When the Germans occupied Schlisselburg and nearly the entire southeastern bank of the Neva during World War II, they perched on the narrow bank between the two canals, dug their trenches, and shelled the island. Schlisselburg remained in German hands until 1944. The Russian soldiers in Oreshek were supplied and replenished by the Red Army. Oreshek remained in Soviet hands.
But all that history warranted no more than twenty minutes, according to my father; any longer was too much. I was full of regret as we strolled down the strip of land that had once been the German front line. Meanwhile my dad spent the thirty minutes of our walk discoursing at length on the inadequate money-making capabilities of the Russians.
It was hard to argue with him. In the last fifty years, Schlisselburg had remained largely ignored by vacationers and tourists. The town was run-down in a typical Russian fashion, and the glorious lakeside coast, which anywhere else in the world would have long ago become developed and prosperous, lay fallow. In seventy years of rule by the proletariat for the proletariat, the Soviets had not even paved a road in town, except for the highway to nowhere.
My father and I discussed two other canals we had seen with our own eyes: the intercoastal waterways flanking the state of Florida, one on the Atlantic Ocean, one on the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, one could argue there were one too many nightclubs on the Gulf of Mexico, a few too many luxury yachts. But these excesses of Western civilization did not detract from the appeal of the coast. You could get a drink, breathe in the salty air, go for a boat ride, buy a new bathing suit, cluck at the magenta sun beyond the palms.
Here in Schlisselburg, alongside the historic Peter Canal, a potholed dirt road led to nothing. At the apex of a most magnificent view — the Neva opening up into a breathtaking oceanic expanse of Lake Ladoga — lay an ancient closed-down scrap-steel yard and nothing else. No houses, no cars, no shops, no people strolling.
On Catherine Canal a few old rowboats were moored. A squalid hut here and there showed us that some fishermen lived close to their boats. One of the huts had a caved-in roof.
“What happens to the huts when there’s a storm?” I asked.
“Take a guess,” replied my father.
“How could the Germans have entrenched on the land strip between the canals?” I asked. “How would they get there from across Peter Canal, anyway? Did they swim?”
“It was winter,” my father said with a disdainful snort.
Oh, yeah. They just walked across the ice. “Okay. But the blockade lasted three years. What about in the summer? How did they get back and forth?”
“If I had a million dollars,” my father said, “I would buy all this land. Heck, probably for a lot less than a million. I would buy it all.”
“Well, you don’t have a million dollars.”
“But if I did,” he said, “can you imagine? Can you even imagine what this would look like with some Western money? What a waste. Isn’t it, Paullina? Isn’t it, Viktor? A waste?”
“A waste,” I agreed. “But what about the Germans?”
“They had boats,” said Viktor. “They rowed across the canal.”
“Where did they get the boats from? They didn’t bring boats with them from Germany, did they?”
“No,” my father said. “They stole them. From the fishermen.”
We took a few more unenthusiastic pictures and left, my father all the while lamenting the Soviet lack of initiative.
One last time, I looked at Oreshek Island across the water. With its battered fortified walls, it was a baffling anachronism. It was as if Oreshek was meant to look exactly as it had in 1943. As if perhaps Schlisselburg was, too.
As if perhaps this was by design, not neglect. As if it was left as it had been then, in memoriam.
I thought of Shepelevo. I thought of Fifth Soviet and Gostiny Dvor. Had everything been left the way it had been, in memoriam?
“Paullina,” my father said, patting my back. “Look at the Neva. It’s something, isn’t it? Just look at it.”
I looked at him, smiling. “You like this river, don’t you, Papa? You love this river.”
He nodded ruefully. “Did you know the Neva is one of the fullest rivers in the world?”
“This I did not know.”
“In spring, when the ice melts, you should see it. You think all is well — you’re smelling the daffodils, looking forward to the lilacs — and then, boom, the ice on Lake Ladoga melts, and great icebergs float down the river to the Gulf of Finland. You should hear the noise.”
