Six Days in Leningrad

“Do you remember what the gravestone looked like?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember where in the cemetery you buried her?”

  “Not really. Somewhere on the right-hand side, toward the back. I’m not sure.”

  “I see,” I said. “We’ll find it. How hard can it be?”

  She cried.

  My grandfather interrupted, asking if I would be coming to New York before July 12. I told him I didn’t think I would be coming to New York in the next ten days with a trip to Russia looming. What was he thinking? “Because there are some people in Russia I want you to go and visit,” he said. “The Ivanchenkos. Do you remember them?”

  “Are they dead or living?”

  “Don’t joke. Living, living. They want to see you very much.”

  Interrupting him right back, my grandmother said, “I’m sure her grave has not been taken care of. I don’t know if Yulia takes care of it. Probably not. Who knows? I hope you and your father spend some time with her. But do you remember the Likhobabins? They still live in Shepelevo —”

  “If they’re not dead,” Deda interjected.

  “Leva, stop it,” said Babushka. “Plinka, I want you to give the Likhobabins money. Give them a hundred dollars. That’s a lot of money for them but not so much for you. You have a hundred dollars, don’t you? Give it to them and ask them to take care of my mother’s grave.”

  “So you’re not coming to New York?” my grandfather said. He sounded disappointed. “That’s a pity. I really wanted to talk to you about the Ivanchenkos. I have to go. Now is really not a good time to talk, Paullina. I’m having a birthday party.”

  With 22-month-old son the night before I fly to Russia. July 11, 1998.

  TO LENINGRAD

  At 4:30 in the morning on the day of my flight, I slithered out of bed, having gone to sleep just two and a half hours earlier. We had gone to my husband’s boss’s fiftieth birthday bash, and because I thought ahead, I had partaken in seven vodka-cranberries. Or it could have been six, or eight; being a lightweight as a drinker, very un-Russian of me, after the first two I had lost my ability to perform simple math.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had that much to drink. In college, maybe. But back then, I’d go to sleep for fourteen hours and wake up nearly sober. Today, less than three hours after going to bed, I had to get up and travel 5000 miles. And I had woken up not sober.

  My flight to New York was leaving at 7:10 a.m. We were in the car at 5:45 for the fifty-minute ride to the airport.

  I sat stiffly, staring straight ahead. As Kevin drove, I asked him to please not make any right or left turns and at all costs to avoid coming to a complete stop. By the time we got to the airport, I felt a bit better. The vodka behind my eyes wasn’t sloshing inside my brain anymore.

  I had squeezed everything I was bringing into a single garment bag, as planned. My publisher had arranged for a car to pick me up at LaGuardia and take me across town to JFK, so that I wouldn’t be delayed flagging a yellow cab. Even with these precautions, however, it was clear I would not have enough time to make my flight. When I had called Aeroflot to inquire about check-in times, the woman told me in her Russian-accented English that I had to be at the check-in counter three hours before departure. Since that was clearly not possible, I asked what she recommended as the minimum check-in time, explaining my situation. She said, “As long as you’re there at least two hours before, you’ll be all right.”

  I had one hour and forty-five minutes to get to JFK from LaGuardia. Anyone who has battled the Van Wyck Expressway and lost will understand what I was facing.

  Bottom line: my garment bag simply had to come with me as carry-on.

  Not according to the American Airlines woman at DFW in Dallas printing my boarding pass. The first thing she said was, “That can’t come with you.”

  “It has to,” I said. “I have a connecting flight at JFK at 1:15.”

  I’m not sure she knew what JFK was. If she knew, she didn’t care.

  Shaking her head, she said, “It has to be checked. See?” She flung her hand in the direction of the metal frame into which I was supposed to fit my carry-on bag. “It has to be that size.”

  “But this isn’t a carry-on,” I pointed out. “It’s a garment bag.”

  “It has to be that size,” she said, and turned away from us to fill out a gate check ticket.

  “What are you talking about?” my husband said. “We’ve taken this bag with us three times and every time they’ve let us take it on the plane.”

