Where did the boy play? I wondered. Where were his toys? Outside, yes a hammock, but today was cold and raining. There was nowhere to go. He sat silently on his father’s lap.
Sunny and animated, Valya moved quickly, carrying large pots of food. Nikolai sat and watched, above the fray. I saw why my grandfather liked him.
We had black caviar on bread with butter, beef Stroganoff, cucumbers and tomatoes. We also had hot potatoes with dill, sardines, some ham, and then coffee with unchewable stale waffle cake.
“I didn’t know you liked sardines, Paullina,” Ellie said when she saw me ladling sardines onto my plate.
“Love ’em.”
“I would have opened two cans for you. We have so many. Too bad you’re leaving tomorrow.”
“It is too bad, isn’t it, Ellie?”
“Next time you come you have to stay for longer. You can stay at our dacha. Bring your whole family and stay for as long as you want.”
“Thank you.”
Nikolai said to me, “I am glad and proud you are sitting next to me. I should be so lucky as to have a writer, a real-life novelist, sit to my left. But Paullina, your books, I’ve never seen one in Russian. Are there any in Russian?”
My father promised he would send Nikolai Tully in Russian as soon as he returned to Prague.
Then he raised a glass of vodka to Nikolai. “I just want to say how glad I am we came to see you today. I remember you so well from when I was a child, and it means so much to me . . .” He couldn’t finish the toast. He just downed his vodka.
Nikolai turned to his wife and said, “Is there anything for me to drink, kotik?”
Kotik is a Russian endearment literally meaning kitty cat, but the connotation is one of great tenderness, like my sweetest beloved darling. You would not say kotik to someone you did not completely and unconditionally adore. It was inspiring to hear a husband call his wife kotik after sixty years of marriage.
The Russian way was to finish everything on your plate, because of the war, but I didn’t know what to do with my stale waffle cake. When Ellie wasn’t looking, I slipped it onto her plate. Now it was her problem.
Viktor finished the film in my camera, taking pictures of us by Nikolai’s house, outside in the cold rain. Just as I was thinking that my grandfather would love all these pictures, I opened my camera to load a fresh roll of film, thinking — erroneously — that Viktor would have rewound the finished one. He hadn’t. I had inadvertently exposed it. How much of it would be lost? And what would I tell my father and grandfather when he asked for photos of the Ivanchenkos in front of their green dacha?
We said our goodbyes and drove to Radik’s house, also on the Karelian Isthmus but closer to the Gulf of Finland, not inland. I was afraid to ask how far it was. Finally I mustered up some courage. “Papa,” I said, “about how long is it to Radik’s house from here?”
“Like I know,” he said.
“Forty-five minutes,” Viktor told me.
“Paullina, you’ll be happy,” said Ellie. “Radik’s house has a toilet inside the house. You’ll see.”
“Paullina,” Anatoly said, “I promise you that when you come back to see us in Russia, my dacha in Lisiy Nos will have a toilet that flushes. I’m working on that right now. You will have it when you come.”
My father promptly interjected that the key to civilization was a shower.
“But Yura,” said Ellie, who never forgot anything, “you said you could wash your whole self with a kettle.”
My father grunted and fell asleep.
RADIK
As we drove, Ellie told me about Radik. The gist of it was: “Radik when he was young was the most handsome man you ever saw. Now he is older, you know he is nearly sixty — or maybe he is sixty. He has gained weight, but still. Yes, still, but not like before.”
“Before what?” I ventured.
“Before, he was just — you could not stop looking at him. Well, you’ll tell me what you think.” She stopped. “How can you not remember him?”
“I was very young,” I said. “I was nine. What did I know of handsome? I had my own father. I remember Radik’s son, though, Korney.” Korney was born in August 1963 to my November. My mother and his mother, Lida, Radik’s wife, were pregnant girlfriends together. We grew up knowing each other. Each of us was our parents’ only child. But in 1973, we left Russia, and they stayed behind.
And that made all the difference.
