A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  On the rim of the trench I see a tall mushroom, a bright red umbrella with white dots, a splash of color among pale blades of grass and sparse strawberry bushes. It is called muhomor, death to flies. My mother chops it up in a saucer with a little water and sugar—and the next day there are piles of dead flies around the saucer on the windowsill and on the floor. It’s always perfect, untouched by animals; it can afford to be conspicuous and bright. And right next to it, under the shade of the polka-dot umbrella, is a small brown-top only two centimeters out of the ground, and a bigger one next to that, and another—like a row of nested matryoshka dolls lined up on the downward curve of the slope. Eight altogether—a perfect family of belye.

  Dizzy with success, I jump up and down on the bottom of the trench, pinecones crunching under my feet. To find eight belye on one mushroom-hunting trip is almost impossible. For the first time, I have managed to beat Marina.

  Carefully, one by one, I wiggle them out of the ground. The biggest one is about ten centimeters tall, with a velvety head the color of chocolate. I stoop to line my basket with fern leaves from the bottom of the trench, as I’ve seen Marina do so many times; a prize like this must be padded against the bristling twigs.

  I climb out of the trench, head spinning, knees scratched from the splintery wood of the slope. For a minute I stand on the rim, trying to get my bearings. The most important thing is to think back, to remember. I approached the trench from a clump of balding fir trees, but as I look around I see that there are firs all around it. And the sun has moved; it is oozing through the treetops from the left now. I stand still and listen hard, listen for rustling of leaves and crackling of dead branches, for signs of my mother and sister.

  I listen so hard that my own breathing gets in the way. Leaves rustle high above my head, but everything below seems to exist in silence: blueberries, mushrooms, moss spreading over crumbling stumps. No sounds, no human movements intrude into the calm of the forest.

  “A-ooo!” I yell at the top of my lungs, turning in different directions—a cry of being lost in the woods. The only response is a murmur of leaves high above my head. It is still morning, I say to myself, it’s sunny outside the forest, and my mother and sister are probably already looking for me. Besides, in my basket I have a perfect row of belye.

  Suddenly it strikes me: the last field we crossed to come into the forest, where I found my first two mushrooms, must not be far. It didn’t take me long to walk from there to the trench. If I turn back, I will find the field and retrace my way home.

  I start walking away from the trench, toward a patch of light glinting through a tall opening between trees. The light is deceptively close, but every time I come near, it floats away, further and further, until I realize that what seems like an open space must be a play of light and shade, an optical illusion resulting from sunlight sifting into shadow.

  I walk for a long time, for what seems like an hour, before I understand that I am not approaching the edge of the forest. The biggest opening of light before me turns out to be a small grass meadow dotted with blue flowers and surrounded by trees.

  I plop into the grass, a purple flower before my eyes, like a tiny bell. The last of the wild strawberries are glowing along an ant path that leads to a hill of sand and pine needles. I know a trick: if I spit onto an anthill, the ants will stand on their hind legs and squirt their liquid onto my palm, a sharp yet irresistible smell. Then I sniff my palm, again and again, until no odor remains, until I’ve completely drained it out of my skin.

  It’s cozy in the grass, so I close my eyes and the image of the purple flower bell floats on my eyelids. And then I am at home, in our tiny dacha kitchen, where a smell of sizzling mushrooms tingles my nose. My mother has piled the most noble of them from our baskets, cleaned and cut up, into the biggest frying pan we have. Now the cubes of white stems and spongy yellow caps absorb the melting butter, and it begins to smell like dinner and home. In a few minutes my mother, a kitchen rag wrapped around her hand, will lift the pan off the burner, lower it onto a wooden cutting board, and scoop the fragrant stew onto my waiting plate. All the gray and red caps we found today, and the biggest of my belye mushrooms, all melt into a steaming mouthful balanced on my fork.

