Pop, and: Talonchikovaya Vodka

Pop

He had been Austrian, he told me, and when I was young, I imagined him in Vienna, its waltzes and tankards of foaming beer. The few times I was taken to his apartment, confined to the kitchen, I would peer at the living room, always dim in late afternoon sunlight, and study the furniture, the hulking sofa and easy chairs covered in thick, cloudy vinyl, the room no one used.

Sunday mornings, when he ate with us, there were bagels, butter or cream cheese, and whitefish, lox, sardines, big cups of coffee with milk and sugar. Finished, well-chewed cigar between his teeth, he'd climb into a DeSoto or Dodge the rich maroon of gravy, one stop completed on the rounds of his three children, and disappear.

His actual birthplace, I learned, was on the frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czernowitz - city of Paul Celan, who wrote in German, Rumanian, translated Mandelstam, who, family murdered by the Nazis, fled to Bucharest, and finally, in 1970, the Seine, a suicide in Paris.

After Pop, as my mother called him, died, I studied the remote corners of Europe for a city that kept moving: to Rumania, Moldavia, Ukraine, the Soviet Union. I scanned maps for mysterious Bessarabia, which I adorned with palm trees, then the adjacent Bukovina, of which it was the capital, until I'd pinned it down: Czernowitz, city on the River Bug, Cernauti, city whose name kept changing, Chernivts, city of five languages, Cernauti, city cleansed by Nazis, Soviets, Rumanians, Cernivtsi, like Papa - the irrecoverable past tangled and clotted in the present.

Talonchikovaya Vodka

- for Maya

At the table where your father once told me "there isn't good vodka or bad vodka; there's only more and less," we talk about Soviet customs with that piquant pleasure only people who have shared the experiences of a vanished world can know. You mention a theatre in Tblisi. People went there, you say, because the food was the best in town. After the curtain went up, a waiter would drift in from the buffet and announce the first row's khinkali were ready, and the first row would file out. Then it would be the second row's turn.

In Tallinn, when I first worked in the Soviet Union, pay included the ration coupons needed to buy cigarettes, vodka, soap - so many per month. "Talons," they were called, or, more affectionately, "talonchiki." I gave the ones for soap to my landlady, and in return she did my laundry, and I traded cigarette talonchiki for soap or vodka talons.

Several years after the Soviet Union's demise, I attended a party in St. Petersburg, that name then only recently restored. The long table everyone sat around was heavy with pickled mushrooms, radish and beet salads swimming in sour cream, meat or cabbage stuffed rolls; there was good Moldavian white wine and suspect Georgian red, "Soviet" champagne, and a number of different vodkas. Guests kept arriving with contributions.

The feast had already begun when a latecomer opened a paper sack, withdrawing a half-liter of vodka, the old sort that once opened can't be resealed. Everyone grew excited. "Talonchikovaya vodka?" A nod. The bottle, a survivor of another time, was passed around and everyone filled a little glass. Maybe there was a salute to hardships endured or youth - I don't remember what was toasted, certainly not the good old days. There isn't good nostalgia or bad nostalgia.