I was finally anxiously excited about returning to Leningrad.
My mother, who had recently moved to Maui, called me while I was packing and Kevie was bringing me offerings from my purse.
“You know it upsets me when you don’t call me,” she’d said. “I know you’re busy. I know you have children. But Paullina, you can have many, many children. You only have one mother.”
Who could argue with that?
“Your father doesn’t like the title of your new book,” she continued. “The Bronze Horseman. He says it’s like calling a book Romeo and Juliet.”
“No, it isn’t. No one in America has heard of Pushkin’s poem, ‘The Bronze Horseman’.”
“Well, I don’t think you should call your book Romeo and Juliet.”
I paused. “Okay, Mama. I won’t call my book that.”
My mother told me she was jealous of my father and me going to Leningrad together, without her. With a heavy sigh, she added, “Under different circumstances, I would have liked to come with you.”
All I could say was, “Yeah. That would’ve been great.”
Back in 1991, my father, my mother and my sister Liza drove down from New York to Sanibel Island in Florida. I wasn’t invited.
My father said, “Paullina, I would love for you to come, but you and your mother — you know you just keep going at each other.”
When they got back, I asked my sister how the vacation had gone.
She rolled her eyes and said, “You wouldn’t believe it. They had the hugest fight about forgetting their sunglasses by the time we got to the bridge.”
I laughed. The Verrazano–Narrows Bridge was about ninety minutes’ drive from our house. The drive to Florida took two full days.
“They had a fight on the Verrazano over dumb sunglasses?”
“What Verrazano?” Liza said. “They had a fight at the bridge over the Long Island Expressway!”
It wasn’t a bridge; it was an overpass — a mile from our house. They had to turn back to get the sunglasses. Liza said they didn’t speak again until North Carolina.
So when my mother said she wished she could come with us to Russia, I kept my mouth shut.
Forty-five minutes after we boarded, we were still on the ground. It was now an hour past our scheduled departure time. I could have walked from LaGuardia to Kennedy.
The missionaries still had not materialized.
In 1996, with my father’s retirement a few years away, my parents went to Maui on a fact-finding vacation. They’d never been, so they went to find out whether they liked it, and whether it really was paradise on earth like the internet said.
They came back two weeks later, tanned, converted, and the proud if slightly stunned owners of a plush new condo.
No one in the family could understand why they’d done it. My father’s elderly parents were still alive and living in his house on Long Island. My sister, Liza, was nineteen and attending art school in New York. I had three children. Moving to Hawaii would take my parents 5000 miles away from us, a continent and half an ocean away.
Oh but the weather was apparently glorious on Maui. Everything worth having requires some sacrifices, my mother said. There was a price to be paid for fabulous weather, and complete separation from the family was the price she was willing to pay. My father wanted to make my mother happy so he said nothing.
A year later, in 1997, my mother suddenly left my father in Prague where they had been living and moved to the empty Maui condo by herself. Which is, by the way, why she couldn’t come with my father and me to St. Petersburg — she had moved to Maui by herself. Had she remained in Prague with my father, she would have come with us to Russia.
My mother had adjusted dismally to Europe when my dad was transferred in 1992. She became blackly depressed. She was lonely, and my father spent all his days and nights working. The best years of his adult life were the worst years of hers. So she up and went to Maui, where she was now completely by herself and not much happier. Her one consolation was my dad’s impending retirement, when they would finally be able to spend all their time together.
As I attempted to stuff eight changes of clothes into one garment bag, my mother said, “I don’t like Hawaii anymore.”
I stopped packing. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve made a terrible mistake. It’s all my fault.”
“But Mama,” I said. “It’s Hawaii. Paradise on earth. That’s what you told me. You know, if you can’t be happy in paradise, you can’t be happy anywhere.” My mother had been looking for paradise every place she lived.
“That’s the problem,” she said. “It’s sunny all the time. It’s very depressing to have sun like that. You want a rainy day once in a while.”
“I see.” I didn’t really. Texas was sunny. I didn’t want rain.
“Hawaii is a nice place to visit for two weeks, but not to live. I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she repeated. At noon every day, she explained, the winds began. They whipped up red dust from the earth and blew it all around the island: into all the open windows, onto the tables and the sofas and the shelves and the chairs. If she didn’t dust daily, in less than a week she’d have an inch of red dust to deal with.
“Why don’t you close the windows?” I asked.
“Close the windows? But it’s so hot.”
I was afraid to ask. “Don’t you have central air?”
“Central air? What is central air? There is no central air. We have one air-conditioner in the bedroom, but it’s small.”
My father didn’t know about the red dust. My mother was afraid to tell him.
“Didn’t you both notice the red dust when you visited?”
“No. Who notices anything? We stayed in a hotel. The cleaning people dusted everything. You know, if it wasn’t for you and this trip he’s taking with you, he’d be here with me already. I can’t wait until he retires. Then we can suffer the dust together.”
The missionaries finally started filtering through. There had been six announcements, all in Russian, apologizing for the delay.
