My eyes hurt from being up, from reading, from being alive.
February 1965. Fifteen months old.
THE BLUE SILENCE
COMING HOME
An uneventful American Airlines flight back to Dallas, a flight marked only by my ravenous hunger. I inhaled the entire platter of Southwestern chicken plus two cookies. It was a struggle to keep myself from asking the woman next to me if she was going to finish her chicken.
She didn’t.
My flight landed at 6:00 p.m. Kevin was supposed to pick me up by the gate with the kids. I was looking forward to the sight of my daughter holding a homemade sign that said “MOM.”
Not only was there no sign, there was no family either. I tottered over to the baggage claim, where I stood dejectedly for fifteen minutes until the luggage started coming out, and then my family appeared. Apparently there was confusion over arrival time. I was so tired and happy to see them, it didn’t matter. I just wanted to be done with my day.
We went to the Rainforest Café for dinner.
Misha, my three year old, said, “Mom, do you know what we had for breakfast? Ice cream! And do you know what we had for lunch? Cookies! We had popcorn for dinner and we watched TV all day!” He laughed joyously.
Playing along, I furrowed my brow and turned to Kevin.
Smiling, Kevin shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know where he gets this stuff.”
I didn’t know how I kept myself upright.
“So tell me about Russia,” Kevin said in the car on the way home.
The thought of relating my trip to Kevin in the car in between traffic lights filled me with exhausted dread. We were driving past McDonald’s, a Mobil station, a Boston Market. Gamely I tried.
The children interrupted us like a stutter as I spoke. My words came out in staccato half-sentences. “Shepelevo, border patrol, Misha stop yelling at your brother, give him the toy, Natasha stop complaining, smell, poverty, wait I can’t hear myself talk, you kids are screaming so loud, okay, Fifth Soviet, the toilets, Radik, Misha stop scratching the window with your rake, sit down, don’t take your seatbelt off, okay if you kids don’t stop it, we’re turning right around, and there will be no Magic School Bus tomorrow. Kevin did you get that? Did you get what my Russia meant to me?”
We didn’t get home until 10:00 in the evening, which was 7:00 in the morning Leningrad time, which meant I had been up for twenty-four hours.
I don’t think I fell asleep so much as fell unconscious around midnight.
FIRST DAY BACK
The next morning my husband walked into our bathroom and found me gazing at our toilet.
“Um, what are you doing?” he asked cautiously.
“Nothing. Look how nice it is.”
“What? The toilet?”
“I mean . . . well, yeah. Clean. And white. I’m so happy we didn’t get a black toilet.”
I felt Kevin staring at me. Turning around I said, “It’s just so clean, don’t you think?”
“Yeah . . . sure,” he said. “Do you want to go look at the other five toilets?”
“Let’s go get the kids ready,” I said.
We got the boys dressed and ready for the day. The babysitter came and Kevin went to work.
I trudged upstairs to my office. Phil the foreman called me on the cell phone, because the regular phones still weren’t working — which reminded me I had to call the phone company. The alarm guy came to the house supposedly to fix the alarm, but really just to tell me that if lightning struck my house and ruptured the alarm signal, he would have to charge me three hundred dollars to fix it. Did I still want the work done? Our homeowner’s insurance was being cancelled. The landlord from our old rental house hadn’t sent us our security deposit back. Kevin hadn’t listened to the answering machine the whole week I was gone. There was a panicked message from my mother. She was about to go in for her gall bladder surgery and needed to speak to someone — could Kevin please call her as soon as possible? Not only had he not called her, but my father hadn’t called her either. We’d been too busy dissecting the dire real estate situation in Schlisselburg to call my mother, who was having gall bladder surgery.
I was too scared to call her, so I called my grandparents in New York instead in preparation and then called my mother at the hospital. She was groggy and recovering but clearly not happy not to have heard from any of us.
That took the whole morning. In the afternoon I made Russian beef soup and blinchiki. It took me three and a half hours to make dinner. As I cooked, I became uncomfortably aware that my house was too beautiful. Granite island, white cabinets, brass hardware, handscraped floors, crown mouldings, tall ceilings. Lots of large rooms with solid-core doors. Not in-laid with gold doors. But still. Two staircases. A three-car garage. A swimming pool. A spa. My head bent low, I tried not to look at any of it.
Kevin came home and we ate dinner, went swimming, put the kids to bed, watched some TV . . .
The next day we got up and did it all again.
And the next day.
And the next.
Life continued as if I hadn’t been to Russia, hadn’t been to Shepelevo, hadn’t been to Leningrad.
Except . . . I couldn’t lift my head, my eyes, my heart to my house.
I said I would tell Kevin about Russia after I got my photographs developed. Once I had the photos, I said I’d tell him when I had organized them. After I had put the photos in order, I said I didn’t want to tell him without putting them in context.
This book is that context.
It took me eight months to write it. I wrote it when I should have been writing The Bronze Horseman, the book three editors in three different countries were desperately waiting for, the book that was egregiously late, like years late.
In my photos, Leningrad doesn’t look quite so drab. The lens softens the peeled paint, flattens the dimensionally broken stucco. Rust looks like a ray of light, you can hardly see the dirt on the street. The Neva is gorgeous, and so is the sky.
