A Cook's Tour (13 page)

How to Drink Vodka

Wrapped up against the cold in the small outer entryway of the midnight train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, I watched the faint shaking of the silver samovar of hot tea and hand-wrought silver cup holders and glasses at the end of the first-class carriage. Snow collected in narrow drifts on the floor and around the window glass as I smoked.

     It was February of the coldest, snowiest winter in Russia for a hundred years. Out there in the hinterlands of snowed-over farms and disused factories, people were dying in droves, heating oil was short, and President Putin was talking of arresting and indicting a few provincial governors who’d mishandled supply. In the news, an American graduate student had been detained for marijuana possession, the charges suddenly – and ominously – upgraded to espionage. A Russian colonel, charged with rape and murder, implicated directly by forensic evidence and the testimony of his fellow officers, was arguing for acquittal and garnering considerable support from the remnants of Commie hard-liners.

     Outside the window of my snug sleeping compartment with its triple locks, mile after mile of birch forest, snow-covered farmland, and frozen lakes swept by, glimpsed for a second and then gone. So far, Russia had been everything I’d wanted it to be.

     It was the Russia of my dreams and adolescent fantasies that I was looking for: dark, snowy, cold, a moody and romantic place of beauty, sadness, melancholy, and absurdity. In Moscow, the white-topped minarets and onion domes, the tall redbrick battlements of the Kremlin, the imperious, gloomy facades of GUM department store, the snow-smeared cobblestones of Red Square – they all looked exactly as I’d hoped they’d look. The Lubyanka – KGB headquarters and the site of the notorious prison where a countless number of Stalin’s victims had been tortured, coerced, interrogated, and finally dispatched with a single gunshot to the neck – looked strangely neutered now that Dzerzhinsky’s statue no longer gazed down on its square. There may have been slot machines on the subway, casinos everywhere, prowling hookers, and street signs sponsored by Western brand names – Gorky Street – Brought to You By the Fine Folks at Philip Morris! – but this still looked like the Russia of my fevered imaginings: dead drops, brush contacts, burst transmissions, betrayals. It was where Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, and Guy Burgess had spent their days in pampered limbo. This had been the epicenter, ground zero for all the evil in the world (according to my kindergarten teacher and most right-thinking Americans) back when I was a little kid, crouching under my desk during duck-and-cover drills, the cause of or justification for all sorts of dimly remembered madness: the Cuban missile crisis, my neighbors’ backyard bomb shelter, Vietnam, JFK, CIA, LBJ, Nixon – all the purported saints and boogeymen of my youth. I grew up thinking the Big One could come at any moment, and this country – or fear of it, the way my country reacted to the threat – radicalized, marginalized, and alienated me in ways that still affect me.

     And there was ‘Dimitri,’ my first and most important mentor and partner in the restaurant business. The first professional I knew who was actually passionate about the craft of cooking, a guy who cooked on his day off. Romantic, curious, literate, maudlin, gregarious, mercurial, he had been my first glimpse of Russia’s beating heart and dark, tormented soul. As the train chugged through the snow, I wanted a closer look at that soul. I wanted borscht,
zakuski
, caviar, black bread, and vodka. I wanted a big furry hat and snow on my boots.

A lightly padded fist crashed into the nose of an overweight lug with a crew cut, flattening it with a sickening, wet
Whapp
sound. The larger of the two men in the cage dropped back onto the canvas; blood spread across his face, running off his chin onto his chest. His opponent, a ripplingly muscled young fellow in clapped-out tube socks and faded athletic shorts, didn’t hesitate – he drove his knee twice into the fallen man’s liver and began pounding mercilessly at the side of his skull with both fists.

     The mood in the room was controlled but festive, kind of like a company cocktail party. Well-dressed women in short short skirts and backless dresses looked on from their tables, expressionless behind carefully applied makeup. Next to them, their male friends, most of a type and appearance described in Russia as ‘flathead’ – big, bordering on huge, with monster muscles bulging through elegant dark suits, low brows, brush cuts, and the eyes of underwater predators – sipped drinks and talked among themselves, the women largely ignored. The venue? I’ll call it ‘Club Malibu.’ (I still have friends who live there.) It was a modern black and chrome nightclub/disco/restaurant complex built inside an older building, sort of goombah chic, circa 1985 (like the China Club), with recessed lighting, glitter balls, big noise, and nice clothes. I was sitting ringside on a high leather-backed stool with an older guy with shoulder-length hair and one of those denim brim caps that Freddie Prinze might have worn. He spoke not a word of English and I spoke no Russian. An apparently well-known singer/songwriter, he shared the VIP table with me, close enough to the ring to catch the blood spray. I was at the VIP table because that’s what it took for me to get a glimpse of what my Russian friends sarcastically call the ‘new Russians,’ the mad, bad, and very dangerous to know successors of old Russians. In the new Russia, everything is possible. And nothing is for certain.

