A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  WHEN MY MOTHER AND I return from the anatomy department, we bring the formaldehyde smell back home, where it lingers in the hallway, around our coats and shoes.

  “Where do babies come from?” I say casually as she is thrashing around the kitchen, throwing together a quick dinner. I watch her grab a piece of meat out of the refrigerator and force it down the throat of a meat grinder. A few vigorous cranks of the metal handle, and the face of the meat grinder erupts in red twists squeezing out into a bowl underneath. Of course, I have a general idea about babies, but I want to hear my mother, an anatomy teacher, give me her straightforward version of an answer.

  “Babies come when a female sex cell is connected with a male sex cell,” my mother says, patting the mixture of meat and bread into palm-size kotlety. “Then a fetus is developed in a uterus, and nine months later a woman gives birth to a baby.”

  I am grateful to her for this direct and daring explanation sprinkled with the words “male,” “female,” and “sex,” which I can bet are not used so nonchalantly in other apartments facing the courtyard. Chewing on my kotlety, I contemplate the weight and abstraction of my new knowledge. I am enlightened by adult anatomical vocabulary, yet still completely ignorant.

  ON OUR WAY TO the medical school we pass a maternity hospital, a four-story building overlooking a little square with streetcar tracks crossing in the middle.

  “This is where you were born,” says my mother.

  In the summer, the hospital windows are opened, and young women lean out shouting details about their condition to their husbands, who are not allowed past the reception desk. “The water broke, but I’m still here,” one woman yells. “There hasn’t been any water, hot or cold, for three days,” screams another one. I am not sure they are talking about the same water, but I have no one to ask.

  Like every maternity patient, my mother stayed in the hospital for a week. Husbands came in the evening, after work, to stand on the streetcar tracks in front of the hospital and shout questions to their wives who were hanging out of the windows.

  “What color eyes?” They wanted to know, cupping their hands around their mouths so their voices could reach all the way up.

  “Blue,” yelled the women, leaning out precariously. “All infants have blue eyes.”

  “And hair?” The men persisted as streetcars jingled a warning for them to get off the tracks. “What color hair?”

  Had my father been standing on those tracks instead of sulking in a friend’s dacha about becoming a father of a girl at fifty-five, I know what my mother would have shouted down. I’ve seen my pictures as an infant. “No hair,” she would’ve said. “Bald. Just like Khrushchev.”

  Amid all this clamor, waiting for my father, she stood in the window to show me to the other women’s husbands, to the people peering out of the open streetcar windows.

  Still, seeing the maternity hospital does nothing to get me closer to understanding. Like the inside of the hospital wards, the secret is still just that, a secret.

  I STAND UNDER A poster for a movie, Love Under the Elms, hanging in our local House of Culture, which bears the name of the First Five-Year Plan. The poster shows a tree with heavy, sprawled branches that must convey the weighty and complicated nature of that love. It is an American movie, but it stars Sophia Loren, who everybody knows is Italian. I don’t understand how an Italian actress can star in an American film, how the borders between countries can be so unprotected and so easily crossed. But there is even a bigger question looming in my head, the question about the title. It is based on a play by an American playwright, Eugene O’Neill, as my friend Masha, whose mother teaches college English, informed me, and its real title is Desire Under the Elms. So what does this mean? Are desire and love the same? Or did the translator take too broad a license? Or—the more likely possibility—was the change in translation deliberate, a metamorphosis from the bodily and the sensual toward the soulful and the more lofty? None of us is surprised, for example, when during rehearsals Marina’s theater removes whole passages from Western plays. After all, as everyone knows, the capitalist West with its economy and art can produce nothing but vulgarity and shame.

  I’m afraid I will never learn the answer to any of these questions. Under the film title there is a warning: forbidden for children under sixteen. This means there is a kiss on the screen, a real kiss where you can see the lips, not where all they show is the back of the head. The warning is written in small, but deliberate letters, and it means that for four more years I won’t be able to see robust Sophia Loren—in love, or desire—who undoubtedly knows more about the secret than the skinny, black-and-white heroine of Men in Her Life.

