Cholesterol

              Australia is an amazing country.
              When I just came here from Tashkent I rushed into an Australian supermarket straight away. As a child I had enjoyed an expression from the Russian fair-tail such as “you first give me food and drink, and then put a question to me”.
              I saw I’d got a fair-tail.
              “Really people have a good life here”, - I thought watching how people were filling the trolleys up with food.  “No worries, we would live not worse soon”.
              But I scraped money up only for milk so far.
              At home my wife dumbfounded me, “Why did you buy such fatty milk?”
              What declarations! Over there she had been swearing that the milk was not actually milk, but pure water, yet here the milk had too much fat for her.
              “The fatter, the better,” I stated in response.
              “Fatty milk has lots of cholesterol,” she said.
              “Lots of what?”
              “Cholesterol,” my wife repeated. “It’s an animal fat which ruins your figure and reduces your life expectancy. Australians fight against cholesterol.”
What an abstruse word she had managed to pick up. Why not just call it fat? But no, she has to say something foreign in any case. And since when has milk reduced your life expectancy? And where does it say we have to fight against fat? It’s food, after all.
              You can do nothing. Now I buy two cartons of milk – one without cholesterol, for my wife, and one with, for me. With cholesterol it’s tastier and more nourishing, I reckon.

              Once, my wife and I dropped in a fish market.
              U-u-u-uh! There they had everything under the sun!
              There were fish of unknown shapes and colours, some kind of sea slugs, shellfish, oysters and some strange slimy paste in tubs.
              “Is all this really edible?” I asked my wife.
              “It’s not only edible, some of it is eaten raw and they even swallow it live,” my wife smiled.
              “B-r-r-r,” I imagined those slugs sliding around in my stomach.
              Just then, I caught sight of a good old friend, and nudged my wife joyfully.
              “Look, our fellow-traveller is here too!”
              “Who? Where?”
              “Look here!” I showed her a colossal carp, placed right in the corner of the counter.
 It was the magnificent carp! King one! So regal and dignified, wearing a golden cloak, the carp really looked like a king amongst all this hodge-podge.
And how mush? O my mother… my friend was the cheapest one.
 “Why such injustice?” I was outraged.
             “What’s wrong?” My wife began to worry.
             “Why are these sea-slugs dearer than the carp? Imagine, these sick-looking shockers are five times more expensive, and even this… this…” I could not find the right word and waved in the direction of the shellfish, “costs three times as much!”
             “If you don’t like the prises, don’t buy them. Why make a fuss?” my wife grumbled.
             “It’s not about that. Let them to sell their rubbish as much as they want for, it’s for them to decide. I can not understand why they have offended/humiliated the carp”.
              “The carp is a freshwater river fish”.
              “Yeah, so what?”
              “That’s what it is!” my wife smiled in condescending manner and continued my enlightenment. “What you call rubbish is called seafood here, that is food from the sea. It’s considered clean and healthy. Apart from that, it’s low in cholesterol.  But your carp is considered unclean here, since it lives in rivers.  And it is high in cholesterol, you should know. It’s a dirty fish.”
               “Is my carp the dirty fish?!” I got angry. She had hit a raw nerve. “If you must know, our ancient ancestors settled along the river and fish was their main food source. Nothing ever happened to them… They survived, thank goodness.”
               “But the water in the rivers was clean then,” said my wife, and I couldn’t help agreeing with her. 
 While I was busy being preoccupied with the topic “What, Where and When”, my wife started to pick shellfish up and put them in the bag.
               “Do you at least know how to cook them, or are you going to swallow them alive?’ I said sarcastically.
               “I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out. What’s the problem?” she answered and, for no reason at all, added proudly, “I’m an Australian, you see”.
               “You call yourself an Australian, but you toss money to the wind like a Russian,” I grumbled. “You should buy the carp. It’s testier”
               “Things are tasty if they’re good for you, my dear,” my wife pronounced in didactic tone. “By the way, you also live in Australia and should learn to change your tastes.”
               Well, cope that! How come I have to change my tastes? I changed country, not my tongue. I’m not one of those who change their taste like a glove. I’ve only got one tongue, my own, which I inherited from my ancestors. In the end, what’s tasty is tasty everywhere.
               My wife bought the shellfish and I bought my carp... with cholesterol.
I even began to like this word. Cholesterol! What a nourishing, well-fed word.
               
