!” Chaim said, kissing her hand.
“You see, little voman, this is vay vife treat husband,” Viktor boomed, squeezing Joie’s knee.
Delilah smiled at him and sat down, looking down into her own plate. Slowly, she scraped the sauce off the squab with her knife, eating tiny, relatively sauceless pieces as best she could.
“Umm, this is just scrumptious!” Solange exclaimed, putting a sauce-drenched morsel on her tongue.
“Yes, divine. The sauce is so creamy and rich. I’ve never tasted anything like it,” Mariette said, savoring each piece. “You must get us the recipe, Delilah.”
Delilah nodded silently, not looking up.
“Come. Ve toast some more!” Viktor called out.
Chaim downed his fourth glass. He staggered to his feet, shakily holding up his shot glass. “Now—now it’s my turn. Shhhh, shaa.” He waved at everyone. “Sit down! To all my wonderful friends in Swallow Lake, who have entrusted me with their spiritual growth and who have allowed me to become a part of their lives and the lives of their families, so that we might be true to our heritage and our holy Torah, fulfilling all the commandments of our God.”
My God, were those tears in his eyes? Delilah thought, horrified.
“And to my wonderful wife who has made this fabulous evening possible, bringing together old friends and new, nourishing us with a gourmet kosher”—Delilah started to cough—”meal.” She coughed louder and louder.
“She’s choking!”
“Somebody do a Heimlich maneuver!”
“I vill do it!” Viktor sprang up.
“No, I’m fine—don’t,” Delilah protested, terrified as she watched Viktor Shammanov lumbering drunkenly toward her, getting ready to squeeze her in half. “I’m fine. Something must have just gone down the wrong pipe, that’s all.” She smiled, wiping her eyes. “See?”
Viktor smiled and sat down. “Finish toast!”
“Ah, yes.” Chaim nodded. “To my wonderful wife, who has been a true helpmate, like Sarah to Abraham, like Rivkah to Isaac, like Rachel to
Jacob. . . .”
Like Eve to Adam, Delilah thought.
“May God bless her! It’s not easy to be a rabbi . . . so many things I’d like to do, and it’s impossible . . . to please everyone . . . and some people are jerks, you can never please them, and some are just drunks, like the kiddush Club members, and the ones who tell me they go for lap dances because it helps them fulfill their God-given duty to pleasure their wives . . .”
Felice turned sharply to her husband, Ari, who stared down at a fork he was digging into the tablecloth. Joseph Rolland cleared his throat.
“Chaim!” Delilah said sharply, pulling him back down into his seat.
“Er . . . I think maybe it’s time for dessert?” Arthur pointed out.
“What did you say, time to desert?” Stuart Grodin laughed.
“Is that a true story?” Mariette turned to Delilah. “About the lap—”
“Wait, wait, I’m not finished,” Chaim muttered, struggling back up to his feet. “And to the women who want to know if they should tell their husbands one of the kids isn’t theirs or if it would be a mitzva to keep the information to themselves . . .”
“Oh, ho!” Viktor roared.
“And of course, to my beautiful, difficult wife . . .”
She elbowed him. “You already did me!” she hissed.
“Sit down!”
He ignored her. “. . . whom I love, and who makes my life miser—”
“Chaim!”
“To Delilah. I raise my glass to her and to all of you!”
“To Delilah!” The men roared, while the women studiously avoided looking at each other.
Delilah drank another shot of vodka. The room was swimming in front of her. Solange looked suddenly fat. And Mariette looked like she was wearing devil’s horns. Or maybe that wasn’t Mariette; maybe it was just her own reflection in the glass of the china closet.
TWENTY-FOUR
People remember what they want to remember. And while everyone had had a great time at the rabbi’s house meeting Viktor and Joie Shammanov, they soon forgot the circumstances of their initial meeting, remembering only that they were now dear friends of the fabulous Shammanovs. In fact, soon it felt as if they had known them forever.
Joie made an effort to invite the women over to her home at least once a week, preparing fabulous meals. After some coaching from Delilah, she got rid of her French chef and hired one who had once worked in the Catskills at a kosher hotel. She had Chaim over to supervise making her kitchen kosher. And even when he went a bit mad with a blowtorch, effectively ruining the inside of their $6,000 Gaggenau oven, she told him not to worry about it, and just replaced it. The silverware and glasses could all be made kosher by plunging one into boiling water and by just soaking the other. The dishes, of course, were a bit of a problem; there is no way to make porcelain dishes kosher if they have held milk and meat or pork or shellfish. But even Joie, caught up as she was in fitting into her new community, balked at throwing out an entire set of $200-a-plate Hermes Toucans dinnerware, with its $1,500 soup tureen. What they did was order additional plates to use when the synagogue came over.
Sightings of Viktor Shammanov in earnest conference with the board members and others from among the most prominent citizens of Swallow Lake became more and more frequent. Meanwhile, the women of the synagogue board had taken it upon themselves to advise Joie Shammanov on how to make a Bar Mitzva.
“I once went to a Bar Mitzva where they turned the entire synagogue into a circus tent, and the Bar Mitzva boy greeted the guests on an elephant. . . . They had flame eaters, clowns, and jugglers,” Amber told her excitedly.
“And I was at one where they turned the place into an African jungle, with grass floors and tribal dancers flown in from South Africa. All the food was African too. It was something to remember,” Solange remarked.
“That’s nothing. I was at one where they flew everyone to a safari game park in Kenya. But we wound up waiting on line for hours to get in. It turned out there were two other Bar Mitzvas in front of us,” said Felice.
