A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (25 page)

“W
UDJA LIKE TGO FOR
a waak?” asks Kevin when we get off the bus back near his hotel. The British students are crowding around Sveta, who has an embarrassed look on her face, not knowing what to do with packages of pantyhose and ballpoint pens they are handing to her. I don’t know what I would do, either. Although Sveta has never seen Western pantyhose, she hesitates to take them. I wish these jean-clad students would be a little more insightful and give her a book of poetry from
Beriozka
or, at least, a can of something called shrimp.

Would I like to go for a walk with Kevin? This is a rhetorical question, but I don’t answer right away because I’m thinking about Maria Mikhailovna, with her laundry list of rules. Is walking outside as gross a violation as going inside a hotel? Is it a violation at all if a British tourist initiates the invitation? I’d like to ask my friend Tanya, but she is busy scribbling her address on a piece of paper for the girl in Reebok sneakers. I look at Kevin, who is staring at me with his dark Western eyes, waiting for an answer, and something tells me—a little sly voice—that in the official game of
vranyo,
it would be a legitimate move to take a walk with this boy, despite the fact that he is a capitalist, the worst kind of foreigner of all.

The wind has ripped holes in the sheets of clouds, and the sun has revealed some interesting things: the outside of our bus is covered with a layer of dirt, the puddles in the sidewalk sparkle with a rainbow film of gasoline, and Kevin’s eyes are hazel, not black. I look around: the British students have gone inside the hotel, and there is no Maria Mikhailovna in sight. Tanya makes big eyes when I tell her I’m going for a walk with Kevin, but I can see she is envious.

We take the metro to the city center, to places worth parading in front of a visitor. As we glide down an escalator, down and down, underneath all that swamp Peter the Great decided to turn into a city, Kevin’s eyes widen in surprise and his mouth drops open to expose straight English teeth. “It’s a mile deep!” he exclaims with the same glee I saw in his face when he grabbed the museum gun in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Down at the metro platform, he stands stunned, gaping at the crystal chandeliers, marble columns, and mosaic walls. “This is a bloody palace,” he says, turning around to examine every piece of granite and inlaid marble that spells the station name.

I know that “bloody” doesn’t mean “bloody.” I know it’s a curse, and I promptly file the word into the English compartment of my head, a corner where I am no longer a law-abiding tour guide for the House of Friendship and Peace but someone completely different, someone whose vowels are called diphthongs, whose
l
’s lilt and
r
’s roll, and whose sentences, unlike those in our docile Russian, soar at the end.

I like the English compartment of my head because it feels like Theater. It feels like I’m playing a role, pretending to be someone confident and bold. That’s what my sister must feel like when she is onstage—liberated from everyday drudgery and imbued with the power to be someone else. It is thrilling and a little dangerous.

This thrill, to my surprise, makes English words spring from memory and align themselves into grammatically correct sentences. I tell Kevin all about the construction of the Leningrad metro, about pushing and drilling through the marsh of the Neva delta. I tell him about the granite slabs hauled from the north, just as they had been dragged by serfs for the construction of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Pointing guide-like to the chandeliers and the marble, I see that the people around us, loaded with string bags on their way from work, turn around to look. They look at Kevin because he is obviously a foreigner and at me because I’m speaking English—in the way they look at actors when they come out of the stage door after a performance, in a way I can only call deferential.

Kevin marvels at the digital clock, which clicks off seconds between trains, and at the train, which arrives before the clock registers one minute. It’s rush hour, I explain. Ordinarily, the intervals between trains are up to two minutes. I know I sound formal and stilted, with words like “intervals” and “ordinarily,” but Kevin nods vigorously, letting me know he understands.

We are carried up another mile-long escalator and spat out the glass doors onto Nevsky Prospekt.

“D’ya wanna have a cup of coffee?” asks Kevin.