               At home my wife rang around to find out from her friends how to cook the shellfish.  Then with a bewildered smile she told me she had, in fact, bought oysters and they are indeed eaten raw.
               Not being one to laugh at others’ misfortune, I kept quiet. Besides, I didn’t feel like tearing myself away from my pleasant musings on the subject of whether to fry the carp or make a fish-soup.
               Three days I spent enjoying my carp, while my wife, screwing up her face in despair, bravely swallowed her oysters.
               In sympathy I decided to help her. I blocked my nose with a clothes peg, closed my eyes, and, only after several attempts, did I manage to stuff one of those slimy things down my throat. Now I became convinced that seafood was not carp.

               However, fish is not meat, which is what I soon began to long for.
         Since my youth, I have dreamt of breeding bull-calves. For this I would have had to join a collective farm and raise only those animals ordered by those at the top.
               When free enterprise was eventually permitted in our former homeland the times have come such that, as they used to say, “You shouldn’t worry about fat, but about survival.”
               Here in Australia I my spirits had lifted again. I shared my dream with my wife.
               “Are you joking or serious? And what are you going to feed your bulls with then?” she asked mockingly.
               “Have you forgotten where we live now? It’s Australia! The green continent!” I said with as much enthusiasm as possible. “ Here you can feed a whole herd of bison only on the nature strips alone.”
               “Well! That’s just beautiful!” she answered ironically. “You’re going to graze your bulls on a nature strip, are you? Are you feeling all right?” She touched my forehead to see if I had a fever.
               “Try to be realistic. After all, you are a qualified builder,” she said.
I tried to explain that it wouldn’t be bad to raise animals; the milk and meat would be your own.  But she parried my arguments, announcing right there that if wanted meat, I could buy it at the butcher’s at any time.”
               My wife, as ever, was right. Nevertheless, I think that food you make by your own hands is more delicious.

