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March 8, 2005
S 8 marta!
Has it really been a year?
Last International Woman's Day I was in St Petersburg. It had been fifteen days since I'd arrived in Russia, twelve days since I'd met my then-boyfriend, and eight days since I'd kissed him for the first time. I remember we had sushi on Nevsky Prospekt, and then he bought me a salmon-coloured rose at the metro florist's, who had dutifully tripled prices for the occasion. (The fresh-looking bud had obviously been injected with some kind of magic Russian embalming fluid, because it withered literally hours later.) I bought a white rose for my host mother and then we parted, as we both felt we should put in an appearance at the prazdnichnyi stol (festive table) of our respective host families on this most important of still-observed Soviet holidays. On the way home, a man tried, unsuccessfully, to steal my wallet. Attempted robbery of a woman on Woman's Day - what better way to mark the occasion?
I arrived back in Petrogradskaya in time to pretend to eat some gritty plov and a very questionable pod shuby (beet-blushed pickled herring in "fur coats" of mayonnaise), to drink glasses of sweet, potent homebrew and what passed for cognac to toasts I couldn't understand. I was still at the stage where I could make out no spoken Russian at all - my aging host parents' weatherbeaten guests gave up trying to ask me questions, and discussed me pityingly. My host mother brought out a succession of variously-shaped home-baked desserts, identical in sickly flavour. I smiled and said "Vkusno!" to everything that was offered me, and picked out the dog hair as discreetly as I could. (Gyeza, their Alsatian mix, slept on the kitchen floor.)
A week later I had just about had my fill of waterlogged rice and hairy pelmeni, and announced to my host family that I was going to make dinner. I spent several hours making what I thought was a masterful little chicken stew, with a mirepoix base and a red wine reduction, which I served with penne. I should have made a salad, but I'd already spent more than 700 roubles on groceries at Paterson's expat trap on Sennaya Ploshad' (probably the world's only shopping mall to make a feature of looking onto squalor - "But it's Dostoevsky's Petersburg!"), which might have bought me 35 packs of Camel Lights or a bit of time with at least one HIV-positive Vosstaniya hooker.
My host father and sister immediately splattered my sauce with Mechta Khozyaiki (Dream of a Housewife, which always sounded to me like a Soviet realist ballet) mayonnaise, which comes in the same kind of pouches they use for IV drips. My host mother picked demurely at her portion. My host sister's husband, bless his soul, not only refrained from polluting my sauce with condiments, but wolfed his down and asked for more. But then he was the family daredevil who liked a bit of Tex-Mex now and then. It wasn't a huge success, and the next day we resumed our basically unchanging menu of kotlety, pelmeni and black tea. I moved into my own apartment a fortnight later.
Happy Woman's Day. Za lyubov'.
Posted by michele at March 8, 2005 10:44 AM