Six Days in Leningrad

Kevin and I got to our new house at 8:20 in the morning and not a moment too soon because the moving truck was already parked in front of the driveway. We had to drive on the grass to go around it. We had barely opened the garage doors when the moving guys started laying down their moving blankets and getting out their wheeling carts. The next thing we knew, they were moving stuff into the house.

Into a house, I might add, that wasn’t ready yet. The builder’s cleaning crew had just arrived. The cleaning women were in the kitchen, scrubbing. The movers started piling boxes onto the carpet that had not been vacuumed since the day it was installed. So, in other words, never.

I asked the women to please vacuum the rooms before they continued with their other tasks so that the movers could pile the boxes onto clean carpets. You would have thought I had asked them to carry heavy objects on their backs upstairs in 100-degree heat. First the diminutive ladies huffed and puffed, and then they said they spoke no Inglés. Phil, my building manager, explained to me that the women worked at their own pace and according to their own schedule. I looked at him as if he were not speaking Inglés to me and finally said, “Phil, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re moving in. Please ask them to vacuum the floor in the bedroom and the living room.”

“Problem is,” Phil said, “Most of them don’t speak any English.”

“Could you find one that does?”

My two young sons, Misha, three, and Kevie, one, zigzagged in front of the movers. I think they were trying to trip them. Misha was crying, “I don’t want to go to Burger King for breakfast, I don’t want to go to Burger King for breakfast!” Natasha, eleven, was wisely reading, perched on top of a book box, ignoring everyone and everything.

The babysitter cajoled him, but in the meantime, the one-year-old had toddled off to the pool. The dogs barked non-stop. They either wanted to be let in, be let out or be shot.

My husband ran in and said, “Please go to the garage and talk to the movers. They need one of us there at all times to tell them where things are going.”

“But I labeled all the rooms!” I protested.

“Well, they don’t know where to go,” Kevin said.

The pool guy knocked on the back porch door. “Hey, guys? Is this a bad time to show you how to use the pool equipment?”

One-year-old Kevie ran in from the pool, draped himself around his father’s leg and wouldn’t let go until dad picked him up. The babysitter pried him off with difficulty. The dogs continued to bark. Three-year-old Misha continued to scream about Burger King. Apparently, he wanted to stay right here at the new house.

Our builder walked in. “Well, good morning! We needed just a couple of more days with this house, but that’s okay, we’ll make it work! Hey, do you have a couple of minutes to go over the change orders? I have your closing contract. I need both you and Kevin to sign.”

One of the moving guys stuck his head in and said pointedly, “Mrs. Simons, could we see you in the garage, please?”

The phone rang.

How could that be? I didn’t think we’d unpacked a phone yet.

Open boxes were on the kitchen counter.

The front door bell rang. It was the guy from Home Depot. He had brought the barbecue. Where would I like it?

Another delivery truck stopped in front of the house. This one was unloading a dryer and a television.

Another truck pulled up, this one with my office desk. The two desk guys steadfastly refused to take the desk upstairs, “because we’re not insured for damage.” They asked if maybe the moving guys could move my desk upstairs.

The moving guys said they certainly weren’t insured to move the desk upstairs. So I told the desk guys that either they moved the desk upstairs or else they could take it right back to the warehouse.

They moved the desk upstairs.

“Mrs. Simons!”

In the garage, the four large moving guys stood with their arms folded and impatiently told me they were having a problem with the cleaning ladies who really needed to stay out of their way. “We cannot do our job, Mrs. Simons.” Again punctuating my marital status.

The dogs were still barking. My sons were now running around in the street as the babysitter ran after them trying to corral them into the minivan.

Pressing my fingers into my temples, I looked at my watch. It was 8:45 AM.

The phone rang again. It was my father. “Hey, Papa,” I said weakly.

“Are you excited about our trip?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Our trip to Russia? It’s not a small thing, you know, you going back for the first time in twenty-five years. Are you thinking about it?”

“Oh, absolutely, Papa. I’m thinking about it right now.”

