Chapter 34: Margarita’s Kitchen
Ivan took Rudy into the woods on a couple more casual logging expeditions riddled with philosophical interrogations. The old man never connected to Rudy’s water main, but he did take a job and a paycheck.
On their second trip into the forest, Ivan mentioned that his Margarita had cooked for the loggers. In Soviet times, the mess hall had fed every man in the camp. Margarita commanded a small team of women who had hot breakfast ready for all the men when they arrived at dawn and great pots of soup and stew ready at lunchtime. For the loggers who would be out in the forest all day, Margarita packed beef and chicken sandwiches, bread and cheese, sausage and pickles, thermoses of broth and tea, whatever she could make from the supplies that came from the central warehouse in Irkutsk. In summer and fall, she would include cucumbers, radishes, carrots, and tough little tomatoes from her and Ivan’s garden. Fulfilling the lumber quotas of each Five-Year Plan depended as much on the food Margarita’s crew made for the men as the diesel pumped into the trucks and the gas and oil funneled into the chainsaws. And when Ivan would go through the mess line, Margarita would always have some small treat for him, perhaps nothing more than an extra dollop of butter for his bread or honey for his tea, but always something. The other lumber men would tease and shout “Gorko! Gorko!” like at a wedding, and Ivan would lean across the counter to kiss Margarita, to cheers from the lunching workers.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, supplies and paychecks became less reliable. Once the logging camp went two weeks without resupply from Irkutsk. Trucks were running out of fuel, and the kitchen was running out of food. One cold, wet spring morning, Margarita served the men the last cans of pickled eggs, then stormed across the camp to the director’s office with a saucepan in her hand. Staff reported shouting and banging. Ivan said all Margarita told him was that she presented her report on the state of the mess hall, that she may have lost her temper, but that she was careful not to bodily harm the director. By the middle of that afternoon, a truck arrived with sacks of flour, powdered milk, lentils, and enough other ingredients to get the mess hall through the rest of April.
But within a year, the logging operation was privatized, acquired by a subfirm of a subfirm of some Moscow oligarch’s shell game. The mess hall was shut down in the name of efficiency—men can eat at home, Margarita recounted the excuses of the director who could not meet her eye, pack their own meals, no?—and Margarita and her women were sent home. A couple months later, the mess hall caught fire and burned down. Ivan Ivanovich kept working for a couple years, bringing baskets of Margarita’s pickles or rolls once or twice a week for the men, many of whom said they missed Margarita’s cooking and wished their wives would pack them such good lunches. Ivan stuck it out for just one more year, retiring a couple months before the oligarch decided he could make more money shutting down the camp and liquidating the equipment.
The brick foundation of the mess hall remained, the char bleached away by a dozen seasons of snow and rain and sun. The Monday after Ivan told him the story about Margarita’s cooking for the camp, Rudy was looking at that foundation from the steps of his office trailer when it hit him. The old mess hall had stood about where the north side of the Ring administration building would go. The Ring would have hundreds of staff in its first year of operation, more over time. They’d need a place to eat. The plans provided for a small lunch room buried in the admin building, an afterthought squeezed in amidst the primary research functions. After learning of Margarita’s work and the history of that brick foundation, Rudy envisioned the lunch room moved to the north side of the building and expanded to a dining hall, bumping out from the building profile to encompass the outline of the loggers’ mess hall, with lots of windows facing the forest, letting in the soft northern light.
Digging for the admin foundation was scheduled to start in two weeks. Rudy sketched his brainstorm, emailed it to the architect, and asked if the modification was feasible in terms of engineering and cost. Yes and yes, said the architect, who had confined his original proposal to the strictly utilitarian vibe that Galina Filipovna exuded and who was pleased to see under Rudy’s management an aesthetic opportunity. Rudy and the architect compared visions and settled on a design that fell within the budget savings Rudy had so far accumulated. They discussed elements that would combine the modern function of the Ring with the historical logging operations. For the latter elements, Rudy asked the architect to incorporate idiosyncratic woodwork that would fit the natural style he found at Ivan Ivanovich’s house.
And Rudy decided to commission Ivan Ivanovich to produce that woodwork, to carve his designs on the mouldings that would decorate the main entry and the windows of the Ring dining hall and six great logs that would support a balcony opening off a second-floor corridor and the sloping roof above.
“I don’t need the money,” Ivan said when Rudy proposed the job.
“No, but we need your craft.”
Rudy gave Ivan a copy of the plans at the end of August and told him to start choosing and preparing his wood. Rudy re-evaluated his work schedule and directed his contractors to have the dining hall ready for trim work by January. Rudy assigned Ivan a tractor and a driver, and with their help, Ivan ventured into the woods and brought back the straightest, healthiest logs from which to hew by hand the trim the plans called for. Rudy offered use of the wood shop on site, but Ivan did most of his work at home, spending the fall and the first month of winter—the first blizzard came November 14, and the temperature stayed below freezing all day, every day after that—working in his backyard shop. That old building was little more than tin sheets and tar paper tacked together; Rudy made time on a couple October weekends to frame up some insulation. Ivan Ivanovich protested this change, but Rudy said, “Drink what water you want, but here, you’re working for me, and I’m paying you for your best work. You’ll do your best work at 20° above, not 20° below.” And indeed, when Rudy was finished and when he brought over a propane heater, during that first blizzard, Ivan was working out back in shirtsleeves, without gloves, routing edges and vines and carving the first flowers into the long trim pieces that he indexed to locations on the blueprints.
