A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (31 page)

W
HEN MY
T
UESDAY STUDENTS
come for their lesson, Aunt Mila goes out for a walk. They are a married couple, Roman and Malvina, both doctors. Out of my six private students, they are the only ones who choose to come to my apartment, and that’s because they are Jewish and are learning English in the hope that they will be allowed to emigrate. They cannot possibly have their twenty-nine-year-old daughter stumble onto our English lesson and discover that their minds are harboring such a subversive thought; if she does, they are afraid she may alert the authorities and report their desire to emigrate to their employers. A convulsion of panic twitches throughout Malvina’s body when she mentions the possibility of being fired and disgraced even before they are allowed to file an application to leave. Her face trembles; her shoulders curl and tears surge to her eyes. Her husband covers her hand with his fleshy palm, her sigh the only display of their common despair.

Then Malvina shakes her head as though to shake off dark thoughts. Springs of her black hair quiver around her face; her slim body is once again erect in its defiance. In a blue dress and a silky bright scarf, she looks like an exotic bird that landed on a patch of dirt on its way to sunnier shores. Roman is big and language-deaf; his mouth does not want to contort to form alien sounds, and he lets Malvina speak for both of them. She memorizes vocabulary lists for herself and her husband, and he simply accepts it as another gift from her, laughing at his lack of language ability, the phlegmy laugh of a chain-smoker.

I teach them how to make a doctor’s appointment, how to book a train ticket, one-way and round-trip, how to buy a coat and ask a preposterously polite salesperson from the chapter on shopping to show you to something called a fitting room to try it on. I teach them all I know, all I think they will need to know if they are fortunate enough to succeed. It’s all pure chance from now on: they will be lucky if they don’t lose their jobs; if the visa department accepts their applications; if their daughter, after she realizes that being related to traitors holds such advantages as being able to receive parcels from the West, signs away her objections to their leaving the country; and finally—what would be the greatest luck of all—if the visa department, after scrutinizing their papers and stripping them of Soviet citizenship, issues a permit allowing them to leave.

I wonder whether Malvina and her husband will miss this place with that intense nostalgia Aunt Mila insists was scratching inside the souls of our émigré literary classics. What will my students miss after they step out of the plane in an abstract foreign airport with the allowed forty kilograms of luggage comprising their entire life? After two years in lines in militia and visa offices, after they’ve been publicly humiliated and denounced here, will they miss anything at all? From the mystic avenues of the unfathomable West, will they ever look back at the worn gray pages of this silly conversation textbook in the middle of this table covered with oilcloth, at this milky evening light—the light Pushkin commemorated in verse—pouring through the open window? Will they ever look back at me?

16. The Crimea

I
AM TWENTY, A THIRD-YEAR
university student, and my classmate Nina is still my best friend. She is tall and looks British, or what we think looks British: blonde springs of hair and glasses. Together we smoke Hungarian menthol cigarettes and make plans for the summer. We dare to fantasize about the faraway and nearly impossible, the pinnacle of every vacationer’s dream. The word Crimea, Krym, sounds like “cream”—sumptuous, hedonistic, melting on my tongue, with a sweet aftertaste of decadence and longing. It is the opposite of everything we know: it has crumbling mountains, white sun, and a high sky stretching all the way to Turkey. It has vineyards producing champagne that never reaches our stores and trees called magnolias that we read about in Somerset Maugham novels. It is the opposite of Leningrad—a new world.

With the help of our classmate who works in the foreign tourism office and has powerful connections, we buy train tickets to Simferopol and, on August 1, step out of the train car—after two days clanging through the entire width of the country, north to south—into the dusty, soupy warmth of the Crimea.

I don’t know how I expected this wonder, Krym, to turn out: maybe like the salty wind and brightly dressed crowd of Chekhov’s “Lady with a Lapdog,” or a row of tall fences cordoning off the high-ranking dachas, or the brown cliffs jutting into the sea I remember from an old painting on the wall of the Russian Museum.

