A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (27 page)

“Give him a book,” says my mother in her teacher’s voice.

“He already has a book,” says Marina with a straight face although we all know it’s an old joke, so old that my mother’s posthumously rehabilitated Uncle Volya was telling it back in 1937. “The only thing I can think of is something to add to his collection.”

“What does he collect?” I ask.

“Rabbits,” says Marina. “All kinds of rabbits—glass, porcelain, wood. All sizes.”

It’s instantly obvious what the present must be. It cannot be a coincidence that the music director collects rabbits and in the anatomy department where I work tons of rabbits sit in rusty cages, waiting to become statistics for Sasha’s quantitative study. I’m certain my idea is brilliant and unbeatable. I’m bursting with my own genius; I can no longer keep it in. “A live rabbit!” I shout. “Give him a rabbit from our lab!”

My mother looks at me with a quizzical expression, not sure if I am serious, not sure if removing a rabbit from the anatomy lab is a proper thing to do.

“Yes, yes, a live rabbit!” I babble, choking on my own words. “You’ll have a unique birthday gift—and we’ll save a rabbit from being centrifuged, smothered with ether, and sliced.”

I see my mother hesitate and I trot out my last argument. “We have too many rabbits right now anyway; we’ve just had an inventory,” I say. The inventory bit is a fib. “Sasha said yesterday,” I add, “we should start stewing them for lunch.”

Now my sister’s eyes are burning with excitement, too. With the combined forces of both of us, my mother doesn’t stand a chance.

On Monday, my sister and I go to the basement of the anatomy department with rows of dark, smelly cages and pick a tri-colored rabbit—black, white, and yellow—a sign of luck, according to my sister. The rabbit rustles inside folded newspaper as Marina fits it into a string bag to take on the bus across the city.

I imagine Marina arriving at the birthday party with a rabbit in a string bag. I see the whirl of shock and excitement; the petrified rabbit pressed to the parquet floor; the flurry of rabbit-related toasts; the hands that pet and cradle the rabbit until, in utter panic, it pees on someone’s dress; the empty apartment with clouds of cigarette smoke over the ruins of dinner and the semiconscious rabbit gasping in the corner of a dark hallway.

“Are you sure he can handle a live rabbit?” I say, but all I see is Marina’s back disappear behind a closing door.

I
N THE BEGINNING OF
my second year, my English professor Natalia Borisovna pulls me aside and says there is an opening in the House of Friendship and Peace, where I used to work as a tour guide in the ninth grade. The job is the director’s secretary and has nothing to do with speaking English, but with time and luck, the professor points out, it may evolve into something else. At any rate, she adds, it is an impressive and prestigious place to work.

My job is to sit behind an enormous desk in front of the director’s office and answer the phone. The director, Viktor Nikolaevich, a party member like every functionary, doesn’t seem to be interested in the calls that come through me; the only calls that make him excited come on a red phone without a dial that sits on the desk of his office. When the red phone rings, he puts his feet up on a coffee table, laughs into the receiver, and leaves shortly afterward, always in a good mood. Viktor Nikolaevich often seems to be in a good mood. A smile starts from the corners of his eyes, dimples his cheeks, and stretches his large lips when every morning he crosses the waiting room in confident steps at the civilized hour of ten o’clock.

“Hozyain,
” deferentially mutters Ludmila the bookkeeper as he saunters by, the word that means “master.” He is tall and broad-shouldered and looks like a master. He looks as if the House of Friendship and Peace, with its marble stairways, bronze chandeliers, gilded moldings, and thirty people hunkered down in their first-floor offices, belong exclusively to him and not to the state.

The echoey waiting room where I sit behind a vast desk makes me feel both humble and important. It is the social center of the first-floor offices, where people make arrangements for foreign delegations visiting our city. It draws coordinators from both the socialist and capitalist departments to exchange the latest gossip and parade their clothes. The socialist women are usually dressed in brighter colors. The tall and reedy Olya, coordinator for the German Democratic Republic, wears sky-blue suits with short skirts, while the doughy Galina, coordinator for Czechoslovakia, favors spiky heels and heavy makeup. Sergei, the handsome, sad-eyed coordinator for Bulgaria, comes to complain about a hangover and the fact that he has to arrange hotel reservations for groups of Polish Soviet deputies because Sveta, who is responsible for Poland, is on a yearlong maternity leave.