The Bronze Horseman

We had been planning our trip to Russia for a year. Ever since the summer of 1997 when I told my family that my fourth novel The Bronze Horseman was going to be a love story set in WWII Russia during the siege of Leningrad. I said I couldn’t write a story so detailed and sprawling, if only in my mind, without seeing Russia with my own eyes.

My family had listened to me very carefully, and my 90-year-old grandfather said, “Plina, I hope I’m not going to be turning over in my grave reading the lies you’re going to write in your book about Russia.”

“I hope not, Dedushka,” I said. “Though you’re not dead.”

Going to St. Petersburg was not an option before the summer of 1998. The logistics of the trip were too overwhelming. How would I get a non-Russian-speaking husband and three non-Russian-speaking kids, one of them barely walking, to Russia? And what would they do there? Either my husband would be watching the kids full-time in a foreign country — and not just any foreign country, but Russia! — or we would be watching them together, and I wouldn’t be doing any research.

I didn’t need to go all the way to Russia to take care of my kids. I could stay home in Texas and do it. Kevin and I considered leaving them and going just the two of us, but in the end decided that was a bad idea. Leave the kids with a babysitter for ten days? Too much; for them, for us.

Still, thoughts of Russia would not go away. Also, there was no book. Eighteen months earlier there had been a nebulous vision of two young lovers walking in deserted Leningrad on the eve of a brutal war, but a vision does not an epic story make. How could I not go to Russia?

I finally said to Kevin that it looked like I would have to go on my own. He didn’t love the idea, my going to a “place like Russia” by myself. He said I should bring my sister.

I ran the idea by my father. “Kevin thinks I should take Liza to Russia with me,” I said.

My father was quiet on the phone for what seemed like an hour, smoking and thinking, and then said, “I could come with you to Russia.”

I had not thought of that.

A girlfriend of mine said, “Oh, that’s neat! When was the last time you and your dad took a trip together?”

“Never.”

That had been nine months ago. And little by little the trip took shape. My father told me, “Paullina, I’m retiring at the end of May. We have to go before I retire.” My father is the director of Russian Services for Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe. Working has defined and consumed him. Working is and has been his life. And with good reason. His team of writers translated western news, both political and cultural, into Russian and then broadcast it over short waves to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They broadcast to Russia 24/7 with 12 hours of original programming every day. For twenty-five years. I believe that four people were responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall and Communism during 1989-91: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and my father.

We couldn’t find a convenient time for both of us to go. Finally my father postponed his retirement a few months and we settled on July 1998. It was the perfect time to go, my father told me, because we would stand a chance of having some nice weather. Also the nights would be white. “That’s a sight to see. You do remember white nights, Plina?”

“Not much, Papa.”

What would be the shortest time I could go to Russia, and not traumatize my kids? I figured a day to travel there, a day to travel back, and then six days in St. Petersburg. But I vacillated, procrastinated, mulled.

Truth was, I didn’t want to go.

In 1973 There Were Sharks

I was born in St. Petersburg when it was still called Leningrad and came to America when I was ten. We left Leningrad one fall day and lived in Rome while we waited for our entry visa to the United States.

Those were blissful months. Every Thursday my mother gave me a few lire to go to the movies by myself and buy a bag of potato chips. That bag was worth three movies. I’d never eaten anything so delicious in Russia. The movies were all in Italian, of which I spoke exactly three phrases: bella bambina, bruta bambina and mandjare per favore. Cute baby, ugly baby, and food please. It was two more phrases than I spoke in English.

We spent my tenth birthday in Rome. My parents asked me what I wanted, and I said, gum. I got gum. Also some strawberry Italian gelato and then we went to the American movies. We saw The Man for All Seasons. I liked the gum better than the movie. I didn’t understand a word of it, but at the end, a man had his head cut off.

We came to America two days before Thanksgiving 1973. Our first big American meal was turkey and mashed potatoes and something called cranberry jelly. We celebrated in Connecticut, in the home of a young man we met briefly in Vienna and who invited us to his house for the holidays. We gave thanks for our amazing luck, for getting out of Russia, for coming to America. After all, America was every Russian’s beckoning light. America seemed like heaven. True, first you had to die, but then, you had — America! The death was leaving Russia. Because once you had left you could never go back.

