Six Days in Leningrad

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just that . . . I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable . . .”

  “What kind of stuff is in there?” I smiled. “Something saucy?”

  “Well, I don’t know if you know this, but before Ellie and I got together, your father had quite a crush on her.”

  “Really?” I didn’t know that.

  “Yes. How do you feel about that?”

  “It’s all right,” I said, wondering how he wanted me to feel about it. He was obviously bothered by something.

  “When I found out he liked her, it almost ruined our friendship. We didn’t talk for two years. He didn’t want to talk to me either.” He spoke about it as if it happened last week. The discomfort was all over his face.

  “Anatoly,” I said, patting him on the arm. “It’s in the past now. Ellie married you.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but I wonder how your father feels about it.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. He married my mother.

  “I’m sure,” I said, “that it’s in the past for him, too. Has he read it?”

  Shrugging, Anatoly said, “He did, or not. I don’t know. Maybe he read some of it, maybe most of it. I don’t think he read the whole thing. He didn’t seem to like it. I think it’s because of the Ellie stuff. He thought it was too personal.”

  “Well, the more personal the better. Personal makes for very good drama,” I said. “I’ll be glad to read it. Now let’s go back to the table.”

  Pensively looking out onto the wet yard and stepping away from me, Anatoly said, “I’ll stay here for a minute.”

  Radik quickly poured me another drink, made a toast to my father’s and mother’s good health, and we drank.

  The subject of the Russian Revolution came up. My father said, “Yes, my wife was due to give birth to Paullina on November seventh, the anniversary of the Bolshevik uprising. I told her if she gave birth on that day, I would have no choice but to leave her.” He laughed heartily. “I was only half-joking,” he added. “But my wife took me very seriously in those days, and gave birth the day before.”

  “The day before what?” Radik asked, filling my cognac glass, and smiling at me.

  “The day before November seventh,” replied my father.

  “Oh my God,” Radik said to me, “What day were you born?”

  “November sixth.”

  “No,” he said. “It can’t be. So was I.”

  I had not met anyone who was born on the sixth of November. I studied him for a moment.

  “Well, well,” I said. He raised his glass and we drank to our birthdays.

  “Plinka,” Radik said, smiling, “I will always think of you now on my birthday. We will have this bond because we were born on the same day.”

  Sometime before the stuffed peppers were brought to the table, Radik leaned over to me and said in a quiet voice but not a whisper, “Plinka, but you are very beautiful.”

  What could I say? I smiled politely. My father sat across the table; Radik’s wife was just one wife away.

  “Thank you.”

  “You are. You are,” he said. “Do I embarrass you by talking like that?”

  There was nothing I could say. “Of course not.”

  Lida served the stuffed peppers.

  Radik drank a toast to the stuffed peppers.

  Radik and Papa drank a toast to fishing together tomorrow on Birch Island.

  Lida served us all, getting up, going around the table, hardly sitting down. She was lovely.

  She did everything while Radik sat and drank and ate and presided. No one could fault him for that. As if anyone had ever faulted him for anything. He acted like a man whom no one ever faulted.

  He poured me another glass. “Radik, please,” I said. “I can’t drink any more. How many have we had?”

  How many had we had? We drank to me, to my father, to my mother, to my father and me, to borscht, to the stuffed peppers, to our birthdays, to fishing. And to my parents’ good health. Perhaps I was leaving some toasts out.

  “Please,” Radik said. “You have to drink to this one. Yura, please, you too, where is your glass?”

  My father carefully poured himself half a glass.

  Radik stood up. “I want to drink to my beloved friends, my old friends.” He teared up and had to sit down. The way my father had teared up at Nikolai Ivanchenko’s house, and for the same reason: for the passing of time, for the loss of those he loved, for nostalgia, youth gone by, heartache. For Russia.

  Some of us needed to leave Russia to have a life, he said when he could speak again, but the rest of us stayed and took our hits and went to our rented dachas. We continued to fish and pick berries, and our wives cooked our food, and we worked without getting paid, and we cried for our old friends who had flown to all the corners of the globe.

