A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (35 page)

“They covered it with gray during the siege of Leningrad,” I say. “To make it look like everything else.”

Robert focuses on the cathedral as if snapping a mental photograph, then turns to me. “I like the Russian language,” he says. “I want to read Russian writers in the original. That’s why I’m here.”

Now I’m truly awed. I feel undeserving to be standing next to this brilliant American man who solves the problems of the universe during the day and then goes home to play the oboe and sweat over
Crime and Punishment
in Russian.

“Lenin-grad,” says Robert. “Doesn’t
grad
mean city?”

“Yes, the city of Lenin,” I say.

“But the form ‘Lenin’ is also the possessive of ‘Lena,’ isn’t it? ‘Lena’s’ in Russian is
Lenin
, right? So Leningrad literally means ‘Lena’s city.’” Robert looks pleased, as if he’s just solved a stubborn celestial equation. “This is your city,” he says and raises his arm as if bestowing the honor upon my head.

This never occurred to me, but Robert is right. He is even more right than he knows. Lenin’s real name is Ulyanov. Lenin is a pseudonym our legendary leader assumed to fool the tsar’s police when he was secretly shuttling between Russia and Finland to stir up the working masses in preparation for the revolution, and he chose it from the name of the great Siberian river Lena. So Lenin does literally mean Lena’s. Leningrad is literally my city.

R
OBERT WAITS FOR ME
every day I teach, three times a week, and we walk around the city’s center, looking at places he won’t find in his tour guide—real places, too ordinary to be included among the glossy snapshots of bronze statues and golden domes. We walk away from the baroque luxury of the Winter Palace to the part of the Neva where necks of construction cranes hang over the water, along the cracked asphalt side streets where crumbling arches lead into mazes of courtyards.

Robert is fascinated with courtyards. He’s read Dostoyevsky, and he wants to see those courtyard wells that depress the spirit and twist the soul into a truly Russian miserable knot. As far as I can see, a hundred years have changed nothing in terms of courtyards’ contribution to misery, so I delight Robert in stepping with him through the vaulted archways to gawk at aluminum garbage bins that spill rotting potato peels and chicken bones, at broken walls bristling with wires, at piles of rusted sheets of metal brought in at some point for a renovation that never happened.

Robert tells me about Austin, Texas, where he studies, and Trenton, New Jersey, where he lives, the two places fused in my mind, foreign and unintelligible, two black holes in his puzzling universe. He tells me about the films he’s seen, the people he’s met, the things he’s bought, but he might as well be talking about nuclear physics. I don’t know what “special effects” or “star wars” mean; I have no idea who “teaching assistants” are; and I have never heard the word “parka.” But I nod, pretending I understand, pretending I am sophisticated and worldly. I am a professional at the game of pretense; I’ve perfected my skills over years of practice. Robert doesn’t suspect a thing.

In the beginning of the last week of classes I take him to my courtyard. It is better than many, with a playground in the center—a sandbox and a tall slide made of splintery wood down which I used to glide during nursery school winters. The same ankle-deep puddle in the middle of the yard gleams with a rainbow film of gasoline; “Zoika’s a bitch” is scratched into the wall next to the padlocked door where the scary garbageman of my childhood used to shovel the refuse thrown down the chutes.

The chutes are now padlocked, too, and Zoika, who was indeed a bitch ten years earlier, has left her mother to live somewhere on the other side of the Ural Mountains.

“Would you like to see my apartment?” I ask Robert. It’s probably against the rules of the department for a teacher to take a capitalist student home, even if a student is from someone else’s class. A home visit must normally be set up and approved by the director or, more likely, the director’s KGB husband, but we are here already, in my courtyard, and it would be a wrong thing to do, contrary to all rules of hospitality, not to invite him in.

The front door scrapes open, we walk up the eight cement steps to the elevator, and I press the button to summon the rumbling car from above. As we wait next to the bank of wooden mailboxes, a door to one of the first floor apartments opens, the one where the current janitor, a tall woman in a burlap apron, lives. She clangs a key ring to find the one to lock the door, but the search goes on excruciatingly long, and I know, even though I’m standing with my back to her, that she is gawking at Robert, who looks even more alien inside my apartment building than he did out on the street. The janitor doesn’t even have to wait for him to open his mouth to tell he doesn’t belong here, with his corkscrew hair and his corduroys stamped with metal buttons no Soviet store has ever seen.

