Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  When the music finally sounded, it was as stupendous as a nuclear cloud. Soon a chorus joined in, and my arms ran with goose bumps. I felt the music everywhere—in my ears, in my feet. I was so consumed that I didn’t notice the hand on Sasha’s shoulder, and his passionate whispering with its owner. In German, no less. We caught words we recognized—Juden, die Immigranten, Geld: “Jews,” “immigrants,” “money”—but the guard, despite a kind face and nods of understanding, didn’t relent. Rules were rules. Sasha and the Jewish immigrants without money were gently ushered out as the people around us turned to look. Outside, you could still faintly hear; there was no law against standing on the sidewalk and listening. But now my grandfather sneered—So good your life in Europe, Sasha, that you have to sneak into concerts?—and began striding toward the Rose, leaving us no option but to follow. But Sasha had the last word—my grandfather was walking in the wrong direction.

  Chapter 5

  October–November 1988

  What to cook when you’ve been let through to a vita so dolce you can’t stop eating

  What to cook when the product is Mediterranean . . . but the shopper is Soviet

  What to cook while you wait for the most fateful verdict of your life

  The pilgrims set out after breakfast, pausing now and then to check the street signs against their directions. They had arrived in Rome from Vienna the previous evening. They’d been told that the train would pause in Rome for only five minutes; if they did not extract their possessions in time, they would keep going. The trip was spent pondering this restriction. There was the opinion that their minders, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, wished to burden their Italian hosts as little as possible, and there were enough families on the train for an orderly exit to take half an hour. This was countered by the view that the train had departed Vienna an hour and a half late—the Italians did not seem concerned about punctuality. Perhaps that was why they needed to make up time, someone else said. Eventually, this useless wondering—they were at the mercy of opaque, greater forces, and for this they had received a fine preparation in the Soviet Union—was replaced by the more practical issue of how to remove hundreds of suitcases, boxes, and duffels in five minutes.

  A mechanically enlightened passenger had an idea. When the train stopped near Venice—it stopped for a full fifteen minutes, though the passengers could not disembark and had to content themselves with nose-to-glass squinting at the City of Bridges from across the lagoon (the insistence of one older man on packing binoculars was now vindicated)—he fiddled with the window and was pleased to discover that it detached from the frame. When the train stopped—Arezzo, Chiusi, Orvieto—the man performed demonstrations, and everyone practiced. Having acquainted himself with who was where, the man drew up a plan: Half the ablest men would be at the doors when the train stopped in Rome, whereupon they would fan out across the platform while in each compartment a designated opener opened the window. The other half of the able men would then start pushing the largest luggage down to the platform while the women, children, and pensioners scurried out with the things light enough to carry by hand. As the Rome suburbs loomed into view, some hearts in the group beat faster than they had at Soviet customs.

  The train had hardly halted when everyone charged into action. (Though enough immigrants had congregated in Vienna to fill half the train, the only security greeting them was a single carabiniere, a pistol in his holster, who ran up and down the platform shouting in his beautiful, incomprehensible language.) The plan worked so well that the entire party—sixty or seventy people—was out on the platform in less than five minutes. The riders replicated the system for the loading of everyone’s things into the canvas-covered beds of the trucks that awaited them. It wasn’t until they were done that they noticed that the train was still in the station, a half hour later. One man dared to inquire of a passing agent in a boxy hat why—he pointed to his watch, pumped his arms, and said, “Choo-choo-choo.” The agent spread his hands to indicate something large, said “Roma!” and then pointed to his watch and said, “Un’ora.” One hour.

