Six Days in Leningrad

I only thought I was too tired for dreams. When I woke up it felt as if I hadn’t gone to sleep at all. It felt like I had been reliving the same exhausting moment over and over again through the night. What that moment was I could not say. It involved either mountain climbing or linguistics. Or both. Or it might have been swimming butterfly-style in the Dead Sea.

Waking up in my clothes was almost relief at first, until I saw what the clothes looked like — as if I had been chewing them while rock climbing.

I dragged myself off the bed and into the shower. It was eight in the morning. At eight-thirty, room service came: a tablespoon of black caviar and five tough little pancakes.

The phone rang. It was Kevin.

“Your mother called me…”

“Why?” I laughed. “Papa hasn’t called her and she was frantic?”

“Noooo,” Kevin drew out. “She called because she might be having gall bladder surgery. The doctor thinks she has gall stones.”

“Gall stones? Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I know. It’s terrible.”

“No, that’s not it. When would the surgery be?”

“I think she’s in the hospital now. I couldn’t be too sure, I could barely understand her. They’re doing more tests and then I think she’s having the surgery.”

“Of course she is. I thought you said they don’t know if it’s gall stones?”

“They think it’s gall stones.”

“She’s having surgery because they think it’s gall stones?”

“I know. It’s terrible.”

“No, it’s not that. Mama didn’t want Papa and me to have this trip in the first place. Now I’m going to tell him she is about to have surgery and he’ll be upset for the next three days.”

“Paullina, you have to tell him.”

“I know, I know. But what if it’s just a false alarm?”

“You’ve got to tell him.”

“I know. But, I mean, really.”

“She said she hadn’t been well for three months.”

“Oh, but during the six lousy days we’re in Russia that’s when she decides to go get it checked out? Why not in the three months before?”

“I have no answers. She is your mother.”

We talked for too long and I didn’t have time to walk the three blocks to Malaya Konyushennaya, the street on the embankment of the Griboyedov Canal to drop off my film: nine rolls so far.

Viktor picked me up promptly at nine-thirty, and with him we walked along Griboyedov in the morning sunlight to the photo store. I was starting to warm to Viktor — a process that began when he found my great grandmother’s grave.

He told me about the apartment buildings Ellie and Anatoly and my grandparents lived in. “They were built during the Khruschev era in the early sixties when the secretary general decided that each and every Soviet citizen was entitled to a living space of seven square meters. So with that in mind he authorized construction of hundreds — maybe thousands of these buildings. They’re called Khrushchyobi.” It means a tall boxy type of building built during the Khrushchev era.

“But Viktor,” I said. “We lived five of us to seven square meters. That’s not what he intended, was it?”

Viktor had no answer for that. “Communism,” he said, shrugging.

I fell quiet.

“Speaking of Communism,” Viktor said, “President Yeltsin has decided at the last minute to pop in to the Romanov funeral afterall.”

“Oh. Is that bad for us?”

“Well, not bad, but because of that, getting inside the church will be impossible, with heightened security and all. No one is going to let you in, no matter how much you spend on your black dress.”

I laughed.

“So no need to buy one.” Thinking, he added, “You can still wear Ellie’s, I suppose.”

“I could, yes,” I said slowly. “I do have my suit, though.”

We dropped off the film and walked back to Viktor’s Volkswagen. We got to my dad on Ulitsa Dybenko at 10:30 — a crisp brilliant morning.

Anatoly was still home in his robe.

“Ellie,” I whispered. “Is he not going to work today?”

“He hasn’t decided,” she said.

“Oh.”

“He doesn’t get paid for it anyway. He’ll see how he feels.”

Ellie asked us to come and have dinner with them again tonight. My father mumbled something, which is what he always does whenever the answer is no but he doesn’t want to say. Ellie didn’t press further. Anatoly, more sensitive to my father’s reluctance, didn’t say anything except, “Plinka, have you called Yulia yet?” I hadn’t, of course, and my father came to the rescue by saying, “She’ll call her tonight.”

In the car, he said, “Whatever you want to do, Paullina. There are only a few days left. Tonight we might be back late. You have tomorrow night, Friday. You can call her, invite her to dinner. Whatever you want.” He shook his head. “I don’t recommend it. If you want to see her, I won’t come with you. It’s too uncomfortable for me. I’ll just go back to Tolya’s.”

“Papa, what about taking Anatoly and Ellie out to dinner? We talked about that during Monday’s dinner.”

“Monday’s?” He exclaimed the word Monday’s as if it were saying, Nineteenth Century’s? “Again, Paullina. You cannot do everything.”

We found the highway to Schlisselburg and got on it without once asking for directions.

I thought this was a good time to clear my throat. “Papa, hmm, I spoke to Kevin this morning, who said that Mama called him—”

“Yes?” He sat up straighter.

“Have you called Mama yet?”

He grunted. “No.”

I didn’t think so. “Well, Kevin told me that Mama may have gall stones, and that she might need gall bladder surgery. I don’t know how to say gall bladder in Russian. How do you say gall bladder in Russian?”

He slunk back down in his seat and became less interested. “Don’t know,” he said.

“Well, whatever it is in Russian, Mama might have it, and she might need to be operated on. She is waiting for the results of tests to come in.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Mama asked Kevin to tell you, in case you called Maui and she wasn’t there. She’s not there because she’s in the hospital. She didn’t want you to be worried.”

“Okay,” my father said. “I’ll try to call her.”

We said nothing more about it, and then my father became animated again, talking about the quality of the Schlisselburg Shosse.

The highway impressed Papa, who spent the rest of the forty five minute ride to Schlisselburg marveling at what this type of a well-built, four-lane highway would do to Russian civilization if it was built for the five hundred miles between Moscow and St. Petersburg instead of the seventeen miles between St. Petersburg and Schlisselburg. He wished he had some way to explain to the Russians that if they built a road like this between Moscow and St. Petersburg, they would change the face of Russia. He said if he weren’t retiring, he would make a radio program on this very subject.

I wanted to mention that the Chunnel took the British and the French nearly the whole of twentieth century to build and the English Channel at its narrowest point between Dover and Calais was only seventeen miles.

“Maybe there is no money,” I said.

“But there’s money to throw into the military? Billions.”

“Even now?”

“As ever.”

“Maybe the Russians don’t want the enemy to march up the highway between its two major cities. Its only major cities.”

“Maybe,” my father said, “it’s just narrow-mindedness. Tunnel vision. Inability to see the future of the country. Well, what do we expect? Seventy years of communism.”

We came to the Neva and went across a bridge called Mariinsky that took us into Schlisselburg.

My father was right about this: why the highway was built into Schlisselburg became evenmore unfathomable once we saw Schlisselburg, which was a hole of a stricken town under a canopy of oaks. Though it propitiously lay on the southern bank of the Neva at the very crest of the river’s beginning from Lake Ladoga.

Some wretched tenement buildings, a desolate outdoor market, one cafeteria that was closed because it wasn’t quite lunchtime. The only church in town was in what looked like an old boarded up 7-11 building.

There was nowhere to park and no one to ask directions to the ferry. From Schlisselburg there is supposed to be a ferry that travels back and forth to the island fortress Oreshek that stood against the Germans for sixteen months.

No one to ask, and no signs for the island, or the ferry, or the Diorama blockade museum.

Bewildered silence fell inside our car. We were amazed Schlisselburg was thus, my father most of all. Viktor, born and raised in Russia, seemed least surprised except for the widening of his pupils. Me? After seeing Fifth Soviet how could anything surprise me? My father must have been recalling Gettysburg, Fort Sumter, Omaha Beach — places where mystical battles had been fought and later memorialized.

Not only had the greatest battle of Leningrad’s siege been fought on these shores outside Schlisselburg but the 900-day blockade was broken here.

The dewy river shimmered and flowed beyond the oak leaves, a testament to the past, a path to the future. No matter; there was still nowhere to park. Or buy a map, get a sandwich, ask a question, buy a trinket. While my father and I grumbled, Viktor, with his usual equanimity, parked on the uncut grass and strolled to the banks of the Neva to get a ferry schedule.

My father smoked.

I took a picture of the monument to Peter the Great. I had to beat my way through thick brambles to what had once been a clearing. Peter stood on a pedestal, looking proudly onto the… untamed oak forest. Underbrush, weeds, brambles. You couldn’t see the river. I took one picture.

