A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  But the worst drawback of being at the front of the alphabetical list is that no one has yet returned to tell the story. They are all still inside, the A’s, B’s, and V’s, pressed into cotton-padded chairs, cringing away from the drills.

  The door opens again and the first dentist, the woman in the meringue pie hat, is staring into another folder. “Gorokhova,” she barks, my last name only, in a voice that suddenly sounds like Aunt Polya’s. I creep across the waiting room and Vera Pavlovna, who is now standing by the door, pats me on the back.

  The room is the size of our school cafeteria, with twelve dental chairs arranged in two rows, although the drills make it look less like a cafeteria and more like a factory floor. A factory for neglected teeth compromised by too many Squirrels. I see my three classmates, small inside the tall chairs, their open mouths gaping in faces twisted with fear. As I follow the meringue hat around the towering drills, I see Anya Antonova, the first one called, her hand over her cheek, climbing out of the chair now designated for me.

  “Sit down,” says the dentist, and she begins to study my chart. I hope she studies it well enough to see that I had no cavities last year despite all those chocolates my mother pretends she doesn’t like. I hope she decides I am an exceptional case and lets me out of this chair with padded arms and the drill looming on my right.

  She stops reading, puts down the folder, and sinks onto a stool next to the chair. She is so close I can see little black hairs over her upper lip and creases radiating from her eyes into her hair. From the table that is out of my sight she picks up something long and metal. “Open wide,” she says and starts poking inside my mouth, tugging at my teeth with a metal hook, wheezing into my face with a breath of cabbage and black bread.

  Then she stops, puts down the poking instrument, and starts writing in the file. She writes and writes, and the more she writes the lower my hopes sink until they cannot sink any lower, hitting the bottom of the dental abyss. I hear someone scream through the whizzing of drills, and it begins to smell like burning wire, or maybe smoldering bone.

  “Open wide,” says my meringue-hatted dentist as she packs my mouth full of chalk-tasting rolls of cotton. “And stay open.”

  I shut my eyes and stay open. I hear the drill roaring to life; I taste its metal heat as it bores into one tooth, then the second one, then the third, and then I lose count. The drill seems to gouge into the center of every tooth, burning and coming too close to something soft and unprotected that I know would hurt much more than I can tolerate. I clench my fists and think of my father. I think of how strong he had to be to survive the Gulf of Finland storm. I imagine him being pummeled by the waves, struck by the oars flying in the wind. I imagine him clenching his fists around the wood and rowing as hard as he could, hard pellets of rain whipping him in the face. He withstood it all. Not even for a moment did he think of crying or moaning or showing that it hurt.

  When the buzzing of the drill finally stops and I feel the soaked rolls of cotton being pulled out, I open my eyes and see Vera Pavlovna standing in front of me, smiling.

  “Molodets,” she says. “Five cavities and you didn’t even cry.”

  I know she is being generous because I feel the hot path of two tears that rolled down my cheeks. But I know they were silent tears nobody heard, and that makes them unimportant because my dentist with the meaty hands didn’t notice them or pretended she didn’t as she drilled the teeth decayed by too many Squirrels.

  The rest is easy. After the dentist mixes the ingredients on her table, she dips something cold and ether-smelling into each drilled hole. Then she scoops the mixture and packs it into each tooth, pressing hard with her metal hook. It doesn’t matter that the ether stings and makes my tongue go numb; it doesn’t matter that the scraping makes me wince. If I can withstand the drill, I can be like my father. I can withstand anything.

  Back in the waiting room, I see Sveta Yurasova crouched in the corner. She is impressed by my valor, but her eyes are all pupils. I know she has realized that nothing extraordinary is going to happen between G and Y that will save her.

  As I sit there waiting for everyone to be drilled and patched, I find out that five cavities wasn’t actually that bad. Dimka the hooligan, as it turns out, had twelve and is still sweating in the dentist’s chair. Zoya the diamond wailed so loudly and jerked her head so much every time she heard the drill start that the dentist screamed at her, kicked her out of the chair, and told her to come back with her mother. And Anya Antonova, the first girl to go in, has had a dose of arsenic crammed into the root of her tooth and is required to come back in three days when the nerve is dead so that the meringue-hatted dentist can perform a root canal.

