Six Days in Leningrad

I hadn’t talked to my children since I left New York. I missed them. It seemed hard to believe it had only been three days, and not three years.

There was a time zone issue that was more difficult to get around than when I was in England. Nine hours meant that when I woke up at eight in the morning, it was eleven in the evening in Dallas, and the kids were sleeping. When I came home at one in the morning, it was four in the afternoon Dallas time, and the kids were napping.

In England I had bought a phone card and periodically during my day I would stop at any old phone booth and call the kids.

Good luck with that in Leningrad.

Yesterday, when I told my grandmother that it was costing me five dollars a minute, I had just been saying that. I didn’t really know, I had said it for emphasis. This morning I looked at the phone rate card.

It had cost me 8 UNITS A MINUTE to call her.

Once I got over the initial shock, I didn’t mind the phone call to her; it was worth it. What I did mind was talking to my babysitter Monday afternoon for ten minutes as she informed me that she was changing apartments for the third time in six months. Somehow $80 didn’t seem worth that.

I called Kevin and told him that from now on he had to call me, because otherwise the phone calls were going to put us out of our new house.

It then took me an hour to get ready. I was achy and slow.

For breakfast, I had my usual buffet of blini with red caviar.

Before I met my father, I went to a room off the glass mezzanine, labeled Business Services, and inquired about the use of a computer.

The helpful blonde behind the desk told me it would cost me 15 UNITS per hour. “Would you like to book the computer now?” she asked. They only had the one.

I looked around. There was no one in the room. “Is there a need… to book?” I inquired.

“Oh, yes, we get quite busy. Especially if you want two hours. We can book now if you want.”

I booked for the following day at 8 o’clock in the morning. When else could I sit down and write? But I felt I needed to. The few scribbled pages at the end of the night just weren’t enough. Too many things were filling up my day and my head. I didn’t want to forget any of it.

My father must have struggled with getting up himself, because he was quite late, picking me up at quarter past eleven. I waited a long time for him on the street.

He met me with our driver Viktor and another man, whose name was also Viktor. He was Viktor Ryazunkov, a dark, bearded, neatly-dressed colleague of my father’s from the Radio Liberty bureau in Leningrad.

When my father introduced us, he said, “Paullina, this is the Viktor who forgot to tell me about the guard post on highway A-121.”

Viktor R. looked sheepish. Then he kissed my hand.

I smiled. “Viktor, do you think it could have anything to do with that accidental nuclear reactor spill in Sosnovy Bor in 1992?”

Raising his voice, my father exclaimed, “This is six years later! Why are they letting people go the back way if they’re trying to keep out outsiders from Sosnovy Bor?”

“You tell me, Papa,” I said. “I’m just an observer.”

No one had an answer. I asked what we were doing today. We were supposed to go to the Siege of Leningrad museum. My father said, “The first thing we have to do is go to the Marble Palace with Viktor and Viktor to get accredited for the Romanov funeral on Friday. It won’t take but a minute.”

Marble Palace

The words Marble Palace meant nothing to me until I walked inside and saw the wide gray marble stairs leading up to a hall on the third floor. When I saw the marble stairs an image rose up in my head, a feeling in my heart, a hazy recollection of something that had happened on these stairs. Wait, I said. That’s impossible. I’ve never been here before. But that thought was pushed away, and the emotion returned, a vague discomfort, a disturbance; I poked around for it and saw that it resembled fear.

Fear?

I couldn’t move. I heard my father’s voice, “Paullina, let’s go, why are you always lagging behind?”

How could I be feeling fear by looking at marble? What was going on?

Dimly an old memory relit: my young teacher fainting here. I saw her fall down, saw her young body on the marble stairs. I was so small, I didn’t understand what fainting was. I had never seen anyone faint before. I thought she had died.

That was the fear.

I looked at the stairs again, up and down. I saw the cracked marble under my old brown shoes as I walked up in my brown uniform and white apron.

Every 21 January, my school would go to the Marble Palace to commemorate the death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

In twenty five years I had never thought about the Marble Palace. It had fallen off my memory radar. As I walked through the courtyard, I didn’t know I had ever been there.

If someone had said to me, you had been there, I would have denied it. I would have denied it with all my heart, denied it to my death. But something got stirred up — either because of the grayness of the marble, or the span of the staircase.

I was small and I would walk up in line with the rest of my class in kindergarten to stand in the great big marble hall on the third floor and listen to songs and speeches about Lenin.

Once housing the Lenin Museum, after the Great Thaw of 1991, it was renamed back to the Marble Palace and now contains the permanent exhibition on the Romanovs. The museum is, I think, in the process of being restored. Either that or the palace is in chaotic disarray. Restoration and disarray look remarkably the same in Russia. The same peeling paint, the same chipped stucco, the same dirt and dust and rotted out window frames. And outside in the courtyards the same haphazard mess.

On the third floor I caught up with my father, and we went inside a large rectangular room with 40 foot ceilings, 30 foot windows, marble floors and marble columns. It seemed right but it was all shabby. It was called the Marble Room.

In one corner, a table and bulletin board were set up, and about a hundred people milled around, standing dumbly in two confused clusters.

For the lack of any information, we went to the right. After standing on the right for five minutes, we moved over to the left and stood there for five minutes. Finally we asked the person ahead of us what we were waiting for. He shrugged.

We asked another man, a Russian-speaker. He didn’t know either. We were all there supposedly to get an accreditation for the funeral, but no one knew the procedure and we couldn’t get close enough to the table to ask anyone who actually knew.

Viktor R. went off and came back five minutes later with some information.

“We have to stand here, until we reach those people over there, and then we give them our name and they take our photo over here.”

“And then?” Papa asked.

“Then we wait in the line to the left to get our accreditation pin.”

“Oh.”

We waited for ten minutes, until we got to the front. The girl behind the desk, giddy with knowledge and self-satisfaction told us we had been standing in the wrong line. “Before we take your photo, you need to give your name to the girl over here,” she said pointing to the girl next to her.

“Well, can we just give her our name?” I said. “She is sitting right next to you.”

“No!” she said. “You have to stand on her line. In the middle. You give her your name, and she will look it up in her log book to verify that you actually filled out an accreditation application.”

Oh.

So we went to stand in the middle line. Viktor R. said apologetically, “I already got mine done yesterday. There was nobody here. I did it in fifteen minutes. Today is the deadline for getting the press card. That’s why everyone is here.”

My father nodded. “So why are you here if you already did it yesterday?”

“Why, to help you out, Yuri Lvovich,” Viktor R. said.

For the lack of anything else to do, I read the notices on the bulletin board next to us.

“Now why,” I asked, “couldn’t we have a small, no, tiny, notice regarding the procedure for accreditation? I’m not saying anyone should remove these long letters from members of the Romanov family to the media that no one besides the really bored is tempted to read. God forbid. I’m saying, right alongside the Romanov letters, couldn’t we have had even a handwritten note about what to do when we got here?”

Viktor R. shrugged. My father didn’t answer, preferring to wait with the dogged look of someone who had waited in Soviet lines all his life and was quite prepared to do so again.

Finally we were at the front of the desk again. After giving our names, we shifted over to the line on the right, to get our picture taken. In the forty minutes we had been there, the crowd had swelled appreciably. Many more people now tried to muscle their way to the line on the right, without realizing they had to give their name first to the invisible line in the middle..

After we got our pictures taken, we moved all the way over to the cluster on the left.

I say cluster because line is too orderly a term. Line would imply a sense of purpose — that we were all waiting for something.

We noticed several people handing over fifty rubles at a time to the teenage-looking clerks giving out accreditation cards. Wondering if we could just buy an accreditation and get out of there, Viktor R. asked what the money was for.

Apparently it was a form of a bribe called a fine. It worked like this: Yes, today is the absolute deadline, but if you want to come and get your accreditation tomorrow, it will cost you 50 rubles payable now and in cash please. Then you can come back any time you want.

We got our photo IDs and left quickly, taking the wide gray marble stairs two at a time. On the landing, an enterprising woman had a table full of books about the tsar. I bought a Nicholas II book and some St. Petersburg postcards. A man appeared and loudly informed the seller she couldn’t sell merchandise on the marble stairs. “I don’t know who told you you could but you can’t. You have to move right now.”

When we walked outside, we stood in the courtyard for a few minutes, as my father smoked.

“Paullina, pay attention,” Viktor the driver said. “See this statue? It’s a very famous equestrian statue of Alexander III.”

“Oh?”

“Paullina, do you remember?” my father asked. “It was built on Insurrection Square?”

“Insurrection Square?”

“Yes,” he said impatiently. “Where we used to catch the metro.”

“Oh, that Insurrection Square.”

I looked at the statue again, trying to jog my memory. I did faintly recall the square where we used to catch the metro but not the statue.

“What was here in the courtyard before?”

“Lenin’s armored car.”

“Where is that now?”

“In the scrap yard,” replied my father, smoking.

Changing the subject, I asked, “So what do we wear to the funeral?”

“I don’t know,” my father said. “Viktor, can you get us inside the church?” He turned to me. “Because otherwise, I will guarantee, we will see nothing. Mark my words.”

“No, no, Yuri Lvovich. That’s not so,” said Viktor R., promising nonetheless he would make a couple of calls and try to get my father and me in.

“Forget me,” my father said. “Just get Paullina in. She has to see it. She is the writer.”

“I don’t want to go without you, Papa.”

“Forget me. You have a black dress at least?”

I looked at him dumbly. “Didn’t I tell you to bring a suit?” said my father. “What do you think that meant?”

“I thought it meant bring a suit. So I brought my best suit. My best, taupe-colored suit.”

Papa waved his hand at me. “What can I tell you. I brought a black suit—”

“You told me it was blue.”

“It’s dark blue. So dark it can pass for black. Can your taupe suit pass for black?”

“No.”

“No. Of course not. That’s why I’m going to be inside the church and you will be out on the cobblestones. You’ll look good though.”

“I will go and buy a black dress,” I said. “My hotel has a boutique. I’m sure they sell a black dress.”

Viktor R. told me not to buy anything until tomorrow — the day before the funeral — when he would find out if we could get inside the church. “I don’t know if I can do it. It’s only big enough for 300 people and political leaders are coming from all over the world. I’ll try.”

“Oh,” I said. “Political leaders from all over the world. It’s a big deal then. Is Yeltsin coming?”

Viktor R. shook his head. “No. Yeltsin is not coming. There is a bit of controversy over this whole funeral thing. You know.”

“Yeltsin is not coming? What controversy?”

“Well…” Viktor R. looked at my father, who took a deep puff of his cigarette and shrugged as if to say, I’m tired of talking about it.

“The controversy is — well, the communists did kill the Romanovs.”

“Yes, but Yeltsin didn’t personally kill them,”

But I knew this: he might not have killed them but he did burn down the house in which they had been murdered.

“So let me ask you, are any Russian political leaders going to be at the funeral to greet the arriving world political leaders?”

“Yes,” said my father. “Yeltsin is sending Lebed.”

Alexander Lebed was the governor of Krasnoyarsk, a region of Siberia.

“The Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church is very upset at Yeltsin,” said Viktor R.

“He is? Why? Because he wants him to go to the funeral?”

“Well… it’s more complicated than that.”

I glanced at my father who was just wilting. Turning back to Viktor R., I asked, “What’s complicated? Yeltsin is not going. The Archbishop is angry.”

