A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  I think this piece of information about the amount of gold is in questionable taste because what we have been told to convey on this tour is a sense of the city’s artistic, inner beauty. But perhaps Maria Mikhailovna included it precisely because she thinks people from capitalist countries are materialistic, uninterested in the lofty and the ideal.

  I pretend to examine the sculptures on the portal of the cathedral, but I am really looking at Kevin, or Calvin. He is a bit taller than I am, with black hair longer than any boy in my school is allowed, a thick neck and a big, craggy chin. He looks like a rugby player, whatever rugby is. I watch him poke in his ear, then scuff the asphalt with the side of his shoe. Then he suddenly looks up, and our eyes meet for a second before I turn away and pretend to stare at the monument to Tsar Nicholas I, which is still allowed to stand in the middle of the square only because of its unique artistic value.

  I can’t wait to get back into the bus to sit next to the boy again. He asks if all our churches are covered with so much gold. Our former churches, I correct him in my mind. Goold, he says, suh moch goold. The simplest words in his mouth seem to tangle into alien shapes, so hard to decipher I strain my ears. Maybe he doesn’t have the pronunciation I expected because he is from Scotland or Northern Ireland. Maybe I should ask him about the revolutionary McLean, whose name hangs on the corner of my street.

  After a stop in Palace Square, the boy turns to visual aids. He empties his wallet into my hands: two cardboard stubs (tickets for something?), a blue plastic rectangle with numbers, a picture of a girl (his sister?), a card with his own picture and his name (Kevin!). The tickets, he explains, are for a movie he saw just before the trip (movie? Does he mean cinema?); the piece of plastic is a Visa (a visa for what? To enter the Soviet Union?); the girl is his girlfriend (girl friend?); and the card with his picture is his ay-dee.

  I am not sure the visual aids are helping much. “What’s an ay-dee?” I ask, starting with the most incomprehensible.

  “It’s an ay-dee,” Kevin says, throwing his head back, trying to find the words to explain the obvious. “A document to get into a school. A paper to show the police.”

  The word “police” helps. “Like a passport?” I ask.

  “No,” says Kevin. “A passport is to come here. An ay-dee is for England.”

  I smile, letting him know that I understand. But I don’t. Not completely. Here, when I turn sixteen, I’ll get a passport at a local militia office. But I won’t need it to get into a school. I’ll keep it in my mother’s drawer, along with her own passport and her war medals until I am twenty-one and it will be time to get a new one. Right now I don’t have any document certifying that I am me. Everyone in my school knows who I am, and why would our militia, out of the blue, ask me for a document to confirm my identity? They are busy cordoning off the streets for official motorcades or standing in big intersections with zebra-colored batons in their hands making sure we don’t cross against the light. It is odd to carry such a document around, but maybe it’s one of the characteristics of capitalism, in addition to homelessness and unemployment.

  We bump over the tram tracks, to the other side of the Neva to look at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Dostoyevsky and Lenin were imprisoned for their revolutionary activities. The day, sunny in the morning, has crumbled into the usual leaden Leningrad day, with sheets of clouds and blasts of wind tearing through the red banners lined along the embankment. Sveta herds us into the fortress’s prison yard and then into a solitary stone cell with a narrow iron bed and no windows, exemplifying, according to Maria Mikhailovna’s lectures, the injustice and cruelty of the tsarist regime. We don’t all fit into the cell, so Kevin and I stand in the cobblestone corridor, next to a life-size figure dressed as a tsarist prison warden.

  “I wonder if this works,” says Kevin and wraps his hand around the warden’s gun. I’m glad that the museum babushka is busy watching the group inside the cell because one of the worst things you can do, as everyone knows, is touch a museum exhibit. “Rukami ne trogat,” says a sign in big letters. “Do not touch with hands.” But what if Kevin had touched the gun with his elbow? I wonder about the possible repercussions of our language differences. Whereas the Russian word ruka includes everything from fingers to shoulder, the English hand only goes as far as the wrist. Does the sign, in its English version, really mean “Do not touch with hands or arms?” Or are the English-speaking tourists exempt from the elbow-touching prohibition?

