Six Days in Leningrad

I hadn’t eaten breakfast — my blini and caviar — in three days. Who had time for breakfast when I couldn’t even see Yulia? I didn’t have time for blinchiki either. They lay in the hotel room refrigerator until I grabbed them at the last minute to bring them to Viktor. I carried my overstuffed garment bag downstairs myself. Conveniently, I was already dressed, with my day-old make-up a suit of armor on my face. My stomach felt better, while the rest of me felt worse, but there was no time to feel anything, because I was late, it was 7:30 and I hadn’t checked out yet.

Viktor was waiting for me outside in the rain.

“Take this,” I said, handing him the blinchiki. He chivalrously took my suitcase first, then he took the blinchiki.

“You want to share them?”

“No, I want you to have them all.”

We passed by the Triumphal Arc on the Moscow Prospekt, by Moscow Square lined with government buildings of the old Communist Party, punctuated by a statue of Lenin in the center, we drove past The Monument to the Heroes of the Defense of Leningrad.

“We should stop here,” said Viktor. “So you can see. It’s a very nice monument.”

I saw that from the car. It was raining. Each dreary drop of rain was falling into my heart. I said, “We’ll stop for just a sec. But we really must hurry Viktor. It’s eight.”

“I know,” he said, as we got out of the car. In the rain we walked up the steps to the eternal flame in front of the sculpted victors — soldiers, workers, women.

Silently we got back in the car, but before we took off, Viktor said, “I have a small gift for you. I know you were looking for some Russian music. I got you this.” He pulled out a CD. “It’s all Russian marches. I think you’ll like it. Listen to it on my CD player while we drive. Here are the earphones.”

I was afraid I was going to cry. “Thank you, Viktor.”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a small gesture.”

Yesterday, before we got to Radik’s, my father told me to give Viktor a Dallas T-shirt for his small son’s birthday but when we got to Radik’s, he promptly forgot and gave the T-shirts to someone else.

I asked him if my father had given him that T-shirt, and Viktor shook his head. Shaking my own head, I said, “Viktor, after you drop me off, please call my dad and casually ask, ‘Yuri Lvovich, remember you promised my son a T-shirt?’”

Laughing, Viktor said, “No, it will torture your father his whole remaining life.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “That’s the point. What did my father say to you at Lake Ladoga when I desperately needed to go to the bathroom and you were driving over potholes the size of T-rex footprints? He said drive a little faster, Viktor. Drive a little faster. He doesn’t mind torturing me. In fact, he revels in it.”

Viktor laughed.

Closing my eyes, I put on the earphones. “Tell him Viktor. Call him.”

The rest of the ride to Pulkovo I listened to Russian military march music. I would open my eyes and see Russia, and then close them again, retreating into the cymbals of Soviet war.

Pulkovo International’s tiny parking lot was full. We pulled in to a taxi rank spot.

“Write down your address for me, Viktor, will you? I want to send your kids some T-shirts from Texas.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “You absolutely don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t have to. I want to. Please.”

He wrote down his address for me but forgot his zip code. “Viktor, you don’t know your own zip code?”

Smiling sheepishly, he said, “You know, my wife handles all that stuff. She knows everything.”

“Well, where is she when you need her?”

“Call me for a sec from Texas, can you do that? Call me at home or at the office, and I’ll give it to you. Better yet, don’t send anything.”

“I’ll call,” I promised.

I opened the car door and got out. He went to get my bag out of the trunk. He looked into my face in the rain and said, “Paullina, you don’t want to leave, do you?”

I wanted to say not really, but I was filling up, so I said nothing, just shook my head and looked at the ground.

“You should’ve come for longer,” he said.

As if that would have solved anything.

“Maybe next time?”

“Maybe.” I smiled. “Let’s go. We’re so late.”

The airport inside buzzed like Dallas-Fort-Worth on a Sunday afternoon. It was swarming, positively amass with people.

