The goodbyes proceeded slowly: too many people to say goodbye to. When you haven’t seen your friends in twenty-five years, you are saying goodbye promising to write, to call, to visit soon, but you can’t help thinking that it may well be another twenty-five years before you come back. And what if you never come back?
Radik walked around, filming us with his video camera.
Everyone else was leaving, too, except for my father. Lida said, “No one leaves before Plinka. She leaves first.” The guest of honor always left first, she said.
Viktor and Luba wanted me to get in touch with their son who lived in Princeton. I knew that in the Russian mind, Princeton was just over there from Dallas. A car ride away.
Several times Viktor and Alla reminded me not to forget to give my daughter their daughter’s letter.
I looked over Alla’s shoulder. “What’s that?” I pointed.
She turned around. “It’s a well.”
“A what?”
“A well. Have you never seen a well?”
“In movies,” I said. “In my kids’ Hansel and Gretel book.”
“There was a well in Shepelevo,” Alla said.
“Really? I don’t remember.”
“Where do you think you got your water from?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I never thought about it. Is this a working well?”
“Of course. Didn’t you notice there was no running water in the house?”
I’d never thought about it.
I asked them to take a picture of me by the well. Unfortunately I had used up the last of the film. And I had to give my father his camera back, anyway.
Anatoly gazed at me with moist eyes as he hugged me. He said he loved me.
As Ellie said goodbye to me, I could tell she wanted to ask me something.
I thanked Lida for her great hospitality, for the dinner and the mushrooms, which I was carrying along with the other gifts in a heavy plastic bag. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “You’re like family. We feed you for life.”
There were only my father and Radik left to say goodbye to. Radik put down his video camera, waved everyone else away and opened his arms. He hugged me and kissed me, and shaking his head without letting me go, said, “Plinka, I can’t believe it. Not only are you beautiful but you smell great, too.”
I said nothing. He still wasn’t letting go of me. How far that charm must have gotten him in life.
Stepping away, I patted him gently on the chest. When I glanced at our audience, they were completely unfazed. They all knew him.
I saw Ellie’s sparkling eyes. I felt stabs of pain for Anatoly. Could he help that he was wracked with misery? Why wasn’t Radik? Anatoly still had his only child. Why hadn’t the death of Radik’s only son hunched his shoulders and made him weak? Why did he still entertain on a grand scale in his rented dacha without running water as if he really was Marilyn Monroe’s leading man?
Finally I embraced my father. He actually hugged me back. Maybe he was moved, too. I couldn’t tell.
I was about to get into Viktor’s car when Ellie pulled me aside.
“So what do you think?” she whispered.
I played dumb. “What do I think of what?”
She lowered her whisper a notch. “Of Radik!”
I nodded. “What can I say? You’re right. He is handsome.”
“I told you,” Ellie said. I thought she might start to giggle. “He is really something, isn’t he?”
“He certainly is.”
Viktor and I got into his car. “Are you okay to drive, Viktor?” I said. Had he been keeping up with the toasts?
“A little late to ask me this, don’t you think?” he said, adding, “I’m fine.” He looked and sounded fine. “I stopped drinking three hours ago.” Slowly he drove away, honking. I rolled down my window and waved. It suddenly felt gloomy and cold. I saw them waving back, receding in the distance.
In the half-kilometer drive to the paved highway, Viktor stopped twice to ask for directions. It was a straight line to the highway, but he wanted to be sure. The second time was merely to confirm the first set of directions.
I was about to offer him Ellie’s blinchiki, but then had a better idea.
“Hey,” I said, “let’s eat them tomorrow morning together.” My flight was early and we wouldn’t have time for breakfast.
He agreed.
We drove quietly through the rain.
I was unspeakably sad. I turned to my window, hoping to glimpse the miraculous Gulf of Finland, but all I saw was white. The Gulf was white. The sky was white. White gray. I couldn’t see the horizon. The sky and the sea were one: the sky, the water, they were all gray, like me.
Viktor expressed regret for not taking me to the Inform Bureau, a radio station that reported during the war, using a generator from a sunken ship. He said it would have been invaluable for me to see. “Oh, well,” he said. “Maybe next time?”
“Viktor, do we have time to go to Nevsky Patch?” I asked. “It’s on the way, isn’t it?”
He almost laughed. “It couldn’t be farther away from us. It’s on the southeastern shore of the Neva. We’re up northwest.”
“We have time,” I said. “Papa’s not here.”
“Have you packed?”
It was 10 p.m. “Not really,” I said. Not at all, actually. “Hey, maybe next time?”
We talked about the importance of radio during the war. The radio station would get reports from the front and broadcast them daily; that’s how everyone knew what battles were being fought. “With a spin on them, of course,” said Viktor, “and a spin on who was winning.”
“Were there lists of the dead?”
“Of course,” Viktor said.
“Wounded? Missing in action?”
“Of course.”
I fell quiet.
“But so many dead,” Viktor said, “and it took so long to identify them that sometimes the news didn’t get to the families for many months. Sometimes years. They were always running behind with news of the dead. Eventually you knew.”
“I’m sure.”
