A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  Thin applause, initiated by Natasha, stirs up another wave of din from the audience as Tamara collects her notes and plods down the stage steps. Natasha, who has been lurking in the wings all the time, flies up to the microphone and taps on it with a pen. In a short navy skirt, with the red flame of a Pioneer scarf around her neck, she looks exactly like one of us, only more enthusiastic.

  “The next issue on our agenda is of a personal nature,” says Natasha, and waves of hushed giggles rapidly subside. Matters of a personal nature seem out of place at this gathering of three hundred students packed in here as a result of a padlocked front door.

  Someone keeps giggling in the front row, and Natasha patiently waits, looking down with mild reproach at two third-grade chatterers.

  “Although trivial at first glance, this matter seems quite serious after deeper examination.” All the giggles have died down now, and our whole Pioneer commune is unusually quiet. “I am going to ask Lubov Petrovna, the homeroom teacher of grade 5B, to come to the podium and join me.”

  Lubov Petrovna, a stout old woman in a blue suit she wears every day, ascends to the stage and installs herself next to Natasha, severe, thick-rimmed glasses adding importance to her size. She exudes a sense of power, and it streams, like smoke, down from the stage, silencing all of us. She does not need a microphone.

  “One of us,” says Natasha in a somber voice reserved for personal matters, “wrote a note incongruent with the Code of Young Pioneers.” We perk up our ears the same way we did in literature class only a few hours earlier when Ludmila the Couch Legs began to spin her love stories.

  “Fortunately, the note was intercepted by Lubov Petrovna so that the person who wrote it now has an opportunity to apologize in public.” It is so quiet that we can hear the voices of first-graders playing tag in the schoolyard. “The person who wrote the note, come onstage now.”

  A current of whispers and shuffles drifts through the auditorium, grows stronger with every second of waiting, merges into the cloud of authority enveloping the stage. The sun breaks through the windows and dilutes the glare of incandescent lighting into a shade of watered-down tea.

  “Come, come,” repeats Natasha, resolutely and persistently, a voice of a righteous older sister. A girl rises in the third row, her hair blonde and shining, her face almost as red as her scarf, and walks up the three steps to the stage, into the realm of power, slowly approaching Natasha and Lubov Petrovna, both straight and solemn. She seems very small, almost rickety, in front of Lubov Petrovna. She looks as if she could burst into flames at any moment, cinder instantaneously into a small mound of ashes.

  “I am sorry,” mouths the girl, looking at her feet.

  “Louder,” says Lubov Petrovna.

  “I am sorry,” repeats the girl at a higher pitch, her mouth conforming to the words but not pleading.

  “And I will never do it again,” says Natasha, orchestrating the scene.

  “And I will never do it again,” repeats the girl in a voice so high and tense it could pop any second like a taut violin string.

  Lubov Petrovna bends down and pats the girl on the shoulder. The girl turns on her heels and runs down the stage steps, past our greedy glances, past the rising clamor, out of the auditorium.

  “The meeting is over,” says Natasha, smiling, voice ringing with satisfaction.

  IN THE POST-MEETING TURBULENCE no one seems to want to leave, and I find my desk neighbor Larissa surrounded by a tight ring of classmates. By her elbows clenched to her sides and her squinted eyes I realize that she is telling the girl’s story. Larissa somehow manages to know all the school’s scandals, and that is why, despite my smoldering desire to know all about Nikolai, I have hesitated to ask her about him.

  “And then she passed the note to the boy, Valerii I think is his name, and the teacher saw it and grabbed it!” sputters Larissa, and small bubbles of saliva fizzle in the corners of her mouth.

  I think of my first English tutor, Irina Petrovna, and the mysterious word “privacy.” I even remember the sentence from her British textbook, “Helen and her new husband lost their privacy when her mother moved across the street,” the sentence even my tutor didn’t know how to decode. Only now it seems to make perfect sense: Helen and her husband parted with the same privacy the girl with blonde hair has just lost. Helen’s mother across the street was like Lubov Petrovna, who intercepted a note to a boy and made the girl who wrote it apologize in front of the whole school. I wish I could get on the tram and tell Irina Petrovna; I wish I could enlighten her with this newly acquired knowledge that even her fat Oxford dictionary didn’t contain.