Everyone inside looked as if they wanted only one thing — to get on my flight. Moreover, they behaved as if they wanted to get on my flight ahead of me. There were long lines everywhere and a lot of pushing and shoving. It was 8:20 in the morning. My flight was scheduled for 9:50.

Patiently Viktor and I stood and waited, I wasn’t sure for what. To find out what to do next? Good way to describe me too.

“Viktor, what are we waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” he said calmly. “They’ll let us know.”

“Who’s they? And when?”

“I don’t know.”

We waited for thirty minutes. Finally I understood: we were waiting so that my bag could pass through a metal detector control point while a man impassively studied my customs declaration, decided to keep it, and waved me on.

Hurriedly I said good-bye to Viktor and rushed through the metal detector.

“I’ll send you the T-shirts,” I called out to him one last time, 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 looked at me as if I had just insulted his mother. “You go stand over there,” he snapped. “In the check-in line.”

I got in the check-in line.

In front of me on the digital display board, the end of check-in time flashed on the LCD screen as 9:10 AM. I glanced at my watch. It was 8:50.

9:10 came and went, in Leningrad, Russia.

The line did not move. I stood and watched two enterprising Russian men wrap suitcases in plastic wrap for twenty dollars to protect the luggage. 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 I would have to use to cut through the plastic wrap, and what that sharp and pointed instrument was going to do to my bag.

I looked up at the LCD display that now boldly proclaimed that the end of check-in time was 9:40 AM. It dawned on me that the end of check-in was simply 30 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 nylon pants and shirt and she had absurd drooping big breasts. That’s not what got on my nerves. What got on my nerves was that she kept inching her way in front of me and trying to use her ridiculous breasts to influence the passport checker to let her check in her luggage right now, even before her passport was stamped.

Despite her boobs, he was not swayed.

It was now 9:40 AM. I looked up at the LCD display. The end of the check-in time for my flight had completely disappeared and the display now carried a 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 could have been thinking. That all the smokers would be behind me, far away? That the non-smoking air would fill my close-to-non-smoking seat?

She handed me my boarding pass. It had no gate number on it.

“What gate?”

“Gate?”

“Gate, yes. Where is the plane departing from?”

“Oh.” She waved me over to the central terminal. “Ask passport control. They’ll tell you.”

My brain cloudy, I went and waited on the passport control line so they could stamp my passport and take my visa.

I waited fifteen minutes. It was 9:55 AM. “It’s five minutes past my scheduled flight time.” I said to the passport lady.

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” She looked at something 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 don’t know. Go and check the departure and arrival board. It should be up there. You have a few minutes. Don’t worry.”

“It’s past departure time,” I said. “They’re holding the flight, right?”

She shrugged. “I hope so.”

I had to go through yet another metal detector, this time for my carry-on luggage.

I went to the off-duty shop because my father had told me to. He 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.

Eat 600 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 600 rubles. Ellie lived on 360 rubles a month. Six hundred rubles was almost two months of living expenses for her. I could buy six ounces of Beluga for six hundred rubles. An ounce for a hundred rubles. Sixteen dollars. I opened the case to take a jar, but I couldn’t stop thinking of Ellie who kept my mother’s empty bottle of Trésor on her nightstand. Knowing my mother, I bet she didn’t even buy the Tressor for Ellie but gave her one of her gently used dozen since she had eleven more at home, fuller and newer.

I closed the refrigerator. Somehow it didn’t seem right that I should buy six hundred rubles worth of caviar when I hadn’t bought a “I’ve been to St. Petersburg” T-shirt for my husband and kids.

Rushing, I bought four T-shirts. I didn’t get myself a souvenir. Time was ticking. It was after ten. I couldn’t be sure how long the flight would be “held.” Neither could anyone else, I suspected. After the T-shirts, I still had over 300 rubles left. This duty-free would be the last place I could spend the Russian money.

I looked at the caviar one last time and instead decided to buy a bottle of Trésor perfume for Ellie.

I would still have 200 rubles left.

