A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (13 page)

The phrase still makes no sense. Did Helen and her husband want to be secluded or isolated? And if they did, how could the mother, all the way on the other side of the street, affect their isolation? If they all lived in one apartment, like my aunt Muza with my three cousins and my grandparents, I would understand. But across the street? We think, bent over the page side by side, clueless. And if it’s the word’s second meaning we need to consider, were the two of them secret agents or spies whose cover the mother had exposed?

Irina Petrovna, back to her normal color, finally shrugs her shoulders and says that we don’t have the word “privacy” in Russian. “It simply doesn’t exist,” she proclaims. “We do have seclusion, though, as well as isolation.”

She makes me think of the time when a neighbor in the communal apartment on our landing had diphtheria and all three families were put under isolation by a local polyclinic. There was a handwritten sign, “Diphtheria,” posted on their front door so that no one, not even a telegram delivery woman, would think of ringing their bell and having that door opened.

Standing on her toes, Irina Petrovna squeezes the Oxford dictionary back into its spot on the shelf. “Seclusion and isolation, yes,” she confirms. “But no privacy.”

How strange, I think, that an English word has no translation. Does that mean that the English people know something we don’t? Is this mysterious “privacy” an invention of the capitalist West, something that we, the only people destined to inherit a bright future, lack?

W
HEN
I
WALK INTO
our apartment after my last lesson with Irina Petrovna, I immediately sense that something is not right. My sister is in the kitchen pouring hot water from a teakettle over a folded towel in the sink. My father is in bed, stretched under the blanket with eyes closed, his arms on top of the duvet cover, nut-color on white.

“Where is Mama?” I ask, struck by her absence in this moment of trouble.

My father opens his eyes and tries to smile.

“She’s at the neighbors’, calling the hospital,” says Marina, walking in with the towel and stretching it over Father’s head. “They finally agreed to admit him. Forty years in the party, and we had to beg and plead with every idiot in the District Committee.”

“Come over here,” says my father and taps the blanket with his fingers. He doesn’t try to sit up, and that’s unusual because he hates lying in bed. “Come here, Brother Rabbit.”

I sit where his hand patted the cover, and he peers into my face, his eyes dark in the electric light, deep as the water under our fishing boat.

“How is your English?” he asks, words barely audible, a small whistling coming out with every breath. “When is that exam?”

“Monday,” I say. In two days one test will decide if I take a city bus to a new school or stay in my district elementary with Vera Pavlovna, who likes to talk about Stalin and the heroic valor of the Great Patriotic War.

“You’re a smart Brother Rabbit,” says my father and covers my hands with his palm. His fingers are cool and leathery, and they smell of tobacco when I lean down and touch them with my cheek.

M
Y MOTHER AND SISTER
walk him to the elevator and then down to the waiting taxi. With his arms around their shoulders, he hangs between them, an open raincoat thrown over his long underwear, as if it no longer matters what he wears, as if his relevance to the world dressed in street clothes has ceased to exist. My mother lowers him into the car without any seeming effort, as if he were a feather. I see him through the glass recline across the backseat, stalky in his blue underwear, wispy and pale as the sky.

As soon as my mother gets into the front seat, the car begins to move, and Marina and I both start waving, but neither Mama nor Papa turn to look back.

O
N
M
ONDAY, MY MOTHER
goes with me to the new school, but she is only an escort. This is my test. This is between me and the English language.

The school’s hallways are empty, its wide stairway both inviting and intimidating. The testing classroom is small, very different from the huge rooms of my school that must accommodate forty students.
“Zdravstvuite,”
I say as politely as I can to a solemn-looking woman at the desk. “How do you do,” she replies.

She gives me a story in English from a book about animals, which I must read and retell. No dictionary is allowed, but I can take notes. At first the words blur like tiny black figures in a crazy dance. I close my eyes and think of my father, and that slows the words down, structuring them into a pattern. I sit there for as long as the woman allows, rereading the story about a tiger and a monkey, rehearsing its retelling, which requires desperate searches in the book for the words that are hard to remember.

Finally, she calls me to her desk in the corner, a very modest, very British desk. In her solemn English she begins to ask questions. I describe from memory the tiger who lived in the jungle: his appearance, his character, his habits. The teacher’s questions echo in the small space of the room, her pronunciation majestically foreign, swollen with rolling and lilting sounds so uncharacteristic of our docile Russian. Her elastic mouth moves in a mysterious way, lips parting and stretching sideways, to produce something that looks like a pretentious smile, although I know well enough that she is not smiling.

“
Hu-els
lived in the jungle?” she asks, and I realize with horror that I don’t understand the question. I don’t remember any
huels
in the story, although if she is asking this question, there must have been at least one. I keep silent, desperately trying to recall every character, and even furtive peeks at the book do not help. She repeats the question; I keep silent; she repeats the question again. I faintly hope that at the last moment, as in a fairy tale when the princess is about to perish, there will appear a handsome
huel
on a white stallion, a savior who will deliver me into the shining kingdom of English. I stare down at the desk in hot, shameful horror, hearing my own blood rushing through my head, realizing that this may be the end of everything that has not yet begun: I will never have a living room or a coffee table, my hair will always be long and braided and my stockings cotton.

“How was the test?” asks my mother, who used the time while I was inside to go to a farm market and buy the nutritional delicacies to take to Papa’s hospital. Her arms are weighed down by string bags with pears all the way from Azerbaijan, huge scarlet tomatoes from Georgia, and bouquets of cilantro and other greens my father will never touch.

“All right,” I say, and start walking in the direction of the exit.

“What did you have to do?” She hurries after me.

“A story.” I keep walking. “To read and retell.”

“Were there any words you didn’t know?”