The elevator car finally shudders down to the first floor, and I pull the metal door open to let us in. Inside there is a stink of urine, the usual elevator smell, and as the cabin lurches up, we look down at our feet, our backs pressed to a plywood partition that cuts off half the space inside, making the car big enough for only two or three, making it as uncomfortable as everything else here. I curl my toes inside my shoes, embarrassed by this useless partition, by the reek of urine, by the janitor’s look of condemnation. It’s a stupid feeling, of course; I wasn’t the one who built this plywood atrocity, or pissed all over the floor, or branded Robert with a disdainful stare. But I am the one who let Robert see it and smell it. I am, in the words of our American program teacher-trainer, the facilitator of acquisition.

My mother is in the kitchen ironing, bent over an old blanket spread on the table, leaning with all her weight on the heavy iron she’s just heated on a stove burner. She’s doing the linens: sheets, duvets, and pillowcases that are cotton and wrinkle terribly when she wrings them out in the bathtub.

“This is Robert from my American program,” I say, as I wave for him to come to the kitchen. “I was showing him our courtyards, and then he wanted to see a Russian apartment.”

My mother straightens up and sets the iron on a metal trivet. Although she smiles back at Robert and stretches out her hand to meet his for a handshake, I can guess what she is thinking: Americans know nothing about manners; according to the proper etiquette, a man must wait for a woman to stretch her hand out first. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says, taking off her apron. “Please make yourself at home while I organize some tea.”

“You can’t avoid having tea in a Russian house,” I say to Robert, who, I can see, is delighted at the prospect.

My mother is taking this tea very seriously, I can tell: she’s rooting in the cupboard for a jar of raspberry jam; she’s asking me to bring the good cups from my sister’s room. I take the cup assignment as an opportunity to show Robert the apartment, and I now look at Marina’s room through a foreigner’s eyes: creaky parquet, wavy and unwaxed for years; wallpaper with flowers that were once yellow; peeling windowsills with pots of aloe and feeble scallion shoots my mother pinches off for salad.

I open the balcony door, and the summer street noise tumbles into the room—trams, buses, and a line to the liquor store that snakes around the corner and ends somewhere under the balcony where we stand. “What are they selling there?” asks Robert in Russian—he’s switched to Russian completely, proud of his case endings, which make him rub his temples and squint his eyes before they stagger out of his mouth, tortured but nearly perfect.

They aren’t selling anything yet. People are lining up because they see a truck parked next to the store, which signals a delivery—of what exactly, no one knows. Yet whatever it is that has just been delivered isn’t going to last long, so they stand there waiting, leaning forward in hope of getting a glimpse of what they’re queuing up for. “Probably cheap vodka,” I say. “Or cheap port. We call it
chernila
, which means ink.” Robert smiles, and I know he’s just filed the new word away into the coils of his versatile brain.

I’m impressed by Robert’s kaleidoscopic talents, so inaccessible to me: physics, music, writing. I’m bewildered by his curiosity, by his willingness to travel to my city—a grandiose ruin hermetically sealed from the rest of the world—and live in it for six weeks. Most of all, I’m awed by his foreignness. I think I am even attracted to him, and if not to him as an individual, then to his otherness, to the classified, unknowable world he represents. The world I’ve been trying to decipher since I had my first private English lesson with Irina Petrovna when I was ten, the secret and closed place where English is spoken, the place I know so well and yet don’t know at all. Everything alien and mesmerizing and seductive has fused together and condensed in one person gawking down from my balcony at the line for cheap ink.

“Tea is ready!” yells my mother from the kitchen, where Robert and I carry the good cups ensconced on good saucers, the gold-rimmed set my mother inherited from her parents. In addition to a bowl with raspberry jam, I see an open box of chocolates on the table my mother has extracted from the reserve cache of jars of mayonnaise and cans of tuna she keeps for holidays and special occasions. I take one and then one more; the chocolates have acquired a white patina of time from sitting in the cupboard for so long.

