Six Days in Leningrad

TO LENINGRAD

My travel to Russia began at 4:30 in the morning. I slithered out of bed, having gone to sleep two and a half hours earlier. We had gone to my husband’s boss’s 50th birthday bash, and because I really thought ahead, I drank seven vodka and cranberries. It could have been six or eight; not being much of a drinker, after the first two I lost my ability to perform simple math tasks.

While lack of sleep was certainly a factor in my morning paralysis, worse was the alcohol that was left over in my body from the night before. I couldn’t remember the last time I had that much to drink. I vaguely recalled my college days when, perhaps on one or two occasions, I may have had one too many. I went to sleep for twelve hours, and when I woke up in the afternoon, I was sober. Mostly.

Well, today, less than three hours after going to bed, I wake up to travel five thousand miles, and I wake up not sober.

My flight to New York-LaGuardia was leaving at 7:10 AM. We were in the car at 5:45 for the 50-minute ride to the airport.

I sat stiffly staring straight ahead — out of necessity. As Kevin drove, I asked him to please not make any right or left turns and at all costs avoid coming to complete stops. When we got the airport, I felt a bit more clear-headed. My eyes weren’t sloshing atop my brain any more.

My whole plan for catching the plane out of JFK to Leningrad depended on taking my garment bag as carry-on. My publisher had arranged for a car service to pick me up and take me across town so I wouldn’t waste time flagging a yellow cab. Even with all these precautions, it was clear I did not have enough time. When I called Aeroflot to inquire about check-in times, the woman told me in her perfect accented English that I had to be at the check-in counter three hours before departure. Since that was clearly not possible, I asked what she recommended as the minimum check-in time, explaining to her my connecting flight situation. She said, “As long as you’re there at least two hours before, you’ll be all right.”

That was good to know.

I had one hour and forty five minutes to get to JFK from LaGuardia, and only those who have battled the Van Wyck Expressway and lost understand that time was not going to be my friend.

Bottom line: my garment bag simply had to come with me.

Not according to the woman printing my boarding pass.

The first thing she said was, “That can’t come with you.”

“It has to,” I said. “I have a connecting flight in JFK at 1:15.”

I’m not sure she knew what JFK was. Certainly she didn’t care. Shaking her head, she said, “It has to be checked. See?” She flung her hand in the direction of the metal frame into which we were supposed to fit a carry-on. “It has to be that size.”

“But this isn’t a carry-on,” I pointed out. “It’s a garment bag.”

“It has to be that size,” she said dismissively, and turned away from us to fill out a gate check ticket.

“What are you talking about?” my husband said. “We’ve taken this bag with us three times and every time they’ve let us take it on the plane.”

“Uh-uh. It doesn’t work that way,” she said, and pulled the bag out of my hands.

I became suddenly endowed with the ability to see the future. I saw my future at LaGuardia, trying to find my bag, waiting for the luggage carousel, missing my plane to Russia.

The woman was clearly a graduate of an Advanced Rudeness Training seminar of the kind given in an American Airlines Rudeness night school. Suddenly a muscular young man came up to Kevin and began to assure him that everything was going to be all right because there were forty more just like him also going to St. Petersburg on my flight. Their group leader had already called Aeroflot who agreed to hold the plane for all forty until they made their way from LaGuardia to Kennedy.

This made us feel better. Consequently we did not do what we usually do when confronted with graduates at the American Airlines Advanced rudeness program, which is to display our own higher learning degrees from Angry and Defensive Rudeness schools.

Kevin and I didn’t have time for a decent good-bye. It was 7:10 AM, time for take-off. Bye, I’ll call you, I said. I don’t know when — because of the time difference. I’ll do my best, kiss the kids for me when they wake up.

I sat in seat 7A — a bulkhead seat! The first time I had one in eleven years of flying.

As I was climbing past the girl in the aisle seat, I noticed she was extremely friendly. She made lots of eye contact, said hello, was interested in the contents of my purse, in my magazines, in my Walkman, and in finding out how I was and if I was well.

She turned out to be a missionary, one of the forty traveling to St. Petersburg. She told me they were all from a mission near Dallas.

“Oh,” I said. “A Catholic mission?” Because Catholics were the only kind of missionaries I knew. It made sense that the Catholics would be headed to Russia to preach Roman Catholicism to us Russian Orthodox. The Catholics have been trying to reunite with us ever since our one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church split in the Great Schism in 1054. Boy do we hold a grudge. We still haven’t forgiven them for what they did to the Nicene Creed way back then.

