A Mountain of Crumbs

by Elena Gorokhova

  For a year she came to that apartment once a month, as though to an illicit, sordid rendezvous that had to be kept secret from the honest world and, under the gaze of the young, plain-clothed NKVD man, filled scores of pages with her squared handwriting. So when my father proposed marriage and said they’d have to move to Leningrad, she not only saw it as an escape from her harsh, provincial past, but also as a return to decency and peace of mind.

  Two years after she moved, Stalin was dead. Once again, the future bled on the horizon, another hint at the bright dawn promised by the Revolution. Her move to Leningrad worked out the way she’d envisioned: Dr. Zlotnikov retired without having been arrested; she had a baby and a teaching job.

  Would I ever be able to move away from here—the only place I’ve ever known—as my mother moved away from Ivanovo? It is one thing to exchange a provincial town for the second biggest city in the country. But what place could possibly trump Leningrad?

  Kevin, finished with photography, wants to walk along the Neva, past the Hermitage, past the arch of the Winter Canal, where Pushkin’s desperate Lisa jumped from the stone staircase into the black water. We walk by the wrought-iron fence of the Summer Gardens, another Pushkin landmark, a favorite strolling place of Onegin and the poet himself. But Kevin doesn’t know Pushkin, so he tells me something about rugby and then something about driving, although it’s hard to understand why at fifteen he would even bother thinking about such an impossible thing.

  “I’m saving to buy a car,” he says.

  That’s funny, the notion of being able to save enough in one’s lifetime to buy a car. I chuckle, but Kevin’s eyebrows mash together in a frown. Now I need to explain that I’m not laughing at him for saving money to buy a car. I’m laughing because I think of a joke my sister told me. Even in Russian telling a joke is tricky, and I pull all my linguistic resources together to help Kevin understand.

  Three drivers—an Englishman, a Hungarian, and a Russian—all drive down the same road. The Englishman wrecks his car on a tree, gets out, and shouts, “Damn, this car was six months’ salary!” The Hungarian hits the same tree and yells, “This car was five years’ salary!” The Russian crashes into still the same tree and wails, “This car is thirty years’ salary!” The Brit turns to the Russian and asks, “Why do you buy such expensive cars?”

  Kevin narrows his eyes, and I can almost see him thinking. I must have translated the joke so badly that I should probably explain to him it isn’t about expensive cars. But after a few moments of silence he slaps himself on the forehead and grins, although I’m still not sure he understands or just pretends to.

  We take the metro back. It’s seven-thirty and I don’t want him to be late for supper. From the metro station to the hotel we walk in the sun, which, since we are in the period of white nights, will stay up for another four hours before it dips below the horizon, only to re-emerge an hour later. Deprived of the architectural prompts the city center offers, we no longer know what to say to each other.

  “Can I take your picture?” he asks finally, and I stand blushing in front of an archway where another babushka, a street cleaner, is hitting the pavement with a bunch of twigs attached to a stick.

  When we do the compulsory address exchange—pen-pal friendship, as Maria Mikhailovna calls it—Kevin fumbles in his jeans pocket and produces a bracelet, real silver, with intricate burnished flowers stamped into the metal. I’ve only ever seen real silver in my grandparents’ set of teaspoons my mother takes out of a silk-lined box twice a year for holidays. I know Kevin bought the bracelet in the Beriozka, while I was staring at the books.

  “It’s for you,” he says, and then adds, “Please, take it.”

  I’ve never owned any jewelry, especially something made from silver. It is an insanely generous gift, my first gift from a boy, if I don’t count the mandatory pocket erasers and combs I’ve received in my eight years of school for International Women’s Day. I feel my face turn red, and I can do little not to look dumbstruck.

  Sparkling on my palm, the bracelet is a reminder of the exclusive status that permits me to enter a Beriozka shop with all its forbidden treasures. But is it really a privilege to stand next to shelves with foods I can’t eat and books I can’t read? I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if it is better to learn about Kevin’s hometown from my text called London: The City of Contrasts or spend a day there, riding the underground and taking pictures. What I do know is that all this thinking is just that, thinking. It changes nothing. No matter how many jokes I tell, no matter how cynical I’ve become, this is the way things are here. Contrary to my mother’s hopes for a better future, I will never travel to London, or save for a car, or taste shrimp.

  The British students, with their Beriozka souvenirs and clean hair, are going to pack into buses tomorrow and leave. Despite a postcard I’ll receive from Kevin in response to my long letter, elegantly composed and meticulously copied onto a pretty piece of paper, I will never see him again. Tomorrow morning he’ll walk through Peter the Great’s “window on Europe” guarded by the armed border patrol of Pulkovo International Airport. Tomorrow afternoon he’ll cross over to the other side—London, the city of contrasts.

  I thank Kevin with all the expressions of appreciation I know in English, but there is an embarrassing question scratching in the back of my mind like an ungrateful cat. Would I rather have a silver bracelet or Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita? I wiggle my wrist, now shackled in cold silver. “Exquisite,” I say to Kevin, who thinks I am sincere, who doesn’t know this is just a little instance of vranyo.

