“Yes,” I said. I wished I smoked, too, so that I might go out onto the balcony and have three seconds in the white night air with my father. We wouldn’t have to talk about Oswald. We could just smoke.
With his brother and his wife listening raptly, Anatoly said, helped by another shot of vodka, “Yes, but . . .” he trailed off, shaking his head. “It’s the head reeling back that stymies me,” he said. “If he was shot from behind, why did his head snap back?” His brother clucked and nodded, thoughtfully pulling at the strands of his gray beard.
“Oh my God, you’re not still talking about that!” my father said, back inside the living room.
Apparently when my father interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev a few years earlier for Radio Liberty, Gorbachev told my dad he had been keeping a major secret that he would take to his grave.
Anatoly thought this secret was about John F. Kennedy. He was certain that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and that Gorbachev knew the truth.
I looked excitedly at my father, who waved us all away and went back out onto the balcony. When he returned, he said, “So you think Gorbachev would know something like this and not tell?”
“Not tell you,” corrected Anatoly.
“Not tell anyone!” my father said. “Anatoly, you can’t keep quiet about what your wife is cooking for dinner, and here is a man who would die before he would talk about the second most traumatic event of the twentieth century?” He sat down and poured himself a glass of vodka. “The first being the murder of the Romanovs. Which is a perfect example of the point I’m making. The Romanov executioners couldn’t keep quiet for two months. Knowing the very future of Bolshevism was at stake, regardless, they started vomiting up their stories over vodka, then keeping diaries, then writing books, then making full confessions on their deathbeds. All within a decade. The killing of the Romanov family was the first act of political terrorism in the twentieth century, that’s why it was so monumental. And nobody could keep quiet about it. But about Kennedy, you think Gorbachev would keep quiet?”
My father said all this as if he had proven his point beyond any doubt, but Anatoly looked at him defiantly and said, “Yes.”
Alla picked up on the Romanov thread. “Yuri Lvovich, why do you think there is such fascination with the Romanovs?”
“Why?” he said. “Because they were a family that was slaughtered, that’s why. The Communists didn’t kill a political leader, they didn’t kill the Tsar. They killed a family. That’s why.”
“Papa, come on,” I said, pepping up a bit. “Yes, the Romanovs were a family, but that’s not why there is such fascination. They weren’t killed because they were a family. They were killed because they were a royal family. He was the Tsar and she the Tsarina and their son the heir to the throne —”
“There was no more throne!” my father bellowed. “Nicholas abdicated. There was no more throne, no more Tsar! There was just the family.”
“You think if the Ivanov family was killed by the Bolsheviks, anyone would care?”
“Who the hell are the Ivanovs?”
“Exactly.”
Alla looked a little sorry she’d brought it up. “Plinochka, is it true you might be going inside the church for the funeral service?”
When Ellie heard that we might get inside Peter and Paul’s, but that I didn’t have a dress, she disappeared into another room.
I took the opportunity to say to my father, “Papa, only dead monarchs are entombed in Peter and Paul’s Cathedral. The remains of an ordinary family would not be buried there.”
“Hurry up, Mama!” Alla yelled to Ellie.
Ellie reappeared, holding in her hands a folded black garment.
“You can wear this,” she said to me. “Just give it back, okay? Don’t take it to Texas with you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, slowly unfolding the dress. It could have been worn by Ellie’s great-grandmother, and probably had been. “You really don’t have to do this.”
“Why should you go out and buy yourself a dress to wear just once? It’s absurd. Take it.”
“I don’t know if it will fit.”
“It might be a little big. But so what?”
“You’re right. Thank you so much.”
Before I left with our driver Viktor, who had come back for me around midnight, my father said, “Tomorrow we go to Schlisselburg, God help me. I want Viktor to pick you up first and then come to get me. Ulitsa Dybenko is on the way.”
