A Piece of Meat

 

I liked Sonya Rozenberg right away. She reminded me of an old flame (and by "old," I mean someone I knew a long time ago), a girl who had left a deep, poorly healed wound in my heart. Sonya had the same languid, Semitic eyes, the same dark hair falling to her shoulders, and a stunning figure despite being middle-aged, twice divorced, and the mother of three.
We met in Moscow, where I was attending a series of one-day seminars on Japanese — a language I was desperately trying to master on my own. The seminars were run by Olga Petrovna Belousova, a tall, thin woman of retirement age.
I tried to pair these academic consultations on kanji and the tangled jungle of Japanese grammar with very practical, down-to-earth matters — namely, grocery shopping, especially for meat.

Meat is essential. Without enough protein, you’ll wither away. Just look at those African tribes with swollen bellies and emaciated limbs. At the time, I was into weightlifting — pushing tons of iron — so meat was a must for me. And for my wife and kids too; no way was I letting them grow up weak and sickly like those poor African children.
Early in the morning, I’d head to the station to catch the sausage train to Moscow. People would shuffle into the carriages, settle in, and make themselves comfortable. Some pulled out books or magazines to read during the trip. It was a peaceful scene— you’d never guess this was the dreaded crowd of “bag people” raiding the shops in the capital. At this stage, there were no telltale sacks or bulging bags. Each passenger carried only a single bag. Inside that bag? Another bag. And inside that one? Yet another. A matryoshka of bags.
The scene would be entirely different on the return trip. Passengers stormed the train cars, shoving to be first through the doors. They burst into the vestibule and raced to claim seats. If anyone had a fishing rod, it’d snap like a twig in the rush. Pregnant women didn’t stand a chance — if they fell, the crowd would trample them without a second thought. (Seriously, stay home if you're expecting.)
Once the train finally started to move, the passengers would take out loaves of bread and batons of boiled sausage. Glasses would appear as if by magic, and vodka would flow. Buzzed from the vodka and exhaustion, the passengers, now almost happy, would settle in for the ride home.

There were no toilets on the train. That meant your bladder had to endure a nearly four-hour endurance test. Those who couldn’t hold it would relieve themselves between the cars as the ties flashed past below …

The aisles and luggage racks would be crammed with bags stuffed full, some leaking blood — a sure sign of fresh meat.

Despite the grim charm of these trips to the capital, I didn’t like them. But Belousova’s seminars were the only dim torch lighting my way through the dark alleys of Japanese grammar.

During the seminars, I found myself sneaking glances at Sonia Rozenberg. That striking brunette was exactly my type. And I caught her looking at me, too — not because of my looks (nothing special there), but as a fellow translator — and not just any translator. I was fluent in three languages and tackling a fourth, one of the toughest, on my own.
Sonya, on the other hand, had no formal linguistic training — not even in English. She’d been working as a low-level clerk in some Moscow office until staff cuts left her jobless. Forced to find a new career, she chose a bold, promising path: learning Japanese. English translators were a dime a dozen, but Japanese specialists were as rare as snow in the Sahara. And the demand for them was high.
After one of the seminars, she invited me to her apartment. I hadn’t planned on visiting her, but I accepted. The first thing I noticed was the chaos — or rather, the squalor. There was so much trash scattered across the floor that stepping on it felt unpleasant (and Sonya hadn’t offered me slippers after I left my shoes at the door). I felt an almost irresistible urge to take off my socks and shake them out.

