“Was it like Piskarev?”
Viktor shrugged. “At least they are buried in Piskarev. At Nevsky Patch, they lie where they fell. The soldiers made barricades out of the dead bodies.”
“Oh my God.”
“I know,” he said. “So not quite like Piskarev.”
Shell-shocked, I bought some books at the front desk and talked to Ludmilla, the woman who sold them to me. She said she had lived in Schlisselburg since she was a little girl.
The lecturer came over and shook my hand, introducing herself. Her name was Svetlana.
“So where do you girls go shopping?” I asked, me of the NorthPark and Galleria malls in Dallas. I was trying to change the subject to something facile.
“We don’t go shopping much,” Svetlana admitted.
“But you have to buy things, don’t you? Clothes, coats?”
“Not really,” Svetlana said. “We don’t need much.”
Ludmilla and Svetlana had been working at the Diorama Museum since it opened in 1994. They got paid seventy rubles a month. “Theoretically,” interjected Svetlana with a chuckle. “We haven’t been paid in three months.”
“I almost died in Schlisselburg,” Ludmilla said, as if that was the reason she could not leave town.
In September 1941, Ludmilla explained, as she was crossing the Neva with her family to evacuate, their boat was torpedoed by the Germans and sank. Her parents drowned. Ludmilla grabbed her one-year-old brother and clung to him in the near-freezing water.
“We would have gone down for sure,” she said, “but for an eighteen-year-old nurse who saved us.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“I was four.”
Ludmilla was a year younger than my father.
My father appeared next to me and was nodding as if he were listening; he even mumbled, “That’s incredible.” But suddenly he said, “Girls, I cannot tell you how this place would change with a little money, a few restaurants, some vacation homes. I mean, you have a beautiful place here in Schlisselburg. World-class beautiful. If I had a million dollars, I would buy up all the land between those canals of yours, and then this would really be something. That’s all that I’d need. A million dollars.”
The two women smiled blankly at him.
“Papa, let’s go,” I said.
Outside, I turned to him, exasperated. “What are you doing? Those women haven’t been paid in three months and you’re going on about what you would do with a million dollars?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Okay. Do you want to go and look at the tank?”
“Not really. We need to get going. We spent too long in there.”
I didn’t think we spent long enough.
I heaved myself into the car. “Papa, do you think this place we’re going to, the Road of Life, will have a bathroom?”
“Are you joking?”
“Or somewhere along the way?”
“You are joking, right? I can never tell with you.”
“I really need a bathroom.” I had gotten my period, but I was hardly going to tell my father that. I needed a bathroom that instant.
“Go back to those women. Maybe they’ll let you use theirs. They must have a latrine. It’s a world-class military museum. Even the Finns have come.”
I returned to the women, while my father and Viktor waited in the car.
“Svetlana,” I said, “do you have a ladies’ room I can use?”
She glanced at me awkwardly and then gestured toward the exit.
“Come,” she said walking with me. “I’ll take you. Frankly, I’m ashamed. It’s in the woods, behind the museum. But someone stole the doors off it.”
“Stole the doors off the toilet?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why doesn’t someone, maybe the city council, give you new doors?”
“They’d have to pay us first.”
We walked down a path along the highway until just before the entrance to Mariinsky Bridge. The few sparse white birches did not look like a forest; they were more like an anomaly. The grass was uncut — naturally.
In the near distance I saw something I thought could not be an outhouse. It was a tall rectangular structure of corroded steel with a letter M on top.
It was the outhouse. M was for men, engraved helpfully above the opening where the door used to be. I could smell the toilet from thirty feet away. The stench was particularly harsh because we were in the open country. You’d think the freshness of the flowing Neva and the blooming grasses would’ve masked it, filtered it. But no. Nature was inadequate to battle a smell of such intensity. The men’s side was first.
The outhouse was all metal. The missing door had probably been metal too. Maybe the door pilferer sold it for scrap. Maybe not sold it, but bartered it.
The toilet inside was a square hole in the ground lined in concrete, and the concrete was covered in excrement.
Pressing my lips shut, I looked at Svetlana. I was trying not to breathe. I didn’t want to offend this nice woman by retching. People can be sensitive to that sort of thing. Can take it the wrong way.
“The men’s side is awful,” Svetlana said. Her face was full of acute embarrassment. “Please come around this way,” she said. “To the women’s side. The women’s is cleaner.”
We walked around the metal structure to the women’s half. There were no doors on the women’s side, either. Inside was a square hole in the ground lined in concrete. The concrete was covered with excrement.
I couldn’t divine Svetlana’s criteria for “cleaner,” and I didn’t dare ask. I could think of nothing to say except a limp and desperate, “Is there any toilet paper?”
“Nnn — no,” Svetlana said, furrowing her brow. “There is no toilet paper.” She paused. “Do you . . . need toilet paper?”
I stepped away. “You know what? I’m fine. I’ll wait. But thank you anyway.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
As we walked back, she said, “Excuse us, please.”
“No, no,” I said. “Please don’t worry.” I wanted to say, it is I who needs to be excused by you, for intruding on your life. I am the last thing you need.
