A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (2 page)

By the second year, the brigade method was replaced with individual learning. A professor of anatomy arrived all the way from Moscow and promptly issued a failing grade to a former tractor driver. The days of dozing and daydreaming were over.

For the first time at the Medical Institute, my mother opened a textbook and by sheer force of will memorized the name of every bone, vein, muscle, tissue, tendon, and joint. She passed the anatomy final. She passed the surgery internship and the most serious exam of all, in scientific communism, a course hastily spun from quotes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, a requirement for graduation in every university of the Soviet Union, across all its eleven time zones.

Three months after graduation, my mother was the chief and only physician of a fifteen-bed rural hospital thirty kilometers from Ivanovo, near a factory that produced bricks of peat mined from the nearby underground swamps. Brimming with energy and the enthusiasm of the first socialist generation, she was eager to make things better. It was 1937, the twentieth year of Soviet power, the busiest year of the Gulag camps. It was the twenty-third year of my mother’s life—when, for the first time, she left her parents’ home, when her future rose on the horizon like the huge crimson sun over the swamp outside her new apartment window.

She set up a trauma point where she bandaged victims of accidents, mostly work-related: severed fingers, broken arms, bruised backs and shoulders. But she knew she could do more. Although most of the factory workers were women, there was no maternity ward in the hospital. To give birth, women had to take a horse-drawn carriage to a district hospital eight kilometers away, a long ride on a road often buried under snow or washed out by rain. There had already been two babies born en route, one of whom did not survive the trip. She made a call to the local health department and was told that maternity wards were not a top priority at a time when epidemics of typhus and tuberculosis were mowing down entire towns.

Indignant at such a lack of insight on the part of the local authorities, my mother sat down and wrote a letter to the real leader. General Secretary, Moscow, the Kremlin. “Dear Comrade Stalin,” she began. “The patients at my hospital have no place to give birth to our new citizens. The Soviet women, who toil in peat swamps for our common bright future, deserve better.” She stopped to consider how to word her request so that in one simple, effective sentence she would cut through the necessary layers of steel to what she knew was the leader’s compassionate heart. “My apartment can easily be turned into a maternity ward with the help of a few necessary pieces of equipment (list attached). Please help.”

She thought of the best way to sign the letter, vacillating from “comrade” to “citizen” to “physician.” Comrade seemed too self-promoting: how could she be a comrade to the legend? Citizen was too impersonal. She finally chose her professional title, which still sounded strange, Dr. Galina Kuzminova.

The letter, she knew, was a gamble. Only months earlier, when she was living in the Ivanovo apartment with her parents, her siblings, and her uncle, there had been a knock on the door in the middle of the night. It was a loud, demanding knock, the kind that came only at two or three in the morning, the kind that everyone recognized even if they’d never heard it before. Two men in black coats marched straight to the room where her uncle Volya lived with his wife and fifteen-year-old daughter, turned the mattresses and all the drawers upside down, and announced that Uncle Volya was under arrest.

“For what?” asked Aunt Lilya in a ragged voice.

“You’ll find out,” muttered one of the men.

Uncle Volya stood in the middle of the room, in silly flannel pajamas, trying to quell an asthma attack. His round shoulders were slouched forward, and his mouth gasped for breath as he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “It’s all a mistake, a misunderstanding,” he whispered as soon as he could muster enough air, the handkerchief in his hand quivering. The men ordered him to put on a coat and escorted him to a van known as a
voronok
, or black raven, parked in front of their house. Weeks later Aunt Lilya learned that as part of his job in a propaganda agency, he’d taken a stranger from Moscow to a restaurant. There, sitting next to a good citizen dispatched by the NKVD—the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—to listen to conversations with strangers, Uncle Volya told a joke.

It wasn’t even a political joke.
Two militiamen are invited to Comrade Kozlov’s birthday party. What should we give him? asks one. The best gift is a book, says the other. No, says the first militiaman. Comrade Kozlov already has a book
.

