A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  On Monday, my sister and I go to the basement of the anatomy department with rows of dark, smelly cages and pick a tri-colored rabbit—black, white, and yellow—a sign of luck, according to my sister. The rabbit rustles inside folded newspaper as Marina fits it into a string bag to take on the bus across the city.

  I imagine Marina arriving at the birthday party with a rabbit in a string bag. I see the whirl of shock and excitement; the petrified rabbit pressed to the parquet floor; the flurry of rabbit-related toasts; the hands that pet and cradle the rabbit until, in utter panic, it pees on someone’s dress; the empty apartment with clouds of cigarette smoke over the ruins of dinner and the semiconscious rabbit gasping in the corner of a dark hallway.

  “Are you sure he can handle a live rabbit?” I say, but all I see is Marina’s back disappear behind a closing door.

  IN THE BEGINNING OF my second year, my English professor Natalia Borisovna pulls me aside and says there is an opening in the House of Friendship and Peace, where I used to work as a tour guide in the ninth grade. The job is the director’s secretary and has nothing to do with speaking English, but with time and luck, the professor points out, it may evolve into something else. At any rate, she adds, it is an impressive and prestigious place to work.

  My job is to sit behind an enormous desk in front of the director’s office and answer the phone. The director, Viktor Nikolaevich, a party member like every functionary, doesn’t seem to be interested in the calls that come through me; the only calls that make him excited come on a red phone without a dial that sits on the desk of his office. When the red phone rings, he puts his feet up on a coffee table, laughs into the receiver, and leaves shortly afterward, always in a good mood. Viktor Nikolaevich often seems to be in a good mood. A smile starts from the corners of his eyes, dimples his cheeks, and stretches his large lips when every morning he crosses the waiting room in confident steps at the civilized hour of ten o’clock.

  “Hozyain,” deferentially mutters Ludmila the bookkeeper as he saunters by, the word that means “master.” He is tall and broad-shouldered and looks like a master. He looks as if the House of Friendship and Peace, with its marble stairways, bronze chandeliers, gilded moldings, and thirty people hunkered down in their first-floor offices, belong exclusively to him and not to the state.

  The echoey waiting room where I sit behind a vast desk makes me feel both humble and important. It is the social center of the first-floor offices, where people make arrangements for foreign delegations visiting our city. It draws coordinators from both the socialist and capitalist departments to exchange the latest gossip and parade their clothes. The socialist women are usually dressed in brighter colors. The tall and reedy Olya, coordinator for the German Democratic Republic, wears sky-blue suits with short skirts, while the doughy Galina, coordinator for Czechoslovakia, favors spiky heels and heavy makeup. Sergei, the handsome, sad-eyed coordinator for Bulgaria, comes to complain about a hangover and the fact that he has to arrange hotel reservations for groups of Polish Soviet deputies because Sveta, who is responsible for Poland, is on a yearlong maternity leave.

  The capitalist coordinators wear more subdued beiges, grays, and dark greens. Rita, who ten years ago graduated from my department of the university, appears hand-in-hand with the hooded-eyed, theatrical Tatiana Vasilievna, the coordinator for all the English-speaking countries. Tatiana Vasilievna makes me feel even more inferior than I normally do in this exclusive environment of such important and well-dressed people. She likes to give advice to everyone below her in rank, and that’s pretty much everyone except Viktor Nikolaevich, who sits behind an oak door next to my desk.

  “Use a little bit of makeup, darling,” she murmurs into the ear of Anna, a typist in the corner of the waiting room hunched over a typewriter in her perennial gray suit shiny from wear. Anna, who is twice my age and excruciatingly shy, forces her lips to smile, wishing she could compress herself into a wall, away from Tatiana Vasilievna’s ringed fingers, which clutch a thick batch of papers to be typed. Darling, dushenka, is what she calls all younger women before she insults them or overwhelms them with work.

  “Dushenka, don’t call me Mrs. in front of those British gentlemen,” she coos to Rita, embracing her. “I’m not married anymore, am I?”

  Everyone in the House of Friendship and Peace knows that Tatiana Vasilievna’s husband packed up and fled three months after the wedding, nine years ago, just as she turned thirty-five. It’s a wonder he stayed so long, said Ludmila the bookkeeper, who told me the story.

