His face showed such disappointment.
“You mean at the Romanov funeral? No, I couldn’t get him. He was hidden by other people.”
“Oh.” My grandfather looked dejected.
“But I have other pictures!” I said brightly.
“Oh?” he said, but nothing else interested him. He looked through them but was not enthusiastic.
I sat with my grandparents at our kitchen table while we leafed through my two albums. “Deda, Baba, look — our lake in Shepelevo. It’s called Gora-Valdaisko.”
“How were the Likhobabins?” asked my grandfather, after a shrug at the lake’s name. “Vasily Ilyich, how was he? Did you ask Yulia why she doesn’t go to the dacha anymore?”
“No, I didn’t ask her.”
Before I could say another word, my grandmother busted in with, “We talked to Yulia, you know.” She stared at me with stern disapproval. “Why didn’t you go visit her? You had time for Schlisselburg. But no time for Yulia?”
“Babushka, please,” I said weakly. “Let’s just look at the pictures.”
When I showed them the pictures of my grandfather’s cucumber supports in the garden in Shepelevo, my grandmother said, “No, they’re not his. Yulia must have built them.”
“Yulia built them? What are you talking about? She didn’t build them. She doesn’t go there. They’re Dedushka’s.”
“That can’t be,” she said, shaking her head. “It was twenty years ago.” She looked at the pictures. “They can’t still be his.”
“Babushka!”
My father walked by, and glancing at the picture said, “Of course they’re his. As if Yulia would build something.”
It was impossible for us to believe that these lives, houses, mailboxes, blueberries, brown doors, hinges, concert halls, buses, buildings, cucumber supports could all be the same. Our lives had changed so much: how could Russia be at standstill? How could it be so frozen in time, as if on permanent pause?
Looking at me dourly, my grandmother said, “Why did you take those things you took from our dacha? I think you were wrong to take them. Like you stole them. Yulia might need them, and you took them without even asking her.”
“Babushka!” I exclaimed. “What are you talking about? Yulia abandoned that house.”
“Well, maybe she will need Dedushka’s notebooks about when and how to plant vegetables.”
“His notebooks on weather patterns in 1978?”
“Maybe,” she said gruffly.
I had no response, except to shake my head in amazement. I could see she was upset with me. I was upset with myself. I said nothing.
“Listen, Plinka,” my grandfather said. “This relates directly to your trip to Shepelevo. When I was in the army during the war, I went to visit my brother Semyon, who was serving on the Volkhov front as an aviation engineer.”
“Where were you?”
“On the Western Front,” he said. “When I came to his airstrip, I had a little trouble getting in to see him because the border patrol kept me for a long time near the checkpoint, making sure my passport and credentials were valid.”
“How long?”
“How long what?”
“How long did they detain you?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like two days. It was probably two hours. Apparently an airplane had been recently stolen from the airport hangar by an army man who wanted to eat. If you were a pilot with a plane, the army gave you more food than if you were just a soldier. So the guy stole a plane to barter for some food, and because of his hunger, I was held up at the checkpoint.
“The ironic, idiotic Soviet thing,” Dedushka continued, “and this is the part that relates directly to your Shepelevo experience, was that through this airport ran an unpaved road by which all the locals walked on foot to the fields and forests to pick berries. Paullina, the road ran directly through the airport, and they walked on this road by the dozens and no one stopped them. But at the entrance to the airport, I was stopped for several hours.”
“Deda, how far away from the checkpoint was the road the people walked on?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Five meters.”
I laughed.
“That’s Russia for you,” said my grandfather, the former chief engineer for the Soviet shipbuilding industry, a mathematician, a genius, a soldier, a blockade survivor.
During Babushka’s birthday dinner it quickly became obvious that my father had already told all the stories about our trip; there wasn’t much for me to do, except pass my photographs around and clean up. Everyone asked me what I thought of Russia. Did I think St. Petersburg was beautiful? Yes, I said.
My father had told them about the Romanovs, the Diorama Museum, the metal doors of the toilet, the caviar I ate every morning.