  But then something happens. The mushrooms piled in the basket on the kitchen floor begin to move, their heads rising, turning from brown and red to gray, growing tails, all turning into mice. As they dart in different directions, I see that they are bigger than mice, or are they growing bigger as I look? They are now as big as those rats that chewed off the tail of the Gypsies’ bull last winter. The tailless bull watches me out of the corner of his bloodshot eye as I carefully walk past the unpainted Gypsy house. Anita, a Gypsy girl whose father owns the bull—a girl with yellow curds of pus in the corners of her eyes—tells me that rats are so hungry in winter that they will eat anything, even if it is alive. Those must be Gypsy rats; it’s too scary to think that they could be the same rats that scurry at night under our own floorboards.

  Then Anita gets angry with me. Her father, she says, will steal me and stuff me in a sack. I laugh in her face, but she knows I’m terrified. Anita’s father grins and unfurls a Gypsy sack, its inside black as the winter night. His hands are hairy, with gnarled fingers and black nails, and I know that, like all Gypsies, he has a knife in the back pocket of his pants. I try to run, but my feet won’t move. I see Anita smirking as her father extends his arm to grab me around the back of my neck, just as he grabs blind kittens before he drowns them in a ditch.

  I scream—the loudest scream that has ever escaped from my throat—and my eyes pop open. Something is tickling my neck: a couple of ants have climbed over me on the way to their hill.

  “Le-na!” A faraway call is getting louder and now it is unmistakably the voice of my mother. “Aa-ooo!” comes Marina’s voice, slightly to the left of me. I yell back, turning in the direction of the voices. Then I hear the crackling of dead branches and the rustling of leaves. I grab my basket and run toward the sounds, scratched by the bushes, whipped by the firs, stumbling on pitted soil. I run straight into my mother’s stomach and bury my face into the pillows of her breasts. We stand like that for a few minutes, without moving, without saying a word, enfolded in the smell of mushrooms and damp leaves.

  Out of the forest twilight my sister comes into view. Her forehead is puckered and her eyes glare. “We’ve been searching for you for an hour!” she shouts, but as she approaches I glance inside her basket. She knows where I’m looking and stops shouting. There are only a couple of birch-tree mushrooms, scattered on the bottom, and a few commoners, too big and old even for salting.

  She tries to ignore what I have in my basket, her eyes barely skirting its contents, but I make her look. I parade my family of perfect belye—the eight trench warriors—in front of her face, and she squeezes out a smile because there is no one in the entire world, not even my older sister, who could ignore their splendor.

  We walk back, meandering on a narrow footpath through fields, my mother clasping my hand in her hot palm. We walk close together, as if connected by an invisible thread, ants trailing each other home.

  9. About Love

  OUR FIFTH-GRADE LITERATURE TEACHER, Ludmila Ivanovna, is short and round, wheeling from one corner of the classroom to the other on tiny feet. We call her Couch Legs. She is the opposite of our English teacher, who is bony and tall and rarely moves.

  With Couch Legs, we are studying the father of Russian literature, the Shakespeare of the Russian language. There isn’t much in Pushkin that can be shrouded in ideology: he is simply a classical poet whose sharp profile and ringlets of hair are familiar to every student within the borders of the Soviet Union. But Ludmila Ivanovna, her plump face framed in tight chemical curls, is doing something unauthorized and daring: she is entertaining us with an extracurricular analysis of the reading preferences of Tatiana, the virtuous heroine of Eugene Onegin.

  “Tatiana adored romantic novels,” pines Ludmila th
e Couch Legs, basking in the rare spotlight of our attention. “She read in French, as all Russians did back then, and immersed herself in the love adventures of young dukes and ladies-in-waiting.”

  We perk up at the sound of the word “love,” which is never mentioned in school, at least not in its romantic meaning. We hear a lot about love for the motherland and love for the Communist Party, but never about love for one another. It is almost scandalous that Tatiana, the example of chastity in Russian literature, was fond of such improper novels.

  “Do you think she knew how to kiss?” I whisper to Larissa, my neighbor. We are seated two to a desk, thirty of us, encased in a stuffy classroom where dust whirls in the shafts of April light slanting through the windows. “I mean, before she married that general?”

  Larissa giggles, then arches her eyebrows in bewilderment. Who knows what you can trust if Pushkin’s Tatiana could exhibit such astonishing frivolity.

