Kvass

Our old gals in the village cast a wary eye on all food from the store, because who knows what they’ve got in there? Homemade, that’s the only way to go. And that is why even now they bake their own bread, and brew their own moonshine, and when it comes to kvass, that refreshing black-bread beer, why waste the money? Granny Melya’s grandma taught her to brew kvass and here’s Melya teaching her granddaughter, Anka. Anka’s city folk, but she knows how to respect the homespun recipes. The experience of centuries, she calls them. No chemicals. Microelements. Vitamins. A healthy lifestyle. So granny lies on the stove bench, warming herself, and bosses Anka around: “Fetch water from the spring,” she says. “Strip leaves off the young currant branches. And the hop cones are back there, in a sack hanging in the storeroom.”

“How about raisins, Granny?”

“What raisins? Raisins don’t grow here.”

But Anka isn’t about to let this go. “Then what’s going to ferment it?” she wants to know.

“Get the dough starter. It’s in a jug on the porch, under the bench. Did you buy the bread?”

“I did, I did.”

Anka slices chunks of crust off the rye loaf and dries them in the stove until they’re as black as coal, to make the kvass good and dark. The real thing.

She heats the spring water in a pot so huge she could crawl right into it. Her drowsy-eyed granny is yelling at her from the stove.

“Don’t pour the sugar into the boiling water. Let it cool.”

Anka dips her little finger in, to test how hot it is, then starts “mixing” the kvass. (That’s the word they use around here.) She pours in the starter, scatters the slices that smell of burnt bread on top, and, with a quick sideways glance in her granny’s general direction, dumps in some city-bought raisins. The pot starts a merry hissing and burbling; it’s come alive. Now the mash needs to be strained through a cloth into bottles that are securely stoppered and whisked away into the cold, to “finish off.”

There are no glass bottles to be had for love or money, only plastic ones, and that sets granny off: “Ugh, nasty! Don’t pour it into those all-be-damned chemical doodads! How many glass bottles get tossed out behind the store? We’ll give ’em a quick wash and be done.”

With a deeply meaningful clearing of the throat, Anka pours the kvass mash, spreading a satisfying smell of bread through the hut. Yawning, she stuffs the blackcurrant leaves into the bottles, along with shaved horseradish, the fragrant hop cones, and, secretly, some lemon rinds, because there’s no accounting for taste, as Granny Melya says.

Half the bottles are crammed into the door of the imported fridge that granny got as a name-day gift. Those that won’t fit, Anka takes down into the cellar.

It’s all done, and, downing a glass of moonshine for good luck, she tumbles into bed.

The following day, a storm came crashing down on the village. Thunder, lightning, the lights promptly went out, and grandmother and granddaughter sat for three days playing cards and trading gossip.

“In the war, time was when they’d up and start bombing, and that was that. Boom! Bang! Your ears get all clogged, and it’s so scary. So I’d creep into the cellar. I’d take the cat, a book, a candle… You can’t play a club, hearts are trumps!” Granny swats at Anka with her cards because the war stories have been putting her to sleep.

That night Anka felt one heck of a jolt. The explosion was strong enough to deafen her.

“This is it,” she thought. “It’s started.”

She went groping around for a candle, all the while wondering why there was water on the floor, ankle deep. The water was warm and oddly fizzy. Then
the light came on all by itself, and Anka gasped in dismay.

The fridge door had been ripped off its hinges and was twisted into a figure eight. The kvass bottles had exploded from being kept too warm and were spinning across the floor like pinwheels in a fireworks display. Everything was dripping with sweet, sticky kvass. The raisins had made a monogram-like pattern on the ceiling, and the lemon rinds had glued themselves to the curtains like gumdrops, making the old tulle glint and glimmer. Granddad’s portrait was festooned with currant leaves, and the horseradish shavings were floating about like wood chips.

Granny, horrorstruck, tumbled off the stove but did it well, landing in the basket where the cat slept. The cat, meanwhile, was wandering through the goopy mess, squeamishly shaking her paws off with every step.

They spent the whole next day washing the hut, laundering the curtains, and whitewashing the ceiling. Fortunately there was still the kvass in the cellar, but nobody even wanted to drink it, so sorry they were for the poor, blown-out refrigerator.

The next day it turned really hot. Anka and her granny were butts-up in the vegetable patch, glancing from time to time at the dusty road and the people walking along it. The way it worked out, though, they were walking with their heads downward and their feet sticking up.

All at once, granny and Anka saw a huge black spool rolling across the sky. It was wound with threads, like, but thick ones. And there were guys meandering along with it. Granny and granddaughter tore themselves away from the vegetable rows, and the world turned right side up again. The people walking – the guys, that is – were glum and dusty-gray, and they were rolling the spool ahead of them.

“Hey, lads,” granny yells. “What’s that? What’re you going to stitch?”

They laugh.

“We’re going to stitch you to the telephone, old girl. You’ll be calling your kids in town.”

Pleased as can be, granny starts bustling about.

“Come take a seat, my darlings,” she says. “Rest up in the shade under the awning on the porch here.”

And when did any guy ever turn down the chance to take a load off? They sat down, stripped off their shirts, fired up their smokes; they’d been working their tails off. The spool sat out there in the sun, reeking of chemicals because of the cable.

“Get us a drink, lady,” the head guy says. “We’re done in, what with the heat and these hard roads.”

“In a jiffy, my dearies.”

And granny scurries into the hut, telling Anka: “Out you go. There’s some fine-looking marriage material out there.”

Anka shows herself, sleek as a swan.

“Well now, you hardworking fellows,” she says. “Shall I fetch you some nice cold kvass?”

And she winks at her granny.

“Fetch it, do – if it’s not too much trouble, my beauty,” the second guy smiles, pocked and freckled though he is.

So Anka brought out granny’s baking pan, lined it with newspaper, put a pretty towel on top, and got mugs from the china cabinet. Crisp little poppy-seed bread rings went onto a plate, along with pickled cucumber for some unknown reason. She dove down into the cellar and came up with a bottle of kvass, beaded with moisture and looking just like cola, but even better. And she carried it all out onto the porch, a princess to the life.

The lads are actually squinting, so lovely is the relief they’re feeling. They down one apiece, then another.

Anka sails off again, swan-like, and brings another bottle to uncork. The guys drink and say good things about what they’re drinking. But the words start coming out slurred.

“Da-a-a-amn,” the second in command blurts out. “Did you buy this kvass, ma? Is it a store brand?”

“Don’t insult me like that, good fellows. It’s as homebrewed as they come.”

“That’s it,” the head guy says, slamming his cap down into the dust. “Wrap it up. To hell with the work. We’ve worked enough. For shame, ma – we was all on the wagon. Been in treatment since May first. But this ain’t no kvass. It’s the hard stuff.”

“That wasn’t on purpose,” Anka says, fussing and flapping. “Forgive us, good fellows, you hardworking fellows!”

They left the reel where it was and off they went, as if they’d never been there at all. But homemade kvass always has a kick to it. And if it’s given extra fermenting time, that makes it better than any champagne.

The guys were long gone, but the spool wasn’t. Uh-huh. Later on, granny turned it over and made a table of it. And she strung the cable around the vegetable patch. It looked great, just like a fence. But to this day, more’s the pity, there’s no telephone hook-up. And all because of that kvass.