It was a mixed relief for me not to have to recount to my grandparents, to my sister, to my mother, who blessedly didn’t want to hear anything at all, things I couldn’t put in perspective for anyone — most of all me.
And my family didn’t want my perspective. What they wanted was for things to go back to the way they were before I left: peaceful, untroubled, unexamined, nice, nice, nice. While all I felt was shame. Profound shame and regret and fear. Put that into perspective.
“Did we have a good trip, eh, Paullina? Did we?” my father asked.
What could I say?
“Yes, Papa,” I said. “We did.”
He wasn’t writing a book. But he told the stories. That’s what life’s twists represented to my father. Another good story to be told over vodka and herring and potatoes and cigarettes, with a raptly listening and appreciatively laughing audience. He could barely get through an experience before he would start forming the story in his head. Sometimes in the middle of the experience he was already thinking how he was going to tell it so that it would be the funniest, the cleverest, the most touching story he could create.
Feelings, those were extra. Actual pain, sentimentality, nostalgia, that was all extra. And it wasn’t what he was interested in. He was not interested in his own feelings. He was interested in ours. He wanted us to feel something when he told his story to us. Privately, he may have been tremendously affected. I know he was. But publicly, he simply made every facet of his life a story and waited for his enraptured audience to react.
My father affected everyone who knew him. All his friends, all his colleagues adored him, said he was the brightest, the funniest storyteller they knew. His skills as a storyteller were legendary.
Because he was also a romantic, during the birthday dinner he told the story of our walk through Leningrad and hearing the street musician play “Speak Softly Love” from The Godfather on his saxophone.
I waited for him to finish. “That’s so interesting, Papa, because what I also remember from that evening is some homeless drunk striking up a friendship with you and then following us down the lovely Griboyedov Canal, reciting the same Pasternak poem over and over.”
My father shook his head. “You would remember that, wouldn’t you?” We laughed.
Sometime during dinner, I stood up, raising my vodka glass and was interrupted by my Russian family seven times before my mother said, “What do you want to say, Plinka?”
And my father, knowing already, said, “That she likes me. That she likes me very much.”
“I want to drink to my father,” I began.
My mother said, “What about me? What about me?”
“Alla, could you wait?” my father said.
“What about drinking to me?” she repeated. “Who gave birth to you? Who taught you how to read?”
“Who got us out of Russia?” I quietly asked.
My mother sneered bitterly. I raised my shot glass higher and said, sighing, “But first, of course, let us drink to my mother. Had she not given birth to me, I would not be standing here tonight.”
“That’s right,” she said, nodding. “That’s exactly right. You don’t even know how right you are.” With abortio
n being the primary form of contraception in Communist Russia, the average Soviet woman had anywhere from four to eight abortions in her lifetime.
“I know, Mama,” I said. “I know how right I am.”
We drank. I poured myself another vodka. “Now I’d like to drink to my father.” My mother managed to keep quiet. “When we were in Leningrad, sometimes I looked at Papa,” I began, “and wondered how in the world did he ever get us out of Russia? Yet, he did. He learned English in prison because he knew with absolute certainty that without English we would have no hope. He wanted to go to America; he had known that for a long time. If we came here, we might fail, but without his English, we would fail for sure. We’d be part-time hot dog vendors on the streets of Brighton Beach, or driving cabs, complaining about the government not taking better care of us.
“Furthermore,” I continued, my voice cracking, “I raise this glass to him, because if not for him, we would still be in Russia, living the dead-end life of Alla and Viktor, of Anatoly and Ellie, of Radik and Lida. Papa gave Liza and me a future. With his English, he pulled us out of Russia,” I said. “Tonight, I drink to him for giving life to my sister and me.”
We choked up, even Papa. My mother stood up and stormed outside.
When she came back she said to my sister, “Paullina doesn’t love me.”
“What are you talking about, Mama?” exclaimed Liza. “She is your daughter. What are you talking about? You’re crazy.” That’s my twenty-year-old sister.