Viktor and my father were studying the ferry schedule like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls, my father with a worried expression.

“What’s the matter?” I said, coming up to them. “Is there no ferry?”

“No, there is,” my father slowly replied. “But the times are no good.”

“Let me see.” I glanced at the schedule for two seconds, just long enough for me to see a noon departure. “The boat leaves at noon. It’s now eleven-forty. Perfect.”

Noon apparently wasn’t perfect. My father had worked out our whole day in his head, and the day did not include two hours at some island, not even the island where Lenin’s brother was hanged, the island that was instrumental in fighting the Germans during the siege, the island that saved Leningrad. Nah.

“Yes, but the boat doesn’t return until 2:25.”

“So?”

“I’m not going to spend two hours at some island, Paullina. Not when we have so much to do.” He cleared his throat. “Ideally what I’d like to do is take the noon boat and come back on the twelve-twenty five. That gives us half an hour on the island. Now that’s perfect.”

“But, Papa,” I said incredulously, “how can we do that? The boat takes seven minutes just to get to the island. It means that we basically get off and get back on again. Maybe we chould just stay on the boat?”

“Paullina,” my father said with feeling. “You cannot do everything. You just can’t. We have to choose. We can go to Oreshek, but then we don’t go north up Lake Ladoga to the Road of Life.”

I stood my ground for a moment. “Why can’t we do both?”

“Maybe you’d like to go to Kobona too?”

“Yes.”

He turned to Viktor. “Viktor! See what I mean? What to do?”

Viktor studied the schedule, trying to accommodate everybody. But my father, soon-to-be-retiring-or-not, was still his boss. I was only the boss’s daughter. We didn’t go.

Getting back in the car, we drove down a dirt road to another grassy knoll and parked. Instead of taking the ferry, we took a walk on a narrow strip between two canals built to protect trade ships from the heavy storms that often plagued the lake. The first canal was built by Peter the Great in the 1700s, but it wasn’t sufficient to protect the fishing boats. The second was built by Catherine the Great in the 1800s. Only two hundred meters separated Oreshek from the ten-foot-wide shore of the Catherine canal. It was on that shore the Germans perched for over a year in permanent trenches and shelled the island.

The Neva flowed from the bombed-out walls of Oreshek seventy kilometers to Leningrad where it emptied into the Gulf of Finland.

Before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the island was a Tsarist prison, and was in fact the place where Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged in 1881 for conspiring to kill Tsar Alexander III. After the revolution the prison became a museum and in the place where Ulyanov died an apple tree was planted in his honor. At the start of World War II, Russian soldiers occupied the island, and from it fought the Germans who had seized nearly the entire southern bank of the Nevá. Schlisselburg remained in German hands until 1944. The Russian soldiers in Oreshek were supplied by the Red Army troops on the northern side of the Neva. Today the fortress stood as a monument to the Russian heroes and their wartime glory.

But all of that warranted about ten minutes according to my father; any longer would have been too much. I was full of regret as we walked between the two canals and took pictures of the island from what had once been the German front.

I was very much in the blockade and World War II frame of mind, but not so Papa, who for the entire thirty minutes of our walk discoursed on the poor money-making capabilities of the Russians.

Not that he wasn’t right. In the last fifty years, Schlisselburg had gone largely unnoticed by vacationers and tourists. The town was run down in a typical Russian fashion, and the glorious lakeside coast, which anywhere else in the world would have long ago become developed and prosperous, lay fallow amid one cafeteria, a couple of crumbling tenements, a makeshift church, and a dozen fishermens’ huts. Between the two historic canals, the Soviets in 70 years of rule-by-proletariat-for-proletariat could not even pave a road, except the highway to nowhere.

My father and I discussed two other canals we have seen with our own eyes: the intercoastal waterways flanking the state of Florida, one on the Atlantic Ocean, one on the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, one could argue there were one too many night clubs on the Gulf of Mexico, a few too many white sailing boats, and who wanted to see one more wooden house on flood stilts? But these excesses of western civilization did not detract from the appeal of the coast. You could get a drink, breathe in the salty air, go for a boat ride, cluck at the maroon sun beyond the palms, and then get into your SUV and drive a hundred feet to buy a quart of milk or a new bathing suit before you went home to your house on stilts to watch the sun set over the gulf from your den windows.

Here in Schlisselburg, alongside the Peter Canal, only a dirt road with craters blundered ahead. At the apex of a most magnificent view — Lake Ladoga opening up into a breathtaking oceanic expanse — lay an ancient closed-down scrap-steel yard and nothing more.

No houses, no cars, no shops, no people strolling. Only us who wandered amid Bolshevism, gawking at the sights.

On the Catherine Canal, where the Nazi artillery was once entrenched, a few old row boats were moored. A squalid hut here and there showed us that some fishermen lived close to their boats.

“What happens to the huts during storms?” I asked.

“Take a guess,” replied my father.

Staring at one of the huts with a caved-in roof, I said, “Where do you think the Germans dug in? That shore looks awfully narrow. And how did they get there from here, anyway? Did they swim?”

“It was winter,” my father said with a disdainful snort.

“Oh, yeah. They just walked across the ice. But what about in the summer? How did they get back and forth? They certainly couldn’t have remained on that ten-foot strip of land.”

“If I had a million dollars,” my father said, “I would buy all this land, heck probably for a lot less than a million. I would buy it all.”

“Well, you don’t have a million dollars.”

“I wish I did,” he said. “Can you even imagine? Can you even imagine what this would look like with some western money? What a waste. Isn’t it, Paullina? Isn’t it, Viktor? A waste?”

“A waste,” I agreed. “But what about the Germans?”

“They had boats,” said Viktor. “They rowed to the Catherine canal.”

“Where did they get the boats from? They didn’t bring boats with them from Germany, did they?”

“No,” my father said. “They stole them. From the fishermen.”

We took a few more unenthusiastic pictures and left, continuing to lament the lack of Soviet enterprise and initiative.

One last time, I looked at Oreshek Island across the water. The island with its battered fortified walls at the mouth of the now tranquil Lake Ladoga was a baffling anachronism. It was as if Oreshek was meant to look exactly as it did in 1943. As if perhaps Schlisselburg was too.

As if perhaps all this was by design not chaos. As if leaving it as it was, was precisely in memoriam.

Yet, I had seen Shepelevo. I had seen Fifth Soviet. I had seen Gostiny Dvor. Was everything left the way it was in memoriam?

“Paullina,” my father said, patting my back. “Look at the Neva. It’s something isn’t it? Just look at it.”

I looked at him, smiling. “You like this river, don’t you, Papa? You love this river.”

He nodded ruefully. “Did you know the Neva is one of the fullest rivers in the world?”

“This I did not know.”

“After winter, the ice that completely covers seventy kilometers of the Neva melts. You think all is well, you’re smelling the daffodils, looking forward to the lilacs, and then, weeks later, boom, the ice on Lake Ladoga melts, and in great icebergs flows down the Neva to the Gulf of Finland with extraordinary force and noise.”

“In icebergs?”

“Yes. Icebergs. The noise from the Ladoga ice sounds like cannons going off for weeks until it is all carried down into the gulf.”

“Cannons?”

My father nodded. “Every single year the Leningrad spring sounds like war.”

My father sat down heavily into his passenger seat and said, “Off to Road of Life then?”

“Yuri Lvovich,” Viktor said, “Here I must agree with Paullina. We simply must go visit the Diorama of the Breaking of the Siege of Leningrad. We can’t come all the way to Schlisselburg and not see that. Paullina will never see it again.”

My father sighed. “Okay. Let’s go. But quickly. We still have to drive up north.” He turned back to me with hope, “Or maybe you don’t want to see the Road of Life?”

“I do, I do,” I said, hoping we could see the Road of Life in less than twenty five minutes so as not to upset my dad.

In Storied Battles

We parked by a tank. God forbid we should have looked at this green tank, named “Breakthrough.” I gave it a cursory glance as I hurried from it. My father was calling me. “Paullina! Stop dawdling! Come on.” I managed to notice fresh roses lying on the tank’s tread.

We were the only car in the parking lot, which also handily served as parade grounds. The parking lot had grass growing through the cracks in the asphalt, which was surprising considering the museum only opened in 1994, on the 50th anniversary of the lifting of the blockade. Four years later and the weeds were already growing through the paved parade grounds.

