Culinary Memories of a Happy Childhood by Danshoch Alice;

Author:Danshoch, Alice;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2019-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter V

Natalya Frantsevna’s Tomato Soup

Many of our family friends were people who lived in the neighbourhood. It was in the courtyard on Serebryany Lane that my father had met his first love, a girl called Asya, while his best friend Yury Stepanenko, who was killed during the first months of the war, had lived in the attic storey. Grandpa and I often paid visits to Yury’s mother and aunt, Elena Mecheslavovna and Sofia Mecheslavovna.

Another lady who lived in the attic storey, the reader and elocutionist Vera Vasilyevna, looked in on us several times a week, sometimes to take tea, sometimes just to exchange news and have a gossip. She was very generous to me, giving me all sorts of knickknacks that were entirely useless, but to a child absolutely essential and greatly prized: china trinkets, wooden caskets, lacquered jewellery boxes, glass beads, embroidered napkins… I was a true hoarder, and for many years, I used to carry all these riches around with me from place to place, until most of them disintegrated under the strain of multiple repairs.

Round the corner, on Bolshaya Molchanovka Street, lived Grandma-and-Grandpa’s friend Sofia Konstantinovna. Working privately from home, Sonya provided cosmetic services, brewed anti-spot soap for teenagers and made a spermaceti-based face cream which she supplied to half of Moscow. There was a regal quality in her posture and gait. She would amble slowly and gracefully about the Arbat side streets, showing off her long, shapely legs. At five foot ten, she was unusually tall by the standards of the day. Grandpa once joked that if you stood all of Sonya’s husbands on end (there had been three in all), they would still only come up to her chin. Sonya was perpetually afraid, and with good reason: her brother and her first husband had been executed in 1937, her uncle had been put in prison and her mother had become somewhat unhinged as a result of all her tribulations. If someone let loose a particularly clever witticism at the table, she would raise her eyebrows in alarm, put her fingers to her lips and whisper: “Shush, not so loud, NKVD…” She used to write little ditties to suit any situation, from greeting card rhymes to poster messages, such as:

Clean water keeps the germs at bay,

So once you’ve peed, flush right away.

Sonya had a knack for attracting misfortunes, big and small, which would promptly turn into amusing anecdotes. Once, she ended up in hospital after breaking her arm, and everyone went to visit her. One of the numerous well-wishers, a client-friend of hers, moved to envy by the sight of all the tasty offerings on the bedside cabinet, commented: “You get all the luck. All you had to do was break your arm, and now you just lie back in hospital while people bring you oranges.” Sofia Konstantinovna would be there whenever we had lunch, and Grandma would always give her something to take away with her, knowing that she was not very adept in domestic matters, had scant cooking ability and generally tended not to bother with such trifles.

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