  I think of wasp-waisted Sophia Loren in a flaring skirt, as I recently saw her in our movie magazine, Screen. She was walking on twiggy heels past some baroque buildings on an Italian street, which looked like any of our streets, except for the absence of flags and slogans stretched over the façades. Looking at the poster, I try to imagine her in America, but there is nothing concrete to anchor the image. We never see America on television; it’s a fictitious place, too foreign and too far away.

  There is no man on the poster, so I imagine Sophia Loren and the tall, enticing Volodya from my mother’s anatomy department lying under the elms, immersed in their desire. They are experienced and urbane: Sophia Loren because she is from a capitalist country, and Volodya because he is eighteen and has a real job. I envy them both, but I envy Sophia Loren more.

  I wonder if other countries have the secret, and if it is as well-guarded as it is here. I can decipher nothing from A. J. Cronin or even the supposedly raunchy Guy de Maupassant. Maybe in sultry Italy, or stately England, or mythical America, they are all born with some inherent knowledge. Maybe the secret is like their borders—unprotected and easily permeable.

  IT IS THE LAST day of my vacation, and I must say good-bye to the museum, Aunt Klava, and human anatomy. I won’t be back until next fall, another revolution anniversary when schools close for a recess. The diagram I have been copying for days is finished and propped on a museum desk. It is perfect in the precision of its red arteries and blue veins, a splash of color among jars of monochromatic organs.

  I pace along the corridor, past the doors with squares of glass in the middle. Professors stand in front of charts where human bodies are reduced to clusters of threads in primary colors, and behind one of the doors I see my mother pointing to a red clump inside a paper chest. I wonder if she loved my father with that hot, sweaty love that the poster for the Sophia Loren American movie promises. I wonder if my mother, with her need for order and marching in step with the collective, even knows about that kind of love. Or maybe she knew when she was young; maybe she used to know and then forgot.

  I walk down to the basement and saunter past Zina’s lab and Volodya’s morgue. Both doors are closed, but I hear a giggle behind the lab door. I know it’s Zina’s giggle, the little laugh she lets out when Volodya is close. I stop by the door and stand there, although I don’t know what it is I’m waiting to find out. Then there are muted sounds of Volodya’s voice, more like bursts of whisper, then Zina’s babble, then rustling and stirring and breathing. I know I should leave, but I stand there, as if the soles of my shoes have become glued to the cement floor. I know I should leave, but the secret is right here, behind this door, so I stand and listen. There is a creaking noise, and the sound of a chair scraping the floor, and more breathing. There is more whispering and stirring and clanking. I don’t know how long the secret lasts and when it ends, so I can’t estimate when I should plan a safe retreat. It would be embarrassing, it occurs to me, if that door suddenly flew open and revealed me to the eyes of Volodya and Zina, an ignorant twelve-year-old standing in the hallway, spying on their adult ways.

  Again, I feel disappointed. I’m angry that handsome Volodya is choosing to do the adult things with stringy-haired Zina, who ignores me, pretending to stare into her microscope when he is not around. But most important, I�
�m frustrated because this dangerous eavesdropping has not divulged anything new about the secret.

  There is a door between us, as always, and that’s where all important things are kept, behind closed doors.

  So I unglue my feet from the floor and go up to the dissection room. My mother’s class is just over, and her white-gowned students are tiptoeing away from the table on which lies the Man, now a scavenged body, a black skeletal frame with occasional flaps of muscle tissue hanging on dry bones between the joints.

  “Go find Aunt Klava,” says my mother when she sees me. “And turn in your white coat.”

