A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova

Author:Elena Gorokhova
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-01-11T23:00:00+00:00

I AM ON THE stair landing, one flight above our apartment—where the guests are still raising toasts to Marina—gagging on a cigarette stolen from my sister’s purse. I fumbled through her bag in the toilet, under the rusty tank with a chain, after realizing that the probability of Slava looking in my direction is even less than that of Andrei, after deciding that if I cannot get the attention of the men I like and if I am accused of a lack of humility toward the Russian classics and life in general, I may as well start smoking.

I hear our apartment door groan open, and I stand very quietly in the dark, squeezing my back into the wall, waiting for whoever it is to go back in. But when the door shuts, I sense that the person is on the wrong side of it, my side. There is a crinkle of cellophane and the sound of a lighted match. I breathe noiselessly, strangling a cough. Footsteps start up the stairs, up toward where I stand. By the sound I know, at least, that it isn’t my mother; they’re fast, less calculated, breathless steps.

It is Slava, with a cigarette between his teeth and an opened bottle of Bull’s Blood.

He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see me pressing into the wall, trying to stub out a cigarette against a sewer pipe. “Come,” he says and makes an upward movement with his arm, as if inviting me to fly. In the light of a match is another flight of stairs, a short one, leading up to a squatty door to the attic, upholstered in black vinyl. “Here,” says Slava, who in the dark has the sharp, weighted movements of my father, and he gives me his hand. “Come.” He smells of cigarettes and of our apartment, the smell of too many people and burned sunflower oil.

I obediently follow him, step after step, to the black door. What’s happening is so surreal that I feel nothing but a hollow in my chest and the sting of tobacco on my tongue. He gives the door a shake and it scrapes open, releasing a little cloud of dust and an odor of mildew and mice. He lights another match, which plucks out of the darkness a beam and a wall of pocked cement and something as gritty as gravel on the floor. It’s an eerie place, a place I didn’t know existed all this time right above my head, a place no one knew existed but Slava, who is privy to all the mysteries and secrets and the answers to questions we don’t want to ask.

We creep slowly, match after match, until we get to a wooden ladder. Slava climbs up, jiggles a metal latch, and above us opens a night sky, paled by the city lights, wide and still. He crawls out, takes my hand, and pulls me onto the roof. I crouch and sit on the cold metal, awed by the sudden vast openness, by the smallness of the life beneath.

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