“It wasn’t running yet during the war, was it?”
“No. It was being built. It was a bomb shelter, I’m telling you. They came all the way down here and starved to death.”
The escalator was taking us a long way down. It was like descending into Hades, six hundred feet into the ground. It was three times as long as the Central Line escalator at Holborn Station on the London Tube, and the Holborn escalator is notorious in London for being the longest in the city.
It took us eight minutes to snail to the bottom. I wanted to take a picture to show Kevin, but my father wouldn’t let me. He was afraid I would be arrested.
Arrested?
“Stop it,” he said. “Come, and stop it.”
I didn’t take the picture.
We had no idea where to go on the metro. Not he, and certainly not I. Without purpose we stood, while I inhaled the fantastic familiar smell of the Leningrad metro, a warm tunnel wind mixed with marble and metal, blowing around in a cavernous space. Exactly as I remembered, only more so. The New York subways or the London Underground did not smell this way. The D.C. metro did a bit — it had the cavernousness and the tunnel wind, but not the marble.
Yet every time I ride down the New York City subway escalator, I inhale deeply, as ever hoping for the smell of Leningrad.
Tentatively we approached a broad, harsh Soviet-looking woman who told us which two trains to take to get to Ulitsa Dybenko.
By the time we were on a train we could barely keep upright, yet there was nowhere to sit. Rush hour. The body odor coming from the blank-faced, bleak-faced Russian commuters was oppressive and pervasive, almost like the toilets.
While I strap-hanged, I marveled at how much of Russia for me was defined by smells. Good smells, bad smells — of spring, of water, of jasmine and lilac, of metro and toilets, human sweat, old alcohol. Why couldn’t Russia instead be defined by the poetry of Russian writers? Or by food like herring and smoked fish? Or by the Russian language heard everywhere? Or by the strings of a plaintive balalaika?
Russian people returning home from work looked no happier than New Yorkers returning home from work. Across the continents, weary people looked the same. In Russia, they got paid less and smelled worse.
DZHUBGA, 1962
As we got off the train, my father said, “We should buy Ellie some roses.” Out in the street, we walked over to an old woman selling flowers by the side of the road. The roses were three dollars each. They came wrapped in newspaper.
Most of the paper’s black newsprint found its way onto my father’s hands in the twenty minutes it took us to walk to Ellie’s apartment. The first thing my father did once we were inside was wash his hands under cold water. The hot water had been turned off. I ran to use the facilities — for the first time since Grand Hotel Europe in the morning. It was 7:30 p.m.
Having acquired a little perspective, Ellie’s toilet was nicer than any I’d been to so far except for the hotel’s. It seemed clean. The water flushed. It didn’t smell so bad.
I had lived my entire childhood in an apartment where the toilet smell was so terrible that, twenty-five years later, I couldn’t bring myself to go into it. If I had to, of course, I’m sure I would have. Eventually I would stop smelling the stench as I cooked dinner on the stove a few feet away. Human beings can, and do, get used to worse than that. But in the confined space of Ellie’s bathroom, thinking of everything that Soviet human beings had to get used to over the last seventy years filled me with a grief I could almost not bear. Because I now knew the difference.
Obsessively I scrubbed my hands with soap under the cold water. Someone should shout from the ramshackle rooftops, We are still living. We have such little time on this earth, we are not going to get any brownie points for suffering. Couldn’t we have just a little comfort?
With clean hands and an empty bladder, I looked around Ellie’s apartment and realized that their home was nice! There were fresh flowers in a vase, the wooden floor was polished and smooth. They had comfort.
It was quieter than the first night. It was only my father and me, Ellie and Anatoly, and it was lovely. We devoured leftovers from the previous dinner.
“Is it still fresh?” I whispered to my father, but he shushed me, so I ate. The two-day-old food was served at room temperature, on Ellie’s best china.
She’d also made a delicious borscht and, with my Shepelevo blueberries, an extraordinary blueberry compote and a graham and meringue blueberry pie. My father and I ate non-stop until nine.
