“How was the test?” asks my mother, who used the time while I was inside to go to a farm market and buy the nutritional delicacies to take to Papa’s hospital. Her arms are weighed down by string bags with pears all the way from Azerbaijan, huge scarlet tomatoes from Georgia, and bouquets of cilantro and other greens my father will never touch.
“All right,” I say, and start walking in the direction of the exit.
“What did you have to do?” She hurries after me.
“A story.” I keep walking. “To read and retell.”
“Were there any words you didn’t know?”
“A couple.” I push open the front door and take a breath of air. “Can we go home now?”
At home we don’t talk about father’s illness. We talk about the nourishing value of the chicken bouillon my mother boils on the stove and pours into pot-bellied jars, in which it cools on the windowsill, forming a yellow crust of fat under the lids. She’ll take the jars to the hospital because the food there is all stolen by the nurses and orderlies. We talk about the absence of direct streetcar routes to the hospital, which makes her, and sometimes my sister, too, lug the string bags with the jars of bouillon and the harvest of her market trips from the last stop to his ward almost a kilometer away.
She never takes me: children are not allowed in the hospital. The closest I can get to my father is to trail her downstairs to the phone booth in front of our apartment building and wait, leaning on the squeaky door, during the daily call to a woman in Hospital Information.
ON OUR WAY DOWN to the phone booth, the elevator lurches between floors, threatening to get stuck. Outside, clouds seep through the gaps between buildings, promising more rain tomorrow.
I stand outside the phone booth, leaning on the door. I don’t want to hear the words my mother is saying; I don’t want to guess the answers. All I want is to stay outside—out of what’s happening, on the fringes of the actual events, of what I am not told.
This time my mother stays on the phone longer than usual, her lips slowly falling into a new, unprotected curve. She seems to be asking questions; she covers her eyes with her hand while listening to the answers.
“What, Mama, what? What did they say?” I ask. I want to know and at the same time I don’t.
“Nothing new, really.” She is trying to pull her mouth back into a controlled position. “They’re going to change Papa’s medicine. The old one isn’t working so well. That’s all.”
She grabs my arm and pulls me across the broken asphalt of the courtyard so fast, her pace so resolute, that I have to skip after her to keep up.
Back home I hide under the coat hooks, between the crinkly raincoats, alone, because my mother and sister are both in the kitchen pretending to be busy with dinner. I’d rather not hear what they’re talking about, and yet I stand there straining my ears. Nothing much escapes from behind the closed door, only the drone of their voices and splashes of separate words.
“Oxygen,” I hear, a word not normally used while cooking dinner. “Didn’t let me stay,” my mother says more loudly, moving from the stove to the sink near the door. “They knew I’m an anatomy professor, so they told me the truth,” I make out, my hope buoyed by this complete sentence, yet immediately suspended by the banging that begins in a cupboard near the door. I hold my breath, but nothing audible escapes from under the kitchen door, until my mother clinks plates onto the table and says something ending with “too young to understand anything.”
At night, pretending to sleep, I hear her sniffle in her bed, which is next to my father’s, unopened and empty.
“WE’RE GOING TO CALL the hospital early today,” my mother says in the morning.
The three of us chug down in the elevator, staring at the floor, mother clicking two-kopeck coins for the phone in her palm. It starts to pour again as we walk across the courtyard, around the puddles, and into the street, where the green phone booth gleams under the rain. We stop in front of it, and Marina tightens her fist around a piece of paper with the hospital phone number.
“Here is the number,” she mutters, glancing sideways, avoiding my eyes, stuffing a piece of paper into my hand. “You call today.”
With fingers as wooden as my legs, I dial the six digits scribbled on the paper, my heart pounding, my stomach queasy. I don’t recognize my voice when I say my father’s name; it whistles out of my throat, barely audible, like his voice before the taxi took him away to the hospital. On the other end, I can hear the Information clerk rustle through paper, slipping a funny remark to someone, chuckling in response.