  “What was in the note?” asks Dina from grade 5C, elbowing her way closer to Larissa.

  Larissa purses her lips and pauses in order to heighten the anticipation. For a second, all movement in our circle stops as Larissa glowers at us, the owner of a piece of exclusive information.

  “I love you. K.,” she finally announces to an eruption of giggles. “And her name is Kira,” she continues so fast she almost chokes on her own words, “so they quickly found who it was. Can you imagine? I love you! Right in the middle of the class! And this boy Valerii, to whom the note was addressed, immediately told them it was her.”

  “What an idiot,” says Viktor, who sits next to me in math, and everyone understands that he means Kira to be an idiot because he uses the feminine form, idiotka.

  “And she denied it when she was caught,” blurts out Larissa, “but this Valerii told them it couldn’t be anyone else!”

  Now I am glad I haven’t told Larissa anything about Nikolai. Like Natasha and my mother, she doesn’t seem to understand much about love.

  Would my father understand? What would he think about my own unsanctioned letter?

  “And what if it was you?” demands Dina, now standing straight in front of Larissa. “Would you like to be put onstage in front of Lubov Petrovna?”

  “I would never have written the note,” declares Larissa, unclenching her fists and putting her hands on her hips. She looks around to see whether anyone would dare question her integrity. “And if I did, I wouldn’t send it to him in the middle of the class.”

  My letter to Nikolai, also contrary to the Code of Young Pioneers, blooms in my notebook, and neither Natasha nor Lubov Petrovna can make me apologize for writing it. If I add some rhyme, it will be as beautiful as the one Pushkin’s Tatiana wrote to Onegin.

  He will read it, meticulously copied on lined paper, signed with my full name. Sublime and dignified, this letter will haunt Nikolai for the rest of his life. When he reads it in middle age, in his late twenties, he will realize that he looked past something remarkable, something he could have touched by just stretching out his arm, by just casting a glance. He would realize how big and simple it was, this love that sprang up next to him in our school hallways.

  But it will be too late. Like Pushkin’s Tatiana, I will then be married and faithful. It will be too late.

  10. Human Anatomy

  EVERY YEAR, DURING SCHOOL recess in November, my mother takes me to her medical institute, where she teaches in the department of human anatomy, and I spend ten days in the museum. She is trying to indoctrinate me early into the serious world of medicine because she doesn’t want me to become an actress like my sister. The museum is silent and empty and, like the rest of the human anatomy department, stinks of formaldehyde.

  I breathe in, and the thick chemical air fills my lungs. A diagram of the lungs, with blue and red vessels tangled up inside a faceless man’s chest, hangs on the left wall. Below, in a large jar of cloudy liquid, floats a pair of real lungs, like gray, deflated chunks of rubber, a Latin caption underneath. I walk around the room gazing at the exhibits. Half a head stands in a jar with the nasal passages revealed, the gray hemispheres of the brain cracked like parched earth. What thoughts, I wonder, lived in the grooves of its caverns? In another jar floats a heart, colorless and limp, with stumps of arteries suspended in the liquid—a misshapen pear.<
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  Flaps of skin, naked muscles, wrinkled genitals—nothing is frightening. They are all transformed, bloodless, dissociated from the life they are supposed to represent. Grainy and monochromatic, parts of human bodies float in jars like images behind the thick glass of TV screens.

  During these anatomy visits, my mother places me in the care of a lab assistant, Aunt Klava, a shriveled babushka with clumps of gray hair bursting from under a white hat. Everyone here wears a white doctor’s coat and a cloth hat, even lab assistants, even first-year students who silently creep into the museum and carefully pull their chairs away from desks with exhibits, hesitating to sit close to the jars with formaldehyde.

  Aunt Klava smells of tobacco, and when I hang out in the hallway, I see her puffing on a cigarette on a stair landing, near the toilet. She shuffles, and wheezes, and clangs keys. She fishes into her pocket and pulls out three pieces of sucking candy—for me, for stringy-haired Zina, who busily peers into a microscope every time someone opens the door into her small lab in the basement, and for Volodya, who works in the morgue and who clumps along the hallway in a rubber apron and big rubber boots. Zina and Volodya are eighteen, straight out of school, but the six years that separate us are light-years. They acknowledge my presence, but they look right past me. They are adults, they work for a living, and they know things I don’t know.

