A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

and her husband.
When Sasha began spitting up blood, he was admitted to the Ivanovo hospital, my mother’s alma mater. She consulted the head of the TB clinic and her former professor, who concurred that after his release from the hospital, Sasha must leave home since he could not stay in the house with a newborn. But before he left, he took both the butter and the bread, added a few bars of soap from my grandmother’s closet, and sold them to buy himself a jar of moonshine.
Sima died at home on November 1, 1942. My mother washed him and shaved him and dressed him for the funeral. Since she was eight months pregnant, her parents decided that it would be too traumatic for her to go to the cemetery, an invitation to premature labor. She stood on the porch, watching my grandfather crack a whip in a swift strike, watching the horse snort and jerk forward as the cart with my grandmother, slumped against Sima’s coffin, slowly bumped onto the road, rutted by recent rain.
Sasha left on November 7, three weeks before my sister would be born, on the Day of the Great Socialist Revolution, which is in peaceful times an occasion for a citizens’ parade, for people marching in rows, and banners flapping happily in the wind. In gray air pocked with drizzle, they walked through the ruins of her town and stood waiting for the train, my big-bellied mother and her second husband, who would die of TB in his hometown five years later, never having seen his daughter. When a plume of smoke billowed out of the stack and a spasm lurched through the cars, from the engine all the way to the mail wagon, she took a step toward the clattering wheels and raised her arm in a last good-bye. She waited until the train shrank to toy size, until the only smoke she could see was a streak of soot rising from an apartment building bombed the day before.
M Y FATHER , FINALLY , PROMISED stability. He was fourteen years older than my mother, a widower with an eighteen-year-old daughter. During one of her Ivanovo hospital rounds in 1950, my mother’s girlfriend Vera, who had tried to fix her up with men before, noticed a stomach-ulcer patient, undoubtedly a man of distinction because instead of an auditorium-size ward he’d been placed in a room with only three other beds.
“Ilya Antonovich seems like a very serious man,” Vera whispered to my mother, respectfully using a patronymic after his first name. “He is a Communist Party member and has just been assigned to head a technical school in Leningrad. He needs a woman to take care of him,” she added. “ Kozha da kosti —skin and bones.”
Perhaps it was the promise of Leningrad that did it. Her native Ivanovo had lost its luster—ravaged by the war, marred by the memory of one brother dead and the other missing, by the image of the train carrying away the husband she would never see again.
My father was reticent about his past. It was unremarkable and dull, he said. He’d participated in the collectivization from 1929 to 1933, when Stalin purged all of the wealthy peasants and turned the country’s agriculture into collective farms, sad villages of desperate, perpetually inebriated country folk presided over by Red Army officers whose only experience with farming was riding the horses the army had supplied. Due to his political propaganda work, my father was exempt from fighting in the Great Patriotic War, but not from the scurvy he contracted in the mid-1940s. He was sent to Ivanovo to lift the people’s spirit, damaged by the war. He came from a tiny village in the most eastern part of European Russia, but he never spoke of his parents and no one in my family even knew if he had any siblings.
For a man of fifty-one he was good-looking—gaunt, sharp-featured, hazel-eyed. He walked with a light gait and spoke in unhurried sentences that made one forget the war was barely over. He sounded positive and solid. A two-room apartment on the top floor of a newly constructed building in Leningrad was