  “Uh-uh,” she said and pulled the bag out of my hands.

  I was suddenly endowed with the ability to see the future. I saw my future at LaGuardia, trying to find my bag, waiting for the luggage carousel, missing my plane to Russia.

  The woman was clearly a graduate of the Advanced Rudeness Training seminar given at an American Airlines Rudeness night school.

  Just then, a muscular young man rushed up to Kevin and began to assure him that everything was going to be all right because there were forty more just like me also going to St. Petersburg on my flight. Their group leader had already called Aeroflot, who agreed to hold the plane until they made their way from LaGuardia to Kennedy.

  This made Kevin and me feel better. Consequently we did not do what we usually do when confronted with graduates of the American Airlines Advanced Rudeness Training program, which is to prominently display our own higher learning degrees from the School of Angry and Defensive Travelers.

  I sat in seat 7A — a bulkhead seat! The first time I’d ever had one.

  As I was climbing over the girl in the aisle seat, I noticed she was unusually friendly. Her name was Carrie. She made lots of eye contact, said hello, was interested in the contents of my purse, in my magazines, in my Walkman, and in finding out if I was well.

  She turned out to be a missionary, one of the forty traveling to St. Petersburg. She told me they were all from a mission near Dallas.

  “Oh,” I said. “A Catholic mission?” Catholics were the only kind of missionaries I knew. It made sense that the Catholics would be headed to Russia to preach Roman Catholicism to the Russian Orthodox. The Catholics have been trying to reunite with us ever since our one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church split in the Great Schism in 1054. Boy can the Orthodox hold a grudge. We still haven’t forgiven them for what they did to the Nicene Creed way back then.

  But no, these missionaries weren’t Catholic. Carrie said they were a non-denominational mission, going to preach the word of God to the Russians. As though the Russians were heathens.

  I wanted to tell Carrie that although the Communists tried to stamp out Orthodoxy and create their own religion with Lenin and Stalin worship, they failed. But before I could speak, she looked out the window, at the clouds and the sun, and said, “Isn’t this beautiful? How can anyone doubt there is a God when you see the beauty He made?”

  I mumbled incoherently, glanced indifferently out the window and turned on my Walkman. Guns n’ Roses screeched about paradise city while Carrie tried to engage me for a few more moments. Blessedly she gave up, put on her own headphones and took out her diary. I could tell she was not inspired, even by the lovely clouds. I read over her shoulder. She began, “I thank my Father for . . .” and stopped.

  She closed her notebook and went to sleep.

  She snored. Loudly. I could hear her through the din of the 747 and Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction.

  My stomach, still queasy after my liquid dinner the night before, could take no more than half a banana. When Carrie woke up, she offered me hers and her yogurt, too. I politely accepted. I do not turn down offered food.

  It had been such a mad dash for the door and so early in the morning that I’d had no time for long goodbyes with the kids. My youngest boy, Kevie, had watched me get ready the day before. He would bring me items from my purse, saying, “Here, Mommy,” as he handed over each one. Later that afternoon, Misha got out of his crib when he woke from
his nap, opened his bedroom door and came downstairs. He took my hand and said, “Come, Mama. Kevie wants you.” You could say Kevie wanted me. He was crying hysterically.

  I felt unsettled, overwhelmed.

  I didn’t want Misha to get out of his crib. It made it impossible for me to finish whatever I was doing. Packing for Russia, blow-drying my hair, getting ready for the birthday party.

  “You know, Misha,” my husband said. “You have to stay in your crib till we get you.”

  Misha replied, with a roll of the eyes, “But I had to get out, Dad. I didn’t want to stay there anymore.” Big, exasperated three-year-old sigh.

  When it was time for us to leave, Kevie was too busy playing with his toys to look up. The kids barely stirred. Natasha grunted something like, “Have fun in Russia, Mom.”