“No, the Archbishop is angry because Yeltsin is permitting the Romanovs to be buried in a non-religious, devoid-of-sacred-meaning place like Peter and Paul’s. It was a museum for 70 years, you know.”

“How can a church be non-religious?” I said.

“The communists have made it secular. The archbishop wants the Romanovs to be buried in a church in Ekaterinburg.”

“That’s why he is upset at Yeltsin?”

“No,” Viktor R. said patiently. “He is upset with Yeltsin for not going to the service. He figures if the Romanovs are going to be buried in a godless place like Peter and Paul’s, the least Yeltsin can do is pay his respects.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. “That’s why the Archbishop is not going to the funeral?”

“No,” Viktor R. said patiently. “He is not going because he doesn’t think the Romanovs should be buried in any church at all.”

“But didn’t you just say…?”

“If they are going to be buried anywhere, they should be buried in Ekaterinburg where they were murdered. But he thinks they shouldn’t be buried at all.”

“They shouldn’t be buried?”

“No,” said Viktor. “The Archbishop wants them to be canonized, as do many people. If sainthood is bestowed upon them, they can’t be buried.”

“Why not?”

“Relics aren’t buried. They’re displayed in churches across Russia.”

“But what if they’re not canonized?”

“Then they can be buried.”

“How long will the canonization process take?”

“I don’t know,” said Viktor. “Ten, twenty years.”

“Ladies and gentlemen!” my father exclaimed impatiently. “Can we please go?”

We walked out of the courtyard and got into Viktor’s car.

My father who said he was hungry invited the two Viktors to come have lunch with us. “My treat,” he said. “It’s not every day your boss buys you lunch.”

The two Viktors heartily agreed.

The Marble Palace sits on the north side of the Field of Mars, named no doubt for its Parisian peer, the Champs du Mars. The Field of Mars is a park about thirty acres in size, used as a training and parade ground for the Soviet military. In the middle of it burns an eternal flame in memory of the heroes of first 1917 Russian Revolution that deposed Nicholas II, now at the center of the uproar over the disposition of his remains.

As we drove past the Field of Mars, my father said to me, “See this Field of Mars? If you only knew how much of my youth I spent here with my friends. What great times we had. Yes, it holds many memories for me. See the eternal flame in the middle of the field?”

“Yes, it’s beautiful.”

“Late at night, my buddies and I used to cook a shish-ke-bob over that flame,” he said. “And wash it down with vodka. Those were the days.”

We went to a café called Laima for lunch. I came to Russia to have some of my favorite Russian food — salad Olivier, mushroom barley soup, pelmeni, caviar. At Laima they sold hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken. If I wanted a burger I could have gone to a Wendy’s back home. They offered a bit of Russian food. I ordered Brussels mushroom soup and salad Olivier.

The Brussels in the title meant my mushroom soup was cream of mushroom, which was so not what I wanted, while my salad Olivier was just ordinary potato salad. I glanced longingly over at Viktor’s potato salad, which for some reason looked better. “Take it,” he said. “No, really. Go right ahead.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. “I really couldn’t.”

I took it. It was better. Viktor ate mine.

At Laima we planned the rest of our day. Rather, my father planned the rest of our day, and we just ate and listened. He told us the first thing we would do is let Viktor R. go back to work.

“Very kind of you,” Viktor R. said.

Then we would let our driver Viktor drive us to Piskarev Cemetery, where victims of the Leningrad blockade were buried in civilian and military graves.

“Then—” he said and broke off. “Well, what do you want to do then? Do you want to go to the Hermitage Museum and to the Siege of Leningrad Museum? We can go to the Hermitage for an hour, but then Viktor will drive us to your old school and then, he will drive us—”

“Whoa, whoa, Papa,” I said, stopping him right there. “What do you mean, ‘drive?’ I thought we were going to walk?”

He paused. “Walk from where? From Piskarev? Are you crazy? Do you know how far it is?” The other two men smiled at this. “It’s on the other side of the city.”

“No,” I patiently went on. “I thought we agreed that Viktor was going to drop us off at the record store, and then we would walk to my school and to Fifth Soviet?”

Silence at the table. Finally my father sighed. “All right, Viktor. You will take us to Piskarev, and then you will drive us to the record store and there we will say good-bye. We will walk to Paullina’s school and then to Fifth Soviet. Afterward we will take the metro to Anatoly’s place and have dinner—”

“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “I didn’t know we were going to Anatoly’s place for dinner. Didn’t we just have dinner there?” I said that, but I really couldn’t recall when exactly we had dinner at Anatoly’s. It seemed a long time ago. I just didn’t want to have dinner there again so soon. There was too much to do.

Papa shook his head. Everyone ate their food. “We have to go to Anatoly’s,” he said. “You don’t know the pressure I’m under. They want you to come and stay in their apartment. We have to go.” By way of enticing me, he added, “Ellie made blueberry pie with the blueberries you bought yesterday.”

“She did?”

“Yes. And borscht.”

“Also with my blueberries?”

“Don’t be fresh. She thought borscht was your favorite soup.”

“Did you tell her I prefer mushroom barley?” I said, finishing up my inadequate cream of mushroom.

“You’re lucky you’re being fed at all,” my father snapped. “Do you eat anything at all in Texas? Can you even afford to eat?”

The Viktors chuckled. There is nothing my father likes more than an appreciative audience.

“We have to go, Paullina,” he said. “They made us borsht. Ellie has been cooking all day. Also they’re going to show films of you when you were a baby, and of your mother when I first met her. Don’t you want to see them?”

“All right,” I said.

“They really want to do this for us.”

“I said, all right.”

Viktor and Viktor just sat and smiled.

After lunch, Viktor R. went back to work, and our driver Viktor drove us north to Piskarev Cemetery.

The Oak Leaves of Mother Russia

Piskarev Memorial Cemetery is located on the Prospekt of the Nepokorennykh. Avenue of the Unconquered.

The Russians may have remained the unconquered, but there was still nowhere to park. Apparently the only way to come to the cemetery was by public transportation, though we didn’t see much of it as we parked by the curb. The wide prospekt was empty — of people and of public transportation. It was Wednesday, the middle of the week. People were working, I guessed, not visiting cemeteries. I just expected to see more life, I came to see more of it. What about the people who didn’t work? Mothers with babies? Old people?

The cemetery was surrounded by a five foot tall stone wall. Over the wall lay a pleasant-looking green pond, with an island in the middle and benches all around. It was subdued and tranquil. A few people sat on the benches. A few others walked through the tree-covered paths.

Once we walked through the gates I instantly saw that this was not the Arlington Cemetery in Washington D.C. or the St. Laurent Cemetery of Omaha beach.

No white crosses here. No separate graves here.

The cemetery was laid out in a large rectangle about the size of a football field. We stood on a hill at one short end. In front of us burned another eternal flame.

“Did you cook shish-ke-bob here too?” I asked my father jokingly and then saw by his horrified face that he had not.

It was one thing to cook meat on the memory of the communist revolution, it was another to burn it on the flame of the dead of The War.

Across the length of the cemetery on the other end rose the statue of Mother Russia holding oak leaves in her hands. Before her, rectangular grass-covered mounds spread out, thirty feet wide by a hundred feet long.

This was a mass grave cemetery.

Five hundred thousand people were buried here, civilian and military casualties of the blockade, twenty five thousand per mound.

To distinguish between civilian and military victims, the graves were labeled with a red hammer and sickle for the civilian or with a red star for the military.

The bodies were brought here for burial starting in 1942. The War ended in 1945, but the cemetery didn’t open to the public until 1960.

I motioned for my father to come with me down to the grave sites, but he showed no inclination to do so. He continued to mill around the two square white concrete buildings at the gate the cemetery. I walked back to him.

“I’m looking for the Siege of Leningrad museum,” he explained.

I told him that according to my map, the Defense of Leningrad museum was located elsewhere. Viktor disagreed. “I came here with my school,” he said. “It’s here.”

“Okay,” I said. “Papa, why don’t you come down to the graves with me?”

“No,” he said. “You go. I’ll wait for you here.”

I stood near the eternal flame. It was a beautiful day. It was breezy, about 60°F and brightly sunny.

I slowly walked down the 40 steps and through the graves, keeping my eye on the statue of mother Russia, holding out her hands to me in mercy and judgment.

I walked very slowly because, the air, the very atmosphere was charged differently than it was anywhere I had been to so far. Besides oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide there was something else here. It felt heavier, quieter, more ominous.

There were few places where I have felt the same numinous spirituality. History, death, the angels, the war, suffering, all mingling with the graves and the red tulips in the flower beds. The air wasn’t light, it wasn’t diaphanous. No, it was thick with death, and in the quiet stillness of the paralysis of this cemetery with its languid Mother Russia and its perfectly formed mounds, and simple military stars and hammer and sickles, what cried out was the violence of death by starvation, by utter indifference. We died and we didn’t want to die, the voices from the graves whispered, we wanted to live like you and someday walk through a pretty park, we wanted to feel the July Leningrad sun on our faces but we weren’t as lucky and we died a pitiful death, and we’re still here.

That’s what I walked through: anguish and desperation and a desire for life. No wonder I was walking slowly. I stopped before I got to the end. I couldn’t be here anymore. It was too much.

As I turned back something clicked inside me: I have been here once before, with my grandmother. She took me one afternoon when I had been staying with her. My mother was visiting my father in labor camp. I remembered it had been far to walk from the bus; we walked anyway. My grandmother played a word game with me, and that made the time pass. I was maybe six.

Here the past remained present amid the graves, all laid out like hills. Too many souls inside this cemetery, too many unfinished lives. This was different than a walk in the park. The spirit world was too close to the physical world here. No peace was to be found among these righteous dead. All five hundred thousand ceaselessly walked the promenade keeping the past with them, and I must have stumbled upon it like the blind into a wall. I could hear them screaming… I didn’t want to die, I was young like you, and I loved, like you, but love and youth weren’t enough to keep me alive.

Here you are six years old, walking with your Babushka among us. You’re playing a game and you are hungry, and a little tired. We surround you with our suffering that you can’t ease.

I looked around for a bench to sit on. I lowered myself, and immediately saw my father at the top of the forty stairs, He was motioning to me; faintly I heard his voice. He didn’t come down to get me. He called for me through five hundred thousand dead souls. “Paullina, Paullina…”

I got up and walked to him.

“We found the museum,” he said, looking at me. “Are you all right?” but he didn’t wait for my reply, having already turned, he was walking ahead to the square white building.

He and Viktor found a way into the museum, housed in two concrete structures, Part One and Part Two. Inside Part One a 30 by 30 foot room, all gray concrete and darkly lit. Barely lit, I should say, to convey the mood of doom.

It took my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the darkness.

The only light in the room came from the poorly lit photographs and words telling the story of the siege of Leningrad.

I stood sickly fascinated by the size of the bread ration given to the Leningraders during the first terrible winter of the siege, 1941-42.

Now I knew what 125 grams of bread looked like, even if it was behind glass and I couldn’t touch it. It wasn’t 125 grams of a crusty loaf. It wasn’t 125 grams of a bagel. It was 125 grams of a dark, porous, unhealthy substance, and I knew why. The flour was cut with glue and paper and wood shavings before it was baked. There wasn’t enough flour in Leningrad to give to two million people 125 grams of rye or pumpernickel each.

3.8 ounces a day. Military personnel got 8 ounces of bread a day. They were defending the country. They needed more.