But no, these weren’t Catholic. Carrie said they were a non-denominational mission, going to preach the word of God to the Russians. Like trying to convert us. As if the Russians were heathens.

I wanted to tell Carrie that though the Communists tried to create their own brand of religion with Lenin worship and Stalin worship, they failed, but before I could speak, Carrie looked outside my window at the clouds and the sun, and said, “Isn’t this beautiful? How can anyone doubt there is a God when you see beauty like this that He made?”

I mumbled incoherently, glanced indifferently outside the window and turned on Guns n’ Roses on my Walkman screeching at me that in paradise city the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Carrie tried to talk to me. Blessedly she gave up and put on her own Walkman. She then tried to write in her diary, but I could tell she was not inspired, even by the lovely clouds. I read over her shoulder. She began, “I thank my Father for…” and stopped.

For good. She closed her notebook and went to sleep.

She snored loudly. I heard her through the din of the 747 and Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction.

My stomach, still queasy after my vodka dinner the night before, could take no more than half a banana. When she woke up, Carrie offered me hers and her yogurt too.

We landed in LaGuardia at 11:30 a.m., right on time.

My bag wasn’t there.

First I checked at the gate, hoping that maybe it would be there, the way my children’s strollers magically appear.

I went to the baggage claim area, and met my soon-to-be driver, a polite fiftyish West Indian man, who stood with me and watched the baggage carousel go round and round and round.

And round.

And round

The missionaries’ bags came. All three hundred of them it seemed. The other passengers’ bags came. People were lifting off three, four bags at a time. But my one lousy garment bag would not come.

I lived the whole rest of my trip in those 25 minutes when I stood and waited for my bag. I was so tense, if someone blew on me, I could have snapped in two. I imagined… the bag going on a different flight, to Las Vegas, Chicago, Seattle. In the past my kids’ car seats would sometimes disappear. Other times our suitcases would not make our plane but would arrive on a later flight. It was now certain that I would miss my St. Petersburg flight. Could I go to Russia without my clothes? Could I go and buy what I needed there? All that I needed? Did Russia even have all I needed? Shoes, underwear? Jeans, make-up? But what about the ten T-shirts I bought for my father’s friends? What about my coat?

No, I’d have to miss the Aeroflot flight. My six days in St. Petersburg were now going to be five. What if the bag was irretrievably lost? Well, I knew American Airlines would apologize. They would say they were really, really sorry. All this because of one unhelpful woman. I never hated anybody more than I did her during those 25 minutes. My body twitched with anxiety.

During this time, my Minute Man driver, courtesy of the publicity department at St. Martin’s Press, was standing next to me serenely humming a happy tune. Bob Marley’s Don’t Worry, Be Happy. I wanted to put a sock in his mouth.

I was so tightly wound that when the bag finally did appear, hallelujah, I did not feel immediate relief.

Cheerfully the Minute Man grabbed my one single bag and began to wheel it. I hurried. He sauntered. We ambled across the road into the parking garage and guess what? He couldn’t find his car.

It was 12:05 p.m.; my plane was due to leave at 1:15 whether or not I was on it, and he couldn’t find his car.

He approached one black Lincoln Towncar, laughed — as if it was so funny — and said, “Wait, that’s not mine.”

Oh. Ha ha.

Aimlessly we searched for a while. He looked at another Towncar license plate. “No, that’s not mine, either.”

And then he stood. He just stood not moving, in the middle of the parking garage, looking to the left, then to the right, but basically looking as if he had absolutely no idea what to do next. Perhaps he was thinking of hailing a cab.

Lacking any ability at that moment to hide what I was feeling, I said nothing, in the fear that I would greatly offend the man and he would refuse to drive me even if he did eventually find his vehicle.

And eventually he did. He laughed again, leaning into my face, inviting me to laugh too, and said, “They all look the same!”

I smiled thinly. “Are you sure this is yours?”

He laughed harder.

We took off at 12:12 p.m., and got to Kennedy in great time. The Van Wyck did not defeat me. On 12 July 1998, I came as close as Elaine on Seinfeld had come to beating the Van Wyck Expressway.

On the way, I pictured my husband in the pool with the kids in the d100-degree weather. New York was 85 and lovely. The Van Wyck is not a particularly beautiful road — to say the least. Why did the Van Wyck look so beautiful to me then? I missed New York.

I wheeled my bag to the Aeroflot check-in line, and stood for five minutes behind 70 people. Someone yelled in Russian, “Anyone for the St. Petersburg flight?” About ten of us moved forward.