She asks Robert about the program, but from her absentminded questions I can see this is just polite small talk. What she really wants to know is what Robert does in America. Where he works, where he lives, with whom. Mundane questions, as practical as my mother.

He studies in Texas, finishing his PhD in physics. Robert rubs his forehead, thinking of the correct conjugations and declensions. When he is not in Texas, he is in his mother’s house in New Jersey. New Jersey? asks my mother. Close to New York City, he says. On the other side of the Hudson. Hudson? asks my mother. The word in Russian is
Goodzon
, which must sound funny to Robert, as if the Hudson River were a good zone in the middle of the otherwise rotten place.

We spread butter and spoon raspberry jam onto slices of bread, so fresh it gives way under the load. Much better than the cafeteria food, says Robert, chewing and smiling, although I can’t see how bread with dacha raspberry jam can be better than the professorial cabbage stuffed with real meat or the bowls brimming with whipped cream.

While Robert is searching for verb endings, my mother gives him pointed looks. She is trying to figure out what to think of this home visit, knowing all too well that I won’t be the one to reveal the truth. It’s a game we’ve been playing for as long as I can remember, a game of pretending, not unlike the
vranyo
game we all play with the state. I pretend that my bringing Robert home means nothing, and she pretends to believe me. She knows I won’t tell her what I really think about Robert, and I know that she knows that I know.

The truth is I haven’t yet decided how I feel about Robert myself.

“D
ON’T BE AN IDIOT
,” says Nina. “This is one chance in a lifetime.”

On Saturday, the Russian language program is over, and all the students are flying back to the United States. As I’ve anticipated, with both hope and trepidation, Robert has said he is sorry to leave. “I don’t want to say good-bye to you,” he uttered in Russian slowly, in search of the perfect grammatical structure.

“I’m sorry you’re leaving, too,” I said and sighed.

“Maybe I can come back in six months,” he offered. “When the fall semester is over at my university.”

“I hope you can. I would like that very much,” I said. “Your coming back.”

I repeat this to Nina, without mentioning my deliberate sighing. “If I could,” she says, “I’d be out of here on the first goddamn plane. This country is doomed, and we’re doomed with it. I’d go anywhere. I’d go to Patagonia if I could.”

But she knows she can’t. She has just married an engineer named Rudik she fell madly in love with, and now they’re living in her two-room apartment with her parents and her brother. I visited them recently in lieu of going to the wedding they didn’t have. Nina cooked a fabulous dinner, and we drank a bottle of red Bulgarian wine I brought, heating it in a pot with sugar and sliced apples to get rid of the acidic taste. Rudik was tentative, not quite a host in his in-laws’ apartment, not quite the passionate romantic Nina had described him to be. He showed me a huge glass vat with coils, which I was certain he’d stolen from a chemistry lab at his job, where from water, sugar, and yeast he produces what he called
idealniy samogon
, perfect moonshine.

“Do whatever you have to do,” says Nina, “to get the hell out.”

R
OBERT WANTS TO SEE
a white night, and I take him just before he has to leave. Those of us born here are used to white nights, of course; we close the drapes and sleep right through them without any trouble. But tourists think it’s part of the experience to complain that they can’t catch a wink of sleep because the sun shines in their eyes. Influenced by the romantic nonsense on postcards, they have to flock to the Neva after midnight to gawk in consternation as the bridges open and slowly rise into the sky to let the ships on their way to the Baltic Sea pass through the city center.

Robert and I are walking on the wrong side of the river, from where the open bridges do not allow us to return until three in the morning. The needle of the Peter and Paul Fortress is glinting in the first rays of the sun, which is rising one hour past midnight, as usual, a copper disk making the brick-colored Rostrum Columns glow in the hues of pale rose. We watch the Palace Bridge split in the middle and creak up into the pale sky. Streams of high school graduates float past us—seventeen-year-olds decked out in dresses sewn by their mothers and suits borrowed from their family armoire, celebrating their new freedom. Their exuberance dances on the steel grid of the bridges, bounces off the stone fence of the embankment.