A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (17 page)

In the corner, I see Zina, the lab assistant, sitting on a tub lid and Volodya pouring tea out of a kettle into her cup. They don’t see me, or pretend not to, engrossed in their tea break among the cadavers. I would like to sit with them, quietly, preferably next to Volodya, eavesdropping on their freshly acquired adult wisdom, but they continue to be oblivious to my presence. I pretend I am Zina, sitting on the wooden tub lid next to Volodya, talking matter-of-factly about mysterious grown-up things, glancing in the direction of the door, where a clumsy twelve-year-old with big feet is pathetically vying for his attention.

I go back to the dissection room and lurk in the doorway. My mother’s students are cautiously poking at the Man’s forearm with their scalpels, prodding his flesh in pursuit of the inner tubes of vessels, threads of nerves, clumps of muscle tissue. Even from where I stand I can see that the students are tentative, awed by their own audacity, by my mother’s confidence. Under her steady fingers, the Man’s body is slowly shrinking, cut up into museum exhibits spread around in petri dishes. I realize that the Man is disappearing at the rate of my mother’s lesson plans from an anatomy textbook, a chapter a day.

I
SIT IN THE
museum, drawing a big diagram of blood vessels my mother asked me to copy from a textbook. My desk is under the jars marked “Female Reproductive System.” Red arteries and blue veins crisscross their way from the heart to the perimeter of the skin. Red—fresh blood, full of oxygen; blue—old and used, on its way back to the filter of the heart. I must be careful and precise: one centimeter off, and the exact clock of the internal mechanism will creak to a stop and collapse. I am in charge of the organism’s complex wiring, of its smooth operation.

I think of a man I’d seen hanging around our dacha, a tall, dark man who approached me this summer at the bus stop while I was waiting for my mother to come back from work. I had seen him cutting grass in the field by the fringe of the forest, his movements broad and fierce as his scythe fell and whistled with a hypnotic rhythm. He was sitting in the grass, by the paved patch of the field where the bus ended its route, smoking and watching me with his hard, black eyes. I felt flattered that he was looking at me, a twelve-year-old in a homemade sundress, as if I were worthy of this attention, as if I were one of those older girls who painted their eyelids and teased their hair and went to dances on Saturday nights.

A dot at the end of the road grew into a bus, coughing and rattling, but even before it stopped, I knew my mother wasn’t on it. The three people on the bus climbed down the steps and started walking away, one toward the electric train station, the other two in the direction where the Gypsies lived. The air was grainy with gathering dusk, although it wasn’t even six. The bus waited a few minutes, screeched around in a plume of exhaust, and drove away. The man got up. He was wearing black pants and a checkered shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I needed to occupy myself with something, so I squatted near where the asphalt ended and grass began, pretending to study a patch of
podorozhnik,
a medicinal plant commonly known to stop bleeding. It had thick, dark-green leaves that were heart-shaped and veined.

From the corner of my eye I saw the man stretch, walk a few paces the width of the road, and stop, gazing in the direction of the forest as if estimating how long it would take him to get there. I kept sitting on my haunches, hesitant to move now that he was so directly in my field of vision, although the pose was uncomfortable and I could feel tiny needles of numbing pain beginning to tingle in my leg. Then I saw him look directly at me, and I quickly turned away and stared hard at the thick, dusty leaves.

“What is it you’re looking at?” he asked from about six feet away, his hands in his pockets. He used an informal
ty
for “you,” a form used with children or people you are on close terms with, and I wasn’t sure which one he meant.

I got up, my left leg asleep, but I clenched my teeth and didn’t show it hurt. “
Podorozhnik,
” I said, nodding toward the plant. Not looking at the man directly, I could still see him, big and powerful, gazing at me, making me feel important and almost grown-up.

“Do you want to take a walk in the field with me?” he asked, tilting his head toward the forest.

