Six Days in Leningrad

I slept restlessly. I kept waking up every hour or so, opening my eyes and seeing light outside. What time was it? It seemed perpetually dawn, or dusk.

The memory of Shepelevo was strikingly real like the yellow velvet lamp on the night table. Shepelevo was my hypnotic zone, it was where I went when I needed to remember where I was happiest.

There was a hammock and there were cucumbers and there was water. I rowed a boat, I tasted clover, and all the smells were right. I had an old bike I learned to ride in Shepelevo. I saw my first — and only — house on fire in Shepelevo. I tasted warm goat’s milk and warm cow’s milk. I caught my first fish. I tried to catch a fish with my bare hands in a brook by the gulf. I saw the sun rise and set in that village. I read The Three Musketeers, my favorite book, in Shepelevo. I broke my toe, my first toe-break, on the door frame between my and Yulia’s room. I picked blueberries and mushrooms. I killed a hamster — accidentally — by letting him eat coffee grinds in Shepelevo. I had a fish bone stuck in my throat that no one could get out except my grandfather with his surgeon-sure hands.

Shepelevo was my Land of Oz. Why did Dorothy go back in the subsequent books? She was so happy to be back home in Kansas. Yet something drew her back. Sentiment? Love? Pain for the past? A desire to relive some part of your life’s adventure, to see with grown-up eyes your childhood joys?

The Grand Hotel Europe may have been chosen as one of the “Leading Hotels of the World,” but whoever had been grading obviously didn’t need to wake up in the morning. There was no alarm clock in the room. There was no clock at all, not even on the tiny TV. I couldn’t read the fine gold lines on my analog wristwatch, not even in St. Petersburg white nights.

Kevin was my alarm clock. He called at 8:30 in the morning to wake me up. It was 11:30 in the evening his time. “Can I talk to the kids?”

“Well, it’s nearly midnight,” he said. “They’ve been sleeping for three hours.”

My father called half an hour later. “You are not buying a camera in Leningrad,” he said. “What are you, crazy? I loaded new film into my camera. I have a beautiful camera, a Pentax. It’s yours for the rest of the trip. You will take it, and you will give it back to me before you leave. Just don’t forget to give it back to me before you leave Russia.”

“But Papa—”

“That’s all. I will pick you up in a half hour. You will be ready, right? I don’t want to wait. You have to be ready. I’m not even going to come up.”

“Papa?”

“What?” he said gruffly, already done with the conversation.

“I thought you said not to call it Leningrad.”

I got ready in record time. What to wear? I didn’t know what to wear to Shepelevo. It could be cold. On my bed last night there was a note left by the people who performed the turn-down service. “Good evening. The temperature for tomorrow, Tuesday, July 14th, 1998: 67-73°F or 18-21°C. Good Night!”

I wore khaki shorts, a chenille short-sleeve mulberry top and over it a sleeveless white tunic. My feet I decided to place into my relaxed-fit keds that had been very uncomfortable on the plane, but perhaps they would do better in Shepelevo.

I had my buffet breakfast for 24 UNITS in exactly five minutes from 10:00-10:05 in the morning. My father did not like to be kept waiting. I had two blini with caviar, some fried potatoes with fried mushrooms, and some coffee.

My father came at 10:15. “Paullina,” he said, wearing a navy nylon jacket, “you’re not dressed for the weather.”

I shrugged. It was a crisp cool morning.

“Did you bring a bathing suit?” he asked me, completely straight-faced, as we walked to Viktor’s car. “To go swimming in the Gulf of Finland?”

“I didn’t bring a bathing suit at all to Russia,” I said. “Maybe we can buy one at Gostiny Dvor.”

Gostiny Dvor is the premier shopping mall of St. Petersburg. It is a two-story trapezoid yellow stucco building. It had been built in 1765.

And it looked it.

Papa shook his head as if I were crazy to be thinking of buying anything in Gostiny Dvor, but said nothing except, “Maybe I’ll go swimming in the lake instead.”

“Papa, you’re wearing a jacket,” I pointed out.

“So?”

“So, nothing.”

“And sarcasm does not get you my camera. If you’re so clever, where is your camera?”

“Broken.”

“Exactly.”

We walked across Nevsky Prospekt to Gostiny Dvor, which occupied a whole city block, to buy a camera battery, although what I really wanted to buy was a new camera. My father wouldn’t hear of it. “I’m giving you my camera. I already put film in it.” As if his putting film in the camera somehow put the issue to rest.

I was upset at myself. How many times does one return to the city of one’s birth? Once, you would think, and for that occasion, out of my three cameras — one of them a splendid Nikon SLR — I instead bring the tiniest and silliest.

I had a beautiful Nikon 6006, and I had an adequate automatic Pentax with a 38-165 zoom. I didn’t bring one of those. No, I brought my weatherproof Olympus, the camera we bought strictly to go on vacations with small children, because mom could not carry her Nikon and her two boys and two diaper bags and push the double stroller at the same time.

I was so conditioned to travel light because the children are heavy, that I came by myself to Russia and brought nothing. No clothes, no camera.

While my father bought a camera battery, I looked around at the automatic cameras. The lady kindly let me hold a Canon. Viktor stood quietly by me, and then whispered as we left, “That’s how you know there are changes in Russia. You think they’d ever let you touch a camera in a store in the Communist days?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“That’s right,” said my father. “Because they didn’t have any cameras.”

Reluctantly I took my father’s Pentax.

On the way to Shepelevo

We drove merrily. I say merrily, but Viktor seemed to be uncertain of the way, distrustful of the map and of my dad’s innate sense of direction. My father kept telling him, this way, this way, to the right. Viktor remained unconvinced.

We were headed for the south side of the Gulf of Finland. First Peterhof, then Oranienbaum, then Big Izhora, Little Izhora, Lebyazhye, then Gora-Volday, and then at the crest, right before the shore curved — Shepelevo.

Just past Shepelevo was a larger town of Sosnovy Bor, where the Soviets built a nuclear reactor in the early 1980s and restricted all access down the coast because of it.

That’s why my mother did not go to Shepelevo when she visited Russia in 1987.

In 1992 the reactor in Sosnovy Bor had a Chernobyl-like accident and was now in the process of being dismantled.

All I wanted to do was look out the window at the road in silence, but my father was telling Viktor and me how some Russians got rich when Communism fell, so I had to listen.

Apparently, through small bribes some enterprising Russians acquired Soviet buildings on the cheap when they saw what was about to become of Communism in the early 1990s.

Though the buildings were cheap, they were also falling apart. With a few connections and some foreign capital investment these Russians renovated the buildings, and then leased them out as the buildings of the new Russia. They made millions.

Most of this reconstruction was in Moscow but there was some in Leningrad too.

I listened carefully.

“Any questions?” my father asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Tell me again why we couldn’t go to Shepelevo by taking public transportation?”

I remembered fondly taking public transportation to Shepelevo. It would take us 15 minutes on the Metro, and then I would get a crème brulée ice cream, which for me as a child had to be one of the two best things in the world, the other being crème brulée gelatin. Sometimes I’d get disappointing vanilla. Then we would take the electrichka — the short-distance train — for 45 minutes to Lomonosov (now Oranienbaum), where we would wait for a bus that would take an hour to get to Shepelevo. I suspect all I wanted out of the public transportation experience was the crème brulée ice cream.

“I’m too old to take public transportation,” said my father.

But the Lomonosov train station, a big old yellow stucco building, struck chords in both of us. My father said, “Take a picture for your Mama. She’ll cry.”

Well, that was the point, I thought, of taking the bus and train. I remembered waiting at that bus stop with my mother.

A bus came. It didn’t so much ride in as hobble in, as if perhaps one of the tires was blown. The wine-color paint on its sides was peeling and the undercarriage was rusted out. The small shut windows looked not translucent but opaque. The bus made a reluctant-engine noise.

It looked like something out of a movie set in a South American location. Maybe Bolivia.

“Is that the kind of bus we used to take?” I asked.

“Worse,” said my father.

We bought some drinks in a little shop next to the station. Viktor bought a jar of pickles.

My father said that was all new. There had been nowhere to buy anything before, and the few stores that had existed certainly didn’t sell Coke and Sprite, and Perrier spring water.

“What did they sell?”

“Nothing.”

We drove on.

“Papa,” I asked him, “how am I going to write about Russia during WWII?”

“Write, write,” he said. “Everything is exactly the same.”

“Papa, did the Germans get to Shepelevo?”

He told me they didn’t. They trampled through Petergof — Peter the Great’s magnificent Palace — out of which they took rugs to line their miserable trenches with. Forty kilometers before Shepelevo, they were stopped at Lomonosov, which remained in Soviet hands.

“Were they stopped because of Kronstadt?”

“Exactly right,” replied my father, with slight surprise that I even knew what Kronstadt was.

Kronstadt was a tiny island in the middle of the narrow entrance to the Gulf of Finland that housed a naval base. This base bombarded the Germans with artillery fire on the southern coast of the Gulf and the Finns with artillery fire on the northern coast of the Gulf. Kronstadt saved Leningrad.

Right past Lomonosov, on the edge of the Gulf of Finland, Viktor stopped to ask for directions. Musing and looking out onto the Gulf, I said to Papa, “I wonder where Kronstadt is?”

He pointed to a bit of land about a kilometer away rising out of the water. “Right there.”

“Do they allow tourists there now? They didn’t before.”

“They do now.”

“They do?” I became excited. “I really want to go.”

Shaking his head, my father exclaimed, “Paullina, you should’ve come to Russia not for six days but sixty.”

Viktor in the meantime returned and told us that the two men he asked for directions told him that just a few kilometers up ahead on the highway, past a town called Big Izhora, was a border patrol point, and without special permission, no one was allowed through.

“Oh, koshmar! Koshmar!” Papa said. “That’s it. Everything fell through, Paullina. What a nightmare. What a horror. That’s it. Well it’s all over.”