They had all heard this joke before, but now it sounded unfunny and flat. Why did Uncle Volya even bother telling such a bad joke? My mother knew he should have been more careful around strangers. Pasted all over town were posters of a woman in a red head kerchief with a finger across her lips and a caption
ne boltai
in big red letters: do not babble. Babbling was only one step away from treason. Still, she believed that the NKVD had made a mistake. How could Comrade Stalin possibly have arrested an innocent man, her meek and soft-jowled Uncle Volya? Everyone knew that Comrade Stalin wanted everyone to have a good life, whether they were peasants or professors.

Yet there it was still fresh in her memory, the image of her uncle’s trembling handkerchief and his arm missing the sleeve of his coat as the two men yanked all ten volumes of his collected works of Chekhov off the shelf, shaking them open, tossing them on the floor, angry that they could find nothing inside.

My mother also thought of my grandfather, who, in 1921, according to family lore, had telegraphed Lenin when a train full of wheat brought for the starving people of Ivanovo had been detained by a squadron of Red Army soldiers with shotguns. A few hours later, as the story went, the train was allowed to pass, thanks to her father’s telegram.

In her mind, the scene of Uncle Volya being led away into the black
voronok
for telling a joke wrestled for a few minutes with the happy image of the Ivanovo citizens saved from starvation by a telegram. She stubbornly decided to believe that Stalin did not know of this obvious injustice, that it all happened as the result of an un-Soviet struggle for power among his crooked underlings.

But now she was writing directly to Stalin, the country’s conscience and revolutionary glory. My mother signed the letter, folded it in quarters, and gave the envelope to Fyodor, who tended to the hospital horse Verochka and every other day drove the buggy eight kilometers to the nearest town.

A few weeks later, when routine traumas and illnesses had focused her attention away from the letter addressed to the Kremlin, she was called to the office of the head of the district health department. Comrade Palkin sat behind a desk, decked out in a military uniform like Stalin and thin-framed round glasses like the head of the NKVD, Beria. His head was small and bald, with wisps of down over the ears, and his thick forearms, which looked like they belonged to a bigger man, lay on the desk like logs. Leaning over the papers before him as if they were his prisoners, he failed to get up when my mother walked in, despite my grandmother’s assertion that a man had no choice but to stand when a woman entered a room.

“Whom did you write to?” Palkin asked gravely, barely waiting for her to sit down.

“I wrote to Secretary Stalin,” said my mother.

Palkin stared stonily from behind his glasses, and she thought of Uncle Volya. They still hadn’t heard anything about him, despite the fact that Aunt Lilya took a week off to travel to Moscow, where she spent four days and nights standing in front of the Lubyanka NKVD prison, waiting to speak to someone, never allowed inside.

But my mother wasn’t about to show that she was frightened, that her heart, contrary to all she knew about anatomy, was thumping somewhere in her throat. Showing what you felt was as dangerous as babbling. Lock up what you think, my grandmother had always said. What’s inside you no one can touch.

“I’ve just received this order from Moscow,” growled Palkin, baring bad teeth, stabbing a piece of paper with his finger while my mother imagined black
voronoks
and firing squads. “According to this order, Moscow is releasing fifteen thousand rubles to turn your apartment into a delivery room.”

He might as well have said fifteen million rubles. My mother made three hundred rubles a month, a salary her former classmates envied, and since her largest purchase ever had been a woolen winter coat, she’d never seen a ruble note with more than one zero.

Back at the hospital, she went to the peat factory director’s office and asked him to give her a room in the workers’ dormitory. Only days after her meeting with Comrade Palkin, the needed equipment arrived and was installed in her former apartment with an efficiency she’d never seen before. By the spring a four-bed maternity ward was opened, where my mother delivered fifteen babies. During deliveries, she learned how to use forceps, turn a fetus, and manually separate the placenta. The women at the peat factory expressed their gratitude with string bags of cucumbers from their gardens and an occasional tin of lard.