  I would like to share this linguistic inquiry with Kevin, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to pull together enough grammar and vocabulary. I’m so glad I understood completely Kevin’s phrase about the gun that I don’t want to risk another language embarrassment.

  Kevin isn’t very talkative, and I am grateful. As we walk back to our bus, he kicks pebbles and whistles, not even bothering to look at the spire of the Fortress, which is probably covered with no fewer kilograms of gold than the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral.

  I don’t know what I would do if the impossible happened and I could go on a similar tour of London. Without doubt, I wouldn’t whistle, or kick pebbles, or grab museum guns. I don’t even know if I would recognize the real Trafalgar Square from a dusty picture in our English textbook or have the nerve to open my mouth and speak.

  From Peter and Paul Fortress we drive past the cruiser Aurora, which shot a blank in October 1917 to start the storming of the Winter Palace. It is an ancient ship, with black smokestacks and fake-looking cannons on the deck. Not interested in the cruiser Aurora or Sveta’s story, Kevin is counting the money he’s pulled out of his pocket because we are approaching the end of our route, a Beriozka shop. I watch him casually handle the pound bills, so strange-looking and infused with such dangerous power if they somehow should migrate into my hands, or Tanya’s hands, or even the hands of Maria Mikhailovna. One of many statutes of the Criminal Code forbids possession of foreign currency.

  Entering a Beriozka shop, like speaking English, lifts us above the crowd. We are among the select few Russians who are allowed to go in. Beriozka means birch tree, a symbol of Russia. It is a store exclusively for Westerners, selling items only for hard currency, that of capitalist countries. I don’t know why the Eastern European socialist countries, with their more reliable, planned economies, do not have currencies as trustworthy as those of the unstable, dying, capitalist West.

  Or perhaps I do know. Perhaps it’s part of the same old game, vranyo. The game we all play: my mother, my sister, my teachers at school, my friend Tanya, who is talking to a girl in Reebok sneakers, and even Maria Mikhailovna—or maybe especially Maria Mikhailovna—with her well-tailored suits and lectures on Leningrad, the cradle of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.

  The store’s windows are shuttered so that no one from the street is able to see what’s inside. If they could see, they would storm in, through the steel turnstile, past the bored cashier, to the shelves with instant coffee, Polish ham, French cognac, and poems by Pasternak.

  I follow Kevin to a display with souvenirs: rows of matryoshka dolls, bears carved out of wood, hand-painted, lacquered boxes from Palekh, busts of Lenin. He doesn’t seem to be interested in cans of something called shrimp, or bottles of liqueur with floating golden specks, or skinny logs of hard salami I haven’t seen since elementary school. He isn’t interested in the shelf with Russian books, volumes with semi-banned Tsvetayeva and Mandelstam, with Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which my sister says is the epitome of Russian twentieth-century literature, as underground as Solzhenitsyn. I pick up each book, hold it, then put it back. While the British students are gawking at samovars and wooden spoons, I stand next to the shelf with these book treasures, so close and so out of reach.

  “WUDJA LIKE TGO FOR a waak?” asks Kevin when we get off the bus back near his hotel. The British students ar
e crowding around Sveta, who has an embarrassed look on her face, not knowing what to do with packages of pantyhose and ballpoint pens they are handing to her. I don’t know what I would do, either. Although Sveta has never seen Western pantyhose, she hesitates to take them. I wish these jean-clad students would be a little more insightful and give her a book of poetry from Beriozka or, at least, a can of something called shrimp.

  Would I like to go for a walk with Kevin? This is a rhetorical question, but I don’t answer right away because I’m thinking about Maria Mikhailovna, with her laundry list of rules. Is walking outside as gross a violation as going inside a hotel? Is it a violation at all if a British tourist initiates the invitation? I’d like to ask my friend Tanya, but she is busy scribbling her address on a piece of paper for the girl in Reebok sneakers. I look at Kevin, who is staring at me with his dark Western eyes, waiting for an answer, and something tells me—a little sly voice—that in the official game of vranyo, it would be a legitimate move to take a walk with this boy, despite the fact that he is a capitalist, the worst kind of foreigner of all.