“Died last night,” the voice resounds from the other end of the city, a normal female voice accustomed to delivering abnormal messages. It sounds a little like Irina Petrovna’s, only much harsher because the woman is speaking in Russian. I hear a click and then a long tone, flat, droning, and endless.
We are silent on the way back up. In the apartment, Mama trudges into the bathroom and thoroughly towels her face and hair. Slowly, she fills a watering can and makes her way down the hallway to water the plants on the windowsills. She moves carefully and methodically, her rhythm and silence dictated by a long-practiced habit of survival.
“The latest news from the fields,” barks a voice from the radio. “Collective farm number fifty-four of Oktyabrsky region is happy to report the largest ever harvest of …” Marina reaches up and turns the knob, but the voice continues humming from the neighbor’s apartment behind the wall.
Death, I know, makes people cry, but no matter how I fumble inside myself, I cannot locate grief. Uncharted on the map of my ten-year-old life, it belongs to the theater and movies, to the world of my third-grade teacher Vera Pavlovna and the textbook valor of the Great Patriotic War she declaims.
Strangely, life outside my body continues as before, reeling out scenes with the same predictability and order: my mother shuffling around the apartment; my sister trailing after her, as if waiting for orders; the brakes screeching when a car on the corner fails to make the light; the smell of fried onions oozing from a neighbor’s kitchen through the cracks around the door. I mechanically register everything, as if I were Irina Petrovna’s British record, but I don’t know how to feel.
My mother goes back to the bathroom and refills the watering can. She keeps watering the plants, walking from one windowsill to the next, not noticing that the water is rising in the pans around the flowerpots, spilling out onto the sills, dripping on the desk in Marina’s room. It’s dripping onto my English notebook, the only evidence left of my summer of vocabulary lists, irregular verbs, and the twelve tricky tenses.
I lift my notebook to save it from the trickling water, and it opens to the lesson on simple past. The simple past that now contains my father. Yesterday he was still in the present, yesterday and every day for the past ten years, when I watched him dip the oars into the gray water of the Gulf and stroll across the field of our dacha, three fishing rods bobbing on his shoulder. The past has won over the present, the warped irregular past, the most incomprehensible of all the twelve tenses, as inexplicable as the English word “privacy.”
I feel that something has cinched my throat and I know I’m crying. I cry because I was the one who held the phone and dialed the number. I was the one struck by the word “died.” Not my mother, the anatomy professor who was privy to everything about his illness. Not my sister, the actress, who knows how to bring out tears and how to hide them.
I cry because my notebook glares with the past tense, the tense that now contains not only my father but everything my father and I have done. There is a part of me trapped in that past along with him, and I don’t know what that means. Maybe I will die, too—whether I eat salad or don’t, whether or not my dinner includes soup and bread every single day without fail.
What I do know is that I won’t smell tobacco on his hands or feel his stubble or be “Brother Rabbit” ever again, and that knowledge makes me cry even harder, so hard that my mother breaks out of her watering trance a
nd presses me to her soft breasts and whispers to Marina, “Vsyo ponimaet,” which means I’ve instantly grown up and now understand everything.
8. Mushrooms
NOBODY BUT ME CAN find the belye,” says my sister as she and my mother examine different-size baskets piled by the entrance to our dacha. “I bet you all the best ones will be mine.”
It is our first dacha autumn without my father. The three fishing rods are still in the barn, leaning against the splintery boards, but they are now behind the row of spades and hoes, pressed to the wall by the more essential tools. Because of my father’s illness, we planted nothing at the dacha in June, and to my infinite joy, we have almost nothing to harvest. That’s why we can devote a whole Sunday in September—my second week in the fourth grade—to mushroom hunting.
Belye are at the top of the mushroom Olympus, their dark-brown caps clamped down on solid stems. Rare and difficult to find, they are treasures my mother sautés with sour cream, shreds to infuse pungent fragrance into soup, and hangs on thread over the stove to dry for the winter.