We drove on anyway, but slower. For fifteen minutes as we drove, all I heard from the back seat of the car was, “I can’t believe it. I asked him if we needed permission, he said, no, go right ahead, they’ll let you through. I could have gotten permission so easily. No, he said, we don’t need it. Well, that’s it now. It’s all over. What a tragedy. Nothing to do. Ah, hell.”

Who this he was, I didn’t know and was afraid to ask.

I didn’t hear, let’s see what we can do. Let’s try. Maybe there is another way we can go.

No. Apparently it was all over, and he was to blame.

The border patrol booth looked similar to the booth on the road to Fort Wilderness in Walt Disney World. The highway, true, was much worse, but the pine trees were about the same. This was where the similarities ended because the Fort Wilderness gate had a modern, fully-air-conditioned brick and fiberglass booth, in which sat a comfortable, retirement-age man. He would glance at our Disney resort card and languidly press a round red button with his right hand. Pressing the button would automatically lift the gate arm under which we would pass, and then the arm would automatically lower. The guard would go back to reading his newspaper.

The Russian gate was manned by two young, extremely able-bodied soldiers in full uniform with guns strapped to their waists. One soldier manned the way in, one the way out. The soldiers came up to the cars, and checked the credentials of the drivers. But there was no red button to push. Instead, they walked to the gate arm and pushed it open with the force of their bodies. They walked it open. The gate arm didn’t go up or down. It swung out to let the cars through, and then swung back in to close. It was a manual gate.

This wasn’t Fort Wilderness.

The three of us sighed as we parked the car and got out. Slowly we walked over to one of the soldiers, who listened very carefully to our pleas to let us pass and then shook his head. My father handed the soldier his business card and said something about coming from America to see his grandmother’s grave in Shepelevo.

The soldier looked at my father’s passport and his business card, he looked at my passport, he studied all of us, then he shook his head again.

I wished we knew what this border post was for. We certainly weren’t on the border of anything. We were in the middle of a two lane highway, between nowhere and nothing, traveling alongside the Gulf of Finland.

The soldier went to make a phone call. My father shook his head and again mumbled something about a Viktor who should have told him about needing permission. I looked at our Viktor. “You?” I mouthed silently. He shook his head. Loudly he said, “Another Viktor who works at Radio Liberty.”

“Papa,” I asked, “isn’t this the road we used to take the bus on?”

“Of course it is.”

“Well, what is this for?”

“How do I know? Viktor, do you know?”

He said he didn’t.

“Nobody knows. Maybe it has something to do with the nuclear reactor in Sosnovy Bor, but probably not. The soldiers themselves probably don’t know. That’s Russia for you.”

As we waited for the soldier to come back, I saw through the pines the dark water of the Gulf of Finland.

It was on this highway 33 years ago that my mother and I took a taxi to Shepelevo because the bus hadn’t come in three hours. Being two, and talking little, I looked out the window and watched the water appear and disappear behind the trees, and I spoke only these words: “Yes Gulf. No Gulf. Yes Gulf. No Gulf. Yes Gulf. No Gulf.” My mother told me that my hypnotic repetition of those four words the entire hour had a soporific effect on our taxi driver who fell asleep behind the wheel. “Did we stop?” I asked my mother. “Did we stop to let him sleep?”

“No,” she said. “We continued driving.”

I heard the story many times. This was the very road they were not letting us on now.

It wasn’t that they weren’t letting anyone through. Villagers, yes. Summer residents, sure. Fishermen, of course. Drivers with permission, absolutely. Just not us.

Could it really be that our quest for Shepelevo was going to end in such failure? I couldn’t believe that I would come to Russia and not see my Shepelevo. I refused to believe it.

The soldier hung up the phone, came back and shook his head for the third and final time. “They won’t let you through. It is very strict,” he said. “I can’t disobey. But you can go the back way. You can go around. Go back to the Tallinn Shosse, then take the road that will connect you back with this road twelve kilometers further down. Near Lebyazhye.”

“Oh, so this road opens up?” Viktor asked with hope.

“Yes, twelve kilometers down.”

The soldier was serious and unsmiling. The other soldier in the meantime, a big bulky strapping guy, was pushing and pulling both sets of gate arms, earning his soldier’s pay. As he passed from one gate to the other, he stared at me. I stared back.

We turned the car around and drove back a few kilometers to the Tallinn Shossé. Before we could make a right, however, Viktor had to stop and ask the teenagers walking along the road if this was indeed the Tallinn Shossé. Like they knew. They shrugged and said, think so. Great, thanks. Since none of the roads, not even the major highways were marked in any way, Viktor had to stop again to ask if this was in fact the Tallinn Shossé.

We neared an army truck and a red Mercedes parked in the middle of the road at odd angles. The driver of the Mercedes and the driver of the truck were gesticulating to each other. Only when we passed did we see that the Mercedes was caved in all along the passenger side.

After driving for a few kilometers on the Tallinn Shossé, which I thought was one of the roads the Germans took when they marched north to Leningrad, we turned right onto a road that led into a forest of tall birches and reedy pines. It smelled good. Pinecones and wet moss and butterflies.

Viktor said, “No, this isn’t right.” I wondered how he knew.

He asked half a dozen people. They all told him to drive over there. Pointing to the tall birches and reedy pines.

Suddenly, there was no more paved road. We were driving on a dirt road, the likes of which I’d never seen. I’m not saying they don’t exist. I’m just saying I haven’t seen them. Once I was taken for a ride on a motorcycle on an unpaved road in Minnesota that seemed as unpaved as a road could get. However that road was the freshly-poured interstate compared to the crater-like moon surface we now found ourselves on.

This road had potholes every three yards, potholes about three yards in diameter, all filled with muddy water. The potholes alternated — one on one side of the road, one on the other. We had to zigzag between them.

I said, this cannot be right, Viktor. This can’t possibly be right. Turn back at once. He continued to drive.

For five kilometers.

After five kilometers I thought we must be going the wrong way. I could not believe the nice young soldier would have told us to take a road like this. Surely he meant a civilized road to Lebyazhye. He didn’t say, you need a four-wheel drive, he didn’t say, you might have to push your car through the bushes, and he didn’t say, you won’t know where the hell you’ll be going for 10 kilometers. He said a ‘road.’ All my definitions of the word ‘road’ involved asphalt or cement. We had to be going the wrong way.

“Give me the map,” I said.

Yet, there it was, beige on Viktor’s map — a 10-kilometer long road. On the map legend, the color beige stood for ‘dirt road.’

My father called it ‘forest’ road.

I studied the map in the back of the car as we shook. Beige lines criss-crossed all over the place.

Feeling dizzy, I put away the map and stared straight ahead to try to regain my equilibrium and not vomit. The dinosaur footprints filled with murky water were making it hard to stare straight ahead. Like a skier on a giant slalom course Viktor zigzagged from one side to the other to avoid the holes.

The unpaved road forked in quite a few places. We bore to the right. At one point, Viktor declared we were going the wrong way and turned around and came back to the fork and went left instead of right.

The process was a mystery to me.

After seven kilometers, we stopped for a woman. She and her two comrades had been picking mushrooms all night. “Why do we have to stop for her?” I asked a little petulantly.

“She’ll take us to the highway,” Viktor said. “She’ll tell us where to go. She looks like she knows where she is headed.” The woman was wearing orange knee-high rubber boots, light blue sweatpants, a dirty white long-sleeved shirt, and over it an old ski vest. Every inch of her body other than her face was covered by clothing.

We put her mushrooms in the trunk and her in the backseat with me.

When my father asked about giving the men a lift, too, Viktor said, “They’re men, they can walk three kilometers.” They were headed to the train station with their mushrooms.

As the woman got in, a swarm of mosquitoes, a liquid wave, got in with her. I saw her face had been bloodied by the mosquitoes in a few dozen places. And it was a small face.

“What’s your name?” I asked, being polite.

“Olya,” she said, and smiled, flashing all four of her teeth, yellow with black holes, as if the mosquitoes had drilled through them too. I spent the next three kilometers killing mosquitoes and trying not look inside Olya’s friendly smiling mouth.

We let her out near the train station. She said our highway was just half a kilometer down the road. My father shook her hand. When he got back into the car, he turned to me. I lifted my eyebrows and said nothing. “The teeth of poverty,” he said.

I still said nothing.

As soon as Viktor got back into the car, he drove five yards and stopped a group of people to ask them where the highway was. Half a kilometer down the road, they told him.

Finally we were back on A-121, and this time there was no border patrol, no gate, just the highway, the pines, and the Gulf of Finland peeking through them. Yes, Gulf.

Twenty kilometers later we passed a sign that said Shepelevo.

Shepelevo

“Papa,” I asked as we were driving, “what is the lake called in Shepelevo?”

“I don’t know,” he said, adding, “I don’t think it has a name. Even your Dedushka never called it anything but the lake. It doesn’t have a name, I’m sure.”

I looked at Viktor’s map. It was called Lake Gora-Valdaisko. Gora-Valday was the town just east of Shepelevo.

“Papa, the lake is called Gora-Valdaisko. It says so here on the map.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he said, as if it didn’t really matter to him.

I couldn’t wait to tell my grandparents when I got back home. It would matter to them.

We had left Leningrad around eleven in the morning and it was now about three in the afternoon. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom, nor had we eaten. My father and Viktor had twice availed themselves in the woods.

I said, “Papa, where can we get some lunch? Maybe a little Chinese take-out?”

He spun around to glare at me from the front seat. “What are you, kidding me?”

“Yes.”

He and Viktor were trying to work out where to park. I looked out the window trying to find the dirt road that led down to Shepelevo from the highway.

There was nowhere to park, though of course I was half-expecting a little paved lot somewhere, next to a convenience store, perhaps.

We parked right off the highway, on the grass, by the side of the cemetery where my great-grandmother was buried.

Looking for Babushka

I couldn’t wait to get out of the car. The first thing I did was smell the air. I closed my eyes and took a breath, the biggest breath of my life, knowing I was taking the biggest breath of my life. I was taking a breath to smell Shepelevo.

Breathing in Shepelevo was like hitting the right note on the piano. There was only one right note.