“The noise of the icebergs?”
“Yes. For weeks it sounds like cannons going off, until it is all carried down into the gulf.”
“Cannons?”
My father nodded. “Every single year the Leningrad spring sounds like war.”
IN STORIED BATTLES
We went back to the car and Viktor drove us back to Mariinsky Bridge under which the Diorama of the Breaking of the Siege of Leningrad was located.
We parked by a tank. God forbid we should take the time to go near it. I gave it a cursory glance — a placard said its name was “Breakthrough” — and hurried to catch up with my father, who was calling me. “Paullina! For once, stop dawdling! Come on.” Glancing back, I saw fresh roses lying on the tank’s treads.
Ours was the only car in the parking lot adjacent to the museum. There was grass growing through the cracks in the asphalt, which was surprising considering the museum opened only a few years ago in 1994, on the fiftieth anniversary of the lifting of the blockade. Four years later the weeds were already winning.
The museum looked tiny and uninviting from the outside. It was just a low–to-the-ground dark-gray granite building. Above the doorway were inscribed the words, “BREAKING OF THE LENINGRAD BLOCKADE.”
Inside was even more uninviting, all somber and slate-cold.
The entire museum was one room. Two ladies sat at a desk inside the front door.
“Would you like to go in?” one of them asked.
“I suppose,” I said. “What’s in here?”
“Why, the diorama, of course. Have you not heard of our diorama?” She lifted her eyes to the slate ceiling as if to God. “Wait until you see. That will be five rubles, please. Each.”
I looked around and couldn’t see a thing except for a dim blue light emanating from the center of the room behind the girls.
As I paid, I whispered to Viktor, “What’s a diorama, anyway? And why so dark?”
We walked toward the blue light.
“It’s dark,” Viktor said, “so that nothing will draw your eyes away from it.”
I stepped up onto a platform and before me opened up the ragged shores of the Neva in the pre-dawn hours of a bitter winter morning.
I was looking at a life-size panorama of the river in which actual objects and figures were set against a painted backdrop.
The objects were tanks, trenches, guns, artillery. The figures were Russian soldiers charging across the Neva ice, singularly to their deaths but collectively toward the liberation of Leningrad.
A stout Russian woman with a laser pointer appeared and began telling us about what happened on the banks of the Neva for six days in January, 1943.
She talked slowly, stopping frequently. At some point, two other visitors had arrived: a Finnish woman and her translator. I realized it was for the translator that our lecturer stopped every few sentences, and as she stopped, the scene she was haltingly painting — the ice, the blood, the fire and Oreshek up in smoke — burned itself into my heart.
“For six days,” the lecturer said, “the Soviet troops attacked the Nazi defenses across the Neva at Schlisselburg.”
My eyes wide and my mouth wider, I stood mutely, staring at the expanse of the river in miniature. My father and Viktor stood slightly behind me.
“Look over here,” the lecturer said, pointing across the Neva. “We were trying to unite our northern Leningrad front with the Volkhov front. Neither Leningrad nor the Red Army could endure anothe
r winter like the winter of 1941–42 when millions of civilians and soldiers starved to death. We needed to cross the river, remove the Germans and unite the two fronts. It wasn’t easy. The Germans were well entrenched and well fortified. But it was break the blockade or die. We had to succeed at all cost. At whatever the cost.”
Another pause for the Finns. The Finnish woman didn’t look particularly impressed by what the translator was telling her.
“This was not the first attempt to break the blockade,” the lecturer resumed. “Do you see these bodies over here?” With her laser she pointed to the mass of bloodied forms lying on the ice a little downriver. “Half a kilometer away on the frozen Neva, six hundred bodies lay as a testament of the failure of the first attempt to break the blockade, just six days before, on the sixth of January.”
Pause for the Finns.
Turning to my father, I whispered, “Six hundred is a lot.”
