Six Days in Leningrad

An uneventful American Airlines flight back to Dallas, a flight marked only by my ravenous hunger. The entire platter of Southwestern chicken plus two cookies was gone. I didn’t know how I kept myself from asking the woman next to me if she was going to eat her chicken.

She didn’t.

Kevin was supposed to pick me up at six in the evening by the gate with all the kids. I was waiting for the sign made by my daughter 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 15 minutes, until the luggage started coming out, and then my family appeared too. Apparently there was some confusion over scheduled arrival time. I was feeling so tired, I just wanted to be done with my day.

I was happy to see my husband and kids. We went to Rainforest Café for dinner.

My three year old son 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. “Dad!”

Smiling, Kevin shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know where he gets this stuff.”

I didn’t know how I kept myself upright.

Talking While Driving

“So tell me about Russia,” Kevin said in the car on the way back home.

The thought of relating my Russia to Kevin in the car in between street lights filled me with tired dread. We were driving past McDonald’s, a Mobil station, a Boston Market. I tried.

The children interrupted us like a stutter as I rushed to tell him about Russia, staving off exhaustion and sorrow. I used the same words to discipline the children and the dogs. Russia through staccato sentences with no internal structure. “Shepelevo, border patrol, Misha stop yelling at your brother, give him the toy, Natasha stop whining, 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 seat belt 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 ten in the evening, which was seven in the morning Leningrad time, which meant that I had been up for 24 hours less that hour nap next to the stubbly smoking inky artisté.

I don’t think I fell asleep as fell unconscious — detached and incongruous — around midnight.

My First Day Back

The next morning we woke up at seven and exercised. My husband walked into our bathroom and found me gazing at our toilet.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“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. “You want to go and look at the other five toilets?”

“I guess not,” I said. “Let’s go get our kids.”

We went to get our sons dressed and ready for the day. The babysitter came and Kevin went to work.

I trudged upstairs to my office. Phil the foreman called on the cell phone, because the regular phones still weren’t working. I had to call the phone company, and the alarm guy came to tell me that if lightning struck my house and ruptured the alarm signal, they would have to charge me $300 to fix it. Our home owner’s insurance was being cancelled, and the landlord from our old rental house hadn’t sent us our security deposit back. Kevin hadn’t listened to the phone messages the whole week I was gone, and there was one from my mother telling us that she was going in for gall bladder surgery and panicking, asking Kevin to please call her as soon as possible. Not only did he not call her, but my father hadn’t called her either. We were too busy dissecting the real estate situation in Schlisselburg to call my mother who was having gall bladder surgery.

I was too scared to call her right away, so I called my grandparents in New York instead and then called my mother at the hospital. She was groggy and recovering, but even I could tell, she was not happy not to have heard from us.

That took the whole morning. In the afternoon I made Russian beef soup and blinchiki that opened up like tacos. It took me three and a half hours to make dinner. My house was quite beautiful. I tried not to look at it. Granite island, white cabinets, brass hardware, handscraped floors, crown mouldings, tall ceilings. Lots of large rooms with solid-core doors. Two staircases. Three-car garage. My head deeply bent, I tried not to look at any of it.

Kevin came home, and we ate my taco blinchiki, and went swimming, and put the kids to bed, and watched some TV.

The next day we got up and did it all again. And the next day. 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, but when I had the photos developed, I didn’t want to tell him yet without putting the photos in order, and after I put the photos in order, I didn’t want to tell him yet without putting them in context.

This book is that context.

It took me eight months to write it. I wrote it when I should’ve been writing The Bronze Horseman, the book three editors in three different countries were desperately waiting for, the book that was egregiously late.

In the photos, Leningrad doesn’t look quite so drab. The kind lens softens the peeled paint, flattens the broken stucco. Rust looks like a ray of light, dirt becomes the street. The Nevá is gorgeous, and so is the sky, and there is no smell of communism.

No smell of subway or Shepelevo or crème brûlée, or wet trees, no azure sky, no white Gulf of Finland as if it was covered by snow.

Wet Dogs

I had a hard time talking about it to Kevin. I had trouble reducing Russia to a pithy phrase over the non-stop chattering of my children on the way to Baskin-Robbins. What sound bite can I give over the dinner table? What will be my quote of the day about Russia?

My six days didn’t fit well into our life, and I knew it when I was flying home. I knew there would be no time in our daily ritual to stop and talk about Russia, and I was right. The not talking about it became both a solace and a disgrace.

Let’s just get through the day, our lives said, and then put the kids to bed. Talking involved a break from ritual because it involved animate objects — thoughts, words, emotions, reactions colliding against one another and morphing into a different reality than our Texas reality, which seemed less and less real by the hour. Who needed that?

