Patiently Viktor and I stood and waited, I wasn’t sure for what. To find out what to do next?
“Viktor, what are we waiting for?” I finally said.
“I don’t know,” he said calmly. “They’ll tell us.”
“Who’s they? And when? And tell us what?”
“I don’t know.”
Thirty minutes we stood. Finally I figured it out: we were waiting so my bag could pass through a metal detector while an indifferent man indifferently studied my customs declaration, and waved me on. “You’re checking that bag, right?” he said. “Because you can’t bring it on the plane.”
“Yes, I know, I know.” I grumbled under my breath. “I can’t bring carry-on luggage on the plane. I got it.”
Hurriedly Viktor and I said goodbye.
“I’ll send you the T-shirts,” I called out to him, but he didn’t hear me.
To the metal detector man, I said, “Can I get on the plane now?”
I was only joking, but he glared at me as if I had just insulted his mother.
“You and your bag go stand over there,” he snapped. “In the check-in line.”
I joined the check-in line.
On the digital display board in front of me, the deadline for checking in flashed as 9:10 a.m. I glanced at my watch. It was 8:50.
Do I even need to say that 9:10 came and went and the line did not move? I stood and watched two enterprising men wrap suitcases in plastic wrap for twenty dollars a bag. They asked me three times if I wanted to protect my bag from unnecessary nicks and cuts. Three times I told them no, each time wanting to ask what kind of a sharp and pointed instrument would I need to use to cut through the plastic wrap, and what would that sharp and pointed instrument do to my bag.
I looked up at the LCD display, which now boldly proclaimed that the check-in deadline was extended to 9:40 a.m. It dawned on me that the end of check-in was simply thirty minutes ahead of whatever time it was now. How convenient.
The woman standing behind me was beginning to get on my nerves. She wore black platform shoes with tight black pants and a tight black shirt, and she had drooping, absurdly giant breasts. But no, that’s not what got on my nerves. What got on my nerves was that she and her boobs kept bobbing and weaving and undulating their way to get in front of me. When that didn’t work, she tried to use her ridiculous chest to influence the man behind the counter to let her check her luggage right now.
Despite the enormity of her foundering bosom, he was not swayed.
It was 9:40 a.m. I looked up at the LCD display. The end of check-in time for my flight had disappeared completely. The display now carried the check-in time for a flight to Portugal.
Finally — my turn. I had a choice: aisle in non-smoking or window in smoking. Idiotically I asked, “Could you put me at the very beginning of the smoking section?”
“Yes,” the check-in woman said in Russian. “You are at the beginning.”
I don’t know what I was thinking. That all the smokers would be behind me, far away? She handed me my boarding pass. It had no gate number on it.
“What gate?”
“Gate?”
“Gate, yes. The plane, where is it departing from?”
“Oh.” She waved me over to the central terminal. “Ask passport control. They’ll tell you.”
My brain cloudy, I waited in the passport control line so they could stamp my passport and take my visa.
I waited fifteen minutes. It was 9:55 a.m.
“It’s five minutes past my scheduled flight time,” I said to the passport lady when I reached the front of the line.
“It is?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She looked at a piece of paper on her desk. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I hope they’re holding the flight. I’d hurry.”
“Great,” I said. “What gate, please?”
“Gate?”
“Yes, gate.”
“Didn’t they tell you at check-in?”
“No, they said you would know.”
“I don’t know why they would say that. I have no idea. Go and check the departure and arrival board. It should be up there. You have a few minutes. Don’t worry.”
“So they’ll hold the flight, right?”
She shrugged. “I hope so. Sometimes they do.”
I had to go through yet another metal detector, this time for my carry-on bags, all the white plastic bags filled with gifts from my Russian friends.
Deciding that the flight would hold, I ran to the duty-free shop because my father had told me to. He’d said, “Take the remainder of your rubles, how many do you have?”
“Six hundred.”
“Take them and buy yourself black caviar in the duty-free shop at the airport.”