  The arrivals were dispersed between two hotels on the outskirts. The Marco Polo, from which the twenty-five pilgrims set out the next morning, had been a monastery; its cave-like rooms were a dismal welcome, especially in the darkness that had set by the time they reached it. In the banquet-size dining hall, the party was served a dinner of macaroni, some kind of cutlet, and salad. They didn’t know what to think—macaroni was poor man’s food in the Soviet Union. Even more oddly, the salad was served last, and consisted mostly of bizarre green leaves. The bread was the true sin, an eclair-shaped roll with nothing inside, not even dough: It was hollow. This seemed to symbolize everything that had transpired over the preceding several hours. In the morning, after breakfast disappointed again, they flung open their balconies and set up small tables with their remaining nonperishables: canned sardines, the salami they eternally carried. They tried to ignore the clouds of exhaust belching up from the ground, where the morning’s traffic was crawling into the city. The Eternal City versus the Eternal Salami.

  Then the Marco Polo–vites set off for the Nostrand, the other hotel, for a briefing. They were late. On the way, they encountered a man selling grapes, the bundles cradled in tissue paper and seated in tiered rows like guests at an opera. To some, the grapes looked like little green globes about to burst. To others, as if filaments of sun had lodged inside. To a third group, like the amber jewelry they’d left at home, not realizing what profit these Baltic deposits could bring in the West. “Moscato,” the vendor announced to the group. He held up his left index finger, then his right. One kilo, one thousand lira—seventy cents. The group swarmed the seller until each family held a newspaper cone containing a kilo of grapes. Near them, a fire hydrant slowly pumped water into the street, of which they availed themselves, not understanding the seller’s shouts of “Pulite!” (“Clean!”). Who knows what the Italians rushing to work all around made of this tribe. Well, you couldn’t say they were rushing.

  At the Nostrand, the other immigrant group felt despair. They’d received a funereal breakfast—instant coffee, the same accursed hollow bun, and a hard-boiled egg that the uniformed but slovenly waiter hurled out of a giant bowl using tongs. (“Like pig slop,” someone said.) Some insisted on lodging a formal complaint; there were predictable arguments for and against. This was when the Marco Polo contingent appeared, their bellies full of burst globes, sun rays, and amber. What had they been fed, the Nostranders wanted to know? A travesty, the Polovites said: macaroni with a cutlet, then salad of nothing but leaves. This took the Nostranders’ sense of persecution past endurance: They’d gotten the same—minus the cutlet.

  A woman with rudimentary English was sent off to confront the front desk, where, after elaborate miming, the waiter was summoned. (Like the waiter, the receptionist also wore a suit made for another, whereas the entire Soviet contingent had turned out in finery.) The waiter listened, his brows pursed in confusion, then let forth a stream of Italian elaborated by reenactments of the egg’s journey. The receptionist tried to translate to the lady from Mosca (who wasn’t from Moscow, but that was the hotel’s umbrella designation for the group): “Yessa, he flying the egga because then the shella break just enougha,” and the egg wouldn’t roll off the plate. It was a gesture of care, not the opposite—and a bit of an art, actually. If signora was so doubtful, the waiter said, she could try it herself. Then he stalked off.

  The briefing was to tell the immigrants they were now on their own. The aid agency would still pay for lodging—in a coastal suburb called Ladispoli—but they had to arrange it themselves. “In what language, exactly?” someone called out. After generations of being told what to do by our homeland, the refugees had taken naturally to HIAS’s babying. In fact, it would be even more difficult to deploy initiative here—we didn’t speak the language. Somehow, this paralysis coexisted with the daring to leave our lives for the completely unknown. (Even my grandfa
ther, who feared no one but my grandmother, expected to find in America “a big man—tall, in a hat, big stomach, in a striped suit. He’s smoking a cigar. And he’s squinting at me because I’m nothing. And he says: ‘I’m gonna make a puddle out of you.’”) The dictionary of words and phrases with Proustian power over an ex-Soviet person—the use of which can make every non-Soviet in the room, even a spouse or child, suddenly seem irredeemably foreign—includes “dayut,” a verb in the third-person plural that forms a complete sentence by itself and means giving, or handing out, or distributing. The pronoun and verb—They are—are unnecessary. Who they? The they who decide.

