A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir Read Free

walked in, despite my grandmother’s assertion that a man had no choice but to stand when a woman entered a room.
“Whom did you write to?” Palkin asked gravely, barely waiting for her to sit down.
“I wrote to Secretary Stalin,” said my mother.
Palkin stared stonily from behind his glasses, and she thought of Uncle Volya. They still hadn’t heard anything about him, despite the fact that Aunt Lilya took a week off to travel to Moscow, where she spent four days and nights standing in front of the Lubyanka NKVD prison, waiting to speak to someone, never allowed inside.
But my mother wasn’t about to show that she was frightened, that her heart, contrary to all she knew about anatomy, was thumping somewhere in her throat. Showing what you felt was as dangerous as babbling. Lock up what you think, my grandmother had always said. What’s inside you no one can touch.
“I’ve just received this order from Moscow,” growled Palkin, baring bad teeth, stabbing a piece of paper with his finger while my mother imagined black voronoks and firing squads. “According to this order, Moscow is releasing fifteen thousand rubles to turn your apartment into a delivery room.”
He might as well have said fifteen million rubles. My mother made three hundred rubles a month, a salary her former classmates envied, and since her largest purchase ever had been a woolen winter coat, she’d never seen a ruble note with more than one zero.
Back at the hospital, she went to the peat factory director’s office and asked him to give her a room in the workers’ dormitory. Only days after her meeting with Comrade Palkin, the needed equipment arrived and was installed in her former apartment with an efficiency she’d never seen before. By the spring a four-bed maternity ward was opened, where my mother delivered fifteen babies. During deliveries, she learned how to use forceps, turn a fetus, and manually separate the placenta. The women at the peat factory expressed their gratitude with string bags of cucumbers from their gardens and an occasional tin of lard.
My mother felt euphoric and important: what she’d done had upheld poryadok , order. The order that the country needed, that she needed. She described all this in her letter home, which, when she reread it, sounded as lofty and stiff as the front page of Pravda . Yet what she wanted to say was simple and short.
She’d survived.

2. My Mother’s Husbands
W HEN MY MOTHER MET my father in 1950, she had an eight-year-old daughter, my half-sister, Marina, and had already been married twice, two meteoric war marriages whose trajectories faded within months.
Her first husband was delivered to her by the short war of 1939 between the Soviet Union and Finland, laid out on her operating table with bits of shrapnel buried in his rear end.
“What a way to stop a bullet,” said her former classmate Vera, who had been drafted into the same hospital.
My mother sliced open the buttocks of her future spouse and extracted pieces of metal, all except one, a shard lodged near the hip bone. She tried and tried, cutting and prodding, but finally had to leave it there, a lasting memory of their first meeting stowed deeply under his skin.
His name was Sasha Gladky, a graduate medical student himself all the way from Leningrad University, and he joked and laughed about his wound, basking in the attention of the female hospital staff. My mother, looking serious during the daily rounds, evaluated the healing process and checked the sutures. Being in full control of Sasha and his treatment—the expression of his broad-boned face with a slight cleft in the chin when she checked his temperature, the gratitude she could read in his gray, deep eyes—made her want to stay with him forever.
“I bet you he’ll ask me to marry him,” said my mother to Vera, nodding her head toward the door behind which Sasha lay surrounded by nurses. It was almost two weeks since she had operated, a few days before he was