Six Days in Leningrad

  “It is the kitchen,” Maria repeated. “There’s the stove.”

  Oh my God. It was true. There was the stove. I had slept right across from the stove for ten years, yet never realized it was the kitchen. Until now.

  “This was my bed,” I said unhappily. Why was I telling her this? Like she cared. All she wanted to know was why I was breaking open a window. I wanted to call out to my father. Papa, look. Did you see this? Can you imagine that I slept here? How can that be, Papa? It’s all disintegrating before my eyes. I saw D’Artagnan’s Paris from this bed, and Oliver Twist’s London. I read those books lying on this bed, looking out this window, dreaming a thousand childhood dreams. I saw the world from this bed. Yet I didn’t see the stove, didn’t see the rotted window frame, barely holding together. I was barely holding together.

  “Papa!” I called. “Where is he?”

  “He’s out front,” said Maria. “They’re waiting for you. I think they want to go up to the cemetery, back to your grandmother’s grave.”

  I wanted him to see this. But I had a feeling he didn’t really want to.

  I stuck my head inside the room and took a deep breath. It did not smell like Shepelevo. It smelled of dust and dirt and old papers. On the wall was a painting my grandfather had made of the cat I used to torture when I was eighteen months old. I wanted to take the picture from the wall and bring it back to America with me, and give it to my grandparents. But the painting was sixteen inches by twenty and I had only the one garment bag. I had no room for Dedushka’s cat.

  Maria stood like a sullen pillar next to me. I wasn’t going to cry in front of her. I grit my teeth and shook my head slightly to clear my eyes. Then I dropped my camera through the window and onto the bed.

  “I’m going in,” I said.

  “Why?” said Maria.

  “I want to see.”

  “See what?”

  “The rest of the house.”

  “It’s all like this.”

  “I want to see. I’ll only be a minute. You can leave if you want.”

  She didn’t move. She must have been thinking: They come all the way from America to burgle our houses. Maria was too old to crawl in herself, so she stayed at the window and watched me take pictures. When I disappeared into the front bedroom, I kept hearing her voice, calling, “Where are you? Are you coming?”

  “In a minute,” I said.

  I took with me my grandfather’s gardening and weather journals, and some small pictures I thought might be of sentimental value to him.

  In the front room I found a letter that Yulia had written to her small son. The letter read, “Our dear bunny rabbit, Mommy wants to say sorry to her little bunny for last night. Daddy and I were tired and tense and we yelled a little bit and scared you, and we’re sorry. We both love you so much, little bunny, and Daddy isn’t going to leave us ever.”

  Daddy never did leave them, but Yulia later left him, and left her little bunny rabbit, too.

  It was hard to leave your spouse in Russia. There was nowhere to go. You lived in a communal apartment. If you shared a room only with your husband and child, you were lucky. If you were unlucky, you also shared the room with your brother and his family. Or your parents. And your great-grandmother.

  If you were fortunate enough to work at a good job that let you put your name on a list for a private, non-communal apartment, you might wait years. But if you had connections or if somebody died, you might get a tiny, non-communal apartment for you, your mother, your husband, and your child. Which is what happened to Yulia. She lived with her sick mother and her husband and child in her sick mother’s apartment. But if you wanted out, there was nowhere to go. You couldn’t move to another city: you didn’t have a job to go to. You couldn’t go to a realtor and find a new apartment. There were no realtors. You couldn’t even fall in love and go to a hotel room: you could not get a hotel room if you were Russian, only if you were a foreigner with a foreign passport and visa, like me.

  So when Yulia got disenchanted with her lot in life and fell in love with another man, and wanted out, there was nowhere for her to go. She left her husband and son, and her sick mother, too, and went to live with her lover and his mother in his communal apartment on the other side of Leningrad.

  She returned two years later to find her mother nearly dead of renal failure and her former husband ready to go to Canada with his new wife.

  He went to Canada. Yulia’s mother died. Yulia stayed by herself in her mother’s tiny but non-communal apartment with her son, the bunny rabbit. This all happened in the early 1990s.