America was life after death.

That Thanksgiving when everyone else at the table was done with their meal, my father walked around the table and finished all the food that the Americans had left behind on their plates. People of a certain age born in Leningrad do not leave food on their plates.

Our second American meal was the lasagna our landlady brought up to our apartment in Woodside, Queens. Don’t ask me how this is, but during our stay in Rome, Italy, I had not tasted tomato sauce once. I had not had lasagna. I had not had pizza. I did not know tomato sauce until our Italian landlady knocked on our door in Woodside.

In America there was Juicy Fruit gum, and chocolate ice cream, which I had never had, and something called Coca Cola, which I also had never had. And television. I found a children’s cartoon: Looney Tunes. I had never seen anything like it in Leningrad. In Russia, we had black and white war movies, black and white news. There was some animated programming, but it looked like war movies, though less interesting.

War movies and news. The Olympics. Which was the single most exciting thing on Soviet television, but unfortunately the Olympics came only once every four years.

Suddenly, in my life there was Looney Tunes! Bugs Bunny! Elmer Fudd. Porky Pig! Our first TV set was black and white, but the cartoons were straight out of someone else’s Technicolor dream. The bunny blew up a pig and a hunter, ran away, blew up a cave and fell off a cliff, all in eight minutes.

The war movies in Russia were set in gray tents and starred two gray men who talked non-stop until there was a battle, followed by more dialogue, all concluding in a blaze, more dialogue and eventual victory for Mother Russia. The movies lasted, it seemed to me, as long as the war itself.

In Queens, after eight minutes, the Looney Tunes bunny disappeared and was suddenly replaced by a lady selling towels made of paper. Towels made of paper? The cartoon was over, so I turned off the TV, utterly disappointed.

It took me many weeks and the force of inertia to discover that the cartoon did not end but was merely interrupted by the lady selling towels made of paper. Imagine my happiness!

I used to read in Russia, and who could blame me? What else was there to do? Now that I had Bugs Bunny, all reading vanished for a good four or five years.

In school I would occasionally be asked to talk to the other students about my experience of life in the Soviet Union. That’s how it was put: “Your experience of life in the Soviet Union.” I wanted to say even then that it wasn’t my experience of life, it actually was my life, but I didn’t. I did give my broken-English little talk: about the communal apartment, the small rooms, the cockroaches falling on my bed while I slept, about the bed bugs and the smell of decomposing skunk they made when I accidentally squished them, about the lack of food, the lack of stores, the lack of my father.

When I was asked, “How did it feel living with that kind of deprivation?” I would shrug and say, “I didn’t know it was deprivation. I thought it was just life.”

My American friends grew up with Coca Cola and Jesus Christ.

I grew up with hot black tea and the astronaut Yuri Gagarin — the first man in space.

Kevin watched I Dream of Jeannie and Star Trek.

I watched Gagarin’s funeral, and a one-hundred-and-twenty part film called Liberation — burning tents and dark winter nights — which they rebroadcast every December because Decembers near the Arctic circle just weren’t bleak enough.

I’d never seen a palm tree, I’d never seen an ocean, I’d never heard a church service, and had never read Charlotte’s Web. I read The Three Musketeers, Les Misérables and a Russian writer named Mikhail Zoschenko. By the time I was ten I had read all of Anton Chekhov and Jules Verne, but what I wanted, though I did not know it, was Nancy Drew and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

What was baseball? What was peanut butter? I didn’t know. I knew what soccer was, what mushroom barley soup was, what perch was.

And who was this Jesus Christ?

I, who had not grown up with Christmas carols, pageants, cookies, decorations and a divine baby in a cave, had no idea what Jesus had to do with Christmas. My first Christmas Eve in New York my parents went out, leaving me, I thought, alone and joyfully watching Bonanza, except to my great consternation, Michael Landon on whom I had quite the crush, was replaced on Channel 11 by nothing but a log burning on the fire and instrumental musak playing in the darkened background. My Pavlovian reaction to learning that the pre-emption of Bonanza was all about something called Christmas, was less than spiritually positive, as you can imagine.

