I wonder whether Malvina and her husband will miss this place with that intense nostalgia Aunt Mila insists was scratching inside the souls of our émigré literary classics. What will my students miss after they step out of the plane in an abstract foreign airport with the allowed forty kilograms of luggage comprising their entire life? After two years in lines in militia and visa offices, after they’ve been publicly humiliated and denounced here, will they miss anything at all? From the mystic avenues of the unfathomable West, will they ever look back at the worn gray pages of this silly conversation textbook in the middle of this table covered with oilcloth, at this milky evening light—the light Pushkin commemorated in verse—pouring through the open window? Will they ever look back at me?
16. The Crimea
I AM TWENTY, A THIRD-YEAR university student, and my classmate Nina is still my best friend. She is tall and looks British, or what we think looks British: blonde springs of hair and glasses. Together we smoke Hungarian menthol cigarettes and make plans for the summer. We dare to fantasize about the faraway and nearly impossible, the pinnacle of every vacationer’s dream. The word Crimea, Krym, sounds like “cream”—sumptuous, hedonistic, melting on my tongue, with a sweet aftertaste of decadence and longing. It is the opposite of everything we know: it has crumbling mountains, white sun, and a high sky stretching all the way to Turkey. It has vineyards producing champagne that never reaches our stores and trees called magnolias that we read about in Somerset Maugham novels. It is the opposite of Leningrad—a new world.
With the help of our classmate who works in the foreign tourism office and has powerful connections, we buy train tickets to Simferopol and, on August 1, step out of the train car—after two days clanging through the entire width of the country, north to south—into the dusty, soupy warmth of the Crimea.
I don’t know how I expected this wonder, Krym, to turn out: maybe like the salty wind and brightly dressed crowd of Chekhov’s “Lady with a Lapdog,” or a row of tall fences cordoning off the high-ranking dachas, or the brown cliffs jutting into the sea I remember from an old painting on the wall of the Russian Museum.
The real Crimea smells of heated asphalt and warm apple juice just on the verge of turning. In the crowd of other passengers, we elbow past a kiosk with cone-shaped vats of fruit drinks and a counter crawling with wasps to get on a bus that will take us to the small town of Sudak, only seven kilometers away from our destination. We are headed for the village of Novy Svet, which literally means “new world.” “Not too symbolic, is it?” says Nina.
The bus rumbles along a narrow road that snakes across fields of brown grass. The road climbs up, and gentle mountains begin to rise against the bleached sky. From Sudak, we walk on a path that wraps around the mountain with bushes and low pines clinging to the steep sides. We walk and walk, stooping under the weight of our backpacks, pushing forward through the hot air that smells like baked earth.
And then we see it. The road twists again and there is the sea, emerald and still, several hundred meters below.
“Look!” Nina yells as if I could’ve somehow missed it. I stop on the edge of a hairpin curve and stare, like a fool hypnotized by a charlatan, stupidly endangering my life. I blink several times, but the sea is still there, astonishing and real.
This staring feels exhausting; it empties me of words. I don’t know how to react to blue-green water. The biggest body of water I’ve ever seen, the Gulf of Finland, is always gray. The Neva is sometimes zinc and sometimes charcoal. The lake near our dacha is muddy brown, the color of its clay bottom. All the water I’ve known is monochromatic, the colors you find in the sepia photographs of our family album. Water, like earth, does not have color.
Yet this is insanely bright, as bizarre as if the ground suddenly turned purple or the pine needles neon blue. It looks like a giant theater set stretched all the way to Turkey.
Now it feels impossible to walk another step. The sea is here, practically at our feet, so we take a downward footpath, barely visible in the covering of thin grass poking through yellow pine needles, and glide down, saved from a free fall only by the counterweight of our backpacks.
The path ends at the pebbly beach of a small cove hugged by cliffs. At the proximity of five meters, the width of the beach, the sea is different: it moves and makes sounds, lapping onto the rocks in lazy little waves. It is nothing but water, after all, salty and warm as soup.