I don’t know where he thinks he can find a cup of coffee on the main avenue of Leningrad, but I don’t flinch. That is another thing Maria Mikhailovna has taught us: never show you’re surprised, no matter how improbable or far-fetched a question may seem. Do we have bears roaming the streets? No. What percentage of the population is unemployed? Zero. Are there places to have a cup of coffee? I don’t know of any. We must pretend we are sophisticated and erudite, above the naïve or materialistic questions of British high school students, above drinking coffee on Nevsky Prospekt.

I see a line snaking around the corner, and Kevin sees it, too. The House of Friendship and Peace can’t do anything about the lines. There are a couple of feeble strategies Maria Mikhailovna suggested during our practice tours. You can distract the tourists’ attention by pointing to a former church or palace. You can make a joke. When Maria Mikhailovna took us to the Hermitage to practice her museum lectures, she demonstrated what to say if your group asks to use a bathroom. These toilets are museum pieces, too, she said. Preserved from the time of Catherine the Great.

The line Kevin is now gawking at is for toilet paper. It stretches around the corner into the side street, three or four rows thick, elbowing under a banner that reads, “Thanks to the party for the people’s welfare.” I hope Kevin doesn’t insist on turning into that street because the location of the slogan is just too pathetic, as if someone deliberately put it there to make a point so obvious it’s not worth translating. But he isn’t interested in the slogan. He is staring at two women approaching from the front of the line, both wearing necklaces of toilet-paper rolls they’ve threaded on a rope for easy carrying.

“Can I take a picture?” he whispers, lifting his camera, a glee in his hazel eyes.

I don’t think the two women in toilet-paper necklaces would like it. I don’t think the babushka behind an ice cream cart, who is already eyeing us with a frown, would like it. I don’t think the militiaman directing traffic would like it. No one would appreciate having this picture taken, but Kevin is daring: he lowers the camera and snaps shots from his hip, pretending to examine the colonnade of the former Kazan Cathedral. He thinks he is a genius, having come up with such a brilliantly distracting maneuver, but in the area of pretense no British student can compete with our decades of daily practice. All of us—the ice cream seller, the toilet-paper-bedecked women, and the militiaman, if he were to drop his zebra baton and look in our direction—would, in a blink of an eye, see right through Kevin’s trick.

I have to think fast, and do something, because the babushka has planted her fists on her hips and is getting ready to start shouting while one of the women with toilet paper around her neck is pointing in our direction. Another minute, and the militiaman will turn around to investigate who is creating all this commotion, yelling in the middle of the city’s historical center. I grab Kevin by the elbow and tell him to walk fast, very fast, tell him to run, run until we are a block away, lost in the human current of Nevsky Prospekt.

“That was close!” he says, catching a breath, beaming from his adventure. I can hardly share his excitement: the thought of unrealized possibilities involving the militiaman makes my blood run cold. Maria Mikhailovna and my mother would cringe at the headline—“Detained: A Foreigner and His Unauthorized Guide.” We march briskly, hidden inside the crowd, for another block. I am horrified at what could have happened. I am horrified at being horrified, at my own cowardice and fear.

But none of this can I show to Kevin. He lives in London, where there are no yelling babushkas, no militia, and no shortage of toilet paper. I have to pretend to be a guide again. I show him the Moika Embankment as we walk past the House of Books with a turret and a glass globe on top, and past Pushkin’s apartment, where the poet lay dying after the duel he’d fought to protect his wife’s honor.

Kevin likes the House of Books, but he has never heard of Pushkin.

Along Trade Union Boulevard and past the Palace of Labor, we make our way to Decembrists’ Square on the Neva, where Peter the Great, on a rearing horse, in a laurel wreath and with royal grandeur, reaches toward the water. Two and a half centuries ago, he willed the city into existence, hammering pilings into the marsh, transforming the islands of the windy Neva delta into a port with only one goal in mind: to open a window on Europe. It is appropriate, I think, to come to this monument with Kevin, who, by standing here, provides irrefutable evidence that this thoroughfare still functions, even if only in one direction.