The bathroom door latch was broken; you had to hold the door shut with one hand while sitting on the toilet. Stuff was piled everywhere. I couldn’t even see any beds. Where did they all sleep? Maybe Sonya and her husband shared the couch, but what about her kids — two daughters and a son. Where did they sleep? I figured it was a temporary situation. After all, they’d just been given this large apartment because they had several children and had been living in a dormitory. Before that, they’d been in a communal flat in Kharkov, their hometown.
Sonya led me to a large bookcase crammed with an impressive library of books. My eyes immediately landed on Vaccari’s Complete Course of Japanese Grammar, a hefty and authoritative textbook. Sonya noticed the gleam in my eyes.
“Yes, it’s a great textbook. Belousova lent it to me,” she said. Then, as if reading my mind, she added, “Alright, I’ll let you borrow it for a while. But be very careful with it.”
“I’ll treat it like a crystal vase.”
Just then, her husband, Grigory, arrived. He was a lanky, brown-eyed man with a mass of tightly curled black hair — a hairstyle I’d only seen before among the Hadendoa tribe in Africa.
We introduced ourselves and got to talking. Grisha had a doctorate in mathematics and held a job in Moscow’s transportation system, designing public transit schedules. It was neither interesting nor lucrative, but he hadn’t found a better opportunity in the capital yet.
He invited me into his room, which left a lasting impression. Books weren’t stacked — they were heaped into piles. A bicycle hung from a hook on the wall, and a short-wave radio sat on the windowsill, revealing that Grigory listened to “enemy voices” on foreign broadcasts.
“I’ve got some questions about the English present continuous tense,” he said. “Can you explain it to me?”
“Of course,” I said. I did as he requested and threw in some tips about the perfect tense, along with mnemonic techniques to help him memorize vocabulary.
After that visit, I began going to Sonya’s place more or less regularly. Between visits, we corresponded by mail, translating the same short scientific and technical texts from Japanese and comparing our translations. She’d then take them to Belousova for feedback. I could see she was on the right path and would surely succeed. She had no linguistic background, but she possessed something more important: a genuine passion for the language — albeit partly motivated by financial incentives — along with a natural curiosity and a woman’s intuition. She had a real love for the language, and that’s the key to successful language study. Additionally, she’d formed a close bond with Belousova, who had begun giving her paid private lessons. With all that going for her, conquering Japanese was only a matter of time.

I started staying overnight at Sonya’s when I traveled to Moscow. Trying to cram everything into a single day had proven exhausting. My mornings were spent at the seminar, afternoons at bookstores and food markets, and evenings talking with the Rozenberg family about various topics. We spent our time together in interesting ways. Once, we even held a contest to see who could hold their breath the longest. I nearly passed out but won, managing to hold mine for two minutes and twenty seconds.
The state of the apartment, however, never improved. There were still no proper beds. The bathroom door remained latchless, walking on the floors continued to be unpleasant, the kitchen sink was perpetually buried under a mountain of dirty dishes, and there were cockroaches — cockroaches everywhere.
One day, their youngest daughter, Ksyusha, tried to fill a cup with water from the sink and accidentally knocked over a mountain of dishes. The crash echoed through the apartment.
Sonya kissed her daughter and cooed, “Oh, my little darling.”

I became so much a part of the Rozenberg family that they entrusted me with a key to their apartment. It was secured by a flimsy wooden door you could see through. Not much of a barrier, I thought. But if burglars broke in, they probably wouldn’t find anything worth taking anyway. Even the owners could barely find anything themselves.
Sonya had me sleep in the small room that belonged to her son, Pavlik, a boy of about twelve or thirteen. My spot was on the floor next to him, and I got to know him quite well. We would talk as we lay there side by side.
“Pavlik, what subjects do you like in school?”
“Math.”
“Why?”
“It’s interesting.”
“Does your dad teach you?”
“No. I’m learning on my own. He’s only Ksyusha’s dad. Masha and I have a different dad. And my last name is different — Kaufman.”
“So, you like studying?”
“Studying, yes. School, no.”
“Why not?”

“The kids there pick on me. Why do they do that? I haven’t done anything to them.”

“Do you get into a lot of fights?”

“Yeah! They hit me with their fists. But I’m going to sign up for karate lessons. You can’t let yourself get beat up.”

“That’s right, Pasha! You’ve got to be able to stand up for yourself.”

“I’ve already started training,” Pavlik said and, flipping over onto his stomach, began doing push-ups.

“Way to go, Pasha!”

“Would you like me to make you something?”

“Like what? What would you make?”

“You wear glasses. I’ll make you a case for them.”

“That would be nice.”
Pavlik made me a “case,” a little corduroy pouch, clumsily stitched but made with love. I keep it in a drawer under the TV as a fond memory of a wonderful boy.

