A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (34 page)

I realize I know so little about America it’s embarrassing. I’ve never seen an American newspaper or magazine; decreed subversive and dangerous, they are all confiscated at the border. The only American English I’ve heard was an interview with Angela Davis, the head of the Communist Party of the United States, whom I could barely understand because she rolled her
r
’s in a way our phonetics professor called “utterly un-British.”

I haven’t read anything besides what we all read in class—Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
(an anti-war declaration) and Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
(an exposé of capitalist ulcers). The rest of the books, the ones that don’t denounce or expose, trickle in at unpredictable intervals, like deliveries of mayonnaise or imported shoes to local stores. Recently one of our professors snuck in a contemporary novel called
The Other Side of Midnight
from her recent trip to England, and I’m now in line to read it behind all the full-time faculty of the English department. I’ve estimated that at the present rate it should reach me in about four weeks since the first person in line read the book in two days.

And I’ve never seen a live American.

C
LASSES START IN THE
middle of June. I teach three times a week, from 9:00 to 11:50
A.M.
, grammar and conversation. I’ve prepared myself for the nauseating feeling of first-day trepidation, a familiar gut jiggle we all know from annual school visits to the dental clinic or from quiet struggles with school authorities who try to arm-twist good students into serving as local Komsomol, or Young Communist, leaders. Yet, surprisingly, I don’t tremble inside when I walk through the door of my first class and face fourteen Americans, staring at me with the same intense curiosity with which I stare back at them. My Russian is by far superior to theirs, and since this is an immersion program and we can’t use any English during class, I will always have the upper hand, at least linguistically.

As we go through the introductions, I look into their faces, not as foreign as their accents. Lisa from Vermont, blonde and broad-boned, could have come here on a weekend bus tour from Finland; Charles from Virginia, in round spectacles and pimples, looks as if he belongs in the advanced math and physics school, # 239, two blocks from where I live. They look familiar—Steven, Mary, Tony, who immediately become Stepan, Masha, and Anton—yet their otherness is exposed by their open glances, their straight backs, their eagerness to speak our convoluted language, full of conjugations, noun cases, verb aspects, and palatalized consonants that no foreigner can master. They are uninhibited and unafraid. They are earnest and straightforward. They are the opposite of me.

They are from good universities—Dartmouth, Columbia, Duke. I’ve never heard of any of those schools, but I nod as though I have. This is also a good university, I say, looking around. I don’t know if it’s true—I have no references, no comparison lists, no guides—but I sound as though I do. They nod vigorously,
da
,
da
, a very good school. Only the dorm is somewhat
antikvarny
, they say. No, I correct them in a teacher’s tone—
staryi—
old, not antique.

They laugh. Of course, not antique, far from antique. What I don’t tell them is that it’s not even old. It was built five years ago, when I was just starting at the university and passing the building four days a week on the way to school. The rickety scaffolding creaked in the wind, and the workers in quilted
vatnik
jackets and
ushanka
hats staggered around, half-drunk, taking with them at the end of the day everything they could carry—doorknobs, faucets, nails. It was a normal construction site, and the dorm is a normal new building—instantly old and as shoddy as everything else.

The Americans are diligent students. They do their homework and ask questions. During breaks they struggle with case endings to tell me what they saw the previous afternoon after class. The Hermitage and Peterhoff fountains. The cruiser
Aurora,
permanently anchored on the Neva bend not far from their dorm, which signaled the storming of the Winter Palace with one blank cannon shot. Lenin’s hiding place in the Leningrad suburb of Razliv, a straw tent with the leader’s cap and boots displayed on top of a tree stump. “Only they weren’t even his original cap and boots,” says Anton in an acerbic voice. Copies, the sign says; originals safe-guarded in the Kremlin. “Safe-guarded?” asks Anton, with amused disdain. “Cap and boots in a Kremlin safe?” “They’re afraid someone may steal them,” I offer, “some
kapitalisty
like you.” They laugh, thinking it’s a joke. I meant it as a joke, yet—although I’ve never been to Razliv, having somehow dodged every school trip that would herd us there—I know this is the reason Lenin’s cap and boots in his straw tent are reproductions. Capitalists, as we all know, are enemies not to be trusted, who won’t hesitate to stoop to such a lowly thing as pilfering Lenin’s real belongings and selling them on the market to the highest bidder.

They tell me about the food at the university cafeteria.
Uzhasnaya
, they complain—awful. As an instructor for the American program, I have a pass to the cafeteria. It’s really a faculty cafeteria, but the visiting American students have a meal plan there so they won’t be instantly poisoned. When I eat at the cafeteria, I can’t help but linger by the desserts enthroned seductively under glass: squares of cake with roses of butter frosting, flaky puffs covered with chocolate, mountains of whipped cream I’ve never seen anywhere else. I gawk at the stuffed cabbage, whose ingredients include meat, at the carrot salad studded with raisins. For one ruble, I load my tray with delicacies and wolf them down at a corner table, away from other people’s eyes. For some reason I feel as if I were here illegally, undeserving of all this hard-to-get food my American students mock.

On Fridays, Nina and I and all the teachers go to the main auditorium to hear lectures on Russian history and literature given to the American students by our best university professors. It isn’t that we’re so eager to be enlightened about the Decembrists’ uprising of 1825 or Lermontov’s “useless people.” After the lecture, the head of the program, an elegant young woman who is rumored to be married to a KGB colonel, unveils a table with an electric samovar and a pile of big poppy seed bagels called
bubliki
, and, along with our students, we drink tea out of traditional glasses propped in metal holders. The real reason we come here is to hear and speak English.

