Proudly Viktor said, “Oh, Tolya wrote a book, too. Just like you.”
Anatoly demurred. “Hardly a book.”
“No, a book, a book. All right, maybe shorter than Paullina’s book.”
“War and Peace is shorter than Paullina’s book,” chimed in my father, who had overheard.
“But longer than a short story,” Viktor continued.
“A novella, maybe?” I offered helpfully.
“Yes, yes,” exclaimed the twin brothers. “A novella!”
Anatoly lowered his voice. “It’s about the time many years ago your father and I and Ellie met.”
“Oh,” I said. “Nostalgia?” As if I knew what it meant to have lived a life and at sixty look back at yourself when you were twenty, full of youth and hope.
“Yes, nostalgia,” said Anatoly.
“It’s very well written,” said Viktor.
“Oh, Viktor,” said Anatoly. “It’s not up to us to say that. We have an author among us. Her opinion is what’s important.”
“Give it to her, give it to her. Go on.”
“She has no time to read it. She is too busy.”
“I am pretty busy,” I said, “but do give it to me. I’ll be glad to read it.”
“See? What did I tell you? What did I tell you?” exclaimed Viktor. “I told you she’d read it!”
I went back out onto the balcony. There was very little room to stand because it was covered with old chairs, large and small pieces of wood, and dirty chunks of white plastic. My father came out and lit a cigarette. We stood for a minute without saying anything. I went back inside.
We had sat for many hours at the table, and the sun hadn’t moved in the sky. Every time I went outside, it remained directly above our fifth-floor windows.
After the dinner plates were cleared, I casually asked what time it was. I didn’t want to look at my own watch for fear of giving the impression that I wanted to leave.
“Nine o’clock,” Alla said.
“No!” I checked my watch. It was twenty past nine. I looked outside again. The sun was still 60 degrees high in the sky. Didn’t our driver tell me it was going to get dark around ten?
We ate dessert and drank tea out of china cups and saucers. Alla had made a fourteen inch round cake with whipped cream, fresh fruit and rum. Although we had been eating since five in the evening, in a matter of minutes all the cake was gone.
My father started telling everyone our plans for the next day. We were going to Shepelevo.
After Shepelevo, he detailed our schedule for the rest of the week. Everyone at the table had suggestions.
“You’re here to do research on the siege, Plinka,” said Anatoly. “You have to go to Piskarev Cemetery, the memorial to the dead.”
“We’re going there on Wednesday,” my father said. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have it all planned out. You’re not dealing with an infant. You’re dealing with a professional manager of people. I know what I’m doing. Leave it to me.”
“I really want to see your hotel room,” Ellie said. “It’s not every day we get to go to Hotel Europe.”
Yes, of course, come.
Alla wanted to try my famous hotel breakfast buffet with blini and caviar.
Yes, of course, come.
Viktor, Anatoly’s brother, wanted to show me where the music stores were. “I have a car, too, you know,” he said. “Not just your papa’s co-worker. I could take you anywhere.”
Yes, of course.
Anatoly wanted to stroll with me through the streets of Leningrad and talk about the siege.
Yes, of course.
Ellie wanted to come, too.
Yes, of course, come. How about if we go out to dinner?
Everybody wanted to know when I was going to call Yulia, my cousin. Yulia’s father and my father are brothers. I looked at my dad. He was making stern eyes at me and shaking his head a little.
“I’ll call her, um, soon?” I said tentatively. He shook his head.
“Do you want to use the phone?” asked Anatoly. “You can call her from here.”
My dad stepped in. “Paullina, you should go. It’s getting late. And we have a big day ahead of us tomorrow.”
I stood up to leave, got my camera and my purse.
“Paullina,” my father said, “after Viktor drops you off, don’t go walking the streets. All right? Go to your hotel room, relax, get some rest. Tomorrow we go to Shepelevo. All right? Shepelevo, Paullina.” He peered into my face for a reaction.
I widened my eyes. “I know.” I cleared my throat. “Papa, does Viktor have to come with us to Shepelevo?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know he is going to drive us, but what is he going to do when we get there?”