My father also smoked, and in between cigarettes kept trying to plan the next three days.
“Comrades,” he said, standing before us at the head of the table, as if we were having a managers’ meeting. “We have to very seriously think about what we are going to do tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday. We have only three days left.”
Stuffed and tired, I said, “I thought tomorrow we were driving up to Lake Ladoga to see the Road of Life?”
Anatoly said, “You should see Schlisselburg too, it has a fascinating island fortress. Oreshek.”
“She wants to do everything,” my father said with a great sigh.
I nodded. “The man we met today at Piskarevka, Yuliy Gneze, told us we must go to Schlisselburg. He also told us we must go to Kobona, the town across Lake Ladoga. Apparently it has a great Defense of Leningrad museum.”
“Paullina!” my father exclaimed. “Maybe you’d also like to go to Stalingrad, to see their museums?”
“No,” I said. “But I would like to see Nevsky Patch.”
“What about Crimea by the Black Sea?”
“Seriously, Papa.”
“Paullina! You, seriously. We have no time for this. Friday, as you know, is the Romanov funeral. That will take up the whole day.”
“A funeral that lasts all day? All right, fine, but we still have Saturday.”
“No, we don’t have Saturday,” my father mimicked me, quite agitated. “Saturday we must go to Karelian Isthmus to visit my friends.”
“No! What friends?”
“Radik Tikhomirov,” my father replied. “And his wife, Lida. You remember Radik, don’t you?”
I was pretty agitated myself. “Vaguely. Doesn’t mean I want to see him.”
“They want to see you.”
“So? Why?”
“Why, why. They do.”
“We have no time. Is it going to take the whole day?”
“Yes.”
“Papa! No. We can’t spend a whole day with someone named Radik.”
“There is more. Your dedushka wants us to go visit his friends at their summer dacha.”
“What friends? What dacha?”
“The Ivanchenkos. Nikolai Nikolayevich and his wife Valya. You probably don’t remember them.”
“You’re right about that. I don’t. Why do we have to go see them?”
“Because they remember you.”
“Papa, we don’t have time.”
“Paullina, Dedushka will never forgive us if we don’t go and see his friends.”
“Oh my God. Okay, fine, we’ll go see them, but forget Radik.”
“I can’t. Radik will never forgive me. It’s completely impossible. Paullina, you don’t understand —”
He broke off. Still standing at the head of the table, he lit a cigarette. “You remember Radik’s son, Korney?”
“Yes, he was my age. There is a picture of us standing by the doors of some museum.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t remember Radik, though. Was he the one who was in labor camp for eight years?”
“No, that was someone else.”
“Great. Is Korney going to be there?”
“No,” Papa said. “Korney is dead.”
Silence.
“He died at twenty-two of acute alcoholism,” my father said. “Don’t say anything to Lida or Radik when you see them. It may be difficult for them.”
“Was he their only child?”
“Y
es.”
“May be difficult?”
My father continued. “We have to think about what we want to do very carefully. We have a lot to accomplish and only a few days to do it. Let me ask you in all seriousness, do you really want to go to Schlisselburg and Lake Ladoga?”
“Where some of the greatest battles for the defense of Leningrad were fought? Where the Road of Life began and ended? Papa, yes. That’s why I came here. To search for a story. Remember?”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “But you did see a lot at the Piskarev museum.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I was afraid of that. Fine, we’ll go. But we have to go to Karelian Isthmus on Saturday. We have no choice. No one will ever talk to me again, do you understand, if I don’t bring you to them.”
I sighed desperately. “Fine.”
“Paullina, have some more pie,” Ellie said.
“Paullina, tell me about Tully,” Anatoly said. “When you wrote about her, did you write her from life, or did you make up the things that happened? Because it read very true, and I can’t imagine — I don’t know, maybe I don’t know you very well — but I’ve known you since the day you were born, and I can’t imagine your imagination is that vivid. Is it, Paullina? Did you make it all up? I can’t believe that.”
