Six Days in Leningrad

  There were three of us, but we didn’t trust one another. We kept retracing each other’s paths and re-checking the graves. I know Papa wanted to be the one to find the grave. I wanted to find it, too. I wanted to be the hero.

  It was not going to be easy. First of all, the majority of the graves had rusted wrought-iron fences around them. We had to open each gate and walk inside to read the name on the grave and then leave, closing the creaking gate behind us. Second of all, about a quarter of the graves were unmarked. That was discouraging.

  And third, as I walked through the ragged rows of graves, I became eight years old again. I stopped looking for a name. I was eight, and my cousin Yulia was by my side. We used to go inside the cemetery to look for candy. Where else could two poor village kids get candy in Communist Russia? Graves, of course. There was no candy for the living, but mourners put candy on the graves of their loved ones, with the wildflowers. Yulia and I would walk through the cemetery, pilfer the candy and eat it. We couldn’t bring it back home, because our grandmother would kill us. We ate it then and there, standing in between the tombstones, and dropped the candy wrappers onto the ground.

  Now, as I walked, I looked for candy on the graves, to see if the old tradition still stood. It didn’t. There were only flowers.

  My ankles and calves were itching uncontrollably. That was distracting. I was scratching instead of searching. The large Russian mosquitoes were having a field day on my legs. My father and Viktor were covered by clothing; not me. When I checked the back of my calves, I found big red welts. I wouldn’t last another five minutes in the cemetery. The insects were sucking out all my blood.

  Blood.

  I looked at the fleshy space between my right thumb and forefinger. In the folds of the skin, the scar was still visible. Yulia and I had found a piece of broken window-pane glass in this cemetery. Yulia wanted it; I wanted it. She grabbed one side; I grabbed the other. She pulled; I pulled.

  I won.

  She let go of the glass. Involuntarily, I might add. I was eighteen months older and considerably stronger. The glass slipped from her hands and sliced into the meaty flesh of mine.

  My grandmother was not happy with me. Of course it was all my fault. Because I was older and should’ve known better. Bloody hand and all, I was punished and had to stay inside for the rest of the day.

  After we’d walked along the left side of the cemetery, closest to the road, my father said, “We can’t find it. It’s impossible.”

  “But Papa!” I said, scratching my legs.

  “I know! What can I tell you? We can’t find it. There are so many unmarked graves. And maybe your grandmother made a mistake. Maybe she is buried on the left side, not the right.”

  “We are on the left side.”

  We walked back to the right side, glancing at the tombstones as we passed.

  “We’ve checked every grave. We can’t find it.”

  “Papa, we can’t tell Babushka that.”

  He looked around. “I have a terrible feeling that her tombstone, because it was unmarked, was torn down and another erected in its place.”

  “You mean somebody is buried on top of Babushka Dusia?”

  “It’s possible. It was unmarked. And they’re clearly running out of space.”

  Hunched over, my hand never leaving my calf, I said, “Papa, it’s not possible. What would they do with Babushka’s casket? It’s only six feet under ground.”

  “I’m not saying they took it out. But look at the uneven ground right here.” He pointed under the trees. “It’s all messed up. Maybe that’s where it was. You can see how crowded it is.”

  Viktor and Papa stood and looked at the disturbed earth. I couldn’t believe that any cemetery, even a village cemetery, would be doubling up. Especially not a village cemetery. The Russian villagers have nothing but their faith. They wouldn’t put a body on top of another body.

  These weren’t mass graves. All the graves in this cemetery were moderately well kept, with iron fences around them, with little gates and benches where visitors could sit. Many tombstones had crosses and photos of the deceased’s loved ones. Fresh flowers were everywhere. Sure, there was no caretaker’s building. Yes, the grass and nettles were four feet high. But no one would tear down my great-grandmother’s grave to bury their own dead on top of her.

  Dejected and hungry, we searched again. My effort was hampered by my bare legs. I was lunch for mosquitoes — big, black, ravenous mosquitoes. As I walked through the graves, I hopped and itched and flailed my arms. Now I knew why Olya, the toothless mushroom picker, had been covered up from head to toe.