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t know how to explain what I meant. “Well, is there some place for him to go while we walk around, or is he going to walk around with us?”
Papa thought, smoked. “There is no place. He is going to have to come with us. Why?”
I didn’t know how to answer why.
“Papa, Viktor is very nice, but we don’t know him. I don’t know him.”
“So?”
“Well, what if I want to cry? What if we want to cry?”
“Me cry?” He scoffed. “What, are you crazy? And how would we get there without Viktor?”
“Take public transportation.” I perked up. “Like we used to! Remember?” It was important to me to completely recreate my Shepelevo experience.
“Take public transportation in Leningrad?” repeated my father. “You are, you are crazy.” He turned to Ellie. “Ellie, my daughter has gone completely mad.”
“Your Papa is right,” Ellie said brightly. “Why do you have to go to Shepelevo? Stay in Leningrad.”
At ten in the evening I left with Viktor who had returned to take me back to the hotel. He also agreed to drive Alla and her family to their apartment. When we were in his car, I said to him, pointing to the sunlit outside, “Viktor, what do you see?”
“I know, I know,” he said, sheepishly. “I don’t know what I was I thinking. I got confused.”
The white nights were famous; how could Viktor not know that they began on May 20 and ended on July 16, year after year after year? For fifty-seven days and nights, no streetlights were lit in the city so that nothing could detract from the sky and the sun. If someone were to ask me what the weather was like in Dallas in the summer, I would say instantly that it climbed as hot as 105º Fahrenheit, or 40º Celsius. If someone asked me what the temperature was in Dallas at midnight in July, I would say without hesitation, 94º Fahrenheit.
But then I hadn’t lived in Dallas my whole life. Maybe if I’d spent a lifetime in Texas, I wouldn’t notice the heat any more than Viktor noticed the citrus midnight sun.
Alla, her husband and their two children were squeezed into the tiny backseat of the Volkswagen. They didn’t seem so impressed with the white nights either. The rows of tenement houses along the Prospekt of Bolsheviks, which soon turned into the Prospekt of Five-Year-Plans, were dark rectangular giants rising along the wide boulevard, backlit by the sun behind them. Countless satellite dishes hung from their crumbling walls. With different buildings it might have been quite a view. Even with these buildings, it was too spectacular to take for granted.
“Wait,” I said to Viktor when we pulled over to let Alla and her family out. “I want to get out for a second. I have to take a picture.”
“A picture of what?” Alla asked. “It’s only our building.”
“A picture of the satellite dishes.”
“Why? You don’t have satellite dishes in America?”
After I said goodbye to my friend, Viktor and I cruised along the river Neva as the sun set. We neared one of the most famous Leningrad landmarks — Peter and Paul’s Fortress.
The Imperial Russians used it as a prison and a graveyard, burying you in a gorgeous ancient tomb right on the premises by the prison wall
s. The burial service took place in the cathedral, a hundred paces from where you had lived out your miserable days behind bars. The Communists, who didn’t believe in God, turned the place into a museum. Only when Communism fell did Peter and Paul’s Cathedral become active again as a church. So active that the last Tsar of Russia and his family’s remains were going to be interred at Peter and Paul’s on Friday, and my father and I planned to attend.
The cathedral’s golden spire glowed in the sunshine, its slender gilded reflection shimmering on the surface of the Neva. The fortress stood just inside the Neva delta on a tiny man-made island built by Peter the Great to defend the city against northern invaders, like Finland.
Along the Neva, across a narrow canal called the Kronverk Strait was the artillery museum, which is where we stopped next. I wanted to get a picture of the surface-to-air artillery tank that was aimed directly at Peter and Paul’s shining spire.
The picture for some reason looked unfocused through the viewfinder of my Olympus. Before I could utter a “Huh?” I heard a ripping noise coming from the gears inside my camera. I tried again. This time there was a cracking sound. I tried to take a picture but it was no use. The camera had stopped working. What in the world was I going to do? This was the only camera I brought. What a shame. The midnight sun was extraordinary.