I knew it was an adult offer, not usually proffered to a twelve-year-old, and I felt grateful for his attention. I felt I’d been chosen, and it made my heart beat fast and hard. Too bad there was no one around, no one to see me walking with this handsome man. He stood there waiting, now smiling a little, his eyes crinkled, and that made him even more attractive. But then something tightened inside me. There appeared a strange expression in his eyes, making his gaze oily and uncomfortable, as if he could see something in me I didn’t know about, something shameful and illicit my father would’ve hated.

I didn’t want to offend him, but something made me shake my head and step back. He stopped smiling. I turned and started walking toward our house, although I knew that twenty minutes later, when my mother arrived, there would be no one there to meet her. I could sense the man’s eyes on my back, and his stare made me feel sordid, as if I’d done something I could never tell anyone about, something that must be wrapped up tightly and hidden out of sight, on the lowest shelf of my heart.

T
HEY ALL KNOW SOMETHING
I don’t—my sister, handsome Volodya who works in the morgue, Zina the lab assistant who giggles when she is around him, and all those people on the streets and buses, elbowing each other on their way to work. They are all privy to a secret, deep and disgraceful, a secret they don’t talk about. It is only revealed in slanted glances and smirks, in a raised shoulder, in a bitten lip.

There is nowhere I can find out what this secret is about. Some of the girls from my grade behave as if they know what it is, as if they belong to this club of wisdom and experience. They stretch their mouths in all-knowing smiles or narrow their eyes in little smirks, but I have my suspicions. My friend Masha, for example, the girl whom I see less and less frequently although she lives in my courtyard, announced recently that when blood begins to trickle down your thighs, you must pull on long underwear with rubber bands above your knees to catch it before it falls to the ground. Masha said this with the utmost confidence, throwing back her head with perfectly cut hair to underscore her scholarship; yet I knew she was even more ignorant than I. The rubber-banded underwear seemed just as efficient a measure as the instruction of our civil defense teacher to hide under our desks if America hit us with an atomic bomb.

I try to find the answer in books. Not in Russian books, because they all avoid talking about the secret. Indecent and shameful, it is consigned entirely to the books of the rotting capitalist West. In my English literature class we are reading A. J. Cronin’s
The Citadel,
which exposes the ulcers of capitalism, but in a socialist, sterile way. I leaf through the collected works of Guy de Maupassant because a girl in my school, one of those who pretend they are in the know, said there is racy stuff in his books. I skim through the pages in search of the raunchy, but find nothing more than two people sleeping in one bed.

Then help seems to come from the most unlikely place. My school is taking us to see an American film called
Men in Her Life.
I am so excited I can hardly wait for the day, a week away. Men in her life—what can be more straightforward and titillating? I imagine a string of American men, all debonair and provocative, fighting for one woman, who is, without doubt, privy to all the facets of life. But when the lights in the theater turn off and grainy black-and-white images appear on the screen, the men of the title do nothing but walk around in white shirts with smoking jackets and bow ties and speak in long, undecipherable harangues of American English. What’s even more disappointing is that there are only two of them. They look alike, bony and unsmiling, and from the little I can understand, they seem to appear in the woman’s life successively rather than concurrently. The film drags on for two hours, and I cannot sneak out early because our teacher is sitting in my row. When the lights finally come on, I am exhausted from understanding so little English and disheartened because the knowledge was denied, again.

W
HEN MY MOTHER AND
I return from the anatomy department, we bring the formaldehyde smell back home, where it lingers in the hallway, around our coats and shoes.

“Where do babies come from?” I say casually as she is thrashing around the kitchen, throwing together a quick dinner. I watch her grab a piece of meat out of the refrigerator and force it down the throat of a meat grinder. A few vigorous cranks of the metal handle, and the face of the meat grinder erupts in red twists squeezing out into a bowl underneath. Of course, I have a general idea about babies, but I want to hear my mother, an anatomy teacher, give me her straightforward version of an answer.

