A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (10 page)

My mother looks up, a frown on her face, as if she were uncertain about what she should do next.

“What did that
zubnik
say when she patched up your five cavities?” he asks, using my made-up word, ignoring what my mother said about not calling doctors names.

“Nothing,” I say. “She was silent and mean. She put arsenic in Anya Antonova’s root canal.”

“Did she say anything about this?” He picks up a Squirrel from the little metal vase on the table and dangles it between his fingers as if it were poison.

The Squirrel looks so enticing in its blue wrapper that I decide it isn’t worth suffering. Next March is a century away, and I have a whole
zubnik
-free year stretching ahead of me, a year that can be sweetened with kilograms of Polar Bears and Red Poppies and Squirrels blooming on the shelves of our grocery store.

My father can sense that I’ve decided not to care about ruining my teeth, that I’d rather live with my mother’s metallic smile than give up chocolates.

“Do you want to see what happens when you ignore your teeth?” he asks and stretches his arm to put the piece of candy he is holding back into the vase.

I don’t know if I do. I stand in the middle of our kitchen, between the cupboard with jars of our dacha jam and the stove with a pot of borsch under a warmer, not knowing if I want to face the truth. And then, as my father leans forward and drops the candy back, as the sleeve of his flannel pajamas brushes against my empty cup, I do know. I’m certain now that I don’t want to see his real, damaged teeth behind the fake perfect ones. I’d rather fool myself into thinking that his teeth are healthy and white; I’d rather pretend that my father is invincible and faultless.

“Your father had scurvy during the war,” my mother says, preempting whatever she thinks might come next, seeing from my face that I don’t want to see anything that would blemish him. “That’s why he lost his teeth, because of hunger and a lack of vitamins. It happened to a lot of people during the war.”

War and hunger are the two words we hear everywhere: in our classrooms, in our news, in the conversations of babushkas on the benches of our courtyard. They are nonspecific and worn out, something that happened not to individuals but to the entire country. Yet, it occurs to me, my father’s lost teeth happened specifically to him, to this bony man sitting in his chair under the shelf on which the radio is cheerfully dispensing Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Little Swans.” In a quick move, I dash toward him and dive into his lap again, wrapping my arms around his neck, burying my face in the flannel folds on his chest. He smells of the brown soap my mother uses to scrub the laundry in the bathtub against a wooden washboard with metal ribs, and of his Belomor cigarettes, and of warm skin flushed with tea.

These are comfortable smells that make me press even deeper into the flannel of his pajamas, but I know it’s dangerous to lull yourself into a sense of false safety. I’m no longer in second grade and I just had five teeth drilled. I think of war and hunger, not the hunger that happened to the country, but the one that took away my father’s teeth. The specific hunger as opposed to the abstract hunger my teacher Vera Pavlovna lectures about in our history class. I think of the hunger that made Pavlik Morozov a hero, but I also think of what happened later, the part I learned from Marina, the part Vera Pavlovna never talks about at school. Despite Pavlik’s heroic status, his own uncle—in cold disregard of all the people Pavlik had saved from starvation by denouncing his father—picked up an ax and delivered his own, personal justice to his nephew’s head. And that unsanctioned, private act left a far greater impression in my mind than all the stories about saved people and triumphant collectives crammed into our history textbook.

But aside from partitioning the individual loss that affected my father from the collective loss that affects nothing but our grades in history class, I have a more weighty question knocking in my head. Despite his perfect fishing cast and expert rowing and powerful arms, there was something even stronger that was able to harm him. Something that even my father didn’t have the power to prevent. So as I sit in his lap breathing in tobacco and soap, the question is a distraction from these cozy smells of home. If he could succumb to war and hunger, what else is lurking out there, what else is so deeply hidden and unmentionable that it makes my mother press her lips together and sigh?