  “Otherwise they’ll think I’m a housewife with a bunch of runny-nosed children,” whispers Tatiana Vasilievna to Rita. “Just like you.”

  Rita smiles an embarrassed smile and apologizes. I don’t know how she is able to squeeze a smile out of her scrunched face, but I suspect she must be thinking about the future, about ten years from now when Tatiana Vasilievna reaches fifty-five, a retirement age for women, the moment that will put Rita in command of all English-speaking countries. Although I realize it’s a formidable prospect to be in charge of the whole English-speaking world, it hardly seems worth ten more years of Tatiana Vasilievna’s reign. I imagine myself in Rita’s place, coming back with witty, powerful responses I’d need days to think up, responses that would disarm Tatiana Vasilievna and turn her into a kind, sensitive person.

  Tatiana Vasilievna spends a lot of time in the waiting room because she likes the director, my boss. He has a wife, of course, and like all functionaries, must serve as an example of a proper society cell, but this trifle is irrelevant to Tatiana Vasilievna. She thinks up projects and explains them at length to Anna the typist, who shrinks like a turtle into her worn-out suit every time Tatiana Vasilievna sails into the room. She moves papers around my desk, pretending she’s reading each one, waiting for the oak door to open. If it doesn’t, she clutches at her chest and starts to vigorously fan herself. She breathes hard; she calls for Rita in a barely audible voice. When Rita comes running, Tatiana Vasilievna puts the back of her hand over her forehead and implores her to call for a doctor. This is the time when Viktor Nikolaevich, who can usually sense this turmoil, comes out of his office to bring her back to life. One time, when he was away at a meeting, she fainted onto the floor in front of the fireplace, her legs neatly crossed at the ankles.

  From my boss’s squinted eyes I think he sees right through Tatiana Vasilievna and her theatrical hysterics, taking her for what she is—a neurotic, lonely woman. But she is a high-ranking coordinator for a hefty chunk of the capitalist world, so we have to pretend we’re concerned about her shallow breathing and her chest-clutching, rushing to the bathroom for cold water and to the café for wedges of lemon, unbuttoning her blouse just enough to expose a hint of lace from her brassiere.

  Although I don’t know where our coordinators shop for their lace underwear, web-thin pantyhose, and well-fitted suits, I know where they don’t. Maybe owning hard-to-get decent clothes is another perk for being a coordinator at the House of Friendship and Peace, along with a food package containing a kilo of beef, a jar of instant coffee, and a stick of hard salami they can pick up at a special distributor before major holidays. What I wear to work comes from elbowing in line at a local store or from the artistic hands of my sister—a Hungarian shirt with small purple flowers and a brown skirt resewn from Marina’s old pants. My sister has lately been in a good mood, so she’s making me a little black dress from a piece of fabric I found rolled up in our armoire, a number just like the one I saw in the England magazine left open on Rita’s desk.

  Aside from Tatiana Vasilievna and her nervous fits, there isn’t much at work to pay attention to. I sit at the desk, do my homework, and stare at the grandfather clock in the corner whose hands don’t seem to move. At around one-thirty I go to the House of Friendship café, an exclusive place with waitresses and a printed menu, which is open for lunch for employees and members of the select public involved in foreign affairs and which stays open on those nights when there is an
art or culture festival in the ballroom on the second floor.

  It’s those nights that intrigue me. Days are predictable and boring, all work, coordinators trekking through with their reports, Ludmila the bookkeeper offering her latest gossip, Viktor Nikolaevich cackling into his red phone, Anna hitting the typewriter keys with the speed of a machine gun. But what happens here at night? Who sits at these tables in the café when we’re all safely tucked into university classrooms or our apartments, and what kinds of transformations occur to the soup and meatballs and pastries with pink roses after the clock strikes six?

  So the next time there is an evening affair celebrating an anniversary of the British composer Benjamin Britten, I don’t leave at five-thirty. It’s a Wednesday, the only weekday with no university classes scheduled, and my conscience is clear. I walk up the marble staircase with wrought-iron banisters to the main ballroom, vast as a stadium and made even bigger by floor-to-ceiling mirrors in gilded frames. Of course, I immediately see Tatiana Vasilievna—it is, after all, an English-speaking affair—directing Rita in how to arrange the chairs for musicians and where to place the podium.