When I was still in Texas, my grandparents kept saying on the phone how they couldn’t wait to talk to me about Russia. But when I got to New York, they didn’t talk to me about Russia at all.
I thought it was a product of too many people, too much food, too much to do. So one night, at Kevin’s suggestion, I left my family at the hotel and came at 10:30 in the evening to talk to my grandparents by myself. My parents had gone to the movies.
When I arrived, my grandmother was busy watching a Mexican soap opera translated into Russian. My grandfather — an engineer, a shipbuilder, a war hero, a chess player, a genius — was too embarrassed to watch it in front of me, so he made tea and we chatted idly about nothing, biding time until my grandmother was finished. For two hours she didn’t get up from her armchair. It was well after midnight when she shuffled into the kitchen, and we looked over my photos from Leningrad again and bickered about which ones they could have copies of and why I couldn’t give them any of my negatives. I left at one. We had not spoken about Russia.
My father’s old friend Mark came to have dinner with us one night and while he ate he asked me what I thought of Russia. I shrugged. I said by way of reply, “Have you gone back?” He had been in America with his family since 1977. My father got him and his family out. They lived with us for months when they first arrived in New York. Shaking his head, with his mouth full of my father’s garlic shrimp, Mark said, “I don’t want to go back. I’m not interested in seeing it. It hasn’t changed. I left because I didn’t want to live that life. Why should I go back and see it’s all the same?” He looked at me. “And I can see by your face, it is all the same, isn’t it, Paullina?”
My mother, 1958. She is eighteen.
RADIK REVISITED
One evening, not long before we returned to Texas, my mother was leafing listlessly through my photos and stumbled upon pictures of Radik and Lida. Holding a picture in her hand, she jumped up to run to my father, then sat back down and said, “Is this Lida? Paullina, do you know? Is this Lida?”
“Of course I know,” I said. “It is Lida.”
“Oh my God,” my mother said. “She got so old. She got so old. Oh my God.”
Having finished his smoke, my father came back inside, and my mother shoved the picture of Lida into his face.
“This is Lida, Yura?”
“Yes,” he said, taken aback by my mother’s fervor.
“Yura, do I look this old? Oh my God, do I look like this?”
He moved the picture farther away from him, and stepped away from my mother. “No. Stop it, Alla, what are you talking about?”
My mother slumped down, defeated by the photograph. “Lida was never very beautiful,” she said. “But this just shocks me. Shocks me.”
“Not beautiful like Radik?” I teased her.
“Oh,” she said. “No one was beautiful like Radik.”
I smiled. “Of course not.”
She stared at a photo of him. “He got old. He’s lost some of his shine. Still, he’s not bad, right?”
“Right.”
My mother told me that when Papa and she first met, he told her about Radik.
“During or after Dzhubga?”
My mother scrutinized me. “After,” she said slowly. “But before we were married. And what do you know about Dzhubga, anyway?”
“I saw you,” I said. “Saw you being painted. You were so beautiful.”
“I was, wasn’t I?” She looked so sad when she said it. “Beautiful and young.”
“Tell me what Papa said about Radik, Mama.”
Sighing, she continued, “Your Papa, well, he was not your Papa yet, said, ‘I’ll introduce you to all my friends, but one of them, you will stop loving me, leave me and go with him, because he is just incredible.’” My mother had assured my father that that would never happen, but when she saw Radik for the first time, she told me that her breath did stop.
My grandfather chimed in. “Radik,” my grandfather said, “was the most handsome man you ever saw. Men and women both thought so. You could not stop looking at him. You couldn’t even if you wanted to.”
“Well, he is old now,” my grandmother said.
“He may be old, but Babushka, you didn’t see what I saw during dinner at his house, the way the whole table could not take their eyes off him,” I said.
Always a cynic, my grandmother snorted dismissively.
My father, embarrassed by such a personal discussion of his friend, mumbled, “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”, and went outside to smoke.
I was amused by how unforgiving older people could be of the aging process in other older people.
Particularly of the aging process in Radik.
