A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  “I can see that,” Luda retorts. “She refuses to drink vodka, so maybe she’s not even Russian.”

  I think of Masha Mironova, whose mother is Russian, like mine, but whose father isn’t, wondering how being Russian makes life easier if any vodka-sloshing woman on the train can still hurl any accusation she wants straight into your face.

  My mother gets up and props her fist on her hip. “I’m as Russian as you are,” she says. “I just don’t drink as much.”

  “Touché,” says Semyon, extending his arm as if holding a rapier.

  “I don’t know touché,” says Luda, her cheeks flaming like autumn apples. “What I do know is that she’s calling me an alcoholic.”

  My mother did not say the word, but I know that she thought it. It is the word she hurtles into Marina’s face when, on such occasions as an opening night or an actor’s birthday, my sister’s key fumbles in the lock of our apartment and fails to find the keyhole. On these nights my mother deliberately unlocks the door and yells that Marina takes after her father in drinking the same way I take after mine in obstinacy.

  “Why are we arguing?” says Semyon, positioning himself between the two berths. “We have good food, good drink, and good company. Let’s make the best of our trip.”

  Luda pounds her empty glass on the table. “You and my sister-in-law, the one married to my idiot brother.” She glares at my mother. “Always pointing a finger at me. Always telling me I drink too much.”

  “Who drinks too much?” Semyon looks around in mock bewilderment. “A bottle for two, normal stuff.”

  “Just wait.” Luda gets up and takes a step toward my mother, nudging Semyon out of the way with her weight. “One day soon you’ll crawl out to the countryside looking for bread and then I’ll spit on you. The way you spit on me when I stock up in Leningrad.”

  This is ironic because the berth I am sitting on is full of string bags with the same provisions Luda is bringing back: cheese, mayonnaise, and bologna my mother has stored up for my aunt’s family. In the corner of the trunk underneath me is a bucket, the same as Luda’s, the same bucket we always see in our stores, its contents covered with several layers of plastic—eight kilos of meat, a glorious harvest from two hours in a butcher line. Leningrad provisions, as Luda’s joke goes, being delivered to the faraway corners of our country by the people themselves, one shopper at a time.

  “Kaluga next!” the conductor’s voice rings out from the corridor. Our door rattles on its hinges and slides open, and the conductor’s henna-colored head pops into the doorway.

  I’m glad the conductor showed up when she did. I’m scared of Luda, of her thick forearms and her braids, so strange on an adult head. She reminds me of Aunt Polya, and I’m certain that if we were in an open space and she had a chance to shriek at the top of her lungs she would reveal the same kitchen voice.

  “How long is the stopover?” asks my mother.

  “Fifteen minutes,” the conductor yells back, bustling down the corridor in her black uniform with brass buttons on the front.

  Luda now feverishly turns her attention to lifting her string bags out of the trunk. Semyon is helping her with the bucket, and she joins a line of passengers getting off that has stretched down the corridor to our door.

  “Such a nekulturnaya,” my mother mumbles into Luda’s receding back. “Culture hasn’t been anywhere close to this woman.”

  If we are fast, my mother and I, we can jump down the three metal steps of the train and check out the local offerings peddled by kerchiefed women: strawberries sold by the cup; jars of home-marinated mushrooms, their slippery caps glistening through glass; and fried pirozhki filled with cabbage, mouth-watering and greasy. At the end of the platform, a freckled girl holds up a tiny basket of wild strawberries.

  “Let’s buy them all,” I whisper to my mother, who hands a ruble note to the girl as I take the basket, the tangy forest smell tickling my nostrils.

  “Tea!” rings the conductor’s voice back in our car. “Who wants tea?”

  A minute later, three steaming glasses nestled in metal glass-holders—the same glasses used earlier for the vodka—are lowered onto our table. We drink strong tea with wild strawberries, gazing out at the stars that appear one by one, tangled in the freshly crocheted spread of darkness.

  For less than a day, my mother, Semyon, and I are united by the rattle of the wheels, by the changing frames of landscape. We speed through blackness in the cloister of our compartment, where reality is measured by the intensity of amber tea, by the scent of wild strawberries.

