A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (33 page)

Still I could’ve been partially honest in my postcard sent home and said I had a crush on a guy from Kiev. But I didn’t. I’d never admit to such an emotional weakness as falling in love. She’s in love, my mother would whisper with an understanding sigh that conveys her pity. She’d feel sorry for me, or worry about me, or give me advice I didn’t want. Back in Leningrad, if I feel like seeing Boris, I’ll simply buy a ticket for Kiev and tell my mother I’m going to visit some friends. Instead of talking about Boris, or infatuations, or love, we’ll talk about the price of a railway fare and the availability of linens on the train.

My sister is not afraid to announce she is in love. When she went on a theater tour last summer, she wrote us a letter every two days pining for the son of the artistic director. All it caused was my mother’s injured whispering to a neighbor, her sad tirades that the director’s son would never marry Marina because she is too old or because she is an actress, her sighing and lamenting that Marina should have applied to medical school. Yet precisely because she is an actress, my sister doesn’t care that she is baring herself to the ears of the entire floor of our apartment building. She is bold; she’s above the gossip; she is not afraid. Me? I’d rather die than give my mother the advantage of sighing and pitying me. In my grandmother’s words, what’s inside you no one can touch.

In her letter, my mother says that her brother, my uncle Vova, who wasn’t killed during the war and now lives in the town of Ryazan, is vacationing only five kilometers from where I am, in a House of Rest and Recreation, where he was sent because he is a war veteran. Maybe I can arrange to see him, she says, giving me his Crimean phone number.

I don’t mind seeing Uncle Vova. I mostly know him from letters and birthday cards with the poems he likes to compose. They’re amateurish poems, but there is a powerful line now and then, a line that sinks deep and rakes up something I’ve been thinking. So I don’t dismiss his poems as I do my aunt Muza’s, who rhymes any two words that float into her head and then mails them to us on glossy cards embossed with roses.

Also, I wouldn’t mind getting away from our beach for a day. Even the sea, salty and warm and green, can become monotonous if that’s all you see for four weeks.

I call my uncle and we meet at a bus stop in the village where he’s living, the biggest landmark we can think of. I bring a bottle of champagne made in Novy Svet, at one of the only two champagne-producing vineyards in the country. It’s real vintage champagne, made exclusively for export, with a complicated yellow label I’ve never seen before, not the usual champagne called Sovetskoye, which is cooked under pressure for four months before it is released into the stores. The export-quality champagne was procured from a truck driver Nina and I flagged down because we needed gasoline for our camp stove, a generous driver who siphoned five liters of state gas for us and whom we invited down to the beach for mussels and wine.

Uncle Vova stands on the dusty shoulder of the road, smiling. His smile is a little crooked: the right corner of his mouth seems suspended by an invisible thread, surrounded by scarred, almost white skin, the result of a burn. I’ve always assumed that the burned skin was a Great Patriotic War trophy and imagined him climbing out of a burning tank or tossing grenades into battalions of advancing Germans. But last year I found out he’d burned his face in a school accident in chemistry class when he was eleven. He was miserable in the hospital, my mother said, wailing in pain whenever they changed the dressing because the bandages kept sticking to the wound, tearing off pieces of burned skin along with the fabric. Then an innovative surgeon came up with the idea to have my grandmother buy bars of chocolate, no matter how expensive or difficult it was to get. After Vova ate the chocolate, the surgeon sterilized the silver foil it was wrapped in and used it instead of bandages for dressing. The skin didn’t stick to the foil; the taste of the chocolate was exquisite because it was rare, and Vova recovered in record time.

“Black as a Negro,” says my uncle, looking me over with his twisted smile.

“We live on the beach,” I say. “We’re all black.”

“Boys and girls together?” he asks, squinting and pretending to make a serious face.

I like my uncle. Instead of sighing and worrying about my living on the beach with boys, as my mother would do, he winks and asks me about the bottle of champagne I’m carrying. When I tell him the truck driver story, his eyes glimmer with respect and a flicker of admiration at my ingenuity and my guts. Nina and I stood on the road in bathing suits, trying to look helpless, an empty canister for gas hidden in the underbrush.

