A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  The ageless woman wants us to taste her cottage cheese and yellow sour cream and the black bread she baked in the Russian stove. To demonstrate the thickness of her sour cream she sticks a big spoon in the middle of the bowl, filled to the brim, and the spoon remains standing, like a proud flagpole, a testament to the virtue of homemade food. She brings in a pitcher of goat’s milk, steam rising from its surface.

  I don’t drink the milk because it has a pungent smell, and the sour cream melts into a puddle of fat on my tongue. While I pick at the bread, my cousins wolf down bowls of cottage cheese and bread hunks loaded with butter. “Eat, eat,” nudges my mother, her elbow in my side, although the spinning sensation in my stomach nauseates me and I don’t feel like eating.

  At last, we leave the izba, having paid eight rubles for our baskets filled with loaves of bread, jars of sour cream and cottage cheese, and a hefty chunk of butter wrapped in a plastic bag. Kostya, the oldest cousin, treads carefully because he is clutching a three-liter jar of goat’s milk to his chest. While we wait for the bus, I’m so cold that Aunt Muza wraps her shawl around me, but I still shiver. She puts her palm on my forehead, shakes her head, and says that I’m getting sick.

  AT NIGHT, I BURN and sweat and have strange dreams. I dream about my cousin Kolya, who is afraid to swim in the Volga because there are whirlpools there. The o’s in the Russian word for whirlpool, vodovorot, rolled down his tongue like a handful of peas when he told me about his fear by the foot of the steep Volga bank, where brown water, bottomless after the first few steps, licked the dirt in lazy ripples.

  In the dream, Kolya and I wade in, our bodies cutting through the water. An undercurrent tingles my ankles and makes me stop for a moment. Kolya is walking in up to his chest, then to his neck, until I see only his ears sticking out of the sides of his round head. I’ve never seen Kolya so deep in the river. I try to yell to him, but no sound comes out, no matter how hard I strain. He keeps walking slowly, as if remembering his fear, and I know he is walking straight into the whirlpool. One more step and he is embraced by the power underneath, and all I can see is his head spinning on the surface of the water as he is pulled further and further away from the shore.

  I stumble back to the narrow beach, where my uncle in bathing trunks is staring through the binoculars at my school friend Masha doing a cartwheel in her leotard. I don’t understand how Masha got to Stankovo from Leningrad, where she should be spending her summer vacation, but I’m glad she did because I can tell her about Kolya and the whirlpool. It is no use telling my uncle, who is glued to his binoculars, fascinated by Masha’s cartwheels.

  To get to Masha I must climb the slope of the riverbank, so steep that when I approach, it rises like a wall. The wall closes on me like the top of a trunk, and I know that now I will not be able to save Kolya from the whirlpool no matter how hard I try.

  A cool weight presses on my forehead, and the top of the trunk opens a crack. I see a hand straightening something white and wet on my head. “A compress for your fever,” says my aunt’s voice. But I know immediately it’s a surgical napkin, so I yank it off because I don’t want it to end up sewn into my belly. The hand struggles, shoving the compress back onto my forehead, but I scream, and when the hand recoils I am free to run back to the shore, where the whirlpool is spinning around Kolya.

  As I careen down the riverbank, small rocks tumbling in my wake, a question is pounding in my head in sync with my steps: Why of all the kids who swim in the river was it Kolya who stepped into the whirlpool? Why not the girls cavorting in their bikinis on the beach, or Igor from across the street who wobbles to the river on his rusty bicycle, or my cousin Kostya, who refuses to even acknowledge the danger? Why not me?

  Not me, not me, not me, a little hammer bangs in my temple as they try to push a wet napkin in my face again, and again I scream it off my head. The hand then rests on my forehead, pleasant in its cold heaviness, soothing. For a moment, I pause in my flight down the riverbank trying to understand why it was Kolya who was pulled away by the undercurrent. The water below is black as oil, glistening under the last strokes of the sun; no insects glide over its surface, no boats cut into its heft. Through the haze of heavy air the answer sinks in like a rock through water: the whirlpool singled out Kolya precisely because Kolya knew about its existence.