I couldn’t spend another second thinking about it anymore.

As I was paying for the Trésor, I asked the duty free clerk when my flight was. She looked at her schedule. “Nine fifty.” She eyed me with some alarm. “I think you’d better hurry.”

It was 10:03 AM.

I ran out of the shop to the flight information board.

The board had information about other flights, just not mine. I wanted some mention, any mention, that a flight such as mine even existed. I rushed to a representative sitting behind the metal detector and asked him. He spoke no English and refused to help.

Don’t ask me why I didn’t ask him in Russian. Because I thought, what if I didn’t speak any Russian? My husband doesn’t. My friends don’t. What would they do? I don’t know why I felt now was the time to stand on linguistic principle, but the fact of the matter was I didn’t ask him in Russian. Besides, some Russians only respect an English-speaking person, though clearly not he.

I went to another Pulkovo employee. He said in Russian, “No English.” I gave up and asked him in Russian.

He replied, in his most apathetic Russian “Dunno.”

“Who knows?” I asked feverishly.

“Dunno,” he said.

Seconds later, he lazily pointed to the flight information board. “Ask over there. People are walking there.”

That was without question.

People were certainly walking. None of them were actual representatives of an international airport, Russian or English speaking. Not that I didn’t try to ask them in my desperation. Needless to say, no one had any idea that there even was a LED–JFK flight.

I ran up the escalator. I would describe my state by now as three notches above frantic. I flew up the escalator. There was no sign of any gate information. I ran down the escalator, past the metal detector and finally asked someone at passport control.

“Oh, you’re on the New York flight!” the woman exclaimed.

I didn’t like the panic in her voice.

She talked quickly into the walkie-talkie. “Sergei! We have another one!” Then to me, “Hurry, hurry, upstairs to the left.”

I airlifted myself up the escalator, sprinted through double doors on the left. At last a hundred yards down the hall I saw a small sign above an actual gate “New York.”

There was no one at the gate. 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 to 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. Didn’t the check-in woman tell me I’d be sitting at the start of the smoking section?

I felt in Russian, I did everything else in English. Right then, 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 sat down and the electricity switched off. I find it a bad sign when the electric power goes off on an airplane waiting for take off to fly four and a half thousand miles. Don’t they need electricity for their black box or something?

By 10:20 AM we still hadn’t taken off. The captain informed us that the baggage handlers were having a difficult time loading all the luggage onto the plane. Apparently the crew had underestimated the quantity of luggage on an international flight from St. Petersburg to New York. The baggage personnel needed five or ten extra minutes to load the luggage.

Outside my oval window was incessant, driving rain. Not driving the people loading the luggage to move any faster, of course…

The captain helpfully announced it was 10:30 in the morning, and 55°F; already the day seemed two hours too long and 30 degrees too cold.

The young man in the aisle seat next to me was dark, extremely hirsute, and busy drawing in a notebook. Then he was busy snoring, with his hairy elbow on my armrest. I longed for my own armrest. But at least I had a window. When he woke up he chain-smoked.

When I had asked to be put at the beginning of the smoking section, it didn’t occur to me that the man sitting next to me would smoke. Duh, I thought, coughing up nicotine into my sleeve.

I wished I had Viktor’s zip code. I wanted to send his sons T-shirts. But I didn’t have it, and to get it I would have to call him. Months would go by, the impetus would fade, and then, instead of my father, it would torture me the rest of my life that I promised and didn’t deliver. I knew we should have told my father.

The artsy guy with black eyes sitting next to me smoking was deeply irritating me, so I excused myself, and he had to get up and move his cigarettes that fell and his charcoal pencil that smudged his seat and his coat and notebook. The lighter dropped under the seat. I smiled sweetly as I squeezed past him and went to wait by the OCCUPIED lavatory.

Between Russia and America

When I came back to my seat, I read Anatoly’s novella.

Anatoly thought his wife was beautiful. She was, and still is.