  My partner Sveta, the last one to go in, turns out to be the luckiest of all. She takes on my role of last year, the girl with perfect teeth, and even the meanest dentist, the one who yelled at Zoya for crying, fails to find a single cavity in her frightened mouth.

  AT HOME, WHEN WE have our evening tea, I tell my father about the dental visit. He sits in his usual place at the head of the kitchen table, across from my mother, his knee drawn up to his chin, a pack of filterless Belomors next to his teacup. My father doesn’t like sweets, so he has a slice of black bread in his hand, a big piece my mother cut off the center of the loaf and slathered with a thick layer of butter. My father takes a pinch of salt with his fingers and sprinkles it all over the buttered bread.

  “I hate zubniks,” I say, using a word I’ve made up, a tooth person instead of a dentist.

  “Don’t call doctors names,” says my mother. “They are dentists, not zubniks.”

  I like the word I’ve made up because it’s precise. Dentists are tooth people, that’s all they are, prodding around your mouth every March in desperate search of reasons to pull on the cord of a rusty drill and step on a pedal to grind it to life.

  I wonder what my father thinks about zubniks. His teeth look perfect and white, undoubtedly because all his life he’s probably eaten black bread instead of Squirrels with evening tea. Maybe he can teach me something I don’t know. Maybe he can tell me a dental secret that only people with perfect teeth know, the secret that goes beyond staying away from chocolate candy.

  “I want your teeth,” I say to my father. “Perfect, with no cavities.”

  My mother gives him a look across the table, the look that makes my father reach for matches and shake a cigarette out of the pack.

  I feel I need to take a closer look at his teeth, at the teeth that should be mine because he is my father, so I get off my stool and wiggle into his lap and tug on his lips. I pull them apart so I can see his flawless teeth, uniform and straight as in a poster for dental hygiene. In comparison, my mother’s teeth, which are full of metal fillings, should be a reminder of black bread’s superiority and a deterrent against buying more Squirrels.

  But are perfect teeth worth giving up candy in favor of black bread? Is it worth suffering for years and denying myself the pleasure of Squirrels so I could end up with my father’s teeth, or is it better to succumb to guilt and a yearly dentist’s drill?

  I’m proud of myself for asking these philosophical questions about guilt and pleasure, but I know that there is one big unasked question hiding behind this oratory. The question is this: are these perfect teeth real? Once or twice, when my father stayed in bed because he didn’t feel well, I saw a glass on the bathroom sink—something that was there only when he didn’t go to work—filled with cloudy water and chunks of pink, curved plastic sprouting something that looked suspiciously like teeth. Are his own teeth so full of cavities and metal that he has to cover them up with this pretend façade that needs to be kept in a glass? Is this just another instance of vranyo, like our dacha’s fake sink or my mother’s insincere disdain for Squirrels?

  My father pulls away from my hands and lights a cigarette. He doesn’t want any more bread, he says, when my mother picks up a knife to cut off another slice. “You want my teeth?” he asks, lifts me from his l
ap, and puts me down on the floor.

  My mother looks up, a frown on her face, as if she were uncertain about what she should do next.

  “What did that zubnik say when she patched up your five cavities?” he asks, using my made-up word, ignoring what my mother said about not calling doctors names.

  “Nothing,” I say. “She was silent and mean. She put arsenic in Anya Antonova’s root canal.”

  “Did she say anything about this?” He picks up a Squirrel from the little metal vase on the table and dangles it between his fingers as if it were poison.

  The Squirrel looks so enticing in its blue wrapper that I decide it isn’t worth suffering. Next March is a century away, and I have a whole zubnik-free year stretching ahead of me, a year that can be sweetened with kilograms of Polar Bears and Red Poppies and Squirrels blooming on the shelves of our grocery store.

