A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  After an hour of standing, I am released from the corner. Later, when Aunt Polya is pouring milk as we sit around the table, she watches me more closely than usual to make sure I finish the bread. I know she’s watching me, she knows that I know, and I know she knows that I know. We play this little game for a while: she gives me an unexpected glance, and I chew diligently, pretending I don’t know she’s looking.

  The game is called vranyo. My parents play it at work, and my older sister Marina plays it at school. We all pretend to do something, and those who watch us pretend that they are seriously watching us and don’t know we are only pretending.

  The vranyo game of pretend chewing pays off. Neither Aunt Polya nor Zinaida Vasilievna ever tell my mother about my courtyard exploration, and on Sunday, my hand stuffed into my father’s, we stroll to the ice cream kiosk and back, hard chunks of crème brulee slowly melting on my tongue.

  Marina

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT to be when you grow up, Lenochka?” asks Aunt Nina, who is my real aunt, although once removed—my mother’s cousin. We are in Aunt Nina’s apartment for her birthday, six of us, my sister Marina sitting next to me at the table covered with salads, appetizers, and Aunt Nina’s special onion pie.

  My sister Marina is seventeen: she is in her last year of high school and is concocting a plan to wrestle out of our parents their permission to apply to drama school.

  “A ballerina,” I say, jumping out of my chair and raising my leg behind my back.

  “Sit down,” says my mother, “and finish your potatoes.”

  I don’t want any more potatoes. I’m saving room for the cake I glimpsed sitting in the kitchen, all studded with raisins and sprinkled with sugar.

  I wish Aunt Nina would ask Marina what she wants to be, knowing that if she told the truth my parents already know, everyone would forget about my potatoes—and everyone else’s potatoes, as well as the salted herring and beets with mayonnaise and thin slices of salami beginning to curl up at the edges. Everyone would sit with mouths gaping, wondering how such a stable family—the father the director of a technical school and the mother an anatomy professor—could have produced such an anomaly. At five, you are allowed to want to be a ballerina, or an actress, or a cosmonaut, but at Marina’s age, you are supposed to be serious and think of a real profession, like nursery school teacher, or tram driver, or the local polyclinic doctor in the white hat over suspiciously blond hair who came to our apartment when I had the flu.

  “What kind of a profession is acting?” my father wonders when we are home. “Standing onstage, making a fool out of yourself. Gluposti,” he says, and waves his hand in dismissal—“nothing but silliness.”

  “But there were great actors everyone respected,” argues Marina. “Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Mikhail Chekhov. They even wrote books.”

  “Books are good,” says my father out of a cloud of smoke. He is on his second pack of filterless Belomor cigarettes. “But learn how to read and write first. Go to a school where they teach you something useful—how to design an airplane, for example.”

  “And what will you do?” chimes in my mother. “Spend your life in some provincial theater so you can come out at the end of the second act to say, Dinner is served? I won’t be able to help you find a job in Leningrad,” she warns, practical as usual. “They’ll send you to Kamchatka, and you’ll be stuck there, with society’s rejects, with sailors and ex-convicts, with those who can barely make it through a plumbing course, wishing you’d listened to what we told you.”

  My mother doesn’t understand why anyone would voluntarily engage in such a disorderly and unsafe occupation as acting. First of all, it isn’t serious work. What do you study in drama school, she wonders. Not chemistry, or biology, or even Latin. You don’t contribute to the common good being an actress, she says; you aren’t doing anything solid. It’s all frivolous and chaotic, too unworthy a job for a serious citizen.

  “Look at your sister Galya,” adds my mother. Galya is my father’s daughter who is ten years older than Marina and works as a pathologist at Leningrad Hospital No. 2. I don’t know what a pathologist is, but it must be something solid since my mother often uses her as an example. “She has a proper, respectable job. Nine to five-thirty, six days a week.”