While my husband was vacationing near Lake George, I was learning how to swim in the icy Black Sea.

Kevin knew Atlantic Ocean beaches? I knew the dirty sand on the Gulf of Finland. It was enough for me when I was a child. I spent ten summers of my life in a tiny Russian fishing village called Shepelevo near the Gulf of Finland, and it was all I needed. My childhood summers in that village is the treasure I carry with me through life.

But I didn’t want to go back there.

I lived ten years of my life in a communal apartment, nine families sharing 13 rooms, two kitchens, two bathrooms.

Didn’t want to go back there either.

My father was arrested when I was four and spent the next five years of his life — and mine — in a Soviet prison, in a Soviet labor camp, in exile.

I lived alone. With my silent mother.

Not interested in reliving any part of that.

There was no romanticizing our life in Russia. In leaving, we had all died and gone to heaven. If it weren’t for my stupid book, why on earth would I want to go back?

Molotov’s Grandson

My father got me the travel visa through Radio Liberty. The already painful Soviet visa process was further complicated by the fact that we were going to stay with my father’s best friend Anatoly at his apartment instead of in a hotel like normal, non-suspicious tourists.

“Papa, why don’t we stay in a hotel?”

“What hotel are you talking about?”

“Well, I looked in my St. Petersburg guide, and it lists two great hotels in Leningrad—”

“Don’t call it Leningrad.”

“Fine. St. Petersburg. Two great hotels: Grand Hotel Europe, and Astoria.”

“Astoria is a very nice hotel.”

“So it says. It says it’s located conveniently close to the statue The Bronze Horseman. That’s good for me. As you know that’s what I’m calling my book.”

“I want to speak to you about that. I think it’s a terrible title.”

I sighed. “Papa, it’s a very good title, and everybody likes it.”

“Who is everybody?”

“My agent, my editor. My former editor. My husband.”

“They don’t understand.”

“Fine. But hotels?”

“Yes. Hotels.”

“Astoria is nice then?”

“Yes, but Paullina, I can’t stay in Astoria. I’m retiring at the end of July. And my company won’t pay for such a hotel.”

“Grand Hotel Europe then?”

“Very nice hotel, right in the center of town, very close to Nevsky Prospekt. So convenient.” He sounded like a travel agent for Grand Kempinski, the Western hotel company that now owned Grand Hotel Europe.

“So which one is better?”

“Paullina, we can’t stay there. We have a perfectly nice apartment to stay in with Anatoly and his wife Ellie. Remember Ellie? She loved you very much when you were a child. They can’t wait to see you. They have room. You’ll be comfortable. Listen, it’s not the Grand Hotel Europe, but it’ll be fine.”

I thought about it for a few seconds. “How close are they to the center of town?”

“Listen, their apartment is not the Grand Hotel Europe, it’s not going to be fifty paces from Nevsky Prospekt. They live on the outskirts of town, the last stop on the metro. I have to stay with them. They will never forgive me if I don’t.”

Vacillating between the two hotels, my father finally admitted to me that his and my mother’s wedding reception was held on the top floor of Grand Hotel Europe. “Papa, I have to stay there then. There is no question.”

My father told me that when I was a baby, I had helped him smuggle strictly forbidden books out of Grand Hotel Europe. He had received them from an American friend visiting Russia. KGB agents checked all the bags leaving the hotel as a matter of course. They were watching my father particularly carefully because of a provocative letter he had sent to Pravda; he had to be cautious. So when he got the books from his American acquaintance, he put them under me in my carriage, wrapped the blanket around me and the books, and wheeled us out onto the street.

He smuggled out Thirteen Days that Shook the Kremlin by Imre Nagy, The Hungarian Revolution by Tibor Meray, A Bitter Harvest, the Intellectual Revolt Behind the Iron Curtain, a collection of essays and stories edited by Shelman Edmund, The New Class by Milovan Djilas, and The Communist Party of the Soviet Union by Leonard Schapiro.

