Six Days in Leningrad

  “Yes, of course I know. Do you have my dress? We saw the whole thing on television. All five hours of it. It was beautiful to watch. The service was incredible. Well, I don’t have to tell you. You were there.”

  We were going to see my grandfather’s and father’s friends. Ellie said that on the way, she wanted to stop at her dacha. It was in the village of Lisiy Nos, twenty kilometers north of Leningrad.

  After the Germans attacked Russia in 1941, the Finns came down the Karelian Isthmus, to reclaim what once had been theirs. They stopped at Lisiy Nos on the outer city limits and waited for Hitler to take Leningrad.

  “Don’t worry, there are no Finns there now,” Ellie assured me.

  “That’s good,” I said. “I still don’t know what Papa is going to say about us stopping at your dacha.” Actually, I knew very well what he was going to say.

  Slyly smiling, Ellie said, “I made you your favorite. Blinchiki.” Blinchiki are rolled-up meat crèpes fried in butter. I do love them.

  “Mmmm,” I said. My stomach was feeling better. I was hungry.

  “If we stop at Lisiy Nos, I will fry them for you and your papa. We could eat them with some tea.”

  “Let’s talk to Papa, okay?” I said. “What’s in the bag you’re holding?”

  “Oh, these are presents for you,” she said. “I brought a few little things for you to take back to your family.”

  She took out three GIANT bags of Russian candy — one for each of my three children, some chocolate for Kevin, and two china cups with saucers for me.

  “Ellie, thank you. But you shouldn’t have. I mean it. You really shouldn’t have.” Where was I going to put it all?

  She smiled. “It’s custom. To take back something of us with you. So you don’t forget us.”

  “Little chance of that.” I hugged her.

  Thirty minutes later, when we got outside and I saw my father’s sour expression, I was glad I wasn’t a child anymore. If I had been, I certainly wouldn’t be getting any ice cream today.

  Viktor drove. My father sat in the passenger seat. I sat in the back, squeezed in between Ellie and Anatoly.

  Ellie mentioned to my father about our stopping in Lisiy Nos.

  My father glared at Ellie as if she were mad.

  “Go to Lisiy Nos? For God’s sake. Why, woman?”

  Even Anatoly seemed to think it was a crazy idea, and he usually never sided with my father. Ellie was visibly upset.

  “But my blinchiki,” she said. “I don’t understand, I spent all day yesterday making them. I made them for you because you all said you loved them. Paullina told me they were her favorite.”

  “Paullina’s favorite is mushroom barley soup,” my father said. “Did you make that, too? You want to warm that up too at Lisiy Nos?”

  “Ellie, you never make blinchiki for me,” Anatoly said.

  “Oh, stop it,” she said. “I make you food every day.”

  It went back and forth about blinchiki for a half hour.

  I was amused. I wanted Ellie’s blinchiki.

  With five adults in the car, two of them smoking, my father and Anatoly argued loudly about Soviet hypocrisy regarding the Finns and discussed Ellie’s impossible request to stop at Lisiy Nos — until we reached a small supermarket in the middle of a wet nowhere that smelled strongly of fish. Fresh fish and smoked fish and salted fish and fish that was none of the above.

  We bought some pastries and some bread, and some beer. But no fish.

  In the car, Ellie had in her lap a large bag of ginger cookies and some soft meringues.

  “Want a cookie?” For some reason she looked sheepish as she offered it. I took a cookie, which turned out to be awesome. I took three more. After a few minutes, Ellie softly confessed to the occupants of the car that it was a good thing we hadn’t stopped at Lisiy Nos, because she had forgotten her blinchiki back at Ulitsa Dybenko.

  Amid laughter and general mocking, we imagined how the scene would have unfolded had we acquiesced to Ellie’s wishes and gone to Lisiy Nos. For many miles we laughed about what would have been said when we discovered there were no blinchiki.

  Anatoly repeated, “She never makes me blinchiki.”

