When we get to the dining room, it is nearly empty. Unoccupied tables with white tablecloths stand on gleaming parquet, a potted ficus tree behind a grand piano, an air of withered luxury more suited to a town in a Chekhov story than the first proletarian city on earth. A disinterested waiter in a white shirt and a black jacket with an oily stain on the sleeve unhurriedly crosses the room to bring the menus. I pretend to study rows of unfamiliar appetizers, but pretending is all I can do. Boris orders a bottle of champagne and, as the waiter drags his feet to set the table with glasses and napkins, sits back and stares at me, as if he’d been sitting in such restaurants his whole life, as if he hadn’t just spent his week’s salary on the pack of Marlboros and the bribe to get in.
I gaze back at him, and that’s what we do for a while, stare at each other. I don’t know why Boris is here. Beyond the August in the Crimea, I was always the one to initiate phone calls and trips to see him; I was the one who forced him to admit finally that I was too different from him, with all my Leningrad arrogance and cynicism and glorification of Western lifestyles gleaned from foreign books.
The waiter shuffles in with the champagne and Georgian appetizers and interrupts our staring. Boris nudges the plates toward me and instructs me to try the red beans with spices and chicken in walnut sauce, although I don’t know how, living in Kiev, he can be so familiar with Georgian cooking. We carry on a safe conversation about our Black Sea cove and the two border patrol boys who descended from their observation point on a hill, lured by our potatoes and our wine. When the champagne is finished, he orders a bottle of cognac. The waiter, his face scrunched in reproach that we are making him carry all those heavy trays, warily sets down plates with skewers of lamb and chicken tabaka, flavorful and spicy and so much unlike our own food. After a toast of cognac, Boris stops reminiscing about the Crimea and turns to my impending marriage.
“Why are you doing it?” he demands.
I am almost ready for this, so I pick up my cognac glass and drink what’s left in it, a honey-colored liquid that definitely—my mother was right—smells of bedbugs.
“You’re marrying an American and going to live in America,” he says, an accusation I cannot deny. “Don’t you realize they’ll never let you back?”
“They’ll let me back,” I say quickly, as if saying it would make it happen. “I still have my Russian passport. I’m not Jewish; I’m not emigrating to Israel.” If I were, it occurs to me, Boris wouldn’t be sitting at this table, plying me with Georgian food in a place I never dreamed I would see. I still remember his harangue about the Ukrainian Jews during the war, his bewilderment at how they marched to their own graves in Babi Yar. The present-day Jews who want to leave the country are ordered to surrender their passports and their nationality, so they can never return. “I’m still a Soviet citizen. They have to let me back.” I say this in a knowing, deliberate voice, but inside I’m not so cavalier. Will I really be able to come back to visit? Maybe Boris is right, after all. Why would they allow me to return, a traitor who took advantage of the university’s language labs and seminars in Chomskyan grammar, who learned everything there was to learn from books about a London she could never see, then turned around and married a foreigner and left?
But Boris doesn’t stop here. “And if you did return, do you know what would happen?” he says. It feels eerie, as though he could see through my skull and read my thoughts. “You’d be marked. No one would want to be around you. Even your closest friends.”
I gulp more cognac, but it only makes me dizzier. I’ll be vrag naroda, enemy of the people, just like Uncle Volya, my mother’s uncle who was arrested in 1937 and then shot—the time we don’t talk about, the time that makes sense only in the West, where they publish Solzhenitsyn.
“I still don’t understand why,” he says. “You graduated from a great university. You have a good teaching job. Your future is set. The department trusts you. Everybody trusts you. Why are you throwing it all away?” I don’t know if I want to continue this conversation about good jobs and trust. “Do you really want to live in a country where all they think about is money?” he goes on. I’m not sure where Boris learned this tidbit about America and money. Maybe he read Maxim Gorky’s The City of the Yellow Devil, about his visit to New York in the 1920s, when our writers were still allowed to travel abroad. “Here,” he says and stretches out his arm, presenting to me our dirty plates with bones and empty skewers, “we don’t count every kopek. Here if we party, we party.” He reaches for his glass and drinks all of its contents, as if teaching me an example of the proper partying etiquette. “Here our life is more than work and the stock market.”
