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

Squirrel with tea, so every time we walk into a grocery store we play the same game I learned in nursery school.
“Please, can I have some Squirrels, please,” I whine as she stands in line to pay for bread at the cash register. The counter with sweets is right next to the bakery counter. Behind an indifferent saleswoman, ignorant of the fact that she has unlimited access to such treasure, sit chocolate candies called Red Poppy, Polar Bear, and Kara-Kum Desert, with camels trotting across the yellow wrapping papers. Under the wrappers is a thin layer of silver foil that crinkles under my fingers when I open a piece and a dark brown side emerges in all its nut-and-chocolate glory. “Please,” I beg, “only two hundred grams.”
“Candy is bad for you,” says my mother as the cashier gives her a receipt, which she must now take to the bread saleswoman. “I let your sister eat all the candy she wanted and now look—she’s studying acting. Maybe she’d be an engineer or a pathologist like Galya if I wasn’t so soft on her.”
The idea that Squirrels lead to acting makes little sense, but this is not the time to argue with my mother. “Just a little bit,” I wheedle. “A little tiny bit for the evening tea.”
At the bakery counter she exchanges the receipt for a brick of black bread and a loaf of white bulka .
“For the tea,” I whimper. “ Chut-chut —just the tiniest bit.”
She glances at the line to the cashier, which now consists only of an old babushka and a woman with a baby in her arms. With just two people, you can’t even call it a line.
“All right,” she concedes and takes out her purse, just as I knew she would. “But only chut-chut .”
O N M ARCH 10, THE thirty-eight of us pile into a streetcar that takes us to Dental Clinic #34. In pairs, we file into a fluorescent-glaring waiting room with a sharp odor of something that smells like the ether they use to kill rabbits in my mother’s anatomy lab.
We are told to sit down and wait. My partner, Sveta Yurasova, and I, still holding hands, take the two end seats, away from the door with the sinister sign “Treatment Room,” away from Dimka the hooligan, who glides across the linoleum pretending he is skating.
Vera Pavlovna lifts her arm, asking for our attention, but it isn’t her gesture that makes us all quiet down. The door into the Treatment Room opens and reveals rows of drills, ominous and still silent. In the doorway stands a square woman in a white gown and a cotton hat neatly ironed into creases that make it rise on her head like a meringue pie. We are all quiet now, frozen in our last gesture before the door to the Treatment Room opened, as if we were all actors performing the final scene of Gogol’s Inspector General, the most famous silent theater scene of all time.
“Antonova,” reads the woman from a file in her hand, and our eyes all turn to Anya Antonova, a girl with a red braid down her back who gets up and obediently follows the woman into a vast room behind the door.
“Alphabetical order,” says Sveta, and she smiles an embarrassed smile because she will be the last one to be called. I know she is thinking about all the things that could happen between A and Y, hoping for a sudden power outage, or a swift lethal disease that exclusively affects dentists, or even an emergency history test that Vera Pavlovna remembers she has to administer by the end of the day.
I don’t have Sveta’s luxury of hoping and waiting. My name is at the front of the alphabet, G being the fourth letter, after A, B, and V. Yet I know that even if I had the guts to run out of here, the first militiaman on the street would drag me back, to Vera Pavlovna’s scolding. I am nine and I’ve already learned that there is no escape from this waiting room, from this annual dental punishment, from this order of life.
But the worst drawback of being at the front of the alphabetical list is that no one has yet returned to tell the story. They are all