Years later in 1994, a former KGB agent who used to watch my father met him at a gathering in Munich and asked him, “Yuri Lvovich, tell me, that winter night, how did you get those books out of the hotel? We were watching you so carefully.”

After my father told him how, the KGB agent shook his head and said, “We underestimated you, Yuri Lvovich.”

During our next conversation I said to him, “Papa, how about this? We stay with Anatoly and Ellie for a few days, then we pack our bags, and I will get us a suite at Grand Hotel Europe and we’ll stay there for the remainder of our trip.”

“How much is a room there? Four hundred dollars a night?”

“Five hundred.”

“Oh my.”

“Don’t worry about it. It will only be for a few nights.”

This is when we still thought our trip would be for eight days. We were going to spend four days at Anatoly’s and four days at Grand Hotel Europe.

But because I was going to be staying part of the time with friends, I couldn’t get a simple tourist visa. I needed to get a letter of invitation from a business. My father said he would take care of it. Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, which has bureaus in Prague, Munich, Washington, Moscow and St. Petersburg, would provide me with an invitation.

My father’s colleague in Washington personally walked my visa application over to the Russian embassy to be processed.

“The man who is walking over there, doing you a favor, processing your visa for you, treat him well, respect him,” my father told me. “He is Molotov’s grandson.”

Vyacheslav Molotov had been Stalin’s foreign minister, responsible for the war with Germany, the war with Finland and for unwittingly giving his name to the incendiary eponymous cocktails the Finns invented in his honor.

“Molotov’s grandson?” I gasped.

“Yes,” my father said, lowering his voice, “but don’t say anything to him.”

“Why?” I asked. “Doesn’t he know whose grandson he is?”

My father said it was a very complicated subject and spoke no more about it. I did think there was something Homeric about Molotov’s grandchild traipsing to the Russian embassy to get me my Russian visa so I could go to Russia to do research and then write about a time his grandfather was making history. I sent Molotov’s grandson my three books, all signed to his wife, and thanked him for helping me. I really wanted to ask him about his grandfather, but didn’t.

Grand Central Station

Grand Central Station wasn’t in New York. It was my house in Texas.

In Russia I had read a book about a place Americans called the west, and in this west were endless prairies and on these prairies rode cowboys with lassos. I didn’t know what a lasso was, but it all sure sounded exciting when I was a little girl growing up in Russia. One day, I wanted to see this prairie.

Having just moved and not yet unpacked, I was trying to get some work done before we went to Russia, but not only was my mother-in-law visiting from New York for ten days, but my builder must have had every contractor in Dallas stop by my house at least twice in the three weeks between our move and my trip.

I made a firm commitment to myself that I would finish reading one of my Russian research books before I traveled, but that was before Eric, the-screen-door-guy, came to replace the screen door — twice. The painters hadn’t finished painting before we moved in, and a quarter of the power outlets weren’t working, including one my computer was supposed to be plugged into. The faucet in the kitchen was leaking. The icemaker upstairs wasn’t making ice, while the frost-free refrigerator was making frost.

I had an event at a local bookstore and a live TV interview in Austin, Texas, four hours away. We had to go overnight.

The door latches in the house were all breaking, the garage door keypad was not opening the garage door, and the concrete driveway was getting marks in it as if it were made not of cement but dough.

The fence was not finished and the dogs kept running out onto the road.

The grass was dying, which could have had something to do with the fact that it had been over one hundred degrees in Dallas every day for the past six weeks with no rain.

I wanted the prairie and I got it.

The days were too full for me to do my regular work, much less think about going to Russia. But every once in a while, my dad would call and say, “Are you ready for our trip?”

“I am,” I’d say. “But I have to go because the Rotor Rooter guys are at the door. We have an overflow problem in one of our shower drains.”

We built our house on the edge of a prairie. We have the last lot in our development, and the community’s property ends a few hundred yards past our house. There the prairie begins — just a field that disappears into the sky. A lone tree. Some bales of hay. The sun rises in the back of our house and sets in the front. Nothing mars our view of the setting sun. Nothing. There is just the burned out field and burned out grass and dead corn, and the sun. And coyotes. And rats in the pool.