“More for the St. Petersburg flight? Flight completely full!” the man yelled with exasperation, still in Russian. What would my Kevin have done? Or 99 percent of the American population who don’t actually speak a word of Russian? My husband can say two things: “Koshmar!” (“Nightmare!”) and “Bozhe Moi!” (“My God!), both phrases aptly describing the situation of waiting in the wrong line for a flight that was leaving in a half-hour and was completely full. I looked for the missionaries, but they were nowhere to be found. Had they made it to Kennedy before me? They certainly got their hundreds of bags before I got my lousy one.

In any case, I was shepherded “over there,” and waited for an Asian woman to take care of me. She spoke no Russian, which at first seemed a blessing, but a small one, for she spoke no English either.

Her computer broke down in front of my eyes, and she looked as helpless as the Minute Man driver searching for his black Lincoln. She spent five minutes threading tape or paper into the computer, another five looking longingly at the screen. “Is there a problem?” I finally said.

“Yes,” she said. “The computer broke.”

“Of course it did.” I wanted to know what that had to do with my business, but I feared, everything. “I still don’t have a seat assignment.”

“Yes, yes. I will take care of it.” She looked around. “I have to go and use another computer to check you in. Wait here.”

I waited. She fiddled with someone else’s computer. A man came over and glanced at her computer, shook his head and walked away, yelling, “Pasha!”

Everyone at the Aeroflot check-in was named Pasha or Seriozha or Tatiana, and no one seemed to speak English or if they knew, they were not letting on.

I stood tapping my fingers insistently on the counter, waiting for the Filipino woman to take care of me.

Thirty minutes passed, and then when she came back, I timidly inquired if I could have a window seat.

“A window seat?” she said, looking as if she were about to laugh. “There are no window seats left. This is a completely full flight. I can give you aisle.”

Wondering about the availability of window seats twenty minutes earlier — before the computer broke — I kept my mouth shut and got 24D.

I ran to my gate, but though it was 1:15 p.m. and time for departure, we hadn’t even started boarding yet. Bless Aeroflot. I had a bit of time, so I called Kevin, who didn’t answer: probably still in the pool. I bought two more magazines, because the five I had in my bag just weren’t enough. It was now 1:20. I didn’t see the missionaries. Had they not checked in yet? I found that hard to believe, what with my slow-arriving bag, and playing hide and seek with the towncar, and computer problems.

I walked around aimlessly, looking for someone to ask what was going on. A vague line formed near the gate. I would have liked to ask the Aeroflot woman behind the counter, but she was busy snapping in Russian at someone over the phone.

As I was walking past the crowd of people, I overheard a young woman and young man conversing in English. Coming up to them, I asked, in English, “Excuse me, do you know when they’re going to start boarding?” The girl and guy looked at me vacantly. The guy said, “Mhy ne govorim po Angliyski.” (“We don’t speak English”) I stared back just as vacantly, trying to recall some words of the conversation I had just heard. I could’ve sworn they had been talking English. Now of course, I couldn’t remember a single word. It felt as if I was inside an abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock painting. I nodded, said, “I see,” and edged away to stand near the rudely Russian-speaking Aeroflot employee.

Before I had a chance to ask anyone else, we started boarding. It was now 1:30 p.m.

When I got on the plane, you’d think I’d be grateful to sit but no — I was thinking ahead to the next 8 hours and 39 minutes in seat 24D, which was not only an aisle seat, but an aisle aisle seat. Three seats on one window, three seats on the other and four seats in the aisle. I was the fourth seat in the aisle. I couldn’t be more exposed. Also the cold air was blowing on me. I reached up and screwed closed the vent opening. The air continued to blow. I screwed closed every one of the four vent openings. Still blowing. I pressed the orange help button. A polite thirtyish man came up to me. “Pozhalusta,” I said. “Please, could you close the vents? It’s cold.”

Nodding, he reached up and touched something. It was better for a moment. Until he walked away. Then it started blowing again.

An announcement over the PA system in Russian informed us that the missionaries were delaying the flight indefinitely as they continued to check in. As an afterthought the announcement was repeated in broken English.

I had plenty of time to sit and think as we waited for the first sign of the missionaries.

It seemed like everything had been a mad dash for the proverbial door — women and children overboard. There were no long goodbyes with the children the night before, not even time to feed them McDonald’s for dinner. Kevin fed them while I got ready for his boss’s party and packed for Russia at the same time.