Manual laborers 6 ounces of bread a day. Children and old people 3 ounces. I looked closer. My son Misha drops more than that on the floor every breakfast as he sucks the cream cheese off the bagel. Kevie rejoices in feeding twice that to the dogs every meal.

I couldn’t move away from the bread. My father tugged at my sleeve. “I can’t go yet, Papa,” I whispered.

He pulled me away to read Hitler’s instructions to his Group Army Nord on the demolishing of Leningrad by hunger. Quickly he pulled me away from that to read a brief diary of a young girl named Tanya Savicheva, whose entire family had died in Leningrad leaving only her alive. “Only Tanya left…” she wrote in her last entry. “Только Таня осталась…”

She died too in 1942. Now my father was the one who had to look away from me.

We moved away from Tanya Savicheva, from Hitler, from bread and began studying a mercifully abstract map of the siege when a tall thin old man slowly came to stand next to me. He was silent for a moment. He started explaining the map to me.

The man’s name was Yuliy Yulievich Gneze. He was 76-years old. At 19 he had been a Red Army soldier fighting to defend Leningrad. When Stalin finally decided to open a second front in Volkhov, in December, 1941, Gneze was transferred there to attack the Germans from the rear. On the map he showed me the places where fighting had been the most severe. He showed me why and how the Germans always sought out the topographically highest positions from which to systematically mow down the Soviets. There were two such places around Leningrad. One was the Pulkovo Heights, from where the German artillery bombed Leningrad streets for three years. The other was a place near the Volkhov front called Sinyavino Heights.

“Have you ever heard of a place called Nevsky Patch?” Gneze asked me.

I shook my head. Viktor who had been standing nearby grunted knowingly. My father, who knew everything, had long moved away from us.

“The Nevsky Patch was the slaughterhouse of Leningrad,” Gneze said. “I was nearly sent there. But I was lucky, they sent me to Volkhov instead. No one who went to Nevsky Patch came back. No one.”

“But finally…” I said.

“Finally, we pushed the Nazis out of Russia.”

Gneze was of German descent himself. He wore a little cap and in his hands he carried a loaf of bread. He told me that all his life after the war he lived close to this cemetery, and whenever he went out to run errands for his wife, he came here just to walk through the museum and around the graves.

Having been through those graves, I stood as if stunned to hear that someone willingly and daily would walk through half a million dead souls. He must be looking for someone — brother, father, mother.

“I don’t have nobody,” he said. “They’re all dead. Except my wife. I just come here to walk through the graves. To remember.”

Gneze was touched to learn that I came to Leningrad all the way from Texas to research a book about the blockade. “I wish I had known you were here,” he said. “Are you going to be here again? Because I have so much material at home about the blockade.” He looked around to find my father, and then looked at his watch, as if he were about to invite us over his apartment to split the loaf of bread with him.

As we left the museum, Gneze walked out with us, following us to the second building. He asked if I could wait, and he would run home and get me the books he had on the blockade. “I have been saving them for years and never knew why. Maybe this is just the occasion,” he said.

“Keep your books, Yuliy Yulievich,” I told him. “You should not part with your memories.”

“My memories I will not part with,” he replied. “But if the books can help you, it’s worth it.”

The second building was better lit; also the subject matter was less about death and more about vanquishing the enemy.

I asked Gneze about the Russians and Germans exchanging the wounded and the dead for medical treatment or burial. He snorted at my suggestion that the Russians and the Germans actually practiced laws of the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war and exchange of soldiers. “Maybe in Europe they exchanged prisoners or the dead, yes, I’m sure they did,” he said. “But not in Russia. No. It was not that kind of war.”

My father came up to me. “Okay, Paullina? Done?”

“Yes,” I said, and reluctantly walked out into blinding sunshine. We walked to our car, with Gneze walking by our side.

“See this pond over the cemetery wall? I’ll tell you something about the pond.”

I waited.

“When the Russian army collected the dead bodies for burial, they didn’t know what to do with the German corpses,” Gneze said. “At first they were going to burn them or let them rot where they fell, but in the end they couldn’t. They took pity. The Russians dumped all the Germans in one spot and covered them with the earth. Later, the city decided to fill the space with water, and it became a pond. That’s the pond you see here.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Is that funny?” Gneze said. “Benches all around, pedestrians stroll by softly, speaking in hushed tones so as not to disturb the dead.” He laughed.

“Paullina, ready to go?” my father said.

“Where are you going?” Gneze said, as if he wanted to ask to come with us.

“Today to the place we used to live,” I replied. I could see he lost interest. “But tomorrow,” I said, “we were thinking of going to Lake Ladoga. The Road of Life, you know?”

“Of course I know,” he said. “I recommend Kobona on the other side of the lake.”

“Yeah, you said. I think it might be too far for us.”

“It’s far, but it’s worth it. It’s got a great museum.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, watching my father slowly walking away. “Is Schlisselburg worth it?”

“Schlisselburg is a must. You cannot go to Lake Ladoga without seeing Schlisselburg. It’s incredible there. And it’s got the fortress island, Oreshek, that stood against the attacking Nazis for a year and a half. You must go to the island no matter what.”

“We’ll definitely go,” I assured him.

“There is a wonderful museum in Schlisselburg, not a museum really, a Diorama, opened recently, about the breaking of the blockade. If you’re on that side, it’s not far to Nevsky Patch. Or to Kobona.”

“We’ll try,” I said, knowing full well what my father would say.

“Well, good-bye,” said Gneze, shaking my hand. He had a firm, hard handshake, like my Dedushka.

This time I followed him. He was already down the forty steps, walking through the graves, with the loaf of bread and his hat in his hands, half a cemetery in front of me. As I focused my camera on him, he turned around and stared at me. I took a picture, but I didn’t want to come any closer. I waved. Without waving back, he turned around and proceeded down the path.

The spirit of the dead began to descend on me again. I quickly needed to get back up the stairs — stairs that the dead would not ascend.

As we climbed into Viktor’s car, I looked around for some public transportation. There wasn’t any.

“Viktor, where are the buses?”

“Oh, they stop at the Square of Courage,” he said.

“Where is that?”

“About a forty minute walk from here.”

I remembered the walk being a long one by my six-year-old standards. But it turned out to be a long walk, period. You would think a bus could be re-routed to the gates of the cemetery, so that the veterans could come and pay their respects, but no, nearly sixty years later, the old soldiers, the tourists and the six-year-old girls still had to walk forty minutes.

“Where do you want to go now?” my father asked.

I was raw from Piskarev but my father was already on to the next thing. He knew there was plenty more ahead. We hadn’t even been to our old apartment on Fifth Soviet. He was saving his emotional strength.

I looked at the map. “See here,” I said, to no one in particular. “My map says the Defense of Leningrad Museum is off the Field of Mars, not far from the Marble Palace.”

“Oh, Defense of Leningrad,” said Viktor. “You should have said what you meant. Defense is different from Siege. We can go there another day.”

“That man also mentioned there was a nice museum in Kobona.”

“Paullina!” exclaimed my father. “Be serious. What do you think? How much are you prepared to do?”

“Everything.”

“That’s what I am afraid of.”

“Viktor, let’s drive past Smolny Sobor. It’s quite beautiful, and plus I used to work there,” said my father.

“Okay,” I said. “What is it?”

“It’s a church.”

“You worked in a church?”

“Well, it wasn’t a church under the Bolsheviks.” My father chuckled. “The Bolsheviks loved all the religious buildings. But the Smolny was the headquarters of the Communist Party in Leningrad before and after the government operations were relocated to Moscow.”

“So what did you do there?” I asked. “I know you didn’t work for the Communist Party.”

“No. But when I was a lawyer I came there to present my legal briefs.”

“Right inside the church?”

“No, in one of the adjacent buildings. I’ll show you. The church was used as a paper storage warehouse.”

“Paper?”

“Yes. Old documents.”

“Oh.”

We parked in front of Smolny and walked to the front to get a better look. Smolny was once a brilliant (now a faded) blue-and-white Baroque convent, designed by the ubiquitous architect Rastrelli who seemed to have designed most of Leningrad.

We stood in the open square as tourists filtered in and out. My father said said, “Isn’t it something? Ey? Isn’t it?”

It was certainly something. Would the camera hide the peeling paint? Yes, if the picture was softly focused and we stood far away. We did.

“This is one of the most beautiful churches in Leningrad,” Viktor told me. “It’s a major tourist attraction.”

That made it all the more unseemly. Couldn’t the city paint the dang thing? No, of course. That might diminish some of its degraded splendor. I nodded, wondering why my father saw the beauty, why Viktor saw the splendor, and why I saw only the shabbiness of it all.

I wasn’t more critical nor less sentimental than my father. I wanted it all to take my breath away too, I came here wanting nothing less. But I was getting things I had not bargained for and had not wanted. I was getting spirits in a cemetery, and no toilet paper in the toilets, and no toilets, and rusted fences and cardboard walls and sofas that had not been replaced in thirty years. Papa was getting Smolny.

“Did you like being a lawyer, Papa?” I asked as we stood behind the tulips, behind the cars.

“It was certainly ironic,” he replied. “Me defending the factory from worker’s complaints.” I agreed that indeed it was pretty ironic, my dad, the most ardent anti-communist around working for the government since all factories were government-owned.

“Do you see the street leading away from Smolny? At the end of that street was my jail.”

Something stirred inside me. “Your jail? What’s the name of the street?”.

“Shpalernaya. We called the jail Shpalerka. Take a picture for Mama of me with the street in the background. It’ll just kill her.”

I pointed my camera at my father and Shpalernaya Ulitsa, but childhood got in the way of the viewfinder. I couldn’t see clearly. “Was this where I came to visit you that one time?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “This was where you came with Mama.”

The Blue Sky

“Daddy, why is the sky blue?”

“Because God made it that way.”

“Why did God make it that way?”

“Because he liked the color blue for the sky.”

“Daddy?”

“Hmm?”

“Why is the grass green?”

“Because God liked the color green for the grass.”

“Daddy, why didn’t God make the sky green and the grass blue?”

“Because a green sky would look stupid.”

“Why didn’t God think a blue sky would look stupid?”

“Why don’t we ask mommy when we get home?”

“Why would mommy know something you wouldn’t?”

“Because mommy knows everything daddy doesn’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like why you are the most curious little girl in the world, and now I know why mommy doesn’t go for walks with you.”

“Are you the most curious daddy?”

“No, why?”

“Because mommy doesn’t go for walks with you either.”

I was a little girl then. Cheerful and curious. I had a mommy who loved me and a daddy to whom I was everything. And he was everything to me. He played wild games with me. He threw me up in the air so high I thought I might never come down. Mommy always used to yell at him for throwing me up high like that, but he did it anyway. Behind her back, he did it, and then we would laugh because it was our secret, our world. He was the one who took me to kindergarten and for walks. He was the one who bought me ice cream and took me to see funny cartoons at the movies. I went everywhere with him, and I waited outside while he went into a pub to get himself a beer. Mommy stayed home and cooked dinner.

Suddenly daddy disappeared. Mommy started taking me to kindergarten. She brought me home. We ate dinner alone and went to sleep alone. There were no more walks. Mommy sent me out to play by myself.

This went on for nearly a year until one day in April, mommy and I took a walk. On a misty and miserable Leningrad afternoon, she held me by the hand. She didn’t talk, and I didn’t talk.

We walked for a long time and came to a big gate, the kind that fortresses have when they don’t want anybody coming in. Mommy rang the bell and a man opened the gate for us. We walked in. She squeezed my hand, but I had no feeling. I wasn’t nervous or scared or shocked. I was a little numb.

