A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (39 page)

I see Boris first when I elbow my way out of the Nevsky Prospekt metro station. He stands with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his eyes blue as the Crimean sky. When he makes me out in the crowd, his lips stretch into a smile that three years ago would have stopped my heart.

“I got on the train as soon as I heard,” he says, taking me by the shoulders and kissing my cheek. “Natasha called me yesterday and told me.”

He sounds as if he were speaking of a disaster, a terrible accident that forced him to hop on the train and rush here. “Told you what?” I ask.

He peers at me to make sure I’m not joking. “That you’re marrying a foreigner and leaving.” His voice rises at the end, almost like a question. We’re walking along Nevsky Prospekt, two specks in its afternoon crowds, and for a few seconds I don’t say anything as I shoulder my way through a cluster of people getting ready to storm a bus, the air filled with the clang of faulty transmissions and the shriek of brakes. “That you’re marrying an American,” he says, the word
amerikanets
hissing out of his mouth the same way it hisses out of my mother’s.

I don’t know how Natasha from Kiev, who sighed and gave Boris sad, longing glances back in our Crimean cove, could’ve learned that I’m going to marry Robert and leave. I look at Boris and shrug, letting him know that Natasha was right, that I am indeed responsible for this catastrophe that required him to abandon his engineering duties in Kiev and race to Leningrad.

We walk a little longer without saying anything, absorbed in the street noise, in the clatter of buses, trolleys, and trucks, in the ferocious whistling from a militiaman trying to prevent a few girls from jaywalking. Then Boris stops in front of a door with the words “Kavkazsky Restaurant” written in big neon letters on the façade above it, one of those places where no one can get in.

Boris tells me to wait and walks over to the doorman. His hand fumbles in his pocket and then produces a red and white pack of Marlboros, something I’ve seen only once because it’s a black-market item, just like blue jeans and Grundig radios with frequencies reaching beyond our jamming range that can tune into the Voice of America and the BBC. Is there also a red ten-ruble note stuffed under the Marlboro pack? I can’t see from where I stand, but the doorman, whose silly uniform looks like it was dusted off from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” steps away and does what he has theoretically been put there to do, open the door. Boris extends his arm, inviting me to enter, a little smile glowing in his eyes, the usual Boris who is older and wiser and knows everything.

When we get to the dining room, it is nearly empty. Unoccupied tables with white tablecloths stand on gleaming parquet, a potted ficus tree behind a grand piano, an air of withered luxury more suited to a town in a Chekhov story than the first proletarian city on earth. A disinterested waiter in a white shirt and a black jacket with an oily stain on the sleeve unhurriedly crosses the room to bring the menus. I pretend to study rows of unfamiliar appetizers, but pretending is all I can do. Boris orders a bottle of champagne and, as the waiter drags his feet to set the table with glasses and napkins, sits back and stares at me, as if he’d been sitting in such restaurants his whole life, as if he hadn’t just spent his week’s salary on the pack of Marlboros and the bribe to get in.

I gaze back at him, and that’s what we do for a while, stare at each other. I don’t know why Boris is here. Beyond the August in the Crimea, I was always the one to initiate phone calls and trips to see him; I was the one who forced him to admit finally that I was too different from him, with all my Leningrad arrogance and cynicism and glorification of Western lifestyles gleaned from foreign books.

The waiter shuffles in with the champagne and Georgian appetizers and interrupts our staring. Boris nudges the plates toward me and instructs me to try the red beans with spices and chicken in walnut sauce, although I don’t know how, living in Kiev, he can be so familiar with Georgian cooking. We carry on a safe conversation about our Black Sea cove and the two border patrol boys who descended from their observation point on a hill, lured by our potatoes and our wine. When the champagne is finished, he orders a bottle of cognac. The waiter, his face scrunched in reproach that we are making him carry all those heavy trays, warily sets down plates with skewers of lamb and chicken
tabaka,
flavorful and spicy and so much unlike our own food. After a toast of cognac, Boris stops reminiscing about the Crimea and turns to my impending marriage.

“Why are you doing it?” he demands.