I still haven’t seen a lasso.

Slowly time inched its way to 12 July, 1998.

Fly Aeroflot!

My father told me to get a single room at a hotel and forget about a suite. “I will stay with Anatoly,” he said. “And you stay at the hotel for a few days. I will meet you there every morning and we will go about our business. Stay by yourself, getting a single room will be cheaper for you.”

It was. I booked the hotel for the six days. My father was surprised to learn I would be at the hotel the entire time. He thought I would be staying part of the time with him at Anatoly’s apartment. I was thinking of myself. How inconvenient to pack and unpack twice to stay in two places.

Besides it was only for six days.

The fare I booked was one of the cheapest. The travel agent was so happy when after an hour of looking — as I stayed on the line — she finally found something inexpensive for my exact dates.

“What airline is that ticket with?”

“Aeroflot.”

I wasn’t too sure about Aeroflot. When all the other airlines were quoting me a return fare of $1200-$1900, what was Aeroflot doing happily selling me a ticket for $530? I worried. “Is it standing room only or something?”

“No, no, it’s their regular fare. They don’t have a lot of seats left. And it’s a non-stop flight.”

Now I was excited. The other airlines were refueling in Paris, or London; here was a non-stop flight. Aeroflot did not need to refuel! I found it fantastic.

“Non-stop all the way from Dallas? Wow.”

“No, no,” the travel agent hurriedly said. “Not Dallas. JFK. New York.”

I hurriedly pointed out to the travel agent that I did not actually live in New York, I lived in Dallas, and as such would be needing a ticket from Dallas.

“Yes. I don’t have a ticket from Dallas. Well, I do, on Air France, with a three hour layover in Paris, for $1900.”

I remained silent.

“We’ll have to find you a connecting flight.”

I knew it couldn’t be that simple, and it wasn’t. My Aeroflot flight was leaving JFK, New York at 1:15 PM on Sunday, and my American Airlines Dallas flight was not arriving into New York until 11:30 AM.

Into LaGuardia.

Which would give me an hour and forty-five minutes — assuming my first flight was on time — to get my luggage, get a cab, drive across town, and check into an international flight — check-in time for which was strictly three hours before departure.

“I’ll take it,” I said to the travel agent.

I told Kevin I would bring only a garment bag and take it as carry on. How I was going to fit a week’s worth of clothes — and shoes — into one garment bag?

My father had given me suspiciously specific instructions about when he could meet me.

Of course I did it all wrong. Apparently I was arriving too early. “I told you,” he said, “don’t come before Monday, July 13th.”

“But I am coming Monday, July 13th.”

“Yes, but you’re coming in at 5:30 in the morning, and I can’t be there that early.”

“So come when you can and meet me at the hotel.”

I could tell he was frustrated. I couldn’t understand why. Maybe he wanted to meet me at the airport. “I can’t be there at five in the morning,” he repeated.

“Okay,” I said. “Come to my hotel when you arrive. You don’t have to meet me at the airport. I can take a taxi.”

Two days later he called me, “You won’t take a taxi. I will have a man meet you. Viktor. He will meet you holding up a sign with your name on it. In Russian. You know how to read your name in Russian, don’t you?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Pay him. Pay him like thirty rubles. Look, and if something happens and he’s not there, take a taxi then. There are plenty of taxis. Just negotiate the fare in advance. Because if you get in and say you’re going to Grand Hotel Europe, they’ll take all your money. Negotiate in advance. If they quote you a hundred rubles, don’t go. If they quote you fifty rubles, talk them down to thirty.”

“Okay,” I said, but I must have sounded hesitant, because my father quickly added, “But Viktor will be there. He will be there most assuredly.”

My father is nothing if not a planner. It’s a control thing, having been a manager of people for twenty five years. “I will meet you at the hotel, probably around 3:45 PM. Be ready at 3:30, though, just in case I’m early. Don’t go anywhere. Maybe go for a short walk, but better yet, sleep, have a nap for a few hours, but whatever you do, be at your room and ready at 3:30. Understood? We’ll go for dinner at Anatoly’s. They’re very excited you’re coming. Then on Tuesday we’ll go to Shepelevo.” He paused for effect. He knew how I felt about Shepelevo.