Mommy held my hand tight and then a man in uniform led us somewhere and followed him through a dark, smelly yard and then we came to a dark hallway with gray walls. It didn’t look like anything I had seen before. I didn’t care. I knew I wouldn’t see it again.

Finally we stopped walking after the man unlocked a door and showed us into a room. It was a tiny cubicle of a room with dirty, beige walls and a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The man told my mother to wait and left. The room was empty except for a chair, my mother, and me.

After a while we heard footsteps and the door opened. A guard came in. He was big and not friendly. Then another guard came in, with my father.

Daddy didn’t look like I remembered him. He looked tired and unshaven. He came to me and hugged me very tight. Then he sat down on the chair and put me on his lap and told me not to be scared. I wish I could have told him that I wasn’t scared, that mommy was scared and he should be telling this to her not me, but he kept on. He told me he would be home soon and that we would go for walks again. He kept telling me not to be scared. He talked to my mother a little bit. Soon the guard who was watching us all the while said time was almost up. Mommy hugged me because she thought I was going to cry. But I wasn’t thinking of crying. I was thinking of nothing. My daddy had tears in his eyes, and when they took him away, he looked back at us, and then the guard closed the door. In a few minutes a man came to show us the way out, and my mother again took my hand.

I am five years old.

My mother and my grandparents told me daddy was on a business trip. They all told me he would be coming back soon. My mother went to visit him two times and didn’t take me. I stayed with my grandmother. On one of those stays with her, she took me for a walk to Piskarev Cemetery. I turned six and then seven.

I never asked about this business trip. Was his business so important to him that I had to be walked to kindergarten by my silent mother every day? I stopped listening to adult conversation. God forbid I should overhear anything. God forbid I should overhear he wasn’t coming back.

He did come back though, when I was nearly eight. I was in Shepelevo, and it was nap time, around four in the afternoon. I was lying on my bed reading when I heard my grandmother exclaim from the kitchen, “There comes my son.” I ran to Yulia’s room and looked out of her window and saw my father and mother walking arm in arm down the hill near the cemetery.

He came back just the way I remembered him.

Not in that room with the chair and the naked bulb, but in the days before he left, clean-shaven and smiling.

I never cried for my father, I never shed a tear for his absence, but I had tears in my eyes in Shepelevo. I was so happy he came back. I jumped up and down on my bed, and then he came to me, and I still remember hugging him tight enough to break his neck, and my mother standing next to us, patting me gently on the back.

Shpalerka

My mother did tell me once when I was 20, “Yes, when we left Papa’s prison, you held my hand very tight. We walked all the way home, and you didn’t say a word. Usually we can’t shut you up, but that time you walked silently. It rained all the way home.”

My father spent a year in the Shpalerka jail. Then he was tried and convicted and sentenced to two years hard labor in Mordovia labor camp, south of Moscow.

Once when I expressed regret at my father’s suffering, my mother sent me a poem by a Russian poetess, Anna Akhmatova that elevates the abandoned woman’s suffering to a high art as she waits near the prison gates to give a package to her lover, who’s in jail. “That is me, Paullina,” she wrote. “And whatever your father might say about it, it was I not he who stood at those prison gates, while he sat happily in jail. It was I, not he, who stood near the iron gates to give him a package. He quickly forgot that.”

We looked at this jail now, at the gate that was still there, and my father said, “Yes, this is where you came to visit me with your mother and your grandmother.”

That stunned me. Babushka came too? I have no memory of her on that day, none.

“She was not in the room with us, was she?” I asked my father.

“Yes, she was,” he replied. Go figure. I couldn’t find her in my five year old soul.

At the rear of the jail were the KGB headquarters. The jail itself looked like a typical four-storey Leningrad building.

“They thought they were so clever,” my father said. “See the building? It’s nothing but a façade. There is no building. It’s just pretend windows and pretend doors, as ramshackle as everything else on the street. Behind the fake windows was the prison yard and the cells. Amazing isn’t it? Right in the middle of town, next to Smolny Sobor, not far from Neva. Nothing is as it seems.”

The KGB headquarters were in a Bolshevik-era building, a concrete atrocity of no redeeming cultural or architectural value. But then what did I expect of the KGB headquarters? A Byzantine sensibility? Perhaps the statue of David at the front?

“So how long did it take them to try and convict you, Papa?” I asked as we reluctantly moved away from the jail and back to the car.

“Three days,” he said.

In labor camp he told me he didn’t have any sugar for two years and he hoarded the tea my mother would bring him during her visits so he could give all his friends tea on his last day in camp.

“No sugar, huh?” I said, glib, tired, in need of some facilities.

My father glanced at me meaningfully. “You understand nothing,” he said. “That was nearly the worst thing.”

Was that the worst thing, I wanted to say to him. No sugar?

I understood nothing. I lived without him for five years. But I had sugar.

During the war they didn’t have sugar.

No bread, no potatoes, no meat, no milk, no sugar. When the food storage warehouses burned near Leningrad in September of 1941, and the 10 tons of sugar blackened and melted into the earth, the city people panicked, but they could not foresee the dread to come. They could not foresee that two months later in December, 1941, one cup of that black earth would be selling on the black market for a hundred rubles.

Was not having sugar the worst thing during the siege of Leningrad too? What would my mother say, she who quoted Anna Akhmatova’s poetry every time someone would mention how much my father had suffered. “What about me?” she would say. “Did I not suffer?” Was she talking about the sugar?

I remembered Shpalerka in the same faint way I remembered Piskarev. The empty street with wide sidewalks and tall — uncommon for Leningrad — simple concrete buildings, complex only in their multi-layered unattractiveness.

Silently we got back in the car and drove past Tauride Gardens.

While we were driving, still driving, eternally driving, I saw that Viktor seemed to have no intention of ever letting us out of his car.

“Papa,” I said, “I thought you were going to have Viktor drop us off at the record store and we would walk to my school and to Fifth Soviet by ourselves?”

Silence.

“Paullina,” said my father, “you don’t understand what big distances there are between those places.”

“Papa, you told me earlier that all three places — my school, the record store, and Fifth Soviet — were really close to one another?”

He sighed. I took that to mean—

Lack of agreement. My father thought that if he just kept quiet, I wouldn’t notice we were still in the car. I kept quiet. I had too many things to think about. I asked Viktor to stop the car at one point and let me out so I could take a picture of a run-down store I could perhaps use in my Bronze Horseman story.

We drove to my school, number 169. My father didn’t want to get out of the car. But he did.

Take a snap shot of this, take a snap shot of that, he directed me. “Why are you so far away. What are you taking a picture of? Take a picture of this.”

And I will put the snapshots in the family album, of my school with broken windows and a dirty empty yard, and the peeling paint, and the sign out in front, “No walking your dogs here.”

“Take the picture of the no walking your dog sign,” he said. “Why are you so far from it? Take it up close. Take a close-up of it.”

I did as was told.

“Is this how you remember it?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “Yes.”

But the answer was no. I remembered it full of kids, climbing trees, yelling at each other, even running. Did I remember the bars on the windows? No. Did I remember the broken windows? No. The yard was large and empty, so forlorn, so sad, so long ago. I spent only two years going to that school, less time than I spent in my kindergarten where I was from the time I was 4 until I was 7. But it was in school number 169 where I learned my first English phrase: “Take a pen.”

Appropriate, come to think of it.

In the yard there stood a slide, covered with tarp for the summer vacation. I didn’t know for certain if that was still a slide under the covers, but that’s where it had been when I was in school, and in the wintertime it wasn’t covered. During recess, we used to climb up and down, up and down. I climbed up one afternoon and fell two meters down, straight onto my back.

My mother had to leave work early and take me to the medi-clinic in the red brick hospital building near Fifth Soviet. The doctors took an x-ray of my head because after I fell I pressed my head in the white hat against the dirty wall, and the nurses thought I had hit my head.

The x-ray of my head showed, unsurprisingly, that the head was fine.

The back really hurt though. When we got home, we ate dinner, and then I sat at my desk and read, and my father lay on my bed and watched me. Every time he saw me slouch, he said, “Sit up straight. Haven’t you played enough games? Sit up straight.”

I sat up straight. My back really hurt though.

It still hurts.

“I fell off that slide,” I said to my father as we stood in the empty yard.

“What slide?”

“Remember I fell and hurt my back?”

“Not your back. You don’t remember anything, do you? It was your head.”

Shaking his head, he turned to Viktor and said, “Now I understand why she doesn’t remember anything.”

Shaking my head, I said to him, “Papa, go and stand over there and let me take a picture of you looking at the front doors of the school.”

“Why?”

“Can you do it, and then I’ll tell you?”

Reluctantly he went to stand under the shade of the trees as he looked onto the double doors. He lit a cigarette. “What was that all about?”

One morning my father, who would take me to school the few Mondays he was home, was mean and I was mad at him. So as we were walking to school, I told him that we had a new rule: parents were not allowed inside. They had to leave their children at the front door and go. They could not come inside the school like they always did. “Really?” asked my father. “Absolutely,” I said, so when we got to the school yard, I said a quick good-bye and ran up the steps, leaving him outside in the courtyard. I knew he stood and watched me go in. What I didn’t know was that he stood and watched all the other parents go up the stairs and in with their kids.

That evening, my mother said, “Why did you tell Papa parents weren’t allowed inside the school? He stood there, the poor thing, and wondered why you said that to him.”

“I was mad,” I said, my spirits much deflated.

I was eight.

“What did you do that for? Why a picture here?” he said.

“Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?”

I told him.

He didn’t remember.

I remembered though. Nights I can’t sleep I lie in the dark and think of all the people I haven’t called and all the people I haven’t written, the image of my father springs up, fresh and raw, standing in the school yard watching all the other dads go in with their kids.

“Will you forgive me?” I said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “Have you seen enough? Can we go?”

Afterward, Viktor drove us to the record store.

I was becoming pretty frustrated. “Papa,” I said, “I need to get out of the car. I need to walk and see these places.”

My father sounded exhausted, “Why can’t you see them from the car window?”

“You mean from this backseat car window?” I asked. “Because Papa, I’m writing a book about World War II. There were very few cars in Leningrad then. Maybe I should just have my heroine spend the entire siege driving around Leningrad? Could she fall in love in the backseat too?”

“But Paullina, you’re writing fiction,” Viktor said. “Can’t you imagine getting out of the car and walking?”

“Yes, Viktor, but I need to see what I’m going to be imagining slowly. Slower than thirty miles an hour.”

“Viktor can slow down,” said Papa.

“Papa!” I said. “We have to walk to Fifth Soviet.”

My father shook his head. “But we already went there on Monday. What more do you want to see?”

I threw up my hands.

My father turned to a smiling Viktor. “What can I do, Viktor? She wants to walk everywhere.”

Shine Shine My Star

Papa let Viktor go home, and we went into the record store and argued without much conviction about who was going to buy the Vysotsky CD. There was only one, and we both wanted it. My dad let me have it. I think he was just too tired to argue.

We slowly made our way through the dusty streets. It was around 4:30 in the afternoon, sunny, warm, and other people were out too, just like us. Well, maybe not quite like us. Less tired, less cranky, less hungry.

No, just like us.

We crossed the tram tracks on Liteiny Prospekt. My father said, “You know this Liteiny Prospekt?” my father asked. “If you continue walking and make a right, it turns into Shpalerka.”