Viktor said, “We’ll just have to come back another night.”
“I’ll have to get a camera first,” I said, so upset with myself. How many times does one return, after twenty-five years gone, to the city of one’s birth? Yet to mark the occasion, I had brought the tiniest and silliest of the three cameras I had at home.
I had a beautiful Nikon SLR, and a decent automatic Pentax with a 38-165 zoom. I didn’t bring either of those. Oh no, I brought my ancient weatherproof Olympus, the camera we had bought solely for the purpose of taking with us on vacation with small children, because I couldn’t carry my heavy Nikon and two boys and two diaper bags and push the double stroller at the same time. What was my excuse for not bringing the Nikon to Russia? I had been so conditioned to travel light because the children were heavy that I had come by myself to Russia with nothing. No decent clothes, no decent camera.
Quietly we drove along the river embankment, crossed the Palace Bridge, next to the Winter Palace, and made our way down Nevsky Prospekt. In two minutes we were outside my hotel.
“Viktor,” I asked, “how serious do you think my father was when he told me not to walk around by myself at night?”
By way of answer Viktor said he would park the car and walk with me. I declined. I had wanted to know if it was safe for me to be alone. I didn’t want to walk with Viktor. I wanted to walk alone through Leningrad.
Instead I returned to my room, where I opened my blinds and looked out onto the Italian Gardens. The street was quiet. The trees were covered in shadow. The park was dusky, but the light violet sky above me dispelled the illusion of night.
I spent a long time in the bathroom, taking off my makeup and getting ready for bed. I suddenly remembered my busted camera. From the hotel phone I dialed Anatoly’s number, hoping to talk to my dad, but Ellie said he’d already gone to bed.
“Tell him,” I said, “to pick me up a half hour later because I need to go and buy a new camera.”
Ellie clucked sympathetically. “Are you sure it’s broken? How do you know? Are you sure it’s not supposed to make a ripping grinding noise?” Finally she promised to give my father the message but not before adding, “What do you need a camera for, anyway?”
I briefly considered calling Texas. But by the time I figured out what time it was there — mid afternoon — I was too tired to talk to anyone.
Still I could not sleep. Images of the day kept loudly intruding in my subdued room, like late-night TV, but I couldn’t turn them off. My first day in Russia had come and gone. Turn it off, turn it off. It wasn’t what I had expected. What did I expect? I couldn’t say. Not this.
I tried to look forward to Shepelevo. I had dreamed of returning there, to my idealized childhood haven, for twenty-five years. I had been dreaming of Shepelevo since childhood — in adolescence, maturity, womanhood. Now we were going back. How did that make me feel?
Happier, I decided, than returning to Fifth Soviet.
But not by much.
I was wrong. This trip was not an academic exercise. It wasn’t like the brief research excursion I had made to Dartmouth College, the setting for my second novel Red Leaves. Leningrad meant something to me. The crumbled stucco, the window frames as old as Communism, Ellie’s wallpaper. On this first day, everything was just a vague thread of pain, but I couldn’t grasp its meaning.
I sat on the edge of my bed and stared down at the hardwood floor.
By the time I fell asleep it was after 2:00, the sky a metallic blue, blinds, curtains, windows wide open.
Anatoly’s building on Ulitsa Dybenko. July 1998.
My room at Grand Hotel Europe.
DAY TWO
Tuesday
PENTAX
I slept restlessly. I woke every hour or so, opening my eyes and seeing light outside. What time was it? It seemed perpetual dawn.
The Grand Hotel Europe may have been chosen as one of the “Leading Hotels of the World,” but whoever did the grading obviously didn’t need to wake up in the morning. There was no alarm clock in the room. There was no clock at all, not even on the tiny TV. Because I was getting old and losing my eyesight, I could no longer read the fine gold lines on my analog wristwatch without reading glasses, not even in the white night.
Kevin was my alarm clock. He called at 8:30 in the morning to wake me up. It was 11:30 in the evening his time the night before.
“Can I talk to the kids?”