  My father stepped outside the cemetery for a smoke, and as he smoked, he kept yelling to us, “Forget it. It’s no use.”

  But I could not leave. Finding Babushka Dusia’s grave was the only thing my grandmother had asked me to do. I was not going to be the one to tell my eighty-seven year old grandmother that her mother was not found, and her mother’s grave not brought to order. The sun fought its way through the leafy pines; it was shadowy and dark in the cemetery and smelled of sap and pine cones. It smelled of earth and flowers and mosquitoes. I wasn’t leaving.

  My father returned, took one look at me, and said, “Paullina, get out of here. You are being eaten. Go now, or you will ruin the rest of your day. Go into the sunshine.”

  I went out to the highway. My father came out too, for another cigarette. Was he thinking what to tell his mother? Maybe we could lie? We could say we found the grave, say we gave the Likhobabins money to take care of it. My grandmother would never know.

  Yes she would. She had a sense. She knew everything.

  Viktor yelled something. My father went back into the cemetery, walked over to Viktor, bent over, and then yelled to me.

  “Paullina! Come, come! Viktor found it. He found it!”

  He had. Viktor found it because he would not give up. While my dad and I were quibbling and rationalizing our failures, he doggedly looked at every last stone. He found it because he, literally, would leave no stone unturned. We had passed the grave that turned out to be my great-grandmother’s three or four times. It was poor, neat, and at first glance unmarked. But Viktor had stepped inside the little iron fence and searched the ground. Who knows why? He found a dislodged overturned stone plaque that read, “Eudokia Ivanovna Pavlova. 1894–1977.”

  Papa and I stared dumbly at it.

  “Paullina was right,” Papa said. “Now I do want to cry.”

  What did finding the grave mean to our driver? Nothing. Yet he would not give up. I didn’t feel bad anymore about sharing Shepelevo with him.

  We took pictures of the grave, commented on how adequately kept it was despite nearly twenty years of no visitors, wondered if it was Yulia who had been taking care of it. My father brusquely dismissed the idea and went to put Babushka’s plaque back.

  “What do you want to do now?” he asked. He sighed. “I suppose you want to go find our summer house?” That’s what he said, but his body language said, Please can we be done? Can we leave?

  “Of course I want to see our house,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “All right,” he said in a tired voice. “Let’s go.”

  The village of Shepelevo was at the bottom of the hill, down a dirt path just wide enough to fit a car. Viktor drove down the hill. He didn’t want to leave his car on the highway. My father and I walked.

  At the base of the hill was a cherry tree. Every summer that tree would blossom with aromatic white flowers, filling our entire dacha with its perfume. When it had finished blooming, the flowers would fly off the tree like birds. In my memory, it was a giant tree. Now, looking up at it, I saw that with a six-foot ladder, I would be able to touch the top branches.

  A few yards farther on, we stopped at a faded blue house.

  “This is it,” I said.

  “No,” Papa said. “This isn’t it.”

  There was a number on the house. It said 32.

  “This isn’t i
t,” he repeated.

  “It is, Papa,” I said, filled with heartache. “This is it.”

  I knew why he didn’t want this to be it.

  It was abandoned. It didn’t look like my memory, or like his, I was sure. I knew his memory was at least as sentimental as mine.

  The little yard around the blue house was overgrown with long grass and nettles five feet tall. I couldn’t see the gate because weeds covered it outside and inside. Where there once was a hammock, there now wasn’t. Where there once was a garden, there now wasn’t. It was just a shabby deserted dacha, and it looked as if no one had been inside it in years.

  How could I explain what I felt, looking at house number 32 in Shepelevo, the house where I spent the happiest months of my childhood?

  “This isn’t it,” Papa said again in a reasonable tone, hiding his sadness. “I know, because look, there is a window on the second floor, and we didn’t have a second floor. I know this for a fact.”

  We stood and stared for a long time at the blue house.

