A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (20 page)

“After I was done, I went to talk to Dr. Kremer, the head of the hospital. He was also a surgeon and he understood. He turned out to be
intelligentny
. We agreed that the boy would stay for three days so I could make sure the stitches worked and there was no infection. On the fourth day we transferred him to a civilian hospital.”

Intelligentny
is a multi-faceted adjective my mother likes to use to characterize people. It is a salad mix of education, culture, intelligence, and manners, plus a certain view of the world that allows an alternative. The Commissar, who yelled at my mother for breaking a military rule, was obviously not
intelligentny
. The head of the hospital, who colluded with her in rule-breaking, certainly was.

By this standard, Uncle Fedya, with his myopic views and a love for hands of steel, is not at all
intelligentny,
whereas Aunt Muza, with her compassion and common wisdom, could stand a chance. I try to divide the people I know into
intelligentny
vs. not
intelligentny
categories, but the list of the former comes out much shorter than the latter. Not
intelligentny
: Aunt Polya from my nursery school, my third-grade teacher Vera Pavlovna, Luda on the train, every saleswoman in every grocery store.
Intelligentny
: my English tutor Irina Petrovna.

Then what about my mother and Marina? They are educated but not terribly cultured. My mother didn’t bring her bathing suit to Stankovo, so she goes swimming in her white bra and pink underpants. Marina licks plates. Most important, they both yell, at me and at each other, which automatically disqualifies them from the
intelligentny
category.

But do you have to be
intelligentny
yourself in order to decide if others are? Am I
intelligentny
?

I watch the sun heave toward the jagged line of forest on the other bank of the river. My uncle tests the water with his foot and a shiver runs through his skinny body. “
Holod sobachii
”—“dog’s freezing cold,” his favorite expression, except the
o
’s don’t roll down his tongue because he is originally from around Moscow.

From Aunt Muza’s movements in the water, from her cautious stroke, I sense that she, too, isn’t so sure about the advantages of a hand of steel or the benefits of jailing and shooting. I sense that she, like Kolya, believes in whirlpools, in the might of the river, in its silent menace, so I give her the benefit of doubt and add her to my short
intelligentny
list.

W
E ARE BOUNCING ON
a bus over gouged roads to a nearby village to stock up on bread and milk, my mother, Aunt Muza, and my cousins, each carrying an empty basket. When the bus deposits us in the middle of a dirt road, we walk on a footpath through fields specked with blue stars of cornflowers and purple butterflies of wild sweet peas. I am glad I’ve brought a sweater because I am freezing, although the sun is beating down and my cousin Kostya has unbuttoned his shirt.

We walk along a footpath through a patch of weeds to an
izba,
a log cabin with a straw roof pressing down on two squatty windows, perched on the brink of the forest. A kerchiefed woman waddles down the two front steps.

“Zahodite, zahodite,”
she invites us in, her mouth stretched in a toothless smile. She is ageless, in a black canvas dress, with veins threading her suntanned hands. When my eyes get used to the semi-darkness of the entrance, I make out a goat lying on a bed of straw and a hen clucking around a litter of brown chicks. The chicks scurry away, the goat struggles up on its spindly legs, and the six of us, too many for the house’s only room, crowd in front of a Russian stove, a brick wall with an opening in the middle for cooking and a ledge on top for sleeping.

I have never seen a real Russian stove. Everyone knows, from Russian folktales, what it is supposed to look like; you always find Ivan-the-Fool sleeping on top while more serious characters spend the day riding horses or planting wheat. But this Russian stove is blackened with soot, and I can’t imagine anyone lying on the narrow brick ledge.

The ageless woman wants us to taste her cottage cheese and yellow sour cream and the black bread she baked in the Russian stove. To demonstrate the thickness of her sour cream she sticks a big spoon in the middle of the bowl, filled to the brim, and the spoon remains standing, like a proud flagpole, a testament to the virtue of homemade food. She brings in a pitcher of goat’s milk, steam rising from its surface.