“Really?” Shpalerka seemed like a different city. “So we could have walked to the record store from there?”

Irritated at me, he tried to speed up but was too spent frankly to even be sincerely offended.

We walked past the October Concert Hall. My father was right. It was called October Hall. Now that we were walking, I could read the signs.

On the far side of October Hall was the red brick hospital where I was born, where I had gone for aspirin poisoning, and where I had x-rays taken of my head.

My father was a reluctant raconteur and pedestrian. We barely spoke and he walked slowly.

When we came to the front doors of our green stucco building on Fifth Soviet, he mumbled that didn’t want to go inside. He again repeated that last time he came to St. Petersburg and tried to go in, the doors were closed because they had been renovating, and now he didn’t know what was inside; thus his current reluctance. “It could be offices, it could be condos, I don’t know,” he said, lighting a cigarette. Like me, he also had not been back since we left in 1973.

I looked at the double front doors, hanging unevenly on their hinges. The building didn’t look renovated to me. Leaving him to smoke I walked through the passageway to the courtyard inside.

Many Leningrad buildings were built in a rectangular or square shape, as homages to Bart Rastrelli, the most famous architect in Leningrad of the 18th Century. The buildings were miniature ignoble imitations of the Winter Palace with their interior courtyards. Some courtyards had gardens, most were just garbage dumps.

Our courtyard on Fifth Soviet did not have a garden.

In its favor the surrounding walls were of deep yellow stucco and the sunshine hit them in just the right way for me to recall playing in the yard as my mother cooked dinner upstairs. I looked up, counting three stories and saw our kitchen window. It was open. A man, working on his overturned car in the yard next to the garbage, looked up from his work for a moment and stared at me indifferently.

Back on the street, my father was still standing in front of the front door, smoking.

“Papa, I want to go in.”

“Go ahead.”

“Come with me.”

He shook his head. “You just don’t understand, Paullina. All the things you want to remember, I want desperately to forget.”

He lit another cigarette. I went inside.

I don’t know what he was talking about, renovation. There was no renovation. It was the same concrete stairs, torn by time; the same dark green peeling paint on the walls. There was even a dank urine smell, at once familiar and repugnant. The impression was of a building that had been touched by nothing but time since the time it was built.

The faded black and white details turned to color as I stood at the foot of the stairs. Shepelevo had been a myth to me, but Fifth Soviet had been reality, then, as now. For a quarter of a century I recalled Shepelevo only through the scents of white cherry and pine and burning wood and fresh water.

But about Fifth Soviet I remembered the odor of old urine.

I trudged up the stairs, and became 7 years old again, there was no Papa, just me and Mama, she lets go my hand, I walk up the stairs holding the railing. I see the window in front of me on the first floor, my mother ahead of me, I see the dinner she is about to cook for us, behind me three years my mother and I were alone, in front of me silence for two more years. It’s almost too much for me to walk up to the third floor, slowly as my mother had carrying the weight of her desperate life, single motherhood, loneliness, as she climbed to floor 3, apartment 4, me behind her.

I stopped on the landing in front of our apartment and stared at the old brown door. It was remarkably similar to the door in my memory. My childhood eyes were deceiving me. How could that be? It was twenty-five years ago. It couldn’t be the same.

Once, when my father had already come back from prison and was living in exile in Tolmachevo, my mother picked me up from school. We came back to our communal apartment, and standing at the brown door my mother couldn’t find her keys. Someone could have let her in, but she still wouldn’t have any keys for our rooms. She said we had to go and get the keys from Papa. We didn’t eat dinner and instead traveled a hundred and twenty kilometers that evening, spending a long time waiting for the train. But we saw Papa for just a few minutes, got the keys from him, and left. It must have taken us five hours to go to Tolmachevo. Even then I was suspicious of the key story. Papa wasn’t coming home for his weekend furlough for two more weeks, and I had a feeling my mother missed him. But what did I know. I was only seven.

I pulled out my camera and focused on the door, but the flash on the Pentax wasn’t working properly. I changed the f-stop on the lens to allow more light and pressed the shutter release button.

Just then the glossy brown door opened and a man walked out onto the landing. He eyeballed me perplexed and silent but finally said in measured tones, “Why take a picture of the door?”

I told him I used to live in this apartment long ago.

“Good,” he said, locking the door behind him.

I told him I came to Leningrad from America. “Good,” he said again, as he started to walk down the stairs.

I continued to stand on the landing with the camera in my hands, looking at the door and at him. He walked down only a few steps before he turned to me with a sigh. “Would you like to see?”

“Yes, please,” I said, my shoulders hunched in miserable reluctance. Please don’t let me see. All I had wanted to remember I now wanted to forget. But I knew, knew I could not come to Russia, to the Leningrad of my childhood and not see the inside of the communal apartment where I was raised.

As he was opening the door, I remarked, “Looks like the same door.”

“It is the same door,” he said. “Same lock too. Do you still have your key?”

I laughed half-heartedly. “No,” I said. “I do not have my key. I don’t think I ever had a key.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “You could’ve walked right in.”

In the sunny kitchen to the left of the door stood a woman by the sink drying a mixing bowl with a raggy dishtowel.

“Svetlana,” the man said, “I brought a young woman from America who wants to see the apartment.”

Svetlana immediately stopped drying the bowl and came to me. “Plinka!” she exclaimed. Her hands still wet, she took my hands into hers and told me how good it was to see me. Of course, I had never met her before. An attractive heavy-set woman in her forties, she had been living in the apartment for only five years with her husband Volodia.

“What rooms did you live in?” she asked me.

I told her the rooms all the way at the end of the corridor.

“Oh, you must be the Gendler girl.”

“Yes.”

“Of course. Ina has your rooms now.”

Svetlana turned to her husband. “Where are you going, Volodia?” she said tearfully. “Stay — please.”

He shook his head. “Have to go to the store,” he said, and left.

A minute later a dogged Volodia returned with my father trailing behind him. My father looked like I felt coming inside the apartment, miserably reluctant. We were rubber necking, that’s what we were doing. We were in our Mercedes, flying by on the Interstate, and there was a wreck on the road, with three ambulances. We were ashamed for slowing down, but couldn’t help ourselves.

Our communal apartment was built in a style reminiscent of railroad apartments in Queens, New York, built in the early fifties.

It consisted of a long straight narrow corridor with rooms to the left and right. It had nine rooms altogether, along with two kitchens, one in the front, one in the back, two toilets and two baths.

During the heyday of communal living, before the start of The War, forty people lived in these nine rooms and shared these two toilets. When we lived here in the sixties, the number of people had been reduced substantially by death, imprisonment or, in some unfortunate cases, both. About twenty other people had lived in the apartment besides us. Our rooms were at the very end of the corridor. We were lucky. We had two rooms joined by a narrow hallway in which we could sit and have dinner.

I realized this building must have been older than fifty years because my great-grandmother Anna received the rooms at the end of the first World War from the borough residential agency amid mass confusion following the Revolution of 1917. My great-grandmother was so crafty, she somehow received the whole apartment, nine rooms, two kitchens and two toilets.

Clearly it was too much, and soon other people started moving in. My family managed to hold on to the two rooms at the end. My paternal great-grandparents lived in one room, my grandparents in the other with my father and uncle.

During The War, my paternal great-grandfather died in evacuation, and my grandmother’s mother, my Babushka Dusia was homeless, having had her whole house burned down for firewood by the Germans. She came to live on Fifth Soviet too with her son-in-law, my dedushka. In the early 1950s my great-grandmother Anna died so there was a little more space for the remaining five people.

In 1962 when my parents married they lived separately, he on Fifth Soviet, she with her father across town. If you ask my mother about the short-lived time in her marriage before I was born, she’ll say, “Yes…” in a voice filled with nostalgia. “That was the happiest year of my life.” Just to reiterate: the year she lived married but without my father was the happiest year of her life. In 1962 she became pregnant with me (don’t ask how), and my grandparents applied for their own private apartment. They were given one in September, and I was born in November.

After my birth my parents and I lived in one room, my aunt and uncle in the other, first alone, then with their baby, Yulia.

Four years later, my uncle got an apartment of his own and suddenly I had my own room, and my parents had their own room. But then my dad started having secret meetings with his anti-communist friends in my room while I was away in Shepelevo. Not so secret as it turned out because the KGB knew about them, having followed my father for years. He was arrested, and my mother got a room to herself, I’m sure for the first time in her life.

I said to Svetlana, “We would love to see our rooms. Do you think that’s possible?”

A slender fifty-ish woman with bobbed black hair tinged with gray came toward me, and took me by both hands, “Plinochka, oh my God, look at you, I can’t believe I’m seeing you. Remember me? I’m Ina.”

I didn’t remember her. “Ina!” I said. “Of course. Did you live here with us?”

“Of course! Don’t you remember? I lived with my mother and my daughter in this room next to the front door.” She pointed.

“Of course,” I said, recalling nothing. She was still holding on to my hands. “And where are you living now?”

“We live in your old rooms!” She exclaimed smiling. “We were sad to see you go, but when you left we applied to the regional committee and got your rooms.”

“Really?”

“Yes! We all envied you so much for having two rooms. We were so happy we got them.”

“Have you been living in them ever since?”

“Yes!” she said beaming. “Come meet my daughter. Surely you remember my daughter. She is your age. Yulia. She has a daughter herself now. Meet Sophia. She is four. They are living with me at the moment,” She glanced at her daughter and granddaughter so lovingly as if she hoped that the moment might last the rest of her life.

I turned to my father who was standing nearby, looking profoundly ashamed.

“Do you think we can see the rooms?” I asked.

“Yes, of course! Oh I wish I knew you were coming, I would have cleaned up. You will pardon the mess.”

My father started to apologize for the inconvenience we were causing.

“What are you talking about, Yuri Lvovich? We are so happy you came! Is this your first time in Leningrad?”

When my father said it was his third time, Ina tutted. “And you never came to visit? Tsk. Tsk.”

As we walked through the hallway, we had to hold on to the walls. The corridor was poorly lit and the floor was uneven, as if it had buckled during an earthquake and had never been repaired. The two bare light bulbs burning dully in the hallway hung by electrical wires straight from the ceiling. Just like before. The winter coats were piled by the dozens on hooks in the wall, even though it was July. Where else were the residents going to hang their winter coats? There were no closets.

The wall in the corridor had developed substantial holes in a number of places, probably caused by the same earthquake called Communism that warped the floor. The dirty wallpaper hung torn off the wall. My father and I were quiet, aside from his intermittent apologies for our intrusion.

We stopped at the gray door that led to our rooms.

I said quietly to my dad, “I don’t remember the doors being gray.”

“There’s a lot you don’t remember,” he said quietly.

“Gray?” said Ina, chortling a bit. “They’re not gray. They’re white. They just haven’t been washed in a while. I never even noticed. Come in, come in. Please excuse the mess.”

I couldn’t walk in right away.

My father is coming home from an afternoon in the park, walking through the Fifth Soviet corridor, is almost at our door. He is reading the newspaper. “Yura, where is Paullina?” our neighbor Tonia Morzhakova asks.

“Right here,” replies Papa.

He looks for me. I am swinging upside down. He is holding me absentmindedly by the legs, in the crook of his arm under the newspaper he is reading.

“Plinochka, are you coming in?”

First thing I noticed was the tall ceilings that with their height managed to diminish the narrowness and shortness of the hallway itself. As I looked up I noticed the old water damage stains.