  I don’t know that Aunt Klava is standing right behind me, so when I turn, I stumble straight into her sharp body. She opens her arms and holds my cheek to hers, her wiry hair prickling my face. She pats me on the back with her hand, so little and dry it could be a claw of a bird, rasping tobacco-smelling words into my ear. I can’t make out what she is saying, but it must be a good-bye wish, and we stand like this for a few moments, exposed to the gaze of the whole class of freshmen who have just reduced a human body to the anatomical museum display of its parts.

  I wish live bodies were as logical and scientific as cadavers. I wish they didn’t contain any secrets, thrilling and shameful, protected by those who know them with the same zeal we use to protect our borders from foreign intervention. I wish I were sixteen so I could see Love Under the Elms, in color, with real American men, and real passions, and a real mouth-to-mouth kiss as big as the screen of our local House of Culture, which bears the name of the First Five-Year Plan.

  I wish I could ask my mother—the one that is gone, the one in the portrait—about the secret, about life, about love and desire. I wish I could ask her about my father.

  My mother—the real one—takes off her white coat and her cloth hat and folds them up neatly for Aunt Klava. “The dissection is over,” she says and smiles a teacher’s smile. “It’s time to go home.”

  11. Dangers of Big Rivers

  IN JULY, JUST BEFORE I turn thirteen and when Marina is on tour with her theater, my mother and I go to visit our family in Stankovo. It is a small town on the banks of the Volga, a hundred kilometers from Ivanovo, where she was born.

  I look forward to the ride on an overnight train as much as I do to visiting my aunt and my three cousins. The cardboard tickets my mother bought three weeks ago give us admission into a train car, and when the whistle blows and the platform begins to sail away, we leave behind, in a cloud of smoke, some vigorously waving women with handkerchiefs clutched in their fists. The wheels, tentative at first, gradually get into a steady rhythm; the locomotive sighs and begins its droning pull, and the first suburban stations flicker past, surrounded by rows of tiny dachas.

  We are traveling in a more expensive four-berth compartment, separated from the narrow hallway by a mirrored door that slides open when pulled by a metal handle. I am on the upper berth, with my mother underneath me on the lower. There is another passenger, Luda, from the small town of Kaluga, which we will pass later this evening. She is staring out the window, her elbows planted on the table, her fists squashing up against her cheeks. Her heavy arms bulge out of a short-sleeved dress, and the braids of her thick wheaten hair, crisscrossed on the back of her head, sag like a hammock under their own weight.

  A man appears in the doorway of our compartment and, peering at his ticket, pushes in his suitcase. Luda turns her head, a flicker of interest brightening her face as she examines the new passenger. A plaid shirt stretches over his belly, pants bunch around his hips, and his hair, parted just above his left ear, is slicked over his balding head. He hoists a suitcase onto the upper shelf, sweat beading on his forehead. I know his ticket probably indicates that he has a lower berth, but according to train etiquette, lower berths always go to women. Before bedtime, following another unwritten rule, he will leave the compartment to let the women undress and go to bed and then, by the light of a blue bulb, climb onto his bed, carefully stepping on top of the table to lift himself up.

  “Luda,” says the woman, stretching her hand toward him when he finishes with the suitcase and wipes his face with a handkerchief.

  “A pleasure,” he says. “Semyon.”

  He then acknowledges me with a glance and smiles politely at my mother.

  Luda invites Semyon to sit on her lower berth and we all stare out the window. Outside, fields of potatoes and buckwheat sway on the horizon and clouds begin to boil in the anticipation of evening. Fields soon give way to a wall of forest. Black fir trees and white birches flicker by in a checkered pattern fringed by purple and yellow stalks of Ivan-da-Marya flowers, their colors as inseparable as the two lovers who, according to a folk legend, gave the plant its name.

  We soon find out that Luda came to Leningrad to hunt for food. An aluminum bucket with eight kilos of meat is tucked under her seat, along with string bags full of logs of bologna, wheels of cheese, and pot-bellied mayonnaise jars. “Look for a line,” she says, explaining her strategy, which is the same strategy my mother explained to me a year earlier. “The longer the better. If there’s a line, there’s something at the other end of it.”

