A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (24 page)

W
E ALL PASSED THE
exam, said Maria Mikhailovna, all thirty of us. This means that when school is over and the first bus tour comes from England, we must take turns being tour guides.

The first group of British high school students, our age, arrives in the middle of June and stays in a hotel away from the city center. The hotel building looks as if it belongs in the new districts at the end of the metro line, so I am not even sure it is a hotel for foreigners. It could be a notch below that, a hotel for high-ranking Russians, with white corridors and peeling paint, yet with rooms that boast a towel and a bar of soap.

This, of course, is all speculation. We are not allowed to enter the hotel doors, as Maria Mikhailovna has warned us, reciting a litany of rules. We must arrive early and wait outside. We must wear clean clothes and have our hair washed. It’s better if we don’t accept any gifts, and under no circumstances can we accept foreign money.

The law is clear on the possession of foreign currency—punishment by imprisonment. But some other tenets of Maria Mikhailovna’s rules aren’t so unequivocal. What’s the definition of clean clothes and washed hair, for example? I wash my hair once a week, like most others, on Saturday. Tanya, I know, washes it on Sunday, when she goes with her mother to a public bathhouse because they don’t have a tub at home. So if the British arrive on a Tuesday, is my hair considered washed or already dirty? I wish someone would explain how this dilemma would be resolved in England, but the only person privy to Western life is Maria Mikhailovna, and there is no way I’m going to ask her.

Tanya and I arrive early and wait outside. I watch the sun glint in her blonde, shiny hair, which means that she washed it under the kitchen faucet last night. We stand by the six tour buses lined up across from the hotel. Maria Mikhailovna comes out of its doors with a sheaf of papers in her hands and assigns us to the buses. We’ve both been assigned to sit in the back.

I say to myself I should be relieved, but I am disappointed. How is Sveta Kurdina, who blinks nervously in the front of the bus as she tries to adjust a microphone, a better tour guide than me? What criteria did the House of Friendship and Peace apply to separate the front from the back?

Even before Sveta starts to breathe into the microphone, I study the occupants of the bus, those capitalist high school students who warrant so many rules. No doubt, they are different: they’re wearing blue jeans, they have washed hair, they chew gum, and they all speak English. It is their English that lifts them above everything I’ve seen before. It is their English that fills me with both euphoria and melancholy. Although the sounds of this language are intoxicating, like New Year’s champagne, I know that no matter how hard I study, I will never be able to speak like these students. My own English will forever be confined to Maria Mikhailovna’s lectures on the history of former palaces. So the best I can do is sit quietly and humbly, inhaling the sweet smell of exhaust fumes, in the midst of this linguistic heaven. The best I can do is listen and, if I dare, maybe even speak.

As the bus begins to move and Sveta launches into her rendition of Peter the Great’s plan for the city, Tanya aims a conspiratorial smile at me. “We’re like two spies,” she whispers in Russian so no one will understand, “like two paratroopers in the Nazi rear.” Of course Tanya and I both know that what she said is ironic, that the British fought on our side in the war, but we still can’t help feeling surrounded by the enemy, by a species alien to our own, by creatures from a different universe.

Half-turned toward Tanya, I realize that I’m sitting with my back to the boy next to me, that I’m breaking one of Maria Mikhailovna’s rules: don’t turn your back on a visiting Brit. “Excuse my back,” I say, as Maria Mikhailovna taught us. I’m astonished at my own voice, at the English words leaving my mouth, exposed to someone who can immediately detect their lack of phonetic accuracy.

“Never mind,” says the boy and smiles. “It’s lovely.” Lahvly, he says, showing his white teeth, looking straight into my face with his dark Western eyes.

I’ve been put here to maintain order, I remind myself, so I must act responsibly and suppress a foolish giggle. I must pull together all my resources and arrange the words I know into the correct sequence of English morphology and syntax. “How do you do,” I say, like a character in a dialogue from our textbook. “My name is Lena. What’s yours?”