My youngest boy Kevie had watched me get ready, bringing me batteries he took from my purse, saying, “Here you go, Mommy.” Later Misha got out of his crib when he woke from his nap, opened his bedroom door and left the room. He came downstairs, took my hand and said, “Come, Mama. Kevie wants you.” You could say Kevie wanted me. He was crying hysterically in the dark room.

I felt unsettled, overwhelmed.

I didn’t want Misha to get out of his crib and his room because I was left unable to finish whatever I was doing. Packing, blow-drying my hair, getting ready. “You know, Misha,” my husband said, “you have to stay in your crib till we get you.”

Misha replied with a roll of the eyes, “You keep saying, Dad, that I have to stay in my crib, but I had to get out, I didn’t want to stay there anymore.” Big, exasperated 3-year-old sigh.

When it was time for us to leave, Kevie was too busy playing with Little People to look up. I wore a gold lamé dress with matching necklace and earrings. The kids barely stirred. Natasha, grunted something like, “Have fun in Russia, Mom.”

I almost — no, I absolutely couldn’t believe that so much had happened in such a short time. How could we be in our new house already?

My oldest friend Kathie sent me an impromptu letter, full of her life and her kids, signed “I love you.” I was too crazed by my life to send her a birthday card. I wasn’t spending enough time with my own children. I had no time for anything but the new house.

Kevin went to work outside of the house. He published children’s books about a dog who reads. I worked inside the house. Which meant my work stopped when the painters came. When the security men came, the pool guys, the lawn mower guys, the appliance guys, the plumbers, the electricians, it was me, each and every day, calling them, arranging times, talking to the building manager, answering their questions, babysitting their time in my house. And carrying the baby. That’s what I did, and when I was in my office for the briefest of minutes, I remained filled with the house and filled with the kids. I was filled with my life. I was not filled enough with World War II, with Leningrad under siege. Half a million people froze to death and died of hunger in Leningrad during the winter of 1941, and I was sitting in my office that was 80 degrees, and so I called the air-conditioning guy to make an appointment for him to come and fix the air conditioning because it was not cold enough in my office. Outside it was 105 and had been a 105 for 45 days. Leningrad, 1941: snow, death, no electricity, no running water, no food. Texas, 1998: my children shrieking in the swimming pool and the pool filter running 24 hours straight for weeks and continuing to do so for the rest of the summer.

125 grams of bread a day for children during the siege; bread cut with glue and cardboard. I calculated how much 125 grams was. About 4 ounces. Maybe 3.8.

“Misha,” I asked, “Would you like a baked potato with butter and cheese and bacon bits?”

“No,” he replied. “I don’t want anything. Just Tootsie Rolls.”

I built my office upstairs so I could have a lovely view, but I had to close my ivory blinds so I wouldn’t see the view, so it wouldn’t distract me, so I wouldn’t see my children being happy and the dogs running around and leaping into the pool. I might as well have been sitting in the rented house we had been living in, sitting in the small, hot attic room over the garage, looking out onto the driveway and the road and the neighbor’s house. Another minus — the Texas sunshine, all well and good, was actually blanching my computer screen. I couldn’t write if I couldn’t see.

My grandfather used to pour a bit of paraffin oil onto a plate, put a piece of wick in the middle and light the wick. When the oil ran out, it would be dark. All day, all night. He allowed himself only a tablespoon of paraffin oil every 24 hours. That was winter in 1941, no electricity and sundown all day — the flip side of the sublime white nights my father had asked me about.

My refrigerator was still not making ice, and the hot water dispenser still not dispensing hot water. When would the plumber come and fix that so I could be more comfortable in my home office, where I would write about three million people starving to death?

My grandfather and great-grandmother had to burn furniture for firewood in their portable ceramic stove that could have cooked some food had there been food to cook.

Sitting waiting, I wondered what the chances were I’d be fed pelmeni on the plane. Pelmeni is my favorite Russian food — meat dumplings in chicken broth. I also like mushroom barley soup, Russian potato salad, and caviar. Thinking of all this food, I realized I was STARVING.

What did a 3.8 ounce ration of bread look like?

I was anxiously excited about returning to Leningrad.

My mother, who had recently moved to Maui, said to me when she called as I was packing, “You know it upsets me when you don’t call me. I know you’re busy, I know you have children. But Paullina, you can have many many children, but you only have one mother.”

Who could argue with that logic? I wanted to say, Mama, I’m sorry but what about my latches? They’re too tight, and the doors don’t open properly. How can I call you when I have to take care of the latches?