  My father raised his glass to Radik. “Moi dorogoi,” he said. “My dear. We are all getting old. We have known each other forty years. Who knows when we will be together again. Who knows if we will ever be together again. This could be the last night we are together. Tonight I drink to my lifelong friends, Radik, Anatoly. Let’s promise to bury each other when we die.”

  There was not a dry eye at the table.

  “Yurochka,” said Radik. “Do you remember New Year’s Eve, 1971?”

  My father rolled his eyes. “Do I remember New Year’s Eve, 1971? I never forget anything.”

  My ears immediately pricked up. “What happened New Year’s Eve, 1971?” In the chronology of my life, it was my penultimate New Year’s Eve in the Soviet Union.

  Radik said, “Plinochka, listen to this story. It’s a good story, and it’s about your father. New Year’s Eve, 1971, I took my son Korney to a pioneer camp for New Year’s school holiday week. The camp was in Tolmachevo, one hundred and one kilometers south of Leningrad.”

  “So you would say that Tolmachevo was on the one hundred and first kilometer?” I asked.

  Radik laughed. “That’s exactly what it’s called: the one hundred and first kilometer. Now listen.”

  I smiled at the droll way Russians measured distance.

  Radik continued. “It was about twenty degrees below zero Celsius, and I was wearing a long wool coat with an Astrakhan fur collar. As I was slowly walking back to the train station, I ran into a man in a torn dark ratty coat with god-awful black and injured hands. On his head he wore a shabby black hat.” Radik looked at me. “It was your papa.”

  “Yes, yes,” my father said. “My hands really were terrible looking. I hurt them bad.”

  Radik went on. “‘Yura!’ I said. ‘What a coincidence! What are you doing here?’” Your papa told me he was in exile on the one hundred and first kilometer, working and living in a factory that made concrete and steel telephone posts. We hugged. He showed me his injured hands, all blue from the cold. I asked how he hurt them. He said he worked as a cutter of reinforced steel fittings for the telephone posts and cut himself.

  “We went to a local cafeteria, where they were serving three selections for dinner and some wine. After we had plenty to drink, your papa asked if I could take him with me to Leningrad, so he could spend New Year’s Eve with you and your mother. ‘Let’s try,’ I replied, and together we went to speak to his parole officer, the captain of the local militia.

  “But we couldn’t go empty-handed, so first we went to a store and bought bottles of cheap wine that we put in a mesh carry bag, so that the captain could see right away what we had brought him.”

  Lida interjected. “And you should have seen Radik then, Plinochka, oh, my. The militia man took one look at him and stood up. Radik was so tall, and his coat was so beautiful. He looked like a captain in the army.”

  I glanced at Radik to gauge his reaction. He was utterly unmoved. Yes, that was me, his expression read. What of it? Can we get on with the story? I know what I am.

  He continued. “Your papa’s parole officer sat behind a desk in a dark, dirty, extremely well
heated little room, in the middle of which stood a cylindrical cast-iron wood-burning stove. The room was poorly lit, which cast the officer’s expression in a pale, mournful tone. It was the thirty-first of December and he was on duty behind an empty desk, probably all night. He was not a happy man.”

  “But when Radik walked in,” Lida said, “looking so handsome and tall in his coat, the man stood up.”

  “Lida, wait,” said Radik. “Can I?”

  Lida smiled and waved him on. I could see most people in the room had heard the story before, knew it by heart. Radik was telling it for me.

  “So I said, ‘Hello to you,’ to the parole officer, standing before him and holding out my hand to him. In my other hand I held the bag of the cheap but delicious wine, Rubin.

  “Because it was I who extended my hand to him and not vice versa, he was impressed and assumed I must be someone important. I was counting on that, and that’s what happened. I shook his hand and said to him, ‘Sit down, sit down.’ He sat down.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “I handed him the bag with the wine and said, ‘This is my present to you for New Year’s.’ Then I pointed to your papa. ‘You know this man?’ The officer said, ‘Of course I know him. It’s Gendler.’

