The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight Read Free Page B

not to mind the fact that Zoya spent much of her time in the kitchen, filing her nails, as she was doing at this very moment.

    'Who is making all that noise?' Zoya looked up briefly from her nails.
    'Mr Aliyev. On the rooftop again,' Olga said, bending for her jars of schi stacked under the sink. It was extremely rude to point her backside toward Zoya like that, but it was just the kind of mood she was in. Who invited this girl into her apartment? Not Olga, and as the girl had done little to familiarize herself with the kitchen and how to cook or clean in one, she was for Olga simply one more adult-child to care for. Olga emptied the soup into a large pot, slid it onto the ring and waited for it to burn bright red. Now that Sabbath had crept in on the hem of dark, they'd say a prayer, as good Jews should, and eat the soup. And like turning out her pockets by a river, the badness of the days of that week would leave her, if only for a short time. But then the soup heated too quickly in some places, not enough in other. The cabbage despaired in the pot, turning tired and stringy. It was a very bad sign, the soup being life itself.
Cabbage and schi, that's our life.
An old saying she'd learned. She used to know so many more of the sayings,
but now they'd flown away from her. And Olga stamped her feet and fumed quietly.

    'What the matter, Mother?' Yuri looked up from his fly, which for all the world looked to Olga like a silly wad of ratty hair wrapped around a paper clip.
    'Nothing.'
    Zoya sniffed mightily in the direction of the pot.
    Olga scowled. 'Pay no attention. It's just the soup.'
    Yuri swayed on the chair slightly. And if it's good...'
    '...you don't need anything else in this world or the next,' Olga finished the saying. There. That's what she was trying to remember. Another thing about schi: it's a winter soup. You put it up in summer and let it sour through the autumn. Then in winter, when the stomach turned nostalgic, you ate it, a little at a time, stretching it through the months until May when the first cabbage of the season could be planted. Her mother taught her these things, and told her it was every woman's responsibility to teach at least one other woman how to make it.
    But it was so hard to pass on the bits of knowledge, the traditions, to people who did not care to learn them. Olga studied Zoya from the corner of her eye. Yes, the girl was good looking, hair dark as Voronezh soil. But she'd not cultivated in herself any curiosity whatsoever about the past, and little concern for the present. The girl, it seemed, lived entirely for industrial cosmetics. Olga turned back to the pot, quietly muttering her disapproval.
    'Why not consult a cookbook?' Zoya tapped a pointed fingernail against the glossy varnish of the wooden table.

    Yes, all in all it was a bad day. And now this: opinions. Olga sighed loudly. But Yuri, busy tying flies for an imaginary fishing rod, didn't seem to notice. 'I don't trust cookbooks,' Olga stated.
    Zoya started in on another coat of varnish. 'You only say that because you work for a military newspaper. Naturally, then, you are suspicious of all print media.'
    Olga clamped her jaw and ground down on the molars. The girl was right. A cookbook was a fantasy, another form of a lie, promising things that could never happen in ordinary kitchens: that an onion sliced a certain way would not weep and neither would the cook who cuts it, that a miracle will boil up from beans if only one remembered to throw off the first three farting waters. But, as any well-seasoned cook knows, the best recipes cannot suffer being placed on permanent record. These recipes, many of them containing guarded family jokes, curses, blessings, and secrets, were never meant to be written, and certainly never meant to be read. This has to be why, Olga deduced, in the steppe culture of displaced Jews, the ultimate insult was to compliment a woman's cooking by asking for a recipe.
    The pot boiled over and hissed.