“You don’t want to go to Africa,” Mariette counseled authoritatively. “Joseph and I were there once, for some conference. The minute we finished breakfast, the monkeys descended on the tables and ate all the packets of sugar! They were all over the place! It was disgusting. And that’s not the worst of it.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I was reading their local fashion magazine, and they had a full-page advertisement for rape insurance?. They promised to bring you AIDS medication first thing the next morning,” she whispered, shuddering.
Joie’s eyes widened.
“Then again,” Solange said brightly, breaking the stunned silence, “you could always rent a fabulous place right here. Like Radio City Music Hall. Or Madison Square Garden. Then you could put the name of the family up on the marquee. It’s great fun!”
“Been done.” Felice shook her head. “They even hired the Rockettes to dance with the Bar Mitzva boy. The police had to rope off half of Manhattan.”
“That’s peanuts! Did you read about that music producer who built an entire synagogue in the south of France just for his son’s Bar Mitzva and afterward just took it apart? He flew in Beyoncé Knowles and Justin Timberlake!” Delilah said delightedly. “I read all about it in People magazine at my last gynecologist’s appointment.”
Joie lifted her head. “Oh,” she said, “that does sound like fun!”
“But does it sound to you like a religious occasion?” Solange tilted her head.
“Doesn’t it?” Joie looked at Delilah, who was already deep in daydreams, envisioning herself in a pink bikini lolling about on the beaches of Cannes. She looked up, suddenly realizing that everyone was staring at her, waiting for an answer.
“I can’t see anything wrong with it,” Delilah said.
Solange looked puzzled. “But didn’t Rabbi Chaim say he was against this kind of thing?”
“Why do you say that?” Delilah felt her underarms break out in sweat.
“Well, he gave a whole sermon about it about a month ago. Were you there, Amber?”
“Oh, yes, that sermon.” She arched her brow.
“Oh, sure!” Delilah nodded. “I know what you are talking about now,” she said, her mind a complete blank. “But I don’t think he was talking about the same thing.”
“No? Then what did he mean when he said that these kids end up spending two years going to multiple parties every weekend, that they get used to drinking and eating too much and getting all these party favors, so that afterward when the parties stop, they are just so blasé about everything they wind up taking drugs and getting into all kinds of trouble just to keep themselves amused?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what he said,” Mariette agreed. “I remember, because a lot of people were complaining about it afterward. People who’d had Bar and Bat Mitzvas. They were very hurt!”
“Well, you see, I’m sure you misunderstood, because there is no ivay Rabbi Chaim would ever say anything controversial that would hurt people’s feelings,” Delilah pointed out, relieved. “He probably meant they shouldn’t attend too many every weekend. But one would be all right.”
“So you are saying that your husband is in favor of a Bar Mitzva party like the one in France, the one that cost millions?”
“I think I can safely say that my husband would never condemn anyone because of how much money they have, or if they wanted to spend it on fulfilling one of God’s commandments. You know, there is this concept of . . . of”—she thought back to her yeshiva days, desperately searching for solid ground—”of hedoor mitzva.”
The women tilted their heads quizzically.
“It’s the idea that you should go a little overboard when you’re doing God’s commandments. Like . . . let me see—you know, like choosing an etrog for Succoth.”<
br />
Joie looked at her blankly. “Succoth? Etrog?”
“Oh, it’s the Feast of Tabernacles, a seven-day holiday in which we are supposed to ‘dwell in booths.’ So we make this little hut, a sukkah, outside our homes, and we let the sun bake our heads, the rain and snow fall in our soup,” Delilah went on.
“Whatever for?” Joie shook her head.
“Oh, uhm. Well,” Delilah racked her brain. “It’s . . . it’s supposed to teach us to have faith in God. And that a home, no matter how solid and expensive, can’t really save you from the rain or the sun. . . .”
Joie blinked, looking back at her house. “That’s exactly what a home can do.”
“Yes, I know. But—”
“What she means, my dear, is that living in a flimsy hut for a week is supposed to make us understand that we need His help and protection, because, you know, a house can be gone in an instant. Hurricanes, floods, tornadoes,” Mariette told her, nodding sagely. “Isn’t that what you were going to say, Delilah?”
“For sure. Now, where was I? Oh, the etrog—that’s a citron. It looks just like a lemon, except it doesn’t have any juice, and not much taste, but it smells heavenly. For some reason, the Bible chooses the citron, and a few other things, to symbolize the holiday. You are supposed to hold them in your hands and shake them in all directions.”
Joie blinked.
“Well, anyhow, God says to take a citron, any old citron. But people decided it would honor God more if we made an effort to find the perfect citron, the one with no spots or blemishes. One perfectly shaped, not too big or too small. And sometimes, people go around with magnifying glasses when they shop for their citron. They can spend thousands of dollars on one. They think it’s a way of honoring God. You could say the same thing about going over the top in a Bar Mitzva.”
Solange and Felice looked at each other, their mouths falling open.
Mariette shook her head. “You can’t be serious! I was once at this Bat Mitzva in the Plaza Hotel. To enter the reception, you had to pass through a corridor lined with eight-by-ten-foot photos of this twelve-year-old girl doing various dance and acrobatic moves. I mean, I applaud the concept in theory. But a twelve-year-old girl really shouldn’t be blown up to eight by ten feet. She had braces and acne. And when we got into the reception, there were all these well-known chefs standing at different serving stations, preparing food. There were fountains of champagne. And when we were finally stuffed to the gills and sat down, the lights were lowered. And there comes this litter, supported by six-foot “slaves” in loincloths, and on top is the Bat Mitzva girl dressed like Cleopatra. And then it really got ostentatious,” Mariette said. “That can’t possibly be a good thing spiritually. You didn’t mean that seriously, did you, Delilah dear?”