  “This isn’t the house,” he repeated. “Let’s go find the Likhobabins. I hope they’re still alive. They’ll tell us which house it was. You’ll see I am right.”

  Viktor stood beside us, not understanding.

  I walked stiffly ahead down the dirt road. My father and Viktor followed.

  When I was a child, this road I was on felt wide like a thoroughfare. But now I saw that a car could barely drive through without hitting the wooden fences on either side.

  The fences were falling down, barely held up by rusty nails. They were older than I was. Broken fence posts lay strewn in the tall weeds by the side of the road.

  In one yard, a tall Russian man in a skimpy bathing suit stood watching his son — also naked to the waist — play on a garbage heap.

  We asked him if he knew where the Likhobabins were, or if they were still alive.

  “Maria and Vasily?” he said gruffly, as if there wasn’t much love lost between him and the Likhobabins. “Right there.” He pointed to the unkempt two-story building across a dusty common.

  “Still?” my father said, as if stunned that after twenty-five years the Likhobabins could be living not just in the same village, but in the same apartment building.

  “Still. As ever,” said the near-naked man, turning his attention back to his son on the trash heap.

  We crossed the road. There were no names on the bells. There were no bells, for that matter. Or mailboxes. There was just a single front door leading to a central stairwell.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to find them,” my father said.

  I was sure they lived on the first floor, but my father didn’t trust my memory. Outside, two old ladies sat on a bench in a clearing under the trees.

  “Oh, the Likhobabins,” they said when we asked. “They’re probably by the gulf.” And they waved their arms. Over there. So we went over there. My father and Viktor leading the way, while I trailed a hundred paces behind.

  I couldn’t be certain of this, but this was more difficult for me than for my father. I wanted to linger, and he wanted to speed up. He wanted to rush through Shepelevo, so that he could leave it behind again and forget we were ever here.

  And there was so much to forget. We were witnessing our past life through our new American eyes. I was crushed by the relentless poverty of it. Except for the smell — the heady, intoxicating smell of childhood. That was still perfect. As ever. But the sight of Shepelevo tore us up inside.

  On the way to the gulf to find the Likhobabins, we stopped at the public bathhouse. It was a tiny brick bungalow, closed up because it wasn’t Friday or Saturday. The sign on the door — the same as I remembered from childhood — said, “MEN: FRIDAYS. WOMEN: SATURDAYS.” Every other Saturday, my mother, my grandmother, my cousin, my aunt and I would go have a communal bath.

  We had a half-hearted laugh about that sign, my father and I, then resumed our trek to the gulf. The smell of smoked fish was very strong. We could also smell fresh water. The factory that made the smoked fish was to the left, and the Gulf of Finland, full of fresh water, was ahead. We could already see the bulrushes and the seagull-stained rocks.

  Everywhere I looked I saw peeling paint, rotted wood, broken glass, crumbling concrete, rust.

  Anywhere there was metal, there was rust.

  There was no litter. There weren’t any trash cans, either. Maybe there wasn’t much to throw away.

  The Likhobabins — Vasily Ilyich and his wife, Maria — were by the gulf. They were surprised to see us, although not exceedingly so.

  Their sons, Yuri and Alyosha, were both engineers living in Sosnovy Bor, twenty kilometers down the highway. I’d had the biggest crush on Alyosha when I was young. Maria didn’t look happy when her sons were mentioned, particularly Yuri. Vasily whispered to my father, “Yuri is not making his mother happy.” He didn’t give any specifics.

  Maria was short and heavy-set. She wore a peasant print dress, an apron, and a narrow-brimmed hat. Vasily wore glasses that made his eyes as large as two moons. Apart from his vision, he and Maria seemed in good shape. They looked older than my father but younger than my grandparents.

  “So, what are you doing?” my father asked Vasily.

  “The same, the same,” the old man said. “Fishing.”

  Vasily said he would take us to our dacha. As we walked, he regaled my father with stories about his cataracts, his cataract surgery, his recovery, and his general health. I saw my father’s pained expression and wanted to laugh. My father is mortified by talk of other people’s medical histories. He can barely stand talking about his own health. A few years earlier when he’d had kidney stones, he didn’t tell anyone in his immediate family except for my mother that he needed to be hospitalized.