When I was young, Shepelevo was the smell of nettles, of salted smoked fish, of fresh water from the Gulf of Finland, and of burning firewood, all wrapped up in one Shepelevo.

As it had been, so it was.

Across two continents, a dozen countries, twenty cities, three colleges, two marriages, three children, three books, and twenty-five years of another life, I breathed it and smelled the air. Nowhere else in the world had it.

“Papa,” I said, my voice breaking. “Do you think we could photograph the smell?”

He gave me a look and then laughed.

I walked along the road, stepping carefully on the pine needles and dirt. I picked up a handful of both and smelled them. Papa and Viktor were already heading towards the gate in the cemetery, but I was in no rush. I was getting light-headed from breathing in so deeply.

The cemetery was old and fairly small, maybe 50 yards across, completely covered by a canopy of oaks and pines. Though it had been bitter bright sunshine on the road, the cemetery was dark and was ten degrees cooler.

My grandmother gave me very clear instructions regarding her mother’s grave. We had to find it. We could not fail.

The problem was, the cemetery had expanded in the twenty-two years since Babushka Dusia’s death. What once had been the ‘end’ of the cemetery was now the middle. We could tell it had been expanded because the old crumbling fence ended and a new slightly less crumbling fence began. We didn’t give up; we walked up and down the right side of the cemetery looking for the end, or the middle, or the beginning. We could not find a gravestone marked with my great-grandmother’s name. Every once in a while, my father would exclaim, “I think this is it!” But it never was.

When we walked through all the gravestones on the right side of the cemetery, we started with the gravestones in the middle.

There were three of us, but we didn’t trust each other; we kept walking and re-checking all the graves. I know Papa wanted to be the one to find the grave. I wanted to find it too. I wanted to be the hero.

It was definitely not going to be easy. First of all, the majority of the graves had wrought iron fences around them. We had to open the gate and walk inside to see the name on each grave, and then leave, closing the gate behind us. Second of all, about a quarter of the graves were unmarked. That was discouraging.

And third, as I walked through the ragged rows of graves, I became eight again, and stopped looking for a name. I was eight, and Yulia was by my side. We went inside the cemetery to look for candy. Where could two poor village kids get candy in Communist Russia? Graves, of course. There was no candy for the living, but along with flowers, mourners put candy on the graves of their loved ones. So Yulia and I would walk through the graves, take the candy and eat it. We couldn’t bring it back home, because our grandmother would kill us. We ate it right at the cemetery, and dropped the candy wrappers back on hallowed ground.

Now as I walked I looked for candy on the graves, to see if the old tradition still stood. It didn’t. Only flowers remained at the grave sites.

My ankles and calves started to itch uncontrollably. That was distracting. I was scratching instead of searching.

The large Russian village mosquitoes were having a field day with me. My father and Viktor were covered by clothing; not so I. Looking at the back of my calves, I saw big red welts.

I wouldn’t last another five minutes in the cemetery. I had no blood left.

Blood.

I looked at the fleshy space between my right thumb and forefinger. In the folds of the skin the scar was still visible. In this cemetery, Yulia and I had found a piece of broken window pane glass. Yulia wanted it, I wanted it. She grabbed one side, I grabbed the other. She pulled. I pulled.

I won.

She let go of the glass, involuntarily, I might add. I was 18 months older and considerably stronger. The glass slipped from her hands and ripped the meaty flesh in mine. My grandmother was not happy with me. Somehow it was all my fault. Because I was older and should have known better. My great-grandmother who was very much alive then, sided, of course, against me. Bloody hand and all, I was punished and had to stay inside the rest of the day.

After we walked through the left side of the cemetery, closest to the road, my father said, “We can’t find it. It’s just impossible.”

“But Papa!” I said, uncontrollably itching my legs.

“I know! What can I tell you? We can’t find it. There are so many unmarked ones. And maybe your grandmother made a mistake, maybe she is buried on the left side not the right.”

“We are at the left side.”

We walked back to the right side, looking at the tombstones as we passed.

“We’ve looked at every grave. We can’t find it.”

“Papa, we can’t tell Babushka that.”

He looked around. “I have a terrible feeling that her tombstone because it was unmarked was torn down and another built in its place.”

“You mean somebody is buried on top of Babushka Dusia?”

“It’s possible. It was unmarked. And they’re running out of space.”

Hunched over, my hand never leaving my calf, I said, “Papa, it’s not possible. What would they do with Babushka’s casket? It’s only six feet in the ground.”

“I’m not saying they took it out, But look at the ground right here.” He pointed under the trees. “It’s all messed up. Maybe that’s where it was. You can see they’re running out of space.”

Viktor and Papa stood and looked at the disturbed earth. I couldn’t believe that any cemetery would be doubling up, even a village cemetery. Especially not a village cemetery. The Russian villagers have nothing but their faith. They wouldn’t put a body on top of another body.

These weren’t mass graves. All the graves in this cemetery were moderately well kept, with iron fences around them, with little gates and benches where visitors could sit. Many tombstones had crosses and photos of the loved ones. Fresh flowers were everywhere. Yes, there was no caretaker’s building; yes, the grass and nettles were four feet high, but no one would tear down my great-grandmother’s grave to bury their own dead on top of her.

All three of us sighing, we looked again. My search was hampered by my bare legs. Papa and Viktor were both in long pants. Papa wore a jacket. I was just lunch for mosquitoes, big, black, ravenous mosquitoes. As I walked through the graves, I hopped and itched, and flailed my arms, to no avail. Now I knew why Olya, the toofless mushroom picker, was covered from head to toe.

My father left the cemetery for a smoke, and as he smoked, he kept yelling to us, “Forget it. It’s no use.”

I could not leave. Finding Babushka Dusia’s grave was the only thing my grandmother had asked me to do. I was not going to be the one to tell my 87-year old grandmother that her mother was not found, and her mother’s grave not brought to order. The sun fought its way through the leafy pines; it was shadowy and dark in the cemetery and smelled of sap and pine cones. It smelled of earth and flowers and mosquitoes. I wasn’t leaving.

My father came back, took one look at me, and said, “Paullina, get out of here. You will be eaten by the mosquitoes. Go now, or you will ruin the rest of your day. Go into the sunshine.”

I went out to the highway. I saw him outside the cemetery, smoking again, and probably thinking what he would tell his mother. Maybe we could lie? We could say we found the grave, gave Likhobabins money to take care of it. My grandmother would never know.

But she would know. She had a sense. She knew everything.

Viktor yelled something. I saw my father go inside the cemetery, walk over to Viktor, bend over, and then yell to me. “Paullina, come, come. Viktor found it. He found it.”

He had. Viktor found it because he would not give up. He found it because he, literally, would leave no stone unturned. We had passed the grave that turned out to be my great-grandmother’s three or four times. It was poor, neat, and unmarked. But Viktor stepped inside the little iron fence and rummaged on the ground. Who knows why? But he rummaged and found a stone plaque that read, “EUDOKIA IVANOVNA PAVLOVA. 1894–1977.”

Papa and I stared dumbly at it. “Paullina was right,” Papa said. Now I do want to cry.”

What did it mean for Viktor to find this grave? Nothing. He would never have to call my grandmother. We would probably never see him again. Yet, he would not give up. Suddenly I didn’t feel bad anymore about sharing Shepelevo with him.

We took pictures of the grave, commented on how well-kept it was despite nearly 20 years of no visitors, wondered if it was Yulia who took care of it. My father dismissed the idea and went to put Babushka’s plaque back.

“What do you want to do now?” he asked. “I suppose you want to go find our house?” He said that, but what I read in his body language was, “Are we done? Would you like to leave? Because I would.”

“I want to see our house,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“Okay,” he said in a tired voice. “Let’s go.”

We walked down the hill on a dirt path that was maybe a car length wide. Wide enough for Viktor to drive his car down, which is what he did. I don’t know if I expected anything to be paved. I think I hadn’t expected. I didn’t think about it.

It wasn’t.

The narrow dirt road that ran past our summer house started at the woods and continued into the village. On the left side of the path were small wooden houses — one of them ours — and on the other side was a hill on which villagers planted their vegetables.

The cherry tree at the bottom of the cemetery hill was a lot smaller than I remembered. Every summer that cherry tree would blossom and its aromatic white flowers would exude a smell through our entire house just across the road. And then the flowers would fly off the tree like birds. It was such a giant tree in my memory. Now as I looked at it, I could take a six-foot ladder, climb up and touch the top branches.

We walked down the road a few yards and stopped at a faded blue house.

“This is it,” I said.

“No,” Papa said. “This isn’t it.”

There was a number on the house. It said 32. “This isn’t it,” he repeated.

“It is, Papa,” I said, looking at it, filled with heartache. “This is it.”

I knew why he didn’t want it to be it.

It looked so abandoned. It didn’t look like my memory, or like his, I was sure. I knew his memory was at least as sentimental as mine.

The little yard around the blue house was grass and weeds, five feet tall. Where there once was a hammock, there now wasn’t. Where there once was a garden, there now wasn’t. It was just a shabby summer dacha, and it looked like no one had been in it in years.

How could I explain what I felt looking at house number 32 in Shepelevo, the house where I spent by far the happiest months of my childhood?

“This isn’t it,” Papa said in a reasoned voice covering his sadness. “I know, because look, there is a window on the second floor, and I know we didn’t have a second floor.”

We stared for a long time at the blue house.

“This isn’t the house,” he repeated. “Let’s go and find the Likhobabins. I hope they’re still alive. They’ll tell us which house it really was.”

Viktor stood beside us not understanding. Okay, we said, we don’t have to explain why our hearts were heavy. I walked ahead down the dirt road. This road had been wider when I was a child. It had been like a thoroughfare to me. Now a car could barely drive through without hitting the wooden fences on both sides.

