Kishki

Valeriya Epshteyn (2023)

As I sleep, my late mama maneuvers up in my brain, curating my dreams with a clunky Soviet-era slide projector. The stories collage the real and surreal. One night, I’m reliving the bizarre sensation of biting into a piece of chalk in my right hand that preschool-aged me confused for a cracker in my left, contorted with a startling fiction of my babushka slicing her face with a glass shard on the grounds of a bombed-out Ukrainain tenement. Another night, I’m racing down the dim apartment hallways mama cleaned for a living, but the sagging brown carpets distort gravity and I’m terrified, able to just barely moonwalk my way towards my destination.

As I wake, mama leers at me in her worst form: Jaundiced, lazy-eyes, a decade after the Recession. I’m on the toilet too long, triaging work emails, ignoring that I'm having diarrhea for the fifth day in a row, internalizing imagined implications in hasty messages from colleagues. When she’s lucid and caring, mama lurches towards my phone to prevent me from self-sabotaging. Most other days, she viciously urges me to agonize over a missive I sent yesterday before wiping.  

As I cook, mama reminds me to clean as I go! She mocks the now-permanent puddle of melted plastic on my stovetop, scolding me for using a non-wooden utensil, something only a stupid American would do. She interrupts her nagging with a soft apology for the time she accused me for being too good for canned meat and dumped an entire pot of stew on my head after I noted that her hair was in it. It’s like morse code for people coping with intergenerational trauma. Dot dash dot -- fuck you I love you fuck you.

As I eat, mama sits atop my chest freezer, her impossibly long legs crossed at the knees and ankles. She doubts I’ll ever grow enough food to store in the freezer, and says so while spooning roasted red pepper flavored hummus and German cookie butter bought on sale into her mouth -- her sole nutrition of choice in the years just before rehab. I feel my bowels loosening under her ferocious stare.

As I garden, mama stills a bit. It’s easier out here for us both, but still strained. She rushes to the flowering lilac bush and urges me to snap a picture to send back to Natasha in Kyiv. She exhales longingly and muses loudly in Russian about the majesty of Springtime. I rush to the house with a few freshly harvested cabbage heads and a scowl, embarrassed by her emotionality. 

As I prepare sauerkraut, she laughs shrilly and says in her mother tongue, “Complex systems are more resilient, which is why Americans call ferments superfoods! They simply increase the diversity of the microscopic shit in your gut. That’s it! Easy!” 

Later that night, in bed, I sniff the garlic oils under my nails from today’s kraut prep. Mama’s queuing up tonight’s images. She won’t relent, as if she needs to be assured that I continue to interface with her devastation. In her heavily accented English she murmurs, “Fermentation not enough, devochka. It’s balm for troubled guts, but only balm, not antidote. We need so much more.”