The museum looked tiny and uninviting from the outside. It was just a dark-gray low-roofed granite building with the words, “BREAK OF THE LENINGRAD BLOCKADE,” inscribed on the entryway header beam.

Inside was even more uninviting. All dark and slate cold.

The whole museum was one room, with a desk in the front hall. “Would you like to go in?” asked one of the two ladies behind the desk.

“I suppose,” I said. “What’s here?”

“Why, the diorama, of course. Have you not heard of our diorama?” She lifted her eyes to the slate ceiling. “Wait till you see. That will be five rubles please. Each.”

I looked around and couldn’t see a thing except for a dim blue light emanating from the center of the room.

As I paid, I whispered to Viktor, “What’s a diorama, anyway? And why so dark?”

We walked to the blue light. Viktor said, “So nothing will draw your eyes away from it.”

I stepped up onto a platform and before me opened up the ragged shores of the Nevá in the pre-dawn hours of a bitter winter morning.

I was looking at a life-size panorama of the river in which actual objects and figures were set against a painted backdrop.

The objects were tanks, trenches, guns, artillery. The figures were Russian soldiers charging across the Nevá ice, singularly to their deaths but collectively towards the liberation of Leningrad.

Nothing could draw my eyes away.

I listened to a shout Russian woman with a laser pointer speak to the small group of us about what happened on the banks of the Neva for six days in January, 1943.

The lecturer talked slowly and frequently stopped, because it so happened that we weren’t the only ones listening to her. I had no idea when the other two people besides us arrived, but suddenly there was a Finnish woman standing close to her Finnish translator. It was for the translator that our lecturer stopped every few sentences, and as she stopped, the ice, blood, the fire and Oreshek up in smoke, were all slowly burning themselves into my heart.

My eyes wide and my mouth wider, I stood mutely—

“For six days,” said our lecturer, “our Soviet troops attacked the Nazi defenses on the south bank of the Neva at Schlisselburg.”

Pause.

My camera down, my purse down, my hands down, I stood in front of the river.

“Look over here,” the lecturer said, pointing to the shore opposite me. “Across the river on the south shore. We were trying to unite our northern Leningrad front with the southern Volkhov front. The German forces separated our two fronts by ten kilometers. We needed to cross the river, remove them from their positions and unite with the Volkhov front. That wasn’t easy. The Germans were well entrenched and well fortified.”

Pause for the Finns. The woman didn’t really look impressed by what the translator was telling her. My father and Viktor stood slightly behind me.

“This was not the first attempt to break the blockade,” the lecturer resumed. “Do you see these bodies here?” She pointed with her laser to the mass of bloodied forms lying on the ice a little downriver. “Half a kilometer away on the frozen Neva, six hundred bodies lay as a testament of the failure of the first such attempt to break the blockade, just six days before this one, on the sixth of January.”

Pause for the Finns.

Turning to look at my father, I whispered, “Six hundred is a lot.”

“Shh,” he said with a slow blink. “And listen.”

Behind me I heard his quiet voice. “It seems like a lot, I know, considering that on the first day of the D-Day invasion, on Omaha Beach, two thousand Americans died.”

“Yeah.”

“But just listen.”

The woman continued. “For six days, the fighting that you see before you went on. The blockade was finally broken on January 19^th, 1943. On that day, our Leningrad troops hugged their Volkhov counterparts.”

Pause. Smoke everywhere. You could barely see the planes overhead. Fires raged all along the southern shore.

“On January 20^th, the People’s Volunteers began to build the railroad across the Neva on the very place the six hundred bodies lay.” She pointed with her laser. “The first thing the civilians did was carry away the dead, the second thing they did was build a railroad to run from Volkhov to Leningrad.”

Pause. Finns clucked appreciatively.

“The volunteer force comprised sixty percent women.”

More impressed clucking. In front of me was a tarp-covered army truck with a Red Cross emblazoned on its side. Three steps forward and I could reach and touch the truck. Beyond it a tank was treading across the ice. In front of the tank horses lay dead.

“The women built the railroad over land and over ice on the Nevá in seventeen days. On February 7^th, the first train carrying butter came to Finland Station in Leningrad.”

Pause. The sky heaving smoke, as if smoke itself came with deafening noise. I could barely hear the lecturer.

“The Germans bombed this railroad for the next year, and soon, in contrast with the Lake Ladoga Road of Life truck route, it began to be called the Road of Death.”

Pause. The Finns stopped clucking.

“But it was also called the Road of Victory. Because though it kept being bombed, the railroad did not stop working. The Germans never regained this territory.”

Pause. I looked across the river at Schlisselburg — all smoke. Oreshek — all smoke. I wanted to step down into the bunkers to escape the haze. I had no courage. The men in front of me were charging the river. I was next.

“The Germans remained armed in a place called Sinyavino Heights. They loved high positions, the Germans. They could shoot us really well from them. Hitler’s Group Army Nord remained in Sinyavino for months after the siege was lifted because we could not get them down from the hills.”

Pause.

“If you get a chance, do go up to the memorial in Sinyavino. It’s fabulous.”

My father whispered behind me, “Don’t even think about it.”

The soldier in front of me was bleeding to death on the ice holding up the Soviet Flag as high as he could. His eyes were on me. I wondered if the flag would be too heavy for me to pick up and carry. I was hypnotized by the blazing hammer and sickle on the flag. I did not reply to my father.

He whispered, “Are you listening to all this?”

I barely nodded, without turning around.

“Ask her a question,” he said. “Ask her while I go outside for a smoke.”

I thought, no need, there is plenty right here. Look at the sky. I said nothing. “Ask her,” he whispered, “how many men died during these six days.”

He left.

I raised my hand, then quickly put it back down. I wasn’t in school, what was I doing?

“Excuse me,” I began. “Tell me please, how many men died in this battle?”

The lecturer, smiling and helpful, said, “During the six days that it took to break the blockade, nineteen thousand Germans died.”

“How many Russians?”

“One hundred and fifteen thousand.”

I spun around and there was my father, standing back from me in the distance, nodding in the dark, crying.

I turned back to my men. I needed to get inside my bunker. One hundred and fifteen thousand boys in six days. One of them right in front of me, holding up the hammer and sickle for Mother Russia. The truck with the Red Cross couldn’t get to him fast enough. The tanks and the dead horses were in its way.

America lost 300,000 men during four years of the war, and in this one obscure battle, a hundred and fifteen thousand men perished.

Schlisselburg was just a blip on the most detailed map and barely a mention in the most detailed history books. The good ones said of Schlisselburg, “And here on the shores near Schlisselburg, some of the battles for the defense of Leningrad were fought.”

Only a second ago I was feeling slightly resentful that we hadn’t gone to Oreshek. It all fell away from me. The Battle for Leningrad flowed into me. I could reach out with my hand and touch the trenches, that’s how close they were, and beyond them any minute I could any run out myself onto that blue ice at dawn on 12 January. My soldiers were exploding as German planes flew low overhead bombarding us. We picked up one more soldier who died in our arms. We lay him down on the bloodied snow. Red, white, metallic blue, gray tanks, gray uniforms, red blood.

It was all in front of me, as if it had been built for me. In an instant of longing, I had been transported here for understanding. By the time I understood, I was lost in that world. I the drinker stood before my coveted bottle of red wine and opened my throat. I was no longer a spectator but a participant. I put my hand over my heart. I could barely breathe.

There and then, I felt, no, knew — between the Finnish pauses, thank God for Finland! — it was here in Schlisselburg that my Bronze Horseman came alive and jumped off his pedestal just as he did in Pushkin’s poem. I shuddered a little. The horseman came alive and for the rest of Eugene’s days chased him through the streets of Leningrad through that maddening dust until Eugene went mad. Was my horseman also going to chase me down the days through my maddening dust?

This is what I came to see. This is what I came to Russia for.

I came for the Bronze Horseman, and I found him here, rearing up in the cold slate building in front of 115,000 dying Russian soldiers.

I felt it all inside me, twisting and warping its way into fiction, into drama.

Though not much was needed to warp it into drama.

The dead, where did they go? Were they buried in the river? I didn’t ask.