In 1984 Korney died of acute alcoholism. When he died, Radik and Lida were left childless. Rather than tear them apart, Korney’s death brought Lida and Radik closer together; at least that’s what Ellie told me.
Ellie said that no one could understand what Radik saw in Lida, because while he was extraordinary, she was plain and had always been on the heavy side.
“I don’t know if he’s ever been unfaithful to her, but I think so,” Ellie said, “because women have thrown themselves at Radik all his life.”
“They have, have they? All women?”
“Without exception,” Ellie said firmly.
We sat. I looked out the window.
“You do know the famous story about Radik, don’t you?” Ellie asked.
“No,” I said. “I know no story.”
“When Marilyn Monroe was in Russia with her husband Arthur Miller, shooting a film —”
“What film?”
“I don’t know what film. Her latest film. Radik was working on the set. When Marilyn Monroe saw him, she said, ‘Oh yes! I want to act with him in my next movie.’”
“Oh?”
I wanted to correct her, tell her that Marilyn Monroe had never gone to Russia with Arthur Miller. It was Arthur Miller’s third wife, Inge Morath, who had gone to Russia with him in the mid-sixties, and Inge was no actress, but a photographer; and Marilyn Monroe had been dead several years by that point. But I said nothing, except, “Oh?”
“Paullina,” Ellie said, as if I hadn’t understood, “he was handsomer than Alain Delon.”
“Not Alain Delon,” I said, smiling. Ellie with her little round face and youthful freckles was contagiously enthusiastic. As if the French heart-throb of the 1960s was the universal benchmark of manly good looks.
She could not stop talking about Radik. Even I, overwhelmed as I was by exhaustion, affection and heartache, discovered that I had room for one more emotion: curiosity.
All this in the crowded backseat of a Volkswagen, traveling on a country road, the Gulf of Finland a gray blur through the sodden birch trees and the pines. We passed a beautiful old-style Russian church in Zelenogorsk: tall-spired, round-domed. A little farther north, in Ushkovo, we made a left onto an unpaved road. We didn’t ask anyone how to get to Radik’s. We simply found him.
He was standing in his front yard in the rain, waiting for us, and on his face was the biggest smile I ever saw.
He was extremely happy to see my father. They embraced like lifelong friends. Then he came to me with open arms and said, “Plinochka, let me look at you!” After giving me a bear hug, he pulled away to look at me again, and as he scrutinized me, the smile never left his face.
I didn’t remember Radik; I didn’t recognize him from old photos. But even now, at fifty-nine, he was striking. He was tall and tanned and broad-shouldered, with brown, happy eyes and a shocking amount of longish salt and pepper hair. He didn’t look like a hobbled man whose only son had tragically died. Aside from his physical presence, he had a confident manner that had obviously charmed many over the years. A well-used, smiling, casual manner that said, “I know what I am. I don’t even have to try. I’m just going to smile.” He was so happy to see me. It lifted my heart to know that despite all the things I had wanted to do on my sixth and last day, we had done the right thing by coming to visit him.
We were still outside getting soaked by the heavy rain when Radik’s wife Lida came down the porch steps, a huge smile on her face, too. She hurried over to me, hugged me tight, pulled away, and then both she and Radik stood
close with their arms around me.
Lida said to Radik, “Look at her, Papulya. Isn’t she something?”
She said it as if they had talked about me many times before, as if they had seen me before, as if they knew me well. But how could they? When they told my father they would never forgive him if we didn’t spend one-sixth of our trip at their rented dacha, what were they looking forward to? What were they expecting?
As they pulled away again to look at me, Lida tenderly touched my hair.
I was confounded.
Confusion reigned inside the house as well.
For one, it was chock full of people.
Ellie’s daughter Alla and her husband Viktor were already there, without their kids. Anatoly’s brother Viktor and his wife Luba were there. I was so taken aback by the welcome I’d received, I barely managed to grunt in their direction.
And second, the men started making plans to go to the public baths.
“The what?” I said.
“The public baths,” replied Radik, as if that was explanation enough.
“Papa, are you crazy?”
