A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (5 page)

She tells us to stand in front of her, straight up, arms down at attention, and explain why we are so special that we think we can just take off on our own. What makes you different from everyone else, she demands, from the rest of our collective, those who don’t run around looking for trouble? What makes you different from those who are content with the sandbox activities?

Back inside, as everyone is herded into the bathroom to sit on tin potties, Genka and I stand in opposite corners of the room. We are told to face the corner, so all I see is a patch of paint peeling off the wall. I wish I could talk to Genka and ask him if he saw anything through the crack in the door, any hint of the garbageman—a gnarled finger or a glimpse of the quilted sleeve of his filthy jacket—but I hear Aunt Polya’s lumbering steps and her voice behind me.

“Very good, Gorokhova,” she thunders, a smell of sour butter wafting into my corner, “first you don’t finish your soup, and now you run off where you please. Your mother, I’m sure, will be happy to hear this.”

If my mother finds out, I’ll face yet another corner, this one by the garbage chute in our kitchen, after a lecture on the need to march in step with the collective and on the perils of city streets. Serving my term of punishment by the garbage chute would be ironic, I think, especially knowing that the garbageman is six floors below, on the other end of the chute line, and that if I stand on my tiptoes and throw something down—anything, even an empty matchbox—it could land directly on his head and scare
him,
for a change.

The thought of scaring the garbageman makes me grin, but I bite my lip because I know Aunt Polya wants to see me upset and remorseful. I think of the worst thing that may happen, my cruelest possible punishment, the loss of a Sunday trip to the ice cream kiosk with my father: the ten-minute walk to Theatre Square, where from the frozen, steaming depths of a metal cart a morose woman lifts a waffle cup packed with ice cream called crème brulee, hard as stone.

“My mother has a sick heart,” I say. “If she finds out, she may have a heart attack.” This is only a half lie since I heard my mother complaining in the elevator to our neighbor that her heart isn’t what it used to be when she was young.

“That’s interesting,” says Aunt Polya. Still facing the wall, I can only sense her presence from the kitchen smell and the movement of air giving way when she speaks. “You didn’t happen to think about your mother’s sick heart when you ran off into the street, did you?”

“We didn’t go into the street,” I say gloomily. I am telling the truth, but Aunt Polya isn’t interested in the truth. She thinks I’m talking back to her.

“Listen well, Gorokhova,” she shouts in her lunch voice, “you’re a year away from real school, where they won’t be so lenient. They’ll kick you out with a
dvoika
in behavior, sick hearts or not.” I am old enough to know that
dvoika
is the lowest grade you can get in real school. “You’ll be lucky to end up sweeping the streets. I can just see you, an eighteen-year-old hooligan with a broom.”

Standing in the corner, I contemplate my bleak future so succinctly fleshed out by Aunt Polya, afraid that in first grade my teacher, my principal, and everyone else will know not to trust me because I am the one infamous for placing the interests of the collective beneath my own. I will fail consistently: in handwriting, in gym, in keeping my hands folded on the desk, in scrubbing my collar white and then stitching it onto my uniform dress. I will not be allowed to become a member of the Young Pioneers and wear a red kerchief around my neck. My place will always be in the corner in the back, away from the teacher’s attention, the place for those who cannot be relied on, for those with a
dvoika
in behavior. Aunt Polya will take care of that.

After an hour of standing, I am released from the corner. Later, when Aunt Polya is pouring milk as we sit around the table, she watches me more closely than usual to make sure I finish the bread. I know she’s watching me, she knows that I know, and I know she knows that I know. We play this little game for a while: she gives me an unexpected glance, and I chew diligently, pretending I don’t know she’s looking.

The game is called
vranyo
. My parents play it at work, and my older sister Marina plays it at school. We all pretend to do something, and those who watch us pretend that they are seriously watching us and don’t know we are only pretending.