  I straggled behind as the four of them strolled in front of me. Endearingly, Maria had her arm through Vasily’s.

  Likhobabin stopped at the blue house, number 32, and said, “This was yours.”

  I stared at my father with an I-told-you-so face. He pretended not to look at me. We both stared through the fence at the house, the flaking paint, the high grass. Some of the windows were boarded up with rusty nails.

  “Okay,” my father said eventually and reluctantly. “Well, do you want to take a picture? Babushka and Dedushka would probably like to see a photo of it.”

  I turned back to the house and said to my father, “See that big window? That’s Yulia’s bedroom. I ran to that window in 1971, and watched you come down the cemetery hill with Mama on your arm after you returned from the Gulag. I hadn’t seen you for three years.”

  “That Mama was on my arm,” my father said, “I have no doubt. She loved to touch me. But we did not come down that hill. We came down the other hill.” He pointed to a hill farther away. “You couldn’t possibly have seen us.”

  “But I did,” I said. “And Babushka, your mother, said, ‘Here comes my son.’”

  My father was quiet. “I know who Babushka is. Well, do you want to see it up close? Or do you want to go?”

  We pushed open the gate, nearly breaking the rotted wood. The nettles stung my legs. First the mosquitoes, then the nettles. Just like when I was young.

  My father tutted at the disarray.

  “Who does it belong to now?” he asked the Likhobabins.

  “Papa, what are you talking about?” I said. “You know it belongs to Yulia.”

  “Well, look at it. It can’t. No one’s been here in years. Maybe she sold it.”

  “Babushka and Dedushka gave the dacha to her when they left. She wouldn’t have sold it without telling them.”

  My father shrugged. Vasily said he had no opinion.

  When my grandparents left Russia in 1979, they left the house to Yulia. She abandoned it; that much was obvious.

  My dad picked some cherries off the cherry tree and ate them. He gave me five. That was my lunch. Gratefully I popped them in my mouth. They were exquisitely sour.

  When I mentio
ned this, my dad glared at me, as if I had insulted his cooking.

  Our dacha was a little square box. Breaking through the brambles and the tree branches, we circled the house. At the front door, I stopped. I pulled on the handle, but it was locked. A wooden clock hung above the doorway. My grandfather had made it. It wasn’t a real clock; he painted a fake face on it with black ink. The hands perpetually said 1:20. I showed my father, as absolute proof that the house still belonged to a member of our family. My father nodded, which could’ve meant, Yes. Or it could have meant, Let’s go already.

  He instructed me to take some pictures of Dedushka’s ruined garden, in the middle of which stood the wooden cucumber supports he had built back in the seventies. If any village garden deserved high praise, it was my grandfather’s; after all, it fed a family of ten every summer for ten years. Supplemented by the fish he caught. The fish we caught. And the blueberries and the mushrooms we picked. That’s all we ate in the summers. There was no meat. There was no chicken. Oh, there were cows. And there were chickens. But to eat the cows would mean no more milk, and to eat the chickens would mean no more eggs. So no meat and no chicken, but eggs once in a while, and milk.

  The others stayed in the front yard. Lagging behind, I stopped at a small, shattered window. A window under which I had slept for nine hundred summer nights.

  I found a stick, pried open the window, looked inside. Maria Likhobabina suddenly appeared and stood next to me, peering in.

  “What are you doing?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just looking around.”

  She stood and looked around with me.

  “This must be the kitchen,” she said.

  What was this woman talking about?

  “This isn’t the kitchen.” I tried not to sound rude. How could this be the kitchen? There was a bed in there! My bed.

  There was a bed. The same bed. Not just the same bed, but the same yellow-brown bedspread, dirty now, casually covering the bare mattress. The wallpaper was as I remembered but ripped, stained, dirty. Through the torn paper, I could see the wall. The bare plaster had holes in it. But they were the same walls. My bedroom walls—