A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (9 page)

I
N
M
ARCH OUR THIRD-GRADE
class is scheduled to go to a dental clinic. Vera Pavlovna writes the date on the board, in cursive letters uniformly bent to the right, and tells us to copy it into our school journals—Wednesday, March 10.

I hate the dental visit. I wish I could expunge the date we all wrote into our journals, eradicate it from the page and from existence. I wish I could cancel all future trips, one per grade, that will loom in the third quarter of each year, dampening the anticipation of International Women’s Day, when all the boys in my class timidly produce little mandatory presents for all the girls and the last period on March 7 is dedicated entirely to the distribution of pencil sharpeners, erasers, and pocket combs.

Last March, the dentist poked and prodded inside my mouth, looking angry when she didn’t find any cavities to fill. This time, I suspect, she won’t be so disappointed. You cannot be lucky two times in a row, says my sister, who is studying acting in Moscow, and she may be right. I think of the kilograms of Squirrels—chocolate candy wrapped in blue paper with a picture of a brown squirrel holding a huge nut—that I’ve cajoled out of my mother over the past year. My mother pretends she doesn’t want to buy the candy, but I know she likes to unwrap a Squirrel with tea, so every time we walk into a grocery store we play the same game I learned in nursery school.

“Please, can I have some Squirrels, please,” I whine as she stands in line to pay for bread at the cash register. The counter with sweets is right next to the bakery counter. Behind an indifferent saleswoman, ignorant of the fact that she has unlimited access to such treasure, sit chocolate candies called Red Poppy, Polar Bear, and Kara-Kum Desert, with camels trotting across the yellow wrapping papers. Under the wrappers is a thin layer of silver foil that crinkles under my fingers when I open a piece and a dark brown side emerges in all its nut-and-chocolate glory. “Please,” I beg, “only two hundred grams.”

“Candy is bad for you,” says my mother as the cashier gives her a receipt, which she must now take to the bread saleswoman. “I let your sister eat all the candy she wanted and now look—she’s studying acting. Maybe she’d be an engineer or a pathologist like Galya if I wasn’t so soft on her.”

The idea that Squirrels lead to acting makes little sense, but this is not the time to argue with my mother. “Just a little bit,” I wheedle. “A little tiny bit for the evening tea.”

At the bakery counter she exchanges the receipt for a brick of black bread and a loaf of white
bulka
.

“For the tea,” I whimper. “
Chut-chut
—just the tiniest bit.”

She glances at the line to the cashier, which now consists only of an old babushka and a woman with a baby in her arms. With just two people, you can’t even call it a line.

“All right,” she concedes and takes out her purse, just as I knew she would. “But only
chut-chut
.”

O
N
M
ARCH
10,
THE
thirty-eight of us pile into a streetcar that takes us to Dental Clinic #34. In pairs, we file into a fluorescent-glaring waiting room with a sharp odor of something that smells like the ether they use to kill rabbits in my mother’s anatomy lab.

We are told to sit down and wait. My partner, Sveta Yurasova, and I, still holding hands, take the two end seats, away from the door with the sinister sign “Treatment Room,” away from Dimka the hooligan, who glides across the linoleum pretending he is skating.

Vera Pavlovna lifts her arm, asking for our attention, but it isn’t her gesture that makes us all quiet down. The door into the Treatment Room opens and reveals rows of drills, ominous and still silent. In the doorway stands a square woman in a white gown and a cotton hat neatly ironed into creases that make it rise on her head like a meringue pie. We are all quiet now, frozen in our last gesture before the door to the Treatment Room opened, as if we were all actors performing the final scene of Gogol’s
Inspector General,
the most famous silent theater scene of all time.

“Antonova,” reads the woman from a file in her hand, and our eyes all turn to Anya Antonova, a girl with a red braid down her back who gets up and obediently follows the woman into a vast room behind the door.