I take off my sweaty shoes, wade in, and let the sea ripple around my ankles, the blue-green sea, refreshing and entirely mine. Or maybe not entirely: there is a group of young people sitting around a small camp stove, plucking black shells out of a pot, giving us sour looks as if we’d trespassed into their courtyard. They seem to occupy the part of the beach that’s in the shade of brown cliffs, where backpacks and folded blankets lie in a pile, although there isn’t much shade anywhere now, the sun pulsing with heat straight over our heads.
I wonder if those black shells they’re plucking from the pot are midiyi—mussels—the exotic shell creatures northern people never see. I always fish for names of unknown foods in the few foreign-language translations that appear in our literary magazine Inostran-naya Literatura, stumbling over oysters in Françoise Sagan and a vegetable called asparagus in Iris Murdoch. But aside from their names, I don’t know what they look like, let alone taste like. Is asparagus related to spinach if they’re both dark green and both hiss with sibilant sounds? Even the word itself, “asparagus,” sounds as decadent as “pineapple” and “quail” from a Mayakovsky poem, the two truly unsocialist foods eradicated in 1917 along with the tsar. How can oysters, whatever they are, be eaten raw? The Leningrad store called Okean does not provide much help. It is vast as an ocean, and just as forbidding, its glass display cases full of canned sardines in tomato sauce and smelts frozen into huge blocks of ice that saleswomen in white gowns shatter with crowbars on the wet, empty counters.
According to our plans, Nina and I were going to walk into the village and rent a room from a local babushka, a ruble a day, a cement-floored cell with two dusty mattresses, a communal outhouse, and chickens clucking in the owner’s yard. But what we stumbled on in this cove has uncovered a new possibility: we could live on the beach, much closer to the sea than any babushka could fathom, breathing air scented with seaweed and pine, and use our rubles for more exciting ends. Besides, thanks to Nina’s brother, who is partial to camping, we even have two small inflatable mattresses rolled up in our backpacks.
At about nine, when the sea and the cliffs and the pines that climb all the way to the paved road are instantly swallowed by heavy southern blackness, Nina and I lie still, listening to every rustle and every creak, petrified that someone from the group whose territory we’ve invaded will sneak up and dispose of us. Trying to peer into the night, I strain my eyes so hard that they finally close, and I don’t even know when I fall asleep because the blackness on the outside of my eyelids is as thick as it is on the inside.
In the morning, the brightness is as intense as the dark of last night and, still alive, I plunge into the sea, letting my body float on cool, salty water. I stare into the thin-blue sky, water rippling around my eyes, green water with yellow sand underneath, which changes to gray pebbles as I turn my head, and then to brown cliffs and then back to thin-blue sky. Green water, transparent and sparkling, so inviting and so deep. I begin to understand why my provincial aunt Muza, who has been in the Crimea only once, has always reverentially spoken of it as the Sea.
The Sea is the heart here, and everything else, including the people, exists in relation to the Sea. The inhabitants of our adopted cove, young engineers from Kiev, are beach veterans: they’ve been coming here in August for the last three years, claiming this cove with their camp stove, their cans of meat and packets of dry soup, their blankets and guitars. They peel mussels off the rocks, rinse their tin bowls in sea water, lure crabs out of their crevices with crumbs of food, wade waist-deep and wash their hair with brown laundry soap, the on
ly soap that lathers in this water. All day long they sit around in bathing suits, smoking and drinking, skin peeling off their noses and backs.
It takes a day for our camps to merge. It takes two more days for me to notice Boris, the oldest of the Kiev group, whose hair and eyebrows are so blond and bleached by the sun that they look almost white. Or rather it is Boris who notices me, and I simply notice him back.
“HE’S A DIFFERENT BLOOD group,” says Nina. It’s our turn for kitchen duty, and we’re peeling potatoes and rinsing them in the gentle surf, talking about Boris.
