Jan's Story Read Online Free PDF

agonizing, literature and extraordinary classical music. But the sense of gloom rubbed up against Jan's very nature. She believed that each person made their own happiness, and she believed that especially for the two of us. If we had chances to see or do new things, it was up to us to seize those moments and make them ours.
    We had a kitchen large enough for an old wooden table and chairs suitable for breakfast and, on cold Russian winter nights, we would sit with a bowl of borscht and be happy for the warmth of the stove and the cooking. The rest of the rooms were big and simple … one for dining, another as a living room, and one large single bedroom. German prisoners of war had been used to construct the building, and it was solid, with some interior walls almost three feet thick.
    Moscow was perfect for Jan's dinner-party organizing because most of us socialized in our homes. At that time the Soviet-era propagandists still touted Moscow as the glorious culmination of Communism. In fact, it was so in glorious that it had almost no functioning restaurants. By functioning, I mean the absolute bare minimum … clean and with safe, edible food. Instead, the food was badly, and sometimes barely, cooked. The cheese was dried and fly-stained because it had been left sitting out for hours, and the norm was service with a snarl. It was so bad that a business lunch would usually be a rendezvous at the American Embassy snack bar for a hamburger and a soda.
    Case in point of how bad it was; one of the few hotels that catered only to foreigners had the city's only sushi restaurant, which was run by a Japanese company. But to be sure that the sushi was safe, we checked the schedule of the two Tokyo-to-Moscow flights each week and went to the restaurant the next day when the fish from Japan was fresh off the plane.
    Another prime example of Moscow's culinary delights was the butcher's market around the corner from our apartment. Shoppers had to swat away the clouds of flies to get at the meat. Street vendors sold ice cream only in the worst of winter because they had no refrigeration, and the bitter cold was all that kept the ice cream frozen. Even so, we would not buy ice cream from them or any other dairy products from the grimy, dusty local stores that smelled of sour milk.
    So we, as journalists, diplomats, and foreign business people, entertained in our apartments, where the food was safe despite the fact that our conversations were monitored by the KGB. Shopping was a trick, and Jan, true to her nature, mastered it quickly. To guarantee safe food, we had all our groceries shipped in from nearby Finland, using a store that, for years, had specialized in providing food and other necessities (toilet paper, new tires for the bureau cars, bath towels, diapers, ball point pens) to Moscow's foreigners like us.
    Once a week Jan would take out pen and paper, go through their grocery catalog and prepare the food order, right down to meat and milk. About all we could trust to buy in Moscow was bread and sometimes cabbage for borscht when it was in season.
    Armed with her list, Jan went up to the office for a session with the telex machine, basically a typewriter. It worked like a phone in that we could dial another telex anywhere in the world. These were the days before faxes, and in Moscow there were days when the phones could barely transmit a voice. The order was telexed off early in the week.
    On Thursday, dozens of company drivers would head for the train station to pick up the boxes of imported groceries shipped in from Helsinki for their foreign bosses. If we were having people for dinner, the pre-planning was far more extensive. And if you forgot to order something, there was no place to run out to get it. It either came in from Finland on the once-a-week train shipment, or you did without, or you went sheepishly to a neighbor and borrowed what you forgot to order.
    Inviting friends to our apartment fueled Jan's enthusiasm for