A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (28 page)

By the pastry counter, like a savior, sits Natasha from my university English class. I lunge forward and greet her as if she were a best friend I haven’t seen in years, despite the fact that I sat next to her in my phonetics class only yesterday. She tells me how she ended up here, at this concert and in this restaurant, but her words sail past my ears. I’m so relieved I order a Napoleon and a coffee and a bottle of lemonade for both of us, although I’m not even sure I have any money in my purse.

“So who do you think all these people are?” I ask Natasha, nodding toward the crowd smoking in the dusk. There is no food served, I notice, only sweets and drinks.

“I was going to ask you,” says Natasha. “You’re the one who works here.”

She is right; I should know. Everyone who works here probably knows, with the exception of our typist Anna, who sees nothing but the typewriter keys because she’s mortified to oblivion by Tatiana Vasilievna. All my co-workers, I bet, have sat at these tables at night, ordering platefuls of éclairs and perhaps even glasses of the cognac and champagne whose golden labels gleam behind the counter.

To be decadent, Natasha pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. We light up and lean back, feeling relaxed and hedonistic now, lazily poking into our plates as though our parents forced us to eat Napoleons every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This pretense makes me feel like everyone else, makes me feel I belong in a dark corner of this restaurant where no one questions my presence.

Then, with her imperial gait, Tatiana Vasilievna walks through the door and marches straight to the pastry display. She sees me sitting at the table and her face congeals into the expression she wore when Rita failed to procure her a first-class ticket on the same-day train to Moscow to accompany a group of American businessmen.

“May I have a word with you?” she says ominously as I obediently get up because that’s what primary school and our mothers taught us to do when we speak to a person older than ourselves.

“Your work ends at five-thirty,” she says, deliberately glancing at her gold watch. “There’s no need for you to be in this restaurant at night.” In her high heels she is taller than I, or maybe it is my curled shoulders that make her tower over me.

I can’t think of anything to say. I don’t know if Tatiana Vasilievna can prohibit me from entering this restaurant, but judging by her lifted chin and narrowed eyes, she’s certain she can. And it is this certainty, this authority leaking from every pore of her heavily made-up face that makes me stoop even lower. I’m too docile and cowardly to belong here, after all, and I hate Tatiana Vasilievna for driving this point home.

“Dushenka,”
she says in an injured tone because I wounded her senses by eating a Napoleon in a place I am not permitted to enter at night. “You should remember: What’s allowed for Jupiter is not allowed for the bull.”

Although I’ve never heard this saying before, I can imagine that Tatiana Vasilievna has made it up so that she could compare herself to the most powerful Roman god. But why am I the bull? In addition to barging into restaurants without permission and generally not knowing my place, I must also be ignorant of Roman mythology and the idioms that employ it. I glance at Natasha, who is sitting very quietly wedged between the table and the wall, not knowing if this exchange somehow applies to her, too.

With Tatiana Vasilievna leading the way, I leave the restaurant and all its dusky decadence. Still stooped and utterly defeated, I walk through the double oak doors out of the House of Friendship and Peace, which, as it has just become clear, offers neither of the two solaces it was named for.

T
HERE IS A RUMOR
that my boss, Viktor Nikolaevich, is being transferred to Czechoslovakia. People say this with respect: Ludmila the bookkeeper deferentially lowers her voice while Olya the coordinator of the German Democratic Republic rounds her eyes and her mouth into perfect O’s. Since the transfer is to a foreign country, it is definitely a promotion. How big a promotion? Bigger than Bulgaria or Vietnam but smaller than, say, France. At any rate, Viktor Nikolaevich now spends less and less time behind his door, which triggers an injured expression on Tatiana Vasilievna’s face every time she sails into the waiting room only to find his office empty, only to become so despondent she doesn’t even try to pretend to faint because he isn’t there to see her exposed cleavage or her knee sheathed in shimmering nylon and carefully bent on the floor right next to my desk.