  “I said, ‘Well, this man is my brother, and I have come here to take him home with me. He would like to spend the holidays with his family. Say five days or so. I hope you will let him go. If you want, I can leave you my passport as a guarantee of his return.’

  “The parole officer opened my passport and read my last name. ‘Tikhomirov,’ he read. ‘Why is Gendler your brother?’

  “‘Our mothers were flesh and blood sisters.’

  “The captain immediately hid the bottles of wine under his desk and returned my passport to me. ‘Take him,’ he said. ‘But make sure he is back at work by January 2!’

  “As soon as we left the man’s office, your father and I bought some more wine for ourselves and went to wait for the steam train, on which we cheerfully rode to Leningrad, drinking and talking in English so that your father could get some practice. He already knew he wanted to go to America. So — happy end.”

  Thus my father spent New Year’s Eve, 1971 with us. I remembered it well. My mother had been happy beyond belief to see him. Her happiness was a faint memory. What I vividly remembered was Papa walking inside our rooms on Fifth Soviet and her crying out to me, “Look how our poor Papochka hurt his hands.”

  My father raised another glass of vodka and with a stricken face said, “To my old friends, still in Russia.”

  “Forever in Russia,” said Radik resignedly.

  Lida told a joke over tea and cognac.

  “A man’s wife has left him for his best friend,” she said. “Both his children have died and he lost his job. Finally he feels he has had enough, and decides to kill himself. He goes to a hotel room, planning to hang himself in the bathroom. When he stands on the edge of the bathtub to tie the rope to a hook in the ceiling, he sees on top of the cabinet a hidden bottle of vodka. There is a little left at the very bottom. He takes off the cap and drinks what was left. ‘Better,’ he says. ‘Okay, now I’m ready.’ He jumps back up onto the edge of the bath, ties one end of the rope to his neck. As he is about to tie the other end to the ceiling hook and jump to hang himself, he sees on the floor near the bath a cigarette butt. Getting down, he picks it up, finds a match in his pocket, and lights the butt. Sitting down on the edge of the bath, with the noose still around his neck, he inhales the smoke from the cigarette into his throat, and says, ‘Yesss . . . life is slowly returning to normal.’”

  And then Lida took a swig of cognac and laughed uproariously. We all laughed with her.

  “Yura, why aren’t you drinking?” Radik asked my father indignantly before we were served dessert. “Why are you drinking like a woman?”

  My father, refusing more drink, said, “Forget it. I don’t want to get drunk in front of my daughter. Wait until she leaves. Wait until tomorrow.”

  Radik threw back his head in laughter. And then he sang the beginning of a well-known Russian ballad. “If only there was enough vodka for one, how great it would be, but sometimes there’s vodka for two and sometimes there’s vodka enough for three, unlike a wife who’s only for one, and for one she is the cradle and the grave.” He had a good voice. But of course he did.

  My father told me that song was one of his all-time favorites.

  For dessert Lida had made blueberry cobbler and raspberry meringue pie. Radik asked his wife to pass him the platters. I thought, how nice, the man enjoys his wife’s sweets. But he spooned it all onto my plate and poured himself some cognac instead.

  When I lifted the jug with the blueberry compote to pour myself a glass, Radik practically ripped it out of my hands to pour it for me.

  As he was a little too enthusiastically spooning the blueberries onto my plate, some of them fell and stained my cream-colored capris. I was to be traveling back to the States in these pants the next day, so I wished he hadn’t done that.

  Minutes later, Radik stood, motioning me to come with him.

  The two of us got up and left the table. The rest of the guests stayed where they were, chatting. No one said anything, as if no one had noticed.

  Radik took me into one of the bedrooms, the one with his son’s photo in it, and told me to sit down on the bed. Before I could ask him why, he took something from his closet. It was a laundry stick. “This will get the blueberry out. This is the best thing for stains. It’s from the West,” he said. “You’ll see. I’ll get the stain out for you.”

