A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (32 page)

Nina shakes her head and starts collecting the bowls. Her upbringing compels her to be wise and silent, not allowing her to show anger and condemn stupid statements that blame Kiev Jews for being shot and piled into a ravine.

Devoid of noble roots, I want to argue with Boris, to wipe this smirk of assurance from his lips, this arrogant flicker from his blue eyes. I want to tell him that what he is saying is as stale and wrong as the NKVD order that made my mother spy on her dissertation adviser or the sayings of my provincial uncle, who rants about Jews and their cowardice during the war. But I realize I don’t know much about Babi Yar except what I read in the tenth-grade history book, two lines of official jargon denouncing the mass execution, not one word that the victims were all Jewish. I realize that Boris knows more than I do about our history, and although there is no doubt he is a different blood group, I don’t know which is worse, his wrong conviction or my ignorance.

I am ignorant about a lot of things. I’ve never read all four volumes of
War and Peace,
for example. I leafed through the love scenes—pausing at infatuations, elopements, and breakups—but skipped all the battles. For my university exam in foreign literature, I never bothered to open Marlowe or Cervantes, instead regurgitating the professor’s lectures about the impact of their works. All I know about the history of Russia—the real, pre-1917 history—comes from my high school textbook, in which the centuries of Russian monarchy are allotted less space than the fifty-eight years of Soviet power. I would never admit this to Nina, of course, or to anyone else, but the truth is I’m a dilettante. I pick up crumbs, never burdening myself with a whole.

O
N THE MOUNTAIN ABOVE
our cove there is a border patrol post, because on the other side of the Black Sea, a hundred kilometers away, lies a foreign country, Turkey. Due to this proximity, sleeping on the beach is against the law. When we look up, we sometimes see soldiers with German shepherds etched against the sky, as though they peer across the sea trying to decode the secrets of our capitalist neighbor.

It’s evening, the sun just beginning to melt into the edge of the cliffs, and we are sitting around the camp stove, on which mussels boil in a pot with seawater, drinking local wine Boris brought from Sudak in a gallon-size gasoline canister. I see the silhouettes of two soldiers on the mountain, but this time they aren’t standing still or milling around the post. They are beginning to walk down the mountain path. Maybe they’ve decided to take a trip to Sudak for a gallon of wine, too, but instead of getting smaller their figures grow, definitely approaching, so I nudge Boris, and now we’re all staring at the two men in uniforms being pulled by their wolf-like dogs straight down to our cove.

We are all silent now, and even Yura stops strumming his guitar. Everyone remembers last Wednesday, when a boat coughed up to our beach at four in the morning, and two men with militia caps and a megaphone stepped out of the damp darkness, blinding us with flashlights. They demanded to see our internal passports, identifications we carry to get on a train. When we reluctantly pulled the documents out of our backpacks, they snatched them from our hands. I would’ve been petrified if Boris hadn’t told me that the same thing had happened the previous year and the year before that. It must be an official ritual, he said. The militiamen shouted, pushed, and crunched around the beach, serious and self-important, as if our blankets strewn on the pebbles directly threatened the country’s national security.

“How will we get our passports back?” Boris yelled.

“We’ll talk tomorrow at the precinct,” barked the man with the megaphone and kicked Boris’s backpack.

The next day we all walked seven kilometers to Sudak and spent five hours sitting on the precinct’s hallway floor waiting for our passports, which were released at six when the militiaman on duty had to go home. That was when we discovered the local wine, sold by the liter from milk cisterns.

So the first thought on everyone’s mind now is that the militia has informed the border patrol to watch us through binoculars to make sure that we pack up and leave as we’ve been told. And now, seeing that instead of leaving we’ve taken to drinking wine from gasoline canisters, they have activated the military to evict us by force. Now they are coming for us with trained dogs and guns slung over their shoulders. We are lucky they aren’t bringing tanks.

I try to imagine what this will do to Nina’s and my standing at the philology department. We’ve been considered diligent and trustworthy, so responsible, in fact, that our senior English professor hinted recently about the possibility of our teaching at the University’s summer Russian program for American students. It is the highest honor to be allowed to teach students from foreign countries, she said. Especially as foreign as the United States. And now, with the dogs clawing the dry earth of the slope, choking on their chains, the prospect seems as dim as the smoky horizon over the sea sloping toward Turkey.