6. Theater

M
Y MOTHER AND
I are going to Moscow to see my sister’s graduation performance. She has been away for four years, studying theater and acting at the drama school named after the famous dead actor Schukin. It’s June, my mother has given the last exams, and I’ve just said good-bye to Vera Pavlovna and my third-grade class. I am a year older, content in the knowledge that Dimka the hooligan was held back, hoping that I will no longer be the gold setting for Zoya Churkina’s diamond.

We travel on an overnight train and stay in Marina’s dormitory room, which is itself an adventure. I’ve never traveled anywhere but to the dacha, where everything is dull and familiar. The dorm is the dacha’s opposite, with its large corridors and white walls, with its foreign smells of impermanence and other people’s clothes.

“To the end of this corridor and then two flights up,” says Marina, sprinting in front of us, her ponytail swaying as vigorously as the two string bags in her hands. The string bags are filled with
pirozhki
my mother had baked the day before and chunks of salami and cheese, all wrapped in last week’s
Pravda
.

Marina’s hair is long now, and she has bangs that fall down to her artfully curved eyebrows. Last summer, when she was home for two weeks before she took off for her first film role, I saw her pluck her eyebrows with tweezers in front of a hallway mirror, ruthlessly yanking the little hairs out of her face, biting her lip with each vehement tug. It looked barbaric to pull out your own hair, but Marina said that it was what the stage required, and I was as impressed with her courage as with the art’s severe demands. Other than her hairstyle she is the same Marina—loud voice, big eyes my mother calls photogenic, and a pudgy nose that my sister says typecasts her into character roles.

I don’t look anything like my sister. That’s because she is my half-sister and we have different fathers, which also gives us different patronymics. She is Marina Alexandrovna, the daughter of Alexander, and I am Elena Ilyinichna, the daughter of Ilya.

I don’t know when I learned that my sister had a different father. I didn’t know it when I was five, but I already knew it in Vera Pavlovna’s history class. I knew it when she told us about Pavlik Morozov, who had a living real father, which made me think of Marina, who didn’t.

Marina’s father died in 1947. Last year, when we were getting ready to join the Young Pioneers, I tried to imagine her father’s heroic death, worthy of Vera Pavlovna’s history lesson on valor. I saw him stopping a tank with a grenade or throwing himself over an artillery trench until I heard my mother say that he’d died of TB, not at all a heroic way to die, according to our history books.

Marina doesn’t seem to care that my father is not related to her by blood and calls him
papa,
just as I do. He is the only father she has ever known, my mother says, since her real father, that unknown Alexander, sick with TB, died shortly after the war. There is a murky period of five years between Marina’s birth and her father’s death, the time my mother doesn’t talk about, a time long enough, in my estimation, for Marina to have known and remembered her father.

“
Papa
couldn’t come,” says my mother, panting, as she climbs the stairs, heaving our black square suitcase from step to step. “Lately he hasn’t been feeling well.” She says this with a sigh, probably from lugging the heavy bag up the steps.

When we get to Marina’s room, my mother drags the suitcase into the corner and opens it immediately because she needs to hand to my sister what she’s brought for her—an iron, a set of thick rubber curlers the color of rust, and a cylindrical package of cotton for which my mother says she stood in line for a whole hour.

The room has three metal beds and an armoire. Luckily, one of Marina’s roommates just got married and went to live with her new Moscow in-laws, so we move the third bed next to my sister’s for the three of us. At night, I dream of living in the dorm and of long corridors that lead nowhere, that all end in brick walls keeping me away from what I know is behind them, the stage.

M
Y SISTER’S
GRADUATING PERFORMANCE
is tomorrow night. This performance is like a final exam, my mother says; you’d better be ready to show everything you’ve learned, or you’ll get a
dvoika
in acting and they’ll ship you straight to Pinsk to organize a theater club for street cleaners in their local House of Culture. My mother is still unsure that she made the right decision in allowing Marina to go to drama school. Now and then she shakes her head, saying that Marina should’ve listened to what she was told and chosen a real profession. She could have become a pathologist like Galya, my mother laments. She could be building airplanes.