               I hope one day to have my own farm. In the meantime, I followed my wife’s advice and went off to the butcher’s.
               When I first got there, my eyes popped out of my head in amazement at the wealth of different meats. All the cuts were equally splendid, but for some reason prices varied. I shoved my finger into the slice which was the cheapest, but which lost nothing in comparison to the others.
               It really was a magnificent cut! Reddish-pink, and framed with yellowish fat, it looked like an amethyst in a gold setting. The transparent veins of fat shone like silver inlays.
               To be honest, I love fatty meat. Meat without fat is tasteless, like a floor cloth. In Uzbekistan meat and fat sold for one and the same price and the fat from the sheep’s rump was valued even more than the flesh.
               Can you really cook plov, a favourite eastern dish, from lean meat? Of course not! If you were to try, you’d end up with something where the meat and rice would live separately, like a couple who completely sick of each other.
               Fat is like the sense of love which knits hearts together!
               The butcher asked me something. I didn’t understand and couldn’t even guess at what he’d said, because my English was still in an embryonic form. I just nodded.
               The butcher took my slice and suddenly started doing something strange, which took my breath away. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He started cutting fat off my slice and hurling it into a bin.
               An unpleasant feeling, familiar to shoppers in my former country bit me. It was the fear that you were being swindled.
               Over there we didn’t have butchers, we had magicians. No matter how carefully you watched them, they would nevertheless contrive to slide a big bone or some other stinking rubbish under your meat to increase the weight. Yet they’d do it with great skill. At times I even admired their performance. They were classy moves!
               That was there, but here…I just hadn’t expected it! And look how this Australian butcher performed his trick! He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was ripping me off! Clumsy work! 
               While I was choking with anger the butcher cut off all the fat.
“What are you doing?” I quavered at last.
               The butcher smiled insolently, showed me the stripped meat and then said something. I only caught ‘what’. This sounds like the Russian word ‘vot’, which means ‘there it is’.
               What a cheek! He cheats me and then shows me how he did it.
               “What is ‘vot’?” I shouted in Russian and told him all that I thought about him and several generations of his relatives. My tirade was spiced liberally by colourful words, the like of which are found only in Russian.
                “You f... take me for an idiot will you? Just because I don’t speak English? You want to cheat me? Well, mate, it won’t work, I am no fool! No way... We’re cut from the same dirty cloth you and I. I can do f... tricks like you.”
                In short, I kicked up such a row that all the sales people gathered round.
                “Russian, Russian...” they said anxiously.
                I was really taken aback. How could they know where I was from?
                “So,” I supposed then, “I’m not the first Russian who they’ve tried to deceive here. Okay. I’ll teach you Russian. For free”
                Just then the shop owner came running up. He smiled at me in a guarded way. He also started repeating “what… what...?” and gave me an inquiring stare.
                I pointed to the stripped meat, stuck my finger in my chest and tried to explain that the butcher was trying to make a fool of me.
                The owner couldn’t understand me. Maybe he was just pretending, because for some reason he then invited me to his office. I twigged that he wanted to talk to me without witnesses around. Obviously, he feared the bad publicity this disgrace would bring to his shop.
                Instead, he led me to a cool and dark room where I saw whole lot of bins filled to the top with fat.
                “So that’s where the dog is buried,” I remembered a Russian idiom, used when some secret has been exposed. Apparently, they were selling this fat under the counter. I don’t like to poke my nose into other people’s business, but they were slipping their hands into my pocket, and not only mine.
                I was just about to force the truth out of them, when the owner handed me a plastic bag, pointed at the fat and said “free”. I understood him, because ‘free’ sounds like the Russian word for ‘take’.
                “I ought to unmask these swindlers,” I thought, but the fat was so attractive that my thoughts ran away involuntary.
                “Certainly, it’s my moral duty. But what can I do if they have the same defiled system here as we had in my country? Hit my head against a brick wall?
                Over there they preached no end of high moral principles, and what was the result? What is the use of principles, if they don’t lead to a full stomach?
                You can’t fry eggs in principles alone. Principles are principles, and fat is fat”.
                The owner repeated the word ‘free’. The fat shone seductively in the darkness. Someone seemed to whisper into my ear the proverb “if they give you something – take it, if they fight you – run away.” As is often the case in such situations, my mind obligingly offered me an excuse. “In the end, I will pay for the fat”, I calmed my agitated conscience.
               The owner filled the bag with fat and offered it to me. But I refused. With gestures, I explained to him that I am not one who unscrupulously jumps on any old fat, and that I only wanted what was mine. I waved in the direction of the fat which the butcher had cut from my slice.
               This time, to my surprise, the owner understood me immediately. He weighed my meat and I paid for it. Then he put my fat in the other bag and, without weighing, gave it me. I offered him money, but he refused and said ‘free’ again.
               “Thank you, that’s enough for me,” I answered in Russian and ran my hand across my throat. To me this gesture meant full satisfaction.
               For some reason the owner stopped smiling and fear flashed in his eyes. The butchers went strangely silent and gawked at us. “Something’s up,” I thought with alarm. “Maybe they’ve called the police. And why didn’t the owner take any money for the fat?”
               I glanced at the door, but didn’t see anyone resembling a policeman. I smiled just in case. The owner breathed a sigh of relief and also smiled.
               “Perhaps, they give away free fat in order to win customers”, I surmised. “That’s their business” I thought and waved them goodbye.

               I returned home in good spirits, but when I told my wife what had happened in the shop, she laughed till tears rolled down her cheeks. I was on the point of getting insulted, but she explained to me what had actually happened.
               Of course, she couldn’t miss the opportunity of delivering me a lecture on the dangers of cholesterol.
               She said it would be a good idea if I apologised to the butchers. I was way ahead of her and agreed, but I stipulated that this in no way bore any relation to the cholesterol.
               I took a Russian-English dictionary and studied apologies in English for a whole hour. I also prepared a few phrases so I could explain to the butchers why I had misunderstood them.
               The next day I went off to the shop. The butchers recognised me and smiled. They said "Russian", and straight away invited me to the cool room. But I said “no” and tried, in English, to deliver my speech I’d prepared overnight. I got out “I am sorry…” but then, out of embarrassment, the rest just flew out of my head.
               The butchers understood me anyway. They patted me approvingly on my shoulders, saying “Russian good,” and somebody even started applauding.
               Some months have passed since then. I still buy meat in this shop. The butchers are friendly to me and don’t cut fat from my slices of meat any more. They respect me and I respect them.
               I have started to understand why Australians don’t like fatty food. One time recently I watched a clip on TV, where fat was squeezed out of blood vessels. Even I felt sick.
               However, I continua to cherish the dream of my own farm. And if one day I start breeding the bull-calves, I’d name my first bull-calf CHOLESTEROL.
               It’s a wonderful name, isn’t it?