A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  In reality, of course, June is the month when things slow down and people start taking vacations, but the dean and the communist history department are used to the twisted truth. The letter is immaculately typed and has everything but the director’s signature. I time the crucial moment for Monday, the last day before Viktor Nikolaevich leaves for his new position in Czechoslovakia.

  On Sunday I lean on Marina to finish the little black dress she is sewing according to the picture in Rita’s England magazine. On Monday morning, at ten, I stand by my desk to greet my boss, wearing the dress. It’s short, very short, with a deep V-neck too low for work, and Viktor Nikolaevich immediately sees that. He opens his large lips to say something but doesn’t. The blue of his eyes softens and melts as he gazes at me—at the whole me, for the first time since I started working there. The unexpected part is that it feels good, this look. It feels edifying. And maybe part of this edification is the fact that it is I being granted this stare of admiration—not Maya with her tight uniforms and red lips, and certainly not Tatiana Vasilievna, who could faint a thousand times, deftly exposing her nylon and her lace, and still fail to attract this look.

  Viktor Nikolaevich goes into his office, and I follow him with a bunch of mail and a typed letter in my hand. He sits at his desk, puts on his glasses, and starts shuffling through the papers, pretending he hadn’t just drilled me with a stare, pretending he no longer sees the little black dress I’m wearing.

  “Could you possibly sign this for me?” I ask in a timid and submissive way that makes directors feel even more powerful. “To take my final early. The history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

  He takes my letter, reads it, then squints at me from above his glasses. “Overwhelmed with foreign delegations in June,” he reads. “Impossible to find time to study, eh?”

  I nod and squeeze out a little smile, showing that I know that he knows it’s a lie.

  He pulls a pen out of an enormous writing set presiding over his desk, signs, and hands the letter back to me. “It’s my last day here,” he says as I mumble my thanks. “We’re going to celebrate after work.”

  It is obviously no use telling him that I have classes at seven.

  The day drags on because Viktor Nikolaevich is mostly out of the office. First the red phone rings and he promptly leaves; then he reappears only to vanish again toward the café and its waitresses. Several times Tatiana Vasilievna whiffs in, followed by a trail of perfume, and on one of her attempts she gets lucky and bumps into Viktor Nikolaevich, who is also just walking in.

  “Well, well, well, it’s your last day, I hear,” she coos and lifts her hand as if expecting him to kiss it. “Old friends must say good-bye.”

  Viktor Nikolaevich motions her into his office, and she throws her head back as she walks in so that her hair flips away to expose gold hearts drooping from her ears.

  Five minutes later she is back in the waiting room, looking utterly disappointed. I stand by the desk, pretending to be engrossed in a bunch of work orders, but out of the corner of my eye I see her wiggle her shoulders as if shaking off embarrassment. Then she glances at me and notices my dress. I keep shuffling paper, but by her expression, even from this skewed angle, I know she is furious. I know she knows that Viktor Nikolaevich is going to spend more time saying good-bye to me than he did to her. And that knowledge tingles in my throat like champagne as she tosses her head back again and clicks out on her skinny heels.

  Champagne is opened at six. Viktor Nikolaevich, who has already had some earlier during his multiple absences, waves me into his office and shuts the door. From across his desk, he pours two glasses; we drink; he pours more.

  “To you,” I say, and he says the same. The wine fizzles down my throat into my empty stomach—I was too nervous to eat lunch, or maybe I didn’t want to parade my black dress around the café—and makes me instantly drunk.

  “Will you visit me in Prague?” he asks, and I giggle because it’s a silly question. We both know that I can’t go to Prague, or any other foreign capital, that the few people who go must have the right connections or belong to the top bureaucratic layer, like him.

  “Send me a visa and I’ll visit you anywhere,” I say and giggle. “Anywhere abroad,” I add prudently.