The next most prized are red caps, their stems flecked with black, trailed closely by birch-tree gray caps on long, skinny legs. Under the caps of all the best mushrooms is a hard sponge, and it is that underside that separates the noble mushrooms from the peasants with hollow stems and silly umbrella heads lined with spokes of pale flesh.
These second-rate mushrooms are good only for salting. Drops of acrid milk bead on their stems when my mother cuts them, so they need to be boiled to flush out the bitter taste. Then she layers them, limp but still full of color—gray, pink, and the rarely found orange—in an aluminum bucket between yellow umbrellas of dill flowers, garlic, and black currant leaves. When the bucket is full, she pours a pot of hot water up to the top. The mushrooms will be ready to eat by early fall, an essential appetizer in every gathering, a complement to boiled potatoes and black bread. The bucket, impossible to fit in any refrigerator, will sit on our balcony in the city, frozen from November to the end of March, when we will need a hammer or Marina’s strong fist to break the crust of ice over the top.
A mushroom hunt, as everyone knows, must start early, when tentative brightness bleeds from under the horizon, setting alight the stubble of forest across the field. Like fishing, it is a ritual that must be performed at sunrise.
My sister knows the spots. To find mushrooms, especially noble ones, you must know the spots, not necessarily geographically but intuitively. My mother and I meander around the forest looking under every tree, turning up every brown leaf, while Marina walks straight past us to some dinky-looking ditch, where she digs up a perfect family of belye.
The three of us start when the sun appears above the treetops. We walk past the unpainted house where the Gypsies live, past the Gypsies’ bull, whose tail has been chewed off by rats, past the piles of boards dumped here a long time ago for a project that never happened. As we walk through the damp field, toward the forest still hazy with night fog, birds rustle out of bushes, and grasshoppers, as if on cue from an invisible conductor, begin to trill in the clumps of grass.
As we approach the far end of the field, just before the forest begins, we come to an island of birch trees surrounded by blueberry thickets, a good spot for birch-tree mushrooms. I dip my hand into the middle of a bush, part the hard little leaves, and a slippery cap emerges from under my fingers—and another one, smaller, right next to it—resilient and perfect. I sink my fingers into the moss and dig the mushrooms out at the root, their stems sturdy and white.
“I got two!” I yell to Marina’s back zigzagging between the trees far ahead of me. I run until I catch up with her at the line where the real forest begins and where fir trees and oaks tower overhead, screening out the sunlight. I hold out my hand and Marina lifts and examines the mushrooms. They are flawless, with flecked stems and stout caps, and there is nothing to find fault with except for one thing—they are not belye.
“Wait,” says Marina as she hands them back to me, “wait until I get to my spots.” She slips into the forest and vanishes behind an oak trunk.
What secret sense led me to that blueberry patch under a birch tree? My small victory tickles my nose, hones my senses, makes it possible to smell my own way to the hidden treasures of belye.
I step into the forest. Musty leaves marinate in thick loam; dead branches and old pine needles slowly become part of the forest floor. I follow the crackling of Marina’s steps, swift and resolute. My mother’s rustling on my left is slower and less determined. Although most of my senses are alerted to the ground, my ears are still tuned to the territorial shifts of my mother and sister. Their sound is my only compass under the tree roof.
Beyond a clump of old firs the ground slopes to a ravine with steep sides overgrown by grass. I squat on the rim and jump onto the bottom, crunching pinecones under my feet. My eyes are level with the rim, and I see that the sides of the ravine are reinforced by logs, half-rotten and splintery. A World War II trench. There are many of them in the woods, trenches and bomb craters, their sides smoothed by time. There used to be hundreds of old shells, mines, and grenades buried under layers of forest compost, but those are hard to find nowadays.