My mother said, “Your father doesn’t like the title of your new book, The Bronze Horseman. He says it’s like calling a book Romeo and Juliet.”

“No, it isn’t. No one in America’s heard of Pushkin’s poem, The Bronze Horseman.”

“Well, I don’t think you should call your book Romeo and Juliet.”

I paused. “Okay, Mama, Um, I won’t.”

My mother told me she was jealous of my father’s and my going to Leningrad together. Without her. With a heavy sigh, she added, “Under different circumstances, I would have liked to come with you.”

I had no response to that except a, “Yeah, that would’ve been great.”

Back in 1991 my father, mother and sister drove down to Sanibel Island in Florida. I wasn’t allowed to go on that vacation with my family. My father said, “Paullina, I would love for you to come, but you and your mother, you know you just keep going at each other.”

When they had come back, I asked my sister how the vacation went. Liza rolled her eyes and said, “You wouldn’t believe it, they had the hugest fight about forgetting the sunglasses by the time we got to the bridge.”

I laughed, thinking it was pretty funny that by the time they got to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, about an hour and a half drive from our house, with another two days of driving to go, they had already had a big fight.

“They had a fight on the Verrazano over dumb sunglasses?”

“What Verrazano?” Liza said. “They had a fight at the bridge crossing over the Long Island Expressway!”

Not a bridge, an overpass — a mile from our house.

They had to turn back to get the sunglasses.

So when my mother said to me she wished she could come with us to Russia too, I kept my mouth shut.

We were still on the ground an hour after scheduled departure. I could have walked from LaGuardia to Kennedy.

The missionaries had not materialized inside the main cabin yet.

In 1996 my parents bought a condo in Maui, and my mother suddenly moved there by herself in 1997. Which is why she couldn’t come with my father and me to St. Petersburg — because she moved to Maui by herself last November. Had she remained in Prague with my father, she would come with us to Russia.

God looks after us in ways we cannot fathom.

My father, who had been working at Radio Liberty in New York since the moment we set foot on American soil in 1973, planned to join her in Maui as soon as he retired in three weeks. He worked for RFE/RL’s New York bureau until Communism fell. The following year, in 1992, he was promoted to director of Russian Services for the entire multi-city operation and relocated to Munich and then Prague. My mother adjusted dismally to Europe, missing her life in America and becoming and staying blackly depressed. She was so lonely while he spent all his minutes working. The carrot dangling in front of her was his impending retirement when they would be able to spend all their time together.

You know what they say about why God answers your prayers.

In 1996 they went to Maui on a fact-finding holiday. They’d never been, so they went to see if they liked it, if it really was paradise on earth like the Internet said.

They came back two weeks later, agreeing wholeheartedly with the Net, tanned, and sudden owners of a plush new condo.

No one in the family could understand why they’d done it. My father’s elderly parents were still alive, my 19-year-old sister, Liza, was attending art school in New York, there was me and my three children. Yet with this move to Hawaii they would be permanently six thousand miles away from all of us, literally halfway around the globe. Any further away and they’d be closer.

Yes, but the weather was apparently always in the eighties in Maui. All great things worth having required great sacrifices worth giving. Who said there wasn’t a price to be paid for glorious weather?

When my mother and I spoke as I was trying to stuff eight changes of clothes into one garment bag, she said to me, “I don’t like Hawaii anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I have made a terrible mistake. It’s all my fault.”

“But Mama,” I said. “It’s Hawaii. Paradise on earth. The Internet said so. You know, if you can’t be happy in paradise, you can’t be happy anywhere.” All her life, my mother had been looking for paradise every place she lived.

“That’s the problem,” she said. “It’s sunny all the time. It’s very depressing to have sun all the time. You want a rainy day once in a while.”

“I see.”

“Hawaii is a nice place to go and visit for two weeks, but not to live. I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she repeated. “And it’s my fault.”

She told me that on top of the great weather there was also the issue of red dust and wind, which were inexorably tied together. At noon every day, the winds began. They whipped up red dust from the earth and blew it all around Maui, into all the open windows, onto the tables and the sofas and the shelves and the chairs. My mother had to dust daily, because otherwise the red dust became an eighth of an inch thick, then a quarter, then a half, in less than a week.

Trying to find a solution, I said, “Why don’t you close the windows?”

“Close the windows? But it’s so hot.”

I was afraid to ask. “Don’t you have central air?”

“Central air? What central air? There is no central air. We have one air conditioner in the bedroom, but it’s small.”