  The wind has ripped holes in the sheets of clouds, and the sun has revealed some interesting things: the outside of our bus is covered with a layer of dirt, the puddles in the sidewalk sparkle with a rainbow film of gasoline, and Kevin’s eyes are hazel, not black. I look around: the British students have gone inside the hotel, and there is no Maria Mikhailovna in sight. Tanya makes big eyes when I tell her I’m going for a walk with Kevin, but I can see she is envious.

  We take the metro to the city center, to places worth parading in front of a visitor. As we glide down an escalator, down and down, underneath all that swamp Peter the Great decided to turn into a city, Kevin’s eyes widen in surprise and his mouth drops open to expose straight English teeth. “It’s a mile deep!” he exclaims with the same glee I saw in his face when he grabbed the museum gun in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Down at the metro platform, he stands stunned, gaping at the crystal chandeliers, marble columns, and mosaic walls. “This is a bloody palace,” he says, turning around to examine every piece of granite and inlaid marble that spells the station name.

  I know that “bloody” doesn’t mean “bloody.” I know it’s a curse, and I promptly file the word into the English compartment of my head, a corner where I am no longer a law-abiding tour guide for the House of Friendship and Peace but someone completely different, someone whose vowels are called diphthongs, whose l’s lilt and r’s roll, and whose sentences, unlike those in our docile Russian, soar at the end.

  I like the English compartment of my head because it feels like Theater. It feels like I’m playing a role, pretending to be someone confident and bold. That’s what my sister must feel like when she is onstage—liberated from everyday drudgery and imbued with the power to be someone else. It is thrilling and a little dangerous.

  This thrill, to my surprise, makes English words spring from memory and align themselves into grammatically correct sentences. I tell Kevin all about the construction of the Leningrad metro, about pushing and drilling through the marsh of the Neva delta. I tell him about the granite slabs hauled from the north, just as they had been dragged by serfs for the construction of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Pointing guide-like to the chandeliers and the marble, I see that the people around us, loaded with string bags on their way from work, turn around to look. They look at Kevin because he is obviously a foreigner and at me because I’m speaking English—in the way they look at actors when they come out of the stage door after a performance, in a way I can only call deferential.

  Kevin marvels at the digital clock, which clicks off seconds between trains, and at the train, which arrives before the clock registers one minute. It’s rush hour, I explain. Ordinarily, the intervals between trains are up to two minutes. I know I sound formal and stilted, with words like “intervals” and “ordinarily,” but Kevin nods vigorously, letting me know he understands.

  We are carried up another mile-long escalator and spat out the glass doors onto Nevsky Prospekt.

  “D’ya wanna have a cup of coffee?” asks Kevin.

  I don’t know where he thinks he can find a cup of coffee on the main avenue of Leningrad, but I don’t flinch. That is another thing Maria Mikhailovna has taught us: never show you’re surprised, no matter how improbable or far-fetched a question may seem. Do we have bears roaming the streets? No. What percentage of the population is unemployed? Zero. Are there places to have a cup of coffee? I don’t know of any. We must pretend we are sophisticated and erudite, above the naïve or materialistic questions of British high school students, above drinking coffee on Nevsky Prospekt.

  I see a line snaking around the corner, and Kevin sees it, too. The House of Friendship and Peace can’t do anything about the lines. There are a couple of feeble strategies Maria Mikhailovna suggested during our practice tours. You can distract the tourists’ attention by pointing to a former church or palace. You can make a joke. When Maria Mikhailovna took us to the Hermitage to practice her museum lectures, she demonstrated what to say if your group asks to use a bathroom. These toilets are museum pieces, too, she said. Preserved from the time of Catherine the Great.

  The line Kevin is now gawking at is for toilet paper. It stretches around the corner into the side street, three or four rows thick, elbowing under a banner that reads, “Thanks to the party for the people’s welfare.” I hope Kevin doesn’t insist on turning into that street because the location of the slogan is just too pathetic, as if someone deliberately put it there to make a point so obvious it’s not worth translating. But he isn’t interested in the slogan. He is staring at two women approaching from the front of the line, both wearing necklaces of toilet-paper rolls they’ve threaded on a rope for easy carrying.

  “Can I take a picture?” he whispers, lifting his camera, a glee in his hazel eyes.