  On days when Marina is at meetings of her school drama club, my mother rattles the dishes in the sink, lamenting that it’s all the fault of the radio. I prick up my ears, intrigued by the thought that the radio, with its piano banging, morning gymnastics, and solemn three o’clock news could have lured Marina into the trap of acting.

  “It was that program,” says my mother, Theatre at the Microphone. When they lived in Ivanovo, before I was born, Marina had spent hours standing in the corner under the radio, constantly punished for riding astride the bar in the back of a streetcar.

  She would deliberately climb on when an adult was watching, says my mother, who thought she was punishing Marina. But that was my sister’s plan all along—to end up in the corner, under the radio. All they used to broadcast in the evening were radio plays. She stood there for hours, like a totem pole. My mother could barely tear her away to eat dinner. And now here we are—she wants to be an actress.

  I feel a new respect for Marina, for her enviable scheme of reckless streetcar riding in front of adults who would dispense the coveted punishment. I think of her standing under an old-fashioned radio with a wool-covered front, listening to the actors’ voices, imagining them onstage, their eyes gleaming from under layers of greasepaint as they proclaimed eternal love, shed tragic tears, and died.

  Then my mother changes her tone and tells my father that they have nothing to worry about. The competition to get into drama school is so fierce that there are a hundred applicants for one seat. “You must be a Sarah Bernhardt,” she insists. “You must have extraordinary connections. You must be related to the minister of culture. No one gets in,” she says and resolutely bangs a lid onto a pot of soup.

  THERE IS A DOG in our house, a pedigreed Irish setter the color of copper. He is my sister’s dog, although he couldn’t have appeared in our apartment without my mother’s consent. Both my mother and sister constantly brush the dog’s long curls and let him sit in our armchair so he can look at the grainy images on our TV that flutter behind a thick, water-filled lens. When the dog is in the chair, I climb up next to him and we both watch figure skaters glide across the screen.

  The dog’s name is Major, and when it is time to breed him, a man rings our doorbell and introduces himself as Ivan Sergeevich Parfenov, the head of the Leningrad chapter of an organization devoted to Irish setters. Ivan Sergeevich is soft-jowled, just like Major, and somewhere around my mother’s age. As he steps into our hallway, he bows slightly, takes off his felt hat, and hangs it on a hook across from the refrigerator.

  “Who is the dog’s owner?” he inquires as my mother shows him into the kitchen, where she is already boiling water for tea.

  “Marina!” she yells, and my sister appears from her room, where she was pretending to be busy with calculus problems. She is in her senior year of high school, tenth grade, and her future is set. She is guaranteed acceptance at both my mother’s medical school and my father’s technical institute. She doesn’t need to kill her summer cramming for college entrance exams or tremble at the end of August in front of lists of the accepted, pinned to the dank walls of college hallways. In my mother’s words, the future has been served to her on a silver platter.

  To Marina’s surprise, Ivan Sergeevich stands up from his chair and shakes her hand. She is even more startled when he addresses her with the formal pronoun vy reserved for adults and not the casual ty, which is used with children and family members.

  He makes small talk about the final exams that are looming in June and asks Marina where she is planning to apply after she graduates from high school.

  It is no secret that my sister does not care for either medicine or technology. We all know that what makes her heart mel
t is standing on the stage of her school’s auditorium, her voice projected and her soul transformed by tragedy from the pages of Chekhov, or Gorky, or some other important playwright whose name I haven’t yet learned.

  For a second she hesitates, not knowing if she should reveal the truth in front of this stranger, but Ivan Sergeevich calls her vy one more time and smiles so openly that she glances at my mother and bites her lip. “I want to be an actress,” she says looking at her feet. “I want to apply to drama school.”

  My mother, busy pouring boiling water from a kettle into a small porcelain pot filled with tea essence, stops and drills her eyes into Marina, who is still staring at her feet with such concentration that I creep out of the hallway to see if anything extraordinary has attached itself to her slippers.