Leaning over to me, my father whispered, “I used to sleep in this hallway, when I would come back too drunk and didn’t want to disturb your babushka and dedushka.”

“What do you mean sleep?” I whispered back. “We always had a table here.” Like the one that was there now.

“Shows you what you know,” he said. “There used to be a couch here. No table.”

“Excuse us, excuse our mess,” Ina kept saying.

My father apologized again for intruding.

The little hallway that connected the two rooms was tiny. All the furniture was different. I didn’t like that. The wallpaper was different too, but the water stain on the ceiling that had resulted in the plaster breaking and falling down — now that was the same.

I stared at the hallway table long enough to remember sitting down and eating dinner there alone, while my mother was in the kitchen.

I’m eating my macaroni with butter, and I start to cry. Mama runs in from the kitchen, what what.

I don’t want to die, I say.

Oh, honey, you won’t die, you’re so young, you have your whole life, you’re not going to die.

She pats me on the back and leaves.

I eat my macaroni with butter. A few seconds go by. I start to weep and yell, Mama, Mama. She runs in. What, what?

I’m going to die, I say. I don’t want to die.

You won’t die, she says, less patiently. You’re going to live a long, long life. You won’t die. You’re a baby. Now eat your food.

She leaves.

I eat my macaroni and butter. A few seconds go by. I cry again. Mama Mama.

She runs back in.

I don’t want to die, I yell.

She wallops me on the head. Stop your nonsense, she yells. Eat your food. You’re not going to die, I told you.

She leaves.

I’m five.

Papa’s gone.

“Which room was yours, Paullina?” Ina asked.

“It was this room,” I replied, pointing to the door. We walked in.

It took my breath away to see how narrow the room was. The walls were covered in red wallpaper and the big wood furniture made the room seem even smaller.

Everything was immaculate aside from the bed, which was not made. Ina apologized profusely as she rolled up the bedclothes and stuffed them under the bed.

My father had already left and gone into the kitchen but I stood dumbly by the door, trying to see how we could have fit a double bed next to the wall when the room was clearly only seven feet wide.

The window had a deep sill and no shutters.

While Ina rushed around, her daughter Yulia who absolutely had nothing to say to me stood and brushed her daughter Sophia’s hair so I could take a picture. What I wanted to do was look away. Look away, look at something else, as I have done for a quarter century, what relief, what joy in oblivion, not to think, not to remember, not to stand and pretend it was all all right. I smiled at Ina who was looking into my face, for what, I don’t even know. For sentiment, for happiness?

“You like the wallpaper? It’s new.”

“I like it very much.”

We went into my parents’ old room and I stood by the same door handle I grabbed as a young girl of two, when I could barely reach it.

My father, who had come back, obligingly took the picture of me all grown up by the door, my hand on the handle. I think he came back to get me to leave the apartment.

He couldn’t get his Pentax to work either. “Maybe the battery is dead,” he said.

“Papa, I just put in a new battery, remember? Shepelevo?”

“Well, you’ve done something with it, then.” He pushed the flash down and took the picture without it. The shutter snapped.

“Oh, so it works without the flash,” I said.

“Yes,” he said impatiently. “Paullina, you have to know how to use the camera. The flash won’t work without sufficient light.”

Ina and her daughter stood politely to the side.

“Wait, so let me understand. The flash needs light in order to go off?”

“Yes.”

“So in darkened conditions such as this room, the flash won’t work at all?”

“It’s a very sensitive camera,” he said.

“I see that.” I turned to Ina. “Ina,” I said, “The rooms have been redecorated.”

“Yes, you like it?”

“Very much. But the furniture is all different.”

“Yes!” she said proudly. “It’s from Europe.”

“Ah. So what did you do with our old furniture?” I asked.

“Sold some,” she said. “Gave the rest to my parents. They still use it.”

“Let’s go into the kitchen,” my father said. “Please.”

The kitchen was right outside the gray door.

It had warped linoleum and bare dirty walls and bare bulbs, and an open window with a rotting brown frame. I went to the window and looked down into the courtyard. I saw myself, five years old, playing. Now my mother called for me. Often there were no other kids there and I played alone.

I turned away.

The kitchen had no cabinets so all the aluminum pots and pans were piled on a few shelves. Where did they keep their dry goods? Where was the refrigerator? There wasn’t one.

There was an old stove.

“Papa, is this the same stove we had?” I asked my father.

He shrugged. “The same, the same!” said Ina.

I leaned closer to him. “You think the pots and pans are ours too?”

He looked down at the floor coming apart at the linoleum seams. “You remember the pots and pans?” said Ina

I just stared at my father. He walked away from me, looked outside the open window, came to touch the stove, and then said, “Well, we really have to go.”

“You sure?” asked Ina.

“Papa,” I said. “Do you remember the carp?”

He laughed lightly, pointing to the middle of the kitchen. “Yes,” he said. “He was right here. Remember him? He was in your bath.”

My father says to me, “Come here, Plinka. Come, I want to show you something.” He is smiling. I smile too.

“What?” I say, already excited. His enthusiasm guarantees my own.

He leads me from our room into the kitchen, on the floor of which stands a small bathtub, for a toddler, for me. In this small white cast iron tub I see a fish, large and alive. It fills up nearly the entire four foot tub. It is swimming. It is trying to swim away. The fish is black and shiny, and very distressed.

“What is that?” I ask my smiling father.

“Carp,” he says proudly. “Carp.”

We eat the carp for dinner. It is very delicious.

As we stood in the middle of the kitchen, so uncomfortable — with our stupid memories, with the sight of Ina’s life, with Ina, I noticed a peculiar smell, that at first I tried to ignore, but finally was forced to attribute to the half-open door of the lavatory. If we were to eat dinner in this kitchen, this would have been the place we would have sat down and ate — twenty feet away from the back door and the toilet. Despite the wide open window, despite the warm breeze, the odor was excruciating. You could not take a deep breath because you would retch.

“Okay, Papa,” I said. “Let’s go.”

He said he had to make a stop. I looked at him with sympathy.

I had thought I desperately needed to make a stop, but I didn’t know the meaning of the word desperately. What I did was so-so need to make a stop. Big difference between desperately and so-so.

When my father came out, I saw by his face that he wished he had waited.

I did want to peek inside the washroom, in which I took a bath every week. I didn’t.

Once I washed my hair with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. One of the stores in Gostiny Dvor received a small shipment, and my mother waited in line a long time to buy one bottle. Tear-free shampoo. It was yellow, it smelled nice, and made a nice change from the bar soap I usually used. My mother left me in tub while she went about her business in the kitchen. I washed my hair with the shampoo and then decided to go ahead and wash the rest of my body with it too.

My mother came in the bathroom, saw me, and went, “UHH!!” As if she had seen me bleeding from the head. Her shock scared me so much, I slipped in the bath and went under water. “What? What?” I blubbered as I came back up.

“What did you do??” she screamed.

“What did I do?”

Half the bottle of the shampoo was gone. Maybe more than half. My mother was very upset. I went back to using bar soap until we came to America.

With Ina talking to our backs we walked down the hallway to the front door.

In her own kitchen, Svetlana stood by the table, her hands up to her wrists in a mixing bowl full of ground beef. “Stay, please, please,” she said. “I will make you stuffed cabbage.”

“You have pelmeni?” I asked. It was hunger talking. My father gave me a little shove.

“You like pelmeni?” said Svetlana, quickly washing her hands in the sink. “I will make you pelmeni.”

Papa glared at me, apologizing again. “No, we can’t, we really can’t, we have dinner plans.”

“Please,” she said.

“We really can’t,” said my father. “You are all too kind.”

Not giving up, Svetlana poured us each a shot of cognac and we drank it on empty stomachs. We hadn’t eaten since Laima cafe. Was that even the same day, the mushroom soup from Brussels and Viktor’s salad Olivier? It couldn’t have been.

“Then come back,” Svetlana said as she poured my father a second glass while I politely declined. “Come back and have dinner with us. I’ll make you anything you want. When are you leaving Russia?”

“This Saturday,” my father lied. We were actually leaving on Sunday. Somehow it seemed like too much time at that moment.

“It’s only Wednesday. Come back tomorrow, or Friday,” she said pleadingly.

“We’ll try,” my father said.

Svetlana wrote down her name and phone number.

Holding my hands, she talked passionately into my face. “Oh, my poor life, my poor life. I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida. I sang there, I lived there for five years, I have many friends there.”

“Why didn’t you stay?” I asked.

“Why didn’t I stay?” She rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue. “Because. You know. Husband here.” She said the word husband, as if she were saying the word prison, or rats.

“I would love for you to get something to my friends in St. Petersburg, a letter, a little package. If you come back, I will get it all together. Please.”

Squeezing her hands, I asked, “You can’t mail them the letter?”

She shrugged. “I could, but it would be so much better being delivered by you.”

People in Russia, even those who have been to America, even those who have lived in America, have only the vaguest notion of distance. To them, the sixteen hundred miles between New York and Dallas, or the eleven hundred miles between Dallas and St. Petersburg, Florida was just a drive away, a day trip. We were all in America, and that was the only thing that mattered. That was the only temporal measure. We were all in one place.

“So what kind of an artist are you?” I asked.

“I’m a singer,” she replied and couldn’t hide the pride from her face.

I thought of a song I would have liked to hear, the song in the soul of every Russian. “Do you know, ‘Shine, Shine, My Star?’

Svetlana, standing barely a foot away from me, put her hands on her heart, opened her mouth and in a gorgeous operatic voice began to sing “Shine, Shine, My Star.”

After the first verse, she broke down and cried.

My father stood by my side, composing his ashen face.

I hugged her, he shook her hand, and we let ourselves out the brown door.

Trudging down the three flights of stairs was harder than the climb up which was full of youthful anticipation, at least on my part. Having seen was more terrible than having remembered. Now there could be no more facile forgetting.

When my mother went to Russia in 1987, she also saw our Fifth Soviet apartment. She spent a long time telling me all about it, yet now after being inside, it was as if she hadn’t told me a thing.

My father did not go in during his visit in 1992. All he said to me was, “I went to Fifth Soviet.” And stared at me pointedly, as if I would be the one to supply him with the meaning behind those words. I had asked him if he went inside, and he said no. I wanted to ask him why, but I didn’t.

Now I knew why. Why I hadn’t asked, and why he didn’t.

My mother didn’t tell me about the floor or the walls, about the size of the rooms and the heart-rending decay of it all. She didn’t tell me about the stench from the toilet.

She told me she sat down and had tea with the Morzhakovs who lived in the room adjacent to ours and who had since died. Morzhakov had turned informant for the KGB, my father told me (“Don’t you remember how the year before I was arrested he took to his bed with a cold that lasted a year?”). He lay there with his ear next to the wall and listened in on all of my father’s secret meetings. Because of Morzhakov, the KGB got enough evidence to send Papa away to Shpalerka for a year, Mordovia for two years and then exile in Tolmachevo for another two.

That’s what my mother told me about in glorious detail — having tea with the man who had spied on my father.

We walked in silence down Fifth Soviet, and then turned left on Suvorovsky Prospekt. I wanted to walk past my old kindergarten on Sixth Soviet, but I saw my father was close to collapse, so I didn’t ask him. A beautiful sunny evening. Around six, the sun was just past zenith in the sky. Both of us writers, speakers, my father and I were out of words.