“Why? Why do you say this?” he demanded.
“Has anyone noticed it’s raining and cold?”
“So? In the baths it’s warm and hot.”
“And wet. How far are these baths?”
“I don’t know. Radik? How far?”
“Not far. Maybe half a kilometer. I go all the time in the rain. Paullina, it’s refreshing.” He smiled. “It makes me feel young.”
“Hey, girls,” I said. “Maybe we should go swimming in the Gulf of Finland.”
“Paullina, you’re welcome to do it!” Radik exclaimed. “Have you brought your bathing suit? What a pleasure it is to swim in the Gulf. Am I right, Lida?”
“Yes, Papulya. But we’re not going swimming,” she said, frowning. “It is raining.”
But the men, Anatoly, Viktor, Viktor, Viktor, and Radik, all left. They walked half a kilometer in the cold rain, got naked, went into the steam room and beat each other with bundles of birch twigs.
Meanwhile, we girls sat in the warm glow of a little ceramic wood-burning stove, and chatted. Lida took me into her bedroom and showed me a picture of Korney at age twenty with their family dog.
“Both are dead now,” she said. And sighing, she showed me another picture of Korney as a child.
“He is a very good-looking boy,” I said.
“Yes,” she said sadly. “He was.” And then she clicked her tongue and looked upward as if to say, “Ah, life.”
Lida’s features were broad and her skin was coarse, but she had an air that was funny and natural and I liked her enormously. She was a true woman: beaten by life but not defeated, and apparently still in love with her husband.
“Lida,” I said, “I hate to ask, but do you have a bathroom?”
“Do we have a bathroom? What do you think, we live in the woods?” She laughed heartily at her own joke as she took me to a room behind the kitchen. They did in fact live in the woods.
Maybe once upon a time their toilet was flushable. But to flush a toilet, you needed running water. And Radik and Lida didn’t have any. Lida showed me the toilet, and the large bucket of water next to it. There was a small metal saucepan in the bucket.
“You do your business, and when you’re done, you take the saucepan and use it as a ladle, all right? Fill it with water from the bucket and pour the water into the toilet.”
“All right,” I said.
So that’s what Ellie had meant by flushable.
The toilet paper could not be thrown into the toilet but had to go into a receptacle provided, which had a helpful note attached: “For paper.”
To wash my hands, I pressed hard on a short metal nozzle attached to a refillable tank above the sink. Cold water poured over my fingers.
To give credit where credit was due, there was toilet paper! — and it was soft. Also, the bathroom tried to smell clean. There were cleaning supplies in the bathtub, the first I’d seen all week.
I went out onto the covered veranda and looked at the sumptuous dinner table that was set for us.
“Hungry, Plinochka?” Lida asked, carrying the wine and cognac to the table.
“Starving. I am so happy you have marinated mushrooms. They’re my favorite.”
“I wish I had known!” exclaimed Lida. “I would have opened another jar. But I’m going to put them in front of you, and I want you to eat all of them.”
I walked into Lida’s kitchen, saw the dog on the twin bed on the floor, and just as I was about to go to the dog, and to inquire about the twin bed standing next to a wall in the kitchen, my nose got a whiff of something so wretched that I needed to get out of there instantly.
Before I could move, Ellie cornered me near the twin bed and the abominable odor. I held my breath, but I didn’t want her to think I didn’t want to smell her, so I exhaled. Bending me to her four-foot ten-inch frame, she whispered, “Plina, don’t laugh, but I brought my blinchiki after all.”
I laughed.
“Don’t laugh, I said. They’ll laugh me out of the house when they come back and find out.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How did you miss them in the trunk the last time you looked?”
“I don’t know,” Ellie said. “They must have fallen behind the ginger cookies.”
“What are we going to do with these blinchiki now?”
Ellie asked Lida if she could fry the blinchiki after dinner for me to take back to my hotel.
“Of course,” said Lida.