  Couch Legs, bathing in the intensified light of our attention, waves her short arms and rolls her eyes, a requirement for delivering the tragic story of a French countess. Her eyes sparkling, curls shaking, Ludmila is indignant and triumphant in the delivery of a story about this love of the unmentionable kind.

  I do, of course, know about that love, although my mother, just like my school, pretends it doesn’t exist. After all, I will be twelve and in the sixth grade next September. In my courtyard, where things are more real, I see that love lurking over the rusty radiators between flights of stairs, where sixteen-year-olds pluck at guitar strings and sing of heartbreak, lighting the dark with their cigarettes.

  In the middle of this Pushkin rapture, when our attention is piqued by Ludmila soaring to the climax of her story, the door opens and, as solemnly as always, in walks our principal. She is tall and stern, with a perfect crow’s nest hairdo on top of her serious head. No one I know has ever seen her smile. She sits at an empty desk in the back for one of her surprise class observations.

  Couch Legs abruptly stops rolling around her makeshift stage, and the spotlight of our attention shifts, leaving her to flounder in the dark. I kick Larissa under the desk, and she skews her eyes in my direction, eyebrows bunching in a frown. No one dares to say anything, even in a low whisper, with the principal looming in the back.

  We can smell Couch Legs’ distress. It exudes out of the pores of her flushed face and moistens her fine hair, tightening the ringlets over her temples. After a minute of leaden silence, Ludmila desperately hobbles from the breezy affairs of the French court to the curriculum-prescribed role of women in society, her voice a dull monotone.

  I doodle on the desk with my fountain pen, a shameful thing to do since purple ink is impossible to erase. I scribble the word “love,” pressing the pen into the wood so that the letters stand out among other students’ desk comments on teachers and life. Thick and juicy, they pulsate like the hearts of the young lovers in Ludmila’s interrupted story.

  The lecture on the role of women in nineteenth-century Russia floats quietly past my ears and out an open window, where the sun breaks into rainbow shards inside dripping icicles. As soon as class is over, I will run downstairs at breakneck speed and then, catching my breath, casually walk along the hallway past Room 11, where seventh-graders have a zoology class every Thursday. If I am lucky, I may see Nikolai Gromov, the boy who smiled at me in the coatroom two weeks ago.

  Nikolai has just exchanged his Pioneer scarf for a Komsomol badge. This means he has turned fourteen, the age that assures every student a passage from the Young Pioneer Organization to the Komsomol, the Young Communist League. I can’t believe that a fourteen-year-old boy smiled at a mere fifth-grader in the coatroom.

  The bell saves Ludmila from further attempts to breathe life into the mortuary of the social order in pre-revolutionary Russia. No one stirs. We are not allowed to move until the teacher gives permission, and the principal’s presence serves as an unspoken reminder of this unwritten rule. In one stately movement the principal stands up, collects the papers she has been covering with notes, and silently walks out. I don’t think I have ever heard her speak other than through a stage microphone during formal school functions.

  “The lesson is over,” sighs Ludmila, who then sits down at her desk and begins to leaf through the roll book, her plump hand over her eyes. As I pass by her on the way out, I notice that her stubby fingers are trembling.

  TODAY, ALTHOUGH OUR CLASSES are over at two-forty, we cannot go home. We have a quarterly Young Pioneer meeting, and to assure mandatory attendance the doors to the school building have been padlocked since two. The assistant principal stands guard, letting out only Komsomol members, whose necks are not adorned by red scarves. Two boys from my class try to slip past him by mingling with a group of Komsomolets, but he immediately plucks them out, shuts the door, and gives them a quick scolding.

  From where I sit on the hallway window ledge, I wistfully watch Nikolai Gromov putting on his jacket and boots in the coatroom. Inside, all students are required to wear school shoes that we keep in cloth bags on assigned hangers. His shoe bag hangs on the far end in the “senior” corner, with “Gromov” cross-stitched in red across the coarse linen.

  Nikolai walks toward the door without so much as a glance in my direction, and for a moment his tall figure is etched in a diamond of sunlight when the door is briefly opened; then it is just as hastily shut. Through a grimy square of the window, I see him lift stork-like legs over puddles as he crosses the gray pavement of the courtyard.