The Bravest of the Brave

“I know that one hundred and fifteen thousand people dead seems like many — too many,” the lecturer said, “but right here—” she pointed with the red dot of her laser pen to a remote location on the south banks of the Neva— “two hundred and forty thousand men perished during the course of the war, in a place called Nevsky Patch.”

Nevsky Patch. That was the place Yuliy Gneze told me about as he carried a loaf of bread in the crook of his arm through a concrete museum building in Piskarev Cemetery.

I stared at the little place her red laser dot had landed. I could barely see the smoke. What was she pointing to? And wasn’t that the German side? She must have been mistaken, the Germans must have been the ones to lose those men, because—

“Two square kilometers held by Russian soldiers in enemy territory on the south bank,” she continued. “Our men occupied this little patch in the fall of 1941. They were supplied with food, ammunition and new soldiers by boats from across the river.”

I began to ask, “How long?” but broke off. This was ridiculous. I was not going to get emotional in front of two Finns and Viktor. Pausing to compose myself, I tried again. “How long did they hold that land?”

“For five hundred days,” she replied, “they held that bit of land against the Germans.” She paused, her own voice cracking. How many times has she given this lecture since 1994 when the Diorama first opened? “They were the bravest of the brave,” she said.

I remembered what Yuliy Gneze had told me. “They went there to die,” he said. “No one came back from Nevsky Patch.”

I had to turn away because I couldn’t look at the lecturer any more. Behind me was my father listening with his own stricken face. Nowhere to hide.

I turned back to the Diorama.

“Right after the war,” the lecturer said, “the Leningrad city council attempted to plant some trees at the memorial site for Nevsky Patch. Nothing grew. They tried again twenty years later. Nothing grew. They tried again thirty years later. The last time was on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of war. The council once again attempted to plant some trees in the soldiers’ honor, but one tree after another died, their roots turning up.”

“Why?” I said hoarsely. I cleared my throat. “Why?”

Behind me I heard Viktor whisper, “Metal.”

“Because the ground was full of metal,” the lecturer replied. “Nothing could grow, not even fifty years later. Two square kilometers, and to this day nothing grows on that fallow ground. It’s all metal: weapons of the fallen soldiers, enemy artillery, bullets, knives. And their bones.”

The men went to Nevsky Patch to die and were replaced by more soldiers from the boats that came across the river.

“Nevsky Patch holds a near-mythical status for all Russians,” Viktor told me as we turned away from the lecturer for the last time.

“You went there?”

“Yes.”

“Just like Piskarev?”

Viktor shrugged. “At least they were buried in Piskarev. At Nevsky Patch, they lay where they fell. The soldiers made barricades out of the dead bodies.”

Omigod, I mouthed to Viktor.

“I know,” he said. “Not quite like Piskarev.”

Shell-shocked, I bought some books and talked to Ludmilla, the woman who sold them to me. She said she had lived in Schlisselburg ever since she was a little girl.

The lecturer came over and shook my hand, introducing herself. Her name was Svetlana.

“So where do you girls go shopping?” I asked, me of the NorthPark and Galleria malls in Dallas. I was trying to change the subject to something facile.

“We don’t go shopping much,” Svetlana admitted.

“But you have to buy things, don’t you? Clothes, coats?”

“Not really,” Svetlana said. “We don’t need much.”

Ludmilla and Svetlana had been working at the Diorama since it opened. They got paid 70 rubles a month. “Theoretically,” interjected Svetlana with a chuckle. “We haven’t been paid in three months.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I almost died in Schlisselburg,” Ludmilla said, as if that was the reason she could never leave town.

As Ludmilla crossed the Nevá with her family in September, 1941 to evacuate, her boat was torpedoed by the Germans and sank. The drowning Ludmilla nonetheless grabbed her one-year-old brother, and clung to him in forty-degree water. “We would have gone down for sure,” she said, “but for an eighteen-year-old nurse who saved us both.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

“I was four.”

She was a year younger than my father.

A little later Viktor whispered to me, “She was four, and still grabbed on to her brother. Isn’t that incredible?”

Almost inconceivable, I echoed, recalling the complex relationship my daughter has with one of her brothers. Would Natasha grab on to Misha?

My father was nodding as if he were also listening; he even mumbled, “That’s incredible.” But then suddenly he said, “Girls, I cannot tell you how this place would change with a little money, a few restaurants, some vacation homes. I mean, you have a beautiful place here in Schlisselburg. World-class beautiful. If I had a million dollars, I would buy up all the land between those canals of yours, and then this would really be something. That’s all that I’d need. A million dollars.”

The two women smiled vacantly at him.

“Papa, let’s go,” I said, shaking my head.

Outside, I turned to him, exasperated. “Papa, what are you doing? Those women haven’t been paid in three months and you’re going on about what you would do with a million dollars?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Okay. Do you want to go and look at the tank?”

“Not really. We need to get going. We spent too long in there.”

“You think?”

I heaved myself inside the car. “Papa, do you think this place we’re going to, the Road of Life place, there might be a bathroom?”

“Are you joking?”

“Anywhere along the way?”

“You are, right?”

“Well, I really need a bathroom.” For feminine reasons, but I was hardly going to tell my father that. I needed a bathroom that instant.

“Go back to those women. Maybe they’ll let you use theirs. They must have a bathroom. It’s a museum.”

I went back, while the two men waited for me in the car.

“Svetlana,” I said, “do you have a ladies room I can use?”

She glanced at me awkwardly and then pointed me back to the exit. “Come,” she said walking with me. “I’ll take you. Frankly, I’m ashamed. It’s in the woods, behind the museum. But someone stole the doors off it.”

“Stole the doors off the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why doesn’t someone, maybe the city council, give you new doors?”

“They’d have to pay us first.”

We walked down a path that ran alongside the highway just before the entrance to Mariinsky Bridge. A few sparse white birches did not make it look like a forest, more like an outgrowth, and the grass was uncut — naturally.

In the near distance I saw something I thought could not be the bathroom. It was a small, corroded steel square structure with a letter M on top.

It was the bathroom. M was for men, engraved helpfully above the opening that used to have a door. We came closer. I could smell the bathroom from thirty feet away. What was it with Soviet bathrooms? The smell was particularly harsh because we were in the open country. You’d think the freshness of the flowing Neva and the blooming grasses would’ve taken care of the stench. Not so. Nature was ill-quipped to battle the intensity of the rusted cubicle. We came closer. The men’s side was first.

It was all metal. The door must have been metal too. Maybe the door pilferer sold it for scrap. Maybe not sold it, but bartered it.

The opening in the ground that served as the toilet was a square hole poured in concrete, and the concrete was covered in excrement.

Pressing my lips shut, I looked at Svetlana. I was trying not to breathe. But I also didn’t want to offend her by either retching or holding my nose. “The men’s side is awful,” she said. Her face was full of acute embarrassment: the dull yearning for civilization mixed with the resigned knowledge that she wouldn’t find it in these woods.

“Please come this way,” she said. “To the women’s side. The women’s is cleaner.”

We walked around the metal structure. There were no doors on the women’s side either. Inside was a square hole in the ground poured in concrete, and the concrete was covered with excrement.

I couldn’t divine Svetlana’s criteria for “cleaner,” nor would I dare ask. I could think of nothing to say except a limp, “Is there any toilet paper?”

It was that awful time of the month. I could’ve been born a man, but no. In my abject necessity, I repeated, “Toilet paper, is there some?”

“Nnn — no,” Svetlana said, brow furrowing. “There is no toilet paper.” She paused. “Do you… need toilet paper?”

I shook my head. “You know what?” I stepped away. “I’ll wait. But thank you anyway.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

As we walked back, she said, “Excuse us, please.”

“No, no,” I said. It is I who needs to be excused by you, for intruding on your life. I was the last thing these Russian people needed.

“We usually just go into the woods, Ludmilla and I,” Svetlana told me.

“For everything? Even the… hmm… the big things?”

“Well, usually, we wait for those until we get home.”

I walked carefully, trying not to rattle my bladder on the uneven ground.

“So whoever took them, took both doors?”

“Yes. Both doors.”

I was silent.

Brightening up a little, Svetlana said, “You know, President Yeltsin came to see our Diorama a couple of years ago, and we thought maybe they’d give us some doors for the toilet then, but they just brought a portable toilet with them, and when he left, they took their toilet. They didn’t even let us glance at Yeltsin. They locked us in the basement.”