“A couple.” I push open the front door and take a breath of air. “Can we go home now?”

At home we don’t talk about father’s illness. We talk about the nourishing value of the chicken bouillon my mother boils on the stove and pours into pot-bellied jars, in which it cools on the windowsill, forming a yellow crust of fat under the lids. She’ll take the jars to the hospital because the food there is all stolen by the nurses and orderlies. We talk about the absence of direct streetcar routes to the hospital, which makes her, and sometimes my sister, too, lug the string bags with the jars of bouillon and the harvest of her market trips from the last stop to his ward almost a kilometer away.

She never takes me: children are not allowed in the hospital. The closest I can get to my father is to trail her downstairs to the phone booth in front of our apartment building and wait, leaning on the squeaky door, during the daily call to a woman in Hospital Information.

O
N OUR WAY DOWN
to the phone booth, the elevator lurches between floors, threatening to get stuck. Outside, clouds seep through the gaps between buildings, promising more rain tomorrow.

I stand outside the phone booth, leaning on the door. I don’t want to hear the words my mother is saying; I don’t want to guess the answers. All I want is to stay outside—out of what’s happening, on the fringes of the actual events, of what I am not told.

This time my mother stays on the phone longer than usual, her lips slowly falling into a new, unprotected curve. She seems to be asking questions; she covers her eyes with her hand while listening to the answers.

“What, Mama, what? What did they say?” I ask. I want to know and at the same time I don’t.

“Nothing new, really.” She is trying to pull her mouth back into a controlled position. “They’re going to change Papa’s medicine. The old one isn’t working so well. That’s all.”

She grabs my arm and pulls me across the broken asphalt of the courtyard so fast, her pace so resolute, that I have to skip after her to keep up.

Back home I hide under the coat hooks, between the crinkly raincoats, alone, because my mother and sister are both in the kitchen pretending to be busy with dinner. I’d rather not hear what they’re talking about, and yet I stand there straining my ears. Nothing much escapes from behind the closed door, only the drone of their voices and splashes of separate words.

“Oxygen,” I hear, a word not normally used while cooking dinner. “Didn’t let me stay,” my mother says more loudly, moving from the stove to the sink near the door. “They knew I’m an anatomy professor, so they told me the truth,” I make out, my hope buoyed by this complete sentence, yet immediately suspended by the banging that begins in a cupboard near the door. I hold my breath, but nothing audible escapes from under the kitchen door, until my mother clinks plates onto the table and says something ending with “too young to understand anything.”

At night, pretending to sleep, I hear her sniffle in her bed, which is next to my father’s, unopened and empty.

“W
E’RE GOING TO CALL
the hospital early today,” my mother says in the morning.

The three of us chug down in the elevator, staring at the floor, mother clicking two-kopeck coins for the phone in her palm. It starts to pour again as we walk across the courtyard, around the puddles, and into the street, where the green phone booth gleams under the rain. We stop in front of it, and Marina tightens her fist around a piece of paper with the hospital phone number.

“Here is the number,” she mutters, glancing sideways, avoiding my eyes, stuffing a piece of paper into my hand. “You call today.”

With fingers as wooden as my legs, I dial the six digits scribbled on the paper, my heart pounding, my stomach queasy. I don’t recognize my voice when I say my father’s name; it whistles out of my throat, barely audible, like his voice before the taxi took him away to the hospital. On the other end, I can hear the Information clerk rustle through paper, slipping a funny remark to someone, chuckling in response.

“Died last night,” the voice resounds from the other end of the city, a normal female voice accustomed to delivering abnormal messages. It sounds a little like Irina Petrovna’s, only much harsher because the woman is speaking in Russian. I hear a click and then a long tone, flat, droning, and endless.

We are silent on the way back up. In the apartment, Mama trudges into the bathroom and thoroughly towels her face and hair. Slowly, she fills a watering can and makes her way down the hallway to water the plants on the windowsills. She moves carefully and methodically, her rhythm and silence dictated by a long-practiced habit of survival.

“The latest news from the fields,” barks a voice from the radio. “Collective farm number fifty-four of Oktyabrsky region is happy to report the largest ever harvest of …” Marina reaches up and turns the knob, but the voice continues humming from the neighbor’s apartment behind the wall.

Death, I know, makes people cry, but no matter how I fumble inside myself, I cannot locate grief. Uncharted on the map of my ten-year-old life, it belongs to the theater and movies, to the world of my third-grade teacher Vera Pavlovna and the textbook valor of the Great Patriotic War she declaims.

Strangely, life outside my body continues as before, reeling out scenes with the same predictability and order: my mother shuffling around the apartment; my sister trailing after her, as if waiting for orders; the brakes screeching when a car on the corner fails to make the light; the smell of fried onions oozing from a neighbor’s kitchen through the cracks around the door. I mechanically register everything, as if I were Irina Petrovna’s British record, but I don’t know how to feel.

My mother goes back to the bathroom and refills the watering can. She keeps watering the plants, walking from one windowsill to the next, not noticing that the water is rising in the pans around the flowerpots, spilling out onto the sills, dripping on the desk in Marina’s room. It’s dripping onto my English notebook, the only evidence left of my summer of vocabulary lists, irregular verbs, and the twelve tricky tenses.

I lift my notebook to save it from the trickling water, and it opens to the lesson on simple past. The simple past that now contains my father. Yesterday he was still in the present, yesterday and every day for the past ten years, when I watched him dip the oars into the gray water of the Gulf and stroll across the field of our dacha, three fishing rods bobbing on his shoulder. The past has won over the present, the warped irregular past, the most incomprehensible of all the twelve tenses, as inexplicable as the English word “privacy.”