  Viktor Nikolaevich moves from his side of the desk to mine. He sits down in a swivel chair across from me, reaches out and pulls me in, then wraps his big lips around mine, tongue and all, definitely too long for a good-bye kiss. I knew something like this was going to happen, so I act as though I’m used to being pulled into my boss’s lap, especially since it feels like I’m flying. Or maybe it is he who is spinning, I can’t tell, or maybe it’s the chairs that are dancing around the room. His taste is now in my mouth, cognac and champagne, and his smell is all over my face—a smell of cologne, or maybe it’s the perfume Maya the waitress wore when he said good-bye to her.

  Then he stops spinning, lifts me off his knees, and gets up. “Nice dress,” he says putting on his suit jacket. “Go get your things. We’re going to my farewell party.”

  Obediently I get up and amble toward the door, puzzled that we are going somewhere else, that draining a bottle of champagne and smooching in his office did not qualify as a farewell. Things around me are no longer flying, and I’m able to take my coat off the hook in one swoop. I don’t doubt that Viktor Nikolaevich knows a lot of places to hold a farewell party, but there is a dark thought thumping in my head like a brewing headache, a dizzy feeling of to-be-continued. After all, he is forty-five and I’m his eighteen-year-old secretary in a minidress drunk on champagne, a situation so tattered and predictable everyone knows how it usually ends. But I’m also the only one from the whole collective of the House of Friendship and Peace he’s taking to his farewell party. He isn’t taking the sophisticated Tatiana Vasilievna, who’s mad about him, or the lanky pretty Olya, who manages the East German delegation, or any other woman who works here and whose clothes are not resewn from her older sister’s. He’s taking me, who isn’t supposed to drink lemonade at a café after working hours and who is now, full of champagne, meandering toward his black Volga.

  His chauffeur, Borya, a kind old man with a puffed-up face, waves at me and smiles as if I’d been riding in this Volga all the time instead of merely handing him envelopes to deliver to important addresses at the Smolny, the headquarters of the Leningrad Communist Party. Inside the car it smells of gasoline and old leather, and I’m glad that Viktor Nikolaevich, when he ambles out, plops down into his usual seat in the front. As soon as he slams the door shut, Borya cranks the car into gear and we rattle off.

  The car flies along dark streets as I crane my neck out the rolled-down window to try to determine where we’re going. I feel thrilled to be in this luxury car with Viktor Nikolaevich, seduced by all this exclusivity and attention. I also feel mortified about what he may want from me and to which I will, undoubtedly, submit. We zip along, until the building of the Smolny Cathedral sails into view, its pearly cupolas glinting softly against the black sky. Next to it is the yellow building of Smolny, the Leningrad Communist Party itself.

  “Go straight to the entrance,” commands Viktor Nikolaevich. “Grisha’s office is just down the hallway.”

  Grisha, he says, is his friend who calls him on the red phone.

  The car bounces through the main gate and pulls around the circular driveway to the entrance. I can walk straight now, whipped by the cold wind of an April night. Borya and I get out, propelled by the broad waving gesture from our boss, to face the two soldiers standing guard at both sides of the door, holding guns as big as I remember my father’s hunting gun to be when I was eight. Their eyes diligently stare into the distance, but when they see Viktor Nikolaevich, they silently step aside and let us in. We walk along a corridor that smells of fresh paint, toward one of the doors with golden signs on the front. Inside, a man in his forties sits behind the desk, his wide-jawed face gleaming in the light of a table lamp, his forearms laid o
n the leather top. When we creep in, the man takes off his glasses and leans his chest on the desk to help himself up.

  “Vitya, come in, buddy, come in,” he roars, stretching out his hand, heavily patting Viktor Nikolaevich on the shoulder. “He’s abandoning us, imagine that.” He turns to me, and I make a sad face, a quite genuine one because I wish he weren’t going to Prague and leaving me with a new director I haven’t yet met, who probably won’t sign a phony letter or tell jokes and make everyone laugh.