As Kevin snaps pictures, completely legitimate, of the Tsar and the Admiralty’s golden spire, I lean on the parapet and look into the churning, zinc-colored water. If my mother hadn’t decided to marry my father in 1950, which involved moving here from the provincial town of Ivanovo, I wouldn’t be parading all this architectural beauty in front of a boy from England. I wouldn’t be standing here, surrounded by the wide bridges spanning the granite embankments, by the lace of iron banisters and fences, by spires, domes, and the robust curves of Italian baroque.

What prompted my mother to accept my father’s proposal, I wonder, while Kevin is looking for an angle from which to photograph the Bronze Horseman across the street. Was it a search for a better life, as practical as she is: giving my sister a father, having another child, moving to a capital city? Or was it rather that she was running away from something? After all, as I know from one of her stories, she was summoned to the Ivanovo NKVD headquarters after the war, after her uncle Volya had already been arrested and shot, and forced to spy on the chairman of the anatomy department where she worked. Dr. Zlotnikov, Moisey Davidovich, her PhD adviser and a Jew. Every month she was ordered to come to a certain address (an empty apartment that could be used to house a whole family, she thought bitterly), where an NKVD officer was waiting for her with a pen and a stack of blank paper. She couldn’t refuse, she said, so every month she came to this secret place and wrote about the most mundane, innocuous things that involved Dr. Zlotnikov: a conversation about the percentage of enlarged thyroids at the Ivanovo textile factory for her dissertation in progress, a shortage of scalpels at a dissection class, a lab assistant’s alcoholic son. But a fear always clawed in the back of her mind that even those benign things would be twisted and mauled, just like Uncle Volya’s joke, and then Dr. Zlotnikov’s arrest would weigh on her conscience forever.

For a year she came to that apartment once a month, as though to an illicit, sordid rendezvous that had to be kept secret from the honest world and, under the gaze of the young, plain-clothed NKVD man, filled scores of pages with her squared handwriting. So when my father proposed marriage and said they’d have to move to Leningrad, she not only saw it as an escape from her harsh, provincial past, but also as a return to decency and peace of mind.

Two years after she moved, Stalin was dead. Once again, the future bled on the horizon, another hint at the bright dawn promised by the Revolution. Her move to Leningrad worked out the way she’d envisioned: Dr. Zlotnikov retired without having been arrested; she had a baby and a teaching job.

Would I ever be able to move away from here—the only place I’ve ever known—as my mother moved away from Ivanovo? It is one thing to exchange a provincial town for the second biggest city in the country. But what place could possibly trump Leningrad?

Kevin, finished with photography, wants to walk along the Neva, past the Hermitage, past the arch of the Winter Canal, where Pushkin’s desperate Lisa jumped from the stone staircase into the black water. We walk by the wrought-iron fence of the Summer Gardens, another Pushkin landmark, a favorite strolling place of Onegin and the poet himself. But Kevin doesn’t know Pushkin, so he tells me something about rugby and then something about driving, although it’s hard to understand why at fifteen he would even bother thinking about such an impossible thing.

“I’m saving to buy a car,” he says.

That’s funny, the notion of being able to save enough in one’s lifetime to buy a car. I chuckle, but Kevin’s eyebrows mash together in a frown. Now I need to explain that I’m not laughing at him for saving money to buy a car. I’m laughing because I think of a joke my sister told me. Even in Russian telling a joke is tricky, and I pull all my linguistic resources together to help Kevin understand.

Three drivers—an Englishman, a Hungarian, and a Russian—all drive down the same road. The Englishman wrecks his car on a tree, gets out, and shouts, “Damn, this car was six months’ salary!” The Hungarian hits the same tree and yells, “This car was five years’ salary!” The Russian crashes into still the same tree and wails, “This car is thirty years’ salary!” The Brit turns to the Russian and asks, “Why do you buy such expensive cars?”

Kevin narrows his eyes, and I can almost see him thinking. I must have translated the joke so badly that I should probably explain to him it isn’t about expensive cars. But after a few moments of silence he slaps himself on the forehead and grins, although I’m still not sure he understands or just pretends to.