  Ladispoli, a half hour west of Rome, didn’t have much, and didn’t need it—it bordered miles of azure Tyrrhenian coastline. Soviet refugees had been staying here for years, so it wasn’t long before my grandfather had a piece of paper with an address. At the Ladispoli train station, my father offered it to the ticket vendor, who opened fire in Italian and flung her hands in so many directions that, not wishing to harm her feelings, he nodded vigorously and ran off.

  I needed the bathroom, which, instead of being marked donne and uomini (words I already knew), carried the international symbols for “male” and “female”—those circles, crosses, and arrows that correspond to nothing male or female at all. I waited for someone to emerge to clarify which was whose, but nature made it hard and I took my best guess. It didn’t matter—the bathroom was empty. It was only after I heard heels clopping on the tile outside my stall that I understood that some kind of free-world hygienic sophistication was not the reason I’d seen no urinals upon entering. I heard more heels. Then the unclasping of a purse, something skittering down the tile, laughter. Then pulling and snapping that could only confound a nine-year-old boy, followed by—here my chest filled with terror—a stream very assertively greeting the water. I knew, by then, that women peed just like men, but the patriarchal force of my birthplace must have led me to expect a decorous trickle instead of the torrent next door.

  The illicitness might have been arousing were I not crouched on my toilet seat, my heart in my throat because I was certain that my parents—who would have, rationally, confined their search to the men’s bathroom—were frantic. It’s one thing to find Via dei Tulipani without Italian, another to file a missing-person report: “Parted black hair, eats well for the most part, head in the clouds—once he forgot to throw out the garbage and took it to school.” When the sounds finally ceased, I hurled open the stall and flung open the bathroom door with the full force of my fear, thrusting myself upon a young woman trying to enter.

  On Tulipani, my knocking—I’d learned a dozen words of Italian, so I was out front—was answered by a well-fed man with mussed hair, wearing a robe. “Apartamento!” we sang out. “Momento,” he said, wagging his finger in apology, and shuffled away. This, too, we understood—we were getting the hang of things. He returned wearing a shirt, tie, slacks, blazer, and dress shoes, his dark hair wet and scraped over his head. He led us to his garden, took out an arrow-tipped pen, and wrote a number with so many zeros that even the exchange rate couldn’t help.

  “Momento,” he said again to the fallen faces around him, and vanished again. He returned with a woman. Her face was dark from the sun and her bun of hair had silver threads, but her grayish-green eyes were pellucidly young. She wore men’s black leather oxfords over bare feet, a long, loose dotted black skirt, and a black cardigan over a blouse. She may have been the first woman for whom I felt desire—primed, perhaps, by my initiation in the women’s bathroom of the Ladispoli train station. Signora Limona had a two-story villa with a large kitchen, fronted by an orchard of persimmons and pears that she had abandoned to nature—the ground was littered with fruit. Miraculously, the number attached to this extravagant place—a villa!—was right. “Bene,” she nodded, and receded toward a side dwelling, positioning herself on a bench in the sun with that day’s copy of Ladispoli Oggi (Ladispoli Today).

  At 5:00 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, we reported to a synagogue to learn who’d been granted “interviews” at the American embassy, and who had done well enough at theirs to get the green light to go. Then everyone went to “the fountain”—a cracked, weathered goblet at the entrance to town. All sorts of plant life, including a palm tree, had sprouted in its murky waters, clogging things up for the koi-like fish and turtles that made it their home. Periodically, the turtles emerged onto a green metal landing where, like synchronizing Olympians or castaways fleeing ecological ruin, they climbed one another’s backs and retracted their heads until they resembled a stack of giant mushroom heads. All in all, the thing resembled something out of the deep. But there was a wide plaza with benches and a border of high bushes, so here the Soviets of Ladispoli whiled away their evenings as they awaited release.

