Goin’ my Way on the Carrot Highway

Nov. 17
Oh man, today was such an amazing day. I don’t even know where to start. After spending pretty much the past 2.5 months trying to make all of my activities last as long as possible, with nothing to do really, I spent today sprinting about in all directions, and the feeling of hurry was so unexpected and enjoyable. And then, aside from that, the insanity factor of the day just continued to rise as the day went on.

First for some foreshadowing: A few days ago, Valentina Petrovna came home with a little container with a cabbage and carrot salad, rather like coleslaw but with big chunks of cabbage. She remarked on how much she liked this salad, and said she was going to ask her friend for the recipe. Yesterday she told me that Tatiana was going to bring over some cabbage. Later she said she wanted to go to Listvianka this weekend, but she had to prepare the cabbage. I thought this was a strange reason to delay a trip to Baikal, boiling a cabbage. On to the day.

I woke up at 9:30, and I was supposed to be at the Central Market at 10:00 to go to the orphanage to... well, I actually had no idea what I would be doing, but it takes 20 minutes to get downtown, so I didn’t have much time to think about it. As I said, I have not been in a hurry for a while, so it was actually sort of thrilling to rush out the door without eating breakfast. I was especially pleased to run out past Valentina Petrovna’s sort of surprised eyes seeing as how she had designated yesterday as “day to lecture Susanna at great length about how she is squandering her youth and should be doing things other than reading and writing, interspersed with a recounting every inspirational fable on any subject she can remember having read.” Actually this lecture was sort of amazing and I would recount more of it but it has been driven out of my head by the events of the day. It involved the romantic potential of hydroelectric dams. Anyway, after an interesting ride on the trolleybus, which I hardly ever take, I got to the orphanage, along with Natasha and Ivan and this super-cheery Russian girl from the Irkutsk Rotary Club, which is I think is our link to this orphanage, and Mary, a girl from Mississippi. And then we played with various small children for an hour or two, and that also had a satisfactorily frantic pace. Russian orphanages seem like the sort of thing I should be describing at greater length in a blog about Russia, but I don’t really have that much interesting to relate; we were in two different rooms, one with 5 kids I think and the other 8 maybe. And I guess they were about 3 or 4 years old, and they were the same as all other kids, except maybe less shy and more attention-hungry. We’re going back tomorrow. Anyway, we with difficulty extracted ourselves from them when they had to go eat lunch, and then we ourselves went and ate lunch, at a place called MacFood’s, where I had an approximation of a cheeseburger. Then I went home, expecting a slower afternoon, perhaps including a search for the main university library, or going to the reading room of the library by our apartment. But such was not to be.

When I got home, I found Valentina Petrovna in the hallway sorting through... well, basically a hallway flooded with every single thing in the apartment, pulled out from its previous place and piled up around her to waist height. I just sort of gave an alarmed look and then went and took a shower. I read a few pages of homework. I got hungry, and went into the kitchen to eat whatever we call meals eaten at 3:00. Valentina Petrovna came in to drink coffee with me, and told me that Tatiana (her oldest daughter) was coming over to deliver to deliver some cabbage from her garden. I nodded. This sounded normal. Then, however, she decided that Tanya would think she was crazy if she came and found the apartment in its current state of reorganization, so I happily joined in a frantic campaign of throwing everything from the hallway into a closet and forcing it shut. Then Tatiana called that she was there, and we rushed downstairs in our slippers. Her whole family was in the car, as were more cabbages and carrots than I have ever seen in my life. It was like a clown car, more huge sacks of cabbage and carrots just coming out, and we all, for some reason, rushed about as fast as possible pulling these sacks out of the car and pulling them into the building (2 people per sack), and then into the elevator and upstairs and into the apartment; I’m not doing a very good job of describing the level of chaos here, with 6 people taking over the apartment building with their frantic vegetable moving, and Valentina Petrovna at every opportunity grabbing a grandchild and kissing her and everyone talking very loudly at once. As soon as all the vegetables were in the apartment, Tatiana and family rushed out as quickly as they had came, leaving us with... I’ll try to post a picture. Our house has been totally taken over by cabbages and carrots. So then Valentina Petrovna said “We only have a half hour before the poetry concert to clean carrots!” and we started a frantic carrot-peeling campaign. We huddled over this bucket of carrots on the kitchen floor, peeling away without really making a dent in the carrot supply, until it was decided that “Agh, we have not time, get ready to go to the Philharmonia!” so we did that, at top speed, and left the kitchen covered in carrot.