  Had she not been back to Shepelevo in over five years? By the state of things, it might have been longer. The bunny rabbit was probably twelve years old by now. Maybe her memories were not as sentimental as mine. After all, she still lived this life. She could smell Shepelevo any time she wanted to. Maybe the smell of Shepelevo didn’t mean to her what it meant to me.

  I would have sat down and cried, but there was nowhere to sit. Clothes, books, papers, garbage covered every flat surface: floors, beds, tables, chairs. All of it was covered with trash and dust.

  I glanced out the front window, the same window through which I saw my father in 1971, strolling down the cemetery hill, partially obscured by the cherry tree. Now he was standing on the road, talking to Vasily Likhobabin, eating cherries. I understood — my father had no interest in getting inside this house.

  Grabbing Yulia’s letter, I made my way to the porch, where we ate our family meals, and peeked into my grandparents’ room. It was just storage for old trash, although it still had their bed in it and a dresser. I stuck my head into the washroom, a small room off the kitchen porch that housed a basic toilet. This dacha had never had running water. The toilet was a wooden bench with a hole in it. Below the hole was a pit, ten feet deep. When I was little, our envious neighbors considered us lucky because we had the toilet inside the house.

  I heard Maria’s voice from the open window. “Are you coming? Is everything all right?”

  I returned to my little bed and the window where she stood waiting. “Everything is fine,” I said, climbing out. She held my camera for me.

  “What are these?” she asked, eyeing the pictures and the notebooks, in a tone that suggested I was about to take off with the contents of her safe deposit box.

  “Just some stuff for my grandfather,” I said, as the nettles stung my legs.

  My father was waiting for me on the road outside the gate. He hadn’t gone to the cemetery yet.

  “Well?” he said. “Finished?”

  “Yes.”

  We pulled the gate closed behind us.

  “I’m going to show Vasily Ilyich Babushka’s grave,” my father said. “Are you coming?”

  “No,” I said. “The mosquitoes. I’m going to go for a walk.”

  My father must have had his own instructions from my grandmother. He was going to give Likhobabin a hundred dollars to take care of the grave. A hundred American dollars was probably twice what Likhobabin earned in a year.

  While they went back to the cemetery, I left Maria and walked alone to the outskirts of the village. I wanted to find the field where I used to go and eat clover.

  I got lost and I felt lost. Both literally and figuratively, for I could not find that field.

  The scale of things confounded me. Nothing was what I knew it to be. The giant pungent cherry tree was small, but everything else was vast and overgrown. Long grass, sloppy bushes, large branches, concrete blocks, tall nettles, rusted pipes, all spread out on the narrow dirt roads. Back when I was small, the roads were wide and the trees tall, and I saw no rust or broken windows anywhere.

  When I turned around, I saw Maria, some distance behind me, but still doggedly following me.

  Why? I thought. Why? But really I didn’t care.

  I walked past a tiny wooden house that was missing one wall. Maybe the wall had been burned in a fire; maybe the wood had rotted out. Whatever had happened, the missin
g wall had been replaced by cardboard. There were two large sheets of cardboard, nailed to each other and then nailed to the rotting wood of the rest of the house. Where the cardboard had gotten wet from rain, it was mushy and crumbling. There was no fence around the house, but there were tomatoes growing in the side yard, and a chicken-wire cage, with some clucking chickens.

  I wondered how good an insulator cardboard was in the brutal Russian winters when the temperatures dipped well below freezing, and stayed freezing until April. The cardboard didn’t look like a temporary solution. I doubted that the people who lived here left at the end of summer for a warm communal apartment in Leningrad. Once you had chickens in your yard, you were there to stay.

  The Likhobabins didn’t have chickens, but they weren’t going anywhere either. I glanced back. Maria was still behind me.

  I walked past a house that was half-burned from ground to roof. Part of the wall had crumbled into ashes, leaving the black charred frame sticking out. The left side of the house was still standing. There was a small window with floral curtains. The curtains parted and a woman’s frowning face stared back at me.