I don’t drink the milk because it has a pungent smell, and the sour cream melts into a puddle of fat on my tongue. While I pick at the bread, my cousins wolf down bowls of cottage cheese and bread hunks loaded with butter. “Eat, eat,” nudges my mother, her elbow in my side, although the spinning sensation in my stomach nauseates me and I don’t feel like eating.

At last, we leave the
izba,
having paid eight rubles for our baskets filled with loaves of bread, jars of sour cream and cottage cheese, and a hefty chunk of butter wrapped in a plastic bag. Kostya, the oldest cousin, treads carefully because he is clutching a three-liter jar of goat’s milk to his chest. While we wait for the bus, I’m so cold that Aunt Muza wraps her shawl around me, but I still shiver. She puts her palm on my forehead, shakes her head, and says that I’m getting sick.

A
T NIGHT
, I
BURN
and sweat and have strange dreams. I dream about my cousin Kolya, who is afraid to swim in the Volga because there are whirlpools there. The
o
’s in the Russian word for whirlpool,
vodovorot,
rolled down his tongue like a handful of peas when he told me about his fear by the foot of the steep Volga bank, where brown water, bottomless after the first few steps, licked the dirt in lazy ripples.

In the dream, Kolya and I wade in, our bodies cutting through the water. An undercurrent tingles my ankles and makes me stop for a moment. Kolya is walking in up to his chest, then to his neck, until I see only his ears sticking out of the sides of his round head. I’ve never seen Kolya so deep in the river. I try to yell to him, but no sound comes out, no matter how hard I strain. He keeps walking slowly, as if remembering his fear, and I know he is walking straight into the whirlpool. One more step and he is embraced by the power underneath, and all I can see is his head spinning on the surface of the water as he is pulled further and further away from the shore.

I stumble back to the narrow beach, where my uncle in bathing trunks is staring through the binoculars at my school friend Masha doing a cartwheel in her leotard. I don’t understand how Masha got to Stankovo from Leningrad, where she should be spending her summer vacation, but I’m glad she did because I can tell her about Kolya and the whirlpool. It is no use telling my uncle, who is glued to his binoculars, fascinated by Masha’s cartwheels.

To get to Masha I must climb the slope of the riverbank, so steep that when I approach, it rises like a wall. The wall closes on me like the top of a trunk, and I know that now I will not be able to save Kolya from the whirlpool no matter how hard I try.

A cool weight presses on my forehead, and the top of the trunk opens a crack. I see a hand straightening something white and wet on my head. “A compress for your fever,” says my aunt’s voice. But I know immediately it’s a surgical napkin, so I yank it off because I don’t want it to end up sewn into my belly. The hand struggles, shoving the compress back onto my forehead, but I scream, and when the hand recoils I am free to run back to the shore, where the whirlpool is spinning around Kolya.

As I careen down the riverbank, small rocks tumbling in my wake, a question is pounding in my head in sync with my steps: Why of all the kids who swim in the river was it Kolya who stepped into the whirlpool? Why not the girls cavorting in their bikinis on the beach, or Igor from across the street who wobbles to the river on his rusty bicycle, or my cousin Kostya, who refuses to even acknowledge the danger? Why not me?

Not me, not me, not me, a little hammer bangs in my temple as they try to push a wet napkin in my face again, and again I scream it off my head. The hand then rests on my forehead, pleasant in its cold heaviness, soothing. For a moment, I pause in my flight down the riverbank trying to understand why it was Kolya who was pulled away by the undercurrent. The water below is black as oil, glistening under the last strokes of the sun; no insects glide over its surface, no boats cut into its heft. Through the haze of heavy air the answer sinks in like a rock through water: the whirlpool singled out Kolya precisely because Kolya knew about its existence.