  The yard is dotted with spongy piles of dirty snow, the only reminder of the long winter that for six months kept us wrapped in wool and fur. On the chilliest mornings, my nose shielded by a scarf my mother wrapped across my face, I climbed onto the bus that bumped along streets encrusted in ice, past frozen canals, petrified trees, and snow-capped monuments. That is how wintry Leningrad is carved on the template of memory: shimmering like a cameo, seen through a five-kopek-size circle cleared by my breath on a frosted bus window.

  Now, the spring snow is porous and frail, and Nikolai Gromov, the first boy I ever liked, leaves without acknowledging my existence.

  “The Pioneer meeting is starting in five minutes,” erupts the loudspeaker in the enthusiastic voice of Natasha, the school’s Pioneer activities organizer. Natasha is twenty, but she wears a Pioneer scarf and generally behaves like a zealous fifth-grader trying to score pyatorka, a five. A five is the highest grade bestowed on work that is indeed perfect, not marred by the slightest error. I earn straight fives in both English and Russian. Ludmila the Couch Legs adores my compositions in which, in guerrilla-like fashion, I snake around the prescribed interpretations of stories armed with quotations from Russian classics. I pride myself that in the two years I’ve been at this school I have never received a satisfactory three, let alone a two, or dvoika, a failure.

  I sense that Nikolai Gromov, too, is far from ever receiving a dvoika. He has a spark in his eyes, a glow radiating from within. Our two-year age difference raises him even higher above the rest, an older boy whose long neck and measured gait make me feel limp and think about my father.

  There is no way I can escape through the padlocked door guarded by the assistant principal, so there is nothing left to do but trudge into the auditorium already brimming with brown dresses and gray suits, our uniforms. The noise of grades three to six, three sections to each grade, bounces off the walls, clamor and laughter rising from rows of stacking chairs. Attendance is perfect; the padlock worked.

  “We are gathered here today to report on our successes during this quarter.” Natasha’s voice, amplified by a microphone, rings with enthusiasm worthy of a more prominent audience than a flock of young Pioneers from the English school of Oktyabrsky district. She seems to be as competent in addressing a crowd as she is in coordinating our after-school craft projects, and she looks comfortable onstage, eloquent and entirely in charge. “Our first speaker is the head of the Soviet of the Young Pioneer Commune of our school.”

/>   Tamara Kuznetsova, a heavy girl with hair braided in two rattails down her back, lumbers to the microphone with a stack of notes in her hands. Slowly but predictably, the surf of our voices calms, though never fully retreats. For me, Tamara’s significance lies solely in her being a classmate of Nikolai Gromov. She also turned fourteen recently, but will fulfill her head-of-the-Soviet duty until the end of the year.

  In a dreary monotone, Tamara speaks about the 23rd Party Congress, reciting its accomplishments, which are familiar to all of us because they are painted on red banners looming over the most impressive buildings of the city. When she is finished quoting from the General Secretary’s speech, she switches to a recitation of our own school’s triumphs worded in much less sophisticated prose, a report she probably wrote herself between homework assignments the night before. I feel sorry for Tamara, who is sweating onstage in front of us, instead of following Nikolai Gromov out of our padlocked school.

  As the thrill of falling in love floods me, I feel like telling the whole world about Nikolai. I need to share this brimming lightness, this buoyancy that spills out of me with every move, with every new thought about him. I even consider telling him.

  I quietly pull a small notebook out of my book bag, a secret notebook in which I write what cannot be said. In which I wonder, for example, when it was that my mother metamorphosed from a young, daring surgeon into a union member who wouldn’t now be looking for a way to escape from this dreary meeting. In which I wonder why I wonder about this at all. Am I afraid that this transformation may just as easily happen to me? That one day I may become like her, voluntarily going to meetings instead of following older boys into the sunshine of the courtyard?

  As Tamara’s voice fades out, I begin to write what I think about Nikolai, soon realizing that I am writing to Nikolai. Words stream out onto the page, weaving disparate strands of feeling into the trim braid of a letter.