  I thought about the iron fences around the graves in the cemetery. They were clean and not rusted. If there was money to put nice fences around dead people, why couldn’t the fences around the living be repaired? I wanted to ask Maria, but I doubted she knew. My father would just shrug. “Paullina, this is Russia. You want logic, you go back to America.”

  But the greatest contradiction was this: as I saw the Shepelevo of adulthood — the Shepelevo I was not prepared for — each breath I took reminded me of the Shepelevo of childhood. Unchanged, unchanging, Communism-defying smell.

  The smell reminded me of being eight years old, on my rusted bike trying to outrun a truck — and failing. I walked to the place in the road where I had deliberately wiped out, because it was either wipe out or collide with a Soviet truck.

  I smelled going to the library and borrowing the same books week in and week out.

  Another thing about the new, adult Shepelevo: how small it was. I walked past the cardboard house, past the black ash house, past the spot in the dirt where the truck ran me off the road; I was looking for the house that belonged to Yulia’s mother’s side of the family, but there was a field and beyond it trees. Shepelevo was over. Before I could say huh and turn around, Maria came up behind me.

  “You’re looking for something?”

  I would have liked to tell her what it was, had I known it myself.

  “Yes.”

  “Come,” she said. “I’ll show you Yulia’s grandmother’s house.”

  We walked past a rock. I stopped and stared at this rock.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” I remembered that rock. Us kids used to climb it and then fight about whose turn it was to sit on top. The whole summer would pass with us fighting for sitting-on-the-rock rights.

  “Here’s their house,” Maria said.

  I looked. It was a proper two-story house. It had curtains hanging in the windows. It had no fence, just the grass and bushes.

  “No one lives here anymore,” she said. “They’re all dead.” I wondered why the house was better kept than our blue house. Maria couldn’t say.

  We walked back to find my father. He was waiting for us on the corner. He looked done. Just like me.

  “Ready, Paullina?”

  “Wait,” said Vasily Ilyich. “Don’t you want to come in for a minute?”

  “Papa,” I whispered. “I really need to use the bathroom.”

  He sighed.

  We walked back to the Likhobabins’ apartment.

  The apartment was small, but extremely clean. Everything looked pre-twentieth century, but it was all neatly organized. The floor was swept, the table empty of debris. There were no dishes in the sink or smoky ashtrays. No old food. No odd pieces of old wood on the balcony, like at Anatoly’s place. And it smelled okay.

  In their small living room was a couch, a gramophone, and some shelves with books. I stared at the couch.

  “I remember the couch,” I said.

  “Yes,” Maria said, “it’s the same couch.”

  “It’s nice.”

  I asked if the gramophone worked.

  “We think so,” said Vasily Ilyich. “We got it as a gift many years ago. We don’t have any records to play on it.”

  Maria showed me to the bathroom. There was no bathtub, only a toilet and a sink and barely enough room to turn around in.

  Although the apartment smelled okay, the toilet did not. I tried to breathe through my mouth. It didn’t help. I held my breath. No use. I tried not to touch anything. I started to retch. I saw they had an overhead flush. I used it. It worked. But why the stench? The toilet smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned in . . .

  I left the bathroom, shutting the door quickly behind me, and smiled my best smile at Maria.

  “Well, thank you so much,” I said. “Ready, Papa?”

  I was glad when we left.

  “We will walk down to the gulf now, all right, Paullina?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I want to see our beach.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I forgot. We’ll go there. Viktor, how are you holding up?”

  “Fine.” He shrugged. “I’m fine.” He was a good sport.

  On the way, we passed a garbage dump that wasn’t there twenty-five years earlier. Actually, we didn’t pass it: it was blocking our path. We stared at it with dumb disbelief.

  We couldn’t smell the pines for the rancid stink of garbage. It made my father feel so bad he didn’t want to go any farther.

  “Papa,” I said consolingly. “Where else are the villagers going to throw out their garbage?”