  14. Work

  I AM SEVENTEEN AND JUST got accepted to the Leningrad University’s English department, evening division. The day program where I applied did not admit me because my parents were professionals and because my family lacked connections. This made me think of my mother, who had to wait for a milkmaid’s daughter to drop out to be accepted to the Ivanovo medical school because my grandfather by then was an engineer and no longer a peasant. It was interesting, I thought, that with our incomparable leaps toward a better future in other areas, nothing has changed in the college admission process since 1930.

  “Nyet huda bez dobra: there is no evil without good,” my mother recited, when I repeated what my English professor said at our first class. “The evening program is much better because all of you are qualified,” she told us. “You got in because you know English, not because your mother drives a tractor or because your father sits in a Smolny office.” It made me feel good to be so qualified, yet still resentful toward the university’s admission board.

  But now I need a job, immediately: the evening division requires its students to work during the day. By the end of September I must bring to the dean a letter, signed and stamped, certifying my full-time employment.

  The prospect of having a job is thrilling. It plucks me out of the wading pool of my classmates and drops me into the sea of adults, instantly making me a grown citizen imbued with real, paid-for responsibility. But it’s not the responsibility that sounds so attractive, it’s the status and the rights that working brings. It’s the feeling that I’ve finally reached real life, quivering on the horizon like a promise, that everything before this was mere expectation, a string of landmarks on the way to that horizon.

  “I’m going to work,” I’ll utter casually as I pass handsome Vitya from the fourth floor, who will blink his usually disinterested eyes and stare after me in stunned admiration.

  I don’t know how one finds a job, but I don’t need to: my mother is in charge. As a result of her commandeering, a neighbor from the third floor, Alec, offers me a position.

  “You’ll be a draftsman,” my mother says.

  “But I don’t know how to draft,” I object, instantly imagining how I will embarrass our generous neighbor on the very first day of the job.

  “You don’t need to know anything. They’ll tell you what to do. As I understand it, you’ll copy some blueprints.”

 
; “Blueprints of what?”

  My mother pauses, pretending she’s sorting out the silverware in a drawer. “It’s a secret factory,” she says. “They make ships.”

  “Ships?” I giggle. “What kind of ships? Atomic submarines? They have to make atomic submarines, otherwise why would it be such a secret?”

  “I don’t know,” my mother says. “All Alec told me is you need to get clearance.”

  Clearance will take two months, Alec says, but in the meantime I can still work copying drafts. Maybe these are drafts of outdated submarines, those that are no longer classified and can be safely exposed to my unvetted eyes. I sit in a huge room with long tables, next to a boring girl with thin lips and dusty-looking hair, arrogant because she’s just received her clearance. Sometimes we draw blue lines on translucent drafting paper, but mostly we carry rolls of drafts to the production department, hot rooms the size of my school gym with rows of forges managed by bawdy men. I walk fast and look straight ahead, but my heels click on the metal floor no matter how hard I try to step softly, and the men leer from behind their enormous machines and smile and yell things I don’t want to hear.

  So far I haven’t seen any boats, or any parts that could belong to a boat. To my relief, I haven’t seen Alec, either.

  Every morning at eight I pass through a checkpoint. This is the time when the whole factory files in through one turnstile, so we often stand outside in a small crowd, in the morning dusk, waiting our turn to show our IDs to a woman on duty. From her perch near the door, she silently peers at each one of us and angrily presses the button to open the turnstile. Once in a while she starts screaming when someone has forgotten or lost his card. I don’t know why she has to be so angry. She’s not the one who will have to stay behind the factory wall until five, when it will be dusk again, when we will have to walk through the same turnstile back into the unclassified world.

  Every morning at eight a question buzzes in my head, persistent as a fly: is this all there is to work? What has happened to the spirit of adulthood and independence, to that promise quivering on the horizon? I try to ask the girl with dusty-looking hair, but she doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say. She keeps drawing thin lines and carrying the rolls of blueprints to the production area, ignoring leering men and their catcalls. Or maybe the men can sense how boring she is and don’t even bother to look up and yell after her.

  At the end of October, a frightening thought begins to stir in my head, especially on those dark mornings when freezing half-rain/half-fog congeals the air into globs of icy aspic as we stand outside the checkpoint. Everything I’ve done so far has always been the eve of something else. Eighth grade was the eve of an academic path, when a few of my classmates left to go to vocational school; the all-night walk around the city after graduation was the curtain call of childhood and the eve of the next morning, when boys suddenly grew tall and brazen; the marathon of university entrance exams was the eve of self-sufficiency and freedom—all these things, although nerve-wrecking and difficult, have led to something else. This waiting at the checkpoint, replayed every morning with slight variations of a different angry woman on duty shouting at a different man who forgot his card, only leads to the pocked cement of the factory yard, to the cafeteria with more surly women ladling cabbage soup, to production lines with no hint of any boats.

  I quit on the first day of November, just a few days before they approve my clearance.