As I looked around, I saw the wooden fences, falling down, held up by rusty nails, all older than I. Broken fence rails and posts lay strewn about by the side of the road. The grass and the nettles grew tall to my shoulder. There were no planted flowers, no lawns. There was no cut grass anywhere. What was cut grass? What was a lawn mower? The villagers couldn’t afford a lawn mower. Before they bought a lawn mower they would buy meat and eat for a year.

I lowered my gaze to the dirt under my shoes until we got to the corner house. I looked up. In the yard stood a tall Russian man, naked except for a bathing suit that looked like skimpy underwear, watching his naked-to-the-waist son play on a garbage heap out front.

We asked him if he knew where the Likhobabins were, or even if they were still alive.

“Maria and Vasily?” he said gruffly, as if there wasn’t much love lost between him and the Likhobabins. “Right there.” He pointed to the two-story unkempt building across the road.

“Still?” said my father, as if stunned that twenty five years the Likhobabins they could still be living not just in the same village, but the same apartment building.

“Still, as ever,” said the naked man, going back to watching his naked son play with the trash.

We crossed over to the building. After trying for two minutes to find their apartment number, we gave up. There were no names on the bells. There were no bells either. Or mailboxes. There was just a door that led to the stairs that led to the apartments. No one rang for anyone. They just walked up.

“I don’t know how we’re going to find them.”

I vaguely remembered where they lived. They were on the first floor, but my father didn’t trust me. We asked two old ladies sitting on the bench in the little clearance area under the trees. They said, “Oh, the Likhobabins. They’re probably by the Gulf.” And they waved their arms. Over there. So we went over there. I walked a hundred paces behind my father and Viktor.

Why was this more difficult for me than for my father? I didn’t know for certain that it was. But where I wanted to linger, he wanted to speed up. He wanted to rush through his Shepelevo, so he could again leave it behind and forget. With our American eyes we saw our past life. There was so much that needed to be forgotten.

I was crushed by the relentless poverty of it. But the smell, the heady, intoxicating smell, more powerful even than the sight of Shepelevo. The sight of Shepelevo tore us up inside. Yet the smell was nothing but bliss.

On the way to the Gulf to find the Likhobabins we stopped at the public bath house. It was a tiny brick bungalow house, closed up because it wasn’t Friday or Saturday when it was open. The inscription plaque on the door — same inscription plaque I remembered from childhood — said, “MEN — FRIDAYS. WOMEN — SATURDAYS.” My mother, my grandmother, my cousin, my aunt and I would all go have a communal bath, every other Saturday, whether we needed it or not.

We had a half-hearted laugh about that plaque, my father and I.

He and Viktor sped up, and I lagged behind. My father turned around, waving me to come on.

The smell of smoked fish was very strong. We could also smell fresh water. The factory that made the smoked fish was just to the left, and the Gulf of Finland full of fresh water was just ahead. I already saw the bullrushes and the seagull-stained rocks.

Everywhere I looked I saw unwashed peeling paint, rotted wood, in fences and houses, broken glass, doors hanging on just one hinge, mysterious concrete blocks, rust.

Rust anywhere there was metal.

Shepelevo wasn’t littered. I guessed because there wasn’t much to throwaway. There weren’t any trash cans either.

But there was rust and rotted wood, and peeking out from beyond the pines was the Gulf of Finland.

Vasily Ilyich Likhobabin was by the Gulf with his wife Maria. He was surprised to see us, though not exceedingly so.

His sons, Yuri and Alyosha were both engineers living in Sosnovy Bor, 20 kilometers down the highway, toward Tallinn. I had had the biggest crush on Alyosha when I was young. Maria didn’t look too happy when her sons were mentioned, particularly Yuri. Likhobabin whispered to my father, “Yura is not making his mother happy.” He didn’t give any specifics.

Maria was short and heavy-set. She wore a peasant print dress, an apron, and a narrow-rimmed hat. Alexei wore glasses that made his eyes as large as two moons. His vision looked to be pretty bad, but otherwise he and Maria seemed in good shape. They looked older than my father but younger than my grandparents.

“So what are you doing?” my father asked Vasily.

“The same, the same,” he said. “Fishing.”

Vasily told us he would show us our house and we walked there together. Vasily kept telling my father in minute detail about his cataracts, his cataract surgery, his recovery, and his health at present. I saw my father’s pained expression and became amused for a few moments. My father is stultified by talk of other people’s medical history. He certainly never talks about his own health. He had been barely able to tell his immediate family he had kidney stones and had to be hospitalized.

I straggled behind, as the four of them strolled forward in front of me. Maria had her arm through Vasily’s. I found that endearing.

Likhobabin stopped at the blue house, number 32, and said, “This was yours.”

I looked at my father and said nothing. He looked at me and said nothing. We both stared at the house.

The grass was high, the paint was fading and peeling, and some of the windows were boarded up with rusty nails.

My father said, “Okay, well, you want to take a picture?” Reluctantly we stood in front of our dacha, to show our Babushka and Dedushka their beloved summer home. Viktor snapped the photo.

I turned to the house and said to my father, “See that big window? That’s the window to Yulia’s bedroom. I ran to that window in 1971 after having seen you only once in three years, and watched you come down the cemetery hill with Mama on your arm.”

“That Mama was on my arm,” my father said, “I have no doubt She loved to touch me. But we did not come down that hill. We came down that hill.” He pointed to the one farther away. “You couldn’t have possibly seen us.”

“But I did,” I said. “And Babushka, your mother, said, ‘Here comes my son.”

My father said nothing for a moment. “I know who Babushka is. Well, do you want to see up close? Or do you want to go?”

We looked through the fence at the house. My father clucked with the Likhobabins about the house being in such disarray. “Who does it belong to now?” he asked.

“Papa, what are you talking about?” I said. “It belongs to Yulia.”

“Well, look at it. It can’t. No one’s been here in years. Maybe she sold it.”

“Babushka and Dedushka gave the dacha to her when they left. She wouldn’t have sold it without telling them.”

My father shrugged. Vasily said he didn’t think it belonged to someone else.

I was sure the house was still Yulia’s. When my grandparents left Russia in 1979, they left the house to her, and she abandoned it; that much was obvious.

We pushed the gate open, nearly breaking it as the rotted wood buckled under pressure. The nettles stung my legs. First the mosquitoes, then the nettles. Just like when I was young.

My dad picked some cherries off the cherry tree and ate them. He gave me five. That was my lunch. Gratefully I ate the cherries. “A little sour,” I told my father. He glared at me, as if I had just insulted his cooking.

My father, Viktor and the Likhobabins walked around the house. They fought their way through the grass, and after them I trudged, as the nettles continued to sting my legs. I stopped at the front door of the dacha. It was locked and wouldn’t open despite my pulling on it. A wooden clock hung over the door mantle. The clock had been made by my grandfather. It wasn’t a real clock; he had painted the face on with black ink. The hands perpetually said 1:20. I showed it to my father, as if it was the final proof that this house still belonged to some member of our family. My father nodded, which I took to mean, yes. Or it could have meant, let’s go.

As we walked around, he told me to take pictures of Dedushka’s dilapidated garden in the middle of which still stood the wooden cucumber supports he had built back in the seventies. If any garden deserved high praise, it was my grandfather’s; after all, it fed a family of 10 every summer for ten years. The garden and the fish he caught. We caught. And the blueberries and the mushrooms we picked. That’s all we ate. There was no meat, there was no chicken. Well, that’s not true. There was meat; there were cows. And there were chickens. But to eat the cow meant no more milk ever, and to eat the chicken meant no more eggs. So there was no meat, there was no chicken.

Our dacha was a little box with four equal sides. Breaking through the bushes and the branches, we walked all the way around. They came out to the front yard. Lagging behind, I stopped at a small window with shattered glass.

I don’t know what I was hoping for. At that moment, all I really wanted was not to be there, standing next to a window under which I had slept for 900 summer nights.

I needed a stick to pry the window open; I found one, pried it open, looked inside. Maria Likhobabina returned to stand by me, glacing in.

“What are you doing?” she asked, suspiciously.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just looking.”

We stood and looked. She said, “This must be the kitchen.”

What was she talking about?

“This isn’t the kitchen,” I said. I wanted to point to the bed. How can this be a kitchen? There is a bed in here. My bed.

It wasn’t just the same bed, but the same yellow-brown print dirty bedspread casually covering the bed. The wallpaper was the same. All ripped, stained, dirty. Through the torn paper, I saw the wall. The bare plaster had holes in it.

The room where I had slept to my adult eyes looked no wider than five feet. It wasn’t a bedroom—

“It is the kitchen,” said Maria. “There is the stove.”

I saw the stove. I had slept right across from the stove and never knew it was the kitchen. Didn’t even see it now until Maria pointed it out.

“I slept in this bed,” I said unhappily, “Why was I telling her this? Like she cared. All she wanted to know was why I was breaking open a window to the house. I wanted to call my father back. Papa, look. Did you see this? Can you imagine I slept here? How can that be, Papa? How can I have slept here, it’s all disintegrating right before my eyes, and I never saw that when I was growing up, reading about D’Artagnan’s Paris, and Oliver Twist’s London. I read those books lying on this bed looking out this window. I didn’t see the stove, I didn’t see the wallpaper, or the window frame which could be pulled out of the wall with my bare hands.

“Papa?” I called. “Where is he?”

“Oh, he’s already out front,” said Maria. “They’re waiting for you. I think they want to go back up to the cemetery to your grandmother’s grave.”

I wanted him to see this. But I had a feeling he didn’t really want to.

I stuck my head in and took a deep breath. The inside of the house did not smell like Shepelevo. It smelled like no one had been in the house for years. I would have preferred not to have to have a memory of this smell, of the dust and dirt and old papers. On the wall was a painting my grandfather had made of the cat I used to torture when I was 18 months old. I wanted to take the picture off the wall and bring it back to America with me and give it to my grandparents, but the painting was a 16 by 20 and I only had garment bag with me. I had no room for Dedushka’s cat.

What I felt when I stared through my window, with its rotted window frames, its misty, dusty glass, at my bed and the stove a foot away, I cannot adequately express.