My father didn’t know about the red dust. My mother was afraid to tell him.

“Didn’t you see the red dust when you went to visit for two weeks?” I asked.

“No. Who sees? We stayed in a hotel. The cleaning people dusted everything. It’s only now that I have to do it myself that it’s unbearable. I can’t wait until your father retires. Then we can suffer the dust together.”

The missionaries started filtering through — it was about time. There had been six announcements all in Russian, apologizing for the delay.

The same muscular blond guy who had talked to my husband in Dallas walked by me shouting something to one of his friends, saw me and said, beaming, “See, I told you, you’d make the plane no problem.”

The plane taxied off at 2:30 p.m.

My head throbbed, my left eye throbbed, even six Advils later.

Aeroflot tried hard but they were hardly British Airways. Where was the back-of-the-chair TV screen? Where was the beautifully presented four-color brochure with a painting of a beach or a sunset, and inside a typed-up menu? Grilled salmon, exquisitely prepared with Hollandaise sauce and sautéed onions, served with new potatoes and string beans.

On Aeroflot they took a more informal approach. The man in blue and gray wheeled his trolley to my seat and barked in Russian, “Shto?” which means, “What?”

I looked at him inquiringly, but before I could ask, he said, “Fish or turkey.”

“What kind of fish?” I asked, also in Russian.

The man shrugged.

“I’ll take the fish,” I said.

The server came around with the drink tray, she said, “Shto?”

“Please could I have some tomato juice and some water?”

She nodded — and poured me tomato juice and some water. Both were room temperature. Ice was not offered. I smiled. It was as if we were already in Russia. They had started assimilating me in transit so it wouldn’t be too much of a shock when I landed. They’ll give you ice if you ask, but it seems they have to go in the back and chip it off the air conditioning unit, which by the way, seemed to be running at full power. No matter how I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders, I could not get warm.

When I had said tomato juice and water, I fully expected to be denied both. No. I was given both; that was a pleasant surprise. Like I was saying, Aeroflot tried hard to be western.

So what if the plastic glasses were filled only half way? I downed their contents and after eating the “fish” became thirsty. The fish was cod, I think. With rice and carrots. Served with plastic utensils of the cheap picnic set quality. I pressed too hard into a pea and one of the tines broke off. I ate the fish, I ate the Caesar salad with vinaigrette — no, vinegar — dressing, I ate the ham, pepper and potato salad in thick mayonnaise, I ate the small carrot cake, and then I started on the bread roll. I ate like I fully expected blockade-level conditions in Russia for the next six days. As if further preparing me, the roll was ice cold (oh, so something is ice cold!) and decidedly unfresh. I ate half of it with unsalted butter. Russians don’t eat salted butter; they consider that a travesty of the churning process, and they start breaking the Americans of the salted butter habit right on the plane.

When I eat on planes I always wonder what my husband would be able to eat. He hates mayo, salad dressing, vinegar and doesn’t like fish. He would have to eat the whole stale roll and leave the butter off because he doesn’t like butter either.

Does this roll of stale bread weigh more or less than 125 grams?

Thirsty, I stopped the stewardess in a garish red uniform walking by and asked in my politest Russian, “Could I get some more water, please?”

“No,” she barked. “Not now. Maybe later.” She walked away.

Later, she did come back to bring me half a cup of tepid water, which I drank gratefully and thanked God for having it.

I drank two cups of black tea with sugar. To Aeroflot’s credit, the sugar was not doled out in tiny western one-teaspoon increments, as it is on domestic flights and even on British Airways international flights, but in thick communist packets of a heaped tablespoon. Much better.

After dinner, I slept when I could shut out the bickering married couple sitting across from me. It was very hard to sleep because the husband and wife were immensely entertaining. They made up for lack of TV screens. Thoroughly Russian and in their sixties, they sat as far away from each other as was possible without actually sitting in different rows. The wife could not stop commenting on her husband’s every move. “Vova, why are you putting your hands there? This isn’t your magazine. Don’t touch it. They’re bringing our food soon.”

Slowly the man would pull out the flight magazine anyway.

“Why are you looking at that, Vova? What is so interesting about it?”

“Do you want to get a new suitcase?” Vova asked in his gruffly appeasing voice. His face was lined with resignation.

“Get a new suitcase? Vova, put the magazine down. I’ve had enough of your nonsense. And don’t drag the blanket on the floor.”