The real Crimea smells of heated asphalt and warm apple juice just on the verge of turning. In the crowd of other passengers, we elbow past a kiosk with cone-shaped vats of fruit drinks and a counter crawling with wasps to get on a bus that will take us to the small town of Sudak, only seven kilometers away from our destination. We are headed for the village of Novy Svet, which literally means “new world.” “Not too symbolic, is it?” says Nina.

The bus rumbles along a narrow road that snakes across fields of brown grass. The road climbs up, and gentle mountains begin to rise against the bleached sky. From Sudak, we walk on a path that wraps around the mountain with bushes and low pines clinging to the steep sides. We walk and walk, stooping under the weight of our backpacks, pushing forward through the hot air that smells like baked earth.

And then we see it. The road twists again and there is the sea, emerald and still, several hundred meters below.

“Look!” Nina yells as if I could’ve somehow missed it. I stop on the edge of a hairpin curve and stare, like a fool hypnotized by a charlatan, stupidly endangering my life. I blink several times, but the sea is still there, astonishing and real.

This staring feels exhausting; it empties me of words. I don’t know how to react to blue-green water. The biggest body of water I’ve ever seen, the Gulf of Finland, is always gray. The Neva is sometimes zinc and sometimes charcoal. The lake near our dacha is muddy brown, the color of its clay bottom. All the water I’ve known is monochromatic, the colors you find in the sepia photographs of our family album. Water, like earth, does not have color.

Yet this is insanely bright, as bizarre as if the ground suddenly turned purple or the pine needles neon blue. It looks like a giant theater set stretched all the way to Turkey.

Now it feels impossible to walk another step. The sea is here, practically at our feet, so we take a downward footpath, barely visible in the covering of thin grass poking through yellow pine needles, and glide down, saved from a free fall only by the counterweight of our backpacks.

The path ends at the pebbly beach of a small cove hugged by cliffs. At the proximity of five meters, the width of the beach, the sea is different: it moves and makes sounds, lapping onto the rocks in lazy little waves. It is nothing but water, after all, salty and warm as soup.

I take off my sweaty shoes, wade in, and let the sea ripple around my ankles, the blue-green sea, refreshing and entirely mine. Or maybe not entirely: there is a group of young people sitting around a small camp stove, plucking black shells out of a pot, giving us sour looks as if we’d trespassed into their courtyard. They seem to occupy the part of the beach that’s in the shade of brown cliffs, where backpacks and folded blankets lie in a pile, although there isn’t much shade anywhere now, the sun pulsing with heat straight over our heads.

I wonder if those black shells they’re plucking from the pot are
midiyi
—mussels—the exotic shell creatures northern people never see. I always fish for names of unknown foods in the few foreign-language translations that appear in our literary magazine
Inostran-naya Literatura,
stumbling over oysters in Françoise Sagan and a vegetable called asparagus in Iris Murdoch. But aside from their names, I don’t know what they look like, let alone taste like. Is asparagus related to spinach if they’re both dark green and both hiss with sibilant sounds? Even the word itself, “asparagus,” sounds as decadent as “pineapple” and “quail” from a Mayakovsky poem, the two truly unsocialist foods eradicated in 1917 along with the tsar. How can oysters, whatever they are, be eaten raw? The Leningrad store called Okean does not provide much help. It is vast as an ocean, and just as forbidding, its glass display cases full of canned sardines in tomato sauce and smelts frozen into huge blocks of ice that saleswomen in white gowns shatter with crowbars on the wet, empty counters.

According to our plans, Nina and I were going to walk into the village and rent a room from a local babushka, a ruble a day, a cement-floored cell with two dusty mattresses, a communal outhouse, and chickens clucking in the owner’s yard. But what we stumbled on in this cove has uncovered a new possibility: we could live on the beach, much closer to the sea than any babushka could fathom, breathing air scented with seaweed and pine, and use our rubles for more exciting ends. Besides, thanks to Nina’s brother, who is partial to camping, we even have two small inflatable mattresses rolled up in our backpacks.