My astonishment must have been too bald on my face, because she shrugged and laughed a little. “I know. Not a single peek at him.” She sounded more upset about not getting a glimpse of the Russian president than she did about the toilet.

“But who got to tell him the story of the breaking of the blockade?” I wanted to know. “You tell it so well.”

Svetlana shrugged again. “They have their own people for that.”

When I said good-bye to her, I held her hand for a moment.

When I came back to the car, my father asked, “Well?”

“I decided to wait.”

He whirled around. “There was no toilet?”

“Oh, there was.”

When I told him, my father didn’t know whether to laugh or shake his head. He did both.

“It’s easier for them to requisition a port-a-toilet from somewhere,” he said, “than to replace those doors. In any case, they were hardly going to send Yeltsin into the woods to pee in a hole.”

“Certainly not,” I agreed, as Viktor drove away from the Diorama, the tank with the roses, and across Mariinsky Bridge.

On the way to the Road of Life, my father told me the story of the writer André Gide, who came to Russia in 1936 and wrote a scathing book about his visit. Gide’s chief complaint was that there was no toilet paper to be found in the Soviet Union. Aleksei Tolstoy, a Russian writer and Leo’s nephew, after reading Gide’s book said viciously, “That’s right, because of course all André ever thinks about is his ass.” Gide, apparently, was a known homosexual.

Northward we drove up the western coast of Lake Ladoga. Viktor called the road “the Broken Ring.”

“Why do you call it that?” I asked.

“Because,” he replied, “the memorial to the start of the Road of Life is a concrete ring that’s broken at the top, symbolizing that the Soviets broke the blockade with this route along the ice years before Schlisselburg.”

“Papa, what did you think of the Diorama?”

“What can one think of it? What about that Nevsky Patch?” He shook his head. “You know your dedushka, my father?”

“Yes, I know my dedushka, your father.”

“Don’t be fresh. You remember his brother, Semyon? He was an engineer during the war; he repaired airplane engines for the Red Army. Semyon told me that all the pilots in his company died. They either died in the air or they died while landing because in those days planes didn’t have the stabilizing third brake. He said before the pilots went out, they drank, they smoked, went to sleep and when they woke up, they flew out to die.”

“All of them?”

“That’s what he said. All of them.”

“Papa, do you think we’ll have time to go to Nevsky Patch?”

“Are you crazy? We don’t have time today to eat. Have you noticed we haven’t eaten?”

“That’s because there is nowhere to buy food.”

“We can’t go to Nevsky Patch.”

“It’s worth seeing,” Viktor said.

“Everything is worth seeing, Viktor!” my father exclaimed. “But we cannot see everything.”

“What about Saturday? Isn’t it on the way to somebody on Saturday?”

Shaking his head, my father said, “Nevsky Patch is on the way to nowhere, I already told you.”

We stopped to get some food at a small open market with stalls. “Fresh bread,” the sign read.

“Do you think there will be a toilet here?” I asked with hope.

“Absolutely not,” said my father. “Not even a possibility.”

We bought some bread of dubious freshness, tomatoes, cucumbers, cherries, 200 grams of bologna, 200 grams of lamb bologna, and Kvas — a Russian drink made from bread. For one ruble, or sixteen cents, Viktor also bought a replica of a Swiss army knife. “For a ruble?” I said. “Wow.”

“Pretty good, huh?” He smiled — a rarity. “Made in Taiwan.”

On the way to the car, we bought crème brulée ice cream, which was the only thing I wanted. I sat in the back of Viktor’s car, and ate the ice cream with the kind gusto and joy one reserves for reading a fantastic book, slowing down at the end because it is just too good to finish. I kept gazing at the caramel-colored ice cream in its plain tasteless wafer cone, and my father kept turning around and asking, “Well, how is it? How is it?”

“It’s everything I thought it would be.”

These three things: the smell of Shepelevo, the smell of the Metro and the taste of crème bruleé ice cream. The essence of my childhood in Russia.

The rest of it — well, I didn’t want to remember.

Viktor was pulling over to the shoulder.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “We’re not there yet, are we?”

“This is a good place,” he said, turning to me. “There is no one here.”

“A good place for what?” I said, staring deep into the well of my diminishing ice cream.

“Go in the woods, do your business. You’ll feel much better.”

“Viktor,” I said. “Please. Who are you talking to? Drive. I’m not going in the woods.”

My father shook his head at me with a scowl. “Stop it, you fool. You will have to go in the woods in the end. Go now and end your misery — and ours.”

“No, I will not end your misery,” I said. “At Broken Ring, there’s bound to be something.”

“There will be nothing, I tell you!” my father said. “Nothing! Go now.”

“I can’t.”

“Ah, hell,” said my father. Viktor pulled away from the grass.

He slowed down several more times before we got to Broken Ring. Each time he said, “This is not a bad spot. Secluded. Go here.”

“No.”

How they laughed at me. Yes, my father laughed, but underneath I could tell he wished he could just order me to go, as if I were still a child or an employee under his control. It frustrated him that I would not see sense and would not listen to him.

The Broken Ring memorial near the tiny village of Kokorevo is about thirty kilometers up the northern coast of Lake Ladoga. The Road of Life stretched to Kobona on the eastern shore of the lake, thirty kilometers (twenty miles) across the ice. During the damning winter of 1941, the desperate Leningrad city council together with the Red Army devised a trail across the frozen lake. Army trucks made their way through the night to bring bread to the dying Leningraders. The passage between Kobona and Kokorevo is one of the narrowest points across Ladoga, which at its widest stretches 126 kilometers, or 71 miles. Three times as wide as Long Island in New York. Three times as wide as the state of Israel.

The Germans bombarded the bread trucks from the air as they carried bread and sugar from Kobona and picked up evacuating Leningrad residents from Kokorevo. The Russians set up land-to-air artillery missiles to fight the Luftwaffe, and little by little, in the dead of night, with only the headlights of the trucks showing the way, they rolled across the ice to save dozens, possibly hundreds from dying. Some trucks fell to German air strikes. Some fell through the ice.

The road we were on extended in a narrow straight line towards the horizon. There were no crossroads, nor any houses. It was just a birch and pine forest through which ran a road toward the lake and the Broken Ring. From two kilometers away I could see the ring rise up out of the ground like a smaller Arch of St. Louis.

The ring didn’t look broken from the distance. The highway ended at the ring. We stopped the car. The ring still didn’t look broken.

“Where is it broken?” I asked Viktor.

“Right on top. Do you see?”

There was no place to park for the memorial. We parked on the grass. The ring was a giant concrete semi-circle with the two circular halves not quite connecting. Under the ring, tire tracks treaded through the asphalt, vanishing into the wetland cattails of the flattened lake.

Only when I came close, did I see the break in the ring, at the very apex, maybe six inches wide. Considering the ring itself stood forty feet above ground, it was a tiny break indeed. I hoped this was symbolic — the Road of Life breaking the German ring around Leningrad. Was the lack of a parking lot also symbolic?

A wedding party was taking place underneath the ring. Either that or a wedding. The bride was clowning around, throwing her veil up above her head and dancing on the tire tracks. Why would anyone want to come here to have pictures taken of the bride and groom?

“A wedding wouldn’t happen here if there weren’t a bathroom,” I said to my father.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Why don’t you go ask the bride. Ask her where she goes to pee.”

“I bet she doesn’t go in the woods.”

“I bet she does,” said Viktor.

I walked up to the bride. “Congratulations,” I said. “Excuse me, but is there a bathroom around here?”

She shook her veiled head. I could tell she was surprised by my question. “There are no conveniences here,” she said in a casual tone of someone who expects exactly that and nothing more.

I wanted to point out that a toilet was more a necessity than a convenience, but I smiled and said, “Of course. Thank you.” Clearly it wasn’t a convenience.

After the bridal party departed, my father came up to me and said with a wide self-satisfied smirk, “Did you ask the bride if she lifted up her wedding dress to pee in the woods?”

“No, I did not.”

He laughed heartily. “What did I tell you? I told you there would be nothing here. I told you to go in the woods. Who told you?”

Viktor pointed out all around us that there were still plenty of woods for me to come to my abandoned senses.

“She can’t go here!” my father said in an affronted tone. “It’s the Road of Life memorial, for God’s sake.”

