A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (23 page)

Even if it’s true that I am deficient in my knowledge of Russian classics, I don’t want to think about them any more. Instead, I decide to think about tonight, and the happy prospect of my sister’s birthday party rises up inside me and mercifully nudges other thoughts aside.

I
AM ON THE
stair landing, one flight above our apartment—where the guests are still raising toasts to Marina—gagging on a cigarette stolen from my sister’s purse. I fumbled through her bag in the toilet, under the rusty tank with a chain, after realizing that the probability of Slava looking in my direction is even less than that of Andrei, after deciding that if I cannot get the attention of the men I like and if I am accused of a lack of humility toward the Russian classics and life in general, I may as well start smoking.

I hear our apartment door groan open, and I stand very quietly in the dark, squeezing my back into the wall, waiting for whoever it is to go back in. But when the door shuts, I sense that the person is on the wrong side of it, my side. There is a crinkle of cellophane and the sound of a lighted match. I breathe noiselessly, strangling a cough. Footsteps start up the stairs, up toward where I stand. By the sound I know, at least, that it isn’t my mother; they’re fast, less calculated, breathless steps.

It is Slava, with a cigarette between his teeth and an opened bottle of Bull’s Blood.

He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see me pressing into the wall, trying to stub out a cigarette against a sewer pipe. “Come,” he says and makes an upward movement with his arm, as if inviting me to fly. In the light of a match is another flight of stairs, a short one, leading up to a squatty door to the attic, upholstered in black vinyl. “Here,” says Slava, who in the dark has the sharp, weighted movements of my father, and he gives me his hand. “Come.” He smells of cigarettes and of our apartment, the smell of too many people and burned sunflower oil.

I obediently follow him, step after step, to the black door. What’s happening is so surreal that I feel nothing but a hollow in my chest and the sting of tobacco on my tongue. He gives the door a shake and it scrapes open, releasing a little cloud of dust and an odor of mildew and mice. He lights another match, which plucks out of the darkness a beam and a wall of pocked cement and something as gritty as gravel on the floor. It’s an eerie place, a place I didn’t know existed all this time right above my head, a place no one knew existed but Slava, who is privy to all the mysteries and secrets and the answers to questions we don’t want to ask.

We creep slowly, match after match, until we get to a wooden ladder. Slava climbs up, jiggles a metal latch, and above us opens a night sky, paled by the city lights, wide and still. He crawls out, takes my hand, and pulls me onto the roof. I crouch and sit on the cold metal, awed by the sudden vast openness, by the smallness of the life beneath.

Below, in the tar of a November night, a trolleybus, like an awkward insect, crawls past a shuttered newspaper kiosk where the news has all grown old since this morning. Two amber squares of windows glow on the black façade of the building across the street, revealing a toy-size figure waiting for a streetcar; an open truck packed with shaved-headed soldiers bumps across the tracks and rattles through the red light.

“Are you cold, kid?” says Slava, and I realize I’m so cold that I can’t even answer right away because my teeth are chattering. He pulls off his sweater, tugs it down over my head, and hands me the bottle of Bull’s Blood. “Take a swig,” he says, “it’ll warm you up.”

I upturn the bottle over my mouth, but in the dark I underestimate how much is left, so the wine spills out and pours down my face. Now I’ve ruined Slava’s sweater, making him think that I am a fool who has never tasted alcohol before, proving that he should’ve left me standing where he found me, by the sewer pipe, hacking after my first cigarette. I hold the bottle at arm’s length and try to wipe the wine off my face and neck with the back of my other hand while Slava, laughing a tipsy laugh, tries to scramble to his feet to get a better view of a canal glistening in the distance. He is oblivious to my streaked face and his ruined sweater. He doesn’t care that according to my mother, we are
chuzhoi
to each other and he shouldn’t be sharing with me this climb through the attic, this diminished life below, these waves of roofs that rise before us like a tide churned by the undertow of the sleeping city.