“Babies come when a female sex cell is connected with a male sex cell,” my mother says, patting the mixture of meat and bread into palm-size
kotlety
. “Then a fetus is developed in a uterus, and nine months later a woman gives birth to a baby.”

I am grateful to her for this direct and daring explanation sprinkled with the words “male,” “female,” and “sex,” which I can bet are not used so nonchalantly in other apartments facing the courtyard. Chewing on my
kotlety,
I contemplate the weight and abstraction of my new knowledge. I am enlightened by adult anatomical vocabulary, yet still completely ignorant.

O
N OUR WAY TO
the medical school we pass a maternity hospital, a four-story building overlooking a little square with streetcar tracks crossing in the middle.

“This is where you were born,” says my mother.

In the summer, the hospital windows are opened, and young women lean out shouting details about their condition to their husbands, who are not allowed past the reception desk. “The water broke, but I’m still here,” one woman yells. “There hasn’t been any water, hot or cold, for three days,” screams another one. I am not sure they are talking about the same water, but I have no one to ask.

Like every maternity patient, my mother stayed in the hospital for a week. Husbands came in the evening, after work, to stand on the streetcar tracks in front of the hospital and shout questions to their wives who were hanging out of the windows.

“What color eyes?” They wanted to know, cupping their hands around their mouths so their voices could reach all the way up.

“Blue,” yelled the women, leaning out precariously. “All infants have blue eyes.”

“And hair?” The men persisted as streetcars jingled a warning for them to get off the tracks. “What color hair?”

Had my father been standing on those tracks instead of sulking in a friend’s dacha about becoming a father of a girl at fifty-five, I know what my mother would have shouted down. I’ve seen my pictures as an infant. “No hair,” she would’ve said. “Bald. Just like Khrushchev.”

Amid all this clamor, waiting for my father, she stood in the window to show me to the other women’s husbands, to the people peering out of the open streetcar windows.

Still, seeing the maternity hospital does nothing to get me closer to understanding. Like the inside of the hospital wards, the secret is still just that, a secret.

I
STAND UNDER A
poster for a movie,
Love Under the Elms,
hanging in our local House of Culture, which bears the name of the First Five-Year Plan. The poster shows a tree with heavy, sprawled branches that must convey the weighty and complicated nature of that love. It is an American movie, but it stars Sophia Loren, who everybody knows is Italian. I don’t understand how an Italian actress can star in an American film, how the borders between countries can be so unprotected and so easily crossed. But there is even a bigger question looming in my head, the question about the title. It is based on a play by an American playwright, Eugene O’Neill, as my friend Masha, whose mother teaches college English, informed me, and its real title is
Desire Under the Elms.
So what does this mean? Are desire and love the same? Or did the translator take too broad a license? Or—the more likely possibility—was the change in translation deliberate, a metamorphosis from the bodily and the sensual toward the soulful and the more lofty? None of us is surprised, for example, when during rehearsals Marina’s theater removes whole passages from Western plays. After all, as everyone knows, the capitalist West with its economy and art can produce nothing but vulgarity and shame.

I’m afraid I will never learn the answer to any of these questions. Under the film title there is a warning: forbidden for children under sixteen. This means there is a kiss on the screen, a real kiss where you can see the lips, not where all they show is the back of the head. The warning is written in small, but deliberate letters, and it means that for four more years I won’t be able to see robust Sophia Loren—in love, or desire—who undoubtedly knows more about the secret than the skinny, black-and-white heroine of
Men in Her Life.

I think of wasp-waisted Sophia Loren in a flaring skirt, as I recently saw her in our movie magazine,
Screen.
She was walking on twiggy heels past some baroque buildings on an Italian street, which looked like any of our streets, except for the absence of flags and slogans stretched over the façades. Looking at the poster, I try to imagine her in America, but there is nothing concrete to anchor the image. We never see America on television; it’s a fictitious place, too foreign and too far away.