I know exactly what this means, and I know she is right. A different blood group is someone who hasn’t read Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which was officially published two years ago, and who prefers a soccer match to a Tarkovsky film. All of our new Kiev friends seem to fall into this category, in which soccer takes precedence over avant-garde cinema. A different blood group is someone who thinks that Mikhail Baryshnikov, who has just defected to the West during one of the Kirov Theatre ballet tours, is a traitor and the enemy of the motherland. My sister, when she read the denouncing article in Pravda, said molodets—good for you. My mother said nothing. Nina said he should’ve done it earlier. The Kiev engineers treat the topic with disapproving silence, staring at the green sea ripples or turning to more pressing issues, such as shaking sand and pebbles out of their bathing suits and towels.
But it is flattering that Boris dives deep into the sea to bring me conch shells and necks of two-thousand-year-old amphoras, which should sit in museums instead of the pockets of my backpack. It is flattering that it is I he takes snorkeling along the cliffs and not the curly-haired Natasha from his Kiev group, who chain-smokes, sighs, and pretends not to look in his direction.
The truth is that despite our differences, I’m drawn to Boris, to his blue eyes and steely arms and solid legs bristling with bleached-white hairs. He is six years older than I and very different from the mild-mannered Vitaly back in Leningrad, whose dissertation in psychology I agreed to type in April for sixty rubles. Vitaly pressed my hand between his clammy palms, awkwardly brought me roses, and spoke in the dim, careful voice of an inexperienced lecturer.
There is nothing careful about Boris’s speech: words rattle out of his mouth, swift and definitive, sharpened by a trace of the Ukrainian pronunciation so alien to my northern ears.
In our conversation, we’ve somehow drifted to the Great Patriotic War, and Boris is adamant. He’s talking about Kiev, which was occupied, unlike Leningrad.
“They walked there on their own will,” he sputters, hitting a rock with the heel of his hand to accentuate his statement. He’s telling us about Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, where Germans, with help from the local police, executed thirty-three thousand Jews. “They were ordered to walk and they walked, like sheep,” he says. “All the way to their own graves.”
Nina shakes her head and starts collecting the bowls. Her upbringing compels her to be wise and silent, not allowing her to show anger and condemn stupid statements that blame Kiev Jews for being shot and piled into a ravine.
Devoid of noble roots, I want to argue with Boris, to wipe this smirk of assurance from his lips, this arrogant flicker from his blue eyes. I want to tell him that what he is saying is as stale and wrong as the NKVD order that made my mother spy on her dissertation adviser or the sayings of my provincial uncle, who rants about Jews and their cowardice during the war. But I realize I don’t know much about Babi Yar except what I read in the tenth-grade history book, two lines of official jargon denouncing the mass execution, not one word that the victims were all Jewish. I realize that Boris knows more than I do about our history, and although there is no doubt he is a different blood group, I don’t know which is worse, his wrong conviction or my ignorance.
I am ignorant about a lot of things. I’ve never read all four volumes of War and Peace, for example. I leafed through the love scenes—pausing at infatuations, elopements, and breakups—but skipped all the battles. For my university exam in foreign literature, I never bothered to open Marlowe or Cervantes, instead regurgitating the professor’s lectures about the impact of their works. All I know about the history of Russia—the real, pre-1917 history—comes from my high school textbook, in which the centuries of Russian monarchy are allotted less space than the fifty-eight years of Soviet power. I would never admit this to Nina, of course, or to anyone else, but the truth is I’m a dilettante. I pick up crumbs, never burdening myself with a whole.
ON THE MOUNTAIN ABOVE our cove there is a border patrol post, because on the other side of the Black Sea, a hundred kilometers away, lies a foreign country, Turkey. Due to this proximity, sleeping on the beach is against the law. When we look up, we sometimes see soldiers with German shepherds etched against the sky, as though they peer across the sea trying to decode the secrets of our capitalist neighbor.
It’s evening, the sun just beginning to melt into the edge of the cliffs, and we are sitting around the camp stove, on which mussels boil in a pot with seawater, drinking local wine Boris brought from Sudak in a gallon-size gasoline canister. I see the silhouettes of two soldiers on the mountain, but this time they aren’t standing still or milling around the post. They are beginning to walk down the mountain path. Maybe they’ve decided to take a trip to Sudak for a gallon of wine, too, but instead of getting smaller their figures grow, definitely approaching, so I nudge Boris, and now we’re all staring at the two men in uniforms being pulled by their wolf-like dogs straight down to our cove.