The German shepherds pull; the soldiers yank them back. The dogs stop, sniff the air, and jerk in the direction of the pot on our camp stove, where the fat from a can of beef is just beginning to coat the freshly boiled potatoes. For a few minutes it looks like the soldiers are interested in the contents of the pot, too, because they trot after their dogs as if driven by a common purpose, their boots crunching the pebbles in unison.

“Don’t hand anything over,” Boris commands. “Say our passports are still in the militia precinct.”

“Offer them some wine,” says Nina. “It’s a polite thing to do.”

No one else, after the day spent walking all the way to Sudak and sitting on the militia precinct floors, thinks we should be polite with the law.

The soldiers stop and assess the situation: ten kids their age in bathing suits, swilling wine out of mugs; an empty can of stewed beef they haven’t seen since they were twelve. It’s just what they saw peering down into the cove, wine and meat; their binoculars didn’t betray them.

“Join us,” says Nina. “Would you like some wine?” she asks and rinses two mugs in the sea.

The soldiers, who look no older than nineteen or twenty, tell their dogs to lie down, and the shepherds, their noses sniffing the food smells out of the air, reluctantly obey. The soldiers wedge down into our circle, toasting with their filled mugs, and even Boris now has trouble believing they are here to arrest us.

Their names are Vitya and Serega. Vitya is bony and tall; Serega is as solid as if he’d been carved from the rock buttressing the side of this cove. They’re both local, from Simferopol, where the train deposited Nina and me two weeks earlier, and they’re fortunate they haven’t been sent to Uzbekistan or Kamchatka for the two years of their draft. They’ve wanted to come visit earlier, but this is the first time their sergeant has taken off to get an order of new uniforms. “Look,” says Vitya, bending his arm and pointing to his sharp elbow sticking out of his khaki shirt. “Yeah,” confirms Serega, pulling off his boots to demonstrate their soles, worn down to holes. His feet are wrapped in
portyanki,
a square of fabric used instead of socks, which look and smell like they are in dire need of change, too.

They earn three rubles a month, the price of the rapidly emptying canister of wine that sits next to the camp stove.

We hand them bowls of potatoes and canned beef; we pour more wine. Yura tunes his guitar and sings Vladimir Vysotsky songs about war that everyone knows by heart. When darkness creeps behind us and pounces without warning, Vitya and Serega, full of wine and food for the first time since they were assigned here four months ago, trudge away, dogs following reluctantly, their chains dragging on the gravel behind them.

“Hey, you forgot your guns,” yells Boris into their backs.

“That was a hell of a military force,” says Nina. “I hope they don’t attack us like that again.”

We never find out if Vitya and Serega have received new uniforms. From now on, we only see them on top of the mountain, outlined against the sky, too far away to see the holes in their shirts or their boots, too far away to even wave hello.

I
N RESPONSE TO MY
Postcard with a view of Novy Svet, my mother sends a letter to the local post office marked “general delivery.” In my postcard I wrote: I’m all right here in the new world. Of course, I said nothing about Boris. It was shocking enough for my mother to find out I was living on a beach; I couldn’t possibly say I was living on a beach with a man. Sex is a deep and shameful secret not meant to be discussed. In our books, printed by the state publishing house, Progress, a man and a woman may break steel-production records or risk their lives to protect a collective, but they’ll never find themselves in the same bed. Western films are dubbed into a benign Russian version, racy scenes carved out. Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are allowed to kiss, but usually viewed from the back and only for two seconds.

My mother’s anatomy charts of human reproductive systems, despite the unabashed names of their parts, fail to reveal a single crumb of insight into what makes sex such a dishonorable thing. Such a dark force that must be eviscerated from films and never mentioned in our books. “We don’t have sex in the Soviet Union,” said a stern woman from the Ministry of Culture in a recent TV interview, when a French reporter asked a provocative question about Lelouch’s film
A Man and a Woman,
dubbed into Russian and recently released into our theaters. Is it possible that happy, shameless sex has been successfully eradicated by the Great October Socialist Revolution, along with social inequality and decent shoes?