We would clean up, maybe unpack some books, go to bed, read for a few minutes, kiss and fall asleep, and in the morning we would once stumble out of bed. Kevin went to work, and I was left home with my life and my insides.

He would come home for dinner. Sometimes there would be swimming and sometimes we would just putter, all tense from the day and stressed. Never a moment to break free of life and think about another life, another time when I lived and felt things I had never felt in my life, when I didn’t chase wet dogs who were running around my brand new carpet.

I came home one afternoon to find a message on my answering machine. A female Russian voice was saying, “Misha, is this you? Pick up the phone, Misha, I want to talk to your mommy.” All of this was in Russian, like Misha could speak 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 cried and cried.

“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 I couldn’t 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 cried again.

We are swinging in the hammock in the afternoon. We are with our bare legs in the stream our hands trying to catch the little fish that swim by, we are staring in wonder at Dedushka’s bleeding foot, Yulia running to our grandmother yelling, ‘Babushka, Babushka, Plinka split her leg open, Babushka come!”

Here we are, here we are.

“How are you, Yulia?” I said, my voice catching. “How have you been?” I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see my swimming pool and the prairie out of my window. What was she seeing when she talked to me? Did she see the Prospekt of Veterans outside her window? Did she see the Khrushchev buildings blighted by her tears as she cried to me on the phone.

“I know nothing about your life,” Yulia said. “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 her husband either.

“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 my house anymore. I didn’t feel the same about my life.

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, maybe I could sit in an old wicker chair by the tub and breath in the air and recreate Shepelevo right in Texas.

But 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 had looked at his own life and found it wanting? What could he do about it?

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 that Prozac prescription at Rite-Aid before our psychotherapy session on Friday.

In Russia, Anatoly could find his life to be unsatisfactory on every level that defines success in a man’s life, 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. And even if he 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 but the life he had, and after a while, after a whole lifetime of having nothing else, many of us might look like Anatoly, the lines in our faces etched out by grim determination to face his days unexamined.

There but for the grace of God go I. That life would have been mine, too, and I would have lived it and shrugged my shoulders just like they do, and gone on and put out my china and crystal when the guests came, and every shrug of my shoulders meant another gray hair, another line in my face.

That’s how I felt inside. On the outside, I was in my glorious spacious home, seven square meters times sixty-six. A home in which there are five and a half working, gleaming white indoor 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 can’t believe I’m saying that, me the communal apartment critic. I guess you can take the girl out of the Soviet Union but you can’t take the Soviet Union out of the girl.

Inside, I hunched my shoulders and held my breath as I walked into the bathroom at Fifth Soviet that had not been cleaned in years and never would be, and as I squatted down, I knew I was squatting in my old life. Outside I was in America, but inside I was 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,” he said to me as he stood smoking outside Fifth Soviet.

Faulkner was right. The past is never over, he said. It’s not even the past.

When would the Good Witch Glinda be right?

Would she ever be right?

When we were in Russia, sometimes I would catch my father smoking and I wanted to smoke too, I wanted to start, to relieve the aching, to soothe my soul, to smoke and see him again as I remembered him when I had been so small and he was taken away from me.

We moved to America. He made that happen for us. It was worth it. I was going to be all right in the end, as long as I could somehow stop myself from thinking of the life that would have surely been mine had we stayed behind, had he not learned English in the Gulag to get us out.

Why can’t I just say, so what? So what, it’s not my life. I don’t care.

Yes, they stayed. But we didn’t stay.

It’s not my life. I don’t care.

But the soldiers smoked it in the walls and burned it in the ashes, and died consecrating the earth on which we walk.

Did they die so we could have the Fifth Soviet life? The Ulitsa Dybenko life? Are the bones of their bodies and the metal from the bullets that killed them lying in the ground for fifty years so that we could have a life of daily privation, a life of no hope?

Twenty million Russian soldiers and civilians dead, and today everyone can say, and does, I had an uncle, a brother, a father, a beloved boy who died, was shot down, blown up, starved to death, got pneumonia in evacuation. Every family is touched by grief. Multiply that by a geometric factor of the incomparable propensity of the Russian man to drink and suffer to suffer and drink, and what you’ve got is a nation of bereaved alcoholic failed poets.

Drinking was a languid vice I could ill afford. 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 mad. I took my unresolved feelings and opened a drawer in my desk and I put them inside and I closed the drawer, and then I left the room.

The best thing for me, really, putting the elephant that was Russia into a drawer in my desk and opening it only when I didn’t have too much to do.

Thank God I had too much to do.