A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (12 page)

The thought of the Vietnamese, who don’t have an alphabet anyone understands, makes learning English easier. If some Vietnamese can learn Russian in one summer, I can certainly learn English. For an hour and a half I listen to Irina Petrovna, to her melodious English voice that sounds so much more thrilling than the familiar Russian cadence. In the evening, I write out the exercises she gives me for the next day, after reading five pages from Kipling. It is the same routine, six days a week, until the end of August.

In addition to the envelope with my tutor’s money, I hold a three-kopeck coin, my streetcar fare back home. The coin is copper, darkened by many fingers, and I roll it around my palm until it inadvertently slips out of my grip and disappears between the wooden planks of the floor. Squatting between the two seats, I peek into the dark, but the coin has vanished, lost in the guts of the streetcar.

At the end of the lesson, I know I should ask Irina Petrovna for three kopecks—a minuscule amount, the price of a glass of water with syrup squirting out of vending machines at every railway station. As I linger in her apartment doorway, she asks if I need something, giving me a perfect opportunity to word my request, but my tongue refuses to move. I cannot bring myself to ask for money, even for three kopeks, so I shake my head and say good-bye.

Outside, for about five seconds I contemplate stealing a ride. Since there are no conductors to collect the fare, it’s an easy thing to do—simply ignore the box where you are supposed to drop the money and quietly sit down, pretending you’re so distracted by the unfolding landscape that you absentmindedly failed to buy a ticket. But then there are inspectors who could expose your guilt and question your honesty, putting your character in doubt in front of the whole car as they demand a five-ruble fine. It is ultimately fear that guides me past the streetcar stop and along the tracks, the only way I know to find my way home.

I walk for hours through the afternoon haze, then the evening twilight. Streetcars are flying past, screeching at the turns, sparks bursting on the electric wires above. Finally, after one more bridge and one more turn, a familiar street extends before me, with my apartment building looming at the corner. The courtyard seems to be waiting. It does not reproach me for my stubbornness, for my silly fears. As I walk to my door, a gust of wind puffs in from the street, as if the yard is breathing a sigh of relief: I am three hours late, but I am home.

M
Y MOTHER TEACHES A
late class at her medical school and isn’t back yet. I don’t have to make up an improbable story she won’t believe or admit that I couldn’t bring myself to ask my tutor for a three-kopeck coin. My sister isn’t home, either: after graduation from drama school she has been working at the Leningrad Comedy Theatre. It makes me feel important to have an actress sister, but it also makes me feel jealous and resentful.

The only person at home is my father. He is out of bed, sitting in a kitchen chair in his long blue underwear with one knee drawn up to his chin. His knee is so sharp that I can see the outline of his bones under blue cotton, the skinniest knee I’ve ever seen, even for his reedy frame.

He is smoking his Belomor, although it’s a half a pack a day now, instead of the usual two. In the cloud of smoke around his face, his nose seems sharper, too—another angle protruding out of his body, in addition to his elbows and wrists and long, bony fingers. “I can teach anatomy on you,” my mother said ruefully the other day, looking at him sitting up in bed. This is what she usually says when Marina or I refuse to eat another slice of bread with dinner, although we both know we aren’t so skinny that you can see the outline of our bones. But this time, with my father, she actually could teach an anatomy lesson: his body is nothing but skin shrink-wrapped around bones.

There is a plateful of salad in front of him on the table, cucumbers and radishes sliced by my mother’s expert hand, mixed in with wisps of dill and scallion chopped into bits so small they look like dark green paste. In the summer, when fresh vegetables appear in the markets and in all the gardens, my mother insists on a plate of salad every single day, the same way she insists on a bowl of soup. The salad is necessary for our nutrition, she says, and the soup for our digestion.

“Cow chow,” says my father each time, pushing the salad away, which never stops my mother from chopping up another plateful.

“That’s the reason you lost all your teeth,” she says, banging a knife on the cutting board, reminding him that had he understood the nutritional value of vegetables he wouldn’t have had scurvy during the war.