I met Sonya’s father during one of my visits. He was gray-haired, yet not very old, a gentleman in thick glasses and a professor of political economics.
That evening, as the family gathered in the kitchen over tea, Sonya’s father gave us a lecture on political economy.
First and foremost, he assured us that political economics is the science of all sciences. It answers the most fundamental questions of life — why people behave as they do.
“All human life takes place within an economy,” he explained. “Economics is the sum of human actions. And what motivates those actions? Human greed and selfishness. But since that sounds cynical, let’s give it a more cultured definition — the satisfaction of basic needs. The foremost needs are physiological: the need to breathe, to eat, to drink, to stay warm, and to feel safe. Not even the sex drive is as strong as those. A person who is hungry and cold won’t want to procreate. Then come other needs and desires, all the way up to someone who wants to make people happy in his own way or become ruler of the world. The American sociologist Abraham Maslow developed an entire hierarchy of needs to explain human behavior based on this idea.”
I listened to the associate professor of political economy with interest, finding his arguments extravagant but very close to the truth about life.

Then perestroika hit, and the era of oddball economic reforms began. The city’s meager food supplies virtually disappeared. Stores became barren, with empty shelves occasionally stocked only with jars of seaweed —  kelp. But people still needed to live and feed themselves. With two little kids at home, Belousova’s seminars were no longer the sole reason for my trips to the capital.
I mapped out a route based on which grocery stores in Moscow were the easiest to reach. I also fulfilled a long-held dream — I bought a trolley bag on wheels. I had grown tired of lugging heavy bags that pulled my arms out of their sockets. Backpacks weren’t much better: meat would chill my back, and if it leaked, soak my shirt. The cart made my life a little brighter. One of my favorite stores was on Smolenskaya Square near the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It had a wide selection of goods (for diplomats and foreigners to see, perhaps?) and was a good place to stock up. On one visit, the queue was long and the wait grueling. Finally, I selected a nice piece of beef at the counter and approached the saleswoman in her white apron.
She took my cut, looked me in the eye, and said, “Your card?”
“What card?”
“Your Moscow card.”
“I’m not a Muscovite.”
“In that case... here you go,” she said, handing me a bare bone with a few scraps of meat clinging to it.
I froze for a few seconds. Something clicked inside me. “Never mind,” I managed to say and left the store.
I couldn’t breathe. So that’s the way it was now. If you were a Muscovite, you got meat. But if you were from another town, you got a bone to choke on? What kind of rules were those? What kind of country was this? I struggled to hold back tears.
Our city had a meat processing plant that was running at full capacity, but none of its products were on our shelves. Where were they all going? I remembered a sign I’d seen on the wall of a Moscow store: “Citizens! Let’s make Moscow a model communist city!”
I dejectedly trudged through the streets of the capital, dragging my cart behind me. I ducked into another small shop — I hadn’t traveled 200 kilometers to go home empty-handed.
The shop was nearly empty, but there was some meat on the counter. A young man approached, picked up a piece, examined it closely, then disdainfully threw it back. “Some model communist city this is,” he muttered through his teeth.
You damned city slicker! Spoiled brat! I thought to myself.
I walked over, picked up that same piece, and went to the checkout. Never mind, we weren’t proud. My family would eat it with pleasure.
I told Sonya about the incident during one of my trips. “That’s outrageous,” she said. “But don’t worry. I’ll help you. I have a Moscow card. I’ll buy some meat for you. Let’s go!”
We walked through the streets of Moscow together. Sonya had offered to help me, a stranger, a man from the provinces with a trolley bag for taking things bought in the capital back to the sticks. What a noble soul she was! I shot her a glance. What a beautiful woman! I would even say she was stunning, and she was practically a spitting image of my earlier flame. My heart pounded harder whenever I looked at her, and something else stirred as well…

She was fashionably dressed and strolling along with an air of confidence. You’d never guess that this young woman lived in a roach infested apartment, or that her children slept on a floor so dirty you’d want to wash your socks after walking on it.
We arrived at the store and found it full of shoppers! It seemed we’d have to wait. We got in line, standing side by side. We were in luck; the butcher dumped out a fresh batch of meat right in front of us. We picked out some excellent cuts. I was walking on air, and I could just imagine how thrilled my wife would be when I got back home. I was overcome with gratitude toward Sonya.
As we headed to the register to pay, Sonya turned to me. “You know, Sergey, I’ve decided to keep this meat for myself. I hope you don’t mind?”
I paused briefly — literally for just a second. But in that moment, a million thoughts flashed through my head. Sonya, you promised me! You can come back tomorrow and buy as much meat as you want. But me? I’m from a place where food is scarce. I had to travel 400 kilometers to buy this for my kids. And now, you break your promise at the sight of some meat. You’ve shown me you lack integrity...
But I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I put on an expression of mild disinterest and said, “Okay, sure. No problem.”
No problem? Inside, I wanted to scream, I’m giving you my meat. And I never want to see you again, then run and hop on the train home.
But… I didn’t. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