Besides the ring memorial and the Zenith land-to-air artillery gun there was nothing else around, and I mean nothing. It was marshland. Long grasses grew right out of the water. After ten minutes we left.

My father and Viktor were hungry.

We decided to go down the dirt road to a paid beach, have a swim and then a picnic. “It’s a paid beach,” my father said, “so there’s bound to be a toilet there.”

Not bloody likely.

The road with the same gargantuan potholes as we had found on the way to Shepelevo was hard on my bladder.

“Viktor, gently. Please.”

It was three in the afternoon.

“Harder, Viktor, harder,” Papa said. “That’s right, like that. Teach her a lesson.” He laughed, enjoying himself.

The attendant at the beach took ten rubles from us. Papa asked him about a toilet. “Toilet? No, no,” the man was surprised we were asking. “No toilet here.”

“Why would there be?” I said.

“Exactly,” he replied.

“Makes you wonder what we’re paying for,” my father remarked as we drove on.

After Viktor parked, he retrieved from the trunk some harsh-looking brown unbleached toilet paper he had bought at the open market for just such an occasion.

“Take this,” he said. “Go down the path and go into the woods.”

Vanquished by the merciless demands of my body, I went into the woods. How ridiculous I must have seemed to Viktor, walking lamely down the forest path, holding my little purse in my hands as if I were heading down the stairs to the marble public bathrooms at the Plaza Hotel to freshen up a tad.

In a manner of seconds, every part of me that was exposed was stung by big black fat mosquitoes that probably hadn’t eaten since the Road of Life bride.

As I was walking back, I saw my father and Viktor changing by the car. That was the last thing I needed to see, so I turned around and started to walk back to the woods.

“Paullina, where are you going?” my father called after me.

“Going to give you some privacy, Papa.”

“Come back.”

I came back.

“Papa, I read somewhere that there is no word in Russian for privacy. Is that true?”

He thought about it. “Let me think about it,” he said. “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

In a minute, he said, “There is a word for private property.”

“No, Papa. I want a word for privacy. As in give you some privacy.”

Clearing his throat, he said, “No, I can’t think of it. I guess there isn’t.”

“I understand,” I said. “Now I understand everything.”

As we were walking to the beach, Viktor said, “You mustn’t feel bad about the woods. The woods is often the best place to go. Clean, hygienic.”

Yeah, I wanted to say, with 150 million people using the woods as one large unprivate public toilet, clean and hygienic is precisely what springs to my mind.

My father and Viktor immediately went swimming in Lake Ladoga. The day was blazingly sunny, and almost warm — maybe 63°F. I touched the lake water gingerly with the tip of my big toe. It was cold. Standing up to his torso in the water, my father called out, “Paullina, what a shame you didn’t bring your bathing suit!”

“Yes, isn’t it just,” I said, taking the tip of my big toe out of the water.

I went back to the car, sat on a rock and leafed through the blockade book I just bought.

Two hundred and forty thousand dead in a place the rest of the world and ninety percent of all Russians have never heard of. Dead on Nevsky Patch where the memorial to those men reads:

Viktor and Papa came back, dried off. At the market, Viktor had very smartly bought a plastic picnic set that came with a plastic cloth that we now laid out on the ground right next to the car. Problem was, it kept blowing away. So we put the bologna and the tomatoes on it. Then we put our shoes on it. Then we looked at it. There was nowhere left for us to sit. My father stood. I sat on my rock. Viktor snaked himself among the shoes and the bologna. Getting out his version of the Swiss Army knife, he attempted to cut the tomatoes. Instantly I saw why his knife had cost sixteen cents. He may as well have been cutting the tomatoes with a spoon. First the juice started pouring out. Then the seeds. Then only the skin was left in his hands, the skin that was still pretty much intact except for the gouges.

Searching through my purse, I said, “Hmm. I hope we have another tomato.”

“Yes, we bought a couple.”

“Viktor the knife is no good,” my father said.

“What do you expect for a ruble?”

“Here, Viktor, let me,” I said and took out my little bought-in-America Swiss Army knife, which cost $10 bucks and was actually made in Switzerland. The knife effortlessly cut paper thin tomato slices for all and then sliced some bread. Those Swiss. They were busy designing a perfect utility knife while the rest of the world made automatic rifles and then used them.

We ate the pumpernickel bread and bologna. My father and Viktor drank the bread juice. “Plinka, want some Kvas?” my father asked.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I would rather have my bread in a sandwich.”

Besides, I learned too late a cardinal rule the hard way. Any liquid that goes in, must come out. I wasn’t going to drink another sip of anything until the Sunday flight home.

We talked in detail and at length about real estate possibilities on Lake Ladoga, which is the largest lake in Europe and the least inhabited. So what if it was covered with a sheet of ice two solid meters deep for eight months of the year? That didn’t matter. This was the tourist attraction of the 21^st century, according to my father and Viktor.

I wasn’t paying attention to them. I was thinking of Schlisselburg, of Nevsky Patch.

On the way back, my father slept. I was near silent. All I could think about was the blue Neva ice at dawn, of losing a hundred and fifteen thousand men in six days, and of the two square kilometers covered with Russian bones and German bullets.

As we were passing Schlisselburg again, I leaned forward and whispered, “Viktor, how about if you drive on, to Nevsky Patch?”

“Oh, Paullina,” said Viktor. “Your father will kill me.”

“He’ll never know,” I said. “He’ll be asleep until Grand Hotel Europe. We’ll be quick. Fifteen minutes.”

“But it’s an hour or more out of our way.”

“So?”

“Your father will wake up.”

“Trust me, he won’t.”

“He will wake up at Grand Hotel Europe and wonder why it is eight o’clock instead of six.”

“Tell him you were stuck in traffic.”

“Oh, Paullina. What traffic?” There was no one on the road.

I imagined walking on earth on which nothing grew. I leaned back. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, we were at Grand Hotel Europe.

My father showered in my room.

I talked to my three-year-old son — finally! Poor boy. I had not spoken to him since I left five days ago. Could that even be possible?

Misha began with, “I’m so happy, Mommy.” So happy he finally got me on the phone.

Afterward, while my father was getting ready, I went for a walk around the hotel, and looked inside the boutique for the black dress I would have bought had I been going inside the cathedral for tomorrow’s funeral.

All I can say is thank God for President Yeltsin because the dress was not 200 UNITS but 375, and it wasn’t black.

Without our coats, because it was a sweet warm evening, we walked to Dom Knigi — House of Books. My father was not talkative and told me he would wait for me on the street. “Hurry up,” he said.

There are a few fundamental skills one needs to run a bookstore. One is a loose knowledge of alphabetization and some of its practical applications in a place that sells books.

Dom Knigi disagreed.

Perhaps they had other ideas for classifying their books that I had not been aware of.

“I’m trying to find books about the blockade,” I asked the clerk.

A young, bleached-blonde, sloppy girl stared at me wanly and spoke only when she was good and ready. “The blockade? Berlin?”

“Well, I was thinking of the blockade, Leningrad.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

Then, “Did you try upstairs?”

“No.”

“Try upstairs.”

“Thanks,” I said. “What about maps?”

“Maps of the blockade?”

“No. Just generally of this region.”

She sighed. “Try upstairs.”

Upstairs was run-down, unfriendly, and had no good maps. I had to wait five minutes before I could ask where they were hiding their history section. The man pointed me to the front window, where I found five shelves of books in no discernible order. I went back to him, and after waiting five more minutes asked where I could find books about the Leningrad blockade.

“Leningrad? What are you doing upstairs?”

“Well—”

“They’re downstairs, of course, in the World War II section. Just look through there. You’ll find what you need.”

I left.

On the street my father looked cranky and hungry. He was having a little trouble walking.

“I’m going to wait for you right here,” he said, settling on a stone bench underneath a lone tree near the Griboyedov Canal.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“We haven’t eaten,” he said. “I’m not feeling very well. I have slight diabetes. I’m just dizzy. Go pick up your pictures. But hurry, I want to eat.”

I ran to get my silly photos from the Kodak store, as if I were in London’s West End. How civilized, how westernized, how decidedly un-communist.

Speak Softly Love

We ate at “Sankt Peterburg” Russian restaurant on the Griboyedov Canal, next to the Church of the Resurrection. Last Monday my father promised me we would see this church again, and here we were, glancing at it as we made our way down the steps of a darkened restaurant.