As if, in their secret souls, they were all happy that even a star like Radik’s had dulled, that old age had not spared him either. We were all beautiful when we were young, they seemed to say, but we got old, and he got old, too. Thank God.
I ventured, “Well, I didn’t know Radik when he was young —”
“Oh, you wouldn’t have been able to resist him,” interjected my grandfather.
I repeated, “I didn’t know him then, but I think that for a sixty-year-old man, he still looked pretty good.”
My mother studied his picture for a long time.
“Not bad,” she finally said. “But not like before.”
Oh, the pitiless old age.
February 1965.
SIX HUNDRED PHOTOS
I had shot sixteen rolls of film. Six hundred photos. To reflect on the events of six days, that’s a hundred pictures per day. Surely that was enough to show what I had seen, to show a small measure of what I had felt. But I found that the pictures subtracted from rather than enhanced my memories.
Each photo, taken at an average speed of one-sixtieth of a second. During the whole trip, the shutter was open for a total of ten seconds. Ten seconds out of six days. They conveyed nothing: not the pain of Shepelevo, not the sadness of Fifth Soviet, not the crumbling stucco, not the marble halls of the Hermitage. And what about all those seconds, those minutes, those hours I didn’t take pictures of? What happened to them? I regretted not taking a photo of Ellie’s floors. I regretted not taking pictures of any of the toilets I had visited or avoided. Why didn’t I take a photo of the outside of the Diorama Museum or of Mariinsky Bridge? Where was the mezzanine of the Grand Hotel Europe? Where were my blini and caviar? Where was the smell of Shepelevo? The smell of the metro? Where did the six days go?
They sat in my
chest. They filled me from morning to night, and when we came back to Texas I was so glad I had my wood blinds and my Irish Cream walls and my satellite television service, so I didn’t have to close my eyes and see Shepelevo, my old apartment, of the other life that was mine. No, let me swim in my pool instead, to get my heart away from Leningrad.
I still couldn’t look at my house.
There was no place for me there, but there was no place for me here, either.
Blink and you’ll miss it. Forget. Regret. Sitting on a plastic picnic blanket by Lake Ladoga, pouring salt onto fresh tomatoes from a folded napkin, eating bologna and Russian bread. Where was my picture of that?
And the smell of fresh water from the canals of Leningrad. All right, fresh may not be the best word for it — but the scent flowed through the city and rose up to meet me wherever I went, attaching itself permanently to my insides.
Russia was like a hard dream from which I could not wake up. When I was young I used to have a recurring nightmare in which I was being chased by a cow down the railroad tracks. Every time I turned around, the cow was behind me. I’d speed up, but I ran with a dreamer’s ineptitude, tripping, falling, slowing down. Then I’d turn around, and there was the cow, just a few railroad ties behind me.
“Kevin, what am I?” I asked him one evening after the kids had gone to sleep. “When you have to describe me to people or think of me in your own head, how do you describe me?”
“Well, first and foremost, you’re my wife.”
“Okay, and then?”
“Then you’re . . . well, you’re . . .”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “I can’t describe myself either. What am I? Am I an American? Am I Russian?”
“Yes!” he said triumphantly. “I got it. You’re a Russian-born American author who also happens to be my wife and the mother of my children.”
“Okay, good,” I said.
I decided I had lived in too many places. When we first came to America, we lived in Woodside, Queens, then in Kew Gardens, Queens, then in Ronkonkoma, Long Island. I lived at Stony Brook University, in one dorm, then another dorm, and another dorm, then in a house in Port Jefferson, then at a university in England. I lived in an apartment in Lawrence, Kansas, back in another dorm in England, and another dorm in England. A house in Ilford, a house in Birmingham, a house in Dagenham. Back in the States, I lived in one apartment in Forest Hills, another apartment in Forest Hills, a third apartment in Forest Hills, then a house in Lake Ronkonkoma, a rented house in Texas, and finally here, in my yellow stucco home from our own original design. That’s nineteen different places since we left Russia. About one a year.