  To change the subject, I asked my father how it had been for him, staying in their apartment without hot water. He told me that every morning he boiled a kettle and diluted the scalding water with cold water in a pan.

  “First I shave, and then I wash myself piece by piece.”

  “Really?” I said. “And how did that work out?”

  My father was cheerful. “I discovered you can wash a whole person on one kettle of boiling water.”

  “Depending on which parts you wash,” said Ellie.

  “Stop it!” Papa barked, whirling to her. “What’s gotten into you?”

  As we drove north up the Karelian Isthmus, I stared out onto the gloomy misty distance and imagined that somewhere, on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, was my Shepelevo.

  Now that I had seen it with adult eyes, would it ever mean the same to me again?

  I closed my eyes.

  KILOMETER 67

  “How long is this trip?” I asked my father after what felt like four hours in the cramped car.

  “Forty-five minutes,” he replied. “Right, Viktor?”

  “Right,” said Viktor.

  “Right,” I said.

  After what seemed to be another few hours, I inquired again.

  Apparently we could not find the town of Orekhovo, where my grandfather’s friends, the Ivanchenkos, lived.

  We might as well have been looking for a Corelware factory in the middle of Tunisia, or asking a blind South African for directions to Disney World. The streets were unmarked, the houses un-numbered, the roads barely paved. It was raining, and the locals were stuporously unfriendly.

  After a week-long observation, I finally concluded that, for all his other very fine qualities, our faithful driver Viktor loved to stop and ask for directions. It was like a hobby, a pastime for him, like photography or baseball. Every several hundred feet he would stop and ask. When he was directed to go straight for two kilometers, he would go straight for two hundred and fifty meters and then stop and ask someone to reaffirm the directions.

  He would do this every two hundred and fifty meters.

  Sentimentally, I reminisced about getting lost with Kevin, twelve years ago, before he was my husband. I was driving; we were headed to an amusement park in New Jersey. Our map had been inadequate, and we drove around lost for a half hour, missing the exit to the highway. Occasionally Kevin would mutter, “We could stop and ask for directions.”

  “No!”

  Finally Kevin gave up and started reading a paperback.

  He was a third of the way done with his dumb book before I gave in, stopped and asked for directions.

  He married me anyway.

  We drove down a wrong road, drove and drove, stopping and asking for directions every two hundred and fifty meters. Then we turned and came back to the highway, and asked someone else at an intersection. The man told us we hadn’t gone far enough down the wrong road. So we turned around and drove back, and drove farther than before, without really knowing what we were looking for.

  My father and Viktor finally told me they were looking for Kilometer 67.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Kilometer 67. Just that,” said my father. “The Ivanchenkos live on the sixty-seventh kilometer from Leningrad.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s the directional marker we’re going for? Kilometer 67?”

  “We don’t have another one.”

  “I see.”

  A man and a boy told Viktor we were going the wrong way, and had to go back to the highway, through an outdoor market, and down over the railroad tracks. Why we had to stop at the market, I don’t know.

  But we did stop at the market, into which Anatoly up and disappeared — ostensibly to ask for directions. We sat in the car for a few minutes, wondering
what to do.

  Where was he? Where did he go? And why? “Don’t worry about him,” Ellie said. “He always does this.”

  “So why did you let him out of the car if he always does this?” I wanted to know. “And what exactly is this?”

  “This. This.” My father pointed to the market. “He goes off and disappears.”

  Ellie shook her head. I reached for the door handle. “So let’s go find him.”

  “Sit right there,” my father said. “He’ll be back.”

  “When?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Ellie shook her head again.

  “What’s he buying?”

  “How should I know?” Ellie shrugged. “He doesn’t have much money, though.”

