Free A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir by Elena Gorokhova

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