Six Days in Leningrad

Two weeks after I returned home from Leningrad, we flew out to New York in August to visit our families. My grandmother was turning 87. My father had retired from Radio Liberty at the end of July and was making a pit stop in New York on the way to Maui to begin a new life with my mother, who, despite her health, also came to visit for a week. We all gathered together in our family home on Long Island.

“So how was your trip?” asked my 20-year-old sister Liza.

“Fine,” I said. “What can I say, Liz… It was…”

“Why won’t you tell me about it?” she said impatiently. “Papa did.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “What did he say?”

“He said it was the best trip of his life.”

“He said that?”

“Was it?”

“He said that?”

“Yes. Was it?”

“It was a good trip,” I said.

When I came inside the house and saw my father, I did feel that there was now something new between us, and only us. As if there wasn’t enough there before.

My mother slowly came down the stairs to greet us. I put on my best smile. “Hey, Mama! How are you feeling?”

“As if you care,” she said as she walked past me to hug my kids.

A little later, before dinner, I tried again. “So, Mama, how are you feeling? You look good.”

“How I look is no indication of how I’m feeling. I feel terrible. Absolutely awful. I was dying all alone in the hospital while you and your dearest father were gallivanting all over Leningrad.”

I was eager to show my grandparents my six hundred photos. After all, at 91 and 87, they would never see Leningrad again. “I can’t wait to see the picture of Lebed!” my grandfather said. “I’m really interested in him.”

Not understanding for a moment, I said, “Who? Oh. Deda, I don’t have a picture of Lebed.”

His face showed acute disappointment.

“You mean at the Romanov funeral? No, I couldn’t get him. He was hidden by other people.”

“Oh.” My grandfather looked so dejected.

“But I have other pictures!” I said brightly.

“Oh?” he said, but I could tell nothing else really interested him. He looked through them but didn’t become enthusiastic about anything else.

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. “Vasili 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 when you were in Russia? 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, glancing at the picture said. “Of course they’re his. As if Yulia would build something.”

It was impossible for us all to believe that these lives, houses, mailboxes, blueberries, brown doors, hinges, concert halls, buses, buildings, cucumber supports could be the same. Our lives had changed so much, how could Russia be standing still? How could it have been so frozen in time, as if the VCR player remained on permanent pause — for me for twenty-five years, for my grandparents since the war that cleaved the world into before and after.

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.”

“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 at me. I was upset at 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 recently been 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 that I was held up at 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 right 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 this road the people walked on?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Five meters.”

I laughed.

“That’s Russia for you,” said my grandfather.

During dinner it became quickly obvious to me that my father had already told his stories about our trip; there wasn’t much for me to do, except pass my Russia pictures around and clean up. Everyone asked me what I thought. Did I think St. Petersburg was beautiful? Yes, I said.

My father had told them all the stories. The Romanovs, the Diorama, 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 Kevin, to my grandparents, to my sister, to my mother, who didn’t want to hear anything at all, things I couldn’t put in perspective for anyone — most of all me.

They didn’t want my perspective, what they wanted was for things to go back to just the way they were before I had 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 to him?

“We did, Papa,” I said. “We did.”

He wasn’t writing a book. But he did tell 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 barely could get through the 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 then waited for us to react.

My father affected the people who knew him. All his friends, all his colleagues felt like he was the brightest, the funniest storyteller they knew. His skills as a storyteller were legendary.

Because he was also a romantic, during our first family dinner he told the story of our coming back from the Russian restaurant Sankt Peterburg and hearing the street jazz musician play “Speak Softly Love” from The Godfather.

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 a Pasternak poem over and over.”

My father shook his head. “You would remember that, wouldn’t you?” We laughed.

Sometime during dinner, I stood, 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, 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 fiercely. “That’s exactly right. You don’t even know how right you are.”

With abortion being the primary form of contraception in Communist Russia, the average Soviet woman had anywhere from four to seven abortions in her lifetime. “I know, Mama,” I said. “I know how right I am.”

We drank. I poured myself another. “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 in 1973? 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 but my voice did break, “I raise this glass to him, because if not for him, we would be still back in Russia, living the life of Alla and Viktor, of Anatoly and Ellie, of Radik and Lida. We would be there in a dead-end life, me and Liza. Papa gave us our future. With his English, he pulled us out of Russia,” I said, turning to my sister. “Tonight, I drink to him for giving Liza and me our life.”

Choked up, everyone drank. My mother stood and stormed outside.

When she came back she said to my sister, “Paullina doesn’t love me.”

“What are you talking about, Mama?” said 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 all by myself. My parents had gone out to the movies.

My grandmother didn’t get up from the armchair for two hours because she was too 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 in front of me so he made tea and we chatted idly about nothing, biding time until my grandmother got unglued from her Mexican soap opera. It was well after midnight when she came into the kitchen, and we looked over the copies of the photos from Leningrad and bickered about which ones they could have 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 has been in America with his family since 1977. My father got him and his whole 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 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?”

Radik again

One evening, not long before we returned to Texas, my mother was looking listlessly through copies of my photos and stumbled upon pictures of Radik and Lida. Holding a photo 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 further away from him, and stepped away from my mother. “No. Stop it, Alla, what are you talking about?”

My mother slumped down, defeated by Lida’s photo. “She was never very beautiful,” she said. “But this just shocks me. Shocks me.”

“Not beautiful like Radik?” I teased her.

“Oh,” she said. “Nobody was beautiful like Radik.”

“Of course not,” I smiled.

She looked at a photo of him. “He got old now, he’s lost some of his shine, still he’s not bad, right?”

“Right,”

My mother told me that when Papa and she had first met—

“During or after Dzhubga?”

My mother looked at me as if I were speaking Armenian. “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.

“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,” he said, “was the most handsome man you ever saw. Men and women both thought so. You could not stop looking at him. You could not 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, the way our whole table at dinner at his house could not take their eyes off him,” I said.

Always a cynic, my grandmother snorted dismissively.

My father, embarrassed by these personal discussions of his friends, mumbled, “Ladies and gentlemen…” trailed off and left to smoke outside.

I was amused at the way 60-year-old people and older did not forgive the aging process in other 60-year-old people.

Particularly Radik.

Almost singularly Radik, I decided. As if, they all — Ellie, my mother, grandmother, grandfather were all happy in their secret souls that a star like Radik dulled, that old age did not spare him either. We were all beautiful, they seemed to say, we were all young and beautiful, and he most of all, but we got old, and he got old, too, thank God.

Once I had it figured out, I said, “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 60-year-old man, he still looked pretty good.”

My mother studied his picture again for a long time. “Not bad,” she finally said. “But not like before.”

Oh, the pitiless old age.