“Shh,” he said with a slow blink. “And listen.” I turned back to the diorama, and behind me I heard his quiet voice. “It seems like a lot, I know, considering that on the first day of the D-Day invasion, on Omaha Beach, two thousand Americans died.”
“Yeah.”
“But just listen.”
The woman continued. “For six days, starting on January 12, the fighting that you see before you went on. The blockade was finally broken on January 19, 1943. On that day, our Leningrad troops hugged their Volkhov counterparts.”
My mother was born on January 19. She celebrated her third birthday when the blockade was broken.
Pause. Smoke everywhere. You could barely see the planes overhead for the smoke. Fires raged along the southern shore, where the Nazis were.
“On January 20, the People’s Volunteers began to build the railroad across the Neva across the very place the six hundred bodies lay.” She pointed with her laser. “The first thing the civilians did was carry away the dead. The second thing they did was build a railroad from Leningrad to Volkhov.”
Pause. The Finns clucked appreciatively.
“The volunteer force comprised sixty percent women.”
More impressed clucking.
I saw a tarp-covered army truck with a Red Cross symbol emblazoned on its side. Beyond it a tank was treading across the ice. In front of the tank, horses lay dead.
“The women built the railroad over land and over ice on the Neva in seventeen days. On February 7, the first train carrying butter from Volkhov arrived at Finland Station in Leningrad.”
Pause. The sky heaving smoke. I could barely hear the lecturer.
“The Germans bombed this railroad for the next year, and soon, in contrast with the Lake Ladoga truck route, which was known as the Road of Life, this one came to be called the Road of Death.”
Pause. The Finns stopped clucking.
“But it was also called the Road of Victory. Because although it kept being bombed, the railroad did not stop working. The Germans never regained this territory.”
Pause. I looked across the river at Schlisselburg — all smoke. Oreshek to the left — all smoke. I wanted to step down into the bunkers to escape the haze. I had no courage. The men in front of me were charging the river. I was next.
“The Germans remained armed in a place called Sinyavino Heights. They loved high positions, the Germans. They bombed our railroad from there. Hitler’s Army Group Nord remained in Sinyavino for months after the siege was lifted because we could not get them down from the hills.”
Pause.
“If you get a chance, do go up to the memorial in Sinyavino. It’s fabulous.”
My father whispered behind me, “Don’t even think about it.”
The soldier in front of me was bleeding to death on the ice, holding up the Soviet flag as high as he could. His eyes were on me. I wondered if the flag would be too heavy for me to pick up and carry. I was hypnotized by the blazing hammer and sickle. I did not answer my father.
He whispered, “Are you listening to this?”
I barely nodded, without turning around.
“Ask her a question,” he said. “Ask her while I go outside for a smoke.”
I thought, no need, there is plenty of smoke right here. Look at the sky. I said nothing.
“Ask her,” my dad whispered, his voice breaking, “how many men died during those six days.”
He left.
I raised my hand, then quickly put it down. I wasn’t in school — what was I doing?
“Excuse me,” I said. “Tell me, please, how many men died in this six-day battle?”
The lecturer, smiling helpfully, said, “During the six days that it took to break the blockade, nineteen thousand Germans died.”
“But how many Russians?”
“One hundred and fifteen thousand.”
I spun around and there was my father, standing back from me in the distance, nodding in the dark, crying.
I whirled back to my men. I needed to get inside my bunker. 115,000 boys in six days. One of them right in front of me, holding high the hammer and sickle for Mother Russia. The truck with the Red Cross symbol couldn’t get to him fast enough. The tanks and the dead horses were in the way.
America lost 300,000 men during four years of war. In this one obscure battle, 115,000 men died.
Schlisselburg was a blip on the most detailed map of the war and barely a mention in the most thorough history books. The good ones said of Schlisselburg, “And here on the shores near Schlisselburg, some of the battles for the defense of Leningrad were fought.”