I look down on the Volga, on the stillness that belies its danger, on its beckoning silence. Masha with her cartwheels is gone, and my uncle, who for some reason never ventures to look through his binoculars at the river itself, is focusing on several specks of people etched against the evening sky on the rim of the far riverbank. Stepping out of my shoes, I walk across the hardened dirt of the beach to the waiting water. The river, lukewarm and soothing, envelops my feet, kisses my legs, strokes my back. Its blackness is entrancing, spellbinding, impossible to resist. As I walk deeper, the bottom slides away from under my feet, leaving me to spin slowly in the tender embrace of the whirlpool.

O
NCE MY FEVER BREAKS,
Aunt Muza doubles her efforts to not only add new pounds to my waist but also replace several lost during my illness. A bad flu, she says when I ask her what it was. She sings while she kneads and chops—old ballads and songs from the radio and films. She must have inherited my grandma’s unused opera talent: her voice soars in sophisticated roulades that quickly get trapped in her little kitchen. I obediently sip her
schi
and chew on her
pirozhki,
grateful to my three cousins who, without much effort, can sweep clean a table full of food in a matter of minutes.

I watch her dance in front of the stove, her thick hands surprisingly graceful, her whole body submitting to the food-making ritual and yet presiding over it. I want to ask her what has happened to the patient with the napkin in her belly. I want to ask her about the vague perils that seem to lurk in the most mundane places, but it somehow seems both dangerous and foolish to validate verbally something that is so murky, nothing more than images floating in a feverish head.

I’m surprised I remember this dream at all. There is only one other dream that didn’t evaporate the moment I opened my eyes, and it probably stayed in my memory because it was so odd. In the dream, my father was sitting in his boat, speaking about what happens a minute before the curtain goes up, as if he were an actor. The people in the audience hold their breath and all the noise stops, he said, just before the magic is about to begin. Don’t let the magic slip away, he warned me. Don’t sink into the quicksand of the ordinary.

Did he recognize the magic in real life? Or do I remember this dream so well because I wished he had?

I wonder if Aunt Muza’s napkin incident could have happened in the past, when my father was alive, when there was order, according to Uncle Fedya and my mother. I wonder how orderly it must have been, that order, if my uncle considers our present marching in step with the collective a state close to anarchy. And yet, even in that order, there were
intelligentny
people in charge like Dr. Kremer in my mother’s war hospital, who chose not to follow military rules. Was life easier then? Were there fewer dangers, or more? Would my friend Masha’s parents still have chosen to give her the mother’s Russian name instead of the father’s Jewish one?

Reluctantly I think of what my uncle might say if he knew that Masha’s parents made that decision because they wanted her to have an easier life.

Jews, he would say. You can’t trust them. They were cowards during the war, hiding from bullets at the front. Hiding in cellars and attics, while our Russian boys spilled their blood.

I don’t know how Uncle Fedya, who was a private during the war, can be privy to such a global view. So I remain skeptical about his opinions, and I don’t mention my friend Masha to him even once, finding it ironic that it was the two of them, Uncle Fedya and Masha, who crossed paths in my fever dream.

“Can we go for a swim?” I ask Aunt Muza, who has just wrapped several kitchen towels around a pot of freshly made dough.

“No swimming for you, my sweet,” she says, wiping her flour-powdered hands on her apron. “After the fever you’ve had you can just about forget swimming until you get back home. But you can walk with us to the river—fresh air is good for you.” I am not sure my mother would approve of such an early outing, but since permission has been granted, I rush to the door, where my street shoes, my little orphans that are now almost ruined by Stankovo’s dust, have been patiently waiting this whole week.

We take the familiar path, my cousins flying down, my mother, aunt, and uncle trotting in careful little steps. I am at the end of this procession, every step echoing in my head, and my muscles, unused for a week, shaking inside my skin.

Down on the hard, narrow beach Aunt Muza changes into her green and yellow two-piece bathing suit, carefully folding her huge white bra and underpants. I wait for her to say something about her patient, but she stands at the line where the dark water sighs softly at her feet, gazing into the distance where Kostya’s noisy splashes rip open the oilskin of the river.