The
vranyo
game of pretend chewing pays off. Neither Aunt Polya nor Zinaida Vasilievna ever tell my mother about my courtyard exploration, and on Sunday, my hand stuffed into my father’s, we stroll to the ice cream kiosk and back, hard chunks of crème brulee slowly melting on my tongue.

Marina

“W
HAT DO YOU WANT
to be when you grow up, Lenochka?” asks Aunt Nina, who is my real aunt, although once removed—my mother’s cousin. We are in Aunt Nina’s apartment for her birthday, six of us, my sister Marina sitting next to me at the table covered with salads, appetizers, and Aunt Nina’s special onion pie.

My sister Marina is seventeen: she is in her last year of high school and is concocting a plan to wrestle out of our parents their permission to apply to drama school.

“A ballerina,” I say, jumping out of my chair and raising my leg behind my back.

“Sit down,” says my mother, “and finish your potatoes.”

I don’t want any more potatoes. I’m saving room for the cake I glimpsed sitting in the kitchen, all studded with raisins and sprinkled with sugar.

I wish Aunt Nina would ask Marina what she wants to be, knowing that if she told the truth my parents already know, everyone would forget about my potatoes—and everyone else’s potatoes, as well as the salted herring and beets with mayonnaise and thin slices of salami beginning to curl up at the edges. Everyone would sit with mouths gaping, wondering how such a stable family—the father the director of a technical school and the mother an anatomy professor—could have produced such an anomaly. At five, you are allowed to want to be a ballerina, or an actress, or a cosmonaut, but at Marina’s age, you are supposed to be serious and think of a real profession, like nursery school teacher, or tram driver, or the local polyclinic doctor in the white hat over suspiciously blond hair who came to our apartment when I had the flu.

“What kind of a profession is acting?” my father wonders when we are home. “Standing onstage, making a fool out of yourself.
Gluposti,
” he says, and waves his hand in dismissal—“nothing but silliness.”

“But there were great actors everyone respected,” argues Marina. “Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Mikhail Chekhov. They even wrote books.”

“Books are good,” says my father out of a cloud of smoke. He is on his second pack of filterless Belomor cigarettes. “But learn how to read and write first. Go to a school where they teach you something useful—how to design an airplane, for example.”

“And what will you do?” chimes in my mother. “Spend your life in some provincial theater so you can come out at the end of the second act to say, Dinner is served? I won’t be able to help you find a job in Leningrad,” she warns, practical as usual. “They’ll send you to Kamchatka, and you’ll be stuck there, with society’s rejects, with sailors and ex-convicts, with those who can barely make it through a plumbing course, wishing you’d listened to what we told you.”

My mother doesn’t understand why anyone would voluntarily engage in such a disorderly and unsafe occupation as acting. First of all, it isn’t serious work. What do you study in drama school, she wonders. Not chemistry, or biology, or even Latin. You don’t contribute to the common good being an actress, she says; you aren’t doing anything solid. It’s all frivolous and chaotic, too unworthy a job for a serious citizen.

“Look at your sister Galya,” adds my mother. Galya is my father’s daughter who is ten years older than Marina and works as a pathologist at Leningrad Hospital No. 2. I don’t know what a pathologist is, but it must be something solid since my mother often uses her as an example. “She has a proper, respectable job. Nine to five-thirty, six days a week.”

On days when Marina is at meetings of her school drama club, my mother rattles the dishes in the sink, lamenting that it’s all the fault of the radio. I prick up my ears, intrigued by the thought that the radio, with its piano banging, morning gymnastics, and solemn three o’clock news could have lured Marina into the trap of acting.

“It was that program,” says my mother,
Theatre at the Microphone.
When they lived in Ivanovo, before I was born, Marina had spent hours standing in the corner under the radio, constantly punished for riding astride the bar in the back of a streetcar.