And there is no smell in photographs.
No smell of Communist toilets, or the subway or Shepelevo or crème brûlée or wet trees.
WET DOGS
I had a very difficult time talking about it to Kevin. It became a thing between us, a wedge, a widening unhappy gap. I couldn’t find the words to explain, was afraid he’d never understand, and he resented my silence. How to reduce Russia to a pithy sound bite over the dinner table, or over the joyful chattering of our children on the way to Baskin Robbins?
My six days in Leningrad didn’t fit into my life. I’d known that even as I was flying home. I knew there would be no time to stop and talk about Russia, and I was right. The longer it went on, the not talking about it became both a solace and a disgrace.
Talking would require a break in our daily ritual. Who needed that? Not Kevin, he just wanted things to be good, like they had been, like they still were to him. Talking would need us to enter into a different reality than our Texas reality, which by the way seemed less and less real by the hour because I spent all my waking seconds hidden so deep inside my head.
In the evening we would clean up, maybe unpack some books, go to bed, read for a few minutes, kiss and fall asleep. In the morning we would once again stumble out of bed. Kevin went to work, and I was left home with the contents of my heart.
I came home one afternoon to find a message on the answering machine. A female Russian voice I didn’t recognize was saying, “Misha, is this you? Pick up the phone, Misha, I want to talk to your mama.” All of this was in Russian, like Misha could understand a word of it.
I went up to my office and the phone rang. A woman’s voice in Russian said, “Plinka? Plinka is this you?”
I didn’t know quite what to say.
Was it me?
I said yes.
“Plinka, do you know who this is? It’s Yulia! Yulia. Oh, Paullina, how could you have? How could you have come to Russia and not called me, and not seen me? How could you have
done it?”
Thank God I was sitting down.
Yulia wept.
“I’m sorry, Yulia,” I said. “I’m really sorry. We had no time. We only had six days. Six lousy days, Yulia, I’m sorry.”
But she didn’t understand. She talked and talked, railing at the injustice, at my callousness. Her voice, high-strung and emotional, carried with it such regret, such sorrow. “I would have come to the airport to see you off,” she said. “I found out only on Friday and I called Anatoly the whole day Saturday but no one picked up. You were leaving Sunday, and I would’ve come to the airport to see you; I was so desperate to see you, I must have called Anatoly seven hundred times, that’s all I did Friday and Saturday, I dialed his number over and over, but no one picked up. But in the end I couldn’t have come to the airport — do you know why? Because I was going into labor! Labor, Plinka. I had another child, can you believe it? The day after you left, I had my little girl. So now I have two children, can you believe it, two, a boy and a girl. I named the girl Maria. For our Babushka. She liked it. I just talked to her. She was very happy.”
I was mute.
“How could you not have come to see me, Plinka?” she repeated mournfully.
“Yulia, I didn’t even know where you lived.”
“I live in the same place, Plinka! Where else am I going to live? The same apartment I shared with my mama. I still live there on Prospekt of Veterans! But who cares where I live, I would have come anywhere to see you, anywhere, you tell me where and I would have come, you have no idea how I think of you every day of my life, how I think of you, I’ve never had anyone who was a sister to me. You were my only sister. I love you so much, how could you have not come and seen me?”
She was sobbing.
We are swinging in the hammock all afternoon. We have our bare legs in the stream and our hands are trying to catch the little fish that swim by. We are staring in wonder at Dedushka’s bleeding heel. Yulia is running to our grandmother, yelling, “Babushka, Babushka, Plinka split her knee open, Babushka come!”
Here we are, here we are.
“How are you, Yulia?” I said, my voice breaking. “How have you been?” I squeezed shut my eyes so I wouldn’t see the sparkling swimming pool and the soaking wet golden retrievers leaping into it from the diving board. What did she see while she spoke to me? Did she see the Prospekt of Veterans outside her window? Did she see the Khrushchev concrete tenements through her tears?
“I know nothing about your life,” Yulia said. “Nothing. What are you doing now? I don’t even know how many children you have. How many do you have?”
“Three,” I said. “We’ll come to Russia again, Yulia. We will come again, all of us, my husband, too.”
“Well, next time you come don’t you even think of staying in a hotel. You stay with me. I have room. I have room. All of you stay with me. You don’t have to worry about anything, about food or anything. You just come, and I’ll feed you and take care of you. I’ll do everything. Just come and see me next time, Plinka.”
“Okay, Yulia.” I wiped my face.
“Oh, dear one,” she said. “If only you knew how much I love you.”
We talked for a half hour. She told me the new baby was from her current husband, who wasn’t living with her. Then she told me he wasn’t really her husband.
“But I really like the baby,” she said. “Haven’t had one in nearly eleven years.”
I promised to write and send pictures of my family.
I couldn’t look at my house the same way anymore, or my pool or my hardwood floor, or my dogs, or the view. I didn’t feel the same about them anymore.
I didn’t feel the same about my life, the life it took me so long to build.