I like Viktor Nikolaevich and dread the day when he has to leave. He is easygoing, he makes jokes, he never gets upset with me, and he protects me like a father would, although he looks nothing like my father. He doesn’t smoke, he is broad-waisted and fair-skinned, and he has a mouth full of real teeth.

According to Ludmila the bookkeeper, he has a soft spot for the waitresses at our café. He loves them, she says, especially Maya, who has ash-blonde hair and likes to wear a tight uniform and red lipstick. For some reason I dislike Maya; strangely, it almost feels like jealousy. He is my boss and I want him to like me, only me. The other day, when I was leaving his office with a shuffle of papers to type, Viktor Nikolaevich took my hand, the one without the papers, and held it and stared into my eyes so intensely that I had to look down. When he let it go, I went back to my desk in the waiting room, and a few minutes later he left, having answered the red phone.

Since the Jupiter and the bull incident Tatiana Vasilievna hasn’t spoken to me directly. Maybe she wishes she hadn’t humiliated me in the restaurant because, as it turns out, I could be useful in detecting Viktor Nikolaevich’s whereabouts when she feels like fainting again. Or maybe she expected an apology for my inappropriate behavior and, when she didn’t receive one, decided that I was hopeless, worthy of the only possible course of action on her part—to ostracize and ignore me. Whatever the reason, she no longer addresses me, which is a great relief.

It’s April, two months from the end of my second year at the university, and I’m busy thinking up ways to take my history final early. The course is compulsory, the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and taking it early solves the two problems inherent in the class. It will save me from sitting through the rest of the seminars, listening to made-up history, and according to those innovative minds who’ve done it before, it is much easier to get a good grade early since the professors haven’t yet entered the mind-set of the two merciless final semester weeks. I have composed a letter, on the House letterhead and with the House stamp I keep in my drawer, requesting the university dean to grant me permission to take the finals early because in June we are so swamped with foreign delegations from all over the world that it’s impossible for me, a House of Friendship employee, to find time to study.

In reality, of course, June is the month when things slow down and people start taking vacations, but the dean and the communist history department are used to the twisted truth. The letter is immaculately typed and has everything but the director’s signature. I time the crucial moment for Monday, the last day before Viktor Nikolaevich leaves for his new position in Czechoslovakia.

On Sunday I lean on Marina to finish the little black dress she is sewing according to the picture in Rita’s
England
magazine. On Monday morning, at ten, I stand by my desk to greet my boss, wearing the dress. It’s short, very short, with a deep V-neck too low for work, and Viktor Nikolaevich immediately sees that. He opens his large lips to say something but doesn’t. The blue of his eyes softens and melts as he gazes at me—at the whole me, for the first time since I started working there. The unexpected part is that it feels good, this look. It feels edifying. And maybe part of this edification is the fact that it is I being granted this stare of admiration—not Maya with her tight uniforms and red lips, and certainly not Tatiana Vasilievna, who could faint a thousand times, deftly exposing her nylon and her lace, and still fail to attract this look.

Viktor Nikolaevich goes into his office, and I follow him with a bunch of mail and a typed letter in my hand. He sits at his desk, puts on his glasses, and starts shuffling through the papers, pretending he hadn’t just drilled me with a stare, pretending he no longer sees the little black dress I’m wearing.

“Could you possibly sign this for me?” I ask in a timid and submissive way that makes directors feel even more powerful. “To take my final early. The history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

He takes my letter, reads it, then squints at me from above his glasses. “Overwhelmed with foreign delegations in June,” he reads. “Impossible to find time to study, eh?”

I nod and squeeze out a little smile, showing that I know that he knows it’s a lie.

He pulls a pen out of an enormous writing set presiding over his desk, signs, and hands the letter back to me. “It’s my last day here,” he says as I mumble my thanks. “We’re going to celebrate after work.”

It is obviously no use telling him that I have classes at seven.