“But, Papa,” I said, “doesn’t caviar need to be refrigerated?”
“Yeah? So?”
Russians were not big on refrigeration.
“Eat it as soon as you get home,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
Eat six hundred rubles worth of Beluga when I got home? Through the glass door of the refrigerator I stared at the caviar, squinting to read how much I could buy for six hundred rubles. In the six days I’d been in Russia, the ruble had suffered a catastrophic collapse, and on this Sunday, six hundred rubles amounted to only sixteen dollars.
However, those six hundred rubles would buy me six ounces of Beluga! Long live the worthless ruble. I opened the refrigerator, but I couldn’t stop thinking of Ellie, with the empty bottle of Trésor on her nightstand. Knowing my mother, I bet she hadn’t even bought the Trésor for Ellie: I bet she had given her one of her gently used own, since she had a dozen more at home, fuller and newer.
I closed the refrigerator, empty-handed. I didn’t buy the near-half-pound of Beluga for sixteen dollars.
Instead I bought four T-shirts, one each for Kevin and the kids. Time was ticking. It was after 10:00. I couldn’t be sure how long the flight would be “held.” Neither could anyone else, I suspected. After paying for the T-shirts, I still had over three hundred rubles left.
I decided to buy a bottle of Trésor for Ellie.
After paying for the perfume, I would still have two hundred rubles left. Geez, I couldn’t give this money away.
I asked the duty-free clerk if she knew what time my flight was leaving. She looked at her schedule. “9:50.” She eyed me with alarm. “You better hurry.”
It was 10:03 a.m.
I ran out of the duty-free to the flight information board.
There was nothing on it about my flight.
I rushed to the nearest metal detector and asked the man sitting behind it. He spoke no English and refused to help. Don’t ask me why I didn’t ask him in Russian — I don’t know.
I tried another man.
He said in Russian, “No English.”
I gave up and asked him in Russian.
He replied, in his most apathetic Russian, “Dunno.”
“Does anyone know?” I asked feverishly.
“Dunno,” he said, lazily pointing me back to the flight information board.
My state now was three notches above frantic. I flew up an escalator. There was no information anywhere, either what time the flight was, or what gate it was at. I ran down the escalator, past the metal detector and again asked a woman at passport control.
“Oh, you’re on the New York flight!” she exclaimed.
I didn’t like the panic in her voice.
She talked quickly into her walkie-talkie. “Sergei! We have another one!” Then to me, “Hurry, hurry, upstairs to the left.”
I airlifted myself up the escalator and sprinted through some double doors. At last, a hundred yards down the long hall, I saw a small sign above an actual gate: “New York.”
There was no one at the desk. There was, however, a soldier on the gangplank. He checked my passport. Then the woman who had checked me in at 9:50 a.m. took my boarding pass, ripped it in two and impatiently pointed me toward the
plane, where the stern stewardess demanded to know where the other half of my boarding pass was.
My seat was 35K, five rows from the very back of the plane. Didn’t the check-in woman tell me I’d be sitting at the front of the smoking section?
I felt in Russian, I did everything else in English. At that moment, I was feeling tense — in any language. I couldn’t find the words for tense in Russian. Hyperventilating, breathless, shaking, nerve-wracked: none of them were coming to mind.
I squeezed into my window seat, and the power went out. When the electricity goes out on an airplane about to fly 4500 miles, I don’t see it as a good omen. Don’t they need power for the black box? Outside my oval window was incessant, driving rain.
The young man in the seat next to me was dark, extremely hirsute, and busy drawing in a notebook. He was so hairy, he had thick black hair growing out of his sketching knuckles. Then he was busy snoring, with his hairy elbow all over my armrest. I longed for my own armrest. At least I had a window.
Finally the plane took off. The young man woke up and started chain-smoking. When I had asked to be put at the beginning of the smoking section, it hadn’t occurred to me that the man sitting next to me might smoke. Duh, I thought, coughing his exhaled nicotine into my sleeve.