  I look down on the Volga, on the stillness that belies its danger, on its beckoning silence. Masha with her cartwheels is gone, and my uncle, who for some reason never ventures to look through his binoculars at the river itself, is focusing on several specks of people etched against the evening sky on the rim of the far riverbank. Stepping out of my shoes, I walk across the hardened dirt of the beach to the waiting water. The river, lukewarm and soothing, envelops my feet, kisses my legs, strokes my back. Its blackness is entrancing, spellbinding, impossible to resist. As I walk deeper, the bottom slides away from under my feet, leaving me to spin slowly in the tender embrace of the whirlpool.

  ONCE MY FEVER BREAKS, Aunt Muza doubles her efforts to not only add new pounds to my waist but also replace several lost during my illness. A bad flu, she says when I ask her what it was. She sings while she kneads and chops—old ballads and songs from the radio and films. She must have inherited my grandma’s unused opera talent: her voice soars in sophisticated roulades that quickly get trapped in her little kitchen. I obediently sip her schi and chew on her pirozhki, grateful to my three cousins who, without much effort, can sweep clean a table full of food in a matter of minutes.

  I watch her dance in front of the stove, her thick hands surprisingly graceful, her whole body submitting to the food-making ritual and yet presiding over it. I want to ask her what has happened to the patient with the napkin in her belly. I want to ask her about the vague perils that seem to lurk in the most mundane places, but it somehow seems both dangerous and foolish to validate verbally something that is so murky, nothing more than images floating in a feverish head.

  I’m surprised I remember this dream at all. There is only one other dream that didn’t evaporate the moment I opened my eyes, and it probably stayed in my memory because it was so odd. In the dream, my father was sitting in his boat, speaking about what happens a minute before the curtain goes up, as if he were an actor. The people in the audience hold their breath and all the noise stops, he said, just before the magic is about to begin. Don’t let the magic slip away, he warned me. Don’t sink into the quicksand of the ordinary.

  Did he recognize the magic in real life? Or do I remember this dream so well because I wished he had?

  I wonder if Aunt Muza’s napkin incident could have happened in the past, when my father was alive, when there was order, according to Uncle Fedya and my mother. I wonder how orderly it must have been, that order, if my uncle considers our present marching in step with the collective a state close to anarchy. And yet, even in that order, there were intelligentny people in charge like Dr. Kremer in my mother’s war hospital, who chose not to follow military rules. Was life easier then? Were there fewer dangers, or more? Would my friend Masha’s parents still have chosen to give her the mother’s Russian name instead of the father’s Jewish one?

  Reluctantly I think of what my uncle might say if he knew that Masha’s parents made that decision because they wanted her to have an easier life.

  Jews, he would say. You can’t trust them. They were cowards during the war, hiding from bullets at the front. Hiding in cellars and attics, while our Russian boys spilled their blood.

  I don’t know how Uncle Fedya, who was a private during the war, can be privy to such a global view. So I remain skeptical about his opinions, and I don’t mention my friend Masha to him even once, finding it ironic that it was the two of them, Uncle Fedya and Masha, who crossed paths in my fever dream.

  “Can we go for a swim?” I ask Aunt Muza, who has just wrapped several kitchen towels around a pot of freshly made dough.

  “No swimming for you, my sweet,” she says, wiping her flour-powdered hands on her apron
. “After the fever you’ve had you can just about forget swimming until you get back home. But you can walk with us to the river—fresh air is good for you.” I am not sure my mother would approve of such an early outing, but since permission has been granted, I rush to the door, where my street shoes, my little orphans that are now almost ruined by Stankovo’s dust, have been patiently waiting this whole week.

  We take the familiar path, my cousins flying down, my mother, aunt, and uncle trotting in careful little steps. I am at the end of this procession, every step echoing in my head, and my muscles, unused for a week, shaking inside my skin.

  Down on the hard, narrow beach Aunt Muza changes into her green and yellow two-piece bathing suit, carefully folding her huge white bra and underpants. I wait for her to say something about her patient, but she stands at the line where the dark water sighs softly at her feet, gazing into the distance where Kostya’s noisy splashes rip open the oilskin of the river.

  My mother and Uncle Fedya are sitting on the rock talking. From her body language I know she is telling the story of her uncle Volya. I’ve heard the story several times, when she told it to my father and to our neighbors from the third floor. In 1937 her uncle, who worked in a propaganda bureau, took a stranger from Moscow to a restaurant, where he told a joke.

  “The night they came to arrest him, he said to his wife, Aunt Lilya, and to his fifteen-year-old daughter Anya that it was all a mistake, a misunderstanding, and he’ll surely be back soon.”

  “Was he?” asks Uncle Fedya.