  Grisha invites us to sit in armchairs as he produces a small key out of the top drawer of his desk. “Celebration time,” he announces and walks toward a safe in the corner of the room, an intimidating-looking cabinet of steel, a perfect place for top official secrets. This is where they must keep dissident files and plans for nuclear attacks on the West. This is where Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and all of Solzhenitsyn’s works must be stacked up in neat, forbidden piles. Borya and I sit very quietly, with our eyes on the key and what it is about to reveal, silently marveling at our privileged and exclusive vantage point.

  In a precise, frequently performed movement, Grisha clicks the key in the lock, and the heavy door noiselessly opens. Inside, in the empty iron murk, presides a round bottle of cognac surrounded by six shot glasses.

  As Grisha starts to pour, Borya waves his arms in front of his face, telling him he is at the wheel, responsible for delivering us home.

  “Have one,” says Viktor Nikolaevich. “You must drink to me. And don’t worry about the rest.”

  Borya stops waving. I’m sure he is dying to try the cognac in a bottle marked “highest quality” that we have never seen in stores, knowing that no militiaman would dare arrest anyone who has just been to Smolny and seen the contents of one of its safes.

  I sip the honey-colored cognac much more carefully than the champagne a few hours earlier. It has a strong taste, but it doesn’t have the odor of regular cognac, which, according to my mother, smells of bedbugs.

  I wonder what my mother would say if she saw me drinking cognac with three men at the Leningrad headquarters of the Communist Party. I know she would frown at the men and the drinking part, but what would she think about the highest-quality cognac, hidden inside a party safe? Or about all those kilograms of beef, and the well-fitting suits, and the trips to Czechoslovakia that Viktor Nikolaevich and his friend Grisha have access to because they can enter the building of Smolny, the seat of the party of which my father had been a member longer than either one of them?

  Grisha reminisces about old times. He tells a story of him and Viktor Nikolaevich going fishing when they were on assignment in the German Democratic Republic. They dug the worms and got into a rowboat and caught the biggest pike Grisha had ever seen.

  “You can’t catch a pike with a worm,” Borya interferes. “You need a lure.”

  “Forget a worm, forget a lure,” laughs Viktor Nikolaevich loudly. “We didn’t catch any pike, you old cheat. I’ll tell you what we caught if you don’t remember.”

  I wonder how I am going to explain my late arrival at home. I am supposed to be in class, English phonetics and then the history seminar, the one I’ll soon be out of because in my bag I have a letter to the dean signed by the director of the House of Friendship and Peace. I wonder if my boss’s friend Grisha is powerful enough to exempt me altogether from the final in scientific communism next year.

  Grisha pours another round of cognac. I shake my head and cover the glass with my palm.

  Grisha and Viktor Nikolaevich drink, and then my boss gets up, indicating that the party is over. He embraces Grisha, then motions for Borya and me to follow him back to the car. Borya shakes Grisha’s hand, and I smile and say good-bye.

  “How do you feel?” asks Viktor Nikolaevich, swiveling to me from the front seat of his Volga.

  I feel like throwing up. The empty stomach, the champagne, the “highest-quality” contents of the Smolny safe. The expectation that in a second or two or five Viktor Nikolaevich will take my hand and, this time, will not let it go. The gnawing feeling in my guts that I’ll have to do something I don’t want to do yet, certainly not with my departing boss. The muted, cobweb feeling of being empty of protest, something my mother must have felt when she made her monthly visits to the secret Ivanovo apartment.

  Viktor Nikolaevich stares into my face with his directorial blue eyes, his face so close I can smell cognac on his breath. At this close range he looks completely unfamiliar. I realize how little I know about this man, although we’ve worked together for almost a year. I don’t know, for example, how old his children are. I don’t even know if he has any children.

  “Borya will drive you home,” he says. “I’m the first one on the route.”

  I nod, stick my head out the window, and let the wind scour my face.

