A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir Read Online Free

unleashed by such unmarried permissiveness. Bitterly, she thought of her first Sasha, who had had the nerve to doubt her character.
Although the new Sasha resisted a little—rubbing his hairless chin, dragging out reasons why they didn’t need to rush to the marriage bureau at the crack of dawn—my mother was unyielding. She needed order, she told herself, but she knew this was bigger than order. She was drawn to this blond captain like a fly to spilled honey.
This would be a real marriage, she thought, to a man who seemed gentle and kind. He was also a Communist Party member, an ideology leader of his division, undoubtedly a person of high morals and a definitive sense of purpose aimed at the future of the country as well as their own.
The marriage bureau was a desk in a small room where they registered deaths, births, and those missing-in-action. First, on a lined page ripped out of a school composition book, my mother wrote that she was declaring herself divorced from the first Sasha for the reason of “military cataclysm.” She didn’t know if he was dead or alive, and with the country occupied and ravaged, she couldn’t—and didn’t want to—find out. Then, on another page, she declared herself married to the Sasha standing next to her.
“Congratulations,” said the puffy woman behind the desk, who was wearing a coat and an ushanka hat with the earflaps tied under her chin. After inspecting the purple stamps in their passports, Sasha and my mother went to her cold apartment, where the captain drank two tea glasses of vodka and passed out.
A few days later, my mother learned that in the northern town of Atkarsk, her new husband had a common-law wife and a ten-year-old daughter he hadn’t seen since the beginning of the Finnish war. She also learned he had TB, in an open, most contagious form, which was the reason he had been sent from the front to the nearest hospital. Had she waited a little, she would have received a military transfer order with his chart.
It took her another month to figure out he was an alcoholic.
All too late, she thought of my grandmother’s saying, Pospeshish—lyudei nasmeshish . If you do things in haste, you’ll make people laugh.
S PRING BROUGHT WOUNDED CIVILIANS . When the ice on the Volga turned porous and frail, mines frozen into the river began to explode, touched off by the slightest shift, sending flocks of birds into the air and schools of fish to the water surface, belly up. Locals with buckets waded into the river to collect the unexpected harvest floating among chunks of ice, setting off more mines.
It was prohibited to treat civilians in a military hospital. But when a woman brought in an unconscious nine-year-old boy one April morning, my mother didn’t hesitate. She unbuttoned his quilted jacket and muddy pants and carefully pulled them away from his perforated flesh, revealing blind belly wounds: entrances of shells with no exits. Together with the woman, whose son had been killed by the same mine, she carried the boy into the operating room, taking small, slow steps, the two synchronizing their walk. There she lifted a scalpel out of the boiling water, made an incision, and pulled apart flaps of skin, exposing multiple intestinal wounds, big and tiny holes in the coils of the boy’s belly. She rinsed the boy’s intestines with antiseptic and sewed up the holes, one by one.
As soon as she finished, the hospital Commissar stormed in, shouted that she was breaking a military order, and commanded her to report to the director’s office immediately.
“Rules are rules,” muttered Dr. Kremer, hunched over papers on his director’s desk. “You had no right to operate.”
“The patient is nine years old,” my mother said. “He needs to stay here for three more days. After three days I can send him to the town hospital.” She thought of how thickheaded and unperceptive he was, a typical man. In her mind, she returned to the child in the operating room, then tried