  We sat — not all of us quietly. Viktor periodically left the car himself and approached passersby to ask directions. But how could strangers help us when nothing was marked? Russians can barely tell you how to get to their own house. The directions my father received from the Ivanchenkos went something like this: “Go to the railroad, then turn left. No, wait, right. There will be a sign — no, wait, the sign’s been missing since after the war — just make a left, there will be two roads, I think it’s the one closest to the railroad tracks. Make that left, then drive. We’re on a street to the right. You can’t miss it. It’s a green house.”

  Feebly, my father had asked them, “Will it be the only street to the right?”

  “No, there are many rights, but our street has tall trees and purple lilacs in the spring. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  “But it’s not spring. What’s the name of the street?”

  “It doesn’t have one. I think it used to be called Sireneva Street.” Siren is the Russian word for lilac tree.

  “What’s the number of the house?”

  “Seventy-four. Or forty-seven. Can’t remember. Wait, it’s three. Yes, three. But you won’t know that. The number fell off a long time ago.”

  “Let me guess. After the war?”

  Idly we sat waiting for Anatoly to return.

  “Papa,” I asked, “how does mail get to these people?”

  “It doesn’t,” he snapped, puffing on another cigarette. “There is no mail here.”

  Viktor saw another passerby and jumped out of the car.

  At last Anatoly returned — without any purchases. Everyone in the car yelled at him. He said he’d found a local street map and now knew exactly where to go. Apparently we needed to go over the railroad tracks, straight ahead, and Sireneva Street would be right there.

  We drove to the railroad station, half a kilometer away. Viktor stopped and asked for directions three times. No one knew where Sireneva Street was. This did not inspire us with confidence. Finally, near the station, we stopped in the middle of the street. Blocking the road and foot traffic, we sat with the engine running and the rain hammering outside.

  Russians filed past us, fresh from the train. Anatoly and Viktor kept getting out of the car and asking people where Sireneva Street was. No one knew. But we got plenty of dirty looks from people who had to go around our car in the rain.

  Finally a man told Viktor to turn around and go back. This was precisely what Viktor wanted to hear, so we turned around and went back — to the outdoor market. My father kept smoking and shaking his head. Ellie was trying not to laugh. I had to use a bathroom — naturally.

  I was a little concerned with the way Viktor kept tailgating, keeping barely six feet between himself and the car in front of him in the slick rain, going thirty miles an hour. Leaning forward, I said to him, “Viktor, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a chance to brush up on the immutable laws of physics, but the laws clearly state that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.”

  Papa laughed. Viktor, sensing the joke was at his expense, slowed down ever so slightly. The outdoor market loomed ahead.

  “Can we really risk Anatoly disappearing into the market again?” I asked.

  After a glare in my general direction, my father said, “I see that I have to take matters into my own hands. This time I’m going with him.”

  So my father, Anatoly, and Viktor — who could not keep still — set out to look for another street map. Five minutes later, when they came back, my father was yelling at Anatoly and shaking his head.

  “The man doesn’t know how to read a map! Did you read it upside down? It was clear as daylight where the street was. We went completely the wrong way. One hundred and eighty degrees from where we were supposed to go. Mother of God, what am I going to do with these people?”

  Anatoly looked sheepish and said simply, “I got us here, and now everyone is yelling at me.”

  We drove away from the market and the railroad. Viktor stopped four times to ask directions. The last time he stopped to ask where Sireneva Street was, the man stared at Viktor, then pointed directly to the left of us and said, “Right here.”

  We made a left and finally found a green house.

  “I can’t believe we’re here,” I said. “What the hell time is it?” It felt as if we had been in the car for weeks.

  “Two o’clock,” said Ellie.

  The forty-five minute trip had taken three hours.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” my father said. “A fair word of warning. We can’t stay long. I told Radik we would be at his house by two. We’re running late.” He glared at me again. “If only you’d gotten ready on time like I told you.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It must be my fault it’s so late.”

  They were waiting for us, my grandparents’ old friends, Nikolai and Valya Ivanchenko.