“Kevin,” says the boy. Or did he say Calvin? The sounds bubble in his mouth and stick together, like overdone buckwheat
kasha
. I’m hopeless, and Maria Mikhailovna was right not to allow me in front of the microphone. I shoot Tanya a glance of desperation, but she is now busy talking to a girl on her other side.

Besides introducing myself, I don’t know what else to say, so I feel grateful that Sveta announces our first stop. We must all get off the bus, she commands, and stand in a semicircle opposite the entrance to St. Isaac’s Cathedral to have a proper view of the massive granite columns in the front.

To Sveta’s frustration, the English students don’t want to form a semicircle as she told them to do. They stand as they please, in a small crowd, listening politely as she gives the exact number of kilograms of gold used to gild the cathedral’s dome. One hundred kilograms, she says, and some of the students whistle, and some make a noise as if they exhale.

I think this piece of information about the amount of gold is in questionable taste because what we have been told to convey on this tour is a sense of the city’s artistic, inner beauty. But perhaps Maria Mikhailovna included it precisely because she thinks people from capitalist countries are materialistic, uninterested in the lofty and the ideal.

I pretend to examine the sculptures on the portal of the cathedral, but I am really looking at Kevin, or Calvin. He is a bit taller than I am, with black hair longer than any boy in my school is allowed, a thick neck and a big, craggy chin. He looks like a rugby player, whatever rugby is. I watch him poke in his ear, then scuff the asphalt with the side of his shoe. Then he suddenly looks up, and our eyes meet for a second before I turn away and pretend to stare at the monument to Tsar Nicholas I, which is still allowed to stand in the middle of the square only because of its unique artistic value.

I can’t wait to get back into the bus to sit next to the boy again. He asks if all our churches are covered with so much gold. Our former churches, I correct him in my mind. Goold, he says, suh moch goold. The simplest words in his mouth seem to tangle into alien shapes, so hard to decipher I strain my ears. Maybe he doesn’t have the pronunciation I expected because he is from Scotland or Northern Ireland. Maybe I should ask him about the revolutionary McLean, whose name hangs on the corner of my street.

After a stop in Palace Square, the boy turns to visual aids. He empties his wallet into my hands: two cardboard stubs (tickets for something?), a blue plastic rectangle with numbers, a picture of a girl (his sister?), a card with his own picture and his name (Kevin!). The tickets, he explains, are for a movie he saw just before the trip (movie? Does he mean cinema?); the piece of plastic is a Visa (a visa for what? To enter the Soviet Union?); the girl is his girlfriend (girl friend?); and the card with his picture is his
ay-dee
.

I am not sure the visual aids are helping much. “What’s an
ay-dee
?” I ask, starting with the most incomprehensible.

“It’s an
ay-dee
,” Kevin says, throwing his head back, trying to find the words to explain the obvious. “A document to get into a school. A paper to show the police.”

The word “police” helps. “Like a passport?” I ask.

“No,” says Kevin. “A passport is to come here. An
ay-dee
is for England.”

I smile, letting him know that I understand. But I don’t. Not completely. Here, when I turn sixteen, I’ll get a passport at a local militia office. But I won’t need it to get into a school. I’ll keep it in my mother’s drawer, along with her own passport and her war medals until I am twenty-one and it will be time to get a new one. Right now I don’t have any document certifying that I am me. Everyone in my school knows who I am, and why would our militia, out of the blue, ask me for a document to confirm my identity? They are busy cordoning off the streets for official motorcades or standing in big intersections with zebra-colored batons in their hands making sure we don’t cross against the light. It is odd to carry such a document around, but maybe it’s one of the characteristics of capitalism, in addition to homelessness and unemployment.

We bump over the tram tracks, to the other side of the Neva to look at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Dostoyevsky and Lenin were imprisoned for their revolutionary activities. The day, sunny in the morning, has crumbled into the usual leaden Leningrad day, with sheets of clouds and blasts of wind tearing through the red banners lined along the embankment. Sveta herds us into the fortress’s prison yard and then into a solitary stone cell with a narrow iron bed and no windows, exemplifying, according to Maria Mikhailovna’s lectures, the injustice and cruelty of the tsarist regime. We don’t all fit into the cell, so Kevin and I stand in the cobblestone corridor, next to a life-size figure dressed as a tsarist prison warden.

