The Bread and the Knife

by Dawn Drzal

  is for

  Omul

  A cheerful troop of Russian day-trippers already stands jostling and laughing on the platform at Port Baikal when our sedate little tour group arrives. We all pile onboard the Matanya, the modern commuter train that traces the southern tip of Lake Baikal along Siberia’s old Circum-Baikal Railway. The train buffs in our group try resuming their quiet discussion of its engineering marvels, but they have to keep raising their voices to be heard over the soundtrack to the video loop—which will run for the next twelve hours—and the Russians, who sound on this hot Sunday in July like a bunch of kids let out of school for a field trip. The scenery is spectacular, and the train makes a couple of stops so we can photograph the famous viaducts and revetments. At Shumikha, where we cluster to admire an arched Italian stone wall, I notice several Russians taking long pulls from a passed bottle and suddenly apprehend the reason for their unnaturally high spirits. Not long after, we stop for lunch at Polovinny, the railway’s halfway point.

  Although identified as a railway settlement, Polovinny from the platform appears to be deserted, its few tumbledown buildings sinking back into the earth. Loitering behind the others as they file down the trail to lunch, I spy a man in a cap pushing an ancient high-wheeled black pram through a field of waist-high grass to the door of an unpainted house. Who is he? Where did he come from? It is an image from a dream. The unprepossessing little trail ends, surprisingly, in an idyllic river valley, protected by low hills and larch trees that filter the light to warm greenish gold. The valley is strewn, however, with upturned rowboats, dilapidated sheds, and ramshackle outbuildings, giving the impression that when one is about to fall down, a rickety new one is built onto its side. Dotted here and there are a few well-maintained houses, shaggy brown cedar like the other structures but brightened with turquoise or green shutters. Clinging to its patch of earth like a mussel to a rock, Polovinny remains a settlement after a hundred years, seeming to defy the law of nature that says we must either grow or die.

  Lunch is served from the one unequivocally cheerful building in the valley, a blue and green peacock of a shack on the bend of the river. Bedecked with petunias, with a bright red bench running along one side, it is an oasis of color in a desert of timber. A few rough tables have been tented with red oilcloth, whose lurid glow is tempered by the sunlight filtering through a stand of white birch at the far corner. I am the last to arrive, and our group squeezes together to make room on the bench. The massive proprietress puts before me a dish of Siberian meat-filled dumplings, known as pelmeni. The main course is soup, which everyone else is already eating. There is a line for seconds. The man at the head holds out his bowl, and she uses an enamel cup to ladle it to the very brim, which seems to be expected. As he turns, a smile transfigures his weather-beaten face, but he becomes instantly grave as he negotiates the return journey to his seat, cradling the bowl in his huge, workingman’s hands and freezing after each step so as not to spill a drop. His reverent concentration is so naked that I feel embarrassed watching him: these are the actions of someone who has known hunger.

  The soup is called solyanka, which I have come to think of as Siberian borscht. It is a sort of pickle soup containing bits of beef, cabbage, salted mushrooms, tomatoes, and in this case olives, sprinkled with dill and served with smetana, soured heavy cream. It is spectacular. Also on the table are slices of brown bread and bottles of homemade vodka flavored with cedar. The Russians begin to sing, swaying shoulder to shoulder on the benches. Maybe it is the size of the soup pot, or of their appetites for food and drink, or their determination to wring the most out of the short, hot summer day, but I feel dwarfed beside them, as if they are giants from another age and my hungers are puny next to theirs. I soon leave to wander down to the lake. The angle of the sun changes before I hear them crashing down the trail, still singing, laughing and weaving with their arms around each other.

  The bay at Cape Polovinny is always described in the travel literature as warm, but warm compared to what? Zero degrees Kelvin, the temperature at which all motion stops? And this is not just any Siberian lake, it is Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world and the largest (by volume if not square footage). Whooping to rally their courage, the Russians take a running leap and belly flop off a makeshift pier into the frigid water. Our Siberian tour guide, well-padded as a Nerpa seal in her black one-piece, walks over as she towels off.