I ordered exquisite black caviar with blini, excellent pelmeni and substandard chocolate mousse for dessert. My father had solyanka, a thick meat soup, and pelmeni.

He finished my mousse for me.

With the tap water being undrinkable like we were in Mexico City, I was forced to buy a tiny bottle of Evian, which at thirty rubles or five dollars was three dollars more than my father’s huge glass of beer that he drank to chase down his four dollar double shot of vodka.

He was tired at first but after a bit of food and drink he brightened. We talked at length about his retirement and plans for Maui.

“Papa,” I said, “there are two things you love: fishing and gardening. How are you going to grow your tomatoes? How are you going to sit in your boat?”

“What boat, what tomatoes?”

“Exactly.” No garden for him, no fishing.

My father again mentioned something about fishing off the ocean coast. I remained unconvinced. “Are you going to stand on a pier? Are you going to stand in two feet of water?”

“If I have to.”

“It’s not like sitting in a boat.”

“No,” he said. “But the sun sets on the ocean; you know what that’s like?”

“No,” I said sadly, me of the Atlantic shores that faced east.

“Well, it’s quite a sight. Besides you are wrong. I love three things. The third one is your mother. Maui is the perfect place for her, so I will be happy there too. I can be happy anywhere.”

I thought. “You also love movies.”

“Yes.”

“Instead of gardening or fishing, you can watch The Godfather with Mama.”

He smiled. “What a splendid life.” The Godfather is my father’s favorite film.

We ate, we drank. I wished it weren’t so smoky. My eyes were burning.

“Are you a little scared, retiring? You’ve worked your whole life. You love your job.”

“I have worked my whole life,” my father said. “And I do love my job. There are very few people in the world who can do what I do.”

He shook his head, took another gulp of beer. “Paullina, it’s time for me to leave work. I don’t feel well. I do not live a healthy life. I don’t. And also, your mother.” He fell quiet.

“I’m leaving for her,” he said. “She needs me to stop working, to be with her. I’m going to do that. I want us to have a good life in Maui.”

“And you will,” I said.

“We’re going to get up at seven in the morning,” he said, “and we’re going to go to the beach. We will walk, swim, sit, talk. Then we’ll come home around ten and have breakfast.”

“By the time you’re done, it’ll be time for lunch.”

“Then we’ll have lunch. After lunch a nap, and maybe a little Internet.”

“Good plan,” I said, not wanting to mention the red dust.

“Then back to the beach for the late afternoon. Then dinner. Then movies. It’s a splendid life, isn’t it?”

“Perfect,” I agreed.

“And any time we want to, we can hop on a plane and in three hours be in San Francisco. We’ll rent a car, we’ll drive down to see you and the kids, we’ll drive to New York, we’ll travel. Mama will see her Las Vegas. Paullina, it’s what I want to do.”

“I know.”

“You and the children and Kevin of course can come and visit us any time. Any time. For as long as you want. You have a place to stay. With us.”

“Papa, you have a two bedroom condo!”

“We’ll fit.”

“Papa, the flight to Maui is thirteen hours from Dallas. What are we going to do with the kids on the plane for thirteen hours?”

He paused. “It’s not thirteen straight hours. There is a change-over in San Francisco or Honolulu.”

It was time for me to shake my head.

“Paullina, you don’t know Hawaii. You cannot imagine. You won’t want to leave.” He smiled. “It’s not like here.”

Then why didn’t I want to leave here? “I hear it’s paradise on earth,” I said. I sipped my water, he drank his beer.

“There, not here.” In case there was any confusion.

“So I guess I’m not calling Yulia, huh, Papa?”

“Do what you like,” he said. “It’s going to be very difficult for you to see her.”

He seemed so reluctant to share this time with other people. No Alla for breakfast, no Anatoly and Ellie for dinner, no walking with Anatoly through the streets of Leningrad. Just me and my father.

Well, he did put off his retirement to Maui so he could come to Leningrad with me. It was only right.

“What did you think of Schlisselburg?” he asked. “You don’t need any more inspiration, do you?”

I shook my head. It was all I needed. Everything.

He drank his beer.

“But you know, the thing that affected me most…” I broke off. I found it hard to continue. I had started well enough, couched myself in euphemism, the thing, affected me, so banal, taste-free, yet in the middle of six words, an image sprung up, an image of the ground on which nothing grows with we died so you could live. Then darkest Neva rose up, and tears too. This is ridiculous, I thought, and tried again, slower. “You know, the thing I want to say, is this…” Trailing off again, I looked into my tea.

“What?” my father said, trying to understand. “What’s the matter with you?”

My head twitched as I tried to compose at least my voice. What is wrong with me? Why am I crying?

“It’s those two hundred and forty thousand men at Nevsky Patch,” I said, looking into my tea, not looking at my father. “What did they die for?”

My father shrugged. “What does anybody die for? It’s war, Paullina. Young boys go to die. That’s what war is.”

He wasn’t understanding what I was trying to say. What did they die for?

I tried again. “Yes, but we’ve all heard of Iwo Jima, we’ve heard of Omaha Beach.” That wasn’t it. That wasn’t the heart of it.

“Yes, and no one has heard of Nevsky Patch. No one’s heard of Schlisselburg.”

Yes, but that still wasn’t the thing that hurt. It was the enormity of the sacrifice balanced against the reality of the present life. The see-saw was upended.

A show began with elaborately dressed Russian dancers cavorting to loud Russian muzak. I kept waiting to hear “Shine, Shine, My Star,” but no such luck. It was too loud for us to talk, so we asked for the check.

The Russian waiter, though polite, could not for the life of him say “You’re welcome,” when I would thank him for bringing us food or drink. After we tipped him generously, he didn’t say thank you, but he did ask us to come back soon.

On the way out, I stopped to get some matryoshkas for my children while my father went outside to smoke. He had smoked all through the meal, exhaling the fumes into my face. Can they smoke here, oh, of course, not even a thought, and why should he give one? That had been his life and mine too in smaller less well-ventilated rooms and I never said a word and never could.

I must have spent ten minutes choosing my nesting dolls. I glanced outside to make sure he wasn’t getting too antsy, and there was my dad leaning over the canal talking to a young dark-haired man. The Church of the Resurrection was behind them. The man was leaning very close, energetically explaining something, and my father was listening intently.

Suddenly he came inside and motioned for me to come. In the golden glimmer of the evening canal I instantly saw that the dark man was drunk.

“This is my daughter,” my father said, smiling and proud. As if he were introducing me to his good friend.

The man shook my hand; rather, he grabbed my hand and held it. I pulled away. My father said, “Come, I will buy you some water.”

I glared at my dad, but he wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of meeting my eyes, so we started to walk along the Griboyedov with the drunk man following us closely. He never for an instant stopped talking. Rather, he didn’t not so much talk as quote obscure Boris Pasternak poetry.

A few hundred feet down the canal, my father bought the drunk poet an Evian. The man promptly offered to share the Evian with my dad, who promptly refused. We started to walk again. The man continued to amble, somewhat beside us, linear patterns long abandoned, and continued to quote Pasternak. It took me two more blocks to realize he was repeating the same poem over and over, about sitting down and drinking from the common cup. But when he expressed contemptuous distaste at the saxophonist playing by the canal, even my father had had enough. My father was partial to saxophonists. He had given the musician money earlier, for a Russian jazz rendition of You Ain’t Nothing but a Hounddog.

Thankfully, it was time for us to cross the bridge across Griboyedov so my father bid goodbye to his new friend. What surprised me was how unperturbed my dad was by being accosted and unworried about being followed. He bought this man a drink as if it were nothing, and then walked on and didn’t mention him again except to reply, “Very drunk,” to my question, “Was he a very sober man?”

The saxophonist continued to play by the side of the Griboyedov Canal with the golden onion domes of Church of the Spilt Blood in the near distance.

We had long passed him when he started to play “Speak Softly Love,” from The Godfather. My father and I stopped, looked at each other and came back to the saxophonist. Papa smiled. We were back in America, at the movies, at our Kew Gardens apartment, in our Ronkonkoma house, dancing together at my first wedding. We didn’t move until the man finished playing. To hear the dulcet Nino Rota strands drift through the air while walking through the streets of Leningrad on a warm sunny white July night, having drunk, having eaten, having lived a full life in one day, it was a halcyon snapshot of our post-Russia existence. My father and I were suspended in the air with the minor chords.