The day drags on because Viktor Nikolaevich is mostly out of the office. First the red phone rings and he promptly leaves; then he reappears only to vanish again toward the café and its waitresses. Several times Tatiana Vasilievna whiffs in, followed by a trail of perfume, and on one of her attempts she gets lucky and bumps into Viktor Nikolaevich, who is also just walking in.

“Well, well, well, it’s your last day, I hear,” she coos and lifts her hand as if expecting him to kiss it. “Old friends must say good-bye.”

Viktor Nikolaevich motions her into his office, and she throws her head back as she walks in so that her hair flips away to expose gold hearts drooping from her ears.

Five minutes later she is back in the waiting room, looking utterly disappointed. I stand by the desk, pretending to be engrossed in a bunch of work orders, but out of the corner of my eye I see her wiggle her shoulders as if shaking off embarrassment. Then she glances at me and notices my dress. I keep shuffling paper, but by her expression, even from this skewed angle, I know she is furious. I know she knows that Viktor Nikolaevich is going to spend more time saying good-bye to me than he did to her. And that knowledge tingles in my throat like champagne as she tosses her head back again and clicks out on her skinny heels.

Champagne is opened at six. Viktor Nikolaevich, who has already had some earlier during his multiple absences, waves me into his office and shuts the door. From across his desk, he pours two glasses; we drink; he pours more.

“To you,” I say, and he says the same. The wine fizzles down my throat into my empty stomach—I was too nervous to eat lunch, or maybe I didn’t want to parade my black dress around the café—and makes me instantly drunk.

“Will you visit me in Prague?” he asks, and I giggle because it’s a silly question. We both know that I can’t go to Prague, or any other foreign capital, that the few people who go must have the right connections or belong to the top bureaucratic layer, like him.

“Send me a visa and I’ll visit you anywhere,” I say and giggle. “Anywhere abroad,” I add prudently.

Viktor Nikolaevich moves from his side of the desk to mine. He sits down in a swivel chair across from me, reaches out and pulls me in, then wraps his big lips around mine, tongue and all, definitely too long for a good-bye kiss. I knew something like this was going to happen, so I act as though I’m used to being pulled into my boss’s lap, especially since it feels like I’m flying. Or maybe it is he who is spinning, I can’t tell, or maybe it’s the chairs that are dancing around the room. His taste is now in my mouth, cognac and champagne, and his smell is all over my face—a smell of cologne, or maybe it’s the perfume Maya the waitress wore when he said good-bye to her.

Then he stops spinning, lifts me off his knees, and gets up. “Nice dress,” he says putting on his suit jacket. “Go get your things. We’re going to my farewell party.”

Obediently I get up and amble toward the door, puzzled that we are going somewhere else, that draining a bottle of champagne and smooching in his office did not qualify as a farewell. Things around me are no longer flying, and I’m able to take my coat off the hook in one swoop. I don’t doubt that Viktor Nikolaevich knows a lot of places to hold a farewell party, but there is a dark thought thumping in my head like a brewing headache, a dizzy feeling of to-be-continued. After all, he is forty-five and I’m his eighteen-year-old secretary in a minidress drunk on champagne, a situation so tattered and predictable everyone knows how it usually ends. But I’m also the only one from the whole collective of the House of Friendship and Peace he’s taking to his farewell party. He isn’t taking the sophisticated Tatiana Vasilievna, who’s mad about him, or the lanky pretty Olya, who manages the East German delegation, or any other woman who works here and whose clothes are not resewn from her older sister’s. He’s taking me, who isn’t supposed to drink lemonade at a café after working hours and who is now, full of champagne, meandering toward his black Volga.

His chauffeur, Borya, a kind old man with a puffed-up face, waves at me and smiles as if I’d been riding in this Volga all the time instead of merely handing him envelopes to deliver to important addresses at the Smolny, the headquarters of the Leningrad Communist Party. Inside the car it smells of gasoline and old leather, and I’m glad that Viktor Nikolaevich, when he ambles out, plops down into his usual seat in the front. As soon as he slams the door shut, Borya cranks the car into gear and we rattle off.