  “Dip your head in,” she says, smiling and patting my cheek with icy fingers. “It will make you young—take five years off.”

  “Off my life, you mean,” I reply. This trip is for my fiftieth birthday, which I deem old enough to make me a heart attack risk.

  The legend is that immersing your hands in Baikal will add one year to your lifespan, your feet two years, your head five, and your entire body twenty-five—unless it kills you instantly. I opt for two years and dip an exploratory toe into the gelid water. Holy crap! My arch cramps so violently that I barely manage to stagger back up the beach to a fallen log, where I massage my poor foot back to life.

  On the platform at Slyudyanka, where the train turns around, a row of middle-aged women are selling smoked omul, a whitefish of the salmon family found only in Lake Baikal. Omul is a great favorite of the Siberians, who eat it cold-smoked and hot-smoked (as these are), salted, raw, and even “with odor,” a state achieved by leaving the fish in hot sunlight for about fifteen minutes. The slightly smelly fish is then eaten raw, complete with scales and organs. There is an old joke that a man from the eastern shore goes to a fishmonger and asks, “Is this fish fresh?” Indignant, the fish seller replies, “Of course! It just came in this morning.” To which the man responds, “Then I’ll go someplace else.” I had seen ranks of omul smoking unattended that morning on a blackened brazier in Listvyanka, the village on the lake where we had spent the night.

  The American group leader and I quickly decide we’d much rather have omul than the boxed dinner offered for the return train ride, so for ten rubles, about thirty-five cents each, we buy two fish. The woman wraps them in newspaper. It is still early and hasn’t been long since the heavy lunch, but soon after we sit down in the train, the smell—which our fellow group members have been teasing us about—starts to make us hungry. Happily, all of the seats are arranged around tables. We each unwrap a fish, the newspaper making a perfect placemat. My concern about a lack of utensils turns out to be unfounded. After splitting the fish with my thumbs and opening it on the table like a book, the spine lifts clean off the flesh, leaving moist, perfect chunks from which the skin peels like gold foil. Those who came by to scoff stayed to eat. In the background, however, the infernal tourist video resumed its ear-splitting blare. To the accompaniment of the same orange wildflower blooming over and over by the shore of the blue lake, the introductory Muzak gave way first to blessedly incomprehensible Russian, then to English: … years old, Lake Baikal is the most ancient lake in the world. It is also the deepest, at 1,637 meters below sea level. Lake Baikal is the repository of one-fifth of the world’s fresh— From behind us comes a crash, a burst of wild laughter, the sounds of clinking glass. The Russians have been drinking for seven or eight hours straight now. Their raucous din combined with the music blasting from the speakers could be the soundtrack from the ball in Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death. Finally, out of self-protection, I fall asleep.

  When I wake up to use the bathroom, there is an eerie silence (or perhaps it is the silence that wakes me?). At some point the tape loop has been turned off. I turn around to see that the entire car has been felled—as if a bomb exploded. Everyone is passed out, slumped forward on the tables among empty vodka bottles and food wrappers, flopped sideways into the aisles, on their backs with arms outflung. The only sound is bottles rolling the length of the car, up and down, clinking into each other and changing course, until an announcement is made that the train is approaching Station Baikal and the dead begin groaning and stirring back to life.

  is for

 
; Passion Fruit

  It says a lot about the girl I was at twenty-one that I married the first man I met after stepping off the A train. I arrived in Brooklyn on an early September afternoon carrying just one unwieldy suitcase and a plastic garment bag sheathing a gray polyester dress with a patent leather “self-belt.” The only semi-respectable dress in my mother’s closet, it was intended for job interviews, which I prayed would be successful because I had enough money to last about three weeks. After a tearful phone call from Florida the previous week, my high school boyfriend had kindly offered me the sofa bed in his living room until I found a place of my own. Sam didn’t tell me that the living room was separated by uncurtained French doors from the bedroom of the roommate he had found through an ad in the Village Voice, so it was really the roommate who was being kind.