“I wonder if this works,” says Kevin and wraps his hand around the warden’s gun. I’m glad that the museum babushka is busy watching the group inside the cell because one of the worst things you can do, as everyone knows, is touch a museum exhibit. “
Rukami ne trogat,
” says a sign in big letters. “Do not touch with hands.” But what if Kevin had touched the gun with his elbow? I wonder about the possible repercussions of our language differences. Whereas the Russian word
ruka
includes everything from fingers to shoulder, the English
hand
only goes as far as the wrist. Does the sign, in its English version, really mean “Do not touch with hands or arms?” Or are the English-speaking tourists exempt from the elbow-touching prohibition?

I would like to share this linguistic inquiry with Kevin, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to pull together enough grammar and vocabulary. I’m so glad I understood completely Kevin’s phrase about the gun that I don’t want to risk another language embarrassment.

Kevin isn’t very talkative, and I am grateful. As we walk back to our bus, he kicks pebbles and whistles, not even bothering to look at the spire of the Fortress, which is probably covered with no fewer kilograms of gold than the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral.

I don’t know what I would do if the impossible happened and I could go on a similar tour of London. Without doubt, I wouldn’t whistle, or kick pebbles, or grab museum guns. I don’t even know if I would recognize the real Trafalgar Square from a dusty picture in our English textbook or have the nerve to open my mouth and speak.

From Peter and Paul Fortress we drive past the cruiser
Aurora,
which shot a blank in October 1917 to start the storming of the Winter Palace. It is an ancient ship, with black smokestacks and fake-looking cannons on the deck. Not interested in the cruiser
Aurora
or Sveta’s story, Kevin is counting the money he’s pulled out of his pocket because we are approaching the end of our route, a
Beriozka
shop. I watch him casually handle the pound bills, so strange-looking and infused with such dangerous power if they somehow should migrate into my hands, or Tanya’s hands, or even the hands of Maria Mikhailovna. One of many statutes of the Criminal Code forbids possession of foreign currency.

Entering a
Beriozka
shop, like speaking English, lifts us above the crowd. We are among the select few Russians who are allowed to go in.
Beriozka
means birch tree, a symbol of Russia. It is a store exclusively for Westerners, selling items only for hard currency, that of capitalist countries. I don’t know why the Eastern European socialist countries, with their more reliable, planned economies, do not have currencies as trustworthy as those of the unstable, dying, capitalist West.

Or perhaps I do know. Perhaps it’s part of the same old game,
vranyo
. The game we all play: my mother, my sister, my teachers at school, my friend Tanya, who is talking to a girl in Reebok sneakers, and even Maria Mikhailovna—or maybe especially Maria Mikhailovna—with her well-tailored suits and lectures on Leningrad, the cradle of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.

The store’s windows are shuttered so that no one from the street is able to see what’s inside. If they could see, they would storm in, through the steel turnstile, past the bored cashier, to the shelves with instant coffee, Polish ham, French cognac, and poems by Pasternak.

I follow Kevin to a display with souvenirs: rows of
matryoshka
dolls, bears carved out of wood, hand-painted, lacquered boxes from Palekh, busts of Lenin. He doesn’t seem to be interested in cans of something called shrimp, or bottles of liqueur with floating golden specks, or skinny logs of hard salami I haven’t seen since elementary school. He isn’t interested in the shelf with Russian books, volumes with semi-banned Tsvetayeva and Mandelstam, with Bulgakov’s
Master and Margarita,
which my sister says is the epitome of Russian twentieth-century literature, as underground as Solzhenitsyn. I pick up each book, hold it, then put it back. While the British students are gawking at samovars and wooden spoons, I stand next to the shelf with these book treasures, so close and so out of reach.