  FOR THE NEXT EIGHT months I am a lab assistant at my mother’s anatomy department. I’ve grown up in its formaldehyde-saturated walls, so this job doesn’t even feel like a job. I sit in a small room across from another assistant, Luba, creating microscope slides professors use in their research. Right now the predominant research project has to do with space travel and weightlessness. Every year or so we watch on television a time-delayed broadcast of another space crew parachuting down somewhere in Kazakhstan after another successful mission, and our anatomy department provides its contribution to animal research. Luba and I pull lab rabbits out of their cages in the basement, strap them to a centrifuge, and spin them at a cosmic speed that blurs the rabbits into circles of gray and white. If they are still alive after the centrifuge stops, we have to kill them with ether, because what the researchers need is the rabbits’ spine. We have to carefully break the vertebrae, remove the soft cord of spine in one piece, freeze it, and then create slides by slicing it into thin translucent chips that will fit onto a microscope glass. I hate holding a rag full of ether to the rabbits’ faces, to their clotted and damp fur, whereas Luba hates breaking the vertebrae, so we delineate the labor in a mutually agreeable way.

  When there are enough slides stacked up, we sit on top of our desks and chat with Sasha, who is short and square-jawed and always wears a white doctor’s coat. Sasha is an aspirant, a graduate student working on his dissertation, which presumably tackles the question of organic spine changes in space, so he spends more time in our lab than anyone else, always telling jokes, always laughing.

  “There is a Russian, a German, and a Jew,” says Sasha, and I wonder if I’ve already heard this one since all Sasha’s jokes include an international trio roughly representing our view of the world hierarchy. “And God says to them, I’ll grant you one wish each, any wish you like. Kill all the Germans, yells the Russian. Kill all the Russians, screams the German. And what do you want, God asks the Jew. Grant them both their wishes, says the Jew, and I’ll have a cup of coffee.”

  I giggle, but Sasha is watching Luba’s reaction. I know he likes Luba, who is twenty-four and has black eyes bigger than a microscope lens.

  Luba obligingly smiles at his jokes, but when Sasha leaves, she isn’t so charitable. “He’s married,” she smirks and disdainfully bends her wrist. “Plus he’s short and looks like an ape.”

  Luba likes Professor Rodionov, who is also married but is the tallest man in the department and from a distance resembles the French actor Alain Delon. She times her cigarette breaks to the end of his classes so she can casually ask him for a light when he leaves the dissection room. He behaves politely but never goes beyond lighting her cigarette. I don’t think she stands a chance because everyone knows that Professor Rodionov is a class system snob and would never pay attention to someone who, like Luba, can boast nothing past a secondary school diploma.

  Although according to our history books, social classes were eradicated in 1917, along with the tsar, Professor Rodionov takes great pride in belonging to what he calls “the erudite elite.”

  “A classless society,” smirks my sister, “means that the classes never acknowledge each other’s existence.”

  At noon, a curly-haired woman named Valya comes around with a crate of milk. Since we work in a hazardous formaldehyde environment, all of us in the anatomy department are entitled to a free daily bottle of milk. Valya always has medical questions for Sasha, who is eager to answer and who, like most aspirants, knows everything. Yesterday she wanted to know if a gallbladder actually contained gall, and the day before she needed a cure for warts. Today Valya is interested in the most reliable method of contraception. Luba shakes her head and leaves the room, outraged by this shamelessness. I am curious, so I stay.

  “Cement,” says Sasha. “Cement all orifices and nothing will get through, I guarantee.”

  Valya bursts into loud laughter and slaps Sasha on the back with her broad palm. I go back to pasting rabbit spinal cord onto slides, disappointed. Frankly, I was hoping for something more informative.

  When I get home, I find turmoil: Marina is looking for a birthday present for the musical director of her theater. The birthday party is next Monday, and she is desperate. “Men are impossible to find presents for,” she proclaims. “Vodka is too pedestrian and decent cognac impossible to get.”

  “Give him a book,” says my mother in her teacher’s voice.

  “He already has a book,” says Marina with a straight face although we all know it’s an old joke, so old that my mother’s posthumou
sly rehabilitated Uncle Volya was telling it back in 1937. “The only thing I can think of is something to add to his collection.”

  “What does he collect?” I ask.

  “Rabbits,” says Marina. “All kinds of rabbits—glass, porcelain, wood. All sizes.”

  It’s instantly obvious what the present must be. It cannot be a coincidence that the music director collects rabbits and in the anatomy department where I work tons of rabbits sit in rusty cages, waiting to become statistics for Sasha’s quantitative study. I’m certain my idea is brilliant and unbeatable. I’m bursting with my own genius; I can no longer keep it in. “A live rabbit!” I shout. “Give him a rabbit from our lab!”

  My mother looks at me with a quizzical expression, not sure if I am serious, not sure if removing a rabbit from the anatomy lab is a proper thing to do.

  “Yes, yes, a live rabbit!” I babble, choking on my own words. “You’ll have a unique birthday gift—and we’ll save a rabbit from being centrifuged, smothered with ether, and sliced.”

  I see my mother hesitate and I trot out my last argument. “We have too many rabbits right now anyway; we’ve just had an inventory,” I say. The inventory bit is a fib. “Sasha said yesterday,” I add, “we should start stewing them for lunch.”

  Now my sister’s eyes are burning with excitement, too. With the combined forces of both of us, my mother doesn’t stand a chance.