  Ivan Sergeevich becomes agitated, as though this is the best piece of news he has heard in a long time. “I can help you, dear girl,” he exclaims enthusiastically, pressing his hands together in front of his chest as if begging Marina to take advantage of his offer. “I have a wonderful old friend, an actress, who could listen to you read. She can tell you if your talent is suitable for theater. She can advise you on what pieces would work especially well.” He names the actress and Marina stops examining her shoes and looks up. It is a name she has heard many times, first on the radio in the old Ivanovo house, and later in Leningrad, a name attached to a voice that delivers a story every day at three, for which Marina sometimes skips the last period of school.

  He gives Marina the name and the telephone number, oblivious of my mother’s ominous teacup clinking and tensed back as she roots in the cupboard for a jar with strawberry jam. My mother has brought the good dishes from the other room, the set with rosebuds and a golden stripe that makes its appearance on the table only when we have guests, and we drink tea with slices of bread loaded with butter and jam while Ivan Sergeevich explains the steps in the breeding process. When we finish, he carefully sweeps breadcrumbs off the oilcloth into his palm and offers it to Major, who all this time has been waiting for a handout under the table. Then we all crowd into the hallway, and as Ivan Sergeevich reaches for his hat, my mother pulls him back into the kitchen and shuts the door.

  My sister and I stand under the coat hooks, hiding in the folds of wool and crinkly raincoats, unable to hear anything but the hum of voices. I try to breathe very quietly in order not to test Marina’s patience. She wouldn’t normally let me share such a moment with her, but now, intent on unbraiding the strands of two voices behind the kitchen door, she tolerates my presence.

  When the door finally opens, we skitter into Marina’s room and peek through a crack between the hinges. Ivan Sergeevich, looking uneasy, aims a little smile toward my mother, who unbolts the front door with aggressive efficiency.

  The next day Marina calls the number, and the actress gives her a date for a reading. My sister’s face burns with the same feverish energy I see in my friend Genka’s face when he comes up with another plan to outsmart Aunt Polya.

  “This is nothing but childish blabber,” says my father at supper, smoking the last of today’s pack of Belomors, annoyed at the noise my mother makes rattling the silverware in the sink. His head hurts, he says, because Uncle Volodya, his chauffeur, couldn’t fix his twelve-year-old Pobeda today, and he had to take a bus and hang out of its doors with other commuters like a bunch of grapes. He stubs out the cigarette and gets up. “This actress, whoever she is, will yawn through a couple of poems and send her home.”

  I’m glad Marina cannot hear this since she is with her school drama club tonight.

  “Maybe it’s all for the best,” sighs my mother, as she picks up a rag and starts drying the dishes. “Maybe she needs to be told by an actress that a theatrical career is out of the question. Like my mamochka always says, everything that happens, happens for the best.” A diminutive mamochka, which she uses instead of mama, sounds strange to me since I can’t imagine my wide, ancient grandma as anything miniature or slight. My grandma’s philosophy sounds strange, too: if everything happened for the best, why are there so many things around that aren’t so good?

  All week I hear Marina practicing in her room, reciting and singing. Loudly and with inspiration she reads Lermontov’s “Sailboat” and Paustovsky’s “Basket with Pinecones.” Leaning on her door, I try to memorize the lines so I can repeat them later for my friend Genka in the same tragic and melancholy voice, a voice destined for somber theater audiences wrapped in velvet and furs.

  After the audition, my mother receives a phone call. She tells my father about it while Marina is sent out to the bakery, but this time the kitchen door is open a crack, and hiding in the tangle of coats, I hear every word. The actress called her at work, at the faculty room of the anatomy department since we don’t have a phone at home. For about five minutes, under the gaze of a bored pathology professor, my mother heard about Marina’s outstanding talent. You must understand, the actress said, that she has a gift for acting. You must allow her to go to drama school.

