Read Online A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir by Elena Gorokhova - Free Book Online

gate, my grandma, my mother, and I, waving vigorously and then watching him walk across the field, three fishing rods bobbing on his shoulder in synch with his steps.
He doesn’t return the following morning. At noon my mother stops pinching gooseberries off the bush, sets the basket down on the veranda floor, and checks her watch against the alarm clock on the table. With Grandma, they go over the times again: how long it should have taken him to take the boat out into the Gulf, how many hours to bring it back, pull it into the boat keeper’s barn, and then walk four kilometers back home.
“He might be talking to the boat keeper,” offers Grandma. “Maybe he’s fallen asleep. Or decided to clean the fish there, right away. With men you never know.”
Her voice is sweet and thick as honey, but my mother is hard to fool. She gets up, spreads a newspaper on the table in the veranda, and pours the gooseberries out to clean. Instead of cleaning, though, she sits in front of the berry mound and pulls off bits of skin around her fingernails.
They don’t say anything for a while, and we watch Dedushka outside pruning the old pear tree, clipping off branches and rubbing the fresh cuts with something white from a can.
Then it’s two in the afternoon, and three, and four.
“I shouldn’t have let him go. I felt something would happen, felt it right here,” says my mother and drives her fist into her chest.
“Men are men,” Grandma says. “They’ll do what they want.” She shuffles around the veranda, back and forth, pausing by the window to look at Dedushka, who is now pulling out the last handfuls of dill. They are wilted and sinewy, good only for pickling, with yellow umbrellas of blossoms on the top.
“I should have said no,” says my mother. “Just no, you cannot go. And now—here we are.” She opens her hands as if presenting us with the news we already know. Lamenting her own softness, she seems to take this anxious waiting, this possibility of the unspeakable, as punishment for her lenience. Had she been a little stronger, a bit more willful and persistent, the three of us wouldn’t be in the veranda now, avoiding looking at the clock.
“There could’ve been a storm. It’s the Gulf of Finland. It’s the Baltic Sea, after all,” says my mother, adding another log to the blaze of her worry.
Although I participate in this restless waiting, I know my father is safe. Nothing could have happened to him. Nothing could ever happen to him. He is a fisherman, he has three rods and knows how to hook a perfect worm. He knows how to work the oars so that the boat glides noiselessly and turns at a slightest nudge from his hand. In case of a storm, he will simply row hard and fast, stronger than the waves. He is invincible, my father. I know he is waiting somewhere, tired of being told what to do, sick of Dedushka’s commandeering, testing them all with his absence.
At eight, when dusk begins to dissolve the trees’ contours, he staggers across the field, lumbers up the porch steps, and collapses on the couch. I wiggle next to him, but he waves me away. My mother brings him tea, but he waves that away, too.
I glare triumphantly at both my mother and Grandma, letting them know with my eyes that my father stretched on the couch is an indelible proof that I’ve been right all along, that the only thing their worrying did was make him seem weak and vulnerable, as if he could ever succumb to a storm. As if he could succumb to anything.
“So what happened?” asks my mother, her voice tinged with the remains of anguish but also with a demand to know what it was that kept her and Grandma looking at the clock, forced to come up with reasons why a man would be hours late to return home.
There was a storm, he says, a storm he survived by being able to maneuver the boat into a marshy creek—a piece of damn luck—where he tied the boat to a tree and huddled until it was safe to leave.
My mother gasps, but I am the only one