  MY MOTHER’S STUDENTS ARE starting their practicum: they will be learning dissection. Volodya and another morgue assistant, Dima, in rubber aprons and gloves, carry a cadaver up from the morgue in the basement and lay it on a high marble table in the dissection room. The body is brown from formaldehyde, as far beyond life as the museum organs. As my mother begins her class, I slink closer and see that it is a man. I gaze at the limbs stretched along the torso, at the angular face with skin tight around the cheekbones, at the stomach sunken under the rib cage. At the lump of shriveled flesh in the crotch.

  My mother looks up and tells me to go to the museum. Although I want to watch the dissection, I know I cannot argue with her in the middle of the class. Instead of the museum, I go down to the basement and walk along the narrow corridor, past the closed door to Zina’s lab, past the opened door to the morgue. The inside of the morgue is shrouded in twilight, two bulbs throwing dim light on huge tubs with wooden lids where bodies are kept. These are the bodies of people who have no relatives, whom nobody wants, my mother told me. The lids are connected to hand cranks by thick wire cords, frayed and discolored. The smell of formaldehyde is so intense here that it burns my nose and makes me cough.

  In the corner, I see Zina, the lab assistant, sitting on a tub lid and Volodya pouring tea out of a kettle into her cup. They don’t see me, or pretend not to, engrossed in their tea break among the cadavers. I would like to sit with them, quietly, preferably next to Volodya, eavesdropping on their freshly acquired adult wisdom, but they continue to be oblivious to my presence. I pretend I am Zina, sitting on the wooden tub lid next to Volodya, talking matter-of-factly about mysterious grown-up things, glancing in the direction of the door, where a clumsy twelve-year-old with big feet is pathetically vying for his attention.

  I go back to the dissection room and lurk in the doorway. My mother’s students are cautiously poking at the Man’s forearm with their scalpels, prodding his flesh in pursuit of the inner tubes of vessels, threads of nerves, clumps of muscle tissue. Even from where I stand I can see that the students are tentative, awed by their own audacity, by my mother’s confidence. Under her steady fingers, the Man’s body is slowly shrinking, cut up into museum exhibits spread around in petri dishes. I realize that the Man is disappearing at the rate of my mother’s lesson plans from an anatomy textbook, a chapter a day.

  I SIT IN THE museum, drawing a big diagram of blood vessels my mother asked me to copy from a textbook. My desk is under the jars marked “Female Reproductive System.” Red arteries and blue veins crisscross their way from the heart to the perimeter of the skin. Red—fresh blood, full of oxygen; blue—old and used, on its way back to the filter of the heart. I must be careful and precise: one centimeter off, and the exact clock of the internal mechanism will creak to a stop and collapse. I am in charge of the organism’s complex wiring, of its smooth operation.

  I think of a man I’d seen hanging around our dacha, a tall, dark man who approached me this summer at the bus stop while I was waiting for my mother to come back from work. I had seen him cutting grass in the field by the fringe of the forest, his movements broad and fierce as his scythe fell and whistled with a hypnotic rhythm. He was sitting in the grass, by the paved patch of the field where the bus ended its route, smoking and watching me with his hard, black eyes. I felt flattered that he was looking at me, a twelve-year-old in a homemade sundress, as if I were worthy of this attention, as if I were one of those older girls who painted their eyelids and teased their hair and went to dances on Saturday nights.

  A dot at the end of the road grew into a bus, coughing and rattling, but even before it stopped, I knew my mother wasn’t on it. The three people on the bus climbed down the steps and started walking away, one toward the electric train station, the other two in the direction where the Gypsies lived. The air was grainy with gathering dusk, although it wasn’t even six. The bus waited a few minutes, screeched around in a plume of exhaust, and drove away. The man got up. He was wearing black pants and a checkered shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I needed to occupy myself with something, so I squatted near where the asphalt ended and grass began, pretending to study a patch of podorozhnik, a medicinal plant commonly known to stop bleeding. It had thick, dark-green leaves that were heart-shaped and veined.