  My father can sense that I’ve decided not to care about ruining my teeth, that I’d rather live with my mother’s metallic smile than give up chocolates.

  “Do you want to see what happens when you ignore your teeth?” he asks and stretches his arm to put the piece of candy he is holding back into the vase.

  I don’t know if I do. I stand in the middle of our kitchen, between the cupboard with jars of our dacha jam and the stove with a pot of borsch under a warmer, not knowing if I want to face the truth. And then, as my father leans forward and drops the candy back, as the sleeve of his flannel pajamas brushes against my empty cup, I do know. I’m certain now that I don’t want to see his real, damaged teeth behind the fake perfect ones. I’d rather fool myself into thinking that his teeth are healthy and white; I’d rather pretend that my father is invincible and faultless.

  “Your father had scurvy during the war,” my mother says, preempting whatever she thinks might come next, seeing from my face that I don’t want to see anything that would blemish him. “That’s why he lost his teeth, because of hunger and a lack of vitamins. It happened to a lot of people during the war.”

  War and hunger are the two words we hear everywhere: in our classrooms, in our news, in the conversations of babushkas on the benches of our courtyard. They are nonspecific and worn out, something that happened not to individuals but to the entire country. Yet, it occurs to me, my father’s lost teeth happened specifically to him, to this bony man sitting in his chair under the shelf on which the radio is cheerfully dispensing Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Little Swans.” In a quick move, I dash toward him and dive into his lap again, wrapping my arms around his neck, burying my face in the flannel folds on his chest. He smells of the brown soap my mother uses to scrub the laundry in the bathtub against a wooden washboard with metal ribs, and of his Belomor cigarettes, and of warm skin flushed with tea.

  These are comfortable smells that make me press even deeper into the flannel of his pajamas, but I know it’s dangerous to lull yourself into a sense of false safety. I’m no longer in second grade and I just had five teeth drilled. I think of war and hunger, not the hunger that happened to the country, but the one that took away my father’s teeth. The specific hunger as opposed to the abstract hunger my teacher Vera Pavlovna lectures about in our history class. I think of the hunger that made Pavlik Morozov a hero, but I also think of what happened later, the part I learned from Marina, the part Vera Pavlovna never talks about at school. Despite Pavlik’s heroic status, his own uncle—in cold disregard of all the people Pavlik had saved from starvation by denouncing his father—picked up an ax and delivered his own, personal justice to his nephew’s head. And that unsanctioned, private act left a far greater impression in my mind than all the stories about saved people and triumphant collectives crammed into our history textbook.

  But aside from partitioning the individual loss that affected my father from the collective loss that affects nothing but our grades in history class, I have a more weighty question knocking in my head. Despite his perfect fishing cast and expert rowing and powerful arms, there was something even stronger that was able to harm him. Something that even my father didn’t have the power to prevent. So as I sit in his lap breathing in tobacco and soap, the question is a distraction from these cozy smells of home. If he could succumb to war and hunger, what else is lurking out there, what else is so deeply hidden and unmentionable that it makes my mother press her lips together and sigh?

  6. Theater

  MY MOTHER AND I are going to Moscow to see my sister’s graduation performance. She has been away for four years, studying theater and acting at the drama school named after the famous dead actor Schukin. It’s June, my mother has given the last exams, and I’ve just said good-bye to Vera Pavlovna and my third-grade class. I am a year older, content in the knowledge that Dimka the hooligan was held back, hoping that I will no longer be the gold setting for Zoya Churkina’s diamond.

  We travel on an overnight train and stay in Marina’s dormitory room, which is itself an adventure. I’ve never traveled anywhere but to the dacha, where everything is dull and familiar. The dorm is the dacha’s opposite, with its large corridors and white walls, with its foreign smells of impermanence and other people’s clothes.

  “To the end of this corridor and then two flights up,” says Marina, sprinting in front of us, her ponytail swaying as vigorously as the two string bags in her hands. The string bags are filled with pirozhki my mother had baked the day before and chunks of salami and cheese, all wrapped in last week’s Pravda.