I excused myself. When he stood up to let me out, his cigarettes fell to the floor and his charcoal pencil smudged his coat. His lighter dropped under the seat. I smiled sweetly as I inched past him and went to wait by the OCCUPIED lavatory.
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
When I got back to my seat, I read Anatoly’s novella.
Anatoly thought his wife was beautiful. He is right. She was. She still is.
I was really only interested in my mother and father, but there was disappointingly little of them in his book. The story, if you could call it that, had only one main character, and that was Anatoly’s heartbroken nostalgia for a youth long gone. Everything else was subordinated to this prevailing and poignant sense of loss for the past.
Although Anatoly told me that he and my father had both been in love with Ellie, I would not have gleaned it from his book. It was too impenetrable for something as straightforward as a love triangle. Ellie had chosen Anatoly over my father, and this created a rift between the three of them during which, for two years, they did not speak. Eventually things got back on track. Again, I knew this only from what Anatoly had told me; these details were invisible in the murky pages I read. What was clear, however — absolutely conspicuous — was Anatoly’s jealousy about the episode to this day, forty years later.
I put the manuscript down and closed my eyes. Maybe youthful hurt never mends. Could you really feel pain about a forty-year-old incident? I knew you could. I had my own youthful hurts. They didn’t feel raw anymore, but you never forget your first heartbreak. I still carried it with me.
As I carry Leningrad with me. I carry Leningrad with me in a little box next to my heart. The smell of Shepelevo, the memory of me reading in my bed, my mother and me having dinner mute and alone, my father taking me to the movies on Saturdays, as if I were a child of divorce. I carry all of it inside me.
Shepelevo is with me whenever I walk outside and smell the air. I always search for the familiar smell that will take me back home. What I want to smell is smoking fish and fresh water and burning firewood and nettles. But in Texas I smell hardly anything but heat. That has its own, somewhat limited, appeal. Besides, Texas carries no personal history for me.
When I was growing up in Russia, I didn’t constantly want something I didn’t have, something else, something new. As Sinead O’Connor wisely wrote many years later, I did not want what I didn’t have. What no one had. I never even knew that another world besides the one I was living in existed. We were all fish swimming in the same water. I didn’t know I had gills. I just lived. I was a kid with really only one dream. I dreamed that I might one day write books that would transport other people to other worlds, as I myself had been transported, by Dumas, by Dickens, by Verne. I wanted to make other people feel like D’Artagnan had made me feel.
And now I wanted that simple child back. I wanted to be happy with the sunrise and fishing on the Gulf. I wanted to be happy, not ashamed, or anxious, or worried about money or work. I wanted to ride my rusted wobbly bike and smell the fish and the pines and the clover and believe I was lucky.
I had too much time to think on this flight — last thing I needed. I opened my eyes and reluctantly turned to my smoking seat buddy. The scruffy artist pumped my hand, announcing he was Andrew. He didn’t even ask for my name. He was an unkempt twenty-four-year-old artistpaintersculptor with fingers permanently blackened by charcoal pencil, or by tar from the cigarettes.
He offered me a cigarette.
“No, thank you,” I said, poorly suppressing a judgmental cough. He smiled. “Your bad luck to be sitting next to a chain smoker, huh?”
“No, no, it’s fine.” Perhaps not so lucky?
Andrew was a Catholic and an art dealer, though he told me the two things were not “conjoined” (his word not mine). He was the middle son of an Atlanta businessman, engaged to a Russian woman named Olga who, he said, spoke perfect English. Andrew told me he didn’t care about money and was eventually moving to live in St. Petersburg with Olga because he didn’t like government, any government, but especially the U.S. government. His three-month visa had just expired and he was unwillingly returning to his art gallery in the hated United States.
“Russia is so pure,” Andrew said. “There is no pretense.”
“Well, they can’t afford it.”
“Yes, but that’s the beauty of it. The Russian people have to make up their own reality.”
