He told me that when he was in labor camp, he didn’t have any sugar for two years. He hoarded the tea my mother brought for him so that he could give it to his friends on his last day in the camp.
“No sugar, huh?” I said, glib, tired, in need of some female facilities.
My father looked at me meaningfully.
“You understand nothing,” he said. “That was nearly the worst thing.”
Was that the worst thing? I wanted to say. No sugar?
He was right. I understood nothing. I lived without him for five years. Three when he was in prison, and two when he was in exile. But I did have sugar.
During the war they didn’t have sugar. No bread, no potatoes, no meat, no milk, no sugar. When Leningrad’s food storage warehouses burned down in September 1941, and ten tons of sugar blackened and melted into the earth, the city people panicked, but they could not foresee the terror to come. They could not foresee that two months later, one cup of that black earth would be selling on the black market for a hundred rubles.
Silently we got back in the car.
We were driving again, still driving, eternally driving. We drove to my school, number 169. My father didn’t want to get out of the car. But he did.
He directed me to take a snapshot of this, to take a snapshot of that. “Why are you so far away? What are you taking a picture of? Take a picture of this.”
And I will put the snapshots in the family album: snapshots of my school with broken windows and its dirty empty yard; the paint coming off; the sign out front: “No walking your dogs here.”
“Take the picture of the ‘no walking your dogs’ sign,” he said. “Why are you so far from it? Take it up close. Take a close-up of it.”
I did as I was told.
“Is this how you remember it?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
But the answer was no. I remembered it full of kids. Kids climbing trees, yelling at one another, running. Did I remember the bars on the windows? No. Did I remember the broken windows? No. The yard was large and empty now, so forlorn, so sad. I was here long ago. I spent only two years at this school. But it was at this school that I learned my first English phrase, prophetic in retrospect: “Take a pen.”
In the yard, a tarp covered the playground equipment for summer break. I didn’t know for certain that there was still a children’s slide under the tarp, but there used to be. During recess, we would climb up and down this slide, up and down. I climbed up one afternoon and fell two meters down, straight on my back. My mother had to leave work early and take me to the clinic in the redbrick hospital near Fifth Soviet. The doctors took an x-ray of my head because after I fell, I leaned my head in its white hat against a dirty wall. The nurses saw the black smear and thought I must have landed on my head.
The x-ray showed, unsurprisingly, that the head was fine.
The back really hurt, though. When we got home, we ate dinner, and then I sat at my desk and read, and my father lay on my bed and watched me. Every time he saw me slouch, he said, “Sit up straight. Haven’t you played enough games? Sit up straight.”
I sat up straight. My back really hurt, though.
It still hurts.
“I fell off that slide,” I said to my father as we stood in the yard.
“What slide?”
“Remember I fell and hurt my back?”
“Not your back. You don’t remember anything, do you? It was your head.”
Shaking his head, he turned to Viktor and said, “Now I understand why she doesn’t remember anything.”
Shaking my head, I said to him, “Papa, go and stand over there and let me take a picture of you looking at the front doors of the school.”
“Why?”
“Can you just go do it, and then I’ll tell you?”
Reluctantly he went to stand under the shade of the trees as he looked onto the double doors. He lit a cigarette. “What was that all about?”
One morning my father, who takes me to school the few Mondays he is home from exile, is mean and I am mad at him. So as we are walking to school, I tell him that the school has a new rule: parents are not allowed inside. They have to leave their children at the front door and go.
“Really?” asks my father.
“Absolutely,” I say.
When we get to the schoolyard, I say a quick goodbye and run up the steps, leaving him outside in the courtyard. I know he stands and watches me go in. What I don’t know is that he stands and watches all the other parents go up the stairs and inside with their kids.
That evening, my mother says, “Why did you tell Papa parents weren’t allowed inside the school? He stood there, the poor thing, and wondered why you said that to him.”
“I was mad,” I say, my spirits deflated.
I am eight.
“What did you do that for? Why a picture here?” he said.
“Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?”
I told him.
He didn’t remember.
I remembered though. Nights I can’t sleep, when I lie in the dark and think of all the people I haven’t called and all the people I haven’t written, the image of my father springs up, fresh and raw, standing in the schoolyard, watching all the other parents go in with their kids.
“Will you forgive me?” I said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “Have you seen enough? Can we go?”
Afterward, Viktor drove us to the record store. We wanted to buy some Russian music CDs.
I was becoming pretty frustrated.
“Papa,” I said, “I need to get out of the car. I can’t be in the backseat anymore. I can’t see anything. I need to walk through Leningrad.”
My father sounded exhausted, “Why can’t you look out the car window?”
“Papa, I’m writing a book about World War II. There were very few cars in Leningrad then. Maybe I should just have my heroine spend the entire siege driving around Leningrad? Could she fall in love in the backseat, too?”
“But Paullina, you’re writing fiction,” Viktor said. “Can’t you imagine getting out of the car and walking?”
“Yes, Viktor, but I need to see what I’m going to be imagining. At a slower speed than thirty miles an hour.”
