Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  When we returned, I tried to revive the conversation about Machu Picchu.

  “What’s that?” my father said.

  When the bill came, no one fought me for it.

  “You understand, he would pay it if the meal was good,” my mother said to me quietly.

  Back at the hotel, I complained to the front desk (to anticipate the others’ displeasure? Because fifteen hours in their proximity had reinfected me with it?): I had called before dinner for fresh toiletries; housekeeping had left us with the previous guests’ half-used shampoo. (“For three hundred dollars a night . . .”) Someone called back a moment later to apologize—would we like an upgrade?

  I turned to my father—the three men were sharing a room. “Do we want an upgrade?”

  “Hm?” His face hung loose—the lips apart, the eyes puckered—as it did when he didn’t understand. “What’s that?”

  “It’s when they move you to a bigger room.”

  “Why?”

  “Just—because. Do we?”

  He shrugged. Something like that, I would have to decide.

  “No,” I told the front desk. “Just bring fresh shampoo.”

  There had been spilled cognac on the terrace of the Standard; organic chicken with seasonal fare at Talula; gelato on Lincoln Road, the night alive with its glitter and thrum; and an openmouthed tour of the Delano, even Oksana gasping at Philippe Starck’s wonder. It all paled next to the designer shampoo Standard housekeeping finally brought. “Mmmm,” Mr. Pharmacy growled softly, palming the bottles. “Nice shampoo, nice.”

  We decided to finish the night in one of the hotel’s lawn hideaways, where wicker chairs had been set up around enormous terra-cotta pots with burning logs. My father, who, because of his graveyard shift, hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, begged off, and I was relieved. Before I could follow my mother and grandfather into the nook, Oksana beckoned me over.

  “Is there a liquor store nearby?” she said.

  “I think so,” I said. “Yeah, sure.”

  She held out thirty dollars. “I’m asking for a favor,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

  They did have Metaxa at the liquor store on Alton Road, and I even found two lemons—the Metaxa chaser of choice. The drinking cups came from the free water stand in the lobby; the plastic knife for the lemons Oksana had saved from the airport. We passed around the bottle, then hid it in a plastic bag between the wicker chairs, like hoboes with three-hundred-dollar-a-night rooms. The wind occasionally flattened the flame, but the log must have been treated, and it sprang back.

  “So, Arkady,” Oksana said, turning to my grandfather. The wicker chairs were deep, and, sunk in his, he looked like a giant baby. “How long since you measured your blood pressure?”

  He slapped his knee. “How do you like that—I forgot all about it.”

  Oksana opened her hands to say, See?

  “But the dark day is looming,” my mother, a little tipsy, said.

  She meant that Oksana was about to take her annual two months of home leave. For my grandfather, it got worse with each trip. Sometimes the home-care agency sent God knows whom; my grandfather found one of his replacement aides splayed on the floor after having single-handedly emptied a rather select bottle of Armagnac I’d brought him from France. Most, however, were fine people whose only sin was that they weren’t Oksana.

  The previous year had brought an enormous Georgian with hairy shoulders. I knew they were hairy because he wouldn’t wear anything other than an A-shirt, though even that was perennially soaked by sweat. “You’re doing that wrong,” my grandfather kept saying to him. “And you’re full of shit, too.” (I tried to visit more when Oksana was away, and the Georgian kept trying out on me, an emissary from “America,” various entrepreneurial schemes: a Georgian-yogurt operation, a contraption to make tomatoes easier to grow out of a window.) Unfortunately, he came from Georgia, where rudeness to elders wasn’t permitted, so this bear had to suffer the fox’s insults in silence. He tried to ingratiate himself: At the cemetery, where my grandfather went every week to visit my grandmother’s grave, the base of which was always flecked with dried grass from the groundskeepers’ mowing, the man crawled around the burial plot like a cursed rhino, wiping and nicking while trying to avoid trampling the ground.

  My grandfather’s funereal pallor lifted only when the phone rang—it might be Oksana. He answered her questions about his health in infinitesimal detail, then asked about each of her children and relatives (a curiosity he rarely extended to my mother’s life). Once I walked in on him counseling Oksana’s son on his romantic predicaments. (“Buy her perfume and flowers. And another bouquet for her best friend.”) A mournful tally closed every phone call: “Only five weeks till you’re back.” “Only two weeks till you’re back.” “Just several days and you’re back.”

