Nikolayev's Birthday

It was Nikolayev’s birthday, which in ordinary years would always start bright and early, with his best buddies tossing pebbles at his window, hinting that a new life had begun and what did that call for? A celebratory drink, or two, or three. Nikolayev, embarrassed by his own stinginess, would have been down to the district cooperative store ahead of time and laid his hands on the two prescribed bottles of store-bought vodka and some nondescript snacks like caramel candies or stale cheese with a name like “Kam-am-ber” that was meaningless to the Russian ear. And only after that, their souls cheered by the spectacle of the day breaking to a burst of birdsong, the whole troop would parade off down the main street to the motor pool and tractor depot, to set the tractors up with parts lost during the hard-fought campaign to bring in the harvest. Toward evening, they’d gather at Nikolayev’s hut, where his wife, her mouth smeared with scarlet lipstick, would sling onto the table a pot of oven-boiled new potatoes generously sprinkled with dill, use her apron to wipe off some dusty three-liter jars of pickled tomatoes, going out of her way to pick out the jar with the biggest ones, and fry some summer squash, all green and blimpy. Their daughter would be grating beetroot – also last year’s and already putting out young leaves – on grandma’s grater. Mayonnaise rarely showed up in the deliveries to the store, so the dressing would be vegetable oil.

“Put some vinegar in it,” the mother-in-law would chip in from behind the curtain that separated the kitchen from the main room. “And add mustard!”

Mother-in-law would be charged with the most momentous job of all, the slicing of the sausage. A brother-in-law, now a head honcho of some kind, would have got hold of the sausage in town just in time for the big day. Ma-in-law, with grandpa’s glasses on for good measure and sticking out her tongue with the strain of it, would cut thin, transparent little circles from the stick of sausage and lay them in a spiral on the plate. But they’d never be tight-fisted with the lard, which had been kept in the cellar since last year’s November holiday.

They would sit down at the table all prim and proper, after the men had had their smoke and the women were done hanging out in the entryway, elbowing each other and preening in front of the dim, speckled shard of mirror tacked up at an angle over the washstand. Guests would peer into the great room, bowing to the holy corner, although there hadn’t been any icons there for ages. The neighbor women, their chubby shoulders bundled in colorful triangle shawls, would survey the table and scour the room with their eyes, checking it out for something new: curtains, an armoire maybe, a chandelier? The men made little throat-clearing noises as they guesstimated how much vodka was on the table and figured out how much should still be stored up in the crawl space, given the number of folks who were there.

The first toast to the birthday boy wasn’t going to happen, though, not until everyone was served with a piece of bread. The mother-in-law would have baked a big, fancy loaf, because nobody else knew how to get bread to rise so high and look so gorgeous. Although ma-in-law was generally hazardous to other life forms, she did have a way with dough. Well, and so it wasn’t until chunks were broken off the loaf that they started on the drinking, then the dancing, then, when the dancing was over, the fighting – amiably, though, and cheerfully, and always following the rule that bans any flailing of fists indoors. Once the guests left, the wife and mother-in-law would tally up the presents (trinkets, all of them) before separating out the leftovers for the pigs and washing the plates with mustard powder in a big bowl full of steaming water. Nikolayev, the happy man, would be lying with his arms flung out, still in his jacket, on the conjugal bed, giving a rousing rendition of “The International” through his nose.

That, now, was a proper birthday, as much a collective effort as Soviet power itself. But this time, something incomprehensible happened. On that day of days, Nikolayev was left on his lonesome. And it was all because of the mother-in-law, enemy of the human race! She’d taken it into her head to haul her sizable self up onto a stool so she could take the curtains down to be washed, and what stool leg could put up with that? The leg gave way, the old gal came crashing down with a howl, and they carted her off to the district hospital, still clutching a curtain. Of course, the wife and kids went along in the ambulance, because when would there be another chance to get some shopping done in town?

Nikolayev was suffocating on his tears. But Russian men are real men, and they never surrender!

Nikolayev, in his best jacket, ambled around the messy hut. The July darkness was seeping through the uncurtained windows and crawling about every which way. Nikolayev was suffocating on his tears. But Russian men are real men, and they never surrender! So Nikolayev strode boldly to the hutch cupboard. A huge length of white fabric went on the table, with Nikolayev straightening it out nice and neat all the way around, after deciding that the tablecloth was just what the occasion called for. The stamp that read “Rgnl. Hospital No. 5” puzzled him, but not for long. After a bit of banging and crashing in the china closet, Nikolayev tracked down a complete set of dinnerware with gilded rims and worn roses on the flat part of the plates. He wiped down the pressed-crystal shot glasses with the tablecloth, lined them up by height, and for some unknown reason added a couple of blue-glass tumblers. He was going for four covers – four table settings, that is. He’d heard the word “covers” once in a TV serial about the Empress Catherine, found it inspiring, and committed it to memory. The silverware was wobbly on the table. But Nikolayev cushioned each set with cheery little napkins left over from Easter that had chicks on them.

Now to the main event. The pot with its pinkish potatoes had been sitting in the oven for ages, and a can of meat stew had been turned loose in a cast-iron frying pan. Nikolayev didn’t go all the way down into the cellar, instead just leaning in and groping around until he found a jar of pickled cucumbers sealed with a plastic cap. Then he couldn’t help himself; he opened it on the spot and shamefacedly ate the biggest one, which was entangled in dill fronds and mantled in horseradish leaves. Next came the milk-cap mushrooms, brined in a lidded enamel bucket. Nikolayev scooped them out with his hand into a glass salad bowl. After a little thought, he also grabbed a jar of cherry juice and, again for some unknown reason, a store-bought can of sprats. Last year’s pickled cabbage was out in the entryway. The wife had put it there to feed the piglet, but Nikolayev had forgotten about it. He dumped a whole lot of it into a soup tureen. He laid slices of Antonov apples, stained red from the cranberries, in a circle. Then, rummaging around like a wolf in a henhouse, Nikolayev collected even more food to put on the well-stocked table, even getting a rusty can of cod’s liver, some green peas, and two cartons of ramen noodles into the act. The vodka was no problem, because Nikolayev had his home brew stashed everywhere. There were bottles of the unforgiving cinquefoil vodka, of rowanberry vodka, horseradish vodka, and nettle vodka in the workshop, while the mild, “girly” varieties – the cranberry vodka, wild currant vodka, and suchlike – were crammed into every corner of the hut.

Nikolayev gave his hands a ceremonial wash with a clatter of the washstand nozzle, doused his neck with his wife’s perfume, and, wiping his hands, sat down at the table.

Pouring himself a nip of cinquefoil vodka into a shot glass, he filled a tumbler with the cherry juice, rose to his feet, solemnly declared, “Happy birthday to you, my dear man!” and knocked it back. Then he sat down, deflated. The bread! He’d forgotten to buy bread, and there was no big, fancy loaf. His birthday had been hopelessly ruined.