  My mother reports that she felt angry to hear the judgment that instantly shattered the family’s plans and legitimized, to an extent, such an unworthy profession as acting. But at the same time she can’t deny she felt something that resembled pride. For a minute, while the actress went on praising Marina’s innate gift, the anger and the pride bumped against each other, with pride unexpectedly taking the upper hand. My mother said “Thank you” and hung up.

  When Marina returns home with a loaf of bread, she goes directly to the kitchen and starts setting the table. She doesn’t usually set the table unless she is told, but she knows the actress is going to call mother any day now, so she is being preemptively helpful and sweet.

  My mother watches her move across the scuffed linoleum, swing open the cupboard doors, and take out four plates.

  “Elena Vladimirovna telephoned me today,” she says, calling the actress by her name and patronymic, the only way an adult can be addressed in the presence of a child. “You’re going to Moscow,” she says. Marina’s hand stops in midair and drops a fork on the floor. My sister has a stupid expression on her face, a look you should never show, a look I would never let Aunt Polya see—half confusion, half fear. Maybe she thinks she’s being punished for having publicly revealed her ambition to be an actress. Maybe she thinks she did so badly at the audition that the actress has recommended that she be banished from Leningrad altogether.

  “To Moscow?” she stammers out.

  “Yes, to Moscow,” my mother says impatiently, not wanting to repeat the words she wasn’t happy to say in the first place. “Elena Vladimirovna said you should go to the best school there is, and Leningrad drama school is not that good.”

  4. Dacha

  MY GRANDPARENTS COME TO visit every summer. From June to September they stay in our dacha thirty kilometers from Leningrad, a little house squatting on a half-acre of land behind a wood fence. It was my mother who initiated buying the dacha soon after I was born, despite my father’s uncertainty about added responsibilities. I’m already eight, and I can conjure up how it happened. The baby needs fresh air, she would have declared in her teaching voice, the same voice that tells me I must finish every crumb on my plate.

  My father probably hesitated, since no one wants to do right away what the teaching voice tells you. But his deepest passion was fishing, and the dacha stood a mere four kilometers from the Gulf of Finland, where you could catch pike and perch and sometimes even eel. In a rowboat, he felt at peace, enjoying the solitude infinitely more than he enjoyed the catch.

  Now the boards of the dacha have been bleached to gray by years of snow and rain, with only several leftover patches of the original green paint scattered over the wood. A porch, sinking to the left, leads to an enclosed veranda with a table and two long benches in the center. The rest of the house is always dark, since the two small windows sifting light into our tiny bedroom and kitchen are shaded by branches of a sprawling lilac bush. When I enter, my eyes need
a few seconds to adjust to the twilight, to make out the contours of a fat, wood-burning stove propping the low ceiling.

  Another stove, this one flat-topped to accommodate pots and pans, dominates the kitchen. Its cast-iron body seems to grow out of the floorboards, rooted somewhere in the depths of the earth below the foundation. A metal sink—connected to nothing since there is no plumbing—hangs underneath a washing device, a pot with a hole in the middle plugged with a metal stem. When I jiggle the stem up and down, water trickles onto my hands and, through a hole in the washbasin, falls into a pail underneath. The sink makes you think the washing device is really a faucet that drips water into a pipe instead of a stinky pail—another example of vranyo, which Aunt Polya taught me in nursery school.

  Dedushka, my grandfather, loves gardening. Tall and white-haired, his body thick as an oak tree, he turned a half-acre of waist-tall grass into a showcase of neat beds of strawberries, cucumbers, and dill. He planted apple trees, whose branches now bend under the weight of apples, and bushes of gooseberries, their sour fruit covered with soft white fur. In the back, he built a tomato hothouse, a sheet of plastic perched on a wooden frame and held down by bricks.

  Dedushka loves to be in charge. The commander, my grandmother calls him. She looks at him out of the kitchen window, washing plates in a kettle of warm water, the skin around her eyes folding into deeper pleats with a smile from behind her glasses.