The muscular blond guy who had talked to my husband in Dallas walked by me, shouting something to one of his friends. When he saw me, he said, beaming, “See? I told you you’d make the plane no problem.”
The plane taxied off at 2:30 p.m.
My head throbbed. My left eye throbbed, even six Advils later.
Aeroflot tried hard to emulate British Airways. But where was the back-of-the-chair TV screen? Where was the beautifully presented four-color menu? Grilled salmon, exquisitely prepared with sautéed onions and Hollandaise sauce, served with new potatoes and string beans.
On Aeroflot they took a more informal approach. The man in blue and gray wheeled his trolley to my seat and barked in Russian, “Shto?” which means, “What?”
I looked at him inquiringly, but before I could ask, he said, “Fish or turkey.”
“What kind of fish?” I asked in Russian.
He shrugged.
“I’ll take the fish,” I said.
A woman came around with the drinks tray.
“Shto?” she demanded.
“Please could I have some tomato juice and some water?”
She nodded, and poured me a plastic cup of tomato juice and another of water. Both were filled only halfway, and both were room temperature. Ice was not offered. Later I was told that they’d give you ice if you asked — but they’d have to go to the back and chip it off the air-conditioning unit. Which, by the way, seemed to be running at full power. No matter how I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders, I could not get warm.
I downed both cups of liquid, but after eating my meal became thirsty again. The fish was cod. I think. It came with rice, peas and carrots, two kinds of salad, carrot cake for dessert, and plastic utensils. When I pressed too hard into a pea, one of the fork tines broke off. I ate the fish. I ate the Caesar salad with vinaigrette — no, vinegar — dressing. I ate the potato, ham and pepper salad in thick mayonnaise.
I ate the small carrot cake, and then I started on the bread roll. I ate as if I fully expected to starve in Russia for the next six days. Further preparing me for the trials ahead, the roll was ice cold and decidedly unfresh. Oh, so the bread was ice cold! I smothered it with unsalted butter and ate it. Russians don’t eat salted butter; they consider that a travesty.
I wondered if the roll of stale cold bread weighed more or less than 125 grams.
When a stewardess in a garish red uniform walked by, I asked in my politest Russian, “Could I get some more water, please?”
“No!” she barked. “Not now. Maybe later.” She walked away.
Later, she did come back with half a cup of tepid water. I drank it gratefully.
After dinner, I had two cups of black tea with sugar. To Aeroflot’s credit, the sugar was not doled out in tiny Western one-teaspoon allowances, but in thick Communist packets of heaped tablespoons. Much better.
Then I slept. It wasn’t easy: the Russian married couple across the aisle were immensely entertaining. They made up for the lack of TV screens. In their sixties, they sat as far away from each other as possible without actually sitting in different rows. The wife could not stop commenting on her husband’s every move.
“Vova, why are you putting your hands there? This isn’t your magazine. Don’t touch it. They’re bringing our food soon.”
Vova pulled out the in-flight magazine anyway.
“Why are you looking at that, Vova? What is so interesting about it?”
“Do you want to get a new suitcase?” Vova asked in his gruffly appeasing voice. His face was lined with resignation.
“Get a new suitcase? Vova, put the magazine down. I’ve had enough of your nonsense. And don’t drag the blanket on the floor.”
After dinner, Vova wanted to have a smoke. Being Russian, he pulled out a cigarette.
“You can’t smoke in here, idiot,” she said. “Didn’t you hear the captain?”
So Vova got up from his seat and, standing in the aisle, lit up.
“Idiot! What are you doing? They told you not to smoke here!”
He shrugged, extinguished his cigarette and sat back down. She wanted him to pass her a blanket, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. “Can you just give it to me? Can’t you see I’m cold? I’m getting a headache from the cold. Just pass it already.”
Kevin had suggested that on the long flight, perhaps I could write a few pages of The Bronze Horseman — the first chapter or two. Yeah, sure. When I woke up, I read Good Housekeeping, Redbook, McCall’s, InStyle, Reader’s Digest, People, and half of Shape before I got bored and finally picked up one of my research books, The 900 Days, an account of the siege of Leningrad. My goal was to finish it in 900 days, not at all a given.
Drifting off, I recalled what I could of Russia.
I was afraid to see it. Shouldn’t some things remain a memory? Memory is so kind. I had left too young to have any regrets. I had not left love behind. We left family behind, but many of our relatives were now with us in America. My father had seen to that. My grandparents, my father’s brother and his family, my father’s oldest friend and his family — my father had given them all an American life.
I didn’t want to go, but I knew I needed to see it with my own eyes. My grown-up eyes. I imagined it would be like gawking at an old boyfriend. You hope he is well, but not too well — not better than you. I wanted Russia to be well.
When we first came to America, I knew little about it, except that there were sharks and they ate people. That I had learned in school. The Americans killed their presidents, and the sharks ate the Americans.
When my father told me that we were going to America, the first question I asked him was, “In America, are there sharks? And will they eat us?”
“No,” he said. “They won’t.”
The second question I asked was, “Do you think we will ever come back?”
