A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (21 page)

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

T
HE 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.

M
Y 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
.

The discussion of
zelyonyi zmei
makes my mother drive her fists into her hips. Marina, always ready for a fight, takes her position in front of the stove, sharpens her voice, and stabs the words at my mother’s face.

“Slava is the best actor we have,” she yells. “He can play any role in any performance, even if the head of our local party cell directs it himself.”

“He’s in love with the bottle,” says my mother, “and he has let
zelyonyi zmei,
the green serpent, wring its coils around his neck.” She bangs the lid over the pot of soup to punctuate her statement because this is just what she’s predicted would happen to anyone who has come under the corrosive influence of theater.

I know it’s not Slava my mother is so worried about. He is
chuzhoi,
not part of the family, and that means he doesn’t deserve any sympathy or compassion. The opposite of
chuzhoi
is
svoi,
and we can count
svoi
on the palm of our hand—my grandparents, my uncle Vova, who lives in the small town of Ryazan, and my aunt and three cousins, who live in the provinces.

The person my mother really worries about is my sister. She worries about her proximity to all this theatrical chaos; she worries that the green serpent will finally overpower Marina. “There are so many normal jobs,” says my mother, making sure I’m within earshot. “Look at Valya from the fourth floor—she’s just been assigned to the district library around the corner. Look at Irina Petrovna’s daughter. Your former classmate and already a chief engineer.” These are the jobs my mother understands; they are practical and safe, unlike acting or speaking English.

I wonder if my mother would be considered
intelligentsiya
by the previous century’s standards. She is educated, and she’s read Turgenev and other classics. She’s heard Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin
at the Kirov and dragged me to see its multiple productions of
Sleeping Beauty
and
Swan Lake
. Yet it is difficult to imagine a Pushkin or Turgenev heroine grumbling about an uneaten slice of bread or a tuna shortage. Those corseted women, both young and old, with pale fingers and chestnut curls, seemed to have other things weighing upon their consciences, things that provoked multi-page discussions and often conflicted with one another, things like love and honor, or happiness and duty. They sighed a lot, pressed their children to their bosoms, and peered from their aging cabriolets as wooden church steeples and small villages sailed by amidst the fields of wheat. They didn’t seem to think about salads and pies ending up in
chuzhoi
stomachs any more than they worried about
zelyonyi zmei.

F
ROM OUR SEATS IN
the seventh row I see the open stage perfectly, and the fact that there is no curtain immediately signals to everyone but my mother that the play is modern, not at all like Gorky’s dusty
Lower Depths,
which we saw here two months earlier. My mother glances at the stage and utters one word,
besporyadok,
disorder, which is what she says when I leave my uniform dress hanging on a chair, or when radiators in our apartment turn off on New Year’s Eve without warning, or when there is no janitor in sight to break apart a slope of ice in front of the entrance to our building. My mother doesn’t like the gray cubes piled on top of one another on the stage or the silhouettes of landmarks from foreign cities in the back. She doesn’t like the fact that Slava’s name is in the program next to that of the main character, Sergeant Henderson.