Maria Likhobabina stood sullenly next to me, and our only connection was that she was the mother of a boy I once liked. I wasn’t going to cry in front of her. I grit my teeth and shook my head slightly to clear my eyes. Then I put my camera on the bed, and said I was climbing in.

“Why?” Maria said.

“I want to see.”

“See what?”

“The rest of the house.”

“It’s just like this.”

“I want to see. I’ll only be a minute. You can go if you want.”

She didn’t move from the window. She must have been thinking: they come all the way from America to break into our houses. What does she want to do in there, anyway? Maria was too old to crawl in herself, so she remained at the window and watched me take pictures. When I disappeared into the front bedroom, I kept hearing her voice, saying, “Where are you? Are you coming?”

“In a minute,” I said.

Pictures weren’t the only things I took. I took my grandfather’s garden and weather journals, and some small pictures I thought might be of sentimental value to him.

In the front room I found a letter that Yulia had written to her small son. The letter read, “Our dear bunny rabbit, Mommy wants to say sorry to her little bunny for last night. Daddy and I were tired and tense and we yelled a little bit and scared you, and we’re sorry. We both love you so much, little bunny, and Daddy isn’t going to leave us ever.”

Daddy never did leave them, but Yulia later left him, and left her little “bunny rabbit,” too.

It is hard to leave your spouse in Russia. There is nowhere to go. You lived in a communal apartment, and if you were lucky you were sharing the room only with your husband and child. If you were unlucky, you were sharing a room with your brother and his family. Or your parents. And your great-grandmother, too.

If you were fortunate enough to work at a good job that let you put your name on a waiting list for a separate, non-communal apartment, and then waited for years, if you had connections and somebody died, you could get a tiny non-communal apartment for you, your mother, your husband, and your child. But you had better not grow disenchanted with life. Because there was nowhere to go. You couldn’t move to another city, because you didn’t have a job to go to. You couldn’t go to a realtor and get a new apartment. There were no realtors. You couldn’t even fall in love and go to a hotel room, because you could not get a hotel room if you were Russian, only if you were a foreigner with a passport and visa.

So when Yulia got disenchanted, and fell in love with another man, there was nowhere for her to go from her tiny non-communal apartment on the outskirts of Leningrad on the Prospekt of Veterans. She left her husband and son, and her ill mother, too, and went to live with her new lover and his family in his communal apartment.

She returned home two years later to find her mother dying of kidney disease and her former husband ready to go to Canada on a business assignment with his new wife.

He left, Yulia’s mother died, and she remained in the old apartment with her son, the bunny rabbit. That was in the early nineties.

Yulia obviously had come back to Shepelevo once or twice. The last time was probably around the time of the bunny rabbit letter. Was that ten years ago?

Why hadn’t she come back since?

Maybe her memories were not as sentimental as mine. After all, she still lived this life. She could smell Shepelevo any time she wanted to. Maybe the smell of Shepelevo didn’t mean as much to her.

I would have sat down and cried, but there was nowhere to sit. Clothes, books, papers, garbage were all over the floor and over all flat surfaces, beds and tables and chairs. Everything was covered with dust.

I looked outside the front window, the same window through which I saw my father in 1971, strolling down the cemetery hill partially obscured by the cherry tree. Today he was standing on the road, talking to Vasily Likhobabin, eating cherries. Viktor was standing next to him. My father had no interest in getting inside this house.

I took Yulia’s letter, and made my way to the porch where we once ate our family meals. I walked into my grandparents’ room that was just storage for old trash now, though it still had a bed and a dresser. I even stuck my head inside the lavatory, a small room off the kitchen/porch. The house didn’t have running water in the days when I lived in it, and it didn’t have any now. The toilet consisted of a wooden bench with a hole in it. The hole went ten feet into the ground.

We were considered blessed by the other villages because ours was one of the few houses that had the toilet inside.

I heard Maria’s voice from the open window. “Are you coming? Is everything all right?”

I went back. “Everything is fine,” I said, climbing out. She held my camera for me.

“What are these?” she asked pointing to the pictures and the notebooks, in a tone that suggested I was taking off with the contents of her safe deposit box.

“Just some stuff for my grandfather,” I said, as the nettles stung my legs.

My father was waiting for me on the road outside the gate. He hadn’t gone to the cemetery yet.

“Well?” he said. “Finished?”

“Yes.”

We closed the gate behind us.

“I’m going to go show Vasily Ilyich Babushka’s grave,” my father said. “Are you coming?”

“No,” I said. “The mosquitoes will eat me. I’m going to go for a walk.”

My father must have had his instructions too from my grandmother. He was going to give Likhobabin a hundred dollars to take care of the grave. A hundred American dollars was probably twice what Likhobabin earned all year.

While they went back to the cemetery, I left Maria and walked alone to the outskirts of the village. I wanted to find the field where I used to go and eat clover.

I felt a little lost. Both literally and figuratively, for I could not find that field.

The distances all shrank and my pungent cherry tree was smaller, but everything else was overgrown.

Long grass, sloppy bushes, large branches lying on the road, concrete blocks, tall nettles, rusted pipes, all spread out on the narrow dirt roads. No lawns, no patios, no wicker chairs, plastic chairs, outdoor chairs, no barbecues.

I turned around and saw Maria, some distance behind me, but doggedly following me.

Why is she following me? I thought. But I didn’t care.

I walked past one tiny wood house that was missing a wall. Maybe the wall was burned in a fire, maybe the wood had rotted out. I didn’t know and it was impossible to tell what had happened, but the missing wall had been replaced by cardboard. There were two 6 by 8 sheets of cardboard, nailed to each other and then nailed to the rotting wood of the rest of the house. Where the cardboard was wet, it was mushy and crumbling. The cardboard house didn’t have a fence around it, not even a broken fence, but it had tomatoes growing in the side yard, and a chicken wire cage inside which clucked some chickens.

I wondered how good of an insulator cardboard was in the brutal Russian winters when the temperatures dipped to zero Fahrenheit and dipped there till April. The cardboard didn’t look like a temporary solution to a permanent problem. I doubted that the people who lived in the paper house left at the end of summer to return to their warm communal apartment in Leningrad. Once you had chickens in your yard you were there to stay.

The Likhobabins didn’t have chickens. They weren’t going anywhere. Shepelevo was their life until the day they died. I glanced back. Maria was still behind me.

I walked past another house that was burned from ground to roof on the right side. The black charred wood stuck out and part of the wall crumbled down in ashes. On the left side of the house was a small window with floral curtains. The curtains parted and a woman’s face stared at me.

I wondered why the iron fences around the graves in the cemetery were clean and not rusted, and if there was money to put nice fences around dead people, why couldn’t the fences around the living be repaired. I wanted to ask Maria, but I doubted she knew. My father would just shrug. “Paullina, this is Russia. You want logic, you go back to America.”

But the greatest contradiction was this: as I saw the Shepelevo of adulthood — the Shepelevo I was not prepared for, each breath I took reminded me of the Shepelevo of childhood. Unchanged, unchanging, communism-defying smell.

The smell reminded me of being eight years old, on my rusted bike trying to outrun a truck — and failing. I walked to the place in the road where I had deliberately wiped out, because it was either wipe out or collide with a Soviet truck.

I smelled going to the library and borrowing the same books week in and week out.

What was interesting in a clinical way about the new, adult Shepelevo was how small it was. I walked past the cardboard house, past the black ash house, past the spot in the dirt where the truck ran me off the road; I was looking for the house that belonged to Yulia’s mother’s side of the family, and suddenly there was a field and beyond it trees. Shepelevo was over. Before I could say huh and turn around, Maria came up behind me.

“You’re looking for something, yes?”

I would have liked to tell her what it was, had I known it myself.

“Yes.”

“Come. I’ll show you Yulia’s grandmother’s house.”

We walked past a rock. I stopped and stared at this rock.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I remembered that rock. We used to climb on top and then fight about whose turn it was to sit on it. The whole summer would pass with us fighting for sitting-on-the-rock rights.

“Here’s their house,” Maria said.

I looked. It was a proper two-storey house. It still had curtains hanging in the windows. It had no fence, just the grass and bushes.

“No one lives there,” she said. “They’re all dead now.” I wondered why the house was better kept than our blue house. Maria couldn’t say.

We walked back to find my father. He was waiting for us on the corner. He looked done. Like me.

“Ready, Paullina?”

“Wait,” said Vasily Ilyich. “Don’t you want to come in for a minute?”

“Papa,” I whispered. “I really need to use the bathroom.”

He sighed.

We walked to the Likhobabins’ apartment.

The apartment was small, but extremely clean. Everything looked pre-20th century but it was all in its place. The floor was swept, the table empty of debris. There were no dishes in the sink or smoky ash trays. No old food. And it smelled okay.

As I walked into their small living room that had a couch, a gramophone, and some shelves with books, I stared at the couch. “I remember the couch.”

“Yes,” Maria said, “it’s the same couch.”

“It’s very nice.”

Pointing to the gramophone, I asked if it worked.

“We think so,” said Vasili Ilyich. “We got it as a gift many years ago. We just don’t have any records.”

I had drunk too much water and Coke purchased in Lomonosov.

I asked the Likhobabins if I could use their bathroom. Of course, said Maria, pointing me to a door. There was no bathtub in her apartment, only the toilet and the sink in a tiny space, barely enough to turn around in. There were no bathtubs in Russian villages. The bathhouse every other Saturday had hot water enough for everyone.

Though the apartment smelled okay, the toilet did not. I tried to breathe through my mouth. Didn’t help. I held my breath. No use. I tried not to touch anything. I started to retch. I saw they had an overhead flush. I used it. It worked. But why the stench? The toilet smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned in…

I left the bathroom, closing the door not very gently behind me and then smiled my best smile at Maria.

“Well, thank you so much,” I said. “Ready, Papa?”

I was glad when we left.

“We will go down to the Gulf now, all right, Paullina?”

“Of course,” I said. “I want to see our beach.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “All right. We’ll go there. Viktor, how are you holding up?”

“Fine.” He shrugged. “I’m fine.”