     It had taken some arranging to pull this evening off, and a lot of very diplomatic and circumspect negotiation. After a late-night meeting with a rough-looking but willing intermediary, and a lot of talking around the issue with middlemen, finally ‘Gregor’ showed up at a midnight rendezvous with a photo album. After a few shots of vodka and some
zakuski
, he proudly walked me through a collection of photographs depicting him with various thick-necked gentlemen holding automatic weapons; in some shots, they were stripped to the waist, their bare chests and backs decorated with tattoos of cathedrals, minarets, and Cyrillic lettering. Hearing that my associates would like to shoot video of whatever ensued, he became excited, assuring me that should we want to shoot a major Hollywood production in Saint Petersburg or Moscow, he could ‘provide security,’ make sure there were no ‘difficulties or red tape.’ He’d done it before, he boasted, naming two recent film productions. I looked closely at the photographs, determined never to make any of these guys mad at me.

     Club Malibu was set back from Nevsky Prospekt in Saint Petersburg, easy to find by the rows of gleaming Jaguars, BMWs, Porsches, and Mercedes parked illegally out front. After passing through a metal detector and undergoing a thorough, somewhat intrusive pat-down and frisk – as well as a few gruff questions in Russian – followed by a hushed phone conversation, I was led up thickly carpeted steps, vibrating from loud techno music. At the foyer to the main ballroom, where tonight’s event, No-Holds-Barred Caged Extreme Fighting and Senseless Brutality, would soon be under way, Gregor approached me like an old friend, giving me a big warm for-show hug and kisses on both cheeks before deferentially showing me to my reserved table. This demonstration of closeness and friendship, I’d been told, was very important to how welcome I’d be there. I’d worn my best Crazy Joe Gallo outfit for the occasion: black fingertip-length leather jacket, black silk shirt, black silk tie, black pants, pointy black shoes, my hair gelled into what can best be described as late Frankie Avalon, doing the best I could to look like a person who could realistically be introduced as ‘a friend of ours from New York.’

     For two hours, I sat and drank and nibbled caviar with blini, watching the most outrageously ugly and pointless violence I’d ever witnessed. The well-dressed audience, some of whom seemed in mute collusion with some of the contestants (I saw at least two blatant dives taken), consisted of a mix of flatheads and older, more distinguished fellows, most accompanied by tall, high-cheekboned, long-legged, and invariably blond women with spectacular breasts and cold, cold eyes. When one of the contenders in the ring caught an elbow to the face, foamy red sputum bubbling from his lips, I was reminded of the farm kids in Portugal at the pig slaughter as I glanced around the room. The women stared blankly at the sickening carnage.

     One poor brute after another stepped into the ring and was quickly pounded into submission. Choking, kicking, kneeing, flying elbows, head butts – almost every bout ended with one man on the mat, the other’s arm around his throat, choking off his air supply and simultaneously stomping his abdomen with both knees. I counted, at the end of the evening, two KOs, two fixed fights, and ten TKOs – all concluded by near asphyxia. It was nauseating. It was ugly. It was kinda cool.

My local contact, translator and fixer in Russia was the amazing Zamir, a genial, funny, well-informed guy with a dark mustache, a three-day-old growth of beard much of the time, and a fur-lined hat with earflaps. Worldly, experienced, fatalistic about the way things were going in his country, Zamir, on this subzero afternoon, was taking me out to experience a much-beloved Russian institution, a traditional
banya
, or sauna, the place Russians of all ages have relaxed with family or friends on weekends for ages. In this case, it was a small sweatbox in the middle of the snow-covered countryside, next to a frozen lake in the woodsy community of Shuvalovo, about thirty miles outside of Saint Petersburg. Zamir’s friend, Alexej, a musician, drove, while Zamir sat in the passenger seat. We weren’t even out of town yet, taking the corner by the Hermitage onto the road that runs alongside the Neva River, when we were pulled over by a traffic cop.