  The magic will last until noon tomorrow, when the train will arrive at its final destination, Stankovo, and we will step into the bustle of the station, into the arms of my aunt, uncle, and cousins. But for now we are still here, looking out the window into black emptiness to the lullaby of clattering wheels.

  MY AUNT MUZA MEETS us at the train station with my three cousins, Kostya, Fedya, and Kolya. The reason she has three, she jokes, when they crowd around us in the elbowing turmoil of the train arrival, is that she has always wanted a girl. After her third son, Kolya, was born, she realized that girls were my mother’s destiny, not hers, and gave up.

  Muza in Russian means “Muse,” which was, perhaps, my grandma’s attempt to memorialize her own unrealized opera singing career. Her father, a factory owner and a man of strict morals, banned her from studying at a conservatory, where she’d won a scholarship, because no decent woman, in his view, should appear onstage.

  My aunt is short and round, fifteen years younger than my mother, and looks nothing like a Muse. Keeping with the family tradition, Aunt Muza is a doctor, an obstetrician at the town’s only hospital. Round-faced and stocky, she made it her priority to beef me up, to infuse color into my cheeks, which she calls “city pity.” Every afternoon she installs herself in the kitchen, whose walls are adorned with braids of garlic and onion, first in front of the table where she chops, mixes, and kneads, and then before a gas stove, which makes her face even more rosy and shiny. From under her dancing fingers flow sheets of cabbage pie, pans full of potatoes fried with onions, and steaming pots of a sauerkraut soup with beef bones called schi.

  Aunt Muza gets beef from her patients, women who work in stores or meat-packing houses. She likes to repeat a joke that outlines the scarcity of Stankovo’s food supplies: A man comes to a butcher shop. Do you have any fish? he asks. Here we don’t have meat, says the saleswoman. Fish they don’t have across the street.

  The lack of fish in Stankovo is a dark mystery to my mother, who cannot comprehend how a town sitting on the bank of the greatest Russian river can be devoid of its most indigenous product. “Blat,” mutters Aunt Muza—you must have connections. Muza’s own blat weaves through the fabric of the town’s female population, and in addition to beef shanks, she sometimes lumbers home with a whole snapper carefully wrapped in newspaper, its slippery tail sticking out the top of her string bag.

  Those few things the shops do have are placed inside near-empty glass cases, their solitude raising them to the status of delicacies. In grocery stores permeated with the smell of the sawdust that covers their floors, I stumble upon foods different from what I can find at home, and that alone makes them tantalizing. In an echoey bakery I beg my mother to buy a cake covered with a mysterious brown glaze, which is the store’s only ware. I find a dairy, two bus stops away, and although it is usually out of milk by noon, it sells delicious, raisin-studded ice cream packed into a waffle cone by a big morose woman, nine kopeks for as much as she decides to scoop in.

  In the afternoons we all go to the Volga. My cousins Kostya, Fedya, and I race as far as we can into the brown vastness of the river. Kolya skips stones on the far side of the narrow beach, away from the rock where we pile our clothes. My mother, Aunt Muza, and Uncle Fedya come with us.

  “We’re so lucky to live close to the Volga!” my aunt exclaims. “Look at this natural beauty. Where else could you find such vistas?” Muza seems to find beauty or l
uck in almost everything, and this time she’s lucky to live on the riverbank because hot water in their apartment building has recently been turned off.

  During the bathing-in-the-Volga ritual, Aunt Muza tells us stories about the hospital. So far they have all been short and funny and have nothing to do with illness. But I sense that what she does at work is daunting and dangerous compared to my mother’s job of teaching anatomy.

  Aunt Muza is putting on a huge two-piece bathing suit, green with yellow flowers, while my uncle, thin and already balding, is staring through a pair of binoculars in the direction of some girls giggling and cavorting further down the riverbank.

  “She keeps running a high fever, this woman,” says Aunt Muza, carefully folding her dress and placing it on a rock. “Three days after the surgery, and she’s burning like a stove.” Gorit i gorit—burning and burning—she stresses the o’s the same way Kolya does, which still sounds strange to my Leningrad ears.