“Actually,” I say, “it’s less. We don’t have a stock market.”
He leans back in his chair, failing to hear my remark or maybe simply ignoring it. “Our life here is about friendship and love,” he adds.
“Friendship, yes,” I say, “but not so much about love. You certainly didn’t seem to be in love with me.”
What I really want to tell him, what I’ve never been able to tell him, is how it felt when he didn’t move a finger to come to Leningrad to rescue me, even for a weekend. When I concocted plans and counted days and he didn’t. It felt humiliating. It felt like I’d turned loathsome and worthless, a worm inching across our dacha compost pile.
A woman in an apron lumbers out of the kitchen and begins to pile the dirty plates onto her forearm. Boris looks down, busy examining the stains on the tablecloth, and I now have a chance to hold in my gaze his face, already touched by the first Ukrainian sun and his hair falling over his forehead in soft, yellow strands. This is the face that compelled me to borrow fifty rubles from Nina and hop on a plane two months after we’d met in the Crimea, having lied to my mother that a linguistics professor had sent me to a conference in Kiev.
The waiter, a forced creepy smile on his face, sidles up with a bottle of Georgian wine we didn’t order, but Boris is too cocky to send it back, especially since he has just demonstrated the advantages of Russian partying. The bottle is opened and poured into chipped glasses, a syrupy red called Khvanchkara that the oily waiter proudly announces was the favorite wine of Stalin. For a minute, he stands over our table, as if waiting to be invited to salute our former leader, as if he doesn’t see that Boris frowns and stares at something stuck to the bottom of a glass, collecting thoughts for an important statement. When the waiter finally departs, Boris plants his elbows on the table and leans toward me. “Whatever you may think of me,” he says, “you’re making a mistake you’ll never undo. The biggest mistake of your life.”
“And why do you care?” I say. Stalin’s wine tastes like compote made from sweetened ink. “You never came to Leningrad before. I was the one who went to Kiev and then to Moscow when you were staying at your friends’ place, that communal mousetrap with no hot water.” A narrow, mothball-smelling corridor pops up in my mind, and a bony babushka with accusing eyes. “So what are you doing here, haranguing me about my mistakes? Maybe that was a mistake, coming to see you. Maybe the summer in Novy Svet was all there was supposed to be.”
I’m not sure why this tirade has tumbled out of my mouth because all this, as my mother says, is last year’s snow. In two weeks I’ll be married to Robert Ackerman, who resides in Austin, Texas, which makes Boris Kravchenko from Kiev, despite his blond hair and impossibly blue eyes, quite irrelevant. But is he? In all his sermonizing about collective trust, there are grains of something I’ve been thinking, little crumbs of truth that wake me up at night and make me lie in bed, listening to the breathing of my mother in the bed next to mine.
“Nu, nu,” says Boris, reaching across the table and covering my hand with his, benevolently granting me the right to be angry. “All I wanted to say is congratulations.” He grasps my ring finger, leans across the table, and touches it with his lips. “Congratulations and best wishes for a happy life and healthy children,” he says, the drunken words, like wet laundry, tangled in his mouth. He lets m
y finger go, reaches for the cognac bottle, still half full, then puts it back. “But they will never see Leningrad, your children,” he says. “No Hermitage or white nights. No bridges, no Kirov Theatre.”
Strangely, I’m sober enough not to get involved in a conversation about children. “Borya,” I say and lean across the table to get closer, “why are you here?”
He looks down and stares into his empty glass. For a few moments, it seems that he may answer my question, that he may stop lecturing about collectives, about the Hermitage and the Kirov. It seems he may finally admit that the August in Novy Svet, with its unfailing sun and turquoise light, has burned a mark into his soul, just as it has into mine.
Then his old, all-knowing face is back. “How about some chocolate?” he offers. “You must have chocolate before your wedding.”