He looked at me for a long time before he answered, “Never.” He said it with sadness. We were walking down Nevsky Prospekt and as always he held my hand.
“Maybe when there are no more Communists?”
He shook his head. “Not in my lifetime,” he replied. “Not in yours, either.”
Yet here we both were, proving him wrong. My father isn’t wrong often.
When we had left, in 1973, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an all-powerful monolith, designed to perpetuate the power of the Communist Party, fourteen million members strong. We could choose to become Communists if we wanted to. We could become Pioneers in third grade; then we could become Komsomols or young Communists in tenth grade; eventually, we could get a party card, which meant we could get into all the best stores. Since the rest of us couldn’t get anything in any store at all, party membership seemed pretty appealing. One of my dad’s standard replies when people spoke to him about inequality in the Western world as opposed to Russia was, “Yes, in Russia everybody is equal. Everybody has nothing, so we’re all equal.”
From the day I spat on a statue of Lenin when I was eight, I knew I would not make a very good Communist.
In 1987, nearly fifteen years after we had left Russia, my mother made an unprecedented trip back to visit her dying father. Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power and travel restrictions were relaxed a little. She went by herself, shocking the whole family. My father was afraid to go with her. Perestroika or no, the Communists might throw him back into labor camp and not be as kind this time.
So she went by herself. Two years later, the Berlin Wall came down. After the wall fell, my father, despite all his protestations, made a trip to Russia. Then Communism fell. My father’s friend Anatoly visited us on Long Island, and my Uncle Misha from Moscow came, and finally in 1994, my mother and father went to Russia together for the fifty-year celebration at my father’s alma mater. My father was invited as an honored guest, a man who had left Russia and made a great success of himself.
I am not saying all these events transpired because of my father’s persistent radio broadcasts to the Eastern bloc, but I can’t rule it out.
If there’s one question I’m always asked after I say that I was born in Russia, it’s, “Have you been back?”
During Communist rule, my answer was always a puzzled, “Of course not.”
But after 1991, the answer became more complicated. There were children involved, to be sure. There was a sense of danger, of unstable economic and political times. There were logistical issues — but most important of all, there was the question of me: why would I go back? What did I hope to gain by it? What would be the point?
I was happier thinking I would never go back.
There was a certain romance in being a kind of outcast. A refugee for life. Woman leaves Russia as a young child, forever carries Russia in her soul, but never again sees the place where she was born and raised. Such melodrama!
But now, I had a reason to go back. It was for my book.
I had to see the Leningrad streets where my hero and heroine walked, where they fell in love and said their goodbyes, and fought against a mortal enemy, embodiment of evil, and against the Nazis, too. I had to see the city where people starved to death by the thousands.
I had to see the city where I was born.
During my teenage years, what I would not have given to be less Russian, less foreign. I wanted a pair of new jeans, not flared hand-me-downs hopelessly out of style. I wanted American hair, which meant hair not bushy and not cut at home by my mother. I wanted a coat that was not knitted by my mother.
I wanted to speak the language of the hip kids at school. I wanted to say “Hi,” in English without sounding like a dork.
I carried the feeling of wanting to be an American with me wherever I went.
When I was twenty, I went to England.
The British, smiling their sly, sardonic smiles at me, would ask, “So . . . where’re you from?”
“New York,” I’d say.
Those smiles again.
“Really?
We never would have guessed.”
They would tease me, thinking they were being so clever, mocking my adopted country. “What have Americans ever given us?” they’d say. “Except McDonald’s and herpes?”
I couldn’t believe my luck. To the British, I wasn’t Russian; I was American. In England, I wasn’t from Russia. I was from Noo Yawk.
It took five years of living in London for me to become an American. But despite my best efforts, I knew I was only an American on the surface. I knew that I could make a really good show of it, get a nice American haircut, buy nice American shoes, and a pair of Levi’s. I could drive a Chrysler minivan, and even learn a word like equivocate and use it in a sentence.
Yet regardless of what the English believed, my soul was painfully Russian. It was Russian music that would bring tears to my eyes, and Russian food that made me fullest, and Russian language that would make me feel as if I were home.
Having turned myself inside out to become what I wanted to be but was not, deep down I still craved pumpernickel bread with sunflower oil and fried potatoes with onions. I was still a big mushroom-eating dork.
For twenty-five years, I tried to hide it, but now I was being called home.
We were landing soon. Breakfast was served. We were fed roast beef, which was not considered by Russians to be a perishable food, so it was kept at room temperature. It was served with a 125 gram cold bread roll and a slice of pale tomato.
The captain announced — in Russian first and then reluctantly in English — that the temperature in St. Petersburg was 18 degrees Celsius. I spent five minutes converting to Fahrenheit. We were landing. It was raining.
Mama chasing 15-month-old Plink, February 1965.
PART II
HERO CITY
DAY ONE
Monday
HERO CITY
When we landed at Pulkovo Airport, the missionaries clapped.
All I could see out the window at six in the morning was wet buildings and tarmac. And uncut grass.