A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (16 page)

“We are gathered here today to report on our successes during this quarter.” Natasha’s voice, amplified by a microphone, rings with enthusiasm worthy of a more prominent audience than a flock of young Pioneers from the English school of Oktyabrsky district. She seems to be as competent in addressing a crowd as she is in coordinating our after-school craft projects, and she looks comfortable onstage, eloquent and entirely in charge. “Our first speaker is the head of the Soviet of the Young Pioneer Commune of our school.”

Tamara Kuznetsova, a heavy girl with hair braided in two rattails down her back, lumbers to the microphone with a stack of notes in her hands. Slowly but predictably, the surf of our voices calms, though never fully retreats. For me, Tamara’s significance lies solely in her being a classmate of Nikolai Gromov. She also turned fourteen recently, but will fulfill her head-of-the-Soviet duty until the end of the year.

In a dreary monotone, Tamara speaks about the 23rd Party Congress, reciting its accomplishments, which are familiar to all of us because they are painted on red banners looming over the most impressive buildings of the city. When she is finished quoting from the General Secretary’s speech, she switches to a recitation of our own school’s triumphs worded in much less sophisticated prose, a report she probably wrote herself between homework assignments the night before. I feel sorry for Tamara, who is sweating onstage in front of us, instead of following Nikolai Gromov out of our padlocked school.

As the thrill of falling in love floods me, I feel like telling the whole world about Nikolai. I need to share this brimming lightness, this buoyancy that spills out of me with every move, with every new thought about him. I even consider telling him.

I quietly pull a small notebook out of my book bag, a secret notebook in which I write what cannot be said. In which I wonder, for example, when it was that my mother metamorphosed from a young, daring surgeon into a union member who wouldn’t now be looking for a way to escape from this dreary meeting. In which I wonder why I wonder about this at all. Am I afraid that this transformation may just as easily happen to me? That one day I may become like her, voluntarily going to meetings instead of following older boys into the sunshine of the courtyard?

As Tamara’s voice fades out, I begin to write what I think about Nikolai, soon realizing that I am writing to Nikolai. Words stream out onto the page, weaving disparate strands of feeling into the trim braid of a letter.

Thin applause, initiated by Natasha, stirs up another wave of din from the audience as Tamara collects her notes and plods down the stage steps. Natasha, who has been lurking in the wings all the time, flies up to the microphone and taps on it with a pen. In a short navy skirt, with the red flame of a Pioneer scarf around her neck, she looks exactly like one of us, only more enthusiastic.

“The next issue on our agenda is of a personal nature,” says Natasha, and waves of hushed giggles rapidly subside. Matters of a personal nature seem out of place at this gathering of three hundred students packed in here as a result of a padlocked front door.

Someone keeps giggling in the front row, and Natasha patiently waits, looking down with mild reproach at two third-grade chatterers.

“Although trivial at first glance, this matter seems quite serious after deeper examination.” All the giggles have died down now, and our whole Pioneer commune is unusually quiet. “I am going to ask Lubov Petrovna, the homeroom teacher of grade
5
B, to come to the podium and join me.”

Lubov Petrovna, a stout old woman in a blue suit she wears every day, ascends to the stage and installs herself next to Natasha, severe, thick-rimmed glasses adding importance to her size. She exudes a sense of power, and it streams, like smoke, down from the stage, silencing all of us. She does not need a microphone.

“One of us,” says Natasha in a somber voice reserved for personal matters, “wrote a note incongruent with the Code of Young Pioneers.” We perk up our ears the same way we did in literature class only a few hours earlier when Ludmila the Couch Legs began to spin her love stories.

“Fortunately, the note was intercepted by Lubov Petrovna so that the person who wrote it now has an opportunity to apologize in public.” It is so quiet that we can hear the voices of first-graders playing tag in the schoolyard. “The person who wrote the note, come onstage now.”