Only a moment ago I was feeling slightly resentful that we hadn’t gone to Oreshek. It all fell away from me. The Battle for Leningrad flowed into me. I could reach out with my hand and touch the trenches, that’s how close they were, and beyond them, I could run out myself onto that blue ice at dawn. My soldiers were exploding as German planes flew low overhead, bombarding us. We picked up one more soldier, but he died in our arms. We lay him down on the bloodied ice. Red, white, metallic blue, gray tanks, gray uniforms, red blood.
It was all in front of me, as if it had been built for me. After all my longing, I had been transported here as if by magic, by providence, for understanding. By the time I understood, I was drowned in this world. Like a drinker before her coveted bottle of wine, I opened my throat. I was no longer a spectator but a participant. I put my hand over my heart. I could barely breathe.
Then and there, between the Finnish pauses — thank God for Finland! — I felt, no, I knew that it was here in Schlisselburg that my Bronze Horseman came alive and jumped off his pedestal, just as he had in Pushkin’s poem, and galloped away through the streets of Leningrad. I shuddered. The horseman came alive and for the rest of Eugene’s days chased him through the streets of St. Petersburg, through that maddening dust, until Eugene went mad. Was my horseman also going to chase me down my days through the maddening dust?
This is what I came to see. This is what I came to Russia for.
I came for the Bronze Horseman, and I found him here, rearing up in the cold slate building in front of 115,000 dying Russian soldiers.
I felt it all inside me, twisting and warping its way into fiction, into drama.
Though not much was needed to warp it into drama.
The dead, where did they go? Were they buried in the river? I didn’t ask.
THE BRAVEST OF THE BRAVE
“I know that one hundred and fifteen thousand soldiers dead seems like many — too many,” the lecturer said, “but right here,” — she pointed with her red dot to a tiny remote location on the southeastern banks of the Neva — “two hundred and forty thousand men died during the course of the war, in a place called Nevsky Patch.”
Nevsky Patch. That was the place Yuliy Gneze told me about as he carried a loaf of bread in the crook of his arm through a concrete museum building in Piskarev Cemetery.
I stared at the little place across from me on which her red laser dot had landed. I could barely see for the smoke. What was she pointing to? And wasn
’t that the German side? She must have been mistaken; the Germans must have been the ones to lose those men, because —
“Two square kilometers held by Russian soldiers in enemy territory on the southern bank,” she continued. “Our men occupied this little patch in the fall of 1941. They were supplied with food, ammunition and new soldiers by boats from across the river.”
I began to ask, “How long . . .?” but broke off. I couldn’t get the words out. This was ridiculous. I was not going to get emotional in front of Viktor and the two Finns. After pausing to compose myself, I tried again. “How long did they hold that land?”
“For five hundred days,” she replied, “they held those two square kilometers against the Germans.” She paused, her own voice cracking. How many times has she given this lecture? “They were the bravest of the brave,” she said.
I remembered what Yuliy Gneze had told me. They went there to die, he said. No one came back from Nevsky Patch.
I turned away from the lecturer. Behind me, my father was listening with his own stricken face. There was nowhere to hide.
I turned back to the blue diorama.
“Right after the war,” the lecturer said, “the Leningrad city council attempted to plant some trees at the memorial site for Nevsky Patch. Nothing grew. They tried again — twenty years later. Nothing grew. They tried again — thirty years later, on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of war. The council attempted to plant some trees in the soldiers’ honor, but one tree after another died, their roots turning up.”
“Why?” I said hoarsely. I cleared my throat. “Why?”
Behind me I heard Viktor whisper, “Metal.”
“Because the ground was full of metal,” the lecturer replied. “Nothing could grow, even fifty years later. To this day nothing grows on that fallow ground. It’s all metal: weapons of the fallen soldiers, enemy artillery, bullets, knives. And their bones.”
I turned to Viktor. “Viktor, did you know about this?”
He nodded. “All the Russians know. Nevsky Patch has acquired legendary status over the years.”
“Have you been there?”
“Yes.”