“Viktor can slow down,” said Papa.
“Papa!” I said. “We have to walk to Fifth Soviet.”
My father shook his head. “But we already went there on Monday. You want to see it again? Why?”
I threw up my hands.
My father turned to a smiling Viktor. “What can I do, Viktor? She wants to walk everywhere.”
We got out on tree-lined Kirochnaya Ulitsa that ran alongside the leafy Tauride Park. Papa told me the street used to be called Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin. We used to walk here all the time when I was small, he told me.
SHINE, SHINE, MY STAR
Papa let Viktor go home, and we went into the record store and argued without much conviction about who was going to buy the Vysotsky CD. There was only one, and we both wanted it. My dad let me have it. I think he was just too tired to fight.
We walked through the streets. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, sunny, warm, and plenty of other people were out, too, just like us. Well, maybe not quite like us. Less tired, less cranky, less hungry.
No, just like us.
My father was a reluctant raconteur and a reluctant pedestrian. We barely spoke and he walked slowly.
On Grechesky Prospekt, we walked past the October Concert Hall. My father was right. It was called October Hall. Now that we were walking, not driving, I could read the signs.
On the far side of October Hall was the redbrick hospital where I was born, where I had gone for aspirin poisoning, and where I had x-rays taken of my head.
When we neared the front doors of our dirty green building on Fifth Soviet, my dad mumbled that he didn’t want to go inside. He repeated that the last time he had come to St. Petersburg and tried to go in, t
he doors were closed because they had been renovating. He didn’t know what was inside now. “It could be offices, it could be condos, I don’t know,” he said, lighting a cigarette. The implication was whatever it was, he didn’t want to see it.
I looked at the faded pink double front doors hanging unevenly on their hinges. The building didn’t look renovated to me. Leaving him to smoke, I walked through the passageway to the courtyard inside.
Many Leningrad buildings were built in a rectangular or square shape around a central courtyard, as homages to Rastrelli. They were miniature, ignoble imitations of the Winter Palace. Some courtyards had gardens; most were just garbage dumps.
Our courtyard on Fifth Soviet did not have a garden.
In the courtyard’s favor, the surrounding walls were of deep yellow stucco and the sunshine hit them just right for me to recall playing in the yard as my mother cooked dinner upstairs. I looked up, counting three stories, and saw our kitchen window. It was open. A man, working on his overturned car in the yard next to the garbage, looked up from his work for a moment and stared at me indifferently.
Back on the street, my father was still standing in front of the front door, smoking.
“Papa, I want to go in.”
“Go ahead.”
“Come with me.”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand, Paullina. All the things you want to remember, I want desperately to forget.”
He lit another cigarette. I went inside.
There was no renovation. The same torn by time concrete stairs I remembered from childhood greeted me, the same peeling dark-green paint on the walls. There was a dank smell of urine, at once familiar and repugnant.
As I stood at the foot of the stairs, the faded black and white details of my memory turned to color. Shepelevo had always been a myth to me, but Fifth Soviet was reality, then and now.
I trudged up the stairs and became seven years old again.
There is no Papa, just me and Mama. She lets go of my hand, and I walk up the stairs holding the railing. I see the window in front of me on the first floor, my mother ahead of me. I see the dinner she is about to cook for us. We have been alone three years; two more years of silence stretch out in front of us.
It was almost too much for me to walk up to the third floor. I climbed the stairs slowly, as my mother had, carrying the weight of her desperate life to floor 3, apartment 4, while I trailed behind her.
I stopped on the landing in front of our apartment and stared at the old brown door. It was just as I remembered it. How could that be? It was twenty-five years ago. It couldn’t be the same.
Once, after my father has come back from prison and is living in exile in Tolmachevo, my mother picks me up from school. We come back to our apartment, but when we get to the brown front door my mother can’t find her keys. It is a communal apartment — someone could let her in, but they won’t have the key to our rooms. She says we have to go and get the keys from Papa. We don’t eat dinner that evening. Instead, we travel one hundred and twenty kilometers. We spend a long time waiting for the train. We see Papa for barely five minutes, get the keys from him, and leave. It must have taken us five hours to get to Tolmachevo. Even then I am suspicious of my mother’s key story. Papa won’t be home for his regular weekend furlough for two more weeks, and I know my mother misses him. I suspect she made up losing the keys just so we could go to Tolmachevo and see him for five minutes. But what do I know? I am only seven.
I pulled out my camera and focused it on the door, but the flash on the Pentax wasn’t working properly. I changed the f-stop on the lens to allow more light and pressed the shutter release button.
The glossy brown door opened and a man walked out onto the landing. He eyeballed me, perplexed.
Finally he said, in a measured tone, “Why take a picture of the door?”
I told him I used to live in this apartment long ago.
“Good,” he said, locking the door behind him.
I told him I had come back to Leningrad from America.
“Good,” he said again, and started for the stairs.
I stayed on the landing, the camera in my hands, looking at the door and at him. He walked down only a few steps before he turned back to me with a sigh.
