'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. 'Too much salt,' Zoya pronounced and Olga shook her head sadly. The second insult was to offer advice in the form of a helpful suggestion. Because soups were like our lives, were like our very selves, they had to be made with a flaw. This is what Olga wished she could teach Zoya. Because only God is perfect and because good Jews like Olga know that until they see God face to face, they can never be perfect, a wise cook deliberately flaws the soup. The imperfection reminds each of them that as they drain that last drop of broth, they take that imperfection—a pinch too much of white pepper, an extra dollop of pickled cabbage, a twinge of the lavender bud—into themselves, a taste on the tongue to remind them that even good things sometimes settle badly.
The simplest of these soups is called the bride's soup, a dish Olga remembered preparing on her wedding day under the watchful eye of Ilke, her soon-to-be mother-in-law. There was Zvi, his best trousers rolled up and the guests standing behind him. Ilke brought in a basin of river water and Olga knelt and washed Zvi's feet. When she'd washed to Ilke's satisfaction, Olga drank the water, drank until she drained even the dirt. For a Jewish wife it has to be this way, taking the dust of the road, of her husband's journey, into herself so that they can carry the road between them. What words? No words, just the dust, the only true element. 'Cry out,' the rabbi canted. 'What shall we cry?' the guests asked. All men are like grass, like the flower that fades. To dust they return. 'It's bitter,' a male guest sang. 'So a kiss to make it sweet,' they all replied. And they kissed. For the first time, Olga with grains of dirt lodged between her molars.
It was just one of the many old steppe traditions that Olga wanted to teach her future daughter-in-law, whoever that might be—but this girl here, dumb as a Tula cookie, simply could not or would not catch on. At this precise moment, for some reason—God only knew why—maybe because her eyes and ears had become well turned for a disaster in progress—Olga looked up. A dark form fell past the kitchen window and landed on the heap with a loud thud.
'Good God!' Yuri jumped from his chair. Olga threw open the window. For a long moment Olga, Yuri and Zoya observed Mircha's broken body, steaming in the snow beside the heap. A disaster all right, and Olga couldn't find the words for it. All the phrases and euphemisms flapped about uselessly, overcoats four sizes too big.
'Go and bring him in,' Olga turned to Yuri at last. 'We'll put him in the bath,' she said, pulling the window closed and drawing the curtain over it.
***
Having read The Death of Ivan Ilyich several times, and being university educated, Olga took Tolstoy quite at his word when he advised keeping death in the living room in order to appreciate life. She just didn't account for Mircha's body bloating so. Normally so small and wiry, it was now at least twice its usual size. And him still missing an arm! It was as if, Olga decided as she poured the last of the three buckets of water over Mircha, that in death God made us larger to give us all a glimpse of how we might become grander in ways we'd never dreamed.
With Yuri's help, Olga repositioned Mircha in the bath. An oddity of the building, this porcelain tub. It had faux gold spigots and claw feet. It was as if the building was so ashamed of its outward appearance, that the building planners, in an attempt to suggest a grandeur of long-gone days, bestowed this strange relic of misplaced opulence. Especially incongruent now, as they had been without running water in the building for over three months.
After towel drying Mircha with a cloth made with no seams or knots, Olga and Yuri dressed him in his military uniform, though already he'd acquired so much gas they could not button the trousers at the waist and they left the service coat open.