  “Where did we?” he said. “Forget it. Forget the Gulf.”

  “Papa, we have to go to our beach. Let’s find another way to get there.”

  He turned and found another way, walking on without a word.

  As we walked past the unpainted village houses, I studied their fences. Where the wood had fallen apart or rotted away, instead of whole fence stakes being replaced, patches of new wood were nailed to the old palings, giving the fences and everything within them the appearance of poverty.

  I mentioned this to my father.

  “No,” he said. “It’s actual poverty.”

  When I was a little girl, my grandfather — my Dedushka — would take me fishing on the Gulf of Finland. I would row the boat out to sea, and we would hook our worms and maybe catch some perch.

  After a few hours, around midnight, I would row us back to shore. Dedushka would pull our rowboat onto the sand. He wore knee-high rubber boots. We would walk through the woods to our blue house, number 32. My grandmother would be waiting up for us, yelling at my grandfather for bringing me back so late, although the sun was still up. He and I would be laughing and we’d be hungry. My grandmother would make us delicious fried potatoes with onions. And outside it was light.

  In 1973, a few weeks before we left Russia, I went to visit my grandparents. I had just found out that we were not moving to Moscow, as I had been told initially, but to America. My grandfather touched my face and said, “Ah, Plinochka, we are never again going fishing in Shepelevo, you and I.”

  I was excited about America, but a little sad for him. Trying to find a comforting thing to say, I blurted happily, “Yes, but you still have Yulia. You can always go with Yulia.”

  He nodded. “Yes. But it won’t be the same.”

  We never did go fishing again.

  As we neared the beach, we came to a small clearing carpeted in pine needles. My father stopped and said that this was where he and his friends used to meet to drink and smoke and talk. Papa had his memories, too.

  The mosquitoes started feasting on me again.

  We walked out onto the Gulf of Finland where my grandmother used to take Yulia and me to swim, three times a week, every week for three months for ten summers.

  Memory was one
thing; what I saw was something else. The beach sand was sparse and mostly covered by long water grasses and bulrushes.

  The water in the gulf looked muddy and dark. The brook where Yulia and I tried to catch fish, where we waded up to our knees in muck and weeds, was maybe three feet wide and only a foot or so deep. I remembered it as a rapidly burbling stream.

  Was it better to see that it was calm and narrow? Was it better to see that it was shallow, that the rocks were small? I don’t know. I preferred my unsoiled, pristine memories.

  “What a nice sea,” Viktor said. “How lucky you were to have this.”

  Ten seconds later, my father said, “I’m going back,” and disappeared into the woods with Viktor close behind him. Five seconds later, I heard him calling me: “Paullina, Paullina.”

  I didn’t want to go yet. I stared at the water. A young mother and her daughter stood in the sea about a quarter mile out. The water came up to the woman’s knees. It had always been shallow. The girl was diving and splashing about. The echo of her laughter blew like a breeze over the water.

  And through it, I heard, “Paullina . . . Paullina . . .”

  Then, more insistently: “PAULLINA.”

  I stared at the peaceful water, the cattails, the lily pads. “Paullina . . . Paullina!”

  “I’m coming!” I yelled.

  I caught up to my father.

  “Why are you lagging behind?” he said. “We have to go.”

  We walked up the hill to the highway, crossed the road and followed a narrow path next to the railway tracks to Lake Gora-Valdaisko. By the side of the lake, my father took off his nylon jacket, his long-sleeve shirt, his undershirt, his shoes, his socks, his trousers and dove into the water.

  I perched on top of an overturned rowboat, and Viktor gave me a pickle from his pickle jar. I gratefully accepted. Papa swam. Viktor kept talking about something. I couldn’t listen.

  The lake was peaceful.

  As my father was drying himself off, he said, “Oh, to swim, Paullina! You really should have brought a bathing suit.”

  I shivered. It was about 55ºF.

  “I used to row right across this lake when we lived here,” I told Viktor. “We rowed across to the other side to pick blueberries.”