I laughed, perhaps too loudly.
He looked at me seriously, then half-chuckled. “I am totally serious.”
“Of course you are.”
I wanted to ask him if he didn’t think the Russian people had had just about enough of their own reality without having to make any up, but didn’t want to get into it with him. I’d met his type before. Everything about the most pungent poverty everywhere else in the world is noble and glorious, and America sucks.
Andrew loved Michelangelo (“He’s a god”) and Florence. He hated working at an art gallery. “I’m not meant to work there, I know. Soon I’ll be fired, and then I’ll have to go back to Russia. I’ll be fired because I can’t stand all that bullshit. People come in and they want to buy paintings to go with their furniture. It drives me crazy. Once a lady came in and said, ‘Do you have anything blue? I’ve got a blue couch I’m trying to match. I want that blue painting.’ I said to her, ‘Lady, get out. Don’t buy something blue from me. What’s going to happen when you get tired of your blue couch? The painting is still going to be on your wall.’ I got into a lot of trouble with my boss, but most people just don’t understand art. They don’t understand that real art doesn’t go with anything. It has to be something that you walk by every day and see. Every day. Every time you walk by. If you forget to look at it as you pass by, it’s not art. Forget the fucking couch.” He laughed. “I almost got fired.”
“Really?” I said. “For a painting? How much was it?”
“A hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.”
After an hour and a half, I was done listening to him so I read my Defense of Leningrad book in Russian, then slept, really slept, waking with a hurting neck. I dreamed about giving my cleaning lady a raise. I woke up groggy at 10:20 p.m., Leningrad time.
Time to come home to Grand Hotel Europe.
They fed us twice on the flight. First, a choice of beef or salmon; the second time, oily fish plus ham, salad, and pound cake with chocolate fondant. Coffee. Ginger ale for my funny tummy.
Actually, they forgot to feed Andrew and me. Clearly we weren’t art because they walked right past us. They were coming around with the coffee carafe by the time we looked around and realized everyone else had finished eating. There was a grudging non-apology and some food.
/> When we landed, Andrew got up, walked off and didn’t even say see ya. He was too busy smoking.
I went to the bathroom at Kennedy Airport. I marveled at how clean the toilets were, how they flushed! How soft the toilet paper was! I was excited about toilets at an airport, can that just sink in a little bit?
I made beautiful time getting to LaGuardia, and then sat on my hands for three hours waiting for my connecting flight to Dallas.
At the airport everyone spoke English. I spent ten dollars on Chinese food of dubious quality. I was back home.
I wished I had time to go see my grandparents on Long Island. I couldn’t call home: before I left Russia, Kevin told me that a lightning strike had knocked out the power in our subdivision. The phones weren’t working.
In Leningrad during the war, in December 1941, the authorities had to turn off the electricity to conserve it. Russian winters are brutal, dark and long. Without electricity, they must have been unbearable. Without electricity or food. The only thing that took people’s minds off the darkness was impending death by starvation.
Every rat, every mouse, every dog and cat in the city had long been eaten. People sat in the dark and starved. That’s how it was. But every apartment had a little wood-burning ceramic stove, by which they could heat their small rooms, not quite seven meters for every man, woman and child.
The men were at war, the women and children were dying. If there had been soup, they could have heated it up on their ceramic stoves. But there was no soup, and there was no firewood either. The Leningraders burned their furniture and their clothes. They ripped apart abandoned homes to make firewood. Then they started cutting down trees in the parks. The city council by emergency decree protected the Summer Garden, declaring it a felony punishable by death to steal the trees out of it, but everything else in the city was cut down and burned.
I ate my mediocre Chinese food and was grateful.
I stared out the airport window, noticing that in the flat of green between one runway and the next the grass had been cut. Someone had paid for a mower and a person to cut the grass. Not a lot of money. But what I’m saying is, after paying for air-traffic control, electricity and payroll, there was money left over to get the grass cut.