“Well, it’s nearly midnight,” he said. “They’ve been sleeping for three hours.”
At 9:00 my father called.
“You are not buying a camera in Leningrad,” he said. “What are you, crazy? I loaded new film into my camera. I have a beautiful camera, a Pentax. It’s yours for the rest of the trip. You will take it, and you will give it back to me before you leave. Just don’t forget to give it back to me before you leave.”
“But Papa—”
“That’s all. I will pick you up in a half hour. You will be ready, right? I don’t want to wait. You have to be ready. I’m not even going to come up.”
“Papa?”
“What?” he barked, already done with the conversation.
“I thought you said not to call it Leningrad.”
I got ready in record time. What to wear to Shepelevo? I didn’t know. The night before, I had found a note on my bed from housekeeping: “Good evening. The temperature for tomorrow, Tuesday, July 14, 1998: 18–21ºC or 67–73ºF. Good night!”
I wore khaki shorts, a chenille short-sleeve white top and over it a sleeveless white tunic. My feet I decided to place into my relaxed-fit sneakers, although there had been nothing relaxed-fit about them on the plane. Perhaps they would be more comfortable in Shepelevo.
I ate my buffet breakfast in exactly five minutes. My father did not like to be kept waiting. I had two blini with caviar, fried potatoes with fried mushrooms, and some coffee.
My father was waiting for me on Mikhailovskaya at 10:15. He eyed my short sleeves with disapproval.
“Paullina,” he said. “You’re not dressed for the weather.”
I shrugged. I was fine. It was a cool crisp morning. He was wearing a navy nylon jacket.
“Did you bring a bathing suit?” he asked straight-faced as we walked to Viktor’s car. “To go swimming in the Gulf of Finland?”
“I thought you just said I wasn’t dressed for the weather?”
“What does that have to do with swimming in the Gulf of Finland?”
“Never mind. No, I didn’t bring a bathing suit with me,” I said. “Maybe we can buy one at Gostiny Dvor.”
Papa shook his head. “Sarcasm does not get you my camera. If you’re so clever, where is you
r camera?”
“Broken.”
“Exactly.”
But we did cross Nevsky Prospekt to Gostiny Dvor, which occupied a whole city block. Gostiny Dvor is the premier shopping mall of St. Petersburg. It’s a sprawling two-story yellow stucco building. It was built in 1765. It looks it. We went not to find a bathing suit, but to buy a camera battery, although what I really wanted to buy was a new camera. My father wouldn’t hear of it. “I told you, I’m giving you my camera. I already put film in it.”
While my father bought a camera battery, I gawked at the automatic cameras. The lady behind the counter let me hold a Canon. Viktor stood quietly by my side, and whispered as we left, “That’s how you know big changes have come to Russia. You think they’d ever let you touch a camera in a store in the Communist days?”
“Probably not,” I acknowledged.
“That’s right,” said my father. “Because they didn’t have any cameras.”
Reluctantly I took my father’s Pentax.
TO SHEPELEVO
The memory of Shepelevo is strikingly real, vivid as the yellow velvet lamp on the night table at Grand Hotel Europe. There is a hammock and there are cucumbers and there is water. I row a boat, I taste clover, and all the smells are right. I learn to ride a bike. I see my first — and only — house on fire. I taste warm goat’s milk and warm cow’s milk. I catch my first fish. And my last. I try to catch one with my bare hands in a shallow brook by the gulf. I see the sun rise and set. I read The Three Musketeers, my favorite book. I break my toe, my first toe-break, on the door frame between my room and Yulia’s. I pick blueberries and mushrooms. I kill a hamster — accidentally — by letting him eat old coffee grinds my grandmother had thrown out. I have a fish bone stuck in my throat that no one can get out except my grandfather with his surgeon-sure hands.
Was I ready to see my Land of Oz?
We drove merrily. I say merrily, though Viktor seemed to be uncertain of the way, distrustful of the map and my dad’s innate and remarkable sense of direction. My father kept telling him which way to turn. Viktor complied, but remained unconvinced.