On the way to the beach, we passed a garbage dump that hadn’t been there twenty-five years ago. Actually, we were stopped by the garbage dump. It was blocking our path. We stared at it with dumb disbelief.

The pine smell was spoiled by the rancid smell of garbage. It made my father feel so bad he didn’t want to go any further.

“Papa,” I said consolingly. “Where else are the villagers going to throw out their garbage?”

He waved at me. “Where did we?” he said. “Forget it. Let’s not go.”

“Papa, we have to go to our beach. Let’s go another way.”

“Oh, fine.” He turned away, walking on without another word.

I studied the fences as we walked past the unpainted, unstained village houses. Where the fence had fallen apart in places or rotted, instead of whole sections being replaced, new pieces of wood were nailed to the old, giving the entire fence and everything contained therein the appearance of poverty. I mentioned that to my father.

He said, “No, it’s actual poverty.”

The Russian villagers grew their vegetables and caught their perch; they cleaned and cooked their fish with potatoes, but they didn’t tend their gardens or paint their wooden houses to protect them from the elements, or pick up the rusted pipes lying outside their yard.

Through the back way in the woods, my father, Viktor and I walked to the beach area where Yulia and I used to swim. As we came to one clearing, Papa showed me where we kept our Gulf rowboat.

Another rowboat was there now.

When I was a little girl, my Deda would take me fishing on the Gulf of Finland. I would row the boat out to sea, and we would hook our worms and maybe catch some perch. We would talk, I don’t remember what about, but the worms I remember.

After a few hours, I would row us back to shore. Deda would pull our rowboat back onto the sand. He wore knee high rubber boots. I don’t remember what I wore on my feet and don’t know why I don’t remember. We would walk through the woods to our blue house number 32 and it was still light. My grandmother would be waiting up for us and yelling at my grandfather for bringing me back so late. He and I would be laughing and we’d be hungry. My grandmother would make us delicious fried potatoes with onions. And outside it was light.

In 1973, a few weeks before we were leaving Russia, I came to visit my grandparents, having just found out that we were not moving to Moscow as I had been told initially, but to America. My grandfather touched my face and said, “Ah, Plinochka, we’re never again going to go fishing in Shepelevo, you and I.”

I was excited about America, but sad for him, and trying to find a comforting thing to say, I blurted happily, “Yes, but you still have Yulia. You can always go with Yulia.”

He nodded. “Yes. But it won’t be the same.”

“You remember the rowboat, Paullina?” my father asked. “You used to go fishing in a rowboat just like this one.”

“I remember,” I said.

At another small, pine-needle covered clearing, my father stopped and said this was where he and his friends met and drank and smoked and talked. Papa has his memories too.

Then the mosquitoes started feasting on me again.

We walked out onto the Gulf where my grandmother used to take Yulia and me to swim, three times a week, every week for three months for ten summers.

The childhood memory was one thing; what I saw was something else. The sand was sparse and mostly covered by long water grass and bulrushes.

The water looked muddy and dark. The brook where Yulia and I tried to catch fish, where we waded up to our knees in muck and weeds and fish that got away was maybe three feet wide and only a foot or so deep. I remembered it as a rapidly burbling stream.

Was it better to see that it was calm and narrow? Was it better to see that it was shallow, that the rocks were small? I preferred my memories.

“What a nice gulf,” Viktor said. “How lucky you were to have this.”

Ten seconds later, already done with the beach and the gulf, my father said, “I’m going back,” as he and Viktor disappeared into the woods. Five seconds later, I heard him calling me, “Paullina, Paullina.”

I didn’t want to come yet. I stared at the water. A young mother and her daughter stood in the sea about a quarter mile in. The water came up to the woman’s knees. It had always been shallow. The girl though was diving and splashing about. The echo of her laughter blew like a breeze on the sea.

And through it, I heard, “Paullina…. Paullina….”

Then more insistently: “PAULLINA.”

I stared at the peaceful water, the cattails, the lily pads. “Paullina… Paullina…”

“I’m coming!” I yelled.

And through it all, the smell of Shepelevo.

I caught up to my father, who said, “Why are you lagging behind? We have to go.”

We came out of the woods, and crossing the A-121 highway, we walked past the railroad tracks down a half-person-wide path to Lake Gora-Voldaisko, where my father went swimming. He took off his nylon jacket, his long-sleeve shirt, his undershirt, his trousers, his socks, his shoes, and dove in the water.

I perched on top of an overturned rowboat, and Viktor gave me a pickle from his pickle jar. Papa swam. Viktor kept talking about something.

The lake was peaceful.

As my father was drying himself off, he said, “Oh, to swim, Paullina! You should have brought a bathing suit.”

“What was I thinking?” I shivered in all my clothes. It was about 55°F.

To Viktor I said, “I used to row right across this lake when we lived here. We rowed across to the other side to pick blueberries.”

Viktor looked at the distance between this shore and the other. “That’s far.”

Yes, it seemed far, even then. This time, the distance didn’t deceive me. It was about a mile across. It was far.

We left.

We walked back to Viktor’s car parked by the side of the highway, and drove away.

I turned back to look at the road one more time. I saw the white smoke stack of the fishing factory. Rolling down my window I smelled the air.

“Roll up the window, Paullina,” Viktor said. “They’re promising rain.”

I rolled up the window.

Just as we entered the next village after Shepelevo, Gora-Valday, we saw a woman by the side of the road selling blueberries. She didn’t have a sign or a stand. She was just sitting by the side of the road and next to her was a ceramic jug. Had we been going faster, we would have missed her. Viktor said, “Want some blueberries?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” my father said.

But then I remembered the five cherries I had for lunch and the pickle by the lake, and I remembered rowing my whole family across the lake to go blueberry picking. “Yes.”

Viktor stopped the car and we walked back to the old woman. My father remained in the car.

“How much for the blueberries?” I asked.

“Thirty rubles.” (About five dollars.)

“With the jug?”

“No, the jug is mine,” said the woman.

I exchanged a glance with Viktor. “So how am I supposed to take the blueberries home?” Where were the little baskets to take the blueberries home, the ones you saw in every farm stand in America? “I’ll give you thirty more for the jug,” I said.

The old lady shook her head. She wore a kerchief over her gray hair. “I can’t.”

“Fifty more,” I said.

Sadly she shook her head. “Don’t you have a plastic bag in the car?”

“Blueberries in a plastic bag? They’ll get all mushed.” “We’ll have blueberry jam by the time we get to Leningrad.”

“I think they’ll be all right,” Viktor said quietly,

I turned to the old lady. “A hundred rubles for the jug.”

She looked at her jug, looked at me and said, “Darling, don’t you think I want to sell you the jug? I do, I’d sell it to you. But where am I going to get another one? I won’t be able to pick any more blueberries. I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” I said. “I understand. I’m sorry.”

We brought a plastic bag from the car and bought the blueberries, putting most of them in the trunk. I took a bit in a plastic cup.

My father from the front seat said, “Well, how are they?”

I tasted them. “They’re okay,” I said. “They’re a little under-ripe.”

“They’re not under-ripe,” he said. “That’s what they are like.”

“But they’re sour,” I said. “Why can’t they taste like nice American blueberries?” I remembered the Shepelevo blueberries as juicy and very sweet.

Viktor and my father laughed. “Because those are grown on a farm, not in the woods,” my father said. “Or they’re grown in Chile.”

We drove back down the highway to Lebyazhye, where we turned off the main road and went up past the train station where we had dropped off the mosquito-eaten, mushroom-picking Olya, and then quaked through the pot holes again.

Viktor commented that we were lucky it hadn’t rained, because then these holes would be filled to the brim with water, and passage would be really impossible.

It occurred to me that Viktor thought we were generally quite lucky. “You mean filled with more water?” I looked out on the sloshing liquid mud inside the holes. I closed my eyes to rid myself of the holes. I wanted to see what image would rise up.

My bed rose up. The bed near the wall with the ripped wallpaper. The little bed with a pillow and a blanket. Me lying in bed and looking out the window and seeing the sunrise. The window was open. And I smelled Shepelevo.

Washing the Car with the Gulf of Finland

I sat in the backseat. Viktor had suddenly stopped the car off the highway before we got to Lomonosov. While my father vigorously slept, Viktor got out a white bucket and a brush he must have carried for just such emergencies. Maybe he didn’t want his young vacationing wife to know where he had been.

I rolled down the window. “Viktor, what are you doing?”

“I’m just going to clean the car a little,” he replied. “It will only take fifteen minutes.”

I rolled the window back up and watched him jump over a short stone wall and walk down the rocks to the Gulf. Beyond him I saw the Kronstadt naval base. I tried to imagine the sound of artillery as the Soviets bombed their own coast for three years to prevent the Germans from taking it. I was sitting right in the line of fire.

When Viktor returned with his bucket filled with gulf water, I rolled my window back down. “Viktor, but didn’t you tell me it was going to rain?”

“Yeah,” he drew out. “What do they know?”

I rolled the window back up.

To pass the time I wrote in my journal about nonsense and then stared out onto the road. Once in a while a bus would pass. No bus looked younger than 40 or 50 years.

I never noticed buses when I was a girl in Russia. Clearly I hadn’t noticed many things when I was a girl in Russia.

Buses or trams or trolleys. Our communal apartment on Fifth Soviet or our house in Shepelevo, or Nevsky Prospekt. All I did was smell things.

I had pictured the Soviet bus all wrong, that somehow it looked like the Q60 — a modern clean big green bus in Queens, New York with a little destination sign at the front.

This bus at Lomonosov came in three colors: burnt yellow, dreary olive or faded maroon. The hubcap-free wheels rattled, not having been aligned in decades. The bus itself lurched. Where the paint had peeled off, it was rusty. The windows were small, rectangular and numbered, 13 in all, seven on one side, six on the other, plus the front door. What destination sign?

Viktor continued doggedly to wash the windows of his vehicle. After he got back in, he said, “I just couldn’t drive a car that looked like that in the city.”