Viktor had treated me so well. I was grateful to him. When we got back to the hotel, I gave him one of the blinchiki to eat on the way home.
I was back in my room around 11:00. It took me two and a half hours to pack one garment bag. Don’t ask.
The mushrooms were in my purse, right underneath my journal and my Siege of Leningrad book.
LAST NIGHT IN LENINGRAD
The sponge of my heart had filled up sometime during the evening. Now it began to drip.
I couldn’t remember anything I saw or read. I was going back to Texas tomorrow. I remembered that.
Kevin called. “Are you looking forward to getting back to our routine?” he asked. “To Cici’s Pizza?”
I was so far away from my other life.
“I feel a little bit bad,” he said, “because you’re having this incredible experience, and I’m not part of it.”
“I wouldn’t describe it as incredible,” I said.
“How would you describe it?”
“It’s hard for me to tell you over the phone.”
“You’ll show me the pictures,” he said. “It’ll be great.”
“Yes, great,” I whispered, lying down, looking at my garment bag.
When we hung up, it was nearly 2:00 in the morning. I was supposed to be getting up at 7:00 to leave Russia.
Truth was, I didn’t want to leave Russia. I didn’t want to stay in Russia; I was just afraid I was going to leave me in Russia.
“Sit on my lap,” says my grandmother, crying. “Sit, Plinochka.”
I am nine years old, nearly ten. I am staying with them on my last night in Leningrad. The next day we will fly to the new world, to our new life in America.
“Babushka,” I say, “you told me I was too big to sit on your lap. You told me that two whole years ago.”
“Please sit, darling,” she says, pulling me onto
her knee. “The last weight is never heavy.”
I sit on her lap through the whole movie, a black and white film about the war. As usual, everybody dies. Tearfully she keeps patting my back. I do not get down.
Jumping up, I put on my coat and went out. I hoped it wasn’t raining.
It wasn’t. It was cold and wet and dark, and the streetlights were on.
I walked down Nevsky Prospekt to the Neva. There was no one on the street. Occasionally a car would pass. I remembered my father’s admonition about not going out by myself late at night but I didn’t care. I wanted to see the Neva one last time.
On the embankment in front of the Winter Palace, I found a damp bench and sat down. I was cold, but it was nothing compared to how I felt inside. Tightly I wrapped my arms around my chest and rocked back and forth. The Neva was dark. The Palace Embankment was poorly lit.
The beginning of my trip seemed so long ago. A lifetime ago. Six days ago I was a harried, multi-tasking American with a dim memory of my Russian childhood. I had come to Russia with an academic interest. I had come to do “research” for my Russian book, looking for facts, or inspiration. When I left Dallas, my mind was filled with brass knobs and carpeting and handscraped floors.
It took one flight on Aeroflot to forget all that. And then I, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz books, went back through the wet dark tunnels, by boat and by foot, standing waist deep in cold underground water, until I found my way to underneath the Land of Oz. Except my fairytale was cramped into one room on Fifth Soviet and into one dacha in Shepelevo, into a dozen smells, and into the streets of Leningrad. I was embedded in the wet sidewalk, on the street I used to walk with my sullen mother, on the concrete steps of the Concert Hall, where I played as a child.
I became a child again now — first broken and then patched together from the pieces into a fractured whole.
But broken I would be returning home. I didn’t have a deeper understanding. I understood less than when I had set out. I didn’t have a greater appreciation. I had a greater shame.
What did I want?
I wanted Alla to have a future. I didn’t want Anatoly to be hunched over by his life. I didn’t want Ellie to keep an empty bottle of Trésor on her nightstand.
I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t fix any of it.
How could so many Russias be flying inside me all at once? There was the Russia of my childhood, the nearly forgotten, small-child Russia: mute mother, absent father. Shepelevo, Fifth Soviet.
There was the Russia of my grandparents: the impoverished, bombed-out, war-torn Russia, full of death, Stalin, purges, soldiers, evacuation, starvation.
There was the Russia of my parents, Dzhubga in the Caucasus Mountains where they first met, my mother and father falling in love by the Black Sea. Me and your mother, we had a great love, my father once told me when he was trying to talk me out of marrying my first husband. I never forgot that. He was telling me not to compare myself with him and Mama, because they were different, they had something different that bound them together all these years. A great love.
There was the Russia of Anatoly, of the tenement halls and the flowers wrapped in newsprint, and the wallpaper from Europe, and the absence of hot water for three weeks in the summer.
There was the Russia of Shepelevo, of the village life, without chocolate, without clothes, without laundry machines or running water. Still. Ever.
There was the Russia I saw now, by turns exquisite and stupefying, the glory of the northern river emptying out into the cold Gulf waters, the colorful stucco buildings lining these banks for centuries, since the days of Peter the Great, dignified, bent, bowed, broken, their crumbling exposed brick a testament to the ages.
There were the white nights, an astonishing act of God.
And then there was me, starting out in Russia and ending up in Texas, on the prairie. How did that happen? Why was that my life? Why wasn’t it Anatoly and Ellie’s life? Why wasn’t it Alla and Viktor’s? Radik and Lida’s?