The capitalist coordinators wear more subdued beiges, grays, and dark greens. Rita, who ten years ago graduated from my department of the university, appears hand-in-hand with the hooded-eyed, theatrical Tatiana Vasilievna, the coordinator for all the English-speaking countries. Tatiana Vasilievna makes me feel even more inferior than I normally do in this exclusive environment of such important and well-dressed people. She likes to give advice to everyone below her in rank, and that’s pretty much everyone except Viktor Nikolaevich, who sits behind an oak door next to my desk.

“Use a little bit of makeup, darling,” she murmurs into the ear of Anna, a typist in the corner of the waiting room hunched over a typewriter in her perennial gray suit shiny from wear. Anna, who is twice my age and excruciatingly shy, forces her lips to smile, wishing she could compress herself into a wall, away from Tatiana Vasilievna’s ringed fingers, which clutch a thick batch of papers to be typed. Darling,
dushenka
, is what she calls all younger women before she insults them or overwhelms them with work.

“
Dushenka
, don’t call me Mrs. in front of those British gentlemen,” she coos to Rita, embracing her. “I’m not married anymore, am I?”

Everyone in the House of Friendship and Peace knows that Tatiana Vasilievna’s husband packed up and fled three months after the wedding, nine years ago, just as she turned thirty-five. It’s a wonder he stayed so long, said Ludmila the bookkeeper, who told me the story.

“Otherwise they’ll think I’m a housewife with a bunch of runny-nosed children,” whispers Tatiana Vasilievna to Rita. “Just like you.”

Rita smiles an embarrassed smile and apologizes. I don’t know how she is able to squeeze a smile out of her scrunched face, but I suspect she must be thinking about the future, about ten years from now when Tatiana Vasilievna reaches fifty-five, a retirement age for women, the moment that will put Rita in command of all English-speaking countries. Although I realize it’s a formidable prospect to be in charge of the whole English-speaking world, it hardly seems worth ten more years of Tatiana Vasilievna’s reign. I imagine myself in Rita’s place, coming back with witty, powerful responses I’d need days to think up, responses that would disarm Tatiana Vasilievna and turn her into a kind, sensitive person.

Tatiana Vasilievna spends a lot of time in the waiting room because she likes the director, my boss. He has a wife, of course, and like all functionaries, must serve as an example of a proper society cell, but this trifle is irrelevant to Tatiana Vasilievna. She thinks up projects and explains them at length to Anna the typist, who shrinks like a turtle into her worn-out suit every time Tatiana Vasilievna sails into the room. She moves papers around my desk, pretending she’s reading each one, waiting for the oak door to open. If it doesn’t, she clutches at her chest and starts to vigorously fan herself. She breathes hard; she calls for Rita in a barely audible voice. When Rita comes running, Tatiana Vasilievna puts the back of her hand over her forehead and implores her to call for a doctor. This is the time when Viktor Nikolaevich, who can usually sense this turmoil, comes out of his office to bring her back to life. One time, when he was away at a meeting, she fainted onto the floor in front of the fireplace, her legs neatly crossed at the ankles.

From my boss’s squinted eyes I think he sees right through Tatiana Vasilievna and her theatrical hysterics, taking her for what she is—a neurotic, lonely woman. But she is a high-ranking coordinator for a hefty chunk of the capitalist world, so we have to pretend we’re concerned about her shallow breathing and her chest-clutching, rushing to the bathroom for cold water and to the café for wedges of lemon, unbuttoning her blouse just enough to expose a hint of lace from her brassiere.

Although I don’t know where our coordinators shop for their lace underwear, web-thin pantyhose, and well-fitted suits, I know where they don’t. Maybe owning hard-to-get decent clothes is another perk for being a coordinator at the House of Friendship and Peace, along with a food package containing a kilo of beef, a jar of instant coffee, and a stick of hard salami they can pick up at a special distributor before major holidays. What I wear to work comes from elbowing in line at a local store or from the artistic hands of my sister—a Hungarian shirt with small purple flowers and a brown skirt resewn from Marina’s old pants. My sister has lately been in a good mood, so she’s making me a little black dress from a piece of fabric I found rolled up in our armoire, a number just like the one I saw in the
England
magazine left open on Rita’s desk.

