Free A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir by Elena Gorokhova Page A

other wall of the gym, are the three sections of seventh-graders, red kerchiefs stretched on their palms. When the principal is finished with her speech—the Pioneer duties and responsibilities we all know by heart—our music teacher signals a fifth-grader with a horn to play a few notes, and the boy tries so hard to hit them right that his face turns as red as his Pioneer tie. This is the signal for the seventh-graders to move forward and bind the kerchiefs they are holding around our necks. With inadvertent pushing and bumping as each fourteen-year-old moves toward each of us, our identical rows instantly collapse into a crowd. When a seventh-grade boy approaches, freckled and red-eared, he fumbles with my kerchief, tying it so that it hangs too long on the left, but that’s not important because the kerchief is all mine now and I can set it right or untie it altogether and make a brand-new knot.
I turn my eyes sideways to look at Zoya’s white bows obediently lying on her shoulder blades, at Dimka staring into space as he, along with all of us, bends his elbow in salute. Then the school’s Pioneer counselor, who is about twenty but who looks twelve and is in charge of orchestrating the whole event, takes in a lungful of air and yells out, “Be ready!” It is a signal to recite the Young Pioneer motto that we rehearsed so many times after classes and during the big break, pretending we had red kerchiefs tied around our necks. But this is the real thing. Little flames of polyester bloom around our collars, announcing to everyone in our school that we are no longer eight years old. We all breathe in, count to three, and shout as we were taught, “Always ready!”
After the ceremony, there is another opportunity for Vera Pavlovna to tell us about heroism and valor. She stands in front of our four rows of desks, talking about the Great Patriotic War. Stalin, she says, got his name from the word stal , which means “steel,” because he was as strong as steel. “Got his name,” she says, as though names were given out at some name-dispensation fair according to people’s character.
I wonder how Lenin got his name. According to our history book Eternally Alive, he chose it in honor of the great Siberian river Lena. But Lena is also my name, and this coincidence makes me uncomfortable. Am I somehow, in an odd way, related to Lenin? Does it oblige me to be as fervent as Vera Pavlovna in believing what our third-grade history lessons teach? Does it oblige me to admire Pavlik Morozov, who chose the starving people over his father and now sneers down at me from the wall?
My shoulders sag under the weight of this historic liability.
I N M ARCH OUR THIRD-GRADE class is scheduled to go to a dental clinic. Vera Pavlovna writes the date on the board, in cursive letters uniformly bent to the right, and tells us to copy it into our school journals—Wednesday, March 10.
I hate the dental visit. I wish I could expunge the date we all wrote into our journals, eradicate it from the page and from existence. I wish I could cancel all future trips, one per grade, that will loom in the third quarter of each year, dampening the anticipation of International Women’s Day, when all the boys in my class timidly produce little mandatory presents for all the girls and the last period on March 7 is dedicated entirely to the distribution of pencil sharpeners, erasers, and pocket combs.
Last March, the dentist poked and prodded inside my mouth, looking angry when she didn’t find any cavities to fill. This time, I suspect, she won’t be so disappointed. You cannot be lucky two times in a row, says my sister, who is studying acting in Moscow, and she may be right. I think of the kilograms of Squirrels—chocolate candy wrapped in blue paper with a picture of a brown squirrel holding a huge nut—that I’ve cajoled out of my mother over the past year. My mother pretends she doesn’t want to buy the candy, but I know she likes to unwrap a