My sister’s performance is a vaudeville, which, as Marina explained to me, is a short romantic comedy with music. Her play is called
Little Orphan Susanna.
She plays Madame Pichard, a widowed matchmaker unsuccessfully trying to find a husband for the orphan of the title.

In the morning Marina wakes with a scratchy throat and hoarse voice, and all day my mother has been heating milk in the dorm kitchen, adding chunks of butter into the pot. The best remedy for voice restoration, she says, carrying cups of buttery swirls up to our room.

“I can’t sound like a crow,” Marina cackles, swaddled under a blanket in bed. “This better work.”

I press my fingers into tight fists and wish for my mother’s remedy to work. We all understand the importance of tonight’s performance for, as my mother summed it up, Marina has to demonstrate everything she has learned in four years. I’m not sure it’s fair to judge eight semesters of schoolwork by an hour-and-a-half vaudeville, but these are the rules of the drama school and, I begin to suspect, of all schools.

A few hours later, I see Marina draw black lines along her eyelids with a tiny brush, paint little red spots in the inner corners of her eyes. I see her spread a layer of beige all over her face and neck and then rub little puddles of rouge she’d prepared on her dressing table into her cheeks and her chin. I see her put the rubber curlers my mother brought from Leningrad into her hair; I see her lift another brush and outline her mouth in crimson. I watch closely and Marina doesn’t mind, peering intensely into the mirror, stroking her eyelids with a little brush in elegant, exaggerated movements of her hand, utterly enjoying the attention.

I would give anything to do what she’s doing and watch my face change from a familiar Young Pioneer with braids to someone completely different, someone you couldn’t find in Vera Pavlovna’s textbooks. This is Theater, the real make-believe, exciting and meaningful, not at all like the everyday make-believe we all have to live by. This is the game that only the select few, those blessed with talent, one out of a hundred, are chosen to play.

My mother helps Marina lift the heavy burgundy dress, as rough to the touch as my winter coat, its skirt held wide by three metal rings, and pin a headdress of black plumage to her curled hair. Fascinated, I watch this transformation of my sister, two hours earlier wrapped in a dorm blanket, into a stranger called Madame Pichard.

Then we are sitting in the second row, my mother biting her lip as Marina performs an opening scene. She speaks her lines confidently and loudly, holding a fan in one hand and lifting her long skirt just a little bit to expose the tip of her pointy shoe.

Her voice is holding up in the first and the second scenes, but my mother and I both know that it is her song, the main number of this performance, which is going to be the test. Music starts out of the orchestra pit, which is two meters below the stage, and Marina steps onto the rim, a foot-wide strip running around the orchestra toward the audience.

I press my fingernails into the palms of my hands and in my mind call Marina all the curse words I know because this is what you are supposed to do if you want someone to have good luck. Unfortunately, I don’t know any curse words, so I can’t think of anything better to call Marina than an idiot, a fool, and a hooligan, although the latter is not even a curse since my teacher Vera Pavlovna uses it all the time.

My sister starts singing, reining her voice in a little, but only my mother and I know that she is afraid to strain it. Her voice rings out, filling the theater. She walks along the whole length of the stage rim, holding up her dress in one hand and a fan in the other, making small dancing steps with her pointy feet, driving her voice up and down the scale to coax the orchestra music out of its two-meter depths. “Little orphan Susanna, little orphan Susanna,” she sings in the wise, experienced voice of Madame Pichard, “let me find a man for you.” Her dress falls in glamorous cascades of fabric, brushing the stage behind her, as if it were made of fine silk and not of the scratchy polyester I held two hours earlier. She takes a breath and soars to the final roulade, my mother clasping her hands around the chair arms, my fingernails driven into the skin of my palms so deep they hurt. The audience is silent for a few seconds, as if they’ve collectively forgotten to exhale, but then we all realize that she is done and break into a frenzy of applause.