“Alphabetical order,” says Sveta, and she smiles an embarrassed smile because she will be the last one to be called. I know she is thinking about all the things that could happen between A and Y, hoping for a sudden power outage, or a swift lethal disease that exclusively affects dentists, or even an emergency history test that Vera Pavlovna remembers she has to administer by the end of the day.

I don’t have Sveta’s luxury of hoping and waiting. My name is at the front of the alphabet, G being the fourth letter, after A, B, and V. Yet I know that even if I had the guts to run out of here, the first militiaman on the street would drag me back, to Vera Pavlovna’s scolding. I am nine and I’ve already learned that there is no escape from this waiting room, from this annual dental punishment, from this order of life.

But the worst drawback of being at the front of the alphabetical list is that no one has yet returned to tell the story. They are all still inside, the A’s, B’s, and V’s, pressed into cotton-padded chairs, cringing away from the drills.

The door opens again and the first dentist, the woman in the meringue pie hat, is staring into another folder. “Gorokhova,” she barks, my last name only, in a voice that suddenly sounds like Aunt Polya’s. I creep across the waiting room and Vera Pavlovna, who is now standing by the door, pats me on the back.

The room is the size of our school cafeteria, with twelve dental chairs arranged in two rows, although the drills make it look less like a cafeteria and more like a factory floor. A factory for neglected teeth compromised by too many Squirrels. I see my three classmates, small inside the tall chairs, their open mouths gaping in faces twisted with fear. As I follow the meringue hat around the towering drills, I see Anya Antonova, the first one called, her hand over her cheek, climbing out of the chair now designated for me.

“Sit down,” says the dentist, and she begins to study my chart. I hope she studies it well enough to see that I had no cavities last year despite all those chocolates my mother pretends she doesn’t like. I hope she decides I am an exceptional case and lets me out of this chair with padded arms and the drill looming on my right.

She stops reading, puts down the folder, and sinks onto a stool next to the chair. She is so close I can see little black hairs over her upper lip and creases radiating from her eyes into her hair. From the table that is out of my sight she picks up something long and metal. “Open wide,” she says and starts poking inside my mouth, tugging at my teeth with a metal hook, wheezing into my face with a breath of cabbage and black bread.

Then she stops, puts down the poking instrument, and starts writing in the file. She writes and writes, and the more she writes the lower my hopes sink until they cannot sink any lower, hitting the bottom of the dental abyss. I hear someone scream through the whizzing of drills, and it begins to smell like burning wire, or maybe smoldering bone.

“Open wide,” says my meringue-hatted dentist as she packs my mouth full of chalk-tasting rolls of cotton. “And stay open.”

I shut my eyes and stay open. I hear the drill roaring to life; I taste its metal heat as it bores into one tooth, then the second one, then the third, and then I lose count. The drill seems to gouge into the center of every tooth, burning and coming too close to something soft and unprotected that I know would hurt much more than I can tolerate. I clench my fists and think of my father. I think of how strong he had to be to survive the Gulf of Finland storm. I imagine him being pummeled by the waves, struck by the oars flying in the wind. I imagine him clenching his fists around the wood and rowing as hard as he could, hard pellets of rain whipping him in the face. He withstood it all. Not even for a moment did he think of crying or moaning or showing that it hurt.

When the buzzing of the drill finally stops and I feel the soaked rolls of cotton being pulled out, I open my eyes and see Vera Pavlovna standing in front of me, smiling.

“
Molodets,
” she says. “Five cavities and you didn’t even cry.”

I know she is being generous because I feel the hot path of two tears that rolled down my cheeks. But I know they were silent tears nobody heard, and that makes them unimportant because my dentist with the meaty hands didn’t notice them or pretended she didn’t as she drilled the teeth decayed by too many Squirrels.

The rest is easy. After the dentist mixes the ingredients on her table, she dips something cold and ether-smelling into each drilled hole. Then she scoops the mixture and packs it into each tooth, pressing hard with her metal hook. It doesn’t matter that the ether stings and makes my tongue go numb; it doesn’t matter that the scraping makes me wince. If I can withstand the drill, I can be like my father. I can withstand anything.

