Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

My grandmother had grown up in a country where, for all its promises of communal living, there were very few public places to get something to eat. If you were not able to cook, and cook frugally, make the most of the paltry ingredients available, then you would go hungry. You had to cook or you would starve.

So maybe I could finally change. After breakfast I placed pen and paper before my grandmother and demanded a shopping list. I was going to make kotlety and potatoes, plus potato soup. This would provide us two or three days of food, depending on how quickly we ate the kotlety. Then I would cook again.

In her large round hand my grandmother produced a list: a kilogram of meat at the basement butcher’s on Sretenka, preferably with not too much fat in it, a loaf of bread, and milk—the bread was cheapest at the bakery on the boulevard, my grandmother said, and milk was cheapest at the so-called market. For potato soup, a quart of milk and two kilograms of potatoes, also cheapest at the market. Onions and flour we had.

I considered disobeying her instructions as to where to buy what but knew that she’d be able to tell, and so I went to the butcher on Sretenka, the bakery on the boulevard, and finally the market. Then I returned and laid the groceries proudly on the counter. Sitting in her chair at the kitchen table, my grandmother instructed me in the grinding of the meat—I cut it up and then trimmed it of as much fat as possible, something that was difficult to do because the fat was thickly intertwined with the meat, so that after picking at it with my knife and ripping off a certain amount with my fingers, I gave up. I began to grind the meat, mixing in bread and a little bit of milk as I went. The meat grinder was manual, meaning I had to turn a handle like in olden times, and I enjoyed this until, about halfway through our cut of meat, the grinder slowed down. Then it stopped. “What happened?” I asked my grandmother.

“The fat has gummed it up,” she said. “You need to take it apart.” I took it apart and laboriously scraped off the fat. Then I washed it and put it back together again. There were only a few parts to the meat grinder so it wasn’t complicated, but getting one of the smaller iron fittings back in place took a while.

Eventually I had ground the kilo of meat, half a loaf of white bread, milk, and an onion into a ground beef mixture. That turned out to be the easy part. Next I covered the countertop in flour, caked my own hands in the flour, like an Olympic weight lifter, and with these floured hands rolled the ground beef into little spheres. “You don’t want them too small or too dense,” my grandmother instructed. In the end, unfortunately, they were not dense enough, and when I put them in the frying pan, they began to crumble. I watched over them with trepidation and tried with a wooden spatula manually to solder back the pieces that were falling off. But this was not possible.

In between these activities or after them my grandmother taught me how to make kasha. I had not known. Kasha, or grechka, buckwheat, was the staple of the Russian diet, eaten in the morning with milk, in the afternoon with kotlety, in the evening in little buckwheat cakes, if you were lucky. Without kasha there was nothing, and until this day I did not know how to make it.

Kasha was easier than kotlety. You take a cup of kasha, pour it into a small pot. Pour cold water over this, to let the dust and kasha bits burned during the roasting process rise to the surface; drain the water; rinse once more; then pour twice as much boiling water on this as you have kasha. (This first time and several times after, I showed it to my grandmother, who eyeballed the level: good.) Place on a burner and bring to a boil (about three minutes); now mix in butter and salt and lower to a simmer; cover. In fifteen to twenty minutes, you have perfect kasha.

To watch this happen—to be the vessel through which kasha is brought into the world, after a lifetime of eating it—how to describe this feeling? Tolstoy had eaten kasha; Chekhov had eaten kasha. With the power of kasha in my hands, I needed to rely on no one ever again. I still make kasha just about every day.

But that was my one success. The kotlety fell apart, as I’ve said, and my grandmother’s simple potato soup recipe—potatoes, some water, some onions, some milk—ended up too watery. (And yet, to be fair: I made soup.) We ate the food quietly. Before we sat down, after I had finished cleaning all traces of flour from the kitchen, I looked up at the clock. It was a few minutes past four. I had started the grocery shopping at nine in the morning. In its entirety the process had taken seven hours; these flaky kotlety and the watery soup would last us three days, more realistically two if I came home hungry after hockey. Then I’d be off to the grocery store again.

My grandmother ate the lunch with some gusto. “I need to get my strength back,” she said. “The only way to do that is to eat more.” I hadn’t seen her so cheerful in a long time. But soon a shade of worry once again crossed her face.

“Andryush,” she said. “This will last us two days. Then what will we do?”

That evening I looked up an old email from Dima to find the number of a woman named Seraphima Mikhailovna—she used to come clean and cook for him when he was in between wives. Seraphima Mikhailovna agreed to come by the day after tomorrow. She turned out to be a gregarious former math teacher from Ukraine, whose town had stopped paying salaries to schoolteachers years earlier, and she cooked a terrific batch of kotlety and mashed potatoes and borscht that would last until she came again three days later. Her kotlety were good, and her borscht was even better. She charged five hundred rubles per visit, or sixteen dollars, plus supplies, which she picked up herself. It was a good deal. Initially my grandmother found it a little trying, having this relative stranger in the house doing what she used to do and having, my grandmother felt, to supervise her. “Oy, it’s exhausting,” she said. “To cook and clean yourself is intolerable. But to have someone else do it is exhausting!” Still, she grew used to it. And as long as Seraphima Mikhailovna came to cook and clean, my grandmother never asked where our next meal was coming from. It was in the fridge. It was taken care of. That was the end of my experiment in good housekeeping. Aside from making kasha, I still haven’t learned how to cook.

BY THIS POINT two weeks had passed since Sergei’s party. It’s not that I thought Yulia would forget me, exactly. But I did worry that whatever spell had been woven or whatever illusion she was laboring under so that she would kiss me at a party would be broken if any more time passed. And then it was broken. On Friday morning, the first day after the advent of Seraphima Mikhailovna, I texted Yulia asking if she wanted to hang out the next day, a Saturday. I suggested, since it was so cold, that we could go to the Tretyakov museum.

Yulia did not text back right away and I opened my laptop on the windowsill to check my email. The first thing I saw was a message to the October list from Misha with the subject line “Urgent.” I opened it. “Guys,” read the email, “last night our old comrade Petya Shipalkin was arrested during an action against the FSB. I know we’ve had our differences with him but none of that matters now. He’s being held at the precinct on Sretenka—if you’re able, let’s meet there at noon and show our support. There will no doubt be some Mayhem people there—let’s try to stay out of debates for now and just show our solidarity.”

The uncharacteristically somber email from Misha went on to describe logistics and share phone numbers. I wrote them down on a notepad but the entire time I was thinking: Shipalkin. Fucking Shipalkin. This was why Yulia hadn’t texted me back. If she had—if she had texted me to say this had happened—that would be one thing. But she had not.