And then we were at the Pilharmonia. Ivan was also there. It was fun being there with V.P., as she is a member of the Irkutsk artsy/musical elite, apparently, so she knows everyone and we didn’t have to pay and then coat check people were very nice to us and so on. I had never been to the Pilharmonia building; it’s really the prettiest concert hall I’ve ever been in. It has just the right level of grandeur, it’s not all that big (I think it seats about 300); I don’t really know how to describe it, but it’s just a very pretty little room, light blue and white with dark a deep, dark blue curtain on the stage. It’s a particular kind of beauty that we don’t have in America, and I don’t really know why, but has to do with not trying too hard and state sponsorship of music. The concert itself was a poetry reading by a friend of Valentina Petrovna’s, with piano music by another friend of hers. Actually I think they were both friends of her late husband’s. The poet was in his sixties, probably, broad-shouldered and trim and healthy-looking and generally glowing with good-naturedness, and in the first half of the concert he read short poems about composers before, well, the pianist played a piece by that composer. Much more of the concert, exp. the first half, was the pianist, and this was really one of the most remarkable musical experiences of my experience. The pianist could not have been more unlike the poet; he looked like an old, lean, hungry wolf. Actually he physically resembled Ralph Stanley, but he played with a ferocity I have never seen; without sheet music, he glared into the piano and banged away on in, each note accompanied by a dramatic rise and crashing fall of his stiff old claws of hands. He leaned into the piano and away from in, moving his mouth to a silent but intense “bum-bum-bum” accompaniment. After a set of Beethoven and a set of Chopin and a set of some other person who I’ve never heard of but Vanya has, he played Gershwin, and it was sort of unsettling hearing Gershwin melodies sound like a predator skulking through the underbrush and then leaping out in a loud, fierce, flesh-rending attack. In the second half of the concert the poet talked more, and read more poems, and I almost understood what was said and stopped thinking of the poetry segments as an unwanted distraction from the amazingness of watching the wild old pianist. Gammie, you had a poem dedicated to you, as one was for “my grandmother and all of your grandmothers.” I think it involved these grandmothers’ being the saviors of Russia, which may not be a role in which you typically see yourself. I don’t know how good any of the poetry was really, as I didn’t understand enough of it, but it was all very pleasant, and he was able to make the Russian audience smile and act comfortable in public, so I was very impressed by him. Gregory, you now have a signed book by this guy, and you had better appreciate it, because acquiring it involved a certain amount of getting laughed at for my incomprehensibility in Russian by the poet, his wife, and a large number of other well-dressed and intimidating Russians. As for the music of the second half, the pianist was joined by a bass player, so the interestingness was diluted, but they did play “I could have danced all night” from My Fair Lady, which sort of made my night, especially hearing it not only played but savagely attacked with 52 white and 36 black keys. They also, for those of you who have seen this movie, played “potemlonie sontsye,” the song that ends “nyet..tu lyubvi.”

On the bus ride home, I remarked that I was hungry, and joked “good thing we have lots of carrots!” Apparently this was not actually a joke. When we got home, without changing clothes or anything, we got out this huge, ancient food processor and started shredding all the carrots we had peeled and dumping them into a big metal bucket. Then we piled our plates with shredded carrot and poured honey on it and ate it for dinner. It was good, I guess, but mainly just strange. While we were eating, V.P. said “Oh! We should have gone to the store today! We need salt to do the cabbages.” “Well,” I joked, “Everything Will Be Ok Hypermarket is open 24 hours!” This was apparently not a joke either. V.P. ate quickly and started in on the frantic carrot shredding again, and as soon as I was done washing dishes and started to leave the room for my camera, to photograph the growing mountain of shredded carrot, she said “Sonya! Salt!” And I went out to buy salt at 10 at night. There were a lot of people in the store at that time, actually, but they were all buying vodka. Anyway, I as I approached the apartment with my bag full of pounds of salt, I knew that big events were taking place within. The smell of cabbage was clear from the moment I left the elevator. And sure enough, the carrots had been shredded (only the ones we pealed, maybe 1/10 of the huge sack we still have in the hall), and we had moved on to cabbage. For the next two hours I cleaned and chopped cabbage and fed it into the food processor, while V.P. spread it out on a big counter and salted it and mixed it with carrot. As was the case most of the day, I have no idea what the hurry was, but we acted like we were going for the international cabbage-salting record. My hands are going to be sore for a while. We only stopped when the big vat we were dumping the final product in was too overflowing. Tomorrow, I’ve been promised, we will make a different kind of salted cabbage, and we will do something with carrots. And we will make various other dishes I’ve never heard of. In the words of Valentina Petrovna, “we will engage in housekeeping with cabbage!”

Ok, this may not seem like as exciting a day as the first paragraph promised. But it was wild and crazy at the time, let me tell you; nothing like a cabbage-salting in Siberia to get the adrenaline flowing.