A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (8 page)

Most frequently, her praise falls on Zoya Churkina, who sits in the row to my left, two desks closer to the front. Zoya is blond and perfect, her long hair arranged in two tidy braids with bows at the ends, her black apron buttoned over her smart brown dress with a white collar, always starched. “Our diamond,” Vera Pavlovna calls her as Zoya blushes, trying to suppress a smile.

She never calls me a diamond, although I finish the exercises as fast as Zoya does. The best nickname I ever receive is “our gold nugget,” which she bestows on me when I decline all the participles without a single spelling error. I resent Zoya, with her exemplary braids and her permanent diamond status. Although none of us has any idea of what a diamond or a gold nugget looks like, we are all aware of the diamond’s supremacy and thus of my second-place standing.

When the bell rings, Zoya erases the board and makes sure everyone goes into the hallway. She is the class monitor, the only one allowed to stay in at break time, the one to ensure that Dimka, the class hooligan, doesn’t instigate any fights.

Dimka is a
dvoechnik,
the one who gets a
dvoika,
or failing grade, in everything. The opposite of
dvoika
is
pyatorka,
a five, the grade Zoya and I get. “Most likely this Dimka is a plumber’s son,” says my mother, who just recently had an encounter with plumbers. After a week of daily visits to our apartment building office to complain about a water leak, my mother finally prevailed, and two plumbers were sent to fix the problem. But by the time they arrived they were so drunk that when my mother opened the door, they could only sink to the floor of the stair landing, their heads propped against the elevator shaft.

I
T IS ONE DAY
before November 7, the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, a topic Vera Pavlovna is passionate about in our history class. Stretching her long arm forward, like Lenin in the statues scattered around the city, she tells us how the retired World War I cruiser
Aurora,
which is now permanently anchored on the other side of the Neva, fired a blank shot signaling the storming of the Winter Palace.

“Workers and peasants,” she says, “ruthlessly exploited by the Tsar, climbed over the palace gate, ran up the October Staircase, and arrested the Provisional Government.” The part about the Provisional Government remains murky since she never explains how this government came to replace the Tsar, and why it, too, needed to be overthrown if it was the already de-throned Tsar who had plunged the country into the pitiful abyss requiring revolutionary intervention.

As her voice trembles describing the arrest, I try to picture a crowd of workers and peasants inside the Winter Palace, the home of the Hermitage, stomping their boots up the October Staircase with its inlaid marble floors and Italian paintings, hurtling past the throne of Peter the Great with their hammers and scythes. I cannot help thinking that, despite Vera Pavlovna’s ardor, they wouldn’t allow anything of that kind today, when simply to enter the Hermitage you must put on cloth slippers, cinch them around your ankles, and glide slowly under the gaze of a million babushkas in the corner of every room, making sure that you don’t come too close to the royal china or priceless oils.

“Tomorrow, November seventh,” she says, “all across the Soviet Union, from our glorious capital to the permafrost of the Siberian taiga, we will celebrate the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.”

“Why is it the October Revolution if we celebrate it in November?” asks Dimka the hooligan from the last row.

Vera Pavlovna stops in the middle of her story and looks at him with disbelief. The Julian-Gregorian calendar change is first-grade information, but even back then Dimka obviously wasn’t listening.

“Shame on you,” she says, pointing at him Lenin-style. “Shame on you and your ignorance.”

She pauses to let Dimka’s shame and hopelessness sink to an appropriate depth in each of us. After a minute of silence, as the train of her narration is irrevocably off track, she turns to more recent happenings.

“In two days, when we return to school after the holiday, we’re going to have a celebration of our own. A great honor will be bestowed upon you—you will all become Young Pioneers.”

Every year in the school gym, three sections of third-graders, lined up in perfect rows, take the Young Pioneer Oath and have red kerchiefs tied around their necks by the seventh-graders, who in their turn, at fourteen, rotate out of the Pioneers to join the Young Communist League. It’s as much a school ritual as the annual visit to the dental clinic, a day in the middle of March that everyone hates.