“We usually just go into the woods,” Svetlana said.
“For everything? Even the, um, the big things?”
“Well, usually, we wait for those until we get home.”
I walked carefully, trying not to rattle my bladder on the uneven ground.
“So whoever stole them, stole both doors?”
“Yes. Both doors.”
I was silent.
Brightening up a little, Svetlana said, “You know, President Yeltsin came to see our diorama a couple of years ago, and we thought maybe they’d give us some new doors for the toilet then, but his people just brought a portable toilet with them. When he left, they took their toilet. And can you believe it, they didn’t even let us glance at Yeltsin. They locked us in the basement.”
My astonishment must have been bald on my face, because she nodded and chuckled. “I know. Not a single peek at him.” She sounded more upset about not getting a glimpse of the Russian president than she did about the toilet.
“But who got to tell him the story of breaking the blockade?” I wanted to know. “You tell it so well.”
Svetlana shrugged. “They have their own people for that.”
When I said goodbye, I held her hand for a moment.
In the car my father asked how it went.
“I decided to wait.”
He whirled around. “There was no toilet?”
“Oh, there was.”
When I told him, my father didn’t know whether to laugh or shake his head. He did both.
“It’s easier for them to requisition a port-a-toilet from somewhere, like Poland,” he said, “than to replace those metal doors. In any case, they were hardly going to send Yeltsin into the woods to pee in a hole.” But that was funny to him. He laughed again.
br /> We drove away from the diorama, from the tank with the roses, and the dying man on the ice.
On the way to the Road of Life, my father told me the story of the writer André Gide, who came to Russia in 1936 and wrote a scathing book about his visit. Gide’s chief complaint was that there was no toilet paper to be found anywhere in the Soviet Union. Aleksei Tolstoy, a Russian writer and Leo’s nephew, after reading Gide’s book said viciously, “That’s right, because of course all André ever thinks about is his ass.” Gide, apparently, was a known homosexual.
We drove northward up the western coast of Lake Ladoga. Viktor called the road “The Broken Ring.”
“Why do you call it that?” I asked.
“Because,” he replied, “the memorial to the start of the Road of Life is a concrete ring that’s broken at the top, symbolizing that the Soviets broke the blockade with this ice route years before Schlisselburg.”
“Papa, what did you think of the diorama?”
“What can one think of it? What about that Nevsky Patch?” He shook his head. “You know your dedushka, my father?”
“Yes, I know my dedushka, your father.”
“Don’t be fresh. Do you remember his brother, Semyon? He was an engineer during the war; he repaired airplane engines for the Red Army. Semyon told me that all the pilots in his company died. They either died in the air or they died while landing, because in those days planes didn’t have the stabilizing third brake. He said before the pilots went out, they drank, they smoked, went to sleep and when they woke up, they flew out to die.”
“All of them?”
“That’s what he said. All of them.”
“Papa, do you think we’ll have time to go to Nevsky Patch?”
“Are you crazy? We don’t have time today to eat. Have you noticed we haven’t eaten?”
“That’s because there is nowhere to buy food.”
“We can’t go to Nevsky Patch.”
“It’s worth seeing,” Viktor piped in.
“Everything is worth seeing, Viktor!” my father exclaimed. “But we cannot see everything.”
“What about Saturday? Isn’t it on the way to somebody on Saturday?”
Shaking his head, my father said, “Nevsky Patch is on the way to nowhere, I already told you.”
We stopped to get some food at a small open market. “Fresh bread,” a sign read.
“Will there be a toilet here?” I asked. It had now been over a half hour since the time I had to use the ladies’ room instantly.
“Absolutely not,” said my father. “Not even a possibility.”
We bought some bread of dubious freshness, tomatoes, cucumbers, cherries, 200 grams of bologna, 200 grams of lamb bologna, and kvas — a Russian drink made from bread. For one ruble, or sixteen cents, Viktor also bought a replica Swiss Army knife.
“For a ruble?” I said. “Wow.”
“Pretty good, huh?” He smiled. “Made in Taiwan.”
On the way to the car, I bought a crème brûlée ice cream, which was the only thing I wanted. I sat in the back of Viktor’s car and ate the ice cream with the gusto one usually reserves for reading a fantastic book: greedily, then slowing down at the end because it is too good to finish. Every few licks, I paused to gaze at the caramel-colored ice cream in its plain wafer cone.
My father kept turning around and asking, “Well, how is it? How is it?”
“It’s everything I thought it would be.”
These three things: the smell of Shepelevo, the smell of the metro and the taste of crème brûleé ice cream. The essence of my childhood in Russia.
The rest of it — well, I didn’t want to remember.
Viktor pulled over to the shoulder.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “We’re not there yet, are we?”
“This is a good place,” he said, turning to me. “There is no one here.”
“A good place for what?” I said, staring deep into the well of my diminishing ice cream.
“Go into the woods, do your business. You’ll feel much better.”
“Viktor,” I said. “Please. Who are you talking to? Drive. I’m not going into the woods.”
My father scowled. “Stop it, you fool. You will have to go in the woods in the end. Go now and end your misery — and ours. You haven’t stopped talking about a bathroom.”
