A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (41 page)

“You can exchange the rings,” the woman commands, and Robert picks up the smaller gold band. As I extend my right hand, he suddenly freezes and just stands there, making me freeze, too, making me instantly think that he has changed his mind and come to his senses.

“Which hand?” he whispers.

“The right one,” I whisper back, bewildered. What kind of question is this? Everyone wears a wedding ring on the right hand—everyone who could get a written proof from the Acts of Marriage Palace to buy one.

He pushes the ring up my finger and extends his right hand for me. Then we all file out of the grand wedding room into a less grand corridor where Nina’s husband, Rudik, is already pouring into glasses the two bottles of champagne included in the ceremony. I down my glass and someone else’s. Nina comes over and embraces me. Instead of the usual perfume, there is a new smell around her, a scent of ironed laundry and freshly made soup. “Good for you,” she says as her big stomach presses into my dress. “Congratulations.”

Then a photographer appears, herding us all onto the front stairway so he can arrange us on different levels according to the guests’ importance, as if we were coming down the marble steps. Robert and I are ordered to stand next to the carved banister, my family behind us, my friends above on the upstairs landing. The photographer, a short man in a wrinkled suit, runs between our group and the camera, perspiring, yelling instructions, pressing the air between his palms to tell us to stand closer.

I am grateful for all this commotion. I’m glad my aunt is lamenting the empty champagne bottles and not my failure to marry one of “our Russian fellows.” I’m glad my mother is worrying about the photo album and not about my leaving. I squeeze Robert’s hand as my aunt stretches her arms out to grab him by the shoulders and kiss him on the cheeks three times, a good Russian custom she is now bestowing on an undeserving foreigner. No matter what she thinks of American apartheid or of Robert, he is now family, and she has no choice but to apply to him the same generosity she applies to any in-law, in spite of his curly Jewish hair and his watch that sports the incomprehensible word “Seiko.”

At home, the refrigerator is packed with meat stew and a dozen salads. “We’re going in a taxi,” says my mother, pointing to two cabs idling by the entrance. She would prefer a white Volga provided by the Acts of Marriage Palace—two intertwined golden rings on the roof and a doll in a white dress on the hood—but that was where I drew the line.

“Where is your coat?” asks my mother with a frown. “You’ll get cold and get sick.” I don’t know where my coat is, just as I don’t know what they’ve done with my marriage certificate and my stamped passport, which are now much more crucial to my life than coats or any other warm things. Across the street, below the granite embankment, the zinc waters of the Neva churn around the stone pillars buttressing the Liteiny Bridge, the last chunks of ice dipping and rising in their flow like huge bobbins on invisible fishing lines. A gust of wind knifes in from the river; my mother, I reluctantly admit, was right about the coat.

In the backseat of the cab, Robert and I stare at our ringed hands. “In America it’s the left one,” he says, making me feel silly about the moment on the podium. “I wonder what that woman would’ve done if we’d put the rings on our left hands.”

Only someone who wasn’t born here could think of such a bizarre thing, such a deliberate flaunting of rules. But since I know we have different brains and Robert cannot understand how impossible this thought would be to any of us here, I pretend I am considering the option. “She’d probably say that as long as you are on Soviet soil, you must do things the Soviet way. The right way, you know,” I add and skew my eyes to see Robert’s reaction. “The right-handed way,” I say and we both giggle.