After we bought some film, we started to talk a bit. The proliferation of stores and how hard the Russians tried to be like westerners and how much more there was now than had been when I was young, and how you could buy film anywhere, even on Suvorovsky, just like in the west. I listened but I was thinking about our apartment.

“Papa, was our building built before the war?” I asked him as we made our way to the metro. “I guess it had to have been built before the war, because Dedushka lived here.”

“And his mother when she was a young woman,” said my father. “It was built in 1857.”

“No, stop it.”

“It was meant to last a hundred years.”

“Stop it.”

“Now you know.”

“What about the toilets?”

“Same,” said my father.

“What about the kitchens?”

“Same,” he said. “Floor, same. Walls, same. Maybe the wallpaper was changed before the war. I don’t know.”

I was afraid to ask. “Which war?”

“Could’ve been the war of 1905.”

We walked down Suvorovsky.

“It’s the same toilet we had when you were little,” he said. “Forget you. It’s the same toilet I had when I was little. The same overhead chain that barely works. It barely worked when I was growing up. It barely works now.”

“But, Papa,” I asked quietly. “Why the smell?”

“Why the smell,” he said, exasperated. “It’s the smell of communism. It belongs to everybody so nobody cleans it.”

We couldn’t talk about it anymore. I couldn’t think about it anymore. The northern sun shined bright on the gray and cream daub of the Suvorovsky buildings.

I was doing the New York City thing: looking for a yellow cab. I would have gladly paid two hundred rubles to have a man, any man, take us to Anatoly’s. What I wanted was to find a park, a bench, sit, and not move and not speak for three hours. Then I wanted to get up and walk past my Fifth Soviet building again, and touch it. And then I wanted to go back to Grand Hotel Europe and use the toilet in my Art Nouveau room and go downstairs to the glass mezzanine and have a sandwich and a cup of tea. I wanted not to speak to anybody for the rest of the evening.

But human nature is such that even when everything hurts, we find ways to cheer ourselves up. I started goading my dad into going into one of the resaturants and having some pelmeni. The cafeterias all said, “WELCOME! PLEASE COME IN! HOT DELICIOUS PELMENI, AND CHEAP!”

“Papa,” I said, “Come on. We’ll go in and have some. They’re hot and delicious. And cheap too. Then we’ll go to Anatoly’s and pretend we’re hungry.” I was half-kidding but my father said, “I can’t pretend like that. I won’t be able to eat a bite.”

But he brightened, and right before we got to the metro station, he himself pointed at a cafeteria advertising HOT DELICIOUS PIROZHKI and smiled.

We took the metro at Insurrection Square, where once stood a statue of Alexander III. Now the tsar was in the courtyard of the Marble Palace. There was nothing in the middle of Insurrection Square.

As we were going down the escalator — and going down and going down and going down — my father said, “This is why Russians will never be number one in anything.”

I was confused.

“Look how deep they built the subway. Do you know how much money it cost them to build it this deep in the ground?”

“Probably less than what it cost them to make it all out of marble,” I replied.

“Nonsense. Marble was child’s play compared to how much it cost to make it this far down. And they only did it to make to make it into a potential bomb shelter. They thought for sure someone was going to attack them.”

“Well someone did, didn’t they? Hitler attacked them.”

“Yeah? And how many Leningraders did this subway save?”

“It wasn’t running yet, during the war, was it?”

“No. It was being built. It was a bomb shelter, I’m telling you. They came all the way down here and starved to death.”

The escalator was taking us quite deep, it was like going down into Hades, 600 feet into the ground. It was three times as long as the Central Line escalator Holborn Station on the London Tube, and the Holborn escalator is notorious in London for being the absolute longest in the city.

It took us eight minutes to snail to the bottom. I wanted to take a picture to show Kevin, but my father said no! because he was afraid I was going to be arrested.

Arrested?

“Stop it,” he said. “Come, and stop it.”

I didn’t take the picture.

We had no idea where to go on the metro, not he, and certainly not me. Dumbly and without purpose we stood, while I inhaled the fantastic familiar smell of the Leningrad subway, a warm tunnel wind mixed with marble and metal, blowing in a cavernous space. Exactly as I remembered, only more so. The New York subways or the London Underground did not smell this way. The DC metro did a bit — it had the cavernousness and the tunnel wind, but not the marble.

Yet every time I ride down the New York City subway escalator, I inhale deeply, hoping for the smell of Leningrad.

Tentatively we approached a broad, harsh, Soviet-looking woman who told us which two trains to take to get to Ulitsa Dybenko.

Aside from the fact that we could barely keep upright, yet there was nowhere to sit on the train, it being rush hour, the trip to Ulitsa Dybenko was marred by the oppressive body odor coming from the blank-faced, bleak-faced Russian commuters.

I had enough time to strap-hang and marvel at how much of Russia for me was defined by smells. Good smells, bad smells, of spring, of water, of jasmine and lilac, of metro and toilets, human sweat, the odor of old alcohol. Why couldn’t Russia be instead defined by the poetry of Russian writers? Or by food like herring and smoked fish? Or by the Russian language heard everywhere. Or by the strings of a plaintive guitar. But no.

Russian people returning home from work didn’t look any happier than New Yorkers returning home from work. Across the continents, the weary people looked the same. In Russia, they got paid less and smelled worse.

As we got out, my father said, “We should buy Ellie some roses,” and walked over to the old woman by the side of the road. The roses were $3 each. They were without any baby’s breath and came wrapped in newspaper.

Most of the paper’s black newsprint found its way to my father’s hands in the twenty minutes it took us to walk the mile to Ellie’s apartment.

We didn’t forget which floor she lived on this time, and without heavy bags in our hands, the crushing elevator door didn’t seem nearly so menacing.

The first thing my father did was wash his blackened hands but under cold water because the hot water had been turned off. I ran to use the facilities, for the first time since morning. It was 7:30 at night.

Suddenly, having gained much needed wisdom through a little perspective, Ellie’s toilet seemed nicer than any I’ve been to so far. It seemed clean to me. The water flushed. It didn’t smell so bad.

My entire childhood I had been raised in an apartment where the toilet was so terrible that twenty-five years later I couldn’t go in it.

I was sure that eventually, I would go. Eventually I would stop smelling the stench as I cooked dinner just feet away on the kitchen stove. Human beings can, and do, get used to worse than that. But thinking of all that Soviet human beings had to get used to the last seventy years filled me with sorrow like grief I could not endure in the confined space of Ellie’s bathroom.

I obsessively scrubbed my hands with soap under cold water. Someone should shout from the rooftops, we are still living. We have such little time on this earth, we are not going to get any brownie points for suffering. Couldn’t we have just a little comfort?

With clean hands and an empty bladder, I looked around Ellie’s apartment and realized that their home was nice! There were fresh flowers in a vase, the wooden floor was polished and not at all uneven. They had comfort.

Dinner tonight was quieter than the first night. It was only my father and me, Ellie and Anatoly. It was lovely. We had some of the same food from two days ago.

“Is it still good?” I whispered to my father, but he shushed me, so I ate. The two-day-old food was room temperature. I didn’t eat much of it. The leftovers were served, as on Monday, on Ellie’s best china.

She also made delicious borsht, and with the blueberries we had brought back from Shepelevo, an extraordinary blueberry compote and a graham and meringue blueberry pie. My father and I ate non-stop until nine.

He also smoked, and in between cigarettes kept trying to plan what we were going to do for the next three days. “Comrades,” he said, standing before us at the head of the table, as if we were having a managers meeting. “We have to very seriously think about what we are going to do tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday.”

Stuffed and tired, I said, “I thought tomorrow we were driving up to Lake Ladoga to see the Road of Life?”

Anatoly said, “You should see Schlisselburg too, it has a fascinating island fortress.”

“She wants to do everything,” my father said with a great sigh.

I nodded. “The man we met today at Piskarevka, Yuliy Gneze, told us we must go to Schlisselburg. He also told us we must go to Kobona, the town across the shore of Lake Ladoga. Apparently it has a great Defense of Leningrad museum.”

“Paullina!” my father exclaimed. “Maybe you’d like to also go to Stalingrad, to see their museums?”

“No,” I said. “But I would like to see the Nevsky Patch.”

“What about Crimea by the Black Sea?”

“Seriously, Papa.”

“Paullina! You seriously. We have no time for this. Friday, as you know is the Romanov funeral. That’s a whole day.”

“Yes, but we have all Saturday.”

“No, we don’t have all Saturday,” my father said, quite agitated. “Saturday we must go to Karelian Isthmus to visit my friends.”

“No! What friends?”

“Radik,” my father replied. “And his wife Lida. You remember Radik?”

I shrugged. “Vaguely. Doesn’t mean I want to see him.”

“They want to see you.”

“Why?”

“Why, why. They do.”

“We have no time. Is it going to take the whole day?”

“Yes.”

“Papa! No. We can’t spend a whole day with someone named Radik.”

“There is more. Your Dedushka wants us to go visit his friends at their summer dacha.”

“What friends? What dacha?”

“The Ivanchenkos. Nikolai Nikolayevich and his wife Valya. You probably don’t remember them.”

“You’re right about that. I don’t. Why do we have to go see them?”

“Because they remember you.”

“Papa, we don’t have time.”

“Paullina, Dedushka will never forgive us if we don’t go and see his friends.”

“Oh my God. Okay, fine, we’ll go see them, but forget Radik.”

“I can’t. Radik will never forgive me. It’s completely impossible. Paullina, you don’t understand—”

He broke off. Still standing at the head of the table, he lit a cigarette. “You remember Radik’s son, Korney?”

“Yes, he was my age. There is a picture of us standing by the doors of some museum.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t remember Radik, though. Was he the one who was in labor camp for eight years?”

“No, that was someone else.”

“Great. Is Korney going to be there?”

“No,” Papa said. “Korney is dead.”

Silence.

“Great,” I said.

“Died at twenty-two of acute alcoholism. Don’t say anything to Lida or Radik when you see them. It may be difficult for them.”

“Was he their only child?”

“Yes.”

“May be difficult?”

My father continued. “We have to think about what we want to do very carefully. We have a lot to accomplish and only a few days to do it. Let me ask you in all seriousness, do you really want to go to Schlisselburg and Lake Ladoga?”

“Where some of the greatest battles for the defense of Leningrad were fought? Where the Road of Life began and ended? Papa, yes. That’s why I came here. To search for a story. Remember?”

“Okay, okay,” he said, then adding, “But you did see a lot in the Piskarev museum.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I was afraid of that. Fine, we’ll go. But we have to go to Karelian Isthmus on Saturday. We have no choice. No one will ever talk to me again, do you understand, if I don’t bring you to them.”

“I understand.”

“Paullina, have some more pie,” Ellie said.

“Paullina, tell me about Tully,” Anatoly said. “When you wrote about her, did you write her from life, or did you make up the things that happened? Because it read very true, and I can’t imagine, I don’t know, maybe I don’t know you very well, but I’ve known you since the day you were born, and I can’t imagine your imagination is that vivid. Is it, Paullina? Did you make it all up? I can’t believe that.”

“Oh believe it,” said my father. “Of course she made the whole thing up. Tolya, she is the best liar we know. You should have heard her excuses for cutting school half of her senior year.”

Ellie said, “Plinka, do you want some more pie? How about some tea?”

“Papa,” I asked, “Who is this Radik, and why does he care if he sees me or not?”

Ellie leaned over to me and whispered, “I’ll tell you about Radik later,” with a meaningful emotional arch of her painted eyebrows.