  “I have to face the audience directly,” she instructs. “You don’t want me to twist my head off, do you?”

  As Rita tries to push the podium, Tatiana Vasilievna clasps her head and closes her eyes. “Dushenka, you’re scratching the parquet, don’t you see?” she hisses.

  I step back because I don’t want to take part in moving the podium or the chairs, especially under the commandeering of Tatiana Vasilievna. I also don’t want to explain to her what I’m doing here, way past my working hours, at a concert of capitalist music, exposed without her approval to a very real possibility of communicating with people from English-speaking countries.

  I see them filing in through the front door as I walk back downstairs: a group of women who look youthful and ageless, all with rich, blondish hair and real leather shoes, and men in blue jeans, whose movements are unhurried, as if they’d never had to squeeze into a rush-hour bus. They are now gawking at the gold, marble, and crystal that belonged to Count Shuvalov, who owned all this voluptuous excess before 1917, when the Bolsheviks handed it down to the people.

  Tatiana Vasilievna appears on the top of the stairs and stands there magnanimously, as if this opulence belonged to her, waiting for the group to ascend to her height. They walk past me, sending in my direction a whiff of the West, an odor of perpetual cleanliness and good clothes, and knowing that Tatiana Vasilievna is going to be occupied for a while, I retreat into the café in the hope of rubbing shoulders with the select members of the public invited to such exclusive affairs.

  The truth is I don’t know if I really want to retreat to the café. I’m petrified. I’m afraid that the moment I walk in everyone will take one look at me and realize that I’ve never been to a restaurant at night. Aside from my sister, who sometimes goes to the Actors’ Club, I don’t know anyone who has. There are a few restaurants in the city, so someone must eat there, but they’re always guarded by stone-faced doormen who can only be bribed by things we don’t have. The interiors, I’ve always imagined, were sets from old movies: a piano next to a potted palm, a starched napkin in a circle of light cast by a table lamp, a bent waiter with a white towel over his arm. As I stand in the doorway of the House of Friendship café, I feel as exposed as if I were entering my boss’s office having forgotten to put my clothes on.

  The lunch room with neon lights has metamorphosed into a dark cave gauzy with cigarette smoke. At the far end I can still make out the counter with pastries, and I gather all my courage and walk straight toward the shelves with familiar éclairs, focusing on the beacons of tarts crowned with pink roses. I pretend I belong here, and although I do belong here, I feel as if I were walking across a minefield, ready to make a mistake that will shatter my disguise and expose me for what I am: clumsy, ill-mannered, and unworldly.

  By the pastry counter, like a savior, sits Natasha from my university English class. I lunge forward and greet her as if she were a best friend I haven’t seen in years, despite the fact that I sat next to her in my phonetics class only yesterday. She tells me how she ended up here, at this concert and in this restaurant, but her words sail past my ears. I’m so relieved I order a Napoleon and a coffee and a bottle of lemonade for both of us, although I’m not even sure I have any money in my purse.

  “So who do you think all these people are?” I ask Natasha, nodding toward the crowd smoking in the dusk. There is no food served, I notice, only sweets and drinks.

  “I was going to ask you,” says Natasha. “You’re the one who works here.”

  She is right; I should know. Everyone who works here probably knows, with the exception of our typist Anna, who sees nothing but the typewriter keys because she’s mortified to oblivion by Tatiana Vasilievna. All my co-workers, I bet, have sat at these tables at night, ordering platefuls of éclairs and perhaps even glasses of the cognac and champagne whose golden labels gleam behind the counter.

  To be decadent, Natasha pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. We light up and lean back, feeling relaxed and hedonistic now, lazily poking into our plates as though our parents forced us to eat Napoleons every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This pretense makes me feel like everyone else, makes me feel I belong in a dark corner of this restaurant where no one questions my presence.

  Then, with her imperial gait, Tatiana Vasilievna walks through the door and marches straight to the pastry display. She sees me sitting at the table and her face congeals into the expression she wore when Rita failed to procure her a first-class ticket on the same-day train to Moscow to accompany a group of American businessmen.

  “May I have a word with you?” she says ominously as I obediently get up because that’s what primary school and our mothers taught us to do when we speak to a person older than ourselves.