I look out the window at the façades fringed in slushy snow, at the yellow building with white columns, the railroad ticket office, and think of what happened here just a few days before. I know Robert would appreciate this story, a uniquely Russian scene that I describe to him in Russian. At around one in the afternoon, after I’d been standing in line for an hour to buy Aunt Mila a train ticket back to Minsk, two ticket sellers simultaneously barricaded their windows with handwritten signs, the word “lunch” scribbled on cardboard in purple indelible pencil. In front of me, an African man in a sheepskin coat—a foreign student from one of Leningrad’s schools—politely suggested that shutting two out of the three open windows for lunch when the queue curled out the front door might not be the most efficient way to serve the people. “They’re wasting their time in line instead of contributing to the society and the Five-Year Plan,” he said quietly, with a serious face, using correct, docile grammar. The crowd grew silent, a sea of white around a single dark face. Then one of the ticket-sellers shoved the “lunch” sign aside and leaned out of the window, her polyester bosom hanging over the counter. “We taught you Russian,” she barked, glaring at the African, stressing every word as if she were reading Lenin’s decree—a glare of condemnation for his well-fitting coat, for his quiet voice, for his otherness. “We taught you Russian, so now you shut up!”

I wiggle closer to Robert on the scratchy taxi seat. “So now you shut up,” I whisper into his ear, and he puts his arm around my shoulders. I taught him about Russia, and he gave me the power to leave it. He smells of the blue shampoo he brought with him, a cold, antiseptic smell. He smells of America and a different life.

20. Farewell

I
AM ON A SECOND-FLOOR
landing of the philology department, in the “philodrome”—a place to meet, smoke, and gossip. The gossip nowadays is about me: a temporary instructor and a possible graduate school candidate who has married a capitalist and is leaving for America.

After the wedding, three weeks of paper collection have finally produced a complete package accepted by the visa department, and now I’ll have to wait for my exit visa. My work record has been copied from a shelf in the university archive and notarized, my Leningrad residency rescinded, permission to leave signed by my mother, and my Komsomol membership card safely stowed away in a safe in case I decide to come back and reenter the ranks. At home, the talk about these red-tape hurdles and surly clerks allows me to avoid the talk about leaving.

I must be in the dean’s office in ten minutes, an appointment I was ordered to keep by the department’s party secretary, who was so livid that he hardly said anything because he couldn’t unclench his teeth. This meeting is going to be another expression of official outrage, a pro forma scolding.

I’ve never seen the dean before, the only proof of his existence an impatient signature on the department’s rules posted on billboards, Dean Maslov. I timidly knock on the door, as if I don’t want him to hear it, as if his not hearing it would excuse me from this visit. But the voice inside commands me to come in, and I creak the door open. His office is cluttered with chairs, filing cabinets, and papers spilling out of folders; it smells of tobacco and dust. A wrinkle-free Brezhnev in oil frowns from the wall above the desk. Dean Maslov is short and dense, his weight solidly packed inside a suit. He looks like a pirate, one eye covered with a black patch, a pipe jammed between his fingers. A communist pirate, a pirate dean. He blows out smoke and motions to the chair on the other side of the desk.

“So what have they been telling me,” he says, peering at me through the smoke, “you’re leaving us?”

“I’m married to an American citizen, so I guess I’m leaving.” Before coming here, I assembled a few stock phrases from the dustbin of jargon used in speeches and administrative orders tacked to door frames.

He draws on his pipe, squinting—whether from the pleasure of the tobacco or disgust at seeing me, I don’t know.

“Isn’t it a shame—as soon as we raise a decent student, a candidate for graduate school, she’s snatched away by the West. Well, too bad. We will have to be more careful hiring young single women to teach American students.”

I know this is a threat—not to me, but to future foreign-language majors applying for summer teaching jobs. It means that from now on these jobs will go only to women who are married, preferably to KGB officials, like the director of the American program.

“Everyone wants to go to America.” His pipe leaves a trace of smoke in the air as he throws up his arm. “America, America—that’s all we hear. America the paradise. America the land of abundance. Strawberries in the winter and a car for every citizen.”

He pauses and peers at me with his one eye.

“I’m not leaving because of strawberries in the winter,” I say since he expects me to say something. “Or even a car.”

“Not even a car, eh?” He cranes his neck as if to take a better look at me. “Well, why then?”