I was only interested in my mother and father, but there was disappointingly little of them in the book. The story, if you could call it that, had only one main character, and that was Anatoly’s heartbreaking nostalgia for a youth long gone. Everything else was subordinated to this thread of loss for the past that eventually wound into my own throat too.

Though Anatoly had told me that he and my father were both in love with Ellie when they first met, I would not have gleaned it from his book. It was too impenetrable for such clarities 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 that only from what Anatoly had told me; these details were murkily invisible in the pages I read. What was clear though, absolutely perspicuous, was Anatoly’s jealousy about the episode to this day, some forty years later.

I put his manuscript down and closed my eyes. Maybe youthful hurt never mends. How can it not? How can it not mend? How can you still feel pain about a forty-year-old incident?

Bet I know how. I have my own youthful hurts, and though they don’t feel raw anymore, I still carry them with me.

As I carry Leningrad with me. I carry Leningrad with me in a little box near my heart. The smell of Shepelevo, my bed, my mother and me having dinner alone, my father taking me to the movies on Saturdays as if I were a child of divorce. I have that inside me.

Shepelevo is with me whenever I walk outside and smell the air. 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. Texas carries no history for me.

In New York, on wet days, I smelled Leningrad. And in Fort Wilderness in Disney World, lying in the hammock by Bay Lake, I smelled fresh water and pine cones that momentarily would remind me of Shepelevo and my box would be opened. Then we would leave. I ache to smell it everywhere I go.

The smell of childhood.

In Russia I didn’t live a life of constantly wanting something I didn’t have, of wanting something else, something new. As Sinead O’ Connor wisely wrote, I do not want what I haven’t got. I just lived and breathed in the air. I was a child with no dreams. Except for France and D’Artagnan, but that’s another book.

That’s what Russia and Shepelevo meant to me. I wanted the child back in my heart. I wanted the sunrise and the fishing on the gulf. I wanted to be happy again, not ashamed, not anxious, not worried about money and jobs, or about how to pay for this and how to live without that. I wanted to ride my rusted wobbly bike and smell the fish and the pines and believe I was lucky.

Too much time to think; the last thing I needed. I opened my eyes and turned to my smoking companion.

The stewardess gave us a hot wet napkin and beef or salmon.

The scruffy artist next to me shook my hand, announcing he was Andrew.

Andrew was a chain-smoking 24-year-old unkempt artistpaintersculptor with fingers permanently blackened by his charcoal pencil or tar from the cigarettes; I wasn’t sure.

He offered me a cigarette. “No, thank you,” I said, suppressing a judgmental cough. He smiled. “Your bad luck to be sitting next to a chain-smoker, huh?”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

Andrew was Catholic and an art dealer, not that the two had some kind of conjoined significance. He was the middle son of an Atlanta businessman, engaged to a Russian woman named Olga, who apparently spoke perfect English. Andrew told me he didn’t care about money and was eventually going 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 reluctantly returning to his art gallery in the hated U.S. “Russia is so pure,” he said. “There is no pretense.”

“Well, they can’t afford it.”

“Yes, but that’s the beauty of it. The people have to make up their own reality.”

I laughed, perhaps too loud. He looked at me very seriously, and then half-chuckled. “I was totally serious.”

“Of course you were.”

Andrew loved Michaelangelo (“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 the 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 of here. 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 people just don’t understand art. They don’t understand 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 never forget to look at it as you walk by, then it’s art. Forget the 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 after a dream with a hurting neck. I dreamt about giving my cleaning lady a raise. I woke up groggy at 10:20 in the evening Leningrad time.

Time to come home to Grand Hotel Europe.

They fed us a second time on the flight. Oily fish. Ham, same salad we had for dinner, same little rolled-up cake, poundcake with chocolate fondant. Coffee. Ginger ale for my funny tummy.

Actually they forgot to feed Andrew and me. They were going around with coffee when Andrew and I looked at everyone else eating, and went, huh. There was a grumbling 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 couldn’t believe how clean the toilets were, how they flushed, how soft the toilet paper was. This was in Kennedy airport, for God’s sake, where thus I marveled.