The English we hear is more robust, more dauntless than the British voices on our language-lab tapes. These vowels split jaws; these consonants clatter. My students don’t hesitate now, trying to remember a word or think of a correct noun ending. They are fast and at ease. Navigating their own language puts them in control.

The students from my class have crowded around the samovar and are taking turns swiveling the handle that releases boiling water into a glass.

“You look a little like Natalie Wood,” says Charles from Virginia, biting into a
bublik
.

I don’t know who Natalie Wood is, but I wrinkle my forehead, not quite sure if I heard the name correctly. “Natalie Wood?” I ask and squint my eyes. She is probably someone everyone knows but me.

“An actress. In movies, you know,” says Charles. “Her parents were Russian, you know.”

I don’t know. But should I know? Should I be happy that he compared me to an actress with immigrant parents?

I smile and nod. “My sister is an actress, you know,” I say, trying to carry on this conversation.

Charles utters something in response and I pretend I understand it. I pretend I’m happy.

Then I notice the program director, the one with the KGB husband, giving me sharp looks, and I wonder if I’m pretending too zealously, if she might think that I’m really feeling happy among these students, whom we are glad to introduce to our language and culture but who will always, no matter how innocent they may sound, remain our ideological opponents in the world struggle for mankind’s bright future.

I decide to change position and move to where Nina is standing with two of her students, looking just as happy as I must look to the program director. Cynthia and Robert from her class are older, both graduate students in schools whose names come rattling from their mouths, indecipherable, like a good part of what they say.

“Robert is a writer,” says Cynthia. “Science fiction. He just had a book published,” she boasts, as if it was she who had published a book. “And it’s a good one.”

Robert rubs his forehead and smiles a crooked smile, half timid, half haughty. His eyes squint through thick glasses, and his hand rakes his hair, so curly his fingers get tangled.

“Robert Ackerman,” says Cynthia. “Remember this name,” she mocks, wagging her finger.

Robert smiles and rolls his eyes, chagrined but flattered. I also smile, but not too eagerly, because the program director is again looking in my direction.

T
HE FOLLOWING WEEK, AFTER
my class, when I walk out of the building nicknamed “Catacombs” into the drizzly grayness of the university yard, I find Robert leaning against a tree, waiting.

“Nina told me this is where you’re teaching,” he says, his hands in the pockets of his corduroys, his hair like tiny corkscrews standing on end around his narrow face. Visually he clashes with everything around him—with the birch trunk he is leaning against, with the feeble pansies by his feet, with the cracked and flaking walls behind him—looking utterly un-Russian, looking as if he’d fallen from space. I glance around to make sure the program director isn’t anywhere near to witness this unsanctioned, after-class contact with a foreigner.

We walk out of the courtyard through the main building, past the marble staircase and the huge mirror where Nina and I used to meet before classes, into the gray expanse of the Neva Embankment. The clouds are so low that they have swallowed the top of the Admiralty’s spire on the other side of the river; the end of the gold needle looks as if it’s been broken off.

“It’s so damp,” Robert says. “Like being under water.”

“It’s normal,” I say. “It’s the river, the sea, the swamp, you know.” I’m proud of myself for using that American colloquial “you know,” which I learned from my student Charles. I feel remarkably nonchalant walking past the university with such a foreign-looking man—both American and Jewish, both unwelcome here—whose otherness announces itself in his long, corkscrew hair and well-fitted corduroys and leather shoes that don’t seem to maim his feet. Who, in addition to all these improbabilities, is also the author of a published book.

We slowly walk along the embankment, looking down at the slabs of granite under our feet, not knowing what to say.

“So what do you do when you don’t teach Americans how to speak Russian?” Robert asks in his restless American English after a few minutes of silence.

I’m not sure if this is a question about my official life or my private life. Is he asking what I do at the university or what I do at home, what I say to my English professor or what I say to Nina? Which me is he interested in, the proper university teacher and Komsomol member or the real, smirking, cynical person I am with my friends?

“I teach English,” I say. “Grammar, reading, conversation. We read Galsworthy’s
Forsyte Saga
. Volume One, The Man of Property.”

Robert chuckles and scratches the back of his neck. “Isn’t it boring as hell?” he asks.

“It reveals the ulcers of capitalism,” I say.

He peers at me through his thick glasses to see if I’m serious, to see if it’s time for him to remember that he’s left a kettle boiling over back in his dorm or some other thing that will require his immediate attention.

“It’s boring as hell, you’re right,” I say and give him a smile. It’s not that difficult to choose between the two people inside me. With a Jewish-American writer who has chosen to wait for me, out of all the university women prancing around him with samovars and
bubliki
, I am going to be the real me.

“And what do you do when you don’t write science fiction?” I ask.

“I’m a physicist,” Robert says.

A physicist, I quickly repeat in my mind, not to be confused with a physician, one of my first lessons from a translation class. Not a physician, as my mother was during the war, a kilometer from the German front.

“Nuclear and astrophysics,” explains Robert. “The expansion of the universe, the theory of relativity, black holes. I’m finishing my dissertation at the University of Texas.”

I know nothing about physics. In high school, it was the only subject in which I received a final four instead of a perfect five, the four that prevented me from getting a high school diploma bound in red plastic instead of black.

“I also play the oboe,” says Robert, trying to soften the hard edges of science with music, probably thinking he’s intimidated me with his physics credentials because I don’t say anything. Indeed, I am intimidated; I know as little about music as I do about astrophysics.

“And why are you here?” I ask. “Taking Russian classes in Leningrad?”

Robert stops at the granite stairs leading to the water, to the small leaden waves that slurp onto the wet stone, and stares across the river at the gold cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Even in this damp light it radiates a shine that lifts the clouds off its surface, a little halo of insulation against the rain hanging in the air.