I feel like laughing, too, because this view from the night roof, which I haven’t even known existed, is so real and so exclusively mine. This view, it suddenly becomes clear, trumps everything else: today’s public humiliation in literature class, the impeccable Katya and her nauseating perfection, even my sister and the Theater she keeps all to herself. The thought makes me dizzy and elated. It fills me, like the wine, making me progressively drunker. It is I, not Katya, standing here next to god-like Slava, I, who would selfishly choose personal happiness over duty and a foreign play over a Russian classic, who would have to think twice about retreating to a nunnery like the virtuous heroine at the end of
A Nest of Nobles
.

“Look at this,” says Slava, who has just finished off what was left of the Bull’s Blood, and he pulls me closer so I can see the gray dome of the city’s silent synagogue poking in the distance from behind the roofs. I’m not sure if he wants me to see the building or he badly needs support to stand straight, but it doesn’t matter. I lick the last drops of wine off my lips and fit myself into his arms, pretending we’re in the novel’s love scene I’ve so often imagined, the scene with pale fingers, moist eyes, and twitching shoulders. Again, I am Lisa; only now I am not so brittle and somber. Now I’m giggling. There is no orchard and no bench, but Slava, even in his green-serpent state, is a highly superior Lavretsky, worthy of the classic Turgenev with his sad eyes and a noble wave of white hair. In a few hours, all this tar above us will start to dissolve into streaks of gray and then pink, but we aren’t looking up. Trying to keep our balance, we are holding on to each other in an awkward embrace, just like the two characters in
A Nest of Nobles,
both of us so unclassically drained of duty, so dizzyingly high over the treetops and rows of dark windows, so drunk on Bull’s Blood and personal happiness.

13. A Tour of Leningrad

T
HE FATE OF THE
October Revolution was decided on the streets of Petrograd. Here, the first regiments of the Red Army were formed to defend the new freedom and to vanquish the old world once and for all.”

Maria Mikhailovna pauses and tells us to close the quotation marks. Now she is going to dictate a Mayakovsky verse, she says, which we must also write as a quote. I am not sure about the meaning of the English word “vanquish,” so I skew my eyes in the direction of Tanya Puchkova’s notebook. But Maria Mikhailovna is already reciting:

They blew as always, October’s winds,
As cold as capitalism their icy blast.
Over Troitsky bridge sped cars and trams,
Snaking along the rails of the past.

The Mayakovsky poem, which we all know by heart, sounds stilted and pompous in English, and I can’t imagine repeating these lines with a serious face to a busload of touring high school students from Britain.

We are sitting around a long oval table in the House of Friendship and Peace on the Fontanka Embankment. Maria Mikhailovna, in a short, stylish jacket and scarlet lipstick, reads the text of a historical tour of Leningrad from a thick notebook she holds in her well-manicured hands. There are about thirty of us, and we sit very quietly and scribble down every word that falls from her lips because we know we are lucky and privileged to be here. A few months ago, the English schools from the whole city of Leningrad nominated their best students to be trained as tour guides for groups of English-speaking high school students. When the principal called Tanya Puchkova and me into her office to tell us we’d been selected, she talked about the great honor and responsibility. These are students from a capitalist society, she said; we will be the ones to represent our city and embody our superior way of life.

Although I have trouble seeing myself as such a large-scale embodiment of our culture, I am thrilled to be part of this program because it is my only chance to practice English with someone who didn’t learn it from textbooks.

So far we haven’t seen any English students. We are still at the end of the lecture period, coming here twice a week to write down every word Maria Mikhailovna dictates about the history of Leningrad and its architectural landmarks. When all ten lectures have been copied and memorized, we will take an exam: each of us will stand in the front of a bus filled with the rest of our group and recite a part of the tour chosen at random by Maria Mikhailovna. Those of us who pass will be allowed to be tour guides; those who don’t will sit in the back of the buses with British students, making sure order is maintained.