Made beautiful time getting to LaGuardia. Almost, almost made the earlier flight to Dallas, but didn’t get to the clearly marked gate fast enough. It was okay. I had time to sit and stare out the LaGuardia window. Three hours to sit and stare.

I sat at the airport Marketplace, having spent $40 on GNC pills and a pair of fantastic Walkman earphones. I was back home.

Everyone spoke English.

I spent $20 on a kids travel CD and another $10 on Chinese food of dubious quality. I was happy to be back in America. In the Russian duty-free I couldn’t spend $70. Here in LaGuardia I spent $100 in five minutes.

I wished I had time to go see my grandparents on Long Island.

WPLJ played Nimrod’s Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) from their Green Day album. Not exactly in the Russian spirit but the song got stuck in my throat.

Sitting again.

Before I left Russia Kevin told me that lightning had hit our Texas house, or near it, and knocked out our phone lines. Our babysitter instantly called our construction supervisor Phil. When our customer service contract expired with the builder what would we do without Phil at our beck and call?

Point was, I couldn’t call home; the phones weren’t working. It felt all wrong, that any part of our modern house should not function.

In Leningrad during the war, in December 1941, the authorities had to turn off the electricity. Russian winters are brutal and dark. Without light, the winter of 1941 must have been unbearable. The only thing that took people’s minds off the darkness from morning to night was the relentless hunger and 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 was soup, they could have heated it up on the ceramic stove. There was no soup, and there was no firewood either. The Leningraders burned furniture and their clothes, they ripped apart abandoned homes in the villages to make firewood. Then they started cutting down trees in Leningrad. The city council by emergency decree protected the Summer Garden, but everything else was cut down and burned.

After the war, new trees were planted, but few. I walked through patches of Leningrad where there was no vegetation at all, like on the Neva embankment. There was only the wondrous river with its granite walls and the asphalt sidewalk. Nothing green. Now I knew why they had burned all the trees. To keep warm.

That’s what I needed. A little Russia. Every time I thought how hard it was to live without a phone for three days, I could think of Russia. We should all be so lucky as to carry a little Russia inside us in a box near our heart.

I stared out the window in LaGuardia, 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, just enough to get the grass cut. This fiduciary allocation was not superceded by air traffic control, or electricity or payroll. There was money left over to get the grass cut.

In Russia, there was no money at the grass level. And no money to fix the roads, to renovate the buildings, to clean up the Neva, to filter the water, to plant trees.

Or to fix the broken stucco on their walls, or get the garbage out of the courtyards of the Winter Palace or even polish the lions over the palace windows that didn’t face the street. Hell, there was not enough money to pay their own people or to replace the metal doors on their toilets.

The grass has never been cut in Shepelevo. Maybe the grass has never been cut in Sabinal, Texas, or Yazoo, Mississippi, but I doubt it. In any case, I didn’t grow up in Sabinal or Yazoo. I grew up in Leningrad, I grew up in Shepelevo, and I wish their grass were cut and their fences repaired, and their houses not held together by cardboard.

The sight of poverty — stucco falling off the walls, cracked glass panes, rotting window frames, loose doors, holes in the roads. People walking by the new stores with Western merchandise and having not a kopeek to buy the new mascara from Revlon, let alone Lancôme.

Gostiny Dvor, Leningrad’s premier shopping mall had never been renovated. Actually, that was not exactly true. The block that faced Nevsky Prospekt had indeed been repainted a delightful yellow. But as soon as you turned the corner on Mikhailovskaya, 80 years of Soviet rule faced you. Gostiny Dvor looked like an outdoor flea market in the poorest part of Tampa, Florida, but less clean.

Who was going to restore Gostiny Dvor?

Who was going to cut the grass in Shepelevo? And with what?

My sandpaper eyes hurt from being up, from reading, from being alive.