When the food came, Vova had the bad luck of dropping something his wife urgently needed. Both food trays were lowered, so it was impossible for him to bend down and retrieve it. All during their meal, she talked about nothing else. I missed what it was that he dropped, and I think the husband did too, because he continued to eat and said nothing in response the entire dinner.

After dinner, he wanted to have a smoke. Being Russian, he assumed where he was, was the smoking aisle.

“You can’t smoke in here, idiot,” she said to him. “Didn’t you hear the captain?”

So the man got up from his seat and, standing in the aisle, lit up.

“Idiot! What are you doing? They told you not to smoke here!”

The yielding husband shrugged and said in his quietest voice, “I just wanted to light up.”

“Idiot! What are you doing?”

He extinguished his cigarette and sat back down. She wanted him to pass her the blanket, but apparently he wasn’t moving fast enough. “Can you just give it to me? Can’t you see I’m cold? I’m getting a headache from the cold. Just pass it already.”

Kevin had suggested that on such a long flight maybe I could write a few beginning pages of The Bronze Horseman, perhaps the first chapter. Yeah, right. When I woke up, I read Good Housekeeping, Redbook, McCalls, InStyle, Reader’s Digest, People, and half of Shape before I got bored and finally picked up one of my research books, 900 Days, an account of the Siege of Leningrad.

What surprised me was how little the people around me read.

They read nothing. They sat staring catatonically into space, into the chair in front of them, or at me. The Russian woman entertained herself by yelling at her husband. The girl next to me just sat. I offered her my In Style magazine, which I thought would be perfect for her, because no reading was involved, just looking at the faces and houses of beautiful people.

“Yes,” she said, without much enthusiasm.

She leafed through it politely and gave it back to me. “Thank you.” Opening her journal, she took her pen out, placed the pen on the paper and did not write a word for five minutes. Then she closed her eyes. I looked at her blank piece of paper. So I wasn’t the only one with writer’s block, I thought.

For the entire flight, a very heavy girl in tight shorts across the aisle stared at me and my magazines and the food I ate, and the blanket that I had over my shoulders. I tried not to look at her. Apparently she didn’t need to read when she had me for entertainment. Motionless, I peered at her through my nearly closed eyelids. Still staring.

The first time I asked the steward to turn down the vents, he did so with a smile. The second time, he did so without a smile. The third time he did so, he did so with a grunt and a sigh, much like my ten-year-old daughter does when confronted with polite requests.

It was still blowing Arctic-like air down on me.

I drifted off with 900 Days opened, thinking that I would like to finish it in 900 days. I just might fail in that task.

I recalled what I could of Russia.

I was afraid to see it. I knew I was, too. Shouldn’t some things remain a memory? I thought so. Memory is so kind. I had no regrets. I left too young to have regrets. I had not left love behind, or friendship. We left family behind, but many were now with us in America. My father saw to that. Because of his extraordinary effort in getting himself, my mother and me out, four other families were delivered into Florida and Maine and North Carolina and New York: my grandparents, my father’s brother and his family, my father’s oldest friend and his family, and the oldest friend’s son and his family. He gave them all an American life.

But we still knew many in Russia who could not come, or would not.

I don’t want to go, but I know I need to see it with my own eyes. My grown eyes. It’s like gawking at an old boyfriend: how is he? You hope he is well, but not better than you. I wanted Russia to be well.

To see Shepelevo again was going to be worth the whole trip.

So much of my Bronze Horseman story was still a vapor to me. I hoped being with my father would not crush my muse, for when the muse comes, your heart has to be open to receive it. Maybe I would have some time alone to think, to write. We weren’t planning to spend every minute of every day together, were we?

When we first came to America, I knew little about it, except that there were sharks and they ate people. That I learned in school.

The Americans killed their presidents, and the sharks ate the Americans.

When my father had told me that we were going to be leaving Russia and going to America, the first question I asked him was, “Will the sharks eat us?”

“No,” he said. “They won’t.”

The second question I asked him was, “Do you think we will ever come back?”

He looked at me for a long time before he answered. “Never,” he said with sadness. We were walking down Nevsky Prospekt and as always he held my hand.

“Maybe when there are no more communists?”

He shook his head. “Not in my lifetime,” he replied. “Not in yours either.”

Yet, here we both were, proving him wrong. My father isn’t wrong about many things.

It was true, when we were leaving in 1973, that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics seemed an all powerful monolith designed only to perpetuate the power of the Communist Party, fourteen million members strong, and to subjugate the rest of us. We could choose to become Communists if we wanted to. We could become Pioneers in third grade, then we could become Comsomols or young Communists in tenth, and afterward we could get a party card. A party card meant you could get into all the best stores.