I am not as ignorant about sex as I am about Babi Yar. In spite of my country’s taboo and my mother’s silence, or maybe because of it, I’ve taken the initiative to investigate the subject on my own. By the end of ninth grade, just before I turned sixteen, I had to know more. When my mother left for the provinces to visit Aunt Muza that April, my sister invited her actor friends to a party in our apartment. The actors brought wine, and I was drinking Riesling, sour and warm, out of a glass used only for special occasions. The sounds of the piano banged and warbled in the air, professional voices climbed the ladder of the scales, laughter floated on the clouds of smoke. The Riesling was making me happy and unafraid. I wiggled closer to big, dark-eyed Gennadii, who had recently made a film that was sending the girls in my class reaching for their handkerchiefs, and positioned myself on the divan next to his solid elbow. He poured me more wine; he suggested we go out to the stair landing for fresh air.

I leaned on the wall between the flights leading to the attic; I breathed in to keep my balance under his massive hands. His mouth, smelling of wine, clamped on mine; his tongue wrapped around my teeth. With my mouth plugged, I stood there estimating how long I could go without breathing while his fingers slipped under my bra. “Remember this,” a silly thought raced through my mind as Gennadii was lowering his face to my breasts, “this is what men want.”

His head shuttled between my face and my chest, smudging my skin, coating it with a drunken cigarette smell. Not knowing what to do with my hands, I wrapped them around his neck while he was turning my lips inside out in his mouth and squeezing me into the wall with his hips. Then he stopped, as abruptly as he started, and I stood there staring into his open shirt and a black clump of chest hair. I lowered my arms and pressed my wet palms into the wall. My lips felt bloated and chapped, my nipples chilled by air. He peeled my hand off the wall and, with a little guilty smile, led me down the stairs, back into the drunken noise of our apartment.

In my first year at the university, when Nina and I had a discussion about sex, I told her about Gennadii and the stair landing and why it felt like an epiphany. “My head was spinning,” I said, failing to mention the Riesling. “He was twenty years older than me and he smelled of tobacco, even his chest hair, even the shirt he was wearing.” Nina squinted through our own cigarette smoke and blew out a small menthol cloud. “You’re looking for your father,” she said and peered at me from above her glasses, a glance that seemed a bit too intimidating to warrant a response.

Was I looking for my father the following year, when my quest took me a step further, for a dose of real sex?
Seks,
blunt and sibilant, so rarely used in public that it sounds like a curse. In our tenth-grade history book—the only place I ever saw the word in print—it was listed among the ugly characteristics of bourgeois society, next to violence and unemployment. I insinuated myself into the bed of a charismatic theater director who ran the university amateur acting studio, by saying that I was lost and needed his direction. Afterward, I peered at myself in a mirror, trying to discern a significant change, a sign of instant maturation and wisdom, manifested by what? There was not a centimeter of difference that I could see, not a wrinkle of a metamorphosis that would brand me an adult, worthy of a place among the ranks of the enlightened and the experienced. It wasn’t ugly, as the textbook had warned, but it didn’t transport me into a higher realm of being or thinking. The only thing it seemed to have accomplished was to make me more cynical: this sordid, heavily-guarded secret amounted, in effect, to not much more than a few minutes of awkwardness. With lights off, the director’s charisma had dimmed, too. Despite all its promised tantalizing danger, sex was nothing out of the ordinary.

Not at all like making love to Boris, which makes me forget his Ukrainian accent and his rantings about the war and Babi Yar. He has a splendid cinnamon tan, and in the dusk I see his body as if through the green prism of water, shimmering along the rocks when he hunts for crabs. It is simple to be with Boris, as uncomplicated as elbowing in line for tomatoes at a local store, as basic as living on the beach. Yet I still feel guilty whenever he rolls up a blanket and we climb into the mountains. This is what sex has become associated with in my mind—a deep sense of shame. Something performed illicitly and in the dark.