A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (11 page)

I clap so hard my palms begin to burn. This is the moment when I feel proud to be related to Marina, when I love her stage voice because it is powerful and sublime and isn’t directed at me. My mother claps and smiles, too, and there is pride beaming from her eyes, the same pride she must have felt when the famous actress told her about Marina’s gift.

I imagine myself on that stage, curtseying and bowing and graciously smiling, but as much as I want to be up there, in full makeup and a crinoline dress, I know in my gut that I could never do it. I could never perform in front of one pair of eyes, let alone five hundred. Maybe it’s genetics, our different fathers. Marina’s father gave her the acting gift and the operatic mezzo-soprano; mine gave me wooden limbs and two big front teeth.

Or maybe it isn’t genetics at all. Maybe it’s me, my own lack of that special talent that makes theater and its world of make-believe so thrilling and real. Without that natural gift I’ll always be doomed to being a part of the other, common, make-believe, the dull and phony pretense of Vera Pavlovna with her heroic valor and Aunt Polya with her rancid butter and mandatory chewing, the pretense of our history textbook that canonized Pavlik Morozov for the brave deed of turning in his father and of our school that bent the Code of Young Pioneers to allow Dimka, the
dvoechnik
and hooligan, to join in.

With this pitiful truth staring me in the face, all I can do now is clap my hands and shout “Bravo,” just as my mother and the other mothers are doing all over the auditorium. All I can do is admire and applaud this real make-believe, Theater, and within it my sister, who stands on the rim of the proscenium—batting her photogenic eyes and curling her crimson mouth in a smile, her arms outstretched toward the audience—fully aware that she isn’t going to be sent to Pinsk to work in the local House of Culture because her final exam performance deserves nothing less than
pyatorka,
a perfect five.

The next day, as we pack up to leave, I find out that a perfect five is not all her performance deserves. My sister says she has received an invitation from the chief artistic director of the Leningrad Comedy Theatre to join the company starting in the fall. “Imagine this,” says Marina as she folds her housedress and her nightshirt. “The director turned out to be married to that famous actress Elena Vladimirovna, for whom I auditioned in tenth grade.” My sister stuffs her folded clothes, the curlers, and the iron into a suitcase because she is leaving with us on the night train to begin her acting career in Leningrad.

My mother looks satisfied but not surprised, which makes it clear that my sister has already told her, that my mother knows about this favorable turn in Marina’s future.

It makes it clear that the only person who doesn’t know anything is me.

7. Simple Past

M
ASHA
M
IRONOVA IS THE
only girl I know who wears nylon tights. The rest of us put on vest-like
lifchiks,
under-bodices that sprout elastic suspenders with rubber clips, and pull on ribbed cotton stockings that twist around our legs like snakes. Masha’s cut hair, held back by a hair band, is a challenge to another institution: braids. Braids and bows keep our hair long and innocent of barbers. When Masha walks, her shining hair bounces above her neck, and every time I see her cross the courtyard on legs covered with perfectly aligned nylon, my own ankles thickened by cotton instantly turn into lead weights.

Masha is unique in other ways, too. Of all my friends, her mother is the only one who wears high heels. Every morning she clicks across the yard on her way to work: a tailored skirt, teased hair, red lipstick. She teaches college English: the word “English” sounds majestic and alien. In my family no one speaks a foreign language, especially one as foreign as English. My mother knows the names of all the body parts in Latin, but Latin isn’t exotic, it’s ancient and dead. My father speaks nothing but Russian. My sister studied French at her Moscow drama school, but French is so ingrained in Russian history that even my provincial Aunt Muza sometimes says,
“Merci beaucoup.”

Besides her bold appearance and her high-heeled mother, Masha has another quality that makes me admire her: she can speak this rarely heard language of mystery. Every morning, when the rest of us walk to our district elementary school, Masha takes Bus 22 to an English school, one of the few in the city, clearly a place for the chosen. In addition to Russian, math, and biology, she studies literature, history, and geography—all taught in English. Every morning my heart skips a beat when I glance out my window at the bus stop, when I see her nylon-clad legs climb into the crowded bus.