A current of whispers and shuffles drifts through the auditorium, grows stronger with every second of waiting, merges into the cloud of authority enveloping the stage. The sun breaks through the windows and dilutes the glare of incandescent lighting into a shade of watered-down tea.

“Come, come,” repeats Natasha, resolutely and persistently, a voice of a righteous older sister. A girl rises in the third row, her hair blonde and shining, her face almost as red as her scarf, and walks up the three steps to the stage, into the realm of power, slowly approaching Natasha and Lubov Petrovna, both straight and solemn. She seems very small, almost rickety, in front of Lubov Petrovna. She looks as if she could burst into flames at any moment, cinder instantaneously into a small mound of ashes.

“I am sorry,” mouths the girl, looking at her feet.

“Louder,” says Lubov Petrovna.

“I am sorry,” repeats the girl at a higher pitch, her mouth conforming to the words but not pleading.

“And I will never do it again,” says Natasha, orchestrating the scene.

“And I will never do it again,” repeats the girl in a voice so high and tense it could pop any second like a taut violin string.

Lubov Petrovna bends down and pats the girl on the shoulder. The girl turns on her heels and runs down the stage steps, past our greedy glances, past the rising clamor, out of the auditorium.

“The meeting is over,” says Natasha, smiling, voice ringing with satisfaction.

I
N THE POST-MEETING TURBULENCE
no one seems to want to leave, and I find my desk neighbor Larissa surrounded by a tight ring of classmates. By her elbows clenched to her sides and her squinted eyes I realize that she is telling the girl’s story. Larissa somehow manages to know all the school’s scandals, and that is why, despite my smoldering desire to know all about Nikolai, I have hesitated to ask her about him.

“And then she passed the note to the boy, Valerii I think is his name, and the teacher saw it and grabbed it!” sputters Larissa, and small bubbles of saliva fizzle in the corners of her mouth.

I think of my first English tutor, Irina Petrovna, and the mysterious word “privacy.” I even remember the sentence from her British textbook, “Helen and her new husband lost their privacy when her mother moved across the street,” the sentence even my tutor didn’t know how to decode. Only now it seems to make perfect sense: Helen and her husband parted with the same privacy the girl with blonde hair has just lost. Helen’s mother across the street was like Lubov Petrovna, who intercepted a note to a boy and made the girl who wrote it apologize in front of the whole school. I wish I could get on the tram and tell Irina Petrovna; I wish I could enlighten her with this newly acquired knowledge that even her fat Oxford dictionary didn’t contain.

“What was in the note?” asks Dina from grade
5
C, elbowing her way closer to Larissa.

Larissa purses her lips and pauses in order to heighten the anticipation. For a second, all movement in our circle stops as Larissa glowers at us, the owner of a piece of exclusive information.

“I love you. K.,” she finally announces to an eruption of giggles. “And her name is Kira,” she continues so fast she almost chokes on her own words, “so they quickly found who it was. Can you imagine? I love you! Right in the middle of the class! And this boy Valerii, to whom the note was addressed, immediately told them it was her.”

“What an idiot,” says Viktor, who sits next to me in math, and everyone understands that he means Kira to be an idiot because he uses the feminine form,
idiotka
.

“And she denied it when she was caught,” blurts out Larissa, “but this Valerii told them it couldn’t be anyone else!”

Now I am glad I haven’t told Larissa anything about Nikolai. Like Natasha and my mother, she doesn’t seem to understand much about love.

Would my father understand? What would he think about my own unsanctioned letter?

“And what if it was you?” demands Dina, now standing straight in front of Larissa. “Would you like to be put onstage in front of Lubov Petrovna?”

“I would never have written the note,” declares Larissa, unclenching her fists and putting her hands on her hips. She looks around to see whether anyone would dare question her integrity. “And if I did, I wouldn’t send it to him in the middle of the class.”

My letter to Nikolai, also contrary to the Code of Young Pioneers, blooms in my notebook, and neither Natasha nor Lubov Petrovna can make me apologize for writing it. If I add some rhyme, it will be as beautiful as the one Pushkin’s Tatiana wrote to Onegin.

