And women, they loved him regardless. Lena, the pretty mistress sixteen years his junior, waited five years while he “sorted things out” with his second wife, Masha. Masha and Dad drank well together but sucked as a couple. That marriage officially ended in 1982 after Masha hit Dad on the head with a vodka bottle. Whereupon Dad and Lena got hitched.
Better even than no teeth, Sergei had no real employment.
Not having to report daily for sluzhba—the dreaded socialist toil—this was the unholy grail of slacker intelligentsia males of his generation.
Three years after we emigrated Sergei was expelled from his prestigious and classified job at the Mausoleum Lab. It took that long for the thick resident KGB stool to realize that Dad’s first wife was a traitor to Rodina, and that Sergei co-bottled with dangerous dissidents. Under some innocent pretense Dad was summoned to the local militia office. The two KGB comrades greeted him warmly. With practically fraternal concern, they chided Dad for losing his footing in Soviet society. Hinted the hint: that all could be fixed if Comrade Bremzen agreed to inform on his dissident co-bottlers. My father declined. His nice mausoleum boss, teary-eyed, handed him resignation papers. Dad left the cadaver-crowded basement with a sense of dread, but also a certain lightness of being. He had just turned forty and no longer served Lenin’s immortal remains.
Subsequent, briefer stints at top research centers intensified Sergei’s disdain for socialist toil. At the Institute of Experimental Veterinary Science, the Ph.D.s got fat on bounty looted during collective farm calls. The head of the Bee Ailments section had amassed a particularly exciting stock of artisanal honey. Dad resigned again, though not before pilfering a Czech screwdriver set he still owns.
Full unemployment, however, was not a viable option in our righteous Rodina. To avoid prison under the Parasite Law, Dad cooked up a Dead Souls kind of scheme. A connection landed him fictitious employment at Moscow’s leading oncology research lab. Once a month he came in to collect his salary, which he promptly handed over to his boss on a deserted street corner, keeping a small cut for himself. His only obligation? The compulsory collective-farm labor stints. Together with elite oncology surgeons Dad fed cows and dug potatoes. The outings had their pastoral charms. The bottle of medical spirt made its first appearance on the morning bus to the kolkhoz. Arriving good and pulverized, the leading lights of Soviet oncology didn’t dry out for two weeks. When that “job” ended, Dad got another, better “arrangement.” His work papers now bristled with a formidable employment record; the state pension kept ticking. All the while he luxuriated Oblomov-like on his homemade divan, reading novels, listening to opera, snagging a few rubles doing technical translations from languages he barely knew. While his devoted wives toiled.
My romantic mom defied the Soviet byt (daily grind) by heroically fleeing to zagranitsa. Dad beat it in his own crafty way.
But he wasn’t simply a crafty do-nothing sloth, my dad.
The dinner invitation that December 1987 sounded almost like an awkward, weirdly formal marriage proposal.
“I would like to… er… receive you,” Sergei told Mom on one of our walks. He meant to infuse the stilted “receive” with his usual irony, but his voice shook unexpectedly.
Mother shrugged. “We can just drop by for tea sometime.”
“Chai wouldn’t do,” my dad pressed. “But please give me a few days to prepare.” The anxiety in his voice was so palpable, I accepted on Mom’s behalf with a grinning American “Thank you.”
“Amerikanka,” Father said, touching my raccoon coat with something approaching paternal affection. Ah yes, of course: Russians never dispense grins and thank-yous so easily.
For the visit Mom wore much more makeup than usual. And she too smiled, prodigiously, flashing a perfect new dental crown. At Dad’s doorstep she managed to look ten feet tall.
Sergei had long since moved from our Arbat apartment to an atmospheric lane across the cement-hued Kalinin Prospect. His snug thirty-five-meter one-bedroom overlooked the Politburo Polyclinic. From his window I peered down on the lumbering silhouettes of black official Chaika cars—hauling infirm nomenklatura for some quality resuscitation.
I stared at the Chaikas to avoid the sight of the blond, Finnish, three-legged table. It was a relic from our old life together. Familiar to the point of tears, there was a scratch from my eight-year-old vandalism, and a burn mark from Mother’s chipped enameled teakettle—the kettle of my American nightmares. On the heavy sideboard sat the pewter antique samovar Mom and I had found in the garbage dump one rainy April, carried home, lunging over the puddles, and polished with tooth powder. My insipid childhood watercolors were up on Sergei’s walls as if they were Matisses. I noted one particularly anemic still life. The faux-rustic vase filled with bluebells had been painted by Mom.
“I think he constructed a cult of us after we left,” she hissed in my ear.
As Dad scurried in and out of the tiny kitchen in his slippers, his wife, Lena, prattled in a clear, ringing Young Pioneer voice. Unsettlingly, she had the same build and short haircut as my mother, but with a turned-up nose, far less makeup, and pale eyes of startling crystalline blue. In those crystalline eyes I saw flashes of terror. She was here: the dread First Wife. Resurrected from exile, returned in triumph, and now semireclining on Dad’s maroon divan in the pose of a magnanimous Queen Mother.
“Lenochka,” Mother said to her, “can’t you persuade Sergei to get dentures?”
We’d already unloaded the gifts. Proust for Dad, choice nuggets of ninety-nine-cent American abundance for Lena, plus an absurdly expensive bottle of Smirnoff from the hard currency store, where there were no enraged mobs.
To our swank, soulless booze my toothless father replied with home brews of staggering sophistication. The walnut-infused amber samogon, distilled in Mom’s ancient pressure cooker, suggested not some proletarian hooch but a noble, mysterious whiskey. In another decanter glimmered shocking-pink spirt. Steeped in sugared lingonberries, it was known (I learned) as nesmiyanovka (“don’t-laugh-ovka”) after Alexander Nesmiyanov, Russia’s leading chemist, at whose scientific research facility the recipe had been concocted by his savvy associates. Miraculously the lingonberries softened the hundred-proof ethyl harshness, and in my stomach the potion kept on—and on—blossoming like the precious bud of a winter carnation.
“The canapés—weren’t they your favorite?” cooed my dad, handing Mom on her divan a dainty gratinéed cheese toast.
“Friendship Cheese, cilantro, and, what, adzhika (spicy Georgian chili paste)?” she commented coolly.
“Made the adzhika myself,” noted Dad—humbly, almost abjectly—as he proffered another plate, a wonder of herring and egg thingies.
His next salvo was borscht.
It was nothing like Mom’s old flick-of-the-wrist vegetarian version, that small triumph coaxed out of tired root vegetables and a can of tomato paste. My mother was a flighty, impulsive, dream-spinning cook. My deadbeat dad turned out to be a methodical, determined master craftsman. He insisted on painstakingly extracting fresh juice from carrots and beets for his borscht, adding it to the rich rounded beef stock, steeping the whole thing for a day, then flourishing a last-minute surprise of pounded garlic and shkvarki, the crisp, salty pork crackling.