I want to show the trench to my mother. Every Victory Day, on May 9, she takes her three medals out of the drawer, carefully lifting them from brown boxes. The medals look like the chocolates in gold foil we all get for New Year’s, but they are bronze, attached to trapezoid badges of striped cloth.
I wonder what it was like to live in a trench like this because I suspect that those who fought in these woods during the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad were not always attacking under red banners or dying heroically from German bullets, as my third-grade teacher Vera Pavlovna wanted us to believe. Nine hundred days is an awfully long time to live in a trench, especially if it’s winter and there are no mushrooms or berries or even old leaves because everything is under a meter of snow.
I think of my mother’s brothers Sima and Yuva, whom I cannot regard as uncles because they’d died long before I was born. No one actually saw Yuva die, so he is still listed as missing in action. Several times my mother has written to the archives of a town, now in Poland, where he’d been stationed when the war started, but there is no trace of anyone from that division guarding the border at the onset of the blitzkrieg. “They might as well have never existed,” my mother says bitterly. “They didn’t even have guns.”
I don’t understand why the soldiers on the border, right before the Great Patriotic War, didn’t have guns. They have guns now, at a time of developed socialism, as our textbooks call it, which seems far less dangerous than June 1941.
“Not a pistol, not a rifle, not even a shotgun,” confirms my mother. “So what could he do against a division of tanks? Mowed down in the first few minutes. He didn’t even have time to get scared.”
My mother’s brother Sima is not among those missing. He died in plain view of the whole family, a few months after he had been wounded on his first day at the front, a piece of shrapnel lodged in his lung. “That sliver of metal resulted in a metastatic abscess in the brain,” my mother says, deliberately using medical terminology to hide her anger at the doctors who had failed to take the piece out, wishing perhaps that Sima had been brought into the front hospital where she worked and where she would certainly have been more fastidious in removing every shard.
Before going to war and dying, Sima had studied painting at the Leningrad Academy of Art. His canvases hang on the walls of our apartment: a portrait of my young mother, a soldier throwing a grenade at a tank. He must have been thinking of fighting the war even before he was drafted into the army, painting a soldier in front of a rearing hunk of steel, a soldier just like his brother Yuva, only armed with real weapons. Looking at the portrait of my young mother, at her crinkled eyes and her mouth open in a half-smile, I make a discovery: there was a period, even during the war, when my mother was cheerful and ironic, before she turned into a law-abiding
citizen so much in need of order.
When did this transformation take place, I wonder, from the woman in Sima’s portrait into my unsmiling mother? Was it during the war when Marina was born, or when Marina’s father died of TB? Did Marina know a different mother, someone who would let me go fishing with my father instead of making me paint the house, someone who wouldn’t frown at a drama school or learning English? It doesn’t seem fair, the fact that I didn’t have a chance to know this other mother—another advantage my sister has, in addition to her acting gift and her ability to find the best mushroom spots.
Now the remnants of war are buried in the ground. Ten years ago, when my grandfather was turning up dirt for the first strawberry bed in our dacha plot, his shovel struck metal—a foot-long artillery shell, unexploded, hibernating since 1944. A sapper brigade loaded the rusted jacket onto an armored truck and hauled it away. I hear the story each time a new guest is given a tour of the dacha grounds, my mother’s voice ringing with pride that it was our plot that was blessed with such a close danger.
For years, stories have been floating around the countryside about boys who found shells in the woods, threw them into campfires, and had fingers blown off their reckless hands. Supposedly there was a boy in a nearby village whose face was burned by bullets he’d tossed into a fire, and another whose foot was severed by a land mine.
I’ve never seen boys with missing fingers or feet, or anyone with a burned face. But on my mushroom-gathering trips I see enough craters and trenches, like the one I’m standing in now, to know that the war was really fought here, that it cut wounds in the flesh of the earth deep enough to require a quarter-century to heal.
A Mountain of Crumbs Page 10