  When I first met that roommate, sitting on the edge of the sofa bed, I felt a flood of relief so powerful it was like the adrenaline rush you get when you barely avoid sideswiping another car. With one glance, I took in his Wallabees, his curly hair raked into submission, his bitten fingernails, the stretched-out crew neck of his green wool sweater, and, clearly visible from the living room, his lumpy single bed covered with a thin brown spread. The clincher was the miniature beer stein filled with pencils topping his scarred wooden bureau. In a split-second I perceived, with that instinct that pairs people up as unerringly as chromosomes, that here was a man who had self-control in such abundance that he would have some left over for me. He was the solution to my deepest fear, never articulated even to myself: that if I were permitted to run wild, I would put myself in danger one too many times and end up dead in a hotel room, like the heroine in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I was tempted to throw my arms around him before I even learned his name.

  From that moment on, winning Nathan over, gaining entry into his chaste and boyish world, seemed a matter of life and death to me. No damsel in distress ever engineered her own rescue more single-mindedly. Precisely because of the qualities I coveted in him, it proved much more difficult than I anticipated. He was not used to flirting, so the obvious ploys failed miserably. During a Preston Sturges double feature at the old Regency Theater, I let my favorite boatneck sweater slip down off the shoulder nearest him, and he gingerly picked it up, as if it were a small rodent, and replaced it in its proper spot. I retreated, realizing that proximity was not working in my favor, and found a roommate in Manhattan.

  In the end, the simplest strategies are best. Nathan was working as a lifeguard while studying for the LSATs, but no matter how disciplined he was, he still had to eat. In early October I began cooking dinner for him and Sam every Tuesday. They were hardly more than boys, after all, and were trying to survive on next to nothing. At the Strand, the cavernous used bookstore in the Village, I was astonished to find a small red, white, and green–striped cookbook that contained almost all of my grandmother’s recipes. It was like stumbling on a family album. It had never occurred to me that these recipes were written down anywhere—my grandmother never measured anything—or that they were made the same way by anyone else. Until I went to college I hadn’t even realized they were Italian food. What we ate was just food. But here were the dishes I had eaten all my life, collected in an abridged translation of Ada Boni’s famous Talisman cookbook. The publication had been sponsored by the Ronzoni company, whose products were embarrassingly plastered all over its pages, but I found it reassuring to be able to find recipes almost identical to my grandmother’s for spaghetti and clams, braciole, baccalà with green olives, and eggplant parmigiana. After a month or so, I decided to experiment with some dishes from the battered first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking I had also picked up at the Strand. In mid-November, over a winy boeuf en daube, Nathan announced that the following week would be the last that he could come to dinner. Starting after Thanksgiving, he said, he would be devoting himself completely to studying for the LSATs. I felt stricken. I knew enough about him to realize that once he disappeared into a new and even more stringent routine, I would never see him again. Or rather that when I did, it would be like seeing a stranger. It was next week or never.

  I met Sam a few days later to give him a set of keys and instructed him to arrive a little early the following week with Nathan. I didn’t share with him that I’d decided to orchestrate my entrance like a heroine of those romantic comedies I’d been overdosing on at the Regency. That Tuesday, wearing an ivory felt hat with black trim, a long string of pearls, a box-pleated skirt falling just below the knee, and pale gray T-strap shoes, I burst breathlessly into the apartment, my arms full of thirty dollars’ worth of flowers that I couldn’t afford.

  Sam, not quite immune to my charms, exclaimed, “Oh, you look like the young Barbara Stanwyck.”

  “I was trying for Audrey Hepburn,” I said ruefully.

  “What?” said Nathan, rubbing his eyes.

  So I engineered another strategic retreat, dredging up my long-dead desire to be a lawyer, and asked Nathan if we could study for the LSATs together. OK, I thought, perhaps the way to this man’s heart is not through his stomach but through his brain. When we finally did get together, soon after, it seemed so natural that I can’t remember how it happened.