“Oh, believe it,” said my father. “Of course she made the whole thing up. Anatoly, she is the best liar we know. You should have heard her excuses for cutting school half of her senior year.”
Ellie said, “Plinka, do you want some more pie? How about some tea?”
“Papa,” I asked, “who is this Radik, and why does he care if he sees me or not?”
Ellie leaned over to me and whispered, “I’ll tell you about Radik later,” with a meaningful arch of her painted eyebrows.
After dinner, Alla arrived with her husband, Viktor, to watch the ancient home videos of our vacation in Red Schel, in the Caucasus Mountains in 1967, the year before my father was arrested.
We were all eager to watch the films, but there was too much sunlight still streaming from the window. Although it was after nine in the evening, we couldn’t see the projection screen. We decided to draw the red curtains and close all the doors. That helped some, but the sun was still very bright. We waited an hour and after ten began.
There I was, a four-year-old child on a mute, slightly speeded-up film reel. Swimming in the Black Sea. Imitating my best friend Alla. Alla and I sat next to each other on the couch and laughed.
“Plinka, look how funny you were,” she said. Casually dressed, she seemed a lot more comfortable with me than she had been on Monday night, as if she now knew she didn’t have to put on airs.
I said, “What I want to know is, why did my hair look like a boy’s? Why couldn’t my mother let my hair grow out? Yours was so long and pretty. And look at me.”
“Oh, no, Plinka! You were so cute.”
There I was eating watermelon, sandwiched between Alla and a boy. I thought the boy might be Korney, Radik’s son. I glanced over at my father. Blinking he watched the screen and said nothing. On the screen, I was crying. A bee had tried to lick the watermelon juice off my chest and stung me. In the next shot, my mother stood near a well. She wore two little girlish braids, and no makeup. She looked younger than I am now. I tried to calculate. My God, she was younger than I am now. I stared. Much younger. She was twenty-seven. My father stood near her smoking, fixing something to eat, talking. He was only thirty-one. He was also younger than me. I couldn’t watch them.
That was all there was of me. Thirty-three seconds of a celluloid child, proving I once existed in this other world — a world that was more than just smells.
Finally, the film reel we’d been waiting for. My even younger father on vacation in Dzhubga, a resort north of Sochi on the Black Sea in July 1962, with eight of his best friends. The camera was Anatoly’s. My father was twenty-six. Nine of them playing volleyball and practical jokes. Anatoly sleeping on the beach. As we watched we teased Anatoly about his capacity to sleep anywhere, even as a young man.
“Were you already married then?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Ellie snapped.
“Why didn’t you go to Dzhubga with them?” I asked her.
“Because,” she said. “I was home with Alla. She was a baby.”
“So Anatoly went without you on vacation?”
“Yes.” She squinted her eyes with bitterness. “He did that all the time. All the men did that.”
Seeing that I had touched a nerve, I turned back to the screen, where someone had filched Anatoly’s clothes. He woke up, and was not happy. We laughed. Ellie’s face showed grim satisfaction.
I leaned back and watched my father swim in the Black Sea. My handsome, thin, dark-haired young father, unmarried, childless, happy.
Dzhubga. July, 1962.
Before marriage, before pregnancy, and — unfathomably — before me. I found it hard to watch my father living what seemed to be a joyous existence before his new life began. He didn’t even know yet that his new life would take the form of an exquisite twenty-two-year-old exotic-looking girl, sitting with her own friends on the same beach, laughing at nine boys playing volleyball.
Dzhubga. 1962. They met there, fell in love in the space of a week. They married two months later. My father had been engaged to someone else. That evaporated when he met the fresh young woman full of life with high cheekbones and cropped hair.
It hurt to see my mother. She was so beautiful, giggling with her friends in their little bathing suits, watching the half-naked boys, not having fallen in love with my father yet.