  In one corner huddled members of a “mafia,” all from the same Belarus town, who rented apartments and subleased them for more to new arrivals who preferred not to venture into Ladispoli and become trapped in the wrong gender’s bathroom as they tried it themselves. In another corner were the people selling, buying, and trading to improve their offerings at the secondhand market, or unloading final possessions because they’d been waved through to America. In a third corner were the children, squealing and jumping, save for a pair of exceptionally well-behaved young people, a girl and a boy, who sometimes brought construction paper, scissors, and markers. Out of the paper, Alina and I cut cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, pears, eggplant. With the markers, we raised a crop of goose bumps on the cucumbers; draped the tomatoes with green vines; dotted the pears (these would be on sale because spotted). Then we—she was the daughter of new acquaintances, a platonic interest, as my heart belonged to Signora Limona—pulled on our parents’ pant legs until they parted with real lira for our supply. The adults were usually grouped around some sage who knew everything because he’d had his consular interview that afternoon. The grandparents were exiled to the rim of the plaza, ostensibly to keep an eye on the children but really to spare their blood pressure while the middle generation sifted through rumor. This chaos also supplied cover for certain men and women who wished to whisper with each other without their spouses seeing.

  In the morning, everyone fled the villa—we went out of our way to use that word; when else would we get to say such a thing?—because my grandmother’s longing for her sister had reached a hysterical level. My grandfather and I went to the beach, gorging on the persimmons and pears that, heavy with a day’s heat, thudded to the ground as we fell asleep. My father went to the secondhand market.

  There, former engineers, scientists, and physicians wrapped themselves like ancients in high-quality Soviet linen and shouted, “Russo producto!” The spark kindled by my father’s time in Vienna was still fizzing—he relished the same ploys that had killed his spirit back home. Before leaving Minsk, my grandfather had “confiscated” his barbershop’s supply of aftershave, whose label claimed production facilities in Moscow and Paris. “Parizh!” my father yelled as its cloying scent drenched the air. Sometimes he sprayed his compatriots and, by pointing at his own nostrils and then their necks, urged the passing women to consider a gift for signore.

  The Soviet men had been sent off with thermoses of tea with lemon and honey and bundles of bread lined with cold cuts and vegetables, but sometimes they allowed themselves the roasted peanuts and chocolate sold by the Italians. They sat on overturned milk crates or construction equipment, shelled nuts, tested their dental work on the chocolate, and strategized. What if they took turns crowding one another’s stalls so the Italians thought something good was on sale? What about a fake bidding game? The warm air hitting their faces, they crouched and debated like hustlers, like the Gypsies they had once pitied in the open-air markets of their Soviet hometowns, like the petty-merchant grandparents upon whose lot they had been meant to improve.

  The cold cuts, bread, and vegetables in their satchels were nothing like what they’d been fed at their Roman hotels. No
matter what the wives who did the food shopping brought from the local salumerias—soppressata, capicola—the dinner table cheered and banged their forks. Mortadella had flecks of fat, like tongue, which the children prodded with their forks, hanging the giant circular slices over their noses; bresaola looked like Armenian basturma. The vegetables crunched and crisped in ways even fresh Soviet vegetables didn’t.

  In one of the bakeries, my mother found a bread—white, disklike, a swirl at the top—that looked exactly like the polenitsa my grandmother had loved in Minsk, and bought two loaves, hoping it would spell her mother’s heartache for an evening. She also bought cookies filled with chocolate, raspberry, and cream that melted on the tongue like communal wafers. One day, the counterman steered her toward a jar filled with a paste of dubious color. She shrugged—why not. It survived in the cupboard for less than twenty-four hours, the adults sneaking spoonfuls when no one was looking. Each of them meant to apprise the child of the treasure behind the cabinet door but somehow never got around to it. The Nutella did more than the Soviet-style bread to briefly turn my grandmother. Only the strange coffee the Italians consumed remained outside our ken—gleaming machines large as generators huffed and rumbled until they released a pitiful trickle into a thimble the size of two thumbs. We chased our cookies with instant.

  After finishing at the market, my father wandered the town, savoring the unfamiliar delight of not being expected at home. He especially enjoyed passing by an open-windowed bar-café whose patrons clustered at small round tables, seemingly doing nothing other than talking. No one met in a café in the Soviet Union just to . . . talk. Going out was so momentous that one could hardly bother with something so serene and prosaic.