  I don’t think the two women in toilet-paper necklaces would like it. I don’t think the babushka behind an ice cream cart, who is already eyeing us with a frown, would like it. I don’t think the militiaman directing traffic would like it. No one would appreciate having this picture taken, but Kevin is daring: he lowers the camera and snaps shots from his hip, pretending to examine the colonnade of the former Kazan Cathedral. He thinks he is a genius, having come up with such a brilliantly distracting maneuver, but in the area of pretense no British student can compete with our decades of daily practice. All of us—the ice cream seller, the toilet-paper-bedecked women, and the militiaman, if he were to drop his zebra baton and look in our direction—would, in a blink of an eye, see right through Kevin’s trick.

  I have to think fast, and do something, because the babushka has planted her fists on her hips and is getting ready to start shouting while one of the women with toilet paper around her neck is pointing in our direction. Another minute, and the militiaman will turn around to investigate who is creating all this commotion, yelling in the middle of the city’s historical center. I grab Kevin by the elbow and tell him to walk fast, very fast, tell him to run, run until we are a block away, lost in the human current of Nevsky Prospekt.

  “That was close!” he says, catching a breath, beaming from his adventure. I can hardly share his excitement: the thought of unrealized possibilities involving the militiaman makes my blood run cold. Maria Mikhailovna and my mother would cringe at the headline—“Detained: A Foreigner and His Unauthorized Guide.” We march briskly, hidden inside the crowd, for another block. I am horrified at what could have happened. I am horrified at being horrified, at my own cowardice and fear.

  But none of this can I show to Kevin. He lives in London, where there are no yelling babushkas, no militia, and no shortage of toilet paper. I have to pretend to be a guide again. I show him the Moika Embankment as we walk past the House of Books with a turret and a glass globe on top, and past Pushkin’s apartment, where the poet lay dying after the duel he’d fought to protect his wife’s honor.

  Kevin likes the House of Books, but he has ne
ver heard of Pushkin.

  Along Trade Union Boulevard and past the Palace of Labor, we make our way to Decembrists’ Square on the Neva, where Peter the Great, on a rearing horse, in a laurel wreath and with royal grandeur, reaches toward the water. Two and a half centuries ago, he willed the city into existence, hammering pilings into the marsh, transforming the islands of the windy Neva delta into a port with only one goal in mind: to open a window on Europe. It is appropriate, I think, to come to this monument with Kevin, who, by standing here, provides irrefutable evidence that this thoroughfare still functions, even if only in one direction.

  As Kevin snaps pictures, completely legitimate, of the Tsar and the Admiralty’s golden spire, I lean on the parapet and look into the churning, zinc-colored water. If my mother hadn’t decided to marry my father in 1950, which involved moving here from the provincial town of Ivanovo, I wouldn’t be parading all this architectural beauty in front of a boy from England. I wouldn’t be standing here, surrounded by the wide bridges spanning the granite embankments, by the lace of iron banisters and fences, by spires, domes, and the robust curves of Italian baroque.

  What prompted my mother to accept my father’s proposal, I wonder, while Kevin is looking for an angle from which to photograph the Bronze Horseman across the street. Was it a search for a better life, as practical as she is: giving my sister a father, having another child, moving to a capital city? Or was it rather that she was running away from something? After all, as I know from one of her stories, she was summoned to the Ivanovo NKVD headquarters after the war, after her uncle Volya had already been arrested and shot, and forced to spy on the chairman of the anatomy department where she worked. Dr. Zlotnikov, Moisey Davidovich, her PhD adviser and a Jew. Every month she was ordered to come to a certain address (an empty apartment that could be used to house a whole family, she thought bitterly), where an NKVD officer was waiting for her with a pen and a stack of blank paper. She couldn’t refuse, she said, so every month she came to this secret place and wrote about the most mundane, innocuous things that involved Dr. Zlotnikov: a conversation about the percentage of enlarged thyroids at the Ivanovo textile factory for her dissertation in progress, a shortage of scalpels at a dissection class, a lab assistant’s alcoholic son. But a fear always clawed in the back of her mind that even those benign things would be twisted and mauled, just like Uncle Volya’s joke, and then Dr. Zlotnikov’s arrest would weigh on her conscience forever.