“Great,” I said. “How will we get there?”

“Viktor will drive us. We will have him and his car at our disposal for the whole trip.”

“Great,” I said, but not enthusiastically. I didn’t know this Viktor; why would I want a total stranger coming with us to Shepelevo of all places? It made no sense. I wanted to take public transportation. I said nothing.

“On Wednesday we will go to Piskarev cemetery,” Papa continued. “Friday is the funeral of the Romanovs. It’s a historic day, and I got you and me a press accreditation. It’s impossible to get in, but I got it for you. You’ll see history being made.”

“Wow.”

“I don’t know what else you want to do.”

“I want to go to the Siege of Leningrad museum.”

“Yes, that’s at Piskarev cemetery.”

Not according to my map, but who was I to argue? My father had lived in Leningrad for 35 years of his life, not including the years he spent in labor camp. He knew better than my stupid map.

My Great-Grandmother’s Grave

I talked to my grandparents, my father’s parents, the week before I left for Russia. It was my grandfather’s 91st birthday and they were happy I hadn’t forgotten.

“How could I forget your birthday, Deda?” I said. I had lived every summer in Russia with my grandparents in Shepelevo. Every 2 July we were together on his birthday.

I had not been equally close to my mother’s parents. My mother’s mother died when my mother was 16 and before I was born. I am named after her. My mother’s father was a Red Army man — not prone to easy attachments, certainly not to me. The last thing I remember about him was his coming to our communal apartment to talk my mother out of leaving for America. I was told to go in the kitchen, so the adults could talk privately in our rooms. I hung around the hallway, hoping to hear a word or two — with no luck. Suddenly the door opened, and he walked out, not even glancing at me as I stood in the hall. His hat was in his hands, his mouth tightly closed. He walked past me down the hall and out the front door. That was the last I saw of him. Possibly the first, as well. I really can’t recall.

But my father’s father was a different story. The man had lived through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the Stalin years, the Leningrad blockade, the Second World War, the Khrushchev years, the Brezhnev years and through fishing on the Gulf of Finland with me. When he turned 91, I remembered.

“Happy Birthday,” I said.

My grandmother picked up the second line. “Happy birthday, nothing. You and your father, are you planning to go to Shepelevo? He said you were.”

“Yes, Babushka, we are.”

“Plinka,” she said. “You are going to go and visit your great-grandmother’s grave, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

She started to cry. “Because probably no one has been at her grave since we left Russia nineteen years ago.”

“We’ll find it. It’s marked right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“It’s not marked?”

“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

“Do you remember the gravestone?”

“No.”

“Do you remember where in the cemetery you buried her?”

“Not really. Somewhere on the right hand side, toward the back.”

“I see,” I said. “Okay. We’ll find it. How hard can it be?”

“Plinka.” She cried harder. “If you don’t find your grandmother’s grave then you’re no good and you’re not going to heaven.”

At this point my grandfather interrupted her, asking if I would be coming to New York any time between the 2nd and the 12th of July, “because there are some people in Russia I want you to go and visit. The Ivanchenkos. Do you remember them?”

“Are they dead or living?”

“Living, living. They want to see you very much.”

Interrupting him, my grandmother said, “I’m sure the grave has not been kept. I don’t know if your cousin Yulia takes care of it. Probably not. She probably doesn’t even go to Shepelevo anymore. Who knows? But do you remember the Likhobabins? They still live in Shepelevo—”

“If they’re not dead,” Deda interjected.

“Leva, stop it,” said Babushka. “Plinka, I want you to give the Likhobabins money. Give them a hundred dollars. You have a hundred dollars, don’t you? Give it to them and ask them to take care of my mother’s grave.”

“So you’re not coming to New York?” said my grandfather. “That’s a pity. I really wanted to talk to you about the Ivanchenkos. Now is really not a good time to talk. I’m having a birthday party.”