  I couldn’t believe how much had happened in such a short time. How could we be in our new house already? How could I be going to Russia already? I felt woefully unprepared. My oldest friend, Kathie, sent me an impromptu letter, pages long, full of her life and her kids, signed “I love you.” But her birthday had come and gone in June, and I’d been too crazed by my life to send her so much as a card. I wasn’t spending enough time with my own children. I had no time for anything but the house.

  Kevin went to work outside the home. He published children’s books about a dog who reads. I worked inside the home. Which meant my work stopped when the painters came. When the security men came, the pool guys, the lawnmower guys, the appliance guys, the plumbers, the electricians: it was me, each and every day, calling them, arranging times, answering questions. And carrying the baby. That’s what I did — and when I was in my office for the briefest of minutes, I remained filled with the house and filled with the kids.

  I was filled with my life. I was not filled enough (which is to say nearly at all) with World War II, with Leningrad under siege, with my ghosts as characters. The house was formed, the children were formed, but the new novel remained an elusive space in my heart. Half a million people froze to death or died of hunger in Leningrad during the winter of 1941. In Texas in 1998, I sat in my office, which was 80 degrees, and called the air-conditioning guy because it was not cool enough.

  Somewhere I had read that during the siege of Leningrad, each child received only 125 grams of bread a day, about four ounces — bread cut with glue and cardboard. But that was all in another life, not my own. In my life, I said, “Misha, would you like a baked potato with butter and cheese and bacon bits?”

  “No,” he replied. “I don’t want anything. Just Tootsie Rolls.”

  I had built my office upstairs so I could have a lovely view, but I had to close my ivory blinds so I wouldn’t see the view, so it wouldn’t distract me, so I wouldn’t see my children frolicking and the dogs leaping into the pool. I might as well have been sitting in the rented house we’d been living in before, sitting in the small, hot attic room over the garage, looking out onto the driveway and the road and the neighbor’s house. The blinding Texas sunshine, all well and good in theory, was disastrous for computer screens. I couldn’t write if I couldn’t see.

  During the winter of 1941, my grandfather used to pour a bit of paraffin oil onto a plate, put a piece of wick in the middle, and light the wick. When the oil ran out, he would sit in darkness. He allowed himself only a tablespoon of paraffin oil every twenty-four hours. There was no electricity, and barely six hours of murky sunlight each day — the flipside of the sublime white nights my father and I were traveling to.

  Still, my refrigerator was not making ice and the hot water dispenser was not dispensing hot water. When would the plumber come and fix them? Then I would be comfortable in my home office, where I could write about people starving to death.

  My grandfather and great-grandmother had to burn furniture for firewood in their portable ceramic stove. They could have used it to cook some food, had there been any food to cook.

  Thus their granddaughter did not say no to a proffered yogurt and banana.

  We landed in LaGuardia at 11:30: right on time.

  My bag wasn’t at the gate where it was supposed to be, like children’s double strollers that magically appear by the door as you leave the plane. I went to the baggage-claim area and met my soon-to-be driver, a polite, fiftyish West Indian man, who stood with me and watched the baggage carousel go round and round and round.

  And round.

  And round.

  The missionaries’ bags came, all three hundred of them. The other passengers’ bags came. People were lifting off three, four bags at a time. But my one lousy garment bag was nowhere to be seen.

  I was so tense, if someone had blown on me, I would have snapped in two. I imagined my bag on a different flight: to Las Vegas, Chicago, Seattle. The way the kids’ car seats sometimes disappeared. Other times our suitcases would not make the plane and would arrive on a later flight.

  It was now certain that I would miss my flight to St. Petersburg. Because I could not go to Russia without my clothes. Could I buy what I needed there? Shoes, underwear? Jeans, makeup? What about the ten T-shirts I brought for my father’s friends? What about my coat?

  No, I’d have to miss the flight. My six days in St. Petersburg were about to become five. And what if the bag was irretrievably lost? All this because of one unhelpful woman in Dallas. I never hated anybody more than her during those traumatic twenty-five minutes. My body shuddered with anxiety.