The truth is that normally I don’t have any guts. Back in Leningrad, it makes me cringe to attract the smallest bit of attention to myself, but here, in this new world of Novy Svet, I am fearless, as if it’s not even me, as if the sun had branded me with a new identity. Here I can be outrageous and carefree. I sit cross-legged in the warm dust of a road shoulder with a cigarette, attracting punishing glances from passing mothers with teenage daughters in tow. I crawl under rows of vines at a local collective farm, plucking down bunches of grapes. The other day Nina and I climbed onto the biggest rock hanging over our cove and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy in English in front of the whole Kiev group, in front of the whole Black Sea, which by that time of night was literally black. Granted, we’d been drinking mugfuls of wine, but I can’t imagine reciting anything, in Russian or English, in front of my friends back home, even if it were pitch black outside, even if they’d asked.

“So what do you say if we drink to our meeting?” offers my uncle. To my new, fearless self, drinking on a bench sounds thrilling. As he’s already complained to me, the House of Rest and Recreation doesn’t allow alcohol on the premises. If I’d wanted a sanatorium, he says, I’d have stayed home with my wife.

We find a bench under a strange gnarled tree that doesn’t grow in the north. Uncle Vova pops the champagne open, and we take turns sipping from the bottle. The warm bubbles back up my nose and make me hiccup; to my chagrin, I cannot tell the difference between this export-quality rarity and the Sovetskoye champagne we buy for the New Year’s holiday. But my uncle seems pleased, and the other side of his mouth, the unburned side, curls up, too.

We sit in the shade of the strange tree and talk about the Crimea. I tell him about a militia raid, and wine squirting out of vending machines, and seawater fluorescing at night. He tells me that the House of Rest and Recreation has a ten o’clock curfew. Then we walk to where he’s staying, a cement building with uniform institutional blinds. In front of it, there are small trees planted in rows, just a hundred meters from the sea. “It’s dinnertime soon,” he says. “Let’s go up to my room and I’ll try to sneak in some food from the cafeteria.”

The room is small and functional, but what I see through an open door strikes me as almost surreal: in the halo of white tile gleams a bathroom. For four weeks I’ve washed in the sea, rubbing my hair with a bar of laundry soap, trying to make it lather in the salty water. My uncle’s bathroom, with its luxuries of white porcelain and chrome, could have floated directly from the pages of the Western magazines our customs officials routinely confiscate at the border.

“Pretty pathetic, eh?” comments Uncle Vova, watching me freeze on the bathroom threshold. “From a place for war veterans you’d expect something more modern.” I truly don’t know what he means. The tiles sparkle and blind me; the water gurgles out of the spout, abundant fresh water that makes soap bubble and blaze with every color of the rainbow. I unleash more water—from a bathtub faucet, from a showerhead—and it rushes out in cascades of silver, splendid water without color or taste.

Uncle Vova smiles and closes the door. Water splatters onto my skin, which has become as dark and dense as a hide, so dark that my fingernails glow like pale lights, that I can see a border between the suntanned skin of my instep and my white sole. I soap my hair into a heap of lather; I lie in the tub rubbing my skin free of the four weeks of salt. When I finally stick my head out the door, my uncle says he has to go down to the cafeteria if he doesn’t want to miss dinner. “I’ll steal something good for you,” he promises.

I feel so clean I’m weightless. I glide around the room, around another surreal entity, a bed with sheets. I’ll just try what it feels like, I think, the feeling of white cotton against the skin, but the next thing I hear is Uncle Vova’s voice telling me I’m missing some great
kotlety
with mushroom sauce he’s hidden in a towel. “You’ve been sleeping for two hours,” he laughs. “Don’t you have time to sleep on the beach?”

I see a plate covered with newspaper as he unwraps a towel, but my head doesn’t want to part with the pillow and my arms seem glued to the sheets.

He takes away the newspaper, revealing two perfect
kotlety
under the blanket of brown sauce, definitely not extracted from a can, that seem as delicious and unreal as a mirage.