“No, I will not end your misery,” I said. “At Broken Ring, there’s bound to be something.”
“There will be nothing, I tell you!” my father said. “Nothing! Go now.”
“I can’t.”
“Ah, hell,” said my father. Viktor pulled out into the road and drove on.
He slowed down several more times before we got to Broken Ring. Each time he said, “This is not a bad spot. Secluded. Go here.”
“No.”
How they laughed at me. Yes, my father laughed, but underneath I could tell he wished he could just order me to go, as if I were still a child or an employee under his control.
The Broken Ring memorial, near the tiny village of Kokorevo, is on the west coast of Lake Ladoga. The Road of Life stretched twenty miles (or thirty kilometers) across the iced-over lake to Kobona, on the other shore. During the desperate winter of 1941, the Leningrad city council and the Red Army fashioned this trail across the frozen lake. Army trucks inched their way through the night to bring bread to the dying Leningraders. They built the road across one of the narrowest points of the lake, which at its widest is over seventy miles: three times as wide as Long Island; as wide as the entire state of Israel.
The trucks carried bread and sugar from Kobona to Leningrad and picked up evacuating Leningrad residents and transported them to relative safety in Kobona, while being bombarded by German air power. The Russians set up land-to-air artillery missiles to fight the Luftwaffe, and little by little, in the dead of night, with only the headlights of the trucks showing the way, they rolled across the ice to save dozens, possibly hundreds, from dying. Some trucks fell to German air strikes. Some fell through the ice.
The narrow road we were on extended pin straight into the distant horizon. There were no crossroads, no houses, just birch and pine forest. Up ahead, two kilometers away, we could see the memorial rising up out of the ground like a shorter Arch of St. Louis. From a distance, the ring didn’t look broken.
The highway ended at the monument. We stopped the car. There was no place to park. Viktor pulled onto the grass. The ring still didn’t look broken.
“Where is it broken?” I asked Viktor.
“Right on top. Do you see?”
The ring was a giant concrete semi-circle. Under it, tire tracks snaked through the asphalt, vanishing into the wetland cattails of the flattened lake.
Only when I came close did I see the break in the ring, at the very apex, barely six inches wide. The two spans of the arch did not quite meet. Considering the ring was forty feet tall, it was a tiny break indeed.
A wedding party was gathered beneath the ring, taking photographs. The bride was clowning around, throwing her veil above her head and dancing on the tire tracks. Why would anyone want to come here to have their wedding pictures taken?
“There must be a bathroom here,” I said to my father. “A wedding party wouldn’t come here if there weren’t a bathroom.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Why don’t you go ask the bride. Ask her where she goes to pee.”
“I bet she doesn’t go in the woods.”
“I bet she does,” said Viktor.
I walked up to the bride. “Congratulations,” I said. “Excuse me, but is there a bathroom around here?”
She shook her veiled head. I could tell she was surprised by my question.
“There are no conveniences here,” she said in the casual tone of someone who expects nothing else.
I wanted to point out that a toilet was more a necessity than a convenience, but I smiled and said, “Of course. Thank you.”
After the bridal party left, my father came up t
o me and said with a smirk, “Did you ask the bride if she lifted up her wedding dress when she peed in the woods?”
“No, I did not.”
He laughed heartily. “What did I tell you? I told you there would be nothing here. I told you to go in the woods. Who told you?”
Viktor pointed out that there were still plenty of woods around us.
“She can’t go here!” my father said in an affronted tone. “It’s the Road of Life memorial, for God’s sake.”
Besides the memorial and, nearby, an old Zenith land-to-air artillery gun, there was nothing else around, and I mean nothing. It was marshland. Long grasses grew right out of the water. After ten minutes we left. It was three o’clock. My father and Viktor were starving.
We decided to go down the dirt road to the beach, where we could have a swim and then a picnic.
“It’s a paid beach,” my father said, “so there’s bound to be a toilet there.”
Not bloody likely.
The potholed road was hard on my bladder.
“Viktor, gently. Please.”
“Harder, Viktor, harder.” My father laughed. “That’s right, like that. Teach her a lesson.”
At the gate to the beach, an attendant took ten rubles from us. Papa asked him about a toilet.
“Toilet? No, no,” the man said, surprised by the question. “No toilet here.”
“Why would there be?” I said.
“Exactly,” the man replied.
“Makes you wonder what we’re paying for,” my father remarked as we drove on.
After Viktor parked, he retrieved from the trunk some harsh-looking unbleached toilet paper he had bought at the market for just such an occasion.
“Take this,” he said. “Go down the path and into the woods.”
Vanquished by the merciless demands of my treacherous body, I went into the woods. How ridiculous I must have seemed to Viktor, walking lamely down the forest path, holding my little purse in my hands as if I were at the Plaza Hotel, and was just popping into the marble bathroom to freshen up a tad.
I did what I had to. In a matter of seconds, every part of me that was exposed was stung by black ravenous mosquitoes.
As I was returning from the woods, I saw my father and Viktor changing into their swimming trunks by the car. That was the last thing I needed to see, so I turned around.