At about nine, when the sea and the cliffs and the pines that climb all the way to the paved road are instantly swallowed by heavy southern blackness, Nina and I lie still, listening to every rustle and every creak, petrified that someone from the group whose territory we’ve invaded will sneak up and dispose of us. Trying to peer into the night, I strain my eyes so hard that they finally close, and I don’t even know when I fall asleep because the blackness on the outside of my eyelids is as thick as it is on the inside.

In the morning, the brightness is as intense as the dark of last night and, still alive, I plunge into the sea, letting my body float on cool, salty water. I stare into the thin-blue sky, water rippling around my eyes, green water with yellow sand underneath, which changes to gray pebbles as I turn my head, and then to brown cliffs and then back to thin-blue sky. Green water, transparent and sparkling, so inviting and so deep. I begin to understand why my provincial aunt Muza, who has been in the Crimea only once, has always reverentially spoken of it as the Sea.

The Sea is the heart here, and everything else, including the people, exists in relation to the Sea. The inhabitants of our adopted cove, young engineers from Kiev, are beach veterans: they’ve been coming here in August for the last three years, claiming this cove with their camp stove, their cans of meat and packets of dry soup, their blankets and guitars. They peel mussels off the rocks, rinse their tin bowls in sea water, lure crabs out of their crevices with crumbs of food, wade waist-deep and wash their hair with brown laundry soap, the only soap that lathers in this water. All day long they sit around in bathing suits, smoking and drinking, skin peeling off their noses and backs.

It takes a day for our camps to merge. It takes two more days for me to notice Boris, the oldest of the Kiev group, whose hair and eyebrows are so blond and bleached by the sun that they look almost white. Or rather it is Boris who notices me, and I simply notice him back.

“H
E’S A DIFFERENT BLOOD
group,” says Nina. It’s our turn for kitchen duty, and we’re peeling potatoes and rinsing them in the gentle surf, talking about Boris.

I know exactly what this means, and I know she is right. A different blood group is someone who hasn’t read Bulgakov’s
Master and Margarita,
which was officially published two years ago, and who prefers a soccer match to a Tarkovsky film. All of our new Kiev friends seem to fall into this category, in which soccer takes precedence over avant-garde cinema. A different blood group is someone who thinks that Mikhail Baryshnikov, who has just defected to the West during one of the Kirov Theatre ballet tours, is a traitor and the enemy of the motherland. My sister, when she read the denouncing article in
Pravda,
said
molodets
—good for you. My mother said nothing. Nina said he should’ve done it earlier. The Kiev engineers treat the topic with disapproving silence, staring at the green sea ripples or turning to more pressing issues, such as shaking sand and pebbles out of their bathing suits and towels.

But it is flattering that Boris dives deep into the sea to bring me conch shells and necks of two-thousand-year-old amphoras, which should sit in museums instead of the pockets of my backpack. It is flattering that it is I he takes snorkeling along the cliffs and not the curly-haired Natasha from his Kiev group, who chain-smokes, sighs, and pretends not to look in his direction.

The truth is that despite our differences, I’m drawn to Boris, to his blue eyes and steely arms and solid legs bristling with bleached-white hairs. He is six years older than I and very different from the mild-mannered Vitaly back in Leningrad, whose dissertation in psychology I agreed to type in April for sixty rubles. Vitaly pressed my hand between his clammy palms, awkwardly brought me roses, and spoke in the dim, careful voice of an inexperienced lecturer.

There is nothing careful about Boris’s speech: words rattle out of his mouth, swift and definitive, sharpened by a trace of the Ukrainian pronunciation so alien to my northern ears.

In our conversation, we’ve somehow drifted to the Great Patriotic War, and Boris is adamant. He’s talking about Kiev, which was occupied, unlike Leningrad.

“They walked there on their own will,” he sputters, hitting a rock with the heel of his hand to accentuate his statement. He’s telling us about Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, where Germans, with help from the local police, executed thirty-three thousand Jews. “They were ordered to walk and they walked, like sheep,” he says. “All the way to their own graves.”