Maybe if I burned wood and smoked some fish and grew nettles in my backyard and got a tub full of warm water that would slowly evaporate and draw some mosquitoes, maybe I could sit in an old wicker chair by the tub and breath in the air and recreate Shepelevo right in Texas.
What could I do? I still had a life, and I had to continue living it because it was the only life I had.
I thought about Anatoly. What if he looked at his own life and found it wanting? What could he do about it?
Here’s the thing. In America, we could do something. We could move, get a new job, divorce the skunk, have another baby, or we could just shake our heads and call in the Prozac prescription before our psychotherapy session on Friday.
In Russia, Anatoly could find his life to be unsatisfactory on every level, yet he could not get another job. He could not moonlight, could not declare bankruptcy. There was no room for another baby, which is why most Soviet couples only have just the one. The abortion clinic is open every Thursday evening in Leningrad, and there is a long line of women snaking out into the street. And even if Anatoly wanted to get divorced, he and Ellie would have to continue to live in the same apartment, because there was nowhere else to move.
There was nothing else for him but the life he had. After a while, after a whole lifetime of having nothing else, most of us would probably look like Anatoly, the lines in our faces etched out by the grim determination to face our days unexamined. It would be the only way we could face them.
That life would have been mine, too, and I would have lived it and shrugged my shoulders just like they did, and put out my good china and crystal when guests came, and every shrug of my shoulders would have meant another gray hair, another line in my face.
That’s how I felt. On the outside, I was in my glorious home, a home in which there were six working, gleaming white toilets, and five bedrooms, one for Radik and Lida, one for Yulia and her baby, one for Anatoly and Ellie, one for Alla and Viktor, and one for me and my family. I couldn’t believe I was thinking like that. I guess you can take the girl out of the Soviet Union but you can’t take the Soviet Union out of the girl.
But inside, I hunched my shoulders and held my breath as I walked into the bathroom on Fifth Soviet that had not been cleaned in years and never would be, and as I squatted down, I knew I was squatting down in my old life. Outside in America, inside in Russia. Who said memory is kind? Memory is merciless. My father was right. All the things you want to remember, Paullina, I want to forget.
Faulkner was right. The past is never dead, he said. It’s not even the past.
When would the Good Witch Glinda be right? When would my old life fade? It was a race. Either my old life would fade, or my new life. The two could not live together side by side.
When we had been in Russia, I would see my father smoking and sometimes I would want to smoke, too. I wanted to start smoking now to relieve the aching, to soothe my soul, to see my papa again as I remembered him when I was small and he was taken away from me.
But because of the Gulag, we moved to America. He made that happen for us. I had to keep remembering that. He learned English in the Gulag to get us out of the Soviet Union. Wasn’t that worth something? At least as much as the soldiers consecrating the earth on which Russians walk. They died so we could have the Fifth Soviet life, the Ulitsa Dybenko life. Their bones and ashes and the metal from the bullets that killed them all in the same ground while above it, nothing grows.
When I thought like this, I thought I might not make it out in one piece.
And I thought like this all the time.
I was a mom. I had kids to take care of. I had a house to run and dinner to make every night for five starving creatures.
So I did what we all do to give ourselves relief, to keep ourselves from going insane. I took my anguish and opened a drawer in my desk and I put it inside and I closed the drawer, and I left the room.
It was the best thing, really: I squeezed the elephant that was Russia into a tiny drawer in my desk and said I would open it when I didn’t have too much to do.
Thank God I had too much to do.
February 1965.
August 1998.
NEW YORK IN AUGUST
Two weeks after I returned from Lening
rad, we flew to New York to visit our families. My grandmother was turning eighty-seven. My father had retired from Radio Liberty and came to New York to spend a few days with his parents before flying off to Maui to begin a new life with my mother. Despite her ill health and the recent surgery, my mother also came to New York for the week.
“So how was your trip?” asked my twenty-year-old sister, Liza, before I had even made it through the front door. We were gathering in our family home on Long Island to celebrate Babushka’s birthday. There wasn’t enough room for me, Kev and the kids in my parents’ four-bedroom house, so we were esconced in a hotel nearby.
“Fine,” I said. “What can I say, Liz . . . It was . . .”
“Why won’t you tell me about it?” she said impatiently. “Papa did.”
“Oh yeah? What did he say?”
“He said it was the best trip of his life.”
“He said that?”
“Well, was it?”
“He said that?”
“Yes. Was it?”
“What can I say . . .” I said.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said my sister.
As I walked in, I saw my mother slowly making her way down the stairs to greet us. I put on my best smile. “Hey, Mama! How are you feeling?”
“As if you care,” she said as she walked past me to hug my kids.
A little later, before dinner, I tried again. “So, Mama, how are you feeling? You look good.”
“How I look is no indication of how I’m feeling. I feel terrible. Absolutely awful. I was dying all alone in the hospital while you and your dearest papochka were gallivanting all over Leningrad.”
I was very eager to show my grandparents my six hundred photos. After all, at ninety-one and eighty-seven, they would not return to Leningrad again. “I can’t wait to see the picture of Lebed!” my grandfather said. “I’m really interested in him.”
Not understanding for a moment, I said, “Who? Oh. Deda, I don’t have a picture of Lebed.”