  “Speaking of,” Oksana said now.

  “Please don’t say you’re moving back for good,” my mother said.

  “No, no,” she laughed. “My sister Nadia.” She turned to me. “Do you remember? You were there when I wrote the daughter—”

  “Of the man she used to know,” I said. I looked at my grandfather. He knew already.

  “My sister did call him a week later—for his birthday. They kept talking. And they saw each other when she went home for leave.”

  My mother and I waited intently.

  “They’re getting married!” she said. “She’s moving back home.”

  We broke out in cheers, and raised another round.

  We had less than a third of the bottle left; no point in saving it. We skipped my grandfather—he couldn’t handle what he used to, and besides, he was snoring in his wicker bassinet.

  A laughing party—heels clicking the stone walkway, the flick of a lighter, the sound of Spanish—passed the small opening in our hideaway, and my warm head swelled with a new thought. New York had a larger, more diverse array of immigrants than Miami, but they lived on the margins. For the most part, New York was still run by white Anglo people. Whereas here even the “white” people were ethnic—an American city run by immigrants. That must have been part of why I liked coming here: immigrants in charge (though, critically, non-Russians). But why had I made my family come to Miami, if I was the one who felt good there? I hated them for not understanding me, but I wouldn’t leave them alone, either.

  I didn’t think I could explain this to the others, so I just reached out to meet the cups waiting for me. We drank in unison, hissed from the burn, and chased with lemon slices. I stuck out a hand and high-fived the women—perhaps I had crossed the line to drunk. Though the trip had been a resolute failure, this moment was just as certainly a reprieve. Everything I had wanted to happen at Puerto Sagua, the Cuban place, at the Standard, at Talula had not—but it was happening here. They couldn’t feel it there with me, but I could feel it here with them. They were blessed because they had the peace of knowing where they belonged; cursed because they lived in the other side’s country. I was blessed because, unlike them, I was fluent not only in American life, but our life, too. This wasn’t a birthright—I had been moving away from all of it quite effectively for some time. But then Oksana started looking after my grandfather, and cooking when we came over, and suddenly I found myself with more stomach for the family gatherings—in both senses. Her tables were the sublime distraction that allowed the old, well-grooved grievances to occasionally make room for something else. Now, sweetly warm from the fire and four shots of Metaxa, I felt a tremendous love for her, a huge gratitude. It started as a lark in my head, but when I turned to her, it came out as flatly and soberly as if I’d mulled it for weeks. I asked her whether, some year when she went to Ukraine, I could come with.

  Chapter 12

  2013

  What to cook when you’re going back home

  Borscht, let’s be honest, can be only so good.

  —Marcus Samuelsson, Yes, Chef

  Question: How do you know you’ve left the First Wo
rld?

  Answer: A queue will transform into a mad bum rush as soon as the window from which the product in question is being dispensed has, due to mysterious forces, finally opened.

  This was the situation at the Moscow airport, where the plane Oksana and I were taking to Kiev was finally boarding—after a three-hour deicing delay at JFK had forced us to miss our earlier connection to Kiev; after the Moscow terminals refused to display the gate of our Kiev flight until the last minute, though we had waited for ten hours; until that last minute was revealed as quite an early minute by the inexplicable wait at the boarding gate.

  Before I left New York, my frugality had warred against the exploitation of airport concessions. I’d carefully worked down the contents of my fridge until what remained was an unholy trinity that fit into no other meal: a pork sausage, a grapefruit, a beer. Like many such unintended encounters, the result was delightful: The sausage, roasted on a rack set above the evaporating beer, was sweet and hoppy; the grapefruit, quickly charred in a pan, tangy and improbably crunchy. So satisfying that I ate it on the spot, without thinking ahead to the wait at JFK, which became three hours longer due to the delay.

  At some point, it occurred to me to ask Oksana whether she’d brought any food to the airport—sandwiches, maybe. She looked at me like an imbecile: She had made six sandwiches. And the only reason she hadn’t made eight sandwiches was that the replacement aide said that was a ridiculous number of sandwiches to make.