  Meanwhile my driver, courtesy of the publicity department at St. Martin’s Press, stood next to me, serenely humming a happy tune. Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” I wanted to stuff a sock in his mouth.

  I was so tightly wound that when the bag finally did appear — one of the last ones on the conveyor belt — I could not immediately feel relief.

  Cheerfully the driver grabbed my single piece of luggage and began to wheel it. I hurried. He sauntered. We ambled across the road into the parking garage and guess what? He couldn’t find his car.

  It was 12:05 p.m. My plane was due to leave at 1:15, whether I was on it or not. And he couldn’t find his car. But he was happy about it. He was whistling.

  He approached a black Lincoln Town Car, laughed and said, “Wait: that’s not mine.”

  Ha ha.

  Aimlessly we searched. He looked at another Town Car license plate. “Nope, that’s not mine, either.”

  And then he stood. He just stood in the middle of the parking garage, looking to the left, looking to the right, even looking up, as if he had absolutely no idea what to do next. Perhaps he was thinking of hailing a cab.

  I said nothing for fear of offending him. If I had said what I was thinking, he might have refused to drive me even if he did eventually find his vehicle.

  And he did eventually find it. He laughed again, leaning into my face, inviting me to laugh too, and said, “They all look the same!”

  I smiled thinly. “Are you sure this is yours?”

  He laughed harder.

  We took off at 12:12 p.m. and made fantastic time, getting to Kennedy in fifteen minutes. The Van Wyck Expressway didn’t defeat me. On July 12 1998, I came as close as Elaine on Seinfeld had ever come to beating the Van Wyck. I wheeled my bag to the Aeroflot counter, and joined the line of at least seventy people. After five minutes, someone yelled in Russian, “Anyone for the St. Petersburg flight?” About ten of us stepped forward.

  “All of you?” the man yelled with exasperation, still in Russian. “But it’s completely full!”

  I looked around for the missionaries. Had they made it to Kennedy before me? They’d certainly retrieved their hundreds of bags before I got my lousy one.

  In any case, I was shepherded “over there,” and waited for the woman behind the counter to deal with me. She was Asian and spoke no Russian, which at first seemed a blessing — but a small one, for she seemed to speak no English either.

  Her computer broke down in front of my eyes, and she looked as helpless as the driver searching for his black
car. She spent five minutes threading paper into the computer’s printer, and another five looking quizzically at the screen.

  “Is there a problem?” I finally said.

  “Yes,” she said in heavily accented English. “The computer broke.”

  “I still don’t have a seat assignment.”

  “Yes, yes. I will take care of it.” She looked around. “I have to go use another computer. Wait here.”

  I waited, tapping my fingers on the counter, watching her fiddle with someone else’s machine.

  Thirty minutes passed. When she came back, I asked if I could have a window seat.

  “A window seat?” she echoed, as if she were about to laugh. “Oh, no. There are no window seats left.”

  “Why would there be.”

  “This is a completely full flight. I can give you aisle.”

  I kept my mouth shut, took aisle, and ran to my gate. When I got there, the flight hadn’t even started boarding. Bless Aeroflot. I called Kevin, who didn’t answer: probably in the pool with the kids.

  It was now 1:20. Aimlessly I shuffled around. A vague line had formed near the gate; I didn’t know whether or not to join it. Behind the counter, an Aeroflot woman was busy on the phone, snapping at someone in Russian. I overheard a young woman and young man conversing in English. I asked them, in English, “Excuse me, do you know when they’re going to start boarding?”

  They looked at me vacantly.

  The guy said, “Mhy ne govorim po Angliyski.” (“We don’t speak English.”) I stared at him. I nodded. “I see,” I said, edging away.

  Before I had a chance to ask anyone else, we started boarding. It was now 1:30 p.m.

  While I waited for takeoff, I wondered what the chances were I’d be fed pelmeni on the plane. Pelmeni is my favorite Russian food — meat dumplings in chicken broth. I also like mushroom and barley soup, Russian potato salad, and caviar. Thinking of all this food, I realized I was starving.

  What did a four-ounce ration of bread look like?