  A few minutes later, the car stops at the building where he lives, somewhere in the center. My boss, who is now my former boss, gets out, comes around, and leans into my window. “Remember me,” he says and smiles with his big lips and gives me a real good-bye kiss, short and dry.

  “I will,” I say, and I know that he knows that I mean it. I’ll remember him. I’ll remember that he was funny and generous, that he protected me, that he didn’t do what he could have done. And sometimes it is not doing things that edifies a Communist Party boss and gives him a little bit of soul.

  Borya and I watch him saunter toward his door as drizzle falls onto the windshield and smudges his contours, as though he were already beginning to be erased from memory.

  I feel old, as old as Borya. I feel I no longer want to work, at least not in the House of Friendship and Peace. I don’t want to wait years for a promotion that will allow me to move chairs and arrange train tickets; I don’t want to wait for Tatiana Vasilievna to retire, for Rita to take her place and abuse me the same way Tatiana Vasilievna abused her. I don’t want to squeeze into a bus twice a day at dusk, at eight in the morning and at six at night, for twenty or thirty years, before I may be allowed to coordinate the entire English-speaking world.

  15. White Night

  THE PRESENT PERFECT TENSE is not really present,” I say to my private student Svetlana, who is focusing on my mouth with such intensity that my ears begin to burn. “It is really past, but you feel its consequences in the present. Like what happens in life—you have left a good job, one that would have made you coordinator for all capitalist countries, and yet you still feel uncertain about whether you’ve done the right thing.” I write the auxiliary have in her notebook followed by the past participle left. “Give me an example,” I say.

  “I have already read Crime and Punishment,” says Svetlana eagerly, a seventeen-year-old with the pimply face of a diligent student who has most likely finished the curriculum-prescribed novel well ahead of her teacher’s assignment schedule.

  Svetlana tries very hard, pushed by her father, a senior engineer and a party member, who is embarrassed to use a private teacher not authorized by law. But he is also keen on his daughter passing a college entrance foreign language exam, so he has hired me (an example of present perfect: a past action with results in the present) and he is now “looking the other way.” That was what he said when we met for the first lesson, “You were highly recommended, although this is a gray area. So I’m going to look the other way.”

  Instead of having lessons in an apartment, mine or Svetlana’s, we meet in an empty university classroom, a condition set by her father. His face twitches when he hears the word “private” pared with “tutoring”—a little spasm that ripples through his cheek—and meeting on the university grounds legitimizes for him, if only in part, turning to the educational black market.

  My friend Nina and I are recommended as private tutors through the university’s elaborate network of word-of-mouth references and connections. We started tutoring at the end of our second year and are now referred to those in need of private lessons by our most prestigious English professors who, in their British-accented voices, descri
be us as “highly capable young girls.”

  Working three hours a day in the nonexistent private sector, we make more money than the head of our department. We make a lot of rubles, but the irony is that despite our “accumulation of wealth”—the plague of every capitalist country, as we know from our scientific communism textbook—there isn’t much to spend our wealth on. The clothing stores are full of gray coats, the shoe stores overflow with black vinyl contraptions that mangle feet, and the cosmetic departments offer hand mirrors in red plastic frames and dry black mascara that cakes on eyelashes in toxic clumps.

  The only exception is perfume. Not unlike our bakeries, which are somehow still able to produce excellent bread, our perfume factories have cracked the fragrance code, flooding the stores with whimsically shaped bottles of exquisite scents in silk-lined boxes that look like they should be lying on the counters in the Champs-Elysées. I try to imagine the Champs-Elysées, which is translated into Russian as Elysee Fields, but the image doesn’t make sense. I see vast fields covered with grass, like the fields behind our dacha, with clumps of sorrel and a Gypsy bull tethered to a suspiciously flimsy stick. But how can such fields—with or without bulls or sorrel—also have the world’s most decadent shops? I don’t know the answer, but I am grateful to our chemists that a new, complicated fragrance called “White Night” is sloshing in its bottle at the bottom of my bag.