I fell asleep on my back with the blinds open, the sun streaming in. Still fully dressed, my earrings in, shoes on my feet. I fell asleep because I couldn’t write. I couldn’t write about my day, about Fifth Soviet, about Piskarev, about Yuliy Gneze and his Volkhov front and the loaf of bread in the crook of his arm. I couldn’t write about my ravishing joyous mother, as I had never known her.
I fell asleep, too tired even for dreams.
My mother in Dzhubga, 1962, when my father met and fell in love with her. She is twenty-two.
DAY FOUR
Thursday
YULIA
I only thought I was too tired for dreams. When I woke up it felt as if I hadn’t gone to sleep at all. It felt like I had been reliving the same exhausting moment over and over throughout the night. What that moment was I could not say. It involved either mountain climbing or arduous linguistics. Or both. Or it might have been swimming butterfly-style in the Dead Sea.
I dragged myself off the bed, got myself out of my crumpled clothes and into the shower. It was eight in the morning. At eight-thirty, room service came: a tablespoon of black caviar and five tough little pancakes.
The phone rang. It was Kevin.
“Your mother called me . . .”
“Why?” I said. “Papa hasn’t called her and she was frantic?”
Kevin hemmed and hawed. “She called because she wanted to let you and your father know she might be having gall bladder surgery. The doctor thinks she has gallstones.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“I know. It’s terrible.”
“No, that’s not it. When would the surgery be?”
“I think she’s in the hospital now. I can’t be sure, I could barely understand her. Something was wrong with her speech. They’re doing more tests today, but I think then she’s having the surgery.”
“Of course she is. I thought you said she said they don’t know if it’s gallstones?”
“They think it’s gallstones.”
“She’s having surgery because they think it’s gallstones?”
“I know. It’s terrible.”
“No, that’s not it. Mama didn’t want Papa and me to have this trip in the first place. Now I’m going to tell him she is about to have surgery and he’ll be upset for the next three days. Which is exactly her intention.”
“Paullina, you have to tell him.”
“I know, I know. But what if it’s a false alarm?”
“You’ve got to tell him.”
“I know. But, I mean, really.”
“She says she hasn’t felt well for three months.”
“Try eight years. Oh, but during the six lousy days we’re in Russia, that’s when she decides to go get her gall bladder checked out? Why not in the three months before?”
“I have no answers. She is your mother.”
We talked for too long, and then I didn’t have time to walk the three blocks to Malaya Konyushennaya, the street on the embankment of Griboyedov Canal, to drop off my film: nine rolls so far.
Viktor picked me up promptly at 9:30, and together we walked along Griboyedov to the photo store. It was a crisp, brilliant morning. As we walked, Viktor told me about the apartment buildings Ellie and Anatoly (and my grandparents) lived in.
“They were built during the Khruschev era,” he told me, “in the early sixties when the secretary general decided that each and every Soviet citizen was entitled to a living space of seven square meters. He authorized construction of hundreds, maybe thousands, of these
tall, boxy buildings. They’re called Khrushchyobi.”
“But Viktor,” I said, “we lived five of us to seven square meters. That’s not what he intended, was it?”
“Communism,” he said, shrugging.
I fell quiet.
“Speaking of Communism,” Viktor said, “President Yeltsin has decided to drop in on the Romanov funeral, after all.”
“Oh. Is that bad for us?”
“Well, not bad, but getting inside the church is now impossible. Heightened security. No one is going to let you in, no matter how much you spend on a black dress.”
I laughed. “So no need to buy one, then?”
“You can still wear Ellie’s, I suppose.”
“I could, yes,” I said slowly. The dress was four sizes too big and a foot too long. “I do have my suit, though.”
We dropped off the film and walked back to Viktor’s Volkswagen. We picked up my dad at Anatoly’s at 10:30.
Anatoly was still home, wearing his robe.
“Ellie,” I whispered, “is he not going to work today?”
“He hasn’t decided,” she said.
“Oh.”