M
ASHA’S LAST NAME IS
her mother’s, Mironova, and not her father’s, Finkelstein. Uneasy to ask Masha herself about this discrepancy, I ask my mother.

“Mironova is a Russian name,” my mother says, not going into any explanation, as if what she said were self-evident. I know that names ending with -
ova
or -
ov
are Russian and that names ending with -
stein
are Jewish. Realizing that I am waiting for more, she adds, “Parents can choose which name to give their child, father’s or mother’s. It’s usually the father’s, but Masha’s parents wanted her to have an easier life.”

I am relieved. My own name is Russian, so maybe I’ll have an easier life, too.

W
E ARE SITTING IN
Masha’s apartment leafing through glossy magazines her mother has brought from work. There is Bulgarian
Burda,
with toothy women perched on skinny heels; there is Polish
Moda,
thick as
Crime and Punishment.
I look at the beaming models, who undoubtedly all wear tights and have never heard of
lifchiks
and snaking stockings. Masha and I are trying to figure out why in Bulgaria and Poland, countries much smaller than ours, people can be so interested in fashion that they publish whole magazines dedicated exclusively to appearance.

“My mother’s friend from work went to Sofia as part of cultural exchange,” says Masha. “She lived in another teacher’s apartment. She says there were flowers blooming in the lobby of the apartment building.”

It is difficult to imagine flowers blooming in such an unfitting space. The entrances to our apartment building are cement, with broken light bulbs and a smell of pee.

“What’s a lobby, anyway?” says Masha.

I don’t know about lobbies; I only know about stairwells, so I shrug.

“I also know someone who took a trip to Prague,” says Masha nonchalantly, which in my eyes raises her to an even higher level of worldliness. In the overseas ranking order, Czechoslovakia is above Bulgaria, although both are way below England.

“Wouldn’t you like to go to England?” I ask wistfully. “With all the English you’re learning?” We both know it is a purely rhetorical question because England is the West and going there is completely out of the question.

“I’d like to see the Beefeaters,” says Masha, who just finished a lesson on the Tower of London. “And a Laura Ashley store.”

We saw a picture of a Laura Ashley façade in
England,
the only Western magazine we find in her mother’s heap. It is published in both Russian and English by the Moscow house Progress as a joint British-Soviet venture and is available only to reliable readers like Masha’s mother.

The Laura Ashley dresses are so bold in color that they hurt our eyes. They resemble gardens in full bloom, colors merging, rolling into one another, making fantastic arrangements, like bouquets of resplendent flowers. They would fit well, we think, in a lobby of an apartment building in Sofia.

I love sitting in Masha’s apartment. It is similar to hearing English—mesmerizing. Soft yellow armchairs caress my elbows the same way palatalized
l
’s and rolled
r
’s caress my ears. A floor lamp with an appropriately foreign name,
torchier,
soars over the armchairs like a rising tone at the end of English sentences and then suddenly curves down in one bold jazzy stroke, pouring light on
Moda
and
Burda
and
England
scattered on the coffee table. And the coffee table—a round, dainty thing, the epitome of decadence and luxury, serving no purpose whatsoever—is as alien as the English language itself.

What amazes me most about Masha’s apartment is that it contains a room not serving a basic function, a room not used for cooking or sleeping, a room where we can simply sit and talk and gawk at exotic magazines. The word “living room”—
gostinaya
—sounds as strange as “coffee table,” evoking frilled ladies in chestnut curls and whiskered gentlemen puffing on cigars. Its four syllables, slick and cool, linger on my tongue, as foreign as ice cubes.

In my apartment there are only two rooms, neither defined by name. One room has two beds covered with a silk bedspread, pink doves embroidered on a purple background, my mother’s pride and joy. My father was forced to make a call to a department store, where she’d seen it delivered and then hidden by a saleswoman under the counter. A bright red couch, my bed, flames against the wall. A television sits on a chest where linens are kept, and next to it stands a dressing table with tall triple mirrors that no one ever uses for dressing.