  If Uncle Fedya knows what was happening at the front during the war, if he knows where the Jews were hiding, he should know the answer to this question. Were I in my mother’s place, I wouldn’t bother telling him what seems to be obvious. But my mother obliges because she likes telling stories about her life.

  “We were told he was shot trying to escape,” she says. “He was later rehabilitated posthumously, after Aunt Lilya and his daughter Anya were already dead. Anya took a nursing course when the war started, volunteered for the front to avenge her father, and got killed in 1942. Found a bullet, just as she wished, though she didn’t have to look far.”

  I am not sure that Uncle Volya’s posthumous rehabilitation benefited anyone since neither his wife nor his daughter lived long enough to appreciate it.

  After all, this past order heralded so by Uncle Fedya does not seem to have made life any easier or safer. Shooting someone for telling a joke hardly seems any better than leaving a surgical napkin in a patient’s gut.

  My legs give out and I sit down on the grass, next to my cousin Kolya, who is engrossed in searching for something between his toes. Aunt Muza was right when she didn’t let me go swimming because my head pounds like a drum and a million golden dots flash before my eyes. As the sun glides toward the river, Kolya and I gaze at the black water, which I am now certain is full of invisible whirlpools.

  12. A Lesson in Russian Classics

  THE MORAL CONFLICT OF Turgenev’s A Nest of Nobles is between personal happiness and duty,” says our teacher, Nina Sergeevna, peering above her glasses to make sure we are listening. We are pretending to listen.

  Nina Sergeevna, her graying hair pinned up around a squirrel face, is teaching us about lishnie lyudi, or useless people. There is a whole gallery of such people in our literature. Galereya lishnih lyudei, says Nina Sergeevna, and a roll of fat quivers under her chinless jaw. In the sixth grade, it was Pushkin’s Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin from The Hero of Our Time. Corrupted by their noble birth and family wealth, they galloped across Russia and Europe, doing nothing but dueling, gambling, and breaking the hearts of innocent women, not giving a bit of thought to the fate of the serfs or the oppressed masses in general. Then it was Goncharov’s Oblomov, who spent his life sleeping on a divan, refusing to get up even when a woman he fancied knocked on the door of his estate. Now it is Turgenev’s Lavretsky, who failed to challenge the serf-owning nobility because he couldn’t find enough willpower to tear himself away from the spoiled society that produced him.

  I imagine myself as Lisa and Andrei, the only boy in my class who can distinguish a participle from a gerund, as Lavretsky. It’s nighttime, and we are in the orchard—all our classical novels have an orchard as vast and dense as a forest—and Andrei is kneeling at my feet. My shoulders begin to twitch and the fingers of my pale hands press even closer to my face. Andrei, of course, understands what these twitching shoulders and these tears mean. Is it possible that you love me, he whispers. I am frightened, I keep saying, looking at him with moist eyes. I love you, he says, I’m ready to give my whole life to you. I tremble and lower my eyes; he quietly pulls me toward him, and my head falls on his shoulder. He moves his head away a little and touches my pale lips.

  Of course, I know that Andrei is my age and way too young to be Lavretsky, who is married and has a child, but this isn’t important as long as he is in love with me, Lisa. At the end of A Nest of Nobles, Lavretsky’s wife, who had been unfaithful and conveniently out of the picture for the first hundred pages, shows up unexpectedly, repentant, at the most unfortunate time, wreaking havoc and driving Lisa to a nunnery. The last scene is tragic. In the eight years between the end of the novel and the epilogue (there is always an epilogue), Lavretsky has turned into an old man with gray hair and a cane. I see Andrei visiting me at the monastery, and I pass close to him, without looking up, with the docile gait of a nun, and only my eyelashes tremble, only the fingers of my clasped hands laced with rosary beads press even harder together.

  Despite all these scenes unfolding in my head, I know I would never retreat to a monastery if Andrei, for instance, turned out to be married to my classmate Katya. I can think of a number of things I would do: I could snatch the book he is reading out of his lap and thwack it over his head. I could scramble out of my desk and flee the classroom in despair, leaving behind an unfinished composition on the struggle of common people against the yoke of serfdom in tsarist Russia, ignoring Nina Sergeevna, who would thrash down the aisle in her felt boots, shouting for me to come back. I could even go as far as announcing to Katya that we are no longer on speaking terms. But I can’t see burying myself in a monastery so that Andrei, at the end of his life, stooped and defeated, could see my eyelashes tremble and my hands clasp around rosary beads. I am obviously not as strong and pure as Turgenev’s heroines, unable to resolve the moral conflict of personal happiness vs. duty in the correct, classic way, and this may be the reason why the leggy, green-eyed Andrei, the boy who makes my insides melt, does not turn to look in my direction.