  He knelt down in front of me and rubbed at the blueberry on my thigh with this stain stick. After five minutes of this, he got up, left, came back with a wet rag, kneeled back down and rubbed my thigh with it. Of course he didn’t get the blueberry out but now I had a Frisbee-sized wet purple stain on my pants.

  We talked about the stain stick, and about how it was supposed to remove all the blueberry, if we scrubbed hard enough. “It’s from the West,” Radik kept repeating. “You’ll see. It’ll work.”

  I could hear that outside the bedroom, the others had started to carry the dirty dishes to the kitchen.

  Giving up, Radik shrugged, got up off the floor, threw the stain stick emphatically into the garbage and went to get more cognac.

  Lida came to me, holding a large glass jar of marinated mushrooms. “This is for you,” she said.

  “Lida, I can’t take this.”

  “You can and you will.”

  “Where am I going to put it?”

  “In your suitcase.”

  “What if the jar breaks?”

  “Then carry it onto the plane.”

  That opened everyone else up. Suddenly Alla out of nowhere procured gifts for me and for my family. There was the letter for my daughter from her daughter, and there were coloring books for my young boys, and there was a huge box of chocolate-covered prunes. “If you get hungry, you can eat them on the plane,” she said. Yes, I thought, because you know, there’s nothing better than having prunes on a nine-hour flight.

  Then Viktor and Luba gave me rocks to take home with me, not exaggerating, actually rocks, and a book of poems. Anatoly stuffed a manuscript of his novella into my coat pocket.

  “This is for you,” he whispered.

  I wanted to cry.

  Did I want to cry because they had nothing and I must have seemed to them as someone who had everything, and yet here they were giving me things while I hadn’t even brought enough T-shirts for all of them? Or did I want to cry because I couldn’t tell them that I’d only brought a garment bag, which couldn’t even properly fit my seven pathetic little skirts, much less chocolate-covered prunes and rocks from the Gulf of Finland?

  Anatoly hadn’t been paid in four months. They got vouchers to pay for the apartment they couldn’t afford, and lived on Ellie’s pension, three hundred and sixty rubles a month.

  As Ellie fried the blinchiki on Lida’s stove f
or me to take home to America, she told me that she felt happy each month until the money was all gone, and then she was miserable until the next check came. I understood that, living check to mouth when the check did not last a month. Ellie told me that Alla and Viktor were in better shape financially. They were considered middle class in Russia, whereas Ellie and Anatoly were considered poor.

  And here she was, giving me gifts.

  Radik gave me his business card and told me that if I needed anything in terms of research for my Russian book, he would be more than happy to help. That was his gift — his business card. Radik, I decided, was more used to others giving him gifts. That was all right with me.

  It was time to go, but my friend Alla wouldn’t let me. She kept talking about coming to visit me and my family in Texas, how we would go about it, what kind of visa they would need, who could come, what they would have to do.

  Anatoly pulled on my sleeve and said, “Read it, read my novel when you can, but soon, and tell me what you think, write or call and tell me what you think, whatever it is, but tell me the truth.”

  I promised I would.

  Ellie continued to fry the blinchiki.

  Anatoly’s brother Viktor read aloud to me one of his own poems from a self-published poetry book he had given me.

  Lida cleaned up.

  Lida’s dog lay on the twin bed in the kitchen, growling and baring his teeth at anyone who got within a foot of him. Since the kitchen was only seven feet wide and there were ten of us, that was pretty much everybody. Finally the mongrel bit one of the three Viktors. Lida came up to the dog and in the tenderest of tones said, “Darlinkin, Vasia, what’s the matter, bunny rabbit? Too many people for you?”

  Viktor rubbed his finger and stayed away from the twin bed.

  It was 9:00 in the evening.

  It was time to go. Time to say goodbye to all of them, and to my father. My driver Viktor was taking me back to Grand Hotel Europe. My father was staying with Radik for a week. They were going fishing. Ellie and Anatoly were driving back to their dacha. I was the first one to be leaving. I didn’t want to go.

  Eventually we walked outside and took some pictures. A whole roll of pictures. Some with Radik, standing next to me, beaming. Some with Radik and Lida. Some with my father.