“He doesn’t get paid for it anyway. He’ll see how he feels.”
Ellie asked us to come and have dinner with them again tonight. My father mumbled something indistinct, and Ellie didn’t press further.
Before we left, Anatoly said, “Plinka, have you called Yulia yet?”
I hadn’t, of course, but my father came to my rescue by saying, “She’ll call her tonight.”
In the car, he said, “Do whatever you want, Paullina. You can call her, invite her to dinner. Whatever you want. We have only a few days left. Tonight we might be back late. But you have tomorrow night, Friday.” He shook his head. “I don’t recommend it. If you want to see her, I won’t come with you. It’s too uncomfortable for me. I’ll just go back to Tolya’s.”
Yulia was my father’s brother’s only child. But then we left Russia, and my uncle left his wife and Yulia, and got himself a new wife who had a child of her own. This new wife was intensely jealous of Yulia, and so my uncle abandoned Yulia and severed his bond with her. Consequently it became very difficult for the rest of the family to speak to her because she wanted from us what we could not give her — either an explanation or an intervention. My uncle could not and would not be shamed. So it remained from 1977 to 1998, broken and not right. My father did not like this kind of mess. He could barely tolerate messes of his own making. But to be confronted with the child of his brother, so needy, so questioning, was more than he could bear. He hardly wanted to step foot into our Fifth Soviet apartment. Yulia was like that apartment ten times over.
I understood. I let it go.
“Papa, what about taking Anatoly and Ellie out to dinner? We talked about that on Monday.”
“Monday?” He repeated the word Monday as if I had said nineteenth century. “Again, Paullina, you cannot do everything.”
We found the highway to Schlisselburg without once asking for directions. I thought this was a good time to clear my throat. I may have been able to drop Yulia, but I could not drop my mother.
“Papa, uh, I spoke to Kevin this morning. He said that Mama called him yesterday —”
“Yes?” He sat up straighter.
“Have you, um, called Mama yet?”
He grunted. “No.”
I didn’t think so. “Well, Kevin told me that Mama may have gallstones, and that she might need gall bladder surgery. I don’t know how to say gall bladder in Russian. How do you say gall bladder in Russian?”
He sank down in his seat and became less interested. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, whatever it is in Russian, Mama might have it, and she might need to be operated on. She is waiting for the test results.”
“Okay,” was all he said.
“Mama asked Kevin to tell you, in case you called Maui and she wasn’t there. She’s not there because she’s in the hospital. She didn’t want you to be worried.”
“Okay,” my father said. “I’ll try to call her.”
We said nothing more about it, and soon my father became animated again, this time about the quality of the highway to Schlisselburg.
Highway 105 impressed Papa, who spent most of the forty-five-minute ride to Schlisselburg discussing what a similar well-built, four-lane highway could do for Russian civilization if it spanned the five hundred miles between Moscow and St. Petersburg instead of the seventeen miles between St. Petersburg and Schlisselburg. He said he wished he had some way to explain to the Russians that if they built a road like this between Moscow and St. Petersburg, they would transform Russia. He said if he weren’t retiring, he would make a radio program on this very subject.
I wanted to mention that the Chunnel, the tunnel under the English Channel, took the British and the French nearly the whole of the twentieth century to build, and the sea at its narrowest point between Dover and Calais was only seventeen miles wide. So perhaps he was expecting too much from the Russians. Instead, I said, “Maybe there is no money.”
“But there’s money to throw into the military? Billions of rubles to throw into the military.”
“Maybe the Russians don’t want the enemy to march up the highway between its two major cities. Its only major cities.”
“Maybe,” my father said, “it’s nothing but short-sightedness. Well, what do we expect? Seventy years of Communism will do that.”
At the Neva, almost at the point it flowed out of Lake Ladoga, we drove across a bridge called Mariinsky and headed into Schlisselburg.