  The Ivanchenkos lived in a small dacha with a large wet yard full of tall wet pines and birches. They had a vegetable garden, and a little hammock. The hammock reminded me of the one I used to play on with Yulia in Shepelevo when we were children. Remembering Yulia prickled my heart. I was leaving tomorrow. There was nothing to be done now.

  Valya and her husband Nikolai were very happy we had come. I knew immediately it was the right thing to do. Apparently, however, there had been some confusion. My father originally told them we were coming four days ago, on July 14, so Nikolai had gone back to the city and spent all day by the phone, waiting for my father’s call. When my father didn’t call, Nikolai thought we weren’t coming. When my father did call — on July 15 — there was confusion again. Nikolai thought we were going to arrive yesterday, on July 17. I wanted to tell him that we might have — had it taken us less time to find him.

  So to me it sounded for a moment as if they hadn’t known we were coming.

  Yet, when we stepped inside their house, I saw that the table on the veranda was set for ten people.

  “Oh, no. Please,” my father said, looking at the spread, “we can only stay for a little while.”

  “Well, then, let’s hurry and eat,” Valya said.

  Their two-story dacha was very small. I don’t know where Valya and Nikolai slept, but they shared the house with their daughter, her husband and her two children, a three-year-old boy and a shy sixteen-year-old girl.

  “But there’s an upstairs?” I asked.

  “Yes, but we only have the downstairs,” said Valya. “Somebody else lives upstairs. Are you looking for something in particular?”

  I had learned my lesson well and that morning had drunk no water, no coffee, no liquid of any kind. But feminine demands being what they are, I still desperately needed to use the facilities.

  What kind of modern woman plans a trip to Russia during the most inconvenient time of the month? The kind who says I will have mastery over my body. I will not be ruled by the minutiae of discomfort and subservience, I will act as a man, undaunted and free. Well, here I was. Free. Undaunted.

  “Toilet?” I inquired meekly.

  Valya Ivanchenko’s face struck the same expression as Svetlana’s had in Schlisselburg at the Diorama Museum. As if she wished I hadn’t asked.

  She pointed to a green wooden structure in the
backyard. In the rain, I walked across the soggy ground.

  I had to hold my breath and hoped I could do what I had to do before I needed to breathe out again.

  The toilet in the outhouse was a wooden platform at thigh level with a hole in the middle. In Shepelevo we had one just like it, except ours was inside the house.

  What disturbed me was not the hole in the ground, which I had expected, but the brevity of time between liquid leaving my body and making a dense, thudding sound below me. It sounded uncomfortably close; I couldn’t help but look.

  Usually the hole in an outhouse is dug three meters deep in the ground. Here, two feet below me stood a cannister filled with human waste.

  Yet inside the house there was running water. Cold running water, granted, but I was able to wash my hands. I understood nothing.

  As Valya got lunch ready, I quietly asked Ellie why there would be nothing but a bucket in the outhouse.

  Ellie loudly explained to me that in many villages, when the canister got filled up, they took it out and used the contents for fertilizer.

  “Oh,” I said, wondering — silently — if feminine sanitary dressings made good fertilizer.

  The Ivanchenkos’ half of the house included the veranda, where we were eating, a small kitchen-slash-hallway, and one bedroom. Maybe there was another bedroom somewhere? It was all so small.

  What did I mean when I said small? Small compared with what?

  With my house in Texas?

  With our dacha in Shepelevo?

  With any other dacha I’d ever seen?

  With the Winter Palace?

  What was I comparing it with? I was ashamed. It wasn’t small. It was their life, and they were happy in it.

  Valya was bubbly and despite being seventy-eight, looked like a young, energetic girl. Nikolai was eighty-two (“a baby,” my ninety-one-year-old grandfather had called him), and reminded me of my grandfather. He sat with quiet dignity and watched everyone. Much like his three-year-old grandson, Eugene.

  I gave Eugene a T-shirt I had brought for him from Texas. He immediately took it, mumbled a thank you, and disappeared into his bedroom. When he emerged seconds later, the T-shirt was no longer in his hands.