He waves at the waiter, who unhurriedly reappears with a bar of chocolate peeking out of its foil wrapping, displayed on a serving dish as if it were an exotic cake. I get up as the waiter scurries over with a bill, which, I’m certain, contains things we didn’t order. But Boris, of course, is above doing the itemizing and the addition, something they would stoop to only in the money-obsessed West, which doesn’t know how to party or how to love. I rewrap the chocolate bar and take it with me because I don’t want the greedy waiter to have that, too.
We go out onto Nevsky. I am not sure what time it is, but it seems late, and we walk pointlessly along the canal, where the black water licks at the walls of the embankment. Icy wind whips in from the Neva and blows the fog out of my head. We walk past the Kirov, past the Theatre Square lampposts, their glow nestled in the lace of wrought iron. The last Intourist buses are pulling out of the square. Their passengers are on the way back to their hotels after a day in our museums and former churches, where guides instruct them to stay together, as if these uninhibited people in leather shoes could somehow be mistaken for one of us.
It is ironic, I think, that I’m walking with Boris around Leningrad now, two weeks before my marriage to someone else. This is what I’ve wanted to do since that August in the Crimea—dazzle him with Leningrad’s baroque balconies and marble statues and benches in the shade of linden trees; unfold before him the magic rug of avenues beaming out from the Neva toward the center of Nevsky and sparkling with the gold thread of spire needles. Parade in front of his eyes our fountains and our Bronze Horseman, our pearly domes of light-blue cathedrals and our wrought-iron fences sheltering the silent gardens where Pushkin composed poetry.
And although it isn’t beautiful now, on a freezing March night, when most windows are extinguished and the sidewalk is a porridge of dirty snow, I wonder if Boris is right and I am making a mistake. What city on earth can possibly trump Leningrad? I’m leaving a place people from all over the world come to see from the high-perched seats of their Intourist buses. I’m leaving the only place I know.
We stop on the corner to let a streetcar clang by, and Boris puts his arms around me. He holds me close, my face in his wool scarf, and we stand like this for a minute. It is dangerous to be so close to him, especially when we’ve just mixed champagne and cognac with Stalin’s wine, especially when this nostalgic walk has stirred up some sentimental questions in my head. Just as he starts to breathe into my ear, I wiggle out of his arms. “I have to go home,” I say, shaking my head as if to shake him off for good. “I’m glad you came to say good-bye.”
He looks at me, his eyes still a little glassy, trying to understand what has just happened. “Who is this amerikanets, anyway?” he asks.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Just a nice guy. I have to go.”
His eyes are now focused and dark. He runs his fingers through my hair and steps back. “Good luck, silly girl,” he says, “in your America.”
Then he walks to the middle of the intersection to get me a cab. When a car appears, he flags it down with a V sign—the sign for double fare—and the taxi obediently stops where he’s standing. Boris’s figure is etched against the light green car—shoulders leaning forward, hair tossed by a wet, briny breeze.
I say good-bye and kiss him on the cheek. His cheek is stubbly and prickles mine, but for a few moments I stay pressed to his face. Then I give him a last kiss on the lips, salty and raw—the taste of the Black Sea, the taste of this windy night.
ROBERT ARRIVES ON MARCH 24. They detain him at the airport, but only to turn the pockets of his parka inside out and to spend a half-hour leafing through his address book. My phone number, I’m certain, is now registered at the Interior Ministry, but then, considering my English-speaking past, it has probably been in their files all along.
To meet Robert we arrive at the airport in a Volga that belongs to Marina’s friend Grigorii Isaakovich, Gris for short, who is almost bald and much older than Marina. After we wait for an hour, we see Robert’s head bobbing above the barrier that separates the Soviet Union from the West. He gives the glass door a push and crosses over to our side of the world. “Svolochi,” he mutters in Russian, zipping up his jacket—bastards. He doesn’t need to say anything else; we all know who the svolochi are.