  From the corner of my eye I saw the man stretch, walk a few paces the width of the road, and stop, gazing in the direction of the forest as if estimating how long it would take him to get there. I kept sitting on my haunches, hesitant to move now that he was so directly in my field of vision, although the pose was uncomfortable and I could feel tiny needles of numbing pain beginning to tingle in my leg. Then I saw him look directly at me, and I quickly turned away and stared hard at the thick, dusty leaves.

  “What is it you’re looking at?” he asked from about six feet away, his hands in his pockets. He used an informal ty for “you,” a form used with children or people you are on close terms with, and I wasn’t sure which one he meant.

  I got up, my left leg asleep, but I clenched my teeth and didn’t show it hurt. “Podorozhnik,” I said, nodding toward the plant. Not looking at the man directly, I could still see him, big and powerful, gazing at me, making me feel important and almost grown-up.

  “Do you want to take a walk in the field with me?” he asked, tilting his head toward the forest.

  I knew it was an adult offer, not usually proffered to a twelve-year-old, and I felt grateful for his attention. I felt I’d been chosen, and it made my heart beat fast and hard. Too bad there was no one around, no one to see me walking with this handsome man. He stood there waiting, now smiling a little, his eyes crinkled, and that made him even more attractive. But then something tightened inside me. There appeared a strange expression in his eyes, making his gaze oily and uncomfortable, as if he could see something in me I didn’t know about, something shameful and illicit my father would’ve hated.

  I didn’t want to offend him, but something made me shake my head and step back. He stopped smiling. I turned and started walking toward our house, although I knew that twenty minutes later, when my mother arrived, there would be no one there to meet her. I could sense the man’s eyes on my back, and his stare made me feel sordid, as if I’d done something I could never tell anyone about, something that must be wrapped up tightly and hidden out of sight, on the lowest shelf of my heart.

  THEY ALL KNOW SOMETHING I don’t—my sister, handsome Volodya who works in the morgue, Zina the lab assistant who giggles when she is around him, and all those people on the streets and buses, elbowing each other on their way to work. They are all privy to a secret, deep and disgracef
ul, a secret they don’t talk about. It is only revealed in slanted glances and smirks, in a raised shoulder, in a bitten lip.

  There is nowhere I can find out what this secret is about. Some of the girls from my grade behave as if they know what it is, as if they belong to this club of wisdom and experience. They stretch their mouths in all-knowing smiles or narrow their eyes in little smirks, but I have my suspicions. My friend Masha, for example, the girl whom I see less and less frequently although she lives in my courtyard, announced recently that when blood begins to trickle down your thighs, you must pull on long underwear with rubber bands above your knees to catch it before it falls to the ground. Masha said this with the utmost confidence, throwing back her head with perfectly cut hair to underscore her scholarship; yet I knew she was even more ignorant than I. The rubber-banded underwear seemed just as efficient a measure as the instruction of our civil defense teacher to hide under our desks if America hit us with an atomic bomb.

  I try to find the answer in books. Not in Russian books, because they all avoid talking about the secret. Indecent and shameful, it is consigned entirely to the books of the rotting capitalist West. In my English literature class we are reading A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel, which exposes the ulcers of capitalism, but in a socialist, sterile way. I leaf through the collected works of Guy de Maupassant because a girl in my school, one of those who pretend they are in the know, said there is racy stuff in his books. I skim through the pages in search of the raunchy, but find nothing more than two people sleeping in one bed.

  Then help seems to come from the most unlikely place. My school is taking us to see an American film called Men in Her Life. I am so excited I can hardly wait for the day, a week away. Men in her life—what can be more straightforward and titillating? I imagine a string of American men, all debonair and provocative, fighting for one woman, who is, without doubt, privy to all the facets of life. But when the lights in the theater turn off and grainy black-and-white images appear on the screen, the men of the title do nothing but walk around in white shirts with smoking jackets and bow ties and speak in long, undecipherable harangues of American English. What’s even more disappointing is that there are only two of them. They look alike, bony and unsmiling, and from the little I can understand, they seem to appear in the woman’s life successively rather than concurrently. The film drags on for two hours, and I cannot sneak out early because our teacher is sitting in my row. When the lights finally come on, I am exhausted from understanding so little English and disheartened because the knowledge was denied, again.