Next to his untouched salad is a saucer with caviar, which my mother has recently started buying at a deli three blocks away. It sits on the deli counter in two-hundred-gram packages wrapped in wax paper, above a pile of
kotlety,
palm-sized patties of ground meat, and a pot of borsch, next to a handwritten price tag of two and a half rubles. Two and a half rubles is a lot of money, the price of one hour with Irina Petrovna, but my mother doesn’t think twice. Nutritionally, caviar trumps the soup and even the fresh vegetables, so she divides the package into three equal parts and every morning sets down a portion in front of my father, next to the plate of salad he never eats.

“Here, Brother Rabbit, come here,” he calls.
Brother Rabbit
is the first book I read on my own, at five, perched on his lap. “Have a bite. Mother says it’s really good for you.”

He lifts me onto his thigh and spoons some caviar from the saucer. It’s salty and rich, melting on my tongue, and I eat it all because he keeps feeding me spoonfuls, smiling and pleased. Inside my mouth it now tastes like fish, and I think of our fishing trip on the Gulf of Finland, the only one we took last summer. I had my own rod, with a round bobbin painted half red and half white, and my father hooked a worm for me because it had been wriggling in an inch of water on the bottom of the boat and I didn’t want to impale it. We sat on two boards, and he cast my line without getting up, without tipping the boat. The line whistled in the air in a perfect arc and plunked down ten meters away. He hooked worms on his two rods, his fingers black from digging them up in the compost pile, and cast them on the other side of the boat. We sat and waited, silently, because fish, as he’d explained, could hear the slightest sound you make, even your coughing, even a dripping oar. We sat for a long time, the gray water swirling in small ripples, until the red half of my bobbin plunged beneath the surface and my father whispered, “Pull.” I pulled, astonished by how heavy the rod had become, leaning back so far that the boat tipped and the oars grated against their metal casings. He guided my arms until I could see the fish sparkle just a few centimeters below the surface. In a precise, meteoric movement he whipped the line, and the fish vaulted through the air and thumped to the bottom of the boat. It was small, too small for the force of the tug and the resistance it had worked up in the water. I watched it thrashing against the boards, with a comb of spikes on its spine. My father grabbed the fish by the head, avoiding the prickly fins, and I saw the hook in its open mouth as it gasped, gleaming far down its perforated jaw. He yanked the hook down and out, and the fish stopped gasping and lay still. “A perch,” my father said. “Your first catch.” I picked up the perch and held it between my palms, its scales hard and glistening silver, its eyes like glass. I held it the same way I’d held a dead duck my father had once brought from a hunting trip, stroking the shiny scales the same way I stroked the green feathers of the duck’s neck that lay in my fingers, soft and docile as a piece of rope.

My father never cleaned the fish he caught and never ate them. It was my mother who opened the bellies, scraped the guts into a garbage pail, and plopped the fish onto a frying pan. I never knew, though, what she’d done with that duck.

The strong taste of caviar in my mouth stays after I swallow the last bite, when my father circles his arms around me and lowers his cheek into my hair. He smells of tobacco, and I feel his stubble pressed against my head. I like his stubble and his smell and the fishy taste in my mouth, all happening at the same time, but he lets this feast of senses last for only thirty seconds, and then releases his hold and puts me down on the floor.

“Let’s hear you play,” he says. “Some Tchaikovsky or something.”

I don’t like playing the piano. I don’t have an ear for music, as my piano teacher reminds me every week as he tries to teach me bits of
solfeggio
. But now it is my father asking me to play, and I follow him into my sister’s room, where our Red October piano gleams against the wall.

He shuffles across the hallway and slumps onto the couch as if he’d walked up six flights of stairs, watching me fold the lace runner and open the piano lid. The book of sheet music,
Works for Secondary School,
is open to Tchaikovsky, just as my father asked, to the piece my teacher has been assigning to me for weeks, “A Doll’s Funeral.” I don’t like it very much because it’s too slow, all in the low range of the left hand, but it’s the only piece I can play well, so I begin, making it more upbeat, banging the keys to turn the funereal notes into a march.