She would deliberately climb on when an adult was watching, says my mother, who thought she was punishing Marina. But that was my sister’s plan all along—to end up in the corner, under the radio. All they used to broadcast in the evening were radio plays. She stood there for hours, like a totem pole. My mother could barely tear her away to eat dinner. And now here we are—she wants to be an actress.

I feel a new respect for Marina, for her enviable scheme of reckless streetcar riding in front of adults who would dispense the coveted punishment. I think of her standing under an old-fashioned radio with a wool-covered front, listening to the actors’ voices, imagining them onstage, their eyes gleaming from under layers of greasepaint as they proclaimed eternal love, shed tragic tears, and died.

Then my mother changes her tone and tells my father that they have nothing to worry about. The competition to get into drama school is so fierce that there are a hundred applicants for one seat. “You must be a Sarah Bernhardt,” she insists. “You must have extraordinary connections. You must be related to the minister of culture. No one gets in,” she says and resolutely bangs a lid onto a pot of soup.

T
HERE IS A DOG
in our house, a pedigreed Irish setter the color of copper. He is my sister’s dog, although he couldn’t have appeared in our apartment without my mother’s consent. Both my mother and sister constantly brush the dog’s long curls and let him sit in our armchair so he can look at the grainy images on our TV that flutter behind a thick, water-filled lens. When the dog is in the chair, I climb up next to him and we both watch figure skaters glide across the screen.

The dog’s name is Major, and when it is time to breed him, a man rings our doorbell and introduces himself as Ivan Sergeevich Parfenov, the head of the Leningrad chapter of an organization devoted to Irish setters. Ivan Sergeevich is soft-jowled, just like Major, and somewhere around my mother’s age. As he steps into our hallway, he bows slightly, takes off his felt hat, and hangs it on a hook across from the refrigerator.

“Who is the dog’s owner?” he inquires as my mother shows him into the kitchen, where she is already boiling water for tea.

“Marina!” she yells, and my sister appears from her room, where she was pretending to be busy with calculus problems. She is in her senior year of high school, tenth grade, and her future is set. She is guaranteed acceptance at both my mother’s medical school and my father’s technical institute. She doesn’t need to kill her summer cramming for college entrance exams or tremble at the end of August in front of lists of the accepted, pinned to the dank walls of college hallways. In my mother’s words, the future has been served to her on a silver platter.

To Marina’s surprise, Ivan Sergeevich stands up from his chair and shakes her hand. She is even more startled when he addresses her with the formal pronoun
vy
reserved for adults and not the casual
ty,
which is used with children and family members.

He makes small talk about the final exams that are looming in June and asks Marina where she is planning to apply after she graduates from high school.

It is no secret that my sister does not care for either medicine or technology. We all know that what makes her heart melt is standing on the stage of her school’s auditorium, her voice projected and her soul transformed by tragedy from the pages of Chekhov, or Gorky, or some other important playwright whose name I haven’t yet learned.

For a second she hesitates, not knowing if she should reveal the truth in front of this stranger, but Ivan Sergeevich calls her
vy
one more time and smiles so openly that she glances at my mother and bites her lip. “I want to be an actress,” she says looking at her feet. “I want to apply to drama school.”

My mother, busy pouring boiling water from a kettle into a small porcelain pot filled with tea essence, stops and drills her eyes into Marina, who is still staring at her feet with such concentration that I creep out of the hallway to see if anything extraordinary has attached itself to her slippers.

Ivan Sergeevich becomes agitated, as though this is the best piece of news he has heard in a long time. “I can help you, dear girl,” he exclaims enthusiastically, pressing his hands together in front of his chest as if begging Marina to take advantage of his offer. “I have a wonderful old friend, an actress, who could listen to you read. She can tell you if your talent is suitable for theater. She can advise you on what pieces would work especially well.” He names the actress and Marina stops examining her shoes and looks up. It is a name she has heard many times, first on the radio in the old Ivanovo house, and later in Leningrad, a name attached to a voice that delivers a story every day at three, for which Marina sometimes skips the last period of school.