After that incident, I stayed at Sonya’s place only rarely, and only when I absolutely had to.
One winter, completely unexpectedly, I found myself in Moscow in freezing weather without a hat. A young businessman had pulled a fast one on me — he’d shoved me on a plane while he stayed on in Dubai to keep partying.
Where could I go? I remembered Sonya. She was clearly surprised, but she opened her door, which was still letting light shine through, and let me crash for the night.
In the morning, I overheard her husband Grigory on the phone with someone. “No, Mark Aronovich, you’re wrong there. If we expand the linear functional into matrix zones, the transverse integral will diverge from the curvilinear extremum in the integrity domain. And that won’t get us anywhere. Am I still planning on emigrating? Yes, I’m working on it. I’ve already reached out to the embassy.”

During one of my last visits, Sonya shared some news.

“Grisha’s gone for good.”
“Where to?”
“America. He’d been planning it for ages. Good riddance to that thrill seeker,” she said, then after a pause: “and womanizer. the jerk’s been running around on me for a long time.”
“What’s he doing in America?”
“He got a job there.”
“Where?”
“Some research office. Something about calculating the survival rates of lab mice.”
“Have you two stayed in touch?”
“Barely. If you’re interested, I can give you his phone number and email address.”
“Yes, please do. He has my number.”

Some time passed, and then one day the phone on my desk rang. I picked it up and instantly recognized the voice on the other end.
“Grisha, is that you? How are things?”
“Not bad.”
“Where are you working?”
“At a research lab in Virginia.”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s okay, but I’ve hit a major snag.”
“What kind of snag?”
Silence. After a long pause, Grisha finally said:
“They found a tumor in my lung. It’s cancerous.”
“What? But you never smoked!”
“Exactly. I rode bikes. I jogged.”
“Are you getting treated for it?”
“Of course. I regularly fly to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. But the cancer’s too far gone. I don’t know how much time I have left… Luckily, Katya’s here helping me.”
“Katya? Who’s Katya?”
“A new woman of mine,” he replied in English.
“What about Sonya?”
“Sonya’s in Hamburg with my daughter and my dad. They moved to Germany under the expedited immigration program for Jews.”
“And your other kids?”
“They’re in Israel. My eldest daughter married an Israeli. Pavlik’s a corporal in the Israeli army. He’s learned Hebrew and wants to make a career in the military. And you? What are you up to?”
“Nothing much. Getting older and weaker. Reflecting on the past. Writing the occasional short story.”
“So, you’re an author now? Want to be another Tolstoy?”
“No, I’m aiming to surpass him.”
“Ambitious. Send me something. I’d like to read it.”
“Okay, I’ll send you a couple. Take care, Grisha. God willing, you’ll pull through.”

I sent him two stories. One was about life at the research institute — how we would sit around doing nothing, staring at the clock, waiting impatiently for the end of the workday while listening to our boss’s endless complaints about how miserable life in Russia was and how wonderful her life would’ve been if she’d emigrated to Israel — or better yet, America. According to her, she was just as capable as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. After all, they were the same ethnicity.
The second story was about a young woman I knew very well. She fell in love and, in her naivete', did something she absolutely shouldn’t have done. She committed a grave sin condemned by every religion in the world.

Some time later, I received a letter from Grigory calling me the worst kind of scandal monger. Apparently, I’d concocted and written some vile garbage (strictly speaking, I hadn’t made anything up — I’d described a real event). He labeled me a vile anti-Semite, a reactionary Black Hundred sympathizer, and a lowlife he could no longer stand to associate with.
I didn’t respond to his letter, and that was the end of our correspondence. He never called again, and I never learned what became of the Rosenberg family.