My father was right about one thing: why they built a highway to Schlisselburg was even more unfathomable once we saw Schlisselburg. It lay on the eastern bank of the Neva at the crest of the river’s source in Lake Ladoga. The spot was propitious; the town was not.
Some wretched tenement buildings under a canopy of oaks, a desolate outdoor market, one cafeteria that was closed because it wasn’t quite lunchtime. The only church in town was housed in what looked like an abandoned 7-Eleven building. “House of Prayer” the sign read. It didn’t even have a cross on it. It could’ve said “House of Pelmeni.”
There was nowhere to park and no one to ask directions to the ferry. From Schlisselburg there was supposed to be a ferry to the island fortress Oreshek. But there was no one to ask, and no signs for the island, or the ferry, or for the blockade Diorama Museum.
Bewildered silence fell inside our car. We were amazed Schlisselburg was like this, my father most of all. Viktor was least surprised, though even his pupils widened. As for me? After seeing Fifth Soviet, how could anything else surprise me? My father must have been recalling Gettysburg, Fort Sumter, Omaha Beach — places where storied battles had once been fought and were properly memorialized.
Not only had the greatest battle of Leningrad’s siege been fought on these shores, but the nine-hundred-day Nazi blockade was broken here.
The dewy river shimmered and flowed beyond the oak leaves, a testament to the past, a path to the future. But there was still nowhere to park. Or buy a map, or get a sandwich, or ask a question, or buy a trinket. While my father and I complained, Viktor, with his usual equanimity, parked on the uncut grass and strolled to the banks of the Neva to find a ferry schedule.
I took a picture of a monument to Peter the Great. I had to beat my way through thick brambles to what had once been a clearing. Peter stood on a pedestal, looking proudly onto the underbrush and weeds. You couldn’t see the river for the trees. I took one picture.
Viktor returned with a ferry schedule, and he and my father studied it like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls. My father looked worried.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Is there no ferry?”
“No, there is,” my father slowly replied. “But the times are no good.”
“Let me see.” I glanced at the schedule. “The boat leaves at noon. It’s now eleven-forty. Perfect.”
“Yes, but the boat doe
sn’t return until 2:25.”
“So?”
“I’m not going to spend two hours on some island, Paullina. Not when we have so much to do.” My father had worked out our whole day in his head, and it did not include two hours on an island, not even the island that saved Leningrad. He cleared his throat.
“Ideally what I’d like to do is take the noon boat to the island, and come back on the 12:25. That gives us about a half hour. Now that’s perfect.”
“Papa,” I said incredulously, “how can we do that? The boat takes seven minutes just to get to the island. We wouldn’t have a half hour. We’d basically get off and get back on again. Maybe we should just stay on the boat.”
“Paullina,” my father said with feeling. “You cannot do everything. You just can’t. We have to choose. We can go to Oreshek, but then we can’t go north to the Road of Life on the lake.”
I stood my ground for a moment. “Why can’t we do both?”
“Maybe you’d like to go to Kobona, too?”
“Yes.”
He turned to Viktor. “Viktor! See what I mean? What to do?”
Viktor studied the schedule, trying to accommodate everybody. But my father, soon-to-be-retiring-or-not, was still his boss. I was only the boss’s daughter.
We didn’t go.
Getting back in the car, we drove down a dirt road to another grassy knoll and parked. Instead of taking the ferry, we took a walk on a narrow strip of grass between two canals. The first canal was built by Peter the Great in the 1700s, to protect trade ships and fishing boats from the heavy storms that often plagued the lake. But it wasn’t sufficient, so Catherine the Great built another canal in the 1800s.
A mere two hundred meters separated Oreshek from the ten-foot-wide shore of Catherine’s canal. Before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the island was a Tsarist prison. It happened to be the prison where Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged in 1881 for conspiring to kill Alexander III. After the revolution, the prison became a museum, and in the spot where Ulyanov died, an apple tree was planted in his honor.