As fall flew by and winter blew in, Rudy was busy rigging electromagnets, power lines, sensors, and heavily insulated data cables around the Ring itself. He checked progress on the admin building and dropped by Ivan’s home on December 20 to let him know the dining hall was ready for his trim work. Dozens of long boards were up on the racks, carved and ready for installation; Ivan Ivanovich was detailing several rosettes. The old logger didn’t interrupt his work; he just asked if Rudy could send a covered truck in the morning to help haul the long pieces that wouldn’t fit on the Bukhanka.
The admin building was a bit ahead of schedule, but difficulties with power transmission were putting the Ring itself behind. Rudy had to focus his attention there, underground. He saw the Bukhanka parked outside the dining hall every day, and he let the other trimmers know about the old logger’s work and directed them to help with tools and muscle if he needed them, but Rudy didn’t have the time he would have liked to watch the old man at work.
Rudy did make time for one small side project. After walking alone one night through the dining hall, looking closely at the style of Ivan Ivanovich’s carving, and taking a few photos, Rudy snuck a few boards from Ivan Ivanovich’s scrap pile and jointed together a menu board to hang at the main entrance. He routed some lettering—his first try at Cyrillic penmanship in wood—and sanded and stained and varnished the wood to match the trim already up in the dining hall. He left space at the top for a small metal plate that he planned to get in the city.
Ivan Ivanovich and the other trimmers finished their work in the dining hall by the first week of February. The adjoining kitchen was hooked up to water, gas, and electricity and fully equipped with shining stoves and sinks and coolers. Rudy had moved the dining hall up on the priority list because his people deserved a decent hot meal on site and there were enough workers in and out of the site to make regular food service cost effective.
Rudy didn’t plan a big ceremony to open the dining hall; he just hired a facility manager and two cooks and told them to be ready to feed a couple hundred hungry workers each day starting February 8. He posted notices that the kitchen would serve free lunches for workers for a month as they worked out operations, then move to discounted meal tickets that workers could buy and punch as they wished.
And on February 8, Rudy invited Ivan Ivanovich for an early lunch, the first lunch in the new dining hall. They trudged in from the snow at 11:00, an hour before the announced opening time, probably two hours before most of the workers would come up from underground to eat. Outside it was cloudy, windy, and bitterly cold. Inside, the hall was quiet, the big windows stiff and solid against the wind. The cooks clattered in the kitchen.
Ivan Ivanovich’s woodwork glistened in the warm lighting. Amidst the whimsical flowers, trees, birds, bears, and other forest imagery he had carved throughout the hall, Ivan had engraved a few scientific notes: stylized schematics of the Ring, atomic and subatomic symbols, the occasional fundamental equation. Here and there numbers peeked around the images; Ivan Ivanovich told Rudy they were constants—pi, e, Planck’s constant—spread out in sequence, waiting for daydreaming diners to recognize them.
And the columns—six light pine logs, straight and bright like lasers in contrast to the darker stained wood around all the edges of the room. They bore none of the emblems or characters carved into the more ornate trim. Ivan Ivanovich had planed and smoothed each pole into a rippled texture that shimmered, alive, energy pulsing up and down as the viewer walked around them, great cascades of light pushing floor and ceiling apart. Rudy, foreman of this monumental project, had never seen a particle accelerator in operation; neither had Ivan the old logger. But Rudy sensed that Ivan had captured the divine energy that would pulse beneath the forest in Galya’s great machine.
“Beautiful,” Rudy said. “Just what the scientists will need. Just what I wanted.”
Ivan bowed his head. “Our logging camp was much more plain. But Margarita would have wanted these workers to eat in a place of beauty.”
Rudy led Ivan back to the main entrance. His menu board stood on the floor, facing the wall. “We have one more piece to install… but I wanted to get your approval before putting it up, to make sure it fits the style of the master.”
Rudy turned the board around and lifted it for Ivan to read. Across the top, Rudy had carved letters visible from the farthest point of the hall:
MARGARITA’S KITCHEN
Beneath was a brass plate, etched by a neighbor of Vitaly’s who worked with jewelry:
In honor of M.R. Kormareva, Mess Chief,
Baikalnaya Logging Camp, 1972–1993.
Woodwork by I.I. Kormarev.
Ivan smiled, then laughed. “Trickster! Devilish trickster! Make me toil for months, then make my work trivial with one board.” Ivan touched the letters as he finished his indictment. He continued to chuckle.
Rudy also smiled and nodded toward two strong hooks he’d put in the wall. “So we may display it? Would you like to hang it?”
Rudy held the board out a few centimeters. Ivan gripped the sides with his sure hands, peered around the edge to locate the metal hanging loops on the back, and slid the board gently into place. They then took the first warm loaf of bread and the first steaming plates of beef stew from the kitchen and sat at the center of the dining hall, eating and chatting and watching the first workers straggle in to bring life to the dining hall.