  “Your work ends at five-thirty,” she says, deliberately glancing at her gold watch. “There’s no need for you to be in this restaurant at night.” In her high heels she is taller than I, or maybe it is my curled shoulders that make her tower over me.

  I can’t think of anything to say. I don’t know if Tatiana Vasilievna can prohibit me from entering this restaurant, but judging by her lifted chin and narrowed eyes, she’s certain she can. And it is this certainty, this authority leaking from every pore of her heavily made-up face that makes me stoop even lower. I’m too docile and cowardly to belong here, after all, and I hate Tatiana Vasilievna for driving this point home.

  “Dushenka,” she says in an injured tone because I wounded her senses by eating a Napoleon in a place I am not permitted to enter at night. “You should remember: What’s allowed for Jupiter is not allowed for the bull.”

  Although I’ve never heard this saying before, I can imagine that Tatiana Vasilievna has made it up so that she could compare herself to the most powerful Roman god. But why am I the bull? In addition to barging into restaurants without permission and generally not knowing my place, I must also be ignorant of Roman mythology and the idioms that employ it. I glance at Natasha, who is sitting very quietly wedged between the table and the wall, not knowing if this exchange somehow applies to her, too.

  With Tatiana Vasilievna leading the way, I leave the restaurant and all its dusky decadence. Still stooped and utterly defeated, I walk through the double oak doors out of the House of Friendship and Peace, which, as it has just become clear, offers neither of the two solaces it was named for.

  THERE IS A RUMOR that my boss, Viktor Nikolaevich, is being transferred to Czechoslovakia. People say this with respect: Ludmila the bookkeeper deferentially lowers her voice while Olya the coordinator of the German Democratic Republic rounds her eyes and her mouth into perfect O’s. Since the transfer is to a foreign country, it is definitely a promotion. How big a promotion? Bigger than Bulgaria or Vietnam but smaller than, say, France. At any rate, Viktor Nikolaevich now spends less and less time behind his door, which triggers an injure
d expression on Tatiana Vasilievna’s face every time she sails into the waiting room only to find his office empty, only to become so despondent she doesn’t even try to pretend to faint because he isn’t there to see her exposed cleavage or her knee sheathed in shimmering nylon and carefully bent on the floor right next to my desk.

  I like Viktor Nikolaevich and dread the day when he has to leave. He is easygoing, he makes jokes, he never gets upset with me, and he protects me like a father would, although he looks nothing like my father. He doesn’t smoke, he is broad-waisted and fair-skinned, and he has a mouth full of real teeth.

  According to Ludmila the bookkeeper, he has a soft spot for the waitresses at our café. He loves them, she says, especially Maya, who has ash-blonde hair and likes to wear a tight uniform and red lipstick. For some reason I dislike Maya; strangely, it almost feels like jealousy. He is my boss and I want him to like me, only me. The other day, when I was leaving his office with a shuffle of papers to type, Viktor Nikolaevich took my hand, the one without the papers, and held it and stared into my eyes so intensely that I had to look down. When he let it go, I went back to my desk in the waiting room, and a few minutes later he left, having answered the red phone.

  Since the Jupiter and the bull incident Tatiana Vasilievna hasn’t spoken to me directly. Maybe she wishes she hadn’t humiliated me in the restaurant because, as it turns out, I could be useful in detecting Viktor Nikolaevich’s whereabouts when she feels like fainting again. Or maybe she expected an apology for my inappropriate behavior and, when she didn’t receive one, decided that I was hopeless, worthy of the only possible course of action on her part—to ostracize and ignore me. Whatever the reason, she no longer addresses me, which is a great relief.

  It’s April, two months from the end of my second year at the university, and I’m busy thinking up ways to take my history final early. The course is compulsory, the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and taking it early solves the two problems inherent in the class. It will save me from sitting through the rest of the seminars, listening to made-up history, and according to those innovative minds who’ve done it before, it is much easier to get a good grade early since the professors haven’t yet entered the mind-set of the two merciless final semester weeks. I have composed a letter, on the House letterhead and with the House stamp I keep in my drawer, requesting the university dean to grant me permission to take the finals early because in June we are so swamped with foreign delegations from all over the world that it’s impossible for me, a House of Friendship employee, to find time to study.