To me, it seems better in all respects to sit in the back of a bus than to stand in the front. Instead of clutching a microphone in sweaty hands, raking the memory for every minute historical detail and every rule of English grammar, I can gaze at the city’s landmarks from the back of the bus, possibly even exchanging a phrase or two with someone who speaks English better than red-nailed Maria Mikhailovna.

I furtively look around, at the marble columns and gilded moldings, at the curves of the fireplace mantel under a huge mirror in an elaborate frame of curly bronze. The house of Friendship and Peace occupies the former Shuvalov Palace, which means that before the Revolution this whole building, with its four floors, elaborate chandeliers suspended from six-meter ceilings, and gilded doorknobs, belonged to one family. I try to imagine what one family could have done with a space big enough for a hundred, or how they could’ve possibly used this grand room, where the table for the thirty of us on the gleaming parquet floor seems like a speck of dust.

Almost every architectural landmark Maria Mikhailovna has so far dictated to us is prefaced with the word “former.” The museum of the history of Leningrad is in the former Cathedral of the former Smolny Convent, the Naval Museum is in the former Stock Exchange building, and the Central Historical Archives are in the former Senate building. The former Kazan Cathedral is now the Museum of Religion and Atheism. The former Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theatre is now called the Kirov. The Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet occupies the former Sheremetyev Palace, and the former Estate of Counts Beloselsky-Belozersky is now a District Committee of the Communist Party.

“The request to rename the city of Petrograd after Lenin, put forward by the Petrograd workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers, is hereby granted,” dictates Maria Mikhailovna. “Let this largest center of proletarian revolution be hereafter forever linked with the name of the greatest leader of the proletariat—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.” Close the quotation marks, she says, finishing a citation from the resolution of the Second Congress of Soviets in 1924, the year of Lenin’s death.

This is our last lecture, the history of the Lenin Museum, located in the former Marble Palace. Maria Mikhailovna has covered everything from 1703, when Peter the Great laid a stone in the foundation of the Peter and Paul Fortress, to 1917, when the former Winter Palace, the residence of the tsar and then the Provisional Government, was stormed by workers and peasants. There seem to be very few architectural monuments built after 1917 that are worthy of foreign eyes.

Reflected in gilded-framed mirrors, Tanya and I descend the marble staircase, and the heavy entrance doors of the former Shuvalov Palace slam behind us. The waters of the Fontanka River are like lead, the same color as the sky, and we walk to the bus stop through the April dusk, past a dock for tour boats abandoned now and until the end of May.

Tanya lives two buildings away from me, so we get off at the same stop. “Maklin Prospekt,” announces the driver as the bus turns to our street and screeches to a halt. Our English teacher told us yesterday that Comrade Maklin, whose name our street bears, was not Russian, as I’ve always assumed from the name’s “-in” ending, but an Irishman named McLean. I don’t know why they would name a Leningrad street after an Irishman, unless he was a revolutionary and somehow made his way here from Ireland in 1917 to assist in overthrowing the tsar.

I am in the eighth grade, and I am cynical. I no longer believe in the cause of the Young Pioneers, the organization we parted with last year, when we all turned fourteen, to become members of the Young Communist League, or Komsomol. I had strong doubts about joining the Komsomol, which I’d expressed at home prior to our exchanging the red Pioneer kerchiefs for pins with a bonfire and a profile of Lenin.

“It’s all a bunch of
vranyo,
” said my sister. “All this hypocrisy and mendacity.” Marina likes big, theatrical words she’s learned from plays. “All this Communist delirium about paradise on Earth and equal labor. They pretend they pay us, and we pretend we work.”

“Do you want to go to college?” asked my mother.

I don’t know a single person who hasn’t gone to college, except our school janitor Aunt Lusya, so I knew my mother had asked that question to make a point.

“You won’t get into college without a Komsomol pin,” said my sister. “It’s the third question on the application, after your name and ethnicity.”

Now Tanya and I both wear our Komsomol pins on a black uniform apron cinched at the waist around a brown dress. Despite our cynicism and our doubts, we both want to go to college.