  At home, I don’t talk about Andrei. My practical mother thinks that romantic infatuation is improper and wasteful unless it ends in marriage. From her occasional raised eyebrow and slant-eyed look toward my sister, who is twenty-seven and still single, I know she wouldn’t approve. Twenty-seven is a dangerous age for a woman not to be married, only two years shy of Natalia from Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, who, as everyone knows, is described as middle-aged.

  My sister doesn’t have time to get married. In the morning she goes to rehearsals, and at night she goes onstage, activities far more enviable and meaningful than standing in lines for bologna or stooping over a pot of borsch. My mother, however, doesn’t see it the same way. She blames the theater, with its late hours and irregular workday, for Marina’s lack of proper suitors, her single status, and, possibly, her future lonely and childless life.

  At home, my mother talks about canned tuna fish that has all but disappeared from stores and about our neighbor Olga from the fifth floor who bleaches her hair with peroxide, making it look like straw. But instead of disappearing tuna and our neighbor’s yellow hair, I would like to talk about personal happiness and duty. Are they always mutually exclusive so that you are only able to achieve one or the other? Turgenev, who stares at us from the wall of our literature classroom with melancholy eyes, seems to think so. With a white beard and mustache, his hair sadly curling on his forehead, he looks like Lavretsky
in the epilogue of A Nest of Nobles, disillusioned and old.

  MY SISTER IS AT the kitchen table, slurping soup before an evening performance. Her hair is in a ponytail, bangs reaching down to perfectly arched eyebrows. I wish I had my sister’s features, her big eyes and high cheeks, instead of my own face, dotted with freckles and beginning to erupt with pimples. Maybe then Andrei would look at me the same way he looks at my friend Katya.

  “Eat your soup with bread,” says my mother, who never misses a chance to fill us with more food.

  “I don’t want any bread,” snaps Marina, and she glances at her watch because she has to be backstage forty-five minutes before the curtain. I see my mother fold her mouth for a harangue on the nutritional value of grain, and I make a preemptive strike.

  “We have a composition contest at school,” I say. At the end of today’s class, after Nina Sergeevna declared the lives of Turgenev’s nobility to be without direction and meaning, she announced the seventh-grade essay competition.

  “What’s the topic?” asks Marina, tilting the bowl and spooning out the last drops of soup.

  “Anything we want. Describe and analyze a novel, a story, or a play.” I pause after “play,” letting the weight of the word sink in.

  Marina gets up and rinses her plate under the kitchen faucet. “I have to go.”

  I know that there is a new play at her theater, with the intriguing, foreign title We Bombed in New Haven. An American play in a Leningrad theater, a phenomenon as next to impossible as dinner without soup. I saw a poster on Nevsky Prospekt of a man in a black flight suit with a skull in his hand, despondent and Hamlet-like. This is what I’m going to write about, I’ve decided: this play, this foreign, undoubtedly sold-out wonder, which I’ll somehow manage to see whether Marina agrees to take me or not. She doesn’t yet know of my scheme. She doesn’t know many things about me, things I keep inside because they are too brittle to be exposed. She doesn’t know, for instance, that a dark envy curdles my heart every time she walks through the stage door where the baked-apple-faced babushka sits on guard, every time she stares into a three-way mirror and makes up her face until someone new and intriguing emerges from under her fingers. She doesn’t know and she doesn’t care because theater for her is just a job, just as dispensing milk is for a paunchy saleswoman with a ladle, just as shoveling fish skeletons and bones and apple cores was for the garbageman from the cellar of our apartment building. If I could sing like she can, I would stay in the theater and never bother to come home, where wet laundry hangs on ropes stretched across the room and where the air is permeated with the smell of mothballs and yesterday’s soup. I wouldn’t waste my stage voice, if I had one, on arguing with my mother about a figure skating score that a Bulgarian judge gave some dancer from Finland, or about whom we should not invite to Marina’s upcoming birthday—Irina the stage hairdresser because she is only a hairdresser, or Slava the actor because he has an affection for zelyoniy zmei.