Aside from Tatiana Vasilievna and her nervous fits, there isn’t much at work to pay attention to. I sit at the desk, do my homework, and stare at the grandfather clock in the corner whose hands don’t seem to move. At around one-thirty I go to the House of Friendship café, an exclusive place with waitresses and a printed menu, which is open for lunch for employees and members of the select public involved in foreign affairs and which stays open on those nights when there is an art or culture festival in the ballroom on the second floor.

It’s those nights that intrigue me. Days are predictable and boring, all work, coordinators trekking through with their reports, Ludmila the bookkeeper offering her latest gossip, Viktor Nikolaevich cackling into his red phone, Anna hitting the typewriter keys with the speed of a machine gun. But what happens here at night? Who sits at these tables in the café when we’re all safely tucked into university classrooms or our apartments, and what kinds of transformations occur to the soup and meatballs and pastries with pink roses after the clock strikes six?

So the next time there is an evening affair celebrating an anniversary of the British composer Benjamin Britten, I don’t leave at five-thirty. It’s a Wednesday, the only weekday with no university classes scheduled, and my conscience is clear. I walk up the marble staircase with wrought-iron banisters to the main ballroom, vast as a stadium and made even bigger by floor-to-ceiling mirrors in gilded frames. Of course, I immediately see Tatiana Vasilievna—it is, after all, an English-speaking affair—directing Rita in how to arrange the chairs for musicians and where to place the podium.

“I have to face the audience directly,” she instructs. “You don’t want me to twist my head off, do you?”

As Rita tries to push the podium, Tatiana Vasilievna clasps her head and closes her eyes. “
Dushenka
, you’re scratching the parquet, don’t you see?” she hisses.

I step back because I don’t want to take part in moving the podium or the chairs, especially under the commandeering of Tatiana Vasilievna. I also don’t want to explain to her what I’m doing here, way past my working hours, at a concert of capitalist music, exposed without her approval to a very real possibility of communicating with people from English-speaking countries.

I see them filing in through the front door as I walk back downstairs: a group of women who look youthful and ageless, all with rich, blondish hair and real leather shoes, and men in blue jeans, whose movements are unhurried, as if they’d never had to squeeze into a rush-hour bus. They are now gawking at the gold, marble, and crystal that belonged to Count Shuvalov, who owned all this voluptuous excess before 1917, when the Bolsheviks handed it down to the people.

Tatiana Vasilievna appears on the top of the stairs and stands there magnanimously, as if this opulence belonged to her, waiting for the group to ascend to her height. They walk past me, sending in my direction a whiff of the West, an odor of perpetual cleanliness and good clothes, and knowing that Tatiana Vasilievna is going to be occupied for a while, I retreat into the café in the hope of rubbing shoulders with the select members of the public invited to such exclusive affairs.

The truth is I don’t know if I really want to retreat to the café. I’m petrified. I’m afraid that the moment I walk in everyone will take one look at me and realize that I’ve never been to a restaurant at night. Aside from my sister, who sometimes goes to the Actors’ Club, I don’t know anyone who has. There are a few restaurants in the city, so someone must eat there, but they’re always guarded by stone-faced doormen who can only be bribed by things we don’t have. The interiors, I’ve always imagined, were sets from old movies: a piano next to a potted palm, a starched napkin in a circle of light cast by a table lamp, a bent waiter with a white towel over his arm. As I stand in the doorway of the House of Friendship café, I feel as exposed as if I were entering my boss’s office having forgotten to put my clothes on.

The lunch room with neon lights has metamorphosed into a dark cave gauzy with cigarette smoke. At the far end I can still make out the counter with pastries, and I gather all my courage and walk straight toward the shelves with familiar éclairs, focusing on the beacons of tarts crowned with pink roses. I pretend I belong here, and although I do belong here, I feel as if I were walking across a minefield, ready to make a mistake that will shatter my disguise and expose me for what I am: clumsy, ill-mannered, and unworldly.