  Marina’s hair is long now, and she has bangs that fall down to her artfully curved eyebrows. Last summer, when she was home for two weeks before she took off for her first film role, I saw her pluck her eyebrows with tweezers in front of a hallway mirror, ruthlessly yanking the little hairs out of her face, biting her lip with each vehement tug. It looked barbaric to pull out your own hair, but Marina said that it was what the stage required, and I was as impressed with her courage as with the art’s severe demands. Other than her hairstyle she is the same Marina—loud voice, big eyes my mother calls photogenic, and a pudgy nose that my sister says typecasts her into character roles.

  I don’t look anything like my sister. That’s because she is my half-sister and we have different fathers, which also gives us different patronymics. She is Marina Alexandrovna, the daughter of Alexander, and I am Elena Ilyinichna, the daughter of Ilya.

  I don’t know when I learned that my sister had a different father. I didn’t know it when I was five, but I already knew it in Vera Pavlovna’s history class. I knew it when she told us about Pavlik Morozov, who had a living real father, which made me think of Marina, who didn’t.

  Marina’s father died in 1947. Last year, when we were getting ready to join the Young Pioneers, I tried to imagine her father’s heroic death, worthy of Vera Pavlovna’s history lesson on valor. I saw him stopping a tank with a grenade or throwing himself over an artillery trench until I heard my mother say that he’d died of TB, not at all a heroic way to die, according to our history books.

  Marina doesn’t seem to care that my father is not related to her by blood and calls him papa, just as I do. He is the only father she has ever known, my mother says, since her real father, that unknown Alexander, sick with TB, died shortly after the war. There is a murky period of five years between Marina’s birth and her father’s death, the time my mother doesn’t talk about, a time long enough, in my estimation, for Marina to have known and remembered her father.

  “Papa couldn’t come,” says my mother, panting, as she climbs the stairs, heaving our black square suitcase from step to step. “Lately he hasn’t been feeling well.” She says this with a sigh, probably from lugging the heavy bag up the steps.

  When we get to Marina’s room, my mother drags the suitcase into the corner and opens it immediately because she needs to hand to my sister what she’s brought for her—an iron, a set of thick rubber curlers the color of rust, and a cylindrical package of cotton for which my mother says she stood in line for a whole hour.

  The room has three metal beds and
an armoire. Luckily, one of Marina’s roommates just got married and went to live with her new Moscow in-laws, so we move the third bed next to my sister’s for the three of us. At night, I dream of living in the dorm and of long corridors that lead nowhere, that all end in brick walls keeping me away from what I know is behind them, the stage.

  MY SISTER’S GRADUATING PERFORMANCE is tomorrow night. This performance is like a final exam, my mother says; you’d better be ready to show everything you’ve learned, or you’ll get a dvoika in acting and they’ll ship you straight to Pinsk to organize a theater club for street cleaners in their local House of Culture. My mother is still unsure that she made the right decision in allowing Marina to go to drama school. Now and then she shakes her head, saying that Marina should’ve listened to what she was told and chosen a real profession. She could have become a pathologist like Galya, my mother laments. She could be building airplanes.

  My sister’s performance is a vaudeville, which, as Marina explained to me, is a short romantic comedy with music. Her play is called Little Orphan Susanna. She plays Madame Pichard, a widowed matchmaker unsuccessfully trying to find a husband for the orphan of the title.

  In the morning Marina wakes with a scratchy throat and hoarse voice, and all day my mother has been heating milk in the dorm kitchen, adding chunks of butter into the pot. The best remedy for voice restoration, she says, carrying cups of buttery swirls up to our room.

  “I can’t sound like a crow,” Marina cackles, swaddled under a blanket in bed. “This better work.”

  I press my fingers into tight fists and wish for my mother’s remedy to work. We all understand the importance of tonight’s performance for, as my mother summed it up, Marina has to demonstrate everything she has learned in four years. I’m not sure it’s fair to judge eight semesters of schoolwork by an hour-and-a-half vaudeville, but these are the rules of the drama school and, I begin to suspect, of all schools.