  There were no greens or vegetables hanging out the sides of the first sandwich I unwrapped. The bread wasn’t even toasted. “What’s in these?” I said. She nodded wordlessly—Try and you’ll see. I made out four ingredients—ham, cheese, butter, and more butter. “That’s really good,” I said, still chewing. She only laughed. The bread was so fresh that its lack of toasting, I had to concede—I was a dedicated toaster—made the sandwich better.

  The Ukrainian airline had gone under, and Oksana and I had been forced to repurchase our trip to Kiev via Moscow and Aeroflot, which had amenities such as seatback televisions. Sighting them, Oksana, who usually flew the Ukrainian airline, pursed her lips in the way that, for a person from my end of the world, meant I can’t find fault with this no matter how hard I try. Aeroflot was subsidized by the Russian government, so it had the least expensive connections all over the world: Our airplane, in addition to Russian men in pointy shoes, zippered sweaters worn over bare chests, and thin leather jackets, had Hasidic Jews praying in the aisles (they were making a pilgrimage to the Ukrainian birthplace of a religious figure, or going on to Israel); Central Asians in headscarves (women) and gold (men); Turks; and whoever else had the fortune or misfortune to live south and east of Moscow. Though Aeroflot plied us with some of the best food I’d had aboard an airplane (even an ordinary tuna salad was tangy with a sweet-and-tart relish), I had found enough hunger during the ten-hour flight from New York to Moscow to sneak another Oksana sandwich. But no one on the plane looked at me oddly—everyone was busy unwrapping tinfoil of his own.

  Now, at the gate for Moscow–Kiev, we watched travelers to Tehran, at the next gate, board their flight in a patient, single-file queue. We had waited so long by the unmanned boarding desk, after having been summoned so urgently to it, that we had seen the Iranians replace patient, single-file Lebanese bound for Beirut. But as soon as our desk was activated by the wide-cravatted gentleman selected by Aeroflot to serve as our dictator for the next hour, the entire population-to-be of Moscow–Kiev Aeroflot 103 sprang from its seats and surged toward the desk, cutting ahead of those who had stood in line patiently for forty-five minutes.

  The Ukrainian revolution wouldn’t take place for another six months, the annexation of Crimea for six after that. In March 2013, there was nothing eventful about a flight from Moscow to Kiev. At the Kiev airport, we were made to fill out entry forms that no one collected and, though we had had to circle Kiev for an extra thirty minutes because of “all the air traffic heading in,” stood in line with the passengers of only one other flight. It was of worshippers from Tel Aviv, including a radiantly beautiful Sephardic girl in religious vestments of a cutting elegance, her pimpled teenager husband, and a sage with a promethean beard, its strands gathered into eggy coils. A middle-aged Ukrainian couple staged a protest against the expedited treatment being received by a very large Hasidic family, while “we, who would walk through in a minute, are being made to wait.” The possibility of ethnic slurs hung in the air but didn’t materialize.

  It was at this point that an animal was slaughtered somewhere in the arrivals hall. Well, no—who knew the provenance of the foul scent that suddenly settled on every inch of the terminal. It was heavy with ammonia, some combination of expired existence, unhygienic living, and bad decision-making about floor cleaners. It hung hard over passport control, over the baggage claim, the arrivals hall. The airport staff made a big show of holding their noses to demonstrate that this kind of thing did not happen all the time as they walked around doing apparently nothing at all.

  In the arrivals hall, men slept across seats, awaiting flights or recovering from a night on the town. One man, as I passed him, sprang awake and began to hiss—kss, kss, kss. I thought I was finally witnessing the first instance of the fabled Ukrainian anti-Semitism my mother had so strenuously warned me about, but then I realized that the man was trying to summon a feral cat roaming the hall.

  I didn’t care. I was giddy with anticipation. I recognized all of it. Walking down the Bowery shortly before I left, I’d come upon a drunk shouting from the middle of the sidewalk. As I got closer, I realized it was a rhyme, and a Russian rhyme at that, though I didn’t know it. He was finishing the fourth line of a stanza—a cigarette making orange trails around his head as he declaimed, his knees bent as if he couldn’t hold himself upright—but then abruptly fell silent. He’d forgotten what rhymed the fourth line with the third. As I passed him, a word that did—wrong or right, I didn’t know—floated up into my head, and I shouted it at him. His creased, bloated face collapsed into a child’s surprise, and I couldn’t help smiling.