I became certain he didn’t want his wife to know what he had been up to.

My father woke up. It was 6:40 in the evening.

We passed a green electrichka. Rather it passed us. It was army green and looked brand new as it sped by.

“Papa, so how come that train is new and green?”

“What do you mean how come? The Russians built a new train.”

“Huh. No new buses, though.”

“They can’t do everything at once, Paullina,” he said.

We passed a graffiti sign in English that read, “Punk’s not dead.” It was scrawled on a deep yellow stucco building in Lomonosov, next to a sign, “Magazin.” Magazin meant store. What kind of store, the sign did not specify. Just store. The building looked abandoned, yet the “Magazin” was open.

We stopped by an ornate Russian Orthodox Church in Lomonosov. As I got out to take a picture, rain began to stream down from the dark skies. I quickly got back inside the car.

Pulling away from the curb, Viktor said, “See how lucky we were that the rain held off long enough for us to get off that dirt road.”

“Yes,” I said. “But not lucky enough for it to rain before you washed your car.”

“When did you wash your car?” my father asked.

“When you were sleeping, Yuri Lvovich,” replied Viktor.

In the rain we drove past a tall obelisk. The sign announced: “This is the furthest point of the front in defense of Leningrad during WWII, 1941-45.” In the rain, I got out and walked to the stone pillar, taking a picture of this furthest point of defense of Leningrad during World War II. The Gulf of Finland was across the highway. If the sheet of rain wasn’t coming down like a curtain over the gulf, I was sure I’d still be able to see Kronstadt.

We continued on. A bleak treeless boulevard.

“This is the Prospekt of Veterans,” said my father.

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t you remember? Yulia used to live here with her mother.”

“Shall we go and visit her?”

My father shook his head and said nothing.

With tired fascination I stared at the famed Kirov Wall that surrounded the Kirov Works on the southern outskirts of Leningrad. Despite war, despite siege, despite hunger, despite all the odds, the Kirov Works for four years produced tanks for the war effort. Production slowed down when the factory was bombed to smithereens by the Germans, whose bombers were stationed a kilometer or two away at Pulkovo Heights, but it did not stop. The Soviets built a new factory under the camouflage of the ravaged old, and churned out 200 KV-60 tanks a month.

Before WWII, Kirov used to be called Putilov Works, but then Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s right-hand man, was assassinated in 1934 — under Stalin’s direct orders — and the Soviets renamed half the city. Everything now was Kirov this, Kirov that.

As we drove past the Kirov Wall, my father told me the story of how the Soviets took a really big beautiful wrought-iron gilded fence from the Hermitage Museum and transported it to the Kirov Works. The Communists wanted to set the fence into the ground so the workers could marvel at it and be inspired by it, but it was much too heavy. So they abandoned the project, and the poor fence has not been put up to this day.

“Why didn’t the fence get transported back to the Hermitage?” I asked.

“Too heavy to move.”

“But they moved it once,” I said.

“That’s how they found out it was too heavy to move. Gilded iron, Paullina. Iron overlaid with gold. Too heavy.”

“So where is it now?”

“Lying on its side somewhere,” he replied. “Rusting.”

It was still raining when Viktor dropped us off at Grand Hotel Europe. My father told Viktor to go home, though Viktor didn’t want to leave us. I think he wanted to make sure Papa got back to Ulitsa Dybenko safely. We made plans to meet at ten the next morning.

Papa came to my room. “Nice room,” he said, walking around. “Is there a bathroom?”

I showed him the bathroom. “This is not a bathroom,” he said. “This is Ellie’s whole apartment.”

While he was in the bathroom, I checked my messages. I had one from my three-year-old son. “Mommy… Mommy… just calling to see how you were…”

I sat on the bed and looked at my hands and my feet and the hardwood floor, thinking, do I have time to call home? What time is it there? I tried to figure out the time difference, but all that kept popping into my head was Yulia and me walking on tiptoes on the railroad ties in Shepelevo, careful not to step in between on the pebbles because then we would lose. Lose what? Lose, that was all.

My father, meanwhile, was appraising my shoe collection arranged in pairs on the carpet. “Paullina! You said you had no room in your suitcase for T-shirts for my friends, but look at all the shoes you brought!”

I looked. “It’s not that many,” I said. “One pair of shoes for each day I’m here.”

He shook his head disbelievingly. Damn. Now my stupid shoes would end up as a story around the dinner table.

For dinner we went to the dimly-lit Caviar Bar. I didn’t want my father to be worried about money, so I told him dinner was on me, a sort of belated birthday present.

Approvingly, he took out his pack of Marlboros. “Papa, what are you doing?”

“What?” he exclaimed. “There is no smoking here?”

“Papa,” I said to him in condescending dulcet tones. “It’s a restaurant.”

When the waitress came, he asked if he could smoke here. She looked at him as if he had just asked if he could eat here. “But of course,” she said in condescending dulcet tones.

All I wanted for dinner was black caviar and pelmeni. So that’s what I ordered. My father ordered seafood roulettes and sturgeon with onions and mushrooms.

As we were ordering, my father said, “We’ll share, all right? You get the caviar and pelmeni, and I’ll have the salmon roulettes and the sturgeon, and we’ll split it.”

I agreed.

His roulettes, with smoked salmon, dill sauce, shrimp and red caviar, were to die for. I know. He allowed me one tiny bite. He didn’t even taste my poor man’s caviar. The sturgeon came served with mushrooms, potatoes, eggs, and cheese. My father obviously thought his food was much better than mine.

And it was — better than my overcooked undertasty pelmeni, anyway.

During dinner my father talked, and I sat and listened. I’ve had plenty of practice. Both my parents are similar in this way; only the subject matter is different. They talk and I listen. You wouldn’t think this from meeting me, because I know I seem like a talker, but it’s only because I was trained by the best. My whole young life I sat and listened. Tonight I was glad to let my father do the talking. It allowed me to concentrate on my inadequate pelmeni. Also it allowed me to not think about Shepelevo. Also, I was tired.

We did not talk about Shepelevo.

Occasionally when my father would take a breath or light a smoke, I took it as an opening and breathed out a word. Sometimes he heard.

He must have been tired too.

In between a double vodka and a beer chaser, my father told me stories about WWII. He tells very good stories.

He talked about Stalin’s 194 unheeded warnings to his Communist colleagues about Hitler’s planned invasion of Russia.

He talked about Hitler’s passionate speech in response to Roosevelt’s diplomatic one that made my father realize Roosevelt was a politician while Hitler was a madman, a creative genius who would never compromise. A genius who sent ten million German boys to their deaths so he could stand on his principle.

“What was that principle, Papa?”

“Principle?” he asked, as if surprised by the question. “Why, that German supremacy was all, of course. That the Aryan supremacy had to be achieved at all cost. At whatever the cost.”

Then he started talking about the final solution, how it undermined Hitler’s war effort and in the end cost him the war, because so many of his resources were fed into the extermination machine.

“Instead of transporting arms and weapons and soldiers to the Eastern front, he transported Jews to Poland. How many millions of men did that cost him? He didn’t care. It cost him the war. In the end, he didn’t care about that either.”

“I’m surprised,” I said, “that he didn’t build more concentration camps in Germany.”

“He built them,” my father said, “where there was the least resistance.” He paused. “Also the largest number of Jews.”

He spoke at length about the madness of World War I, fought over a misunderstanding over nothing, a war that was continued twenty-one years later to the cost of half of the world’s young men.

As soon as I started to talk about the U.S. Civil War and the casualties America too had suffered, he lit a cigarette and changed the subject: to his impending retirement to Hawaii.

“Does it scare you, Papa?” I asked. “You’ve worked now for how many years?”

“In America, Munich and Prague? Altogether twenty-five. I will have worked two months short of twenty-five years for Radio Liberty. My whole American life. Does it scare me? Well, what do you think? But—” and here he shook his head, and lit another cigarette after a long pause. “There is no other way. I have to go. Your mother won’t have it any other way.”

“She says work, make more money,” I said, jokingly. Actually, my mother really did say that. She said, “I tell him to keep on working, but all he wants is to leave. His sanity is at stake, Paullina.”

“Her sanity is at stake, Paullina,” my father said. “She needs me. So I’m going.”

We were all meeting in New York for a couple of weeks before they flew out to Hawaii, and tonight I tried to convince him to drive cross country and stop over at Texas to visit me.

He declined — not for the first time. His health wasn’t good, he said. There were a million other reasons why he wanted to go straight to Maui and get himself in order. And then with renewed vigor, he and my mother would start traveling around the mainland. “There is so much of our beautiful country we have never seen. I can’t wait. All those western states. Your mother of course wants Las Vegas.” He rolled his eyes. “I’ll get fly fishing in Montana, she’ll get Las Vegas. Everybody wins.”

Remembering what my mother had told me the day before I left for Russia about Mauian red dust, I tried to prep him. “Maybe Hawaii is not the paradise everyone thinks it is,” I said cryptically. “Maybe there are problems you just can’t see.”

“What kind of problems?” he asked incredulously, suspiciously. Another beer, another cigarette.

“You’ll be all alone with Mama. That’s one. When was the last time you did that?”

“Never.”

“Exactly. Also wind. Have you considered that it might be windy?”

He waved his cigarette in my face. “I’m going to make Maui my permanent home. Your mama and I are going to have a wonderful time. We don’t need anybody else.”

“I see. What about fishing?”

“There is plenty of fish in the ocean, Paullina.”

“What about your garden?” Gardening and fishing were what my father loved best.

“I won’t garden. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not a young man anymore.”

“Yes,” I said. “Your own father, who does garden, is not a young man either. He just turned 91.”

“Yes, well. Maybe when I turn 91, I’ll garden too.”

He then proceeded to tell me, aside from ocean fishing and not gardening, what he was going to do every day in Maui. I found this to be the most amusing part of our evening discussion. But Papa, I wanted to tell him, nowhere in this daily schedule do you mention wiping red dust off the furniture.

He must have smoked fifteen cigarettes.