In the other room, my sister’s, gleam two pieces of furniture required for every respectable home: a cupboard filled with cut crystal and a piano. Everyone I know takes piano lessons, whether they have an ear for music or don’t, and every apartment boasts a black upright called Red October. Ours is covered with a lace runner and porcelain ballerinas bending in the poses of dying swans.

I hate dusting the dressing table and the piano. I hate practicing the piano, too, and that double aversion keeps me away from my sister’s room, which suits us both. When I come home from Masha’s apartment, my parents’ purple beds, and my red couch, and the un-dusted triple mirror where nothing interesting is ever reflected, seem sorry-looking and old, mismatched pieces of furniture forced into cheerless coexistence.

I
AM IN A
streetcar, on a seat made of wooden slats varnished yellow, too hard and straight for a fifty-minute ride. It’s a morning in July, and we are clattering along Leningrad streets that are nearly empty. All the citizens who could get out of the city are in their dachas, tending to strawberry shoots and tomato seedlings, shivering on the windy beaches of the Gulf of Finland between watering and weeding.

It’s the first summer in my ten-year-old life that we are staying in the city. My father, who has been home for the last two weeks, doesn’t feel well, my mother says, because he’s been working too much. He sits in bed in his long underwear, light blue like the pale sky behind the window, staring into the television screen.

“You want Channel One or Channel Two?” asks my mother, ready to turn the knob. Channel One is from Moscow: news, figure skating, a travel show. A combine rolls across a field, over acres of wheat, with a truck crawling behind it, filled with tons of grain. A couple glides over a skating rink, a woman pirouetting on one foot, her back almost touching the ice in a movement called “the death loop.” A herd of zebras is galloping across African savannah. When my father shakes his head—a slight, exhausted movement—my mother switches to Channel Two, the Leningrad station, where we see the same combine roll across the same field of wheat.

Looking out the streetcar window, I think about my father back home, sick of the black-and-white television images, reading
Pravda
from beginning to end, all four pages. He scoffs at figure skating and says that if they broadcast soccer as often as they show ice dancing, the country would come to a halt.

“A bunch of silly men chasing a ball,” my mother says. “Give each one his own ball if they’re so desperate to have one.”

My father doesn’t dignify her remark with an answer. He focuses on the screen, where a sports commentator talks about the republic championship. His favorite team, Zenith, has just lost to a pathetic Dynamo, and he mutters in a barely audible voice,
“Sudiu na mylo!”
which is what they shout at soccer matches, a demand to make soap out of the referee. I don’t know if any referees have ever been turned into soap, but it occurs to me that if I could substitute my teacher Vera Pavlovna or Aunt Polya for a referee, it would be a pretty neat call.

I am in the city in the middle of July because of my English lessons. Every weekday I take a streetcar to a tutor’s apartment, where I memorize words, decipher grammatical rules, and contort my mouth around strange sounds until it hurts. During my two-month summer vacation I have to learn what my friend Masha has been learning in her English school for three years. In August, I’ll take an exam to enter the fourth grade of Masha’s school.

The backs of my thighs are glued to the wooden slats of the streetcar seat. My hands are sweaty, too, and I notice that I have left damp marks on the envelope I am clutching. Every ten lessons I hand my tutor, Irina Petrovna, a rainbow of bank notes—green threes, blue fives, red tens, and an occasional purple twenty-five, the largest note I’ve ever seen.

Irina Petrovna is my sister Marina’s age, and I think it’s funny that she could also be my sister. She has short hair and thick eyebrows and isn’t as erratic as Marina, who can benevolently let me use her desk to listen to my English records one day and yell at me for leaving my dictionary on it the next. Irina Petrovna is predictable but strict. She teaches me the tenses, the most difficult part of English grammar, which do not seem that bad compared to the conjugations, declensions, and six case-endings a foreigner would have to sweat over to master Russian. “You’re lucky you were born here,” she says. “Look at those poor Vietnamese and Cubans who come to our universities and have to learn Russian in one summer.”