  An hour later, at the Kiev train terminal, where Oksana and I waited to board a fifteen-hour train to her hometown of Ivano-Frankovsk—we had missed the direct—I handed the oval-shaped grandmother at the entrance to the men’s bathroom three hryvnia for the 2.50-hryvnia entry ($0.37 instead of $0.31). She didn’t have exact change: Did I have half a hryvnia, so she could give me back one hryvnia?

  “You can just take it all,” I said. She seemed perplexed, then aggrieved that I would treat money so carelessly. When I got back to the main hall, I got the right change and, feigning incontinence, returned to the bathrooms. Only this time she would accept nothing more than two hryvnia, making up for the earlier overpayment, and in my effort to get the right change to make up for that, I now had too much for this. The old woman stared at me with anger and pity. Just then someone else showed up, she got the right change, and finally, miraculously, all was settled between us. Our train was not until 3:30 a.m., hours away, but I intended to keep it in at all costs until then, because I did not wish to meet her again, and in the great halls of the main Kiev train terminal I could find no other bathroom.

  As I went back and forth, I realized they were all staring at me. All of them—the swaddled old grandmothers, with their crates emptied of berries and mushrooms, waiting for the 4:00 a.m. back to their prehistoric villages; the exasperated ticket vendors asked to do nothing more than vend tickets; the mob men stalking the halls in their dubious clothes. They were fair-haired, fair-eyed, fair-skinned; I was not.

  At 2:00 a.m., Oksana and I filed into the only dining establishment whose doors remained open, a pizzeria with cheap plastic tables and a Depeche Mode remix album on the stereo. The salad ingredients slept in the same small stainless-steel containers where a Subway kept its banana peppers and triangles of cheese, though here an ancient woman in a bandanna was hand-mixing a fresh vat of dough. Against all expectation, the sleeping vegetables w
ere impossibly fresh—the feta may have been the creamiest I’d ever had, and the pizza bianca had no reason to be that good, as they say. The stereo murmured about waiting for the night to fall. The Depeche Mode was fake, but the food was real. There was even a sign on the wall that said no gmos. There’s nothing as forgiving as a traveler’s hunger—and yet.

  I slept for nine of the fifteen hours we spent on the train. (Miraculously, it kept to the scheduled fifteen, perhaps because it was not physically possible to go any slower.) When I was awake, the train attendant attacked with tea served in those silver glass holders. Oksana tried to press forty hryvnia ($5.00) on him; he smiled shyly into his mustache and took only twenty. I ate the last of Oksana’s sandwiches somewhere in western Ukraine and rolled into Ivano-Frankovsk famished. The lesson was clear: Always make eight.

  Arriving at Oksana’s apartment, I saw the yield of her fanatical Brooklyn frugality—she had a recently renovated three-bedroom apartment that stood empty while she was in the States, her son Misha another in the same building. There was even a country house. These were luxuries in that regional city; probably no other family in Oksana’s building—twenty-eight adjoining nine-story columns in varying stages of advance and retreat, like crooked teeth, fronted by a yard of homely cars, barren trees, and a massive field of snow that sparkled indigo in the evening—had anything comparable. She was the Arkady of her city—I wondered if the other residents admired or resented her for it.

  Inside Oksana’s apartment, the Soviet period lived on—thick rugs; lace window curtains; wood-paneled cases with books, china, and religious icons; velour couches; porcelain and wood figurines of country shacks, elderly burghers, and unicorns; plants that Misha had neglected; and, on every wall, wallpaper. The small kitchen table was soon laid with plates: Oksana fried onions and potatoes in butter, untwined a cured pork loin Misha had bought, chopped fresh cucumbers and tomatoes, and set out a grainy mustard. Then the Zhan-Zhak cognac (“the spirit of France”). I was starving and bit my tongue. The food was as remarkable as the view outside the window was not.