I’m glad Robert’s mind is still on our zealous border guards, so I don’t have to think how to greet my husband-to-be, who has just flown from the other side of the world for our wedding. He shakes his head as if he were ridding himself of a bad dream as I smile an apologetic smile, although I wasn’t the one who demanded, or frisked, or intimidated; I wasn’t the one who made him reach for the Russian words we don’t use in the presence of my mother.
“Here, this will get you into a better mood,” says Gris, back in the car, as he pours champagne into four mismatched teacups he brought from home. “Here is a toast: to the two of you and to your life together. A better life.” We raise the teacups and drink the syrupy champagne, so cold the bubbles feel like needles of ice and make me numb.
SINCE ROBERT AND I are getting married in two days, we are allowed to stay in the apartment that belongs to my older half-sister Galya, my father’s daughter. It is in a new district an hour away from the center, a cluster of tall, dirty-white buildings with low ceilings, called Khrushchevki, built during Khrushchev’s reign, around 1960. The apartment is a co-op, and my father was able to buy it because he had connections. Galya is the only person I know who owns the place where she lives.
For the two weeks of Robert’s stay, Galya has agreed to move in with a friend, but not without the silent comment of compressed lips and a raised eyebrow. Her sentiments are shared by my mother and my aunt Muza, who arrived from Stankovo a week earlier. They all sit in our kitchen, pointing out how inappropriate it is for two people to live in one apartment prior to the moment the state pronounces them officially married. “You should’ve stayed here until the day after tomorrow,” says Aunt Muza in the soft, patient voice of a pedagogue, trying to teach me a belated lesson. In response, my mother throws up her arms, demonstrating that it is futile to fight against the decadent morals of the rotting West.
I think of Uncle Vova, who couldn’t come to the wedding, but who wouldn’t frown at my staying in an apartment with Robert the same way he didn’t care about Crimean Boris or my sleeping on the beach.
But there is a more important message Aunt Muza wants to drive through my head, her final attempt to shake me into sanity. “Maybe you could still find someone else to marry,” she continues wistfully, looking into my face with searching eyes. “A good Russian fellow.” She stresses the word “Russian,” which makes me think of my cousin Fedya, her middle son, who has just emerged from a three-day drinking binge. “We were born here,” coos Aunt Muza, “so what do we know about their Western life?” She exchanges glances with my mother, who shrugs to underscore the fact that we certainly know nothing. All my family, with the exception of my sister, wish the West had already collapsed, as our newspapers promise, so they wouldn’t have to deal with this scandalous wedding.
On the other hand, Marina, who now openly supports my foreign marriage, thinks the West
is perfectly healthy and it is our country that needs surgical intervention. She spits emphatically when my mother unfolds Pravda on the kitchen table and makes my provincial aunt wince by telling the story of the last general election, when Marina and I crossed out Brezhnev, the only name on the ballot, and wrote in Sakharov with a blue ballpoint pen. She rolls her eyes and laughs a devilish laugh every time Muza asks Robert about the West or utters the words “inflation” and “apartheid.”
“Apartheid?” Robert squints in confusion. It doesn’t matter to my aunt that apartheid is happening on the other side of the world from America. The West is the West, no matter what continent. All capitalist vices here get entangled and rolled together, like mismatched threads of wool, into one hairy ball of international evil.
IN OUR TEMPORARY APARTMENT, Robert and I pretend we are getting married. We both know it’s a game, but it’s not quite a game because we have invited six real guests to the ceremony scheduled at the Acts of Marriage Palace in three hours. We both know it’s not quite a marriage, but a marriage nevertheless, for which he has brought a suit borrowed from a friend. He doesn’t own suits, he says proudly, putting on dark brown pants that are an inch too short.
I stand over Galya’s table ironing my wedding dress, made from sparkly polyester the color of lilac that wrinkles at the slightest touch. I bought the fabric at Gostinyi Dvor on Nevsky, and Marina stitched it into something she saw in a coverless fashion magazine left lying around her theater. We didn’t know if the magazine was published this month or even this year, but the girl in the picture looked experienced and worldly, just as I wished to look.
A Mountain of Crumbs Page 29