My mother felt euphoric and important: what she’d done had upheld
poryadok
, order. The order that the country needed, that
she
needed. She described all this in her letter home, which, when she reread it, sounded as lofty and stiff as the front page of
Pravda
. Yet what she wanted to say was simple and short.

She’d survived.

2. My Mother’s Husbands

W
HEN MY MOTHER MET
my father in 1950, she had an eight-year-old daughter, my half-sister, Marina, and had already been married twice, two meteoric war marriages whose trajectories faded within months.

Her first husband was delivered to her by the short war of 1939 between the Soviet Union and Finland, laid out on her operating table with bits of shrapnel buried in his rear end.

“What a way to stop a bullet,” said her former classmate Vera, who had been drafted into the same hospital.

My mother sliced open the buttocks of her future spouse and extracted pieces of metal, all except one, a shard lodged near the hip bone. She tried and tried, cutting and prodding, but finally had to leave it there, a lasting memory of their first meeting stowed deeply under his skin.

His name was Sasha Gladky, a graduate medical student himself all the way from Leningrad University, and he joked and laughed about his wound, basking in the attention of the female hospital staff. My mother, looking serious during the daily rounds, evaluated the healing process and checked the sutures. Being in full control of Sasha and his treatment—the expression of his broad-boned face with a slight cleft in the chin when she checked his temperature, the gratitude she could read in his gray, deep eyes—made her want to stay with him forever.

“I bet you he’ll ask me to marry him,” said my mother to Vera, nodding her head toward the door behind which Sasha lay surrounded by nurses. It was almost two weeks since she had operated, a few days before he was scheduled to return to Leningrad.

She liked Sasha’s eyes following her around the room as she sterilized syringes in boiling water, trying to concoct a plan to keep him there longer. She was approaching twenty-five, rapidly getting too old for marriage. Her own mother had married when she was eighteen, her friend Vera when she turned twenty-two. The best child-bearing age, as everyone knew, was twenty, and she’d missed that a long time ago.

Two days after the prescribed date, she signed his discharge order. Before leaving, Sasha waited for her in the back lot overgrown with thistle, where with a bashful smile, he announced that it was fate that had brought them together. He promised to send her a letter every week and a box of chocolates. “Chocolates!” marveled Vera. “For chocolates
I’d
marry him, too.” A box arrived a few weeks later, embossed with Peter the Great atop a rearing horse, the famous Leningrad “Bronze Horseman” on the front. Since the beginning of the war, chocolates had completely vanished from the stores, and this huge box reminded my mother that it was her efforts and skill that had saved Sasha.

A few months later, when the Finnish War ended, Sasha came back to Ivanovo and they were married. Marriage was easy then, a fat purple stamp from the town hall on the third page of their internal passports and a name change for my mother from Kuzminova to Gladky. After four days Sasha returned to his studies in Leningrad. He sent letters to my mother once a week, then once a month. Then came a letter she did not expect: he accused her of having affairs while he was stooping over medical journals in the Leningrad library. Someone, an anonymous source, had informed him in a letter that his new wife—
stroinaya kak beryozka
, tall and slender as a birch tree—was, as he scribbled in a quick, slanted stroke, nothing but a tart.

My mother felt shock, then anger. She immediately grabbed a pen and wrote back to Sasha that if he could believe this, the two of them had nothing to discuss. If he could trust such toxic gossip, they were finished and their marriage dissolved.

She didn’t really mean it. She simply wanted to register her indignation and discontent, expecting an apology and another box of chocolates. But no answer came. She waited two months and sent an angry inquiry to the anatomy department of Leningrad University, where he studied. The response came months later, in the fall of 1941, when German troops were already deep into Russia. Like all doctors, Sasha had been drafted to the front. On the map of the Soviet Union, where the black stain of German troops was rapidly expanding, there were already several fronts, and no one knew where they’d sent Sasha. No one would ever know.