We are all silent now, and even Yura stops strumming his guitar. Everyone remembers last Wednesday, when a boat coughed up to our beach at four in the morning, and two men with militia caps and a megaphone stepped out of the damp darkness, blinding us with flashlights. They demanded to see our internal passports, identifications we carry to get on a train. When we reluctantly pulled the documents out of our backpacks, they snatched them from our hands. I would’ve been petrified if Boris hadn’t told me that the same thing had happened the previous year and the year before that. It must be an official ritual, he said. The militiamen shouted, pushed, and crunched around the beach, serious and self-important, as if our blankets strewn on the pebbles directly threatened the country’s national security.
“How will we get our passports back?” Boris yelled.
“We’ll talk tomorrow at the precinct,” barked the man with the megaphone and kicked Boris’s backpack.
The next day we all walked seven kilometers to Sudak and spent five hours sitting on the precinct’s hallway floor waiting for our passports, which were released at six when the militiaman on duty had to go home. That was when we discovered the local wine, sold by the liter from milk cisterns.
So the first thought on everyone’s mind now is that the militia has informed the border patrol to watch us through binoculars to make sure that we pack up and leave as we’ve been told. And now, seeing that instead of leaving we’ve taken to drinking wine from gasoline canisters, they have activated the military to evict us by force. Now they are coming for us with trained dogs and guns slung over their shoulders. We are lucky they aren’t bringing tanks.
I try to imagine what this will do to Nina’s and my standing at the philology department. We’ve been considered diligent and trustworthy, so responsible, in fact, that our senior English professor hinted recently about the possibility of our teaching at the University’s summer Russian program for American students. It is the highest honor to be allowed to teach students from foreign countries, she said. Especially as foreign as the United States. And now, with the dogs clawing the dry earth of the slope, choking on their chains, the prospect seems as dim as the smoky horizon over the sea sloping toward Turkey.
The German shepherds pull; the soldiers yank them back. The dogs stop, sniff the air, and jerk in the direction of the pot on our camp stove, where the fat from a can of beef is just beginning to coat the freshly boiled potatoes. For a few minutes it looks like the soldiers are interested in the
contents of the pot, too, because they trot after their dogs as if driven by a common purpose, their boots crunching the pebbles in unison.
“Don’t hand anything over,” Boris commands. “Say our passports are still in the militia precinct.”
“Offer them some wine,” says Nina. “It’s a polite thing to do.”
No one else, after the day spent walking all the way to Sudak and sitting on the militia precinct floors, thinks we should be polite with the law.
The soldiers stop and assess the situation: ten kids their age in bathing suits, swilling wine out of mugs; an empty can of stewed beef they haven’t seen since they were twelve. It’s just what they saw peering down into the cove, wine and meat; their binoculars didn’t betray them.
“Join us,” says Nina. “Would you like some wine?” she asks and rinses two mugs in the sea.
The soldiers, who look no older than nineteen or twenty, tell their dogs to lie down, and the shepherds, their noses sniffing the food smells out of the air, reluctantly obey. The soldiers wedge down into our circle, toasting with their filled mugs, and even Boris now has trouble believing they are here to arrest us.
Their names are Vitya and Serega. Vitya is bony and tall; Serega is as solid as if he’d been carved from the rock buttressing the side of this cove. They’re both local, from Simferopol, where the train deposited Nina and me two weeks earlier, and they’re fortunate they haven’t been sent to Uzbekistan or Kamchatka for the two years of their draft. They’ve wanted to come visit earlier, but this is the first time their sergeant has taken off to get an order of new uniforms. “Look,” says Vitya, bending his arm and pointing to his sharp elbow sticking out of his khaki shirt. “Yeah,” confirms Serega, pulling off his boots to demonstrate their soles, worn down to holes. His feet are wrapped in portyanki, a square of fabric used instead of socks, which look and smell like they are in dire need of change, too.
A Mountain of Crumbs Page 23