That’s what my sadness was. I had been given something I did not deserve. I had been given something I took so woefully for granted.
What was I going to do with it, now that I knew I had it?
I didn’t want to go to sleep. I didn’t want this to be my last night. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to understand, and after I understood, to feel better.
In the last Wizard of Oz book, before she goes back to Kansas, Dorothy asks the Good Witch if she will ever come back to the Land of Oz. The Good Witch replies, No, child. You will never come back. Dorothy starts to cry. The Good Witch says, Don’t worry. Soon the pain of it will fade, and your memories, too. Eventually it will become distant, and one day it won’t even seem like yours anymore. You won’t remember you were the one who had lived through it. It will be just like a fairytale.
It was so cold. I was shivering.
By the time I stumbled back to the hotel and fell asleep fully dressed, it was after 3:00 in the morning — outside, inside.
Friday, July 18, 1998.
PART III
AFTER RUSSIA
Attempting a serious face, 1968.
COMING TO AMERICA
LEAVING LENINGRAD
I hadn’t eaten breakfast — my blini and caviar — in three days. Who had time for breakfast when I didn’t even have time to see Yulia? I didn’t have time for Ellie’s blinchiki, either. They lay in the hotel room refrigerator until I grabbed them at the last minute to give to Viktor. I carried my ridiculous and overstuffed garment bag downstairs. Conveniently, I had been already dressed, my day-old make-up a suit of armor on my face. My stomach felt better after Friday’s debacle, while the rest of me felt worse. But there was no time to feel anything, because I was running late: it was 7:30 and I hadn’t checked out yet.
Viktor was waiting outside in the rain.
“Take this,” I said, handing him the blinchiki. He chivalrously took my garment bag first; then he took the blinchiki.
“You want to share them?” he asked.
“No, I want you to have them.”
We passed by the Moscow Gates on Moscow Prospekt, by Moscow Square with its statue of Lenin and its Communist-era government buildings. It all looked different to me now. Like home.
“We should stop here,” Viktor said, as we were passing the Monument to the Heroes of the Defense of Leningrad. “So you can see. It’s a very nice monument.”
I could see that from the car. It was raining. Each dreary drop fell into my heart. I said, “Okay, we’ll stop for just a sec. But we really must hurry, Viktor. It’s eight o’clock.”
We got out of the car. In the rain we walked up the steps to the eternal flame in front of the sculpted victors: soldiers, workers, women. After a few silent minutes, we went back to the car.
Before we took off, Viktor said, “I have a small gift for you. I know you were looking for some Russian music. I got you this.” He pulled out a CD. “It’s Russian marches. I think you’ll like it. Listen to it on my portable CD player while we drive. Here are the earphones.”
I was afraid I’d cry. “Thank you, Viktor.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a small gesture.”
Yesterday, on our way to Radik’s, my father told me I should give Viktor a T-shirt for his young son’s birthday. But when we got to Radik’s and my father distributed the too-few T-shirts to the too-many guests, he forgot and gave away the T-shirt to somebody else.
I asked Viktor if my father had given him a shirt, and Viktor shook his head. Shaking my own head, I said, “Viktor, after you drop me off, please call my dad and casually ask, ‘Yuri Lvovich, remember you promised my son a T-shirt?’”
Laughing, Viktor said, “No, I cannot do that, it will torture your poor father his whole remaining life.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “That’s the point! What did my father say to you at Lake Ladoga when I desperately needed a bathroom and you were driving over potholes the size of dinosaur footprints? He tol
d you to drive faster. Drive faster. He doesn’t mind torturing me. In fact, he revels in it.”
Viktor laughed.
Closing my eyes, I put on the earphones. “Tell him, Viktor. Call him.”
The rest of the ride to the airport, I listened to Russian military marches. I would open my eyes, see Russia, and then close them again, retreating into cymbals of Soviet war.
Pulkovo’s tiny parking lot was full. We pulled into a taxi rank.
“Write down your address for me, Viktor, will you? I want to send your kids some T-shirts from Texas.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “You absolutely don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to. I want to. Please.”
He wrote down his address for me but forgot his zip code. “Viktor, you don’t know your own zip code?”
Smiling sheepishly, he said, “You know, my wife handles all that stuff. She knows everything.”
“Well, where is she when you need her?”
“Call me from Texas. Can you do that? Call me at home or at the office, and I’ll give it to you. Better yet, don’t send anything.”
I promised I would call.
I opened the car door and got out. He went to get my bag out of the trunk. When he saw my face in the rain, he said, “Paullina, you don’t want to leave, do you?”
I was filling up, so I said nothing. Just shook my head and stared at the ground.
“You should’ve come for longer,” he said. As if that would have solved anything. “Maybe next time?”
“Maybe next time.” I smiled. “Let’s go. We’re so late.”
Inside, the airport buzzed like Dallas–Fort Worth on a Sunday afternoon. It was swarming, amass with people. Everyone behaved as if they wanted only one thing: to get on my flight. Moreover, they behaved as if they wanted to get on my flight ahead of me. There were long lines everywhere and a lot of pushing and shoving. It was 8:20 in the morning. My flight was scheduled for 9:50.