  “The usual remedies don’t work, the antibiotics are still rotting in some warehouse, and the department chief has just flown off to a convention of honorary communists in Moscow.” Aunt Muza cannot fasten the clasp on the back of her bathing suit brassiere, and it takes my mother a minute or two of vigorous pulls to make the two ends meet.

  “I wheel her back and open her up again, and what do I find?” continues Aunt Muza, testing the water with her toe. Her stomach is so round, even more than my mother’s. I wonder at what stage in life women’s stomachs undergo the miraculous transformation from flat like mine to barrel-shaped like Aunt Muza’s.

  “A surgical napkin left in her gut,” announces Muza. “A napkin in the belly, with peritonitis brewing, no antibiotics, and the department chief receiving an award in Moscow.”

  I don’t know what a surgical napkin looks like, but I imagine one of those huge linen squares that appear on the table for major holidays. A napkin that big, I decide, could only fit into a belly the size of my aunt’s. But the conversation makes unpleasant thoughts pop into my mind, and I strain to listen to groans in my stomach, attaching each one to the possible presence of a foreign object.

  “Who left the napkin?” asks my mother in the voice she uses when she demands to pin down responsibility and dispense appropriate punishment.

  Aunt Muza shakes her head and flips her wrist in a gesture that seems out of character with her plump features, her cheerful roundness. She gazes into the darkness of the river for a minute, her eyes wide open, as if straining to make out something deep below its brown water. “It was the nurse’s aide,” she finally says, shifting her gaze back to the land. “The aide got drunk on surgical alcohol.”

  “She should be put on trial,” glowers my mother, her voice ringing with satisfaction at having located the culprit. “Tried and convicted. The patient could have died.”

  Aunt Muza starts wading into the water, pushing it sideways with her hands as if clearing some unseen debris from the surface. When it gets up to her thighs, she stops.

  “It’s not that simple. The aide, Alya Svetlova, has worked there her whole life. Scrubbing and washing since the war. She should be peacefully collecting her pension and growing potatoes like everyone else, but she has to work double shifts to support her thirty-year-old idiot-of-a-son who beats her up.”

  “A firing squad. It would have been quick under Stalin—no investigation and it’s over,” proclaims my uncle, who has stopped staring at the girls and is now sitting on the rock rubbing the lenses of his binoculars with a sleeve of his shirt. “They used to shoot people for lesser crimes than that.”

  “For being two minutes late to work they used to throw you in jail,” says my mother. “You overslept and missed the bell and the next thing you know they’re banging on your door in the middle of the night. I saw people disappear for missing the bell. There was order then.”

  “Order!” erupts Uncle Fedya and spits on the ground. “Look around. Gangs of hooligans on every corner, nurses drunk in operating rooms. Where has the order gone?” His arms fly up in the air. “A hand of steel—that’s what the people need. They understand strength and that’s the only thing they listen to. Put someone strong in charge and even the worst bum will shape up overnight.”

  “That’s absolutely right,” says my mother, and she drives her fists into her hips, which makes her look like a teapot.

  I am glad I wasn’t born when Stalin was in charge. It’s unclear to me why my mother, my uncle, or anyone else would lament the era of throwing people in jail for being late to work. Did they also throw students in jail for being late for school?

  “I had a surgery case during the war,” says my mother, who cannot offer an equally dangerous story from her present teaching experience, so she has to dredge it out of her surgical past. Only now her voice isn’t as firm and she doesn’t sound as certain as she did a few minutes earlier when she argued for a hand of steel. “A nine-year-old boy got blown up on a mine, in the spring of 1942, when the Volga ice began to shift. His dead friend’s mother brought him in.” I’d heard the story before—three boys with buckets wading into the river to collect the fish floating belly up among chunks of ice from a mine explosion, setting off another one by mistake. I know that what impressed my mother most was that woman, who had left her own dead son on the riverbank to carry his only surviving friend to the hospital two kilometers away.

  “I began to prepare him for surgery,” my mother says. “The boy was already on the table when the Commissar stormed in, shouting I had no right to operate on civilians in a military hospital.”