We returned to Grand Hotel Europe for a brief bathroom oasis in the middle of the desert, and then at nearly ten-thirty at night set out for the Decembrists’ Square and the statue of the Bronze Horseman.

We walked past the Kazan Cathedral; I didn’t look up. I knew by now not to look too closely, the gold of the domes was black and green and the walls were black and gray, but above the dome shined a polished luminous gold cross. Before 1991 and the fall of Communism, there were no crosses on any of the cathedrals, because they weren’t houses of God, they were storage facilities or museums. After 1991, brand new gold crosses, the beacons of a religion other than Communism, were placed atop all the Leningrad cathedrals. It was the only new thing in the façade of the cathedrals.

I wanted to get a crème brulée ice cream, but the street seller had run out. All she had was vanilla. I shook my head.

We walked down Nevsky Prospekt. “Where is that sign?” I asked my father. “That famous sign.”

“We’re just about to pass it. Cross the street,” he replied. Just past the alphabetically challenged Dom Knigi, a rectangular blue and white sign hung on the building wall. “COMRADES, DURING ENEMY ATTACK, THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS MORE DANGEROUS.” During the siege, the Germans aimed their missiles at Leningrad’s thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt. The bombs flew all the way from Pulkovo Heights, the site of the current airport eleven miles away, and landed on the northern side of Nevsky. The southern side was safer.

Underneath the sign, another small sign. “Left in memory of the besieged.”

“The war is everywhere, isn’t it?” said my father, as we crossed Nevsky again in the direction of Decembrists Square.

“Yes,” I said. “War, poverty, beauty, white nights, communism, our whole life.”

“Heartbreaking, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

It was eleven at night, and we passed only an occasional pedestrian as we slowly made our way through the empty streets.

One of Leningrad’s most celebrated cathedrals, St. Isaac’s in Decembrists’ Square was so badly in need of paint and renovation, its former splendor so shattered, that I was too sad to take a picture, until my father said, “Look at this incredible St. Isaac’s. Aren’t you going to take a picture?” I did, hoping the falling dusk would camouflage what I did not want the lens to capture.

My father told me Decembrists’ Square had been renamed Senate Square in 1992.

“Who can keep up with all the name changes?”

“Nobody,” he replied. “That’s why everybody still calls it Decembrists’ Square.”

Between St. Isaac’s and the Neva embankment stood The Bronze Horseman — Peter the Great atop his horse. In Pushkin’s poem, after the Great Flood of 1830, the luckless hero Evgeni comes to stand in front of the Bronze Horseman. The stallion rears against the setting sky, comes to life and chases Evgeni through the streets of Leningrad.

The horse and the Tsar stood on monolithic 1600-ton Thunder Rock. On the side of it the most simple words “TO PETER I, CATHERINE II.”

I took three pictures and my film ran out. I didn’t have another in my purse. But of course. I take twenty pictures of the Broken Ring but have nothing for the Bronze Horseman.

My father was already ahead, walking toward the Neva embankment, smoking. I circled the statue, then followed him to the river. He seemed to be searching for something.

“Is there anywhere to buy film around here, you think?”

There was a bar, and young people sat outside in chairs drinking their beer, laughing, talking. Somewhere else on the plaza, music blared. The Beatles were singing “The Things We Said Today”, one of my favourites.

My father still didn’t answer. “See across the river?” he pointed. “Along the embankment of General Schmidt is Leningrad University. That’s where I studied as a young man. See that resplendent building right there? Right in front of us across the river?” My father laughed. “That is not the university. That is Menshikov’s mansion. Do you know Menshikov?”

I shook my head.

“Peter the Great’s chief deputy. Peter told him to build the Petersburg University, as it was then called, on the banks of the Neva and then left for the country, thinking he was the Tsar, and his orders would most certainly be followed. But Menshikov decided to take matters into his own hands and built himself a mansion instead, overlooking the banks of the river. The university buildings he built perpendicular to the river, as you can see, so just the short side of them is showing, but Menshikov’s house spreads out gloriously right along the shoreline. When Peter came back and saw what had been done, he was upset, of course. He threatened banishment, and worse, but the deed was done.”

The anecdote was funny, but as my father gazed across the river at the university of his youth, his Russian life was in his eyes.

We resumed our stroll down the embankment. “You want to get a beer or something?” I asked.

“No, no. I’m getting tired. We have such a long way back. But I just can’t leave. Look at this river.”

“I’m looking, Papa, I’m looking.”

I stood at the Neva and watched the Northern sun ignite the sky as it set in front of us behind Leningrad University. My eyes traveled a bit to the right to Peter and Paul’s Cathedral, where we were going to bury the Tsar tomorrow, the hazy sunrise already glimmering behind the golden spire. So there it was: the sky ablaze with sunset in front of me but just upstream sunrise, all in the same lapis lazuli Leningrad sky. It was after midnight.

In 1984 when I had gone to live in England, I sent back home a photo of the glum, half cloudy Colchester sky with the inscription, “The sky is the same all over the world.”

I was wrong. The sky wasn’t the same all over the world.

When he asked isn’t it beautiful, my father was seeing his youth, and his youth was beautiful. He closed his eyes and saw himself young and so handsome, in love with many girls, funny, brilliant, popular. Of course it was beautiful. It was mystifying. It was mystical.

Yes, I said, wanting so much to see what he saw. But what I saw was what mattered to me. The war, the water, the midnight sun. I saw the streets not of my youth but of my fiction, and that was enough for me. I hadn’t loved in Leningrad, I was a child in Leningrad. But now for the first time, I saw streets of passion, of adult drama, of lovers, of heartbreak. I saw the streets of Alexander and Tatiana.

“Tonight,” my father said, “is the last official night of white nights. Tomorrow the street lights are turned back on.”

“Well, then it’s good we are here.”

We sat down on a bench by the river. No sooner had we sat down that my father sprang back up again, and said, “We must go.”

I willed myself up. Suddenly I was old, and Papa was young.

Taking a deep drag of his cigarette, he said, “Thank you, Plinka. Thank you for making me walk the streets of my life.”

I didn’t speak for a moment. I just placed my hand on his back. “But Papa,” I finally said, “you’ve been to Leningrad three times since 1991. You must have already walked these streets.”

“Never,” he said. “I have never walked here since the day we left Russia in 1973.”

“How can that be?” I was incredulous.

“That’s how it is.”

“Not even when you came here with Mama?”

“Never.”

“What did you two do when you came here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing.” He added, “When Mama came by herself, she walked. She walked everywhere, but not me.”

No film in the camera for these irretrievable seconds of my life, along the Neva with my Papa.

“Oh, Paullina,” my father said, walking slower and slower. It was quarter to one in the morning. “What are you doing to me?”

Back in my room, I undressed, lay on the bed and prayed for sleep.

Getting up, I opened the window to hear the sounds of Leningrad, and to air out my room, because a pungently malodorous cleaning lady had been in it. A mosquito flew in. It was three in the morning.

I found myself thinking in Russian, something I hadn’t done in years. I was not only thinking in Russian, but thinking in Russian words I never knew I knew, like sorrow, and mourning, and biophysical nuclear submarine engineering.

I realized why I could never remember the bon mot in English: because my brain was Russian, and my Russian brain scrambled the signals. The neuron was Russian and I tried to send English electrical impulses across it. Every once in a while rebelled.

I thought back to this morning. What did I do? Morning, morning, morning. Ulitsa Dybenko… sunshine… the highway… Mama’s gall bladder… the scrap steel yard at Schlisselburg… the stolen metal doors of the outhouse… the bride under the Broken Ring… crème brûlée… Kvas… Ladoga… Maui… caviar… in one cloak we are huddled together… Pasternak… speak softly love and hold me close against your heart… in memory of the besieged…

You the living — Know this! We didn’t want to leave this land, and we didn’t. We stood to the death on the banks of the dark Neva, we died so you could live.

Not them. You. We died so that you could live, Paullina.

I tossed, sleeplessly, mournfully. I’m not a Cimmerian, I wanted to cry, why can’t I sleep? I thought about my Bronze Horseman and Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, and remembered cold a verse out of his poem.