I am almost ready for this, so I pick up my cognac glass and drink what’s left in it, a honey-colored liquid that definitely—my mother was right—smells of bedbugs.

“You’re marrying an American and going to live in America,” he says, an accusation I cannot deny. “Don’t you realize they’ll never let you back?”

“They’ll let me back,” I say quickly, as if saying it would make it happen. “I still have my Russian passport. I’m not Jewish; I’m not emigrating to Israel.” If I were, it occurs to me, Boris wouldn’t be sitting at this table, plying me with Georgian food in a place I never dreamed I would see. I still remember his harangue about the Ukrainian Jews during the war, his bewilderment at how they marched to their own graves in Babi Yar. The present-day Jews who want to leave the country are ordered to surrender their passports and their nationality, so they can never return. “I’m still a Soviet citizen. They have to let me back.” I say this in a knowing, deliberate voice, but inside I’m not so cavalier. Will I really be able to come back to visit? Maybe Boris is right, after all. Why would they allow me to return, a traitor who took advantage of the university’s language labs and seminars in Chomskyan grammar, who learned everything there was to learn from books about a London she could never see, then turned around and married a foreigner and left?

But Boris doesn’t stop here. “And if you did return, do you know what would happen?” he says. It feels eerie, as though he could see through my skull and read my thoughts. “You’d be marked. No one would want to be around you. Even your closest friends.”

I gulp more cognac, but it only makes me dizzier. I’ll be
vrag naroda,
enemy of the people, just like Uncle Volya, my mother’s uncle who was arrested in 1937 and then shot—the time we don’t talk about, the time that makes sense only in the West, where they publish Solzhenitsyn.

“I still don’t understand why,” he says. “You graduated from a great university. You have a good teaching job. Your future is set. The department trusts you. Everybody trusts you. Why are you throwing it all away?” I don’t know if I want to continue this conversation about good jobs and trust. “Do you really want to live in a country where all they think about is money?” he goes on. I’m not sure where Boris learned this tidbit about America and money. Maybe he read Maxim Gorky’s
The City of the Yellow Devil,
about his visit to New York in the 1920s, when our writers were still allowed to travel abroad. “Here,” he says and stretches out his arm, presenting to me our dirty plates with bones and empty skewers, “we don’t count every kopek. Here if we party, we party.” He reaches for his glass and drinks all of its contents, as if teaching me an example of the proper partying etiquette. “Here our life is more than work and the stock market.”

“Actually,” I say, “it’s less. We don’t have a stock market.”

He leans back in his chair, failing to hear my remark or maybe simply ignoring it. “Our life here is about friendship and love,” he adds.

“Friendship, yes,” I say, “but not so much about love. You certainly didn’t seem to be in love with me.”

What I really want to tell him, what I’ve never been able to tell him, is how it felt when he didn’t move a finger to come to Leningrad to rescue me, even for a weekend. When I concocted plans and counted days and he didn’t. It felt humiliating. It felt like I’d turned loathsome and worthless, a worm inching across our dacha compost pile.

A woman in an apron lumbers out of the kitchen and begins to pile the dirty plates onto her forearm. Boris looks down, busy examining the stains on the tablecloth, and I now have a chance to hold in my gaze his face, already touched by the first Ukrainian sun and his hair falling over his forehead in soft, yellow strands. This is the face that compelled me to borrow fifty rubles from Nina and hop on a plane two months after we’d met in the Crimea, having lied to my mother that a linguistics professor had sent me to a conference in Kiev.

The waiter, a forced creepy smile on his face, sidles up with a bottle of Georgian wine we didn’t order, but Boris is too cocky to send it back, especially since he has just demonstrated the advantages of Russian partying. The bottle is opened and poured into chipped glasses, a syrupy red called Khvanchkara that the oily waiter proudly announces was the favorite wine of Stalin. For a minute, he stands over our table, as if waiting to be invited to salute our former leader, as if he doesn’t see that Boris frowns and stares at something stuck to the bottom of a glass, collecting thoughts for an important statement. When the waiter finally departs, Boris plants his elbows on the table and leans toward me. “Whatever you may think of me,” he says, “you’re making a mistake you’ll never undo. The biggest mistake of your life.”