Although he is sharp enough to know that I am not going to tell him the truth, Dean Maslov leans back and waits for me to respond. He looks the same way Nadia from my high school looked at me yesterday when I ran into her in the street. Nadia is now a
refusenik
: she is Jewish, and nine months ago her application to leave the country was refused by the local visa department. Her parents, her grandmother, and her husband are now blacklisted and shunned. I felt guilty that I can leave and she cannot, too embarrassed to admit to her that my real reason for leaving has nothing to do with the cause of political freedom. It has to do with my mother. Two years ago, if Boris had asked me to marry him, I would have hopped on the first train headed for Kiev, a thousand kilometers away.

“I got married,” I say. “People get married and leave.”

The dean sets his pipe down in a heavy crystal ashtray on his desk and gets up. He was not really expecting to get an answer. According to procedure, he has to check off in a book that the talk has taken place.

“Where are you going in America?” he asks, leafing through papers on his desk.

“Texas.”

“Ah, the land where they kill presidents.” He walks over to the bookshelf, stops, and runs his fingers over the book spines. “Well, good luck.” I don’t really know what killing of what presidents he is talking about. “I’ve been to America, you know,” he says. “I lived there for a year—a cultural exchange in the early sixties. A fascinating place.” Dean Maslov stuffs his hands into his pockets and rocks on his feet, his eye on the window, where little sticky leaves curl out of buds on poplar branches. “But you don’t want to get fired there, or get sick, or get old. There is no safety net, no collective to help. You are on your own.” He half-smiles for the first time. “It made me feel grateful for my guaranteed ninety-ruble pension.”

This is about what I expected to hear, the talk about collectives and ninety-ruble pensions, although I thought that university deans, considering their ideologically sensitive positions, made more than ninety rubles. I thought that Maslov would limit this talk to a pointy reprimand or, possibly, an angry accusation of squandering the state’s resources, wasted on my education.

“What do you mean, the land where they kill presidents?” I ask.

“You don’t know?” He wags his head to show me how hopeless he thinks I am. “In 1963 an American president was killed in Dallas, Texas. Didn’t you know that?” He looks familiar now, an authority lecturing an underling. “
Your
president. You should brush up on your history.”

I am not sure how I’m supposed to know what happened in America when I was eight as I cannot even find out what is happening there now. Yet he is right: I am as ignorant of my new country’s history as I am of everything else.

Dean Maslov moves back to his desk, to his spilling papers and his pipe. He must be in his mid-sixties, my mother’s age, which means he also went through the post-revolutionary chaos and the two wars. Maybe that’s why he’s tried to warn me about America. Like my mother, he comes from the first Soviet generation, from the time when
vranyo
was still fresh, still a little curly sprout. He comes from the time when it hadn’t yet morphed and metastasized and tunneled its way through our tissue the way my father’s cancer wormed into his bladder and his lungs. When it hadn’t yet crept through every millimeter of our flesh—this lie, which my father helped cultivate after he’d lost his teeth to scurvy, which my mother, busy organizing union meetings and funerals, barely noticed. Maybe Dean Maslov played the same crumb game my grandmother—everyone’s grandmother—invented during the famine; maybe he, too, saw a piece of bread swell into a whole mountain of crumbs.

He feels the pockets of his jacket for a box of matches, squints his one eye, and lights his extinguished pipe—not quite a pirate, not quite a pundit or a leader—an old man ready to retire on ninety rubles a month.

A silly thought floats into my head: this is what it has all come to—a mountain of crumbs.

I get up and carefully close the door behind me. The pro forma talk has taken place.

I
AM ON A
bus, clutching a handbag with my exit visa and an Aeroflot ticket to America. The Aeroflot office on Nevsky was empty, as always, since it deals exclusively with international travel. I went in and asked for a ticket to the United States. The girl perched on a high seat behind the counter winced, sized me up with stiff eyes outlined in imported mascara that doesn’t have to be mixed with spit, and scrutinized my visa while I stood on the other side, staring at her chin. Then, with angry reluctance, after taking my passport to the back room to consult her KGB supervisor, she wrote out a ticket in her diligent official handwriting, reserved for foreign destinations.