The men came back, wet and flushed. Everyone was wearing their coats; everyone but Radik, who strolled in wearing just his shorts and no shirt, exposing his wet tanned body as he stood in the doorway, laughing. A blurred picture could not do justice to the life Radik breathed into that small kitchen when he walked in.
Lida gazed at him with a delighted expression and laughed with him, saying he was simply crazy for being half-naked in this cold. “I always come back from the baths like this,” Radik said to me. “It’s so rejuvenating.”
It was time for dinner. Radik at the head of the table demanded that I sit on his left side. That’s how Radik wanted it, so that’s how it was.
I wanted to be next to my father, who instead sat several people away at the rectangular table. I suddenly became acutely aware that after this dinner, I was going to get into the car and Viktor was going to drive me back to Leningrad, and my trip with my father would be over.
We ate canned herring and tongue with horseradish.
Radik spooned the horseradish onto my plate himself. He made sure I had some tongue and some herring and all the cucumbers I wanted. Lida must have told him about my affection for marinated mushrooms, because every ten minutes, he would ladle some more onto my plate with the words, “Eat, eat.”
He poured me the cognac, glass after glass, as he made the toasts and we all drank with him.
Alla sat to the left of me, and Lida next to Alla. Alla’s husband Viktor was next, then my father, and on the opposite side of the table was Ellie, who watched us jealously, Anatoly next to her, then Viktor and Luba. Somehow, I don’t know how, Viktor the driver finagled a seat on Radik’s immediate right.
Alla tried to talk to me. She would start, “Plinochka, my daughter Marina wrote your Natasha a letter in English.” And Radik would tap on my shoulder and say, “Plinochka, a toast, I would like to make a toast.” After his toast, we would down a glass of vodka, and then Alla would try again. “Plinochka,” she’d say, “I hope Marina wrote the letter correctly. She is learning English and she wanted to make a good impression on Natasha. I asked her if there were any mistakes, and she said no. It’s hard for me to tell.”
Radik would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Plinochka, I have a story for you, listen to this story.” Toast after toast after toast, anecdote after anecdote, he talked and we listened and laughed and commented. My father talked, too, but less than usual. Radik ruled that tabl
e.
We ate cucumbers, tomatoes, warm boiled potatoes with dill and garlic, and marinated mushrooms. I ate plenty of those. I must have eaten the entire jar.
Viktor the driver hung on to Radik’s every word and laughed loudly at every small joke Radik made. Viktor didn’t just hang on to Radik’s words; he could not take his eyes off Radik. Finding this amusing, I glanced at Luba, then at Ellie, then at Lida, and at Alla: every one of them was transfixed by Radik.
Occasionally he and his wife exchanged a small remark about food. “Lidochka, your borscht is very good. Very good. Let me drink a toast to this borscht,” he would say. Or Lida would ask, “Papulya, do you think it’s time for the stuffed peppers?” Papulya, a diminutive of Papa, must have been what Korney had once called his father. It was a vestige of the old days. Fourteen years after Korney’s untimely death, Lida couldn’t go back to just Radik, as if calling him something other than Papulya would remind them both of something they wished to God to forget.
Alla mentioned how handsome Radik had been. I studied his face as she paid him this compliment. He shrugged casually and said, “Ah, youth.”
I turned to Lida and she said, leaving to get her stuffed peppers, “You’re asking the wrong person. I’m biased.” But Viktor could not stop staring at him. When Radik cracked a joke, Viktor was nearly always the first to laugh. Sometimes Ellie beat him to it. She never glanced at anyone else, certainly not at her husband, who sat glumly next to her. Finally Anatoly went out for a long smoke.
I went out at the same time to use the bathroom. As I was coming back to the dinner table, he cornered me on the veranda. “I’ve been thinking that I want to show you something,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” I said, staring longingly at the door.
“Yes. I want you to read my novella. What do you think?”
“I’d be happy to, Anatoly.”
“Your father is in it.”
“That’s fine.”
“As a young man.”
“I’ll be glad to read about my father as a young man.”
“And as a grown man, too.”
“That’ll be fine.”
“Yes, but . . .” he stumbled on his words and stopped.