Back in the waiting room, I see Sveta Yurasova crouched in the corner. She is impressed by my valor, but her eyes are all pupils. I know she has realized that nothing extraordinary is going to happen between G and Y that will save her.

As I sit there waiting for everyone to be drilled and patched, I find out that five cavities wasn’t actually that bad. Dimka the hooligan, as it turns out, had twelve and is still sweating in the dentist’s chair. Zoya the diamond wailed so loudly and jerked her head so much every time she heard the drill start that the dentist screamed at her, kicked her out of the chair, and told her to come back with her mother. And Anya Antonova, the first girl to go in, has had a dose of arsenic crammed into the root of her tooth and is required to come back in three days when the nerve is dead so that the meringue-hatted dentist can perform a root canal.

My partner Sveta, the last one to go in, turns out to be the luckiest of all. She takes on my role of last year, the girl with perfect teeth, and even the meanest dentist, the one who yelled at Zoya for crying, fails to find a single cavity in her frightened mouth.

A
T HOME
,
WHEN WE
have our evening tea, I tell my father about the dental visit. He sits in his usual place at the head of the kitchen table, across from my mother, his knee drawn up to his chin, a pack of filterless Belomors next to his teacup. My father doesn’t like sweets, so he has a slice of black bread in his hand, a big piece my mother cut off the center of the loaf and slathered with a thick layer of butter. My father takes a pinch of salt with his fingers and sprinkles it all over the buttered bread.

“I hate
zubniks,
” I say, using a word I’ve made up, a tooth person instead of a dentist.

“Don’t call doctors names,” says my mother. “They are dentists, not
zubniks
.”

I like the word I’ve made up because it’s precise. Dentists are tooth people, that’s all they are, prodding around your mouth every March in desperate search of reasons to pull on the cord of a rusty drill and step on a pedal to grind it to life.

I wonder what my father thinks about
zubniks
. His teeth look perfect and white, undoubtedly because all his life he’s probably eaten black bread instead of Squirrels with evening tea. Maybe he can teach me something I don’t know. Maybe he can tell me a dental secret that only people with perfect teeth know, the secret that goes beyond staying away from chocolate candy.

“I want your teeth,” I say to my father. “Perfect, with no cavities.”

My mother gives him a look across the table, the look that makes my father reach for matches and shake a cigarette out of the pack.

I feel I need to take a closer look at his teeth, at the teeth that should be mine because he is my father, so I get off my stool and wiggle into his lap and tug on his lips. I pull them apart so I can see his flawless teeth, uniform and straight as in a poster for dental hygiene. In comparison, my mother’s teeth, which are full of metal fillings, should be a reminder of black bread’s superiority and a deterrent against buying more Squirrels.

But are perfect teeth worth giving up candy in favor of black bread? Is it worth suffering for years and denying myself the pleasure of Squirrels so I could end up with my father’s teeth, or is it better to succumb to guilt and a yearly dentist’s drill?

I’m proud of myself for asking these philosophical questions about guilt and pleasure, but I know that there is one big unasked question hiding behind this oratory. The question is this: are these perfect teeth real? Once or twice, when my father stayed in bed because he didn’t feel well, I saw a glass on the bathroom sink—something that was there only when he didn’t go to work—filled with cloudy water and chunks of pink, curved plastic sprouting something that looked suspiciously like teeth. Are his own teeth so full of cavities and metal that he has to cover them up with this pretend façade that needs to be kept in a glass? Is this just another instance of
vranyo,
like our dacha’s fake sink or my mother’s insincere disdain for Squirrels?

My father pulls away from my hands and lights a cigarette. He doesn’t want any more bread, he says, when my mother picks up a knife to cut off another slice. “You want my teeth?” he asks, lifts me from his lap, and puts me down on the floor.