Bread with [a] nail
Could the world survive one more day without learning the further developments in the story of my beautiful friendship with the German literary establishment? I thought it was safer not to find out.
The story left off last time with my agreeing to translate, for the catalog of the Berlin Biennale, an excerpt of Konstantin Vaginov’s Harpagoniad: a novel about an obsessive collector who obsessively collects things like fingernails from Samarkand.
Well, I soon discovered that fingernails are, for Vaginov’s “Harpagon,” just the tip of the iceberg. He collects all kinds of obscure items, rich in historico-cultural backstories. Take, for example, “odno amortizirovannoe perekhodiashchee znamia”: literally, “one amortized transitory banner.” Thanks to the patience and erudition of the literary historian Luba Golburt, I am in a position to explain to you that a “transitory banner” was a special banner awarded in Soviet times to the factory with the highest production over a given period. There was just one banner, which was always getting moved around between multiple factories; hence, “transitory.” Now, the factory/ factories had gone bankrupt; hence, “amortized.” That’s the kind of banner it was.
Other memorabilia in the collector’s apartment include: “cigarettes with string coming out the ends, curling up like horns”; “an Order of the Tortoise, for the slavish rate of the elimination of illiteracy”; and “bread with [a] nail” (khleb s gvozdem). For some reason, I was especially puzzled by this last item. What did it mean for bread to be “with [a] nail”? Could it be a figure of speech (like “with child”)? Or what if khleb s gvozdem was some kind of special Russian holiday bread, possibly with some festive, nail-like ingredient (cloves?)?
Well, I Googled “khleb s gvozdem” and got a total of three hits. This is how I came across a fascinating item of faits divers from Aktobe, Kazakhstan, dated 8 August, 2007:
The Aktobites hadn’t yet forgetten about the rat baked into the bread, when the local bakeries again distinguished themselves. One townsman brought to our editorial offices the latest bread with a “surprise.” This time, the role of the surprise was played by a rather large iron nail. Kurmangazy Bikeshev, the lucky recipient of this loaf, told us that he had purchased this bread last Sunday from a store in the “ Kazakhstan” Metro stop… The store offered to replace his bread, but Kurmangazy refused, in order to have the opportunity to acquaint his townsmen with the work of their local bread-makers.
My sympathy for Kurmangazy Bikeshev—already slightly overshadowed by my feelings for whoever got the bread with the rat in it—was soon forgotten altogether in my amazement upon discovering that those three hits from “khleb s gvozdem” were to three different news stories from the post-Soviet republics. From Zavety Ilyicha (Lenin’s Precepts) I learned the story of a rusty nail found in a loaf of bread at a school cafeteria in Leninogorsk, Tatarstan, earlier this month; the authors call for a public investigation, hinting at a cover-up and at possible shady dealings between the school administration and its bread suppliers.
More mordant social commentary can be found in the mysterious story of Yuliya Vasilinok of Karaganda, Kazakhstan, who told a local television station last December that she had been sold a loaf of “bread with [a] nail” by the Karagandy-Nan bakery. In exchange for this story, the television station paid her 1,000 Kazak tenge (by my calculations, the equivalent of US$ 8.43) with which Vasilinok and her husband promptly “threw a party.”
The management of Karagandy-Nan subsequently accused Vasilinok of fabricating her story, arguing that their technique of production made it impossible for a nail to get into the bread; that Vasilinok was unable to prove that the bread had been purchased from their store; and that, had she really found a nail in her bread, her first move would logically have been to confront either the bakery itself or the sanitation department, and not the local news media.
Karaganda News correspondent Aynur Balakeshova, in an attempt to determine why Vasilinok didn’t contact the sanitation department, made an appointment to meet Yuliya Vasilinok at her home. On the appointed day, however, there was nobody at the Vasilinok residence except for Yuliya’s belligerent and apparently inebriated husband, who offered only such inconclusive comments as: “Maybe we like to eat bread with nails, and that’s why we didn’t go to the sanitation department.” (”Чо пришли? Ну, купили мы хлеб с гвоздем, и чо?—агрессивно вопросил мужчина.—А может, нам нравится есть хлеб с гвоздем, и мы не хотим идти в СЭС и разговаривать со специалистами!”)
Balakeshova concludes with some fairly biting speculations about Vasilinok’s motives (”The inevitable conclusion: if you want people to write about you in the newspapers and show you on television, then stick a nail in bread; you’ll become a star overnight”… one wonders, incidentally, whether Kathy Griffin is familiar with this Kazakh “secret recipe” to celebrity?)
Did Ms. Vasilinok really find the nail in the bread? Did she put it there herself? Well I’m not here to throw stones. Personally, I’m just happy to feel that at last I truly comprehend, in the full and least ambiguous sense of those words, the true import of the Russian phrase, “khleb s gvozdem.” And if I had any last lingering doubts, they were dispelled by the following photograph from the Aktobe media collective RIKA:
Tags: bread, current events, d-list, Germany, Luba Golburt, nails, recipes, Russian literature, translation
February 28th, 2008 at 8:30 am
One correction from the confused literary historian Luba Golburt: The transitory banner actually circulated within a factory, from team to team. So amortized really signaled the death of a particular factory. Sorry for the nitpicking (!). I was just worried that other, more knowledgeable literary historians might read this.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Thank you Dr. Golburt! This makes so much more sense! Of course the confusion and lack of knowledge are all mine. It’s too bad nobody found one of these banners baked into a loaf of bread in Aktobe, or I might have learned my mistake sooner.
In fantastic news for those visitors to the Berlin Biennale who (a) read English, but neither (b) read German, (c) read Russian, nor (d) read my blog: the translation I turned in—something like, “an amortized transferable victory banner from a bankrupt factory”—is actually totally consistent with the truth. But in my heart of hearts, I was confused about why the banner was amortized, just because one of the (multiple, as I thought) factories went bankrupt. (”Did they all go bankrupt at once?” I wondered. “Or maybe that one bankrupted factory was the one that made the itinerant banner so much fun to use?”) Now, however, I know everything! w00t!