I watched my father moments before he fell in love with my mother. An unbearable suspended-in-eternity moment. How could Anatoly have even known what he was filming? The camera was just merrily rolling along, recording for all the world and me what most never get to see — the instant her parents fell in love with each other. The instant I became possible.
My mother sat in a chair on a porch. One of my father’s artist friends was painting her portrait. She couldn’t sit still; every few moments her youthful face exploded in animated happiness. My father stood on the wooden steps of the porch, smiling back, watching her watching him. Before everything. Before she thought her whole life was a failure as she wiped the red dust off her furniture on Maui and complained about the Hawaiian sun.
“Look at my wife,” my father said. Even in the dark, I could see his eyes, misty and twinkling. “Paullina? Just look at your mother.”
“I’m looking, Papa,” I said, looking at him looking at her.
The day after my young mother had her portrait painted, the group of them went to a dance, and afterward my father and mother dove off a mystical boat into the Black Sea, swam alongside each other at night, and the rest as they say is history.
But before the night swim in the sea, on this porch my mother sat, unable to keep still, unable to keep herself from smiling — at the artist, at the beach, at my father, not quite in love with him yet, but completely in love with being young and beautiful and alive.
How terrifying, how mesmerizing to see that moment.
My father got up to smoke. He kept coming back into the room, and every time he came back, he asked the same thing. “Well, was your mother beautiful? Was she beautiful? What do you think? She was like a goddess, wasn’t she? So beautiful.”
“She wasn’t bad,” I said.
“Wasn’t bad?”
Everybody laughed.
My father nodded. “Wait till I tell her you said that. Just wait. I’ll tell her in America. She won’t talk to you for a decade.”
“Plinka,” Ellie said, “your papa tells me you want to photograph the smell in Shepelevo.”
I glanced at him, shaking my head.
“And what were you writing,” she went on, “while your papa slept in the car on the way back from Shepelevo?”
I stared at my father. He went out on the cluttered balcony to smoke.
So my
father had asked Viktor, who had seemed too busy washing the car to observe anything, what I had been doing while he slept. And my father had deemed it important enough to pass along over a glass or four of vodka.
“What were you writing, Plinka?” Ellie repeated. “Were you writing about Shepelevo?”
“Yes, Shepelevo,” I replied carefully.
“Yes,” said Anatoly. “Your papa said you were very affected by Shepelevo. Is that true?”
“If he says so.”
I wondered how long it would take him to turn this afternoon’s trip to Fifth Soviet into a story.
As it turned out, just one more cigarette. He returned from the balcony and promptly told everyone how Svetlana had begged us to stay and eat her freshly made pelmeni.
“Stuffed cabbage,” I corrected.
“And you should have seen the apartment,” he continued. “In all this time, nothing has changed.” He described the unevenness of the floors, the sagging of the walls. He stopped before he got to the toilet. Instead he recounted Svetlana’s operatic singing.
He had so obviously been looking forward to telling the story of her singing to us. He told us colorfully, and we emoted colorfully. Ellie teared up. Anatoly made loud clucking noises. I shook my head. Like any good storyteller, he embellished the truth, and like all good listeners, we embellished our emotions. And then we all had another shot of vodka.
As we talked about 1962 and Dzhugba and 1963 and my birth, the subject naturally segued into one of my father’s favorite topics: the Kennedy assassination. I was born two weeks before the President was assassinated. In Russia, any time someone remarks on the year of my birth, the next sentence always takes us to Kennedy and Oswald.
Thirstily downing his vodka and shaking his head, Anatoly turned to me. “Your father,” he said, lowering his voice with incredulity, “thinks Oswald acted alone.”
He glanced guiltily at my father, who tutted and went out to smoke.
“We used to argue about this all the time,” Anatoly said. “I think he got tired of arguing.”
“That would surprise me,” I said. “Papa loves to argue. Especially when he’s right.”
“You think he is right?” Anatoly asked in the same hush-hush conspiratorial tone.