Since the rest of us couldn’t get crap in any stores at all, party membership seemed pretty appealing.

Yet, even then, knowing nothing, the day I spat at a statue of Lenin when I was 8, I knew I would not make a very good communist.

After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, and perestroika became the mantra of the land, the rules were relaxed a little.

My mother made an unprecedented trip to Russia in 1987 to visit her dying father. The fact that my mother went back all by herself astounded everyone in the family. My father had been afraid to go with her. He must have thought perestroika or no, the communists would throw him back to the labor camp and not be as kind this time.

So she went by herself, and then the Berlin Wall came down two years later. After the wall fell, my father, for all his protestations, made a trip to Russia. Then my father’s friend Anatoly visited us on Long Island, and then my Uncle Misha from Moscow came, and finally in 1994, my mother and father went to Russia together for the 50-year celebration at my father’s alma mater. My father was invited as an honored guest, a man who had left Russia and made a great success of himself.

I am not saying that all these events transpired because of something my mother did in 1987, but I can’t rule it out.

If there is one question I am always asked after I say that I was born in Russia, it is, “Have you been back?”

During Communist rule, my answer was always a puzzled, “Of course not.”

But after 1991, the simple “No,” became infinitely more complicated. There were children involved to be sure, and a sense of danger, of unstable economic and political times, of — as always — logistical issues, but most of all, it was the question of me: why would I go back? What was in it for me? What would it profit me to go back? What was the point?

I was happier thinking I would never go back.

There was a certain romanticism in being that kind of outcast. A refugee for life. Woman leaves as a young child, childhood memories intact and having already shaped her development, and then she carries Russia with her in her soul, but never again sees the place where she was born and grew up. Such melodrama!

That was one of the reasons I was reluctant to go back. To me going back felt like capitulation. Like I wasn’t going to appear as delightfully melancholy.

But now it was for a greater good. It was for my book. Finally a book about Russia, and about a time and place during WWII few people talk about or know about.

I had to see the Leningrad streets. I had to see where my two lovers walked, where they fell in love and said their goodbyes, and where my soldier fought against a mortal enemy, and against the Nazis, too. I had to see the streets where people starved to death by the thousands.

I had to see the city where I was born.

Clearly I am not comfortable with it. My first three books are all close to my heart, but not thatclose. I liked to bare my Russian soul, so long as I didn’t have to bare it about Russia.

Also. I really had no interest in getting in touch with my sensitive Russian side. During my adolescence, what I would not have given to be less Russian, less foreign, less un-cool. I wanted a pair of new jeans, I wanted American hair, which meant hair not cut at home by my mother. I wanted coats that were not knit by my mother. What humiliation, no matter how well-meant.

I wanted to be able to speak the language of the hip kids in school, I wanted to be able to say “Hi,” in English without sounding like a dork.

As I grew, I carried with me the feeling of wanting to be an American wherever I went.

I went to England. I was twenty.

The English, smiling their sly, sardonic British smiles at me would ask, “So… wher’ you from?”

“New York,” I’d say.

Those smiles again. “Really? We never would have guessed.”

They thought they were being so clever in mocking me. “What have Americans ever given us?” they’d say. “Except McDonald’s and herpes?”

I thought I couldn’t have been luckier. To the British I wasn’t Russian, I was American. It took five years of my living in London for me to become an American. In England, I was not from Russia anymore. I was from NooYawk.

But despite my best efforts, I knew I was only an American on the surface. I knew that I could make a really good show of it, get a nice American haircut, buy nice American shoes, and a pair of Levi’s. I could drive a Chrysler minivan, and even learn a word like equivocate and use it in a sentence.

Regardless of what the English thought, my soul was painfully Russian. It was Russian music that brought tears to my eyes, and Russian food that made me fullest, and Russian language that made me feel as if I were home.

Having turned myself inside out to become what I was not, inside I still craved pumpernickel bread with sunflower oil and fried potatoes with onions.

For twenty five years, I tried to put away the child part that was Russia, but now I was being called home.

Where was breakfast? I was starving.

Breakfast was served to me on the plane at eight in the evening U.S. time. I was fed roast beef that was not considered by Russians to be a perishable food, so it was room temperature. It was served with another 125 grams of roll, and a slice of pale tomato.

We were told by the captain in Russian first and then reluctantly in English that the temperature in St. Petersburg was 18 degrees Celsius. We were landing. It was raining.