  Surprisingly, Nathan brought me home to meet his parents over the holidays, not that they celebrated the holidays. We’d been going out for less than a month. I quickly realized from random comments made by his mother and twin siblings that I was his first real girlfriend. At dinner, his mother grilled me on politics and feminism under a flame-red Danish lighting fixture while his father tried unsuccessfully to deflect her with mild witticisms. I’d known Nathan long enough to be sufficiently familiar with the party line to pass muster, but by the end of the meal I felt utterly depleted. I escaped to my room on the third floor to recuperate in a hot bath. Almost immediately, there was a knock on the bathroom door.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I’ve got that book on suffrage in Victorian England I mentioned.”

  “I’m in the tub,” I sang out, trying to sound far away.

  “I thought you might like to take a look at it,” she persisted.

  “I’ll get it when I come out,” I replied in a tone I hoped was both sprightly and firm.

  “No, no,” she said, “I’ll hand it to you.” And she opened the door and walked in.

  There was only one tiny washcloth within reach, and I couldn’t figure out which part of me to cover with it—left breast? Right? Pubic hair? I kept switching from one to the other, thus giving her a look at everything, while she very coolly checked me over. Then she laid the book on the mat and walked out.

  My former mother-in-law’s breathtaking intrusiveness goes a long way toward explaining the defining quality of my former husband, a profound emotional and physical obliviousness. He wasn’t an inconsiderate person, but everyone who knew him learned from painful experience that it was necessary to perform a grown-up version of baby-proofing before he came over, moving fragile vases from end tables and putting away the crystal. Sometimes he reminded me of that cartoon character from the sixties, Tobor the 8th-Man, whose enormous feet crushed every object in his path. He was also completely deaf to hints and subtleties of all kinds. It was as if he had gone deep underground as a child to escape his mother and had never reemerged. The only way to keep her from ferreting out his inner life was to make it inaccessible even to himself.

  Of course, it was precisely this flaw that made me comfortable. I chose him as much for what he was blind to as for what he saw in me. It gave me a kind of privacy. At the same time, having appointed him the jailer of everything I feared in my own nature, I was bound to rebel against him eventually.

  Almost exactly ten years after that Brooklyn afternoon, I found myself standing in a Manhattan publishing office handing a massive three-hole punch to another editorial assistant and asking her to hit me over the head with it so I could go home early. When she realized I wasn’t joking, she confided her worries about my mental state to h
er boss, who spoke to mine, and some vacation time was arranged. My mini-breakdown had only partly to do with keeping afloat an underqualified woman who compensated for Olympian procrastination with pyrotechnically face-saving strokes of brilliance. The other part was that I was miserable at home.

  Nathan had a judicial clerkship in Hartford, so we lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, one hour from his job and two hours from mine. I hated our first-floor apartment in a little house off the Black Rock Turnpike—beige aluminum siding outside, beige walls and carpeting inside. I was exhausted from commuting on Metro-North six days a week and working at home on the seventh. Most of all, I deeply resented him for having taken a position three years earlier at a law firm in Boston, his hometown, when he had been offered an equally good one in New York. I’d had the perfect publishing job and should have stood my ground, but I followed him, and in order to restart my publishing career I’d had to enter one rung lower than where I left off. It is shameful to realize I was so incapable of living on my own that I opted to torpedo my own career rather than take a stand that didn’t even harm someone else.

  The moment I heard I had a week’s vacation, I was on the phone to my mother, a travel agent. Despite my being extraordinarily badly paid for my labors, she was able to book me on a “fam” trip to Margarita Island, the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” off the coast of Venezuela. Eight days and seven nights at the new Hilton resort on the beach, airfare and all expenses paid, for two. “Fam” is short for familiarization, and twenty-five years ago it was one of the great boondoggles of the travel industry. All I had to do was pretend to be a travel agent and I could go for next to nothing—room, board, tours, etc.—in exchange for recommending the facility to “my” clients when I got home. Or not. There were no strings attached. My husband said he couldn’t take off work at such short notice, so I invited my friend Nancy.