“All of you will take the oath in two days, the first step on the great road to becoming a communist,” continues Vera Pavlovna as she looks at Dimka. With a shake of her head she lets us know that, despite school policy, he is obviously undeserving of this honor.

The Code of Young Pioneers, which is posted on our classroom wall, requires good behavior and good grades of all its prospective participants, so technically Dimka is not eligible; but in reality every person in every class gets a red kerchief, and Vera Pavlovna can do nothing to stop Dimka from joining in. We all know, of course, that she would never try. She understands the necessity of diverging in practice from what’s been written on paper, of rules being something you recite and aspire to, not something you follow. It is clear to everyone that it wouldn’t look proper if some people during the ceremony remained unkerchiefed, raising all kinds of questions about their intent and allegiance.

“Look at our Pioneer hero of the past,” says Vera Pavlovna and points to the portrait of Pavlik Morozov hanging on the wall next to Pushkin. His story is in our textbooks, but Vera Pavlovna recites it again. “A son of wealthy peasants, Pavlik found out that his father was hiding sacks of wheat in his cellar—while people were starving. At night, this brave boy ran across the fields to the local Soviet and told them about the grain. The next morning the soldiers came to his house and confiscated the wheat. The local Commissariat gave Pavlik Morozov a medal.” Vera Pavlovna nods her head to punctuate the last word.

I glance at Pavlik’s solemn head looking down on us in a red Pioneer kerchief and a halo of righteous superiority, as perfect as Zoya Churkina’s.

“What happened to the father?” asks Dimka from the last row. Vera Pavlovna pauses and looks at him with a hopeless smile. Even if you don’t know what happened to Pavlik’s father, everyone knows what
should
have happened to him for hiding wheat from starving people.

“For this serious crime, and for breaking Stalin’s decree to give up all the harvest to the people, Citizen Morozov the elder was arrested and served ten years in the camps,” announces Vera Pavlovna.

I am not sure that ratting on your father and having him shipped to Siberia is a heroic thing to do, even if it saved someone from starvation. But I don’t say anything, and no one else does either, to contradict Vera Pavlovna in praising Pavlik Morozov’s vigilance and valor. We all know that some things are so obvious you just don’t debate them. You don’t debate what’s written in history textbooks. You pretend you think that Pavlik Morozov was a true hero deserving a medal, just as in nursery school we pretended to chew the bread with rancid butter.

But Dimka, because of his ignorance or stupidity, does not know the unwritten rules. Unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t weigh what to say before he says it. He doesn’t rehearse in his mind to make sure that what rolls out of his mouth will fit the Code of Young Pioneers. So, once in a while, he can ask an interesting question.

A
T HOME, THE NIGHT
before the Young Pioneer initiation, I wash my white uniform collar and my mother irons it and sews it back on. In the morning she braids my hair with two white nylon bows and stands me in front of a triple dressing mirror in our room. “What a pretty Young Pioneer,” she smiles. My father is fumbling through the armoire looking for his jacket. He left it hanging on the back of a chair, a fine place for a suit jacket, but my mother put it away and now he’ll be late for work. He tugs on a hanger, spills a tangle of cardigan sweaters, and pulls his jacket out of their midst. “Let me see the salute,” he says, the result of my mother’s orderliness crumpled by his feet.

I straighten my right hand and bring my thumb to my forehead, as our school’s Pioneer counselor has taught us.

“
Molodets,
” says my father. “Good for you.” He is standing in front of my mother, who is knotting his tie.

“We’re all joining in,” I say, “even Dimka the
dvoechnik
.”

“I don’t know about that,” says my mother and shakes her head. “What kind of a reward is this for a
dvoechnik
?” she says, and I know she is still fuming over the two drunk plumbers who have yet to fix our water leak. She threads the tie under the collar of my father’s shirt. “What do you think, Ilya?” she asks.