He watches me chew with his crooked half-smile, not lamenting that I am not sleeping in a real bed or eating properly, not accusing my friend Nina of dragging me down to the Crimea to live exposed to the elements like a homeless
bomzh,
not asking about Boris or if there is a Boris. And even if he asked, I bet he could keep a secret. After all, he was the one who performed an abortion on my mother when she was between husbands and when abortion was illegal. I know this because in a drawer of my mother’s desk I found a blue notebook, its pages covered with her square handwriting, detailing her life before she moved to Leningrad. She must have written it for posterity, and that meant for me. So I read it. And even then, at fifteen, I found it ironic that out of the three siblings in her family who survived the war, my mother, so much in love with order and the proper way of doing things—far more than Uncle Vova or even Aunt Muza—is the only one who has had three marriages, three hasty unions, of which none seemed perfect or even good.

I know this is the last time I will see Uncle Vova like this, just me and him, with no family bustling around to tell us not to swill champagne out of a bottle or not to steal food from the cafeteria or not to do something else disorderly, whatever it is.

We give each other a tight hug and stay in each other’s arms for a minute, both cherishing the moment, both knowing it won’t happen again. I’m grateful to Uncle Vova for being twisted-lipped and incurious, for not asking and not pitying. I’m grateful for the stolen
kotlety
in mushroom sauce.

I get back to the cove when it’s dark and the mattresses are already scattered in their night positions on the beach. It looks tranquil and safe, like a Pioneer summer camp, where days are predictable and easy. Maybe my mother is right, after all, and life under the open sky does have its perils. Sameness, for instance—the sum of perfect weather and the perfect songs Yura keeps strumming on his guitar. Uncensored sex, for instance—with no one to ban or even diminish it with a slant-eyed look, robbing it of tension, smudging it with the dust of the ordinary.

I take off my shoes and wade into the dark water. When I wiggle my toes, grapes of fluorescing bubbles bunch around my feet, making the water glow from within. This happens only in August, Boris says, the result of sea plankton that floats close to the shore. Around me, the outlines of rocks are slowly dissolving in the dark, and the top of the white moon, like the heel of a loaf of bread, looms above them. Everyone is about to go to sleep in Novy Svet, the new world that suddenly feels so old.

17. Facilitator of Acquisition

Y
OU AND YOUR FRIEND
Nina can celebrate,” whispers my English professor, Natalia Borisovna, into my ear. “The head of the department and the leader of our local party cell have approved your candidacies. You’re starting next week.” She wraps her arm around my shoulder to indicate her approval: I am considered mature enough to teach Russian in the six-week summer program for American students. I don’t know why she has to whisper; maybe it must be kept secret that there are live Americans wandering around the university premises in such close proximity to Soviet citizens.

Nina and I have just graduated from the English department of Leningrad University. As soon as Natalia Borisovna releases her hold on my shoulder, I rush across town to tell Nina the good news, and we celebrate in her kitchen with menthol cigarettes, pondering through the clouds of smoke how brilliantly we are going to lure our capitalist students into the world of Russian language and literature.

At home, I don’t feel so cavalier. Aside from a freshman class I was assigned to teach in my senior, sixth, year, I’ve never stood in front of a group of students. Especially foreign students, who are probably used to teaching methods that are uncommon and advanced, like everything else in America. We get reports from emigrants—stories that reach us through a complicated chain of connections—that in America you can buy mushrooms in March and strawberries in December; that there is never a shortage of books—any books; that a police officer who stopped one such emigrant for speeding asked him to step out of the car because he didn’t want to humiliate him in front of his ten-year-old son. The last story seems so unbelievable and maudlin it makes me snicker. What kind of government worries about hurting the feelings of its citizens, especially children? Everyone knows that a government is supposed to govern, not sympathize, as Lenin pointed out in 1918. Ours is busy enforcing residency regulations that ban us from moving, and issuing refusals to emigration petitions, which guarantee that applicants will be kicked out of their jobs and then publicly humiliated. If our feelings aren’t bruised, we instantly become suspicious.