He will read it, meticulously copied on lined paper, signed with my full name. Sublime and dignified, this letter will haunt Nikolai for the rest of his life. When he reads it in middle age, in his late twenties, he will realize that he looked past something remarkable, something he could have touched by just stretching out his arm, by just casting a glance. He would realize how big and simple it was, this love that sprang up next to him in our school hallways.

But it will be too late. Like Pushkin’s Tatiana, I will then be married and faithful. It will be too late.

10. Human Anatomy

E
VERY YEAR, DURING SCHOOL
recess in November, my mother takes me to her medical institute, where she teaches in the department of human anatomy, and I spend ten days in the museum. She is trying to indoctrinate me early into the serious world of medicine because she doesn’t want me to become an actress like my sister. The museum is silent and empty and, like the rest of the human anatomy department, stinks of formaldehyde.

I breathe in, and the thick chemical air fills my lungs. A diagram of the lungs, with blue and red vessels tangled up inside a faceless man’s chest, hangs on the left wall. Below, in a large jar of cloudy liquid, floats a pair of real lungs, like gray, deflated chunks of rubber, a Latin caption underneath. I walk around the room gazing at the exhibits. Half a head stands in a jar with the nasal passages revealed, the gray hemispheres of the brain cracked like parched earth. What thoughts, I wonder, lived in the grooves of its caverns? In another jar floats a heart, colorless and limp, with stumps of arteries suspended in the liquid—a misshapen pear.

Flaps of skin, naked muscles, wrinkled genitals—nothing is frightening. They are all transformed, bloodless, dissociated from the life they are supposed to represent. Grainy and monochromatic, parts of human bodies float in jars like images behind the thick glass of TV screens.

During these anatomy visits, my mother places me in the care of a lab assistant, Aunt Klava, a shriveled babushka with clumps of gray hair bursting from under a white hat. Everyone here wears a white doctor’s coat and a cloth hat, even lab assistants, even first-year students who silently creep into the museum and carefully pull their chairs away from desks with exhibits, hesitating to sit close to the jars with formaldehyde.

Aunt Klava smells of tobacco, and when I hang out in the hallway, I see her puffing on a cigarette on a stair landing, near the toilet. She shuffles, and wheezes, and clangs keys. She fishes into her pocket and pulls out three pieces of sucking candy—for me, for stringy-haired Zina, who busily peers into a microscope every time someone opens the door into her small lab in the basement, and for Volodya, who works in the morgue and who clumps along the hallway in a rubber apron and big rubber boots. Zina and Volodya are eighteen, straight out of school, but the six years that separate us are light-years. They acknowledge my presence, but they look right past me. They are adults, they work for a living, and they know things I don’t know.

M
Y MOTHER’S STUDENTS ARE
starting their practicum: they will be learning dissection. Volodya and another morgue assistant, Dima, in rubber aprons and gloves, carry a cadaver up from the morgue in the basement and lay it on a high marble table in the dissection room. The body is brown from formaldehyde, as far beyond life as the museum organs. As my mother begins her class, I slink closer and see that it is a man. I gaze at the limbs stretched along the torso, at the angular face with skin tight around the cheekbones, at the stomach sunken under the rib cage. At the lump of shriveled flesh in the crotch.

My mother looks up and tells me to go to the museum. Although I want to watch the dissection, I know I cannot argue with her in the middle of the class. Instead of the museum, I go down to the basement and walk along the narrow corridor, past the closed door to Zina’s lab, past the opened door to the morgue. The inside of the morgue is shrouded in twilight, two bulbs throwing dim light on huge tubs with wooden lids where bodies are kept. These are the bodies of people who have no relatives, whom nobody wants, my mother told me. The lids are connected to hand cranks by thick wire cords, frayed and discolored. The smell of formaldehyde is so intense here that it burns my nose and makes me cough.