For dessert I drank too-sweet tea (my fault) and ate passable Tiramisu (Russian dessert?). My father had another cigarette.

I thought dinner went quite well, considering.

Considering it was our first dinner together just the two of us.

Ever.

One Saturday when my father was home on weekend leave from exile, he and I went out, just the two of us. It took us a long time to get where we were going. He took me by bus and by tram to the remotest part of Leningrad, to the borough of Kirov, past the Kirov Wall, not far from the soccer stadium where his favorite team, Zenith, played.

In the borough of Kirov there was a movie theatre, and every once in a while, usually on Saturdays, this movie theatre showed American movies. What a treat! That Saturday they were showing The Wizard of Oz.

We got to the theatre at noon.

The movie wasn’t starting until four.

There had been no way to check the movie times. Russian newspapers did not carry that kind of information; certainly there was no one to call.

My father said, “I’m sorry. Let’s go home.”

“Papa, please!”

“Plinka,” he said. “What are we going to do here for FOUR hours?”

I shrugged my shoulders. Like that was my problem.

He looked around. “There is nothing for us to do.” There truly wasn’t. The theatre was in the middle of a concrete industrial park. There were no gardens, no trees, no playgrounds, no bars, no stores — naturally.

The sun was shining.

“Plinka!”

“Papa.”

We stayed.

For four hours.

Finally we were inside and the movie started. Imagine my rank disappointment when it was in black and white. I was crushed. Can’t believe an American movie is in black and white, I thought. If I wanted to see a black and white movie, we could have stayed home and seen something on television about war, or gone to the theatre on Sixth Soviet. I folded my arms.

Then Dorothy landed in Oz.

She opened the door of her fallen house, and through the narrow opening I saw joyous vibrant color. I still viscerally remember my unrestrained elation.

I glanced at my dad and he was smiling. As if he had known.

“Paullina, you want to go for a walk?” It had stopped raining, was cool. I did not have a coat. I knew just what my husband would say to that. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Because I never bring a coat, even when he suggests I do.

“Sure, Papa.” It was 11:20 at night.

Wearing his nylon navy jacket, he glanced at my short-sleeved shirt. “Are you going to be cold?”

“Absolutely not,” I said, hoping it was too gray out for him to see the goose-bumps on my arms.

We strolled in the wet dusk down Nevsky Prospekt toward the river.

I was not terribly impressed by Nevsky Prospekt. I knew that the famous Russian writer Nikolai Gogol wrote in 1836 that there was “nothing finer than Nevsky Prospekt,” but I wondered if he had been abroad. Gogol continued on to say, “at least nothing like it in St. Petersburg.” Even then I had to disagree, having seen the Nevá embankment with its glorious bridges in the burnt twilight hour of midnight. When Gogol finally got down to the details of what it was precisely that made Nevsky “resplendent” for him, he mentioned “how spotlessly clean its pavements were swept.”

I’ll give him that, it was swept pretty clean.

But there was something a bit utilitarian about it; wide, treeless, it had little of that atmospheric-adorable quality I liked in my other big cities like Paris, Amsterdam and London. Paris built boulevards like no other city in the world. Amsterdam was lousy with trees and canals. London stucco gleamed wet white when you could glimpse it through thousand-year-old oaks. Why didn’t Hitler bomb all the London trees during the blitz? Why did he bomb only Leningrad’s? Or did we burn ours for fuel and that’s why we hardly had any now, fifty years later? Leningrad has not been around as long as London. The trees — well, there weren’t any. Rodeo Drive had palm trees. Fifth Avenue had the promise of Central Park just up on 59th Street. What did Nevsky Prospekt have to offer?

Well, for one, it offered me a walk with my father on a summer evening in Leningrad.

A young woman, looking like a longhaired, distraught Jennifer Mandolini, approached my father, sticking a rose in his face and asking him if he would like to buy it for his young woman. My father said, “This is not my young woman. This is my daughter.” He thought that would end it. Such was not the case. The girl stared at me, then at my father, as if she couldn’t comprehend what he had just told her. Maybe she was trying to find a family resemblance. Maybe she thought he was lying. Slowly she offered the rose to him again. I kept walking, as I heard my father repeat, “This is my daughter. One does not buy roses for his daughter.” The girl insisted. I looked at my dad and saw he was at a loss for words and about to lose his temper. He thought the matter should have ended five minutes ago, and here, at the outset, our lovely long-awaited first walk down Nevsky Prospekt was being ruined by a dimwitted flower girl. I ran around my dad, stuck myself brusquely between him and the girl, nearly pushing her away and said firmly, “No! But thank you.” Getting hold of his arm, I walked faster. She still meandered behind us for half a block until we crossed the Moika canal and lost her.

Leningrad had as many canals as Amsterdam, a city also built out of the swamp. The biggest and most famous of the canals are the Moika, the Griboyedov and the Fontanka. The difference was in the greenery. Leningrad had none.

Nevsky Prospekt buckled into the Neva and Palace Bridge. On the left of the bridge stood the golden, slender-spired Admiralty building. I saw something that looked like trees by the side of the Admiralty. To the left of Palace Bridge on the river embankment lay the green stucco Russian Baroque Winter Palace. Behind the Winter Palace was Palace Square — the Palace’s backyard, so to speak.

“Paullina, you’ve seen this, right? You remember this? This is one of the best city views,” my father said. I was certain of it, but I was so exhausted.

Before reaching the river, we turned right on a short, narrow street called Bolshaya Konyushennaya. We were the only ones walking. Ahead of us I saw Arc of the General Staff Building, and through it Alexander’s Column in the middle of Palace Square. Beyond it glowed the Winter Palace.

“Well, what do you think? What do you think?”

I thought it was dark. The sky was cloudy. There was no sun. I could barely place one foot in front of the other.

“It’s incredible,” I said.

Crossing the Palace Square as if we were in Doctor Zhivago, or as if Warren Beatty was about to storm the Winter Palace to help the Bolsheviks take power in Reds, we came out on the Neva embankment.

“Look at this river,” said my father, in a voice full of yearning. He lit a cigarette.

What was he yearning for? I didn’t want to ask him and ruin his moment. He was feeling things; I just wished I knew what they were.

After we passed the palace, my father stopped on a bridge over a small canal. “This is the Winter Canal Bridge. The canal separates the old Palace from the new Palace. Here, Pushkin’s Liza fell to her death, in his story, Queen of Spades. You remember that story?”

“Of course,” I said. “You named both your daughters right out of that story.”

He laughed. “That’s right. Liza and Paullina.”

We stood and stared at the rippling water. “Well, let’s walk along the Moika,” my father said. “Then we better head back. It’s late and it’s a long way.”

“Okay. If you say so.” How many more times in my life would I have a walk like this with my dad?

“Look at the Neva, Paullina,” my father repeated. “Isn’t it so beautiful?”

The night bleached out what the eyes did not want to see. The night was God’s denial. So when he asked, “Isn’t this so beautiful?” there was nothing to stop me from saying, “Yes.” And I meant it with all my heart.

It was after midnight and there was no one on the streets. On the Moika canal we passed Pushkin’s house. Alexander Pushkin was the greatest of all Russian poets; his poetry is the embodiment of the soul of the Russian people. Pushkin wrote the poem The Bronze Horseman, having been inspired by the monument to Peter the Great that Catherine the Great commissioned as a tribute to the tsar in 1792.

I stopped and touched the door to Pushkin’s house. I said, “Papa, I really want to come back here another day.”

“Yes, because we have infinite time,” my father said, without stopping.

After Pushkin’s house, we crossed Griboyedov canal and came to stand in front of the place Tsar Alexander II was slain. In his memory, a glorious cathedral was built called Spas Na Krovi — Savior of Spilt Blood or Church of the Resurrection.

The church was closed.

“I really would like to come back here another day.”

“Paullina, you cannot do everything.”

“I don’t want to do everything,” I said. “I just want to come back here.”

After the earlier downpour, the sky was darker than yesterday and offered no view of the setting sun. Still it looked like the end of dusk in New York on a summer night.

We were walking slower and slower. By the time we got to my hotel, we were barely inching forward.

I attempted to get my father a taxi in front of Grand Hotel Europe, but the bell captain talked me out of it, saying it would cost us a prohibitive amount, so much that he didn’t want to tell me for fear of frightening me. “I don’t want to frighten you,” he said.

“Frighten me, frighten me.”

Shaking his head, he told us to go to the corner of Mikhailovskaya and Nevsky and hail a cab from there. “Be sure to negotiate before getting in,” he added.

My father walked up to the taxi driver. “How much to Ulitsa Dybenko?”

The cab driver appraised my father. “A hundred rubles.”

“Done.”

“Nice negotiating,” I said to my father.

Before he got in the cab, he asked me to call Anatoly and Ellie and tell them he would be arriving in twenty minutes and have one of them come downstairs and wait for him, because he did not want to be dialing their apartment number in the dark and then waiting in the dark for the door to open.

Not to mention fighting with the elevator, I thought.

“Sure, I’ll call them,” I said, but forgot as soon as I got back to my room.

I remembered after I ran my bath. When I called, Ellie answered. “He’s already here.”

My father was going to be pleased with me.

Before I got in the bath, I called my grandparents in New York. Babushka picked up the phone. “Babushka,” I said, “you can’t talk, you can’t say a word, because it’s costing me five dollars a minute to call you, but I just wanted to tell you, we found Babushka Dusia’s grave. We found it.”

My grandmother started to cry.

“You think it was Yulia? You think Yulia is taking care of it?” she asked with hope.

I thought of our decrepit blue dacha.

“Not sure, Babushka. Maybe someone else?”

My great grandmother’s grave would have been abandoned too, if not for some kind soul still living in Shepelevo who weeded the grass and put fresh flowers by the gravestone. It wasn’t the Likhobabins.

The bath was too hot. I think I fell asleep in it. At one point I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I was still in the bath. I had made it too hot, to soothe my aching joints. When I crawled out, something was hurting, breaking me in two.

I slept with the windows open and the light from the dawning sky streaming in.