“And why do you care?” I say. Stalin’s wine tastes like compote made from sweetened ink. “You never came to Leningrad before. I was the one who went to Kiev and then to Moscow when you were staying at your friends’ place, that communal mousetrap with no hot water.” A narrow, mothball-smelling corridor pops up in my mind, and a bony babushka with accusing eyes. “So what are you doing here, haranguing me about my mistakes? Maybe that was a mistake, coming to see you. Maybe the summer in Novy Svet was all there was supposed to be.”

I’m not sure why this tirade has tumbled out of my mouth because all this, as my mother says, is last year’s snow. In two weeks I’ll be married to Robert Ackerman, who resides in Austin, Texas, which makes Boris Kravchenko from Kiev, despite his blond hair and impossibly blue eyes, quite irrelevant. But is he? In all his sermonizing about collective trust, there are grains of something I’ve been thinking, little crumbs of truth that wake me up at night and make me lie in bed, listening to the breathing of my mother in the bed next to mine.

“Nu, nu,”
says Boris, reaching across the table and covering my hand with his, benevolently granting me the right to be angry. “All I wanted to say is congratulations.” He grasps my ring finger, leans across the table, and touches it with his lips. “Congratulations and best wishes for a happy life and healthy children,” he says, the drunken words, like wet laundry, tangled in his mouth. He lets my finger go, reaches for the cognac bottle, still half full, then puts it back. “But they will never see Leningrad, your children,” he says. “No Hermitage or white nights. No bridges, no Kirov Theatre.”

Strangely, I’m sober enough not to get involved in a conversation about children. “Borya,” I say and lean across the table to get closer, “why are you here?”

He looks down and stares into his empty glass. For a few moments, it seems that he may answer my question, that he may stop lecturing about collectives, about the Hermitage and the Kirov. It seems he may finally admit that the August in Novy Svet, with its unfailing sun and turquoise light, has burned a mark into his soul, just as it has into mine.

Then his old, all-knowing face is back. “How about some chocolate?” he offers. “You must have chocolate before your wedding.”

He waves at the waiter, who unhurriedly reappears with a bar of chocolate peeking out of its foil wrapping, displayed on a serving dish as if it were an exotic cake. I get up as the waiter scurries over with a bill, which, I’m certain, contains things we didn’t order. But Boris, of course, is above doing the itemizing and the addition, something they would stoop to only in the money-obsessed West, which doesn’t know how to party or how to love. I rewrap the chocolate bar and take it with me because I don’t want the greedy waiter to have that, too.

We go out onto Nevsky. I am not sure what time it is, but it seems late, and we walk pointlessly along the canal, where the black water licks at the walls of the embankment. Icy wind whips in from the Neva and blows the fog out of my head. We walk past the Kirov, past the Theatre Square lampposts, their glow nestled in the lace of wrought iron. The last Intourist buses are pulling out of the square. Their passengers are on the way back to their hotels after a day in our museums and former churches, where guides instruct them to stay together, as if these uninhibited people in leather shoes could somehow be mistaken for one of us.

It is ironic, I think, that I’m walking with Boris around Leningrad now, two weeks before my marriage to someone else. This is what I’ve wanted to do since that August in the Crimea—dazzle him with Leningrad’s baroque balconies and marble statues and benches in the shade of linden trees; unfold before him the magic rug of avenues beaming out from the Neva toward the center of Nevsky and sparkling with the gold thread of spire needles. Parade in front of his eyes our fountains and our Bronze Horseman, our pearly domes of light-blue cathedrals and our wrought-iron fences sheltering the silent gardens where Pushkin composed poetry.

And although it isn’t beautiful now, on a freezing March night, when most windows are extinguished and the sidewalk is a porridge of dirty snow, I wonder if Boris is right and I am making a mistake. What city on earth can possibly trump Leningrad? I’m leaving a place people from all over the world come to see from the high-perched seats of their Intourist buses. I’m leaving the only place I know.