  “What did you do?” asks Uncle Fedya, tossing a rock in the water, and I see Aunt Muza look at him the way Vera Pavlovna looked at Dimka the hooligan when he asked why the Great October Socialist Revolution is celebrated in November.

  “I did what I had to do, operate,” says my mother. “He ordered me to ship the boy to a civilian hospital as soon as I was finished. ‘We’ll see about that,’ I said.” She folds her arms across her chest, just as she probably did twenty-five years ago.

  “So what happened?” asks Uncle Fedya, who stopped tossing rocks and is now looking at my mother, interested in the story.

  “After I was done, I went to talk to Dr. Kremer, the head of the hospital. He was also a surgeon and he understood. He turned out to be intelligentny. We agreed that the boy would stay for three days so I could make sure the stitches worked and there was no infection. On the fourth day we transferred him to a civilian hospital.”

  Intelligentny is a multi-faceted adjective my mother likes to use to characterize people. It is a salad mix of education, culture, intelligence, and manners, plus a certain view of the world that allows an alternative. The Commissar, who yelled at my mother for breaking a military rule, was obviously not intelligentny. The head of the hospital, who colluded with her in rule-breaking, certainly was.

  By this standard, Uncle Fedya, with his myopic views and a love for hands of steel, is not at all intelligentny, whereas Aunt Muza, with her compassion and common wisdom, could stand a chance. I try to divide the people I know into intelligentny vs. not intelligentny categories, but the list of the former comes out much shorter than the latter. Not intelligentny: Aunt Polya from my nursery school, my third-grade teacher Vera Pavlovna, Luda on the train, every saleswoman in every grocery store. Intelligentny: my English tutor Irina Petrovna.

  Then what about my mother and Marina? They are educated but not terribly cultured. My mother didn’t bring her bathing suit to Stankovo, so she goes swimming in her white bra and pink underpants. Marina licks plates. Most important, they both yell, at me and at each other, which automatically disqualifies them from the intelligentny category.

  But do you have to be intelligentny yourself in order to decide if others are? Am I intelligentny?

  I watch the sun heave toward the jagged line of forest on the other bank of the river. My uncle tests the water with his foot and a shiver runs through his skinny body. “Holod sobachii”—“dog’s freezing cold,”
his favorite expression, except the o’s don’t roll down his tongue because he is originally from around Moscow.

  From Aunt Muza’s movements in the water, from her cautious stroke, I sense that she, too, isn’t so sure about the advantages of a hand of steel or the benefits of jailing and shooting. I sense that she, like Kolya, believes in whirlpools, in the might of the river, in its silent menace, so I give her the benefit of doubt and add her to my short intelligentny list.

  WE ARE BOUNCING ON a bus over gouged roads to a nearby village to stock up on bread and milk, my mother, Aunt Muza, and my cousins, each carrying an empty basket. When the bus deposits us in the middle of a dirt road, we walk on a footpath through fields specked with blue stars of cornflowers and purple butterflies of wild sweet peas. I am glad I’ve brought a sweater because I am freezing, although the sun is beating down and my cousin Kostya has unbuttoned his shirt.

  We walk along a footpath through a patch of weeds to an izba, a log cabin with a straw roof pressing down on two squatty windows, perched on the brink of the forest. A kerchiefed woman waddles down the two front steps.

  “Zahodite, zahodite,” she invites us in, her mouth stretched in a toothless smile. She is ageless, in a black canvas dress, with veins threading her suntanned hands. When my eyes get used to the semi-darkness of the entrance, I make out a goat lying on a bed of straw and a hen clucking around a litter of brown chicks. The chicks scurry away, the goat struggles up on its spindly legs, and the six of us, too many for the house’s only room, crowd in front of a Russian stove, a brick wall with an opening in the middle for cooking and a ledge on top for sleeping.

  I have never seen a real Russian stove. Everyone knows, from Russian folktales, what it is supposed to look like; you always find Ivan-the-Fool sleeping on top while more serious characters spend the day riding horses or planting wheat. But this Russian stove is blackened with soot, and I can’t imagine anyone lying on the narrow brick ledge.