“Would you like to see?”
“Yes, please,” I said, my shoulders hunched in miserable reluctance. Please don’t let me see. All I once wanted to remember I now wanted to forget. But I knew, knew I could not come to Leningrad and not see inside the apartment where I was raised.
As he was opening the door, I remarked, “Looks like the same door.”
“It is the same door,” he said. “Same lock, too. Do you still have your key?”
I laughed half-heartedly. “No, I do not have my key. I don’t think I ever had a key.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “You could’ve walked right in.”
Inside, a woman stood inside the sunny kitchen, drying a mixing bowl with a dishtowel.
“Svetlana,” the man said, “I brought a young woman from America who wants to see the apartment.”
Svetlana immediately stopped drying the bowl and rushed to me.
“Plinka!” she exclaimed. Her hands still wet, she took my hands into hers and told me how good it was to see me. I had never met her before. An attractive, heavy-set woman in her forties, Svetlana had been living in the apartment for only five years with her husband, Volodia, the man who had let me in.
“What rooms did you live in?” she asked me.
I told her the rooms all the way at the end of the corridor.
“Oh, of course, you must be the Gendler girl.”
“Yes.”
“Ina has your rooms now.”
Svetlana turned to her husband. “Where are you going, Volodia?” she said tearfully. “Stay — please.”
He shook his head. “Must to go to the store,” he said, and left.
A minute later the long-suffering Volodia returned with my father trailing behind him. My father looked like I had felt coming into the apartment: miserably reluctant. We were rubbernecking, that’s what we were doing. We were in my dad’s Mercedes, flying by on the interstate, and there was a wreck on the road, with three ambulances. We were ashamed for slowing down, but couldn’t help ourselves.
The apartment was built in a style reminiscent of the railroad apartments built in Queens, New York, in the early 1950s. It was a long, narrow corridor with rooms to the left and right. It had nine rooms altogether, along with two kitchens — one in the front, one in the back — two toilets and two baths.
During the heyday of communal living, before World War II, forty people lived in these nine rooms and shared these two toilets. When we lived here in the sixties, the number of people had been reduced substantially by death, imprisonment or, in some cases, both. We shared the apartment with about twenty other people. Our rooms were at the end of the corridor. We were lucky. We had two rooms joined by a narrow hallway in which we could sit and have dinner. Many families had only the one.
The building must have been more than eighty years old. My great-grandmother Anna received the rooms at the end of World War I from the borough residential agency amid mass confusion following the Revolution of 1917. My great-grandmother was so crafty, she somehow received the whole apartment: nine rooms, two kitchens and two toilets.
Clearly it was too much, and soon other people started moving in. My family managed to hold on to the two rooms at the end. My paternal great-grandparents lived in one room, my grandparents in the other with my father and uncle.
During World War II, my paternal great-grandfather died in evacuation, and my grandmother’s mother, my Babushka Dusia, who is buried in Shepelevo, was homeless, having had her house recently burned down by the Germans. She came to live on Fifth Soviet with her son-in-law, my dedushka. After the war, she stayed, since there was nowhere else for her to go. In the 1950s my great-grandmother Anna died, so there was a little more space for the remaini
ng five people, my grandparents, my great-grandmother, and my father and uncle.
In 1962, when my parents first married, they lived separately: he on Fifth Soviet, she with her father across town. If you ask my mother about this short period of her marriage before I was born, she’ll say, “Yes . . .” in a voice filled with nostalgia. “That was the happiest year of my life.”
Soon after they were married, however, she became pregnant with me (don’t ask me how), and my grandparents applied for their own private apartment, to make room for the newlyweds with a baby on Fifth Soviet. They were given one in September, and I was born in November.
After my birth, my parents and I lived in one room on Fifth Soviet, my aunt and uncle and their baby, Yulia, in the other.
Four years later, my uncle got an apartment of his own and wowza, I had my own room. But then my dad started holding secret meetings with his anti-Communist friends in my room while I was away in Shepelevo. Not so secret, as it turned out. The KGB had been stalking my father for years. He was arrested, and my mother had a room to herself, I’m sure for the first time in her life.
I said to Svetlana, “We would love to see our rooms. Do you think that’s possible?”
A slender woman in her fifties with bobbed black hair tinged with gray came toward me, and took me by both hands. “Plinochka, oh my God, I heard you had come, look at you, I can’t believe I’m seeing you. Remember me? I’m Ina.”
I didn’t remember her.
“Ina!” I said. “Of course. Did you live here with us?”
“Of course! Don’t you remember? I lived with my mother and my daughter in this room next to the front door.” She pointed.
“Of course,” I said, recalling nothing. She was still holding my hands. “Where are you living now?”
“We live in your old rooms! We were sad to see you go, but when you left we applied to the regional committee and got your rooms! We were so happy.”
“Have you been living in them ever since?”
“Yes!” she said, beaming. “Come meet my daughter. Surely you remember my daughter. She is your age. She has a daughter herself now, Sophia. She is four. They are living with me at the moment. Come, come and meet them.”