Alla arrived with her husband Viktor to watch the ancient home videos of our vacation in Red Schel, in the Caucasus Mountains in 1967, the year before my father was arrested.

We were all eager to watch the films, but the problem was that although it was nine in the evening, there was too much light. We couldn’t see the projection screen. We decided to draw the red curtains and close all the doors. That helped some. The sun was very bright. We waited an hour and at ten began.

Here I am, a four-year-old child on a mute, slightly-speeded up film reel. Swimming in the Black Sea. Imitating my best friend Alla.

Tonight Alla and I sat next to each other on the couch and laughed. “Plinka, look how funny you were,” she said. Casually dressed, she seemed a lot more comfortable with me than she was on Monday night, as if she now knew she didn’t have to put on airs.

I said, “What I want to know is, why did my hair look like a boy’s? Why couldn’t my mother let my hair grow out, like your mother let you grow yours out? Yours was so long and pretty. And look at me.”

“Oh, no, Plinka! You were so cute.”

Here I am eating watermelon, sandwiched between Alla and a boy. That boy looks like Korney, Radik’s son. I glance over at my father. He watches the screen, blinks, and says nothing. I am crying on mute because a bee tried to lick the watermelon juice off my chest and stung me. My mother stands near a water well. She wears two little girlish braids, no make up. She looks younger than I am now. I try to calculate. My God, she I younger than I am now. I stare. Much younger. She is twenty-seven. My father stands smoking, fixing something to eat, talking. He is only 31. He is also younger than me. I can’t watch them.

That was all there was of me. Thirty three seconds of me as a child on film — a celluloid child to prove I once existed in this other world — a world that was more than just smells.

Finally, the film reel we’ve been waiting for. My even younger father on holiday in Dzhubga, a resort near the Black Sea in July 1962, with eight of his best friends. Anatoly brought the film camera. My father is twenty-six. Nine of them play volleyball and practical jokes. Anatoly sleeps on the beach. Tonight we all laugh as we tease Tolya about his capacity to sleep anywhere, even when he was a young man.

“Were you already married then?” I ask.

“Yes,” Ellie snaps.

“Why didn’t you go to Dzhubga?”

“Because,” she says. “I was home with Alla. She was just a baby.”

“So Anatoly went without you on vacation?”

“Yes.” She squints her eyes with bitterness. “He did that all the time. All the men did that.”

Seeing that I touched a nerve, I turned back to the screen, surprised that the nerve could be still so raw thirty six years later.

She was upset with him tonight for sleeping on the beach while she stayed home caring for their only child.

On screen someone filches Anatoly’s clothes. He wakes up, is not happy. We all laugh. Ellie’s face shows grim satisfaction.

I leaned back and watched my father swim in the Black Sea. My handsome, thin, dark-haired young father, unmarried, childless, happy.

Dzhubga. July, 1962.

Before marriage, before pregnancy, and — incredibly — before me. I found it hard to watch my father living what seemed to be a joyous existence before his new life began, before he even knew that took the form of an exquisite twenty-two-year-old exotic girl sitting with her own friends on the beach in their little bathing suits, laughing at the nine boys playing volleyball.

Dzhubga. 1962. They met there, fell in love in the space of a week. Married two months later. My father had been engaged to someone else. All of that gone after seeing the fresh young woman with high cheekbones and cropped hair.

It hurt to see my mother. She is so beautiful, laughing like a young girl, giggling with her friends, watching the half-naked boys in the grass playing soccer, having not fallen in love with my father yet.

I watched my father moments before he fell in love with my mother. I looked away from the unbearable suspended-in-eternity moment. My mother sits in a chair on a porch. She is being painted by one of my father’s artist friends. She can’t sit still, every few moments her youthful face exploding in happiness. My father stands on the wooden steps of the porch smiling back, watching her, watching him. Before everything. Before she thinks her whole life is a failure as she wipes the red dust off her furniture in Maui and complains about the Hawaiian sun.

“Look at my wife,” said my father, even in the dark his eyes misty and twinkling. “Paullina? Just look at your mother.”

“I’m looking, Papa,” I said, looking at him looking at her.

The day after my mother was painted, the group of them go to a dance, and afterward my father and mother dive off a mystical boat into the Black Sea, swim alongside each other at night and fall in love.

But on the porch my mother sits, unable to keep still, to keep herself from smiling, at the artist, at the beach, at my father, in love with him not quite yet but in full love with being young and alive.

How frightening, how mesmerizing to see that moment.

My father got up to smoke. He kept coming back into the room, and every time he came back, he asked the same thing. “Well, was your mother beautiful? Was she beautiful? What do you think? She was like a goddess, wasn’t she? So beautiful.”

“She wasn’t bad,” I said.

“Wasn’t bad?”

Everybody laughed.

My father nodded. “Wait till I tell her you said that. Just wait. I’ll tell her in America. She won’t talk to you for a decade.”

“Plinka,” Ellie said to me, “Your papa told me how you said you wanted to photograph the smell in Shepelevo.”

I glanced at him, shaking my head.

“And what were you writing,” she went on, “while your Papa slept in the car on the way back from Shepelevo?”

I stared at my father. He went out on the balcony to smoke.

I marveled at the chain of events that led my father to ask Viktor, who had seemed too busy washing the car to observe anything, what I had been doing while he slept and then for Viktor to reply that I had been writing something in my notebook. And then my father deemed it important enough to pass along over a glass or four of vodka.

“What were you writing, Plinka?” Ellie repeated. “Were you writing about Shepelevo?”

“Shepelevo, yes,” I replied carefully.

“Yes,” said Anatoly. “Your papa said you were very affected by Shepelevo. Is that true?”

“If he says so.”

It took my father a day to make a story out of Shepelevo’s smell. I wondered how long it would take him to make the story out of this afternoon’s trip to Fifth Soviet.

As it turned out, just one more cigarette. He returned from the balcony and promptly told everyone about Svetlana singing “Shine, Shine My Star” as she begged us to stay and eat her freshly made pelmeni.

“Stuffed cabbage,” I corrected, thinking, well, at least he didn’t mention the state of the apartment.

“And you should have seen the apartment,” continued my father. “What’s amazing is that in all this time, nothing has changed.” He went on to describe the unevenness of the floors, the sagging of the walls. He stopped before he got to the toilet. Instead he recounted Svetlana’s singing.

He had so obviously been looking forward to telling the story of her singing to us. He told us, and we emoted. He told us colorfully, and we emoted colorfully. Ellie teared up. Anatoly made loud clucking noises. I shook my head. Like any good storyteller, he embellished the truth, and like any good listeners, we embellished emotion. And then we all had another shot of vodka.

We changed the subject to the Kennedy assassination. This topic always comes up in our conversations. I was born two weeks before the President was killed. So anytime anyone says a word about how they can’t believe Plinka is in her thirties, the next sentence is always some variation of, “Your father thinks Oswald acted alone.”

Thirstily downing a shot of vodka and shaking his head Anatoly turned to me. “Your father,” he said, lowering his voice, “thinks Oswald acted alone.”

He glanced guiltily at my father, who tutted and went out to smoke.

“We have arguments about this all the time,” Anatoly said. “I think he is just tired of arguing.”

“That would surprise me,” I said. “Papa loves to argue. Especially when he’s right.”

“You think he is right?” Anatoly asked in the same hush-hush conspiratorial tone.

“Yes,” I said. I wish I smoked too so I could go out on the balcony and have three seconds in the white night air with my father. We wouldn’t have to talk about Oswald. We could just smoke.

With his brother Viktor listening raptly, Anatoly said, helped by another shot of vodka, “Yes, but…” he trailed off, shaking his head. “It’s the head reeling back that stymies me,” he said. “If he was shot from behind, why did his head snap back?” His brother clucked and nodded, thoughtfully pulling at the strands of his gray beard.

Back in the living room my father exclaimed, “Oh my God, you’re not still talking about that!”

Apparently when my father interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev a few years earlier for Radio Liberty, Gorbachev told my dad he had a major secret that would go with him to his grave.

Anatoly thought this secret was about John F. Kennedy. He was certain that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, that Gorbachev knew the truth.

I looked excitedly at my father, who waved us all away and went back on the balcony. When he came back, he said, “So you think Gorbachev would know something like this and not tell?”

“Not tell you,” said Anatoly.

“Not tell anyone!” my father said. “Tolya, you can’t keep quiet about what your wife is cooking for dinner, and here is a man who would die before he would talk about the second most traumatic event of the 20th Century?” He waved us off again dismissively, sitting down and pouring himself a glass of vodka. “The first being the murder of the Romanovs. A perfect example of what I want to say. Their executioners couldn’t keep quiet for two months. Knowing the very future of Bolshevism was at stake, in fact, regardless, they started positively spilling with stories over vodka, then keeping diaries, then writing books, then making full confessions on their deathbeds. All within a decade. The killing of the Romanov family was the first act of political terrorism in the twentieth century, that’s why it was so monumental. And nobody could keep quiet about it. But about Kennedy, you think Gorbachev would keep quiet?” My father said all this as if he had proven his point beyond any doubt, but Anatoly looked at him defiantly and said, “Yes.”

Alla picked up on the Romanov thread. “Yuri Lvovich, so why do you think there is such fascination with the Romanovs?”

“Why?” he said. “Because they were a family that was slaughtered, that’s why. The communists didn’t kill a political leader, they didn’t kill the Tsar. They killed a family. That’s why it’s so personal.”

“Papa, come on,” I said, pepping up a bit. “Yes, the Romanovs were a family, but that’s not why there is such fascination. They weren’t killed because they were a family. They were killed because they were a royal family. The fascination continues to this day, because he was the Tsar and she the Tsarina and their son the heir to the throne—”

“There was no more throne!” my father bellowed. “Nicholas abdicated. There was no more throne, no more Tsar! There was just the family.”

“You think if the Ivanov family was killed by the Bolsheviks anyone would care?”

“Who the hell are the Ivanovs?”

“Exactly my point.”

Alla was looking sorry she brought it up. “Plinochka, is it true you might be going inside the church for the funeral service?”

When Ellie heard that we might get inside Peter and Paul’s but I didn’t have a dress disappeared for a moment, during which I took an opportunity to say to my father, “Papa, only dead monarchs are entombed in Peter and Paul’s church. The remains of an ordinary family would not be buried there.”

“Hurry up, Mama!” Alla called to Ellie. “Come on!”

Ellie promptly reappeared holding in her hands folded black material. “You can have this,” she said to me. “Just give it back, okay? Don’t take it to Texas with you.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, opening up the dress slowly. It could have been worn by Ellie’s great grandmother, and probably had been. “You really don’t have to do this.”

“Why should you go out and buy yourself a dress to wear just one time? It’s absurd. Take it.”

“I don’t know if it will fit.”

“It might be a little big. But so what?”

“You’re right. Thank you so much.”

Before I left with Viktor around midnight, my father said, “Tomorrow we go to Schlisselburg, God help me. I want Viktor to pick you up first and then bring you here to get me because Ulitsa Dybenko is on the way.”

I fell asleep on my back with the blinds open, the Leningrad night sun streaming in. With my earrings still on, dressed, shoes on my feet. I fell asleep because I couldn’t write. I couldn’t write about my day, about Fifth Soviet, about Piskarev, about Yuliy Gneze and his Volkhov front and the loaf of bread in the crook of his arm. I couldn’t write about my ravishing joyous mother, as I’ve never known her.

I fell asleep, too tired even for dreams.