“Good, good,” my father whispers with his eyes closed. “Nice tune.”

Through my chords I hear a key in the door, my mother getting home. Without taking off her raincoat, she walks into my piano banging, her face tense with worry, demanding that my father immediately get back into bed. In one sweeping glance she surveys the kitchen, her eyes pausing on the untouched salad and the saucer empty of caviar. “Keep practicing,” she tells me, wiggling her shoulder under my father’s arm to help him lift himself off the couch and walk to the other room.

I close the piano and pull the chair to the desk to do my English homework for tomorrow. My father is in bed now, with tea on his night table and grainy figure skaters floating across the TV screen. I carefully pull a record out of its cardboard sleeve and set it on the turntable. After a few moments of hissing, the needle falls into the groove and a voice, British and familiar, announces the lesson: the simple present tense. When we started classes, Irina Petrovna allowed me to borrow the British-made set, her pride, telling me to listen to two pages of each lesson a day and write down ten sentences of my own using the lesson’s grammar.

“I go to school by school bus,” the voice says, giving an example of a habitual action characteristic of the simple present. I don’t know what a school bus is, but I can easily substitute Bus 22 that my friend Masha takes to her English school. I hope it will also be my English school this September, after I take the entrance exam, and with audacity, I write in my notebook for Irina Petrovna, “I go to school by Bus 22.”

My mother walks in, critically regards the room, and unfolds the lace runner from the couch to place it back on the piano lid. She draws the curtains closed, straightens pots with aloe and scallions on the windowsill, and looks into my notebook as if she could read the English sentence I just wrote. Her eyebrows are mashed together in an exasperated look, as though she cannot understand why I am doing something so different as learning English; why, despite her hopes for me to enter the medical field just like her, I would spend a whole summer glued to a seat—in a streetcar, at Irina Petrovna’s, at the desk in my sister’s room. I’m glad she wasn’t home earlier to ask why I was late, to lament my obstinacy, to have another chance to say I am stubborn like my father.

I
AM IN
I
RINA
Petrovna’s apartment for our last class. Two days from now I’m scheduled to take the entrance exam for Masha’s English school.

“Here is a chart of all the tenses,” says my tutor, unfolding a poster-size paper with auxiliary verbs and past participle forms. Four groups of tenses—present, past, and future—twelve in all. “Don’t kill yourself over the perfect continuous; it’s seventh-grade material anyway.” She quizzes me on the form for each tense, satisfied with the answers. “Concentrate on the simple tenses,” she advises. “Especially the irregular verbs of simple past.”

She checks my last homework, an exercise from the British book and record set I’ve brought back to her.

“What is privacy?” I ask as she scans over the page.

She looks at me and I point to the sentence I copied from the text, “Helen and her new husband lost their privacy when her mother moved across the street.” After consulting my English-Russian dictionary I figured out it had to do with the word “private,” as in the “private property” that plagues all capitalist countries, according to our third-grade history book. Perhaps they lost some money, I thought, some essential part of their private property, but it was still unclear how it was caused by the mother’s move. I tried a couple of other possibilities, but no matter how I turned and twisted it, the loss Helen and her new husband suffered refused to reveal itself.

Irina Petrovna squints at the sentence and I notice that her cheeks are turning pink. She has always answered my questions with confidence, everything that had to do with tenses, infinitive constructions, uncountable nouns, and even articles, the most mysterious grammatical element of all. She has distinguished participles from gerunds in a fraction of a second and recited all three forms of every irregular verb we’ve ever encountered. But now, gazing at the sentence I copied from the last lesson in her British textbook, she doesn’t know the answer to my question.

She opens her English-Russian dictionary, the same edition I have at home, which I know doesn’t contain the word “privacy.” Then she climbs onto a chair and pulls a tome off her shelf,
The Oxford Dictionary
. It is as fat as an encyclopedia, all in English. She bends over it, carefully rustles the pages to
P
, and we both stare at the foreign word. “1. The condition of being secluded or isolated from the view of, or from contact with, others,” we read. “2. Concealment; secrecy.”