     ‘Where are your papers?’ went the routine. Apparently, there never are the appropriate papers in these instances. The cop didn’t even wait for Zamir or Alexej to search. ‘Fifty rubles,’ he announced. Grumbling, Alexej gave him a few notes, and the cop simply wrote down the amount in a small lined notebook before putting the money in his pocket and waving us along.

     We stopped at a market on the outskirts of town for some traditional
banya
treats to take along. Soon, we were driving past apartment blocks of worker flats, looking like inner-city projects of the 1950s and 1960s, and then empty spaces appeared, punctuated by swatches of birch forests, the country dachas of old apparatchiks, run-down gingerbread houses, set back from the road on untended plots of woodland behind peeling picket fences.

     The wheels of our car crunched over thick hard-packed snow as we left paved road and wound slowly through forest, finally arriving at the edge of a vast frozen lake. A worse-for-wear wooden house sat next to a small log-and-shingle cabin, smoke rising from a chimney. A rickety ice-encrusted walkway with a shaky-looking railing extended out over the lake, then descended down thickly glazed steps to an eight-by-four-foot hole in the ice, a black oblong of water one degree above freezing, already hardening at the surface.

     We were met by a red-cheeked woman in sweater and overalls. She ushered us inside and showed us into one of three tiny wood-planked rooms, each with its own inner sauna, where Zamir and I quickly stripped, wrapped ourselves in towels, and broke out the drinks and snacks: beer, vodka, dried, salty sprats, a few smoked sable fish, stiff, pungent, and still on the bone, a little dried sausage, and a loaf of dark bread. After a beer, Zamir and I stepped into the closet-sized sauna, took our places on the higher, hotter of the two wooden benches, and started to sweat. Coals glowed in the corner of the tiny room. A battered pitcher of water stood by, a thick bundle of birch branches protruding, their leaves submerged and soaking. We sat in there for a long time, sheets tucked under us, groaning and breathing loudly, and when it seemed that any second I’d pass out, we retired to the outer chamber to devour the food. The deliciously oily, salty fish and a few beers renewed us enough to venture inside again.

     Twenty minutes later, Zamir asked me if I was ‘ready for my interrogation.’ I warily assented, having a pretty good idea what was coming. Our thick-wristed hostess entered the sauna, motioned for me to lie naked on my stomach, and began savagely flogging me with the foliage ends of the birch branches. WHACK! . . . WHACK! . . . WHACKWHACKWHACK! I started with each blow – not too painful in and of themselves – because my bare chest was being scalded through the thin sheet on the skillet-hot upper bench. But it is one of my many failings that I don’t want to look like a wuss, even when medical imperative and good sense dictate otherwise, so I gritted my teeth and endured without complaint. Dead leaves flew everywhere, clinging to my flesh as she whipped and whipped, the blows coming more frequently now, more forcefully, as she informed me in fractured English of the many health benefits this treatment provided. When my whole body was a glowing, irritated red and my chest covered with angry, soon-to-blister burns, every pore on my body open to the elements, she stepped back, opened the door, and pointed to where I’d known from the beginning I’d eventually have to go.

     I paused long enough to throw on a bathing suit. While the prospect of exhibiting my genitals to Food Network viewers, under ordinary circumstances, had a perverse appeal, I preferred that they not be pignoli-sized when I did. I hurled open the outer door, jogged carefully in bare feet out onto the slippery walkway to the lake, lowered myself down two icy steps, and dropped into the frozen lake.

     To say that the experience was shocking, that it knocked the wind out of me, that it was cold would all be grievous understatements. It was like getting hit by a phantom freight train – every cell, every atom of my body went into mad panic. My balls scrambled north, headed somewhere around my collarbone, my brain screamed, my eyeballs did the best they could to pop out of my skull, and every pore, wide open only a few seconds earlier, slammed closed like a plugged steam pipe. It was a punch to the chest from God’s fist. I sank to the bottom, bent my knees deeply, and pushed up, breaking the surface with an involuntary high-pitched shriek that must have sounded to residents across the lake like someone had just hooked their cat up to a car battery. I struggled for purchase on a guide rope completely glazed over with an inch of ice, my hands unable to grab hold, and floundered, slipped, and finally managed to clamber up a few steps and flop onto the snow-covered ice.