Short Story Sunday: Raisin Pancakes

I am learning to speak English. It does not matter that I already speak Russian, German, Romanian, Polish and Hungarian. I must learn English too. I have two Bachelors degrees, one Master's and I am halfway through with another.



My family is from Kiev. I remember when the Ukraine was still under the control of the Soviet Union. I was younger, then. My father was the foreman of a factory. He had a good job and the comrades he worked with respected him and looked up to him. Everyone had jobs in those days. Yes, we had to deal with the secret police and curfews, but nobody was hungry. Nobody was too rich. In some ways it was better because I learnt to appreciate what I had. My son is living with me in Berlin now and he has more toys at the age of three than I had in my entire childhood. I don't know if this is because I never want him to feel left behind, as we were in the East. 

My grandmother remembers Stalin. She remembers the things he said, the fear he inspired. Even now, her most prized possession is her Soviet-era cookbook, which either sits on her lap or her bedside table. It was a cookbook that used the least amount of every ingredient; she said it was so that they would never again starve and suffer as they did during the years of War Communism and the Five Year Plans. She hated extravagance of any kind, but I know she broke the rules for one recipe: the pancakes.

She followed the instructions to the letter, using potato flour, butter, water, and milk. If she could spare an egg, she would add one to the batter. She would bake it in a pan on her wood stove, because frying wasted butter. The filling was the curds she scooped from the milk in the morning. She made this every year for my grandfather's birthday breakfast. But, when Stalin died and Khrushchev decried his legacy, she began to break the rules. WIthout telling anybody, she decided to mix raisins into the curds. Of course, my grandfather noticed, but he did not say anything. He thought she was trying something new, and relished the sweetness in an otherwise savoury - and bland - dish.

And when 1989 changed the destinies of the people of the Soviet Bloc, I was a teenager, determined to enjoy the freedom I had heard about on LP records or seen and lusted over in the magazines smuggled in from the West via someone's cousin's uncle's neighbour's friend, my grandmother made Raisin Pancakes for us to celebrate.

It has been almost thirty years. She hardly recognises me anymore. My mother feeds her puréed food with a spoon and she mutters about the KGB under her breath. Nobody is allowed to touch her recipe book; she even baths with it now.

I wonder what she would think if she knew about the life I've made in Berlin. I have a good job, and I can eat raisins and pancakes every day of the week if I want to. My mother tells her that I am working in Odessa, by the sea, not that it means much to her now. The thing is, we don't want to frighten her with the truth in her lucid moments. And we will never tell her that I am learning English.