  Semyon agrees with this tactic in principle, but adds an opinion. “I hate lines,” he says. “Never stood on one.”

  “Your wife does, right?” smirks Luda.

  Semyon smiles a guilty smile. “You women are stronger than us.”

  Luda, as we quickly learn, lives with her parents, her brother, his wife, and their two “bratty” children. Most of the food from the Leningrad trip will probably be snatched and hoarded by her “shameless” sister-in-law, who manipulated Luda’s “simpleton” brother into marrying her despite the family’s objections.

  “Do you know why it’s so easy to supply this huge country with food?” she asks, patting the bench full of string bags and buckets, reciting an old joke. “Because they only have to supply Moscow and Leningrad. The rest of the country hops on the train, grabs what’s left, and delivers it home.”

  At dusk Luda unwraps her dinner—half a loaf of black bread, four tomatoes, two hard-boiled eggs, and a half of a roasted chicken. Semyon pulls a bottle of vodka out of a newspaper cocoon and triumphantly installs it on the table next to the chicken. Then he runs to the conductor and returns with three ribbed tea glasses, which he says he promised to bring back before she started evening tea service.

  My mother gives the bottle a disdainful look and proceeds with unwrapping our own dinner. There are more hard-boiled eggs, two hefty pieces of cabbage pie she baked three days ago, and two thick slices of bologna glued with butter to chunks of black bread.

  Semyon yanks off the silver bottle cap and measures out vodka, half a glass each, for Luda and himself. Then he turns to my mother, who puts her hand over the top of the third glass under Luda’s gaze, first disbelieving, then sneering. I know my mother despises vodka and feels suspicious of those who drink it.

  “Too bad we have no salted herring for a chaser,” says Semyon, using the diminutive selyodochka.

  “No selyodochka, what a shame,” pipes in Luda, shifting from ridicule of my mother’s refusal to drink to anticipation of a feast. Her nimble hands cut the chicken and slice the bread. Suddenly she slaps herself on the hip and shrieks, “Fool! What a fool I am! I completely forgot!”

  She lifts her berth and roots inside. Triumphantly, she pulls out and unwraps a jar of pickles with chunks of garlic and stalks of dill floating inside. “This’ll do as well,” she says, putting it on the table next to the bottle. “I was bringing it to compare with our own pickles, but what the hell.” She nudges the metal lid with a knife and it obediently pops open. “There’s nothing you’ll spare for good company.”

  “To good company,” says Semyon, raising his glass to click with Luda’s. He drinks in three big gulps, pats his lips on his sleeve, and grunts. Then he squeezes his eyes shut for a second and his whole face ripples in wrinkles of exhilaration. He grabs a pickle and bites half of it off as his features
smooth back into place.

  “To good vodka and good food,” says Luda. She exhales and, after finishing half of her vodka, starts making squealing noises, waving her hand in front of her face. Then she curses under her breath, drinks the rest, and finishes Semyon’s pickle.

  For a second, my mother looks at them scornfully, then turns and peers out the window. Drinking vodka is as low as one can get, as far as she is concerned. At celebrations, she sips a little cognac and the sweet wine my grandfather brews in twenty-five-liter jars out of piles of sugar and black currants from his garden.

  I see that Luda is now staring at my mother with the same scorn my mother had in her eyes seconds earlier.

  My mother senses the stare and meets her gaze. “Vodka from tea glasses,” she says in her teaching voice and didactically shakes her head.

  “Vodka from tea glasses,” mimics Luda, curling her mouth. “And what do you prefer, Madame Leningrad, champagne?”

  My mother purses her lips. “What I prefer is none of your business,” she says in a voice she uses to admonish.

  “Leave her alone,” Semyon tells Luda and grins apologetically at my mother. “You’re from different places, you’re used to different things.” He doesn’t say my mother is kulturnaya, cultured, and Luda isn’t, but I know that’s what he means.