“What difference does it make?” he says. “It isn’t what it used to be.” He pats himself on the pockets to make sure he has his two packs of Belomor cigarettes for the day. “We used to believe in something. You went through the war, you know,” he motions toward my mother. “For motherland, for Stalin. Remember?”

My mother loops his tie back and forth and nods.

“There’s nothing to believe in anymore. You open
Pravda
and everything is so much better there than it was yesterday. And yesterday was better than the day before. At this rate, everyone will be out of communal apartments by next week, driving their own cars to load up on
kolbasa
. You know the joke about
Pravda
and
Izvestiya
?” he asks to no one in particular. “There’s no news in
Pravda
and no truth in
Izvestiya
.”

I think it’s funny—no news in the Truth and no truth in the News—and I laugh, but my mother looks at my father with reproach because, I know, she doesn’t want to disillusion me before I even join.

“Be a good Pioneer,” says my father, taking his briefcase and opening the front door. “And don’t forget that salute.”

“Listen well to what Vera Pavlovna says,” instructs my mother as we go down in the elevator, letting me know that, although what my father said may be true, it does not apply in school.

O
UR MORNING CLASSES ARE
canceled. Lined up in our special uniforms, white aprons instead of black ones for girls, white shirts under gray suits for boys, we stand at attention in the gym and solemnly promise to live, study, and struggle as the great Lenin bequeathed that we must do.

We stand in rows, the three sections of our third grade, a hundred and twenty of us, with Vera Pavlovna straight as a pole, her eyes on the principal at the podium. In front of us, along the other wall of the gym, are the three sections of seventh-graders, red kerchiefs stretched on their palms. When the principal is finished with her speech—the Pioneer duties and responsibilities we all know by heart—our music teacher signals a fifth-grader with a horn to play a few notes, and the boy tries so hard to hit them right that his face turns as red as his Pioneer tie. This is the signal for the seventh-graders to move forward and bind the kerchiefs they are holding around our necks. With inadvertent pushing and bumping as each fourteen-year-old moves toward each of us, our identical rows instantly collapse into a crowd. When a seventh-grade boy approaches, freckled and red-eared, he fumbles with my kerchief, tying it so that it hangs too long on the left, but that’s not important because the kerchief is all mine now and I can set it right or untie it altogether and make a brand-new knot.

I turn my eyes sideways to look at Zoya’s white bows obediently lying on her shoulder blades, at Dimka staring into space as he, along with all of us, bends his elbow in salute. Then the school’s Pioneer counselor, who is about twenty but who looks twelve and is in charge of orchestrating the whole event, takes in a lungful of air and yells out, “Be ready!” It is a signal to recite the Young Pioneer motto that we rehearsed so many times after classes and during the big break, pretending we had red kerchiefs tied around our necks. But this is the real thing. Little flames of polyester bloom around our collars, announcing to everyone in our school that we are no longer eight years old. We all breathe in, count to three, and shout as we were taught, “Always ready!”

After the ceremony, there is another opportunity for Vera Pavlovna to tell us about heroism and valor. She stands in front of our four rows of desks, talking about the Great Patriotic War. Stalin, she says, got his name from the word
stal
, which means “steel,” because he was as strong as steel. “Got his name,” she says, as though names were given out at some name-dispensation fair according to people’s character.

I wonder how Lenin got his name. According to our history book
Eternally Alive,
he chose it in honor of the great Siberian river Lena. But Lena is also my name, and this coincidence makes me uncomfortable. Am I somehow, in an odd way, related to Lenin? Does it oblige me to be as fervent as Vera Pavlovna in believing what our third-grade history lessons teach? Does it oblige me to admire Pavlik Morozov, who chose the starving people over his father and now sneers down at me from the wall?

My shoulders sag under the weight of this historic liability.