Six Days in Leningrad

When I woke up at eight in the morning I was sick.

I must somehow have drunk the water yesterday. Today I took Immodium AD for the first time in my life. What was Immodium exactly? AD, did that refer to the approximate millennium the product was made? What had I drunk? Somewhere in our travels, the Neva water must have run unfiltered into me.

I realized I never did go for my two hours at the business office computer. Who had time to write?

I grimly got ready for the Romanov funeral. I couldn’t believe we were in Russia — I was in Russia on the very day of their funeral. What coincidence, it was, what irony, what destiny.

After I talked to Kevin, I put on my taupe pant suit, my taupe shoes. Threw some make-up on my face, and stumbled out to meet my father.

“Tired, Papa?” I asked. Actually, he looked fresh, shaved, and happy to see me. He was all dressed up in a dark blue suit, white shirt and tie. Viktor also wore a suit.

Before the guards let us inside the fortress grounds, we had to stand and wait behind the police barricades like voyeurs or geeky groupie fans in line for the stars at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at Oscar time.

No one knew exactly what we were waiting for. The people with press credentials like us and the people without, like the woman in front of me from Novgorod, were all standing in the same queue. We were supposed to walk through the metal detectors but there were two of them set up and no one knew which we were supposed to go through. “With invitations here, without invitations there,” the puzzled guard said, as if he himself didn’t know what that meant. What did it mean? I broke through the crowd and made my way towards the guard. “What invitations?” I started to ask, but he cut me off immediately. “Please go back to the sidewalk. Get off the road.”

I got off the road. We waited, wondering if our press credentials were going to mean squat. “Papa, what are we waiting for?”

“Damned if I know.”

Finally, the guard spoke to our wormy block of tightly packed impatient people. “Those of you with press credentials, move over here. The rest of you will not be able to get in. Unless you have an invitation.”

The woman from Novgorod in front of me, in a housecoat and unkempt hair, waved her invitation, or whatever it was at the guard, and said, “I’m here to see the Tsar. I’m here to see the Tsar.”

There was a large disorganized mob of people along the street, having turned out to catch a glimpse of I don’t know what.

We squeezed in through the metal detector at long last and walked over a short bridge and through a portico to the interior square.

Peter and Paul’s is a slender beautiful old yellow stucco church, set into a cobblestone courtyard, which was itself set into the middle of Peter and Paul’s Fortress — a tiny island on the Neva that for many years stood as the sentinel of Leningrad and then became a prison. Most fortresses in Russia became prisons. Peter and Paul, Oreshek. Like Alcatraz but not as well appointed.

The church’s canary stucco had faded, giving the courtyard square the look of ancient Rome or Marseilles.

Marseilles has a church, Notre Dame a La Garde, set on top of the highest mountain overlooking the city. That church looks like it’s from the days of Francis of Assisi, but why was it endearing to me in Marseilles yet so heart-rending to me in Leningrad?

We met Viktor Ryazenkov in the square.

“So what are we supposed to do now?” I asked.

“We wait,” he said. “It’ll start soon.”

“Will we be able to hear the funeral from here?”

“Yes, they’ve set up microphones and a television set for us,” he replied.

“Where?”

“Right there? Do you see?”

“I don’t see the television.”

“Do you see the screens?”

“Yes, but they’re not turned on.”

“Be patient. See the cameras on the crane? They’re televising who is coming inside the church, all the church proceedings and all the speeches.”

“Where is the sound coming from? There are no loudspeakers.”

“Do you see?” He pointed off into the distance. “Right there is a loudspeaker.”

I saw a solitary loudspeaker hanging from a light post. “Okay,” I said. “We wait. Is there anything to drink?”

“Not really,” my father piped in.

“Is there anywhere to sit down?”

“What’s the matter with you?” my father said. “We just got here. You just woke up.” He tutted. “You never did like standing.”

Viktor R. gave me some warm mineral water that tasted like Gatorade.

I walked around, trying to shake off the stomach blues.

The political in-fighting surrounding the burial of the Romanovs was vast and petty and multi-layered. The Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church was not attending. Yeltsin was not attending — until yesterday. A number of the Romanov descendants were not attending.

No one could let Nicholas II and his family rest even eighty years later, even in death, not the people who loved them, not the people who couldn’t care less.

They died a bad death, the worst death, yet somehow it was not suffering enough.

Were they remains or were they sacred remains? Apparently, this semantic issue is what was keeping the Archbishop from attending the funeral as he roundly condemned us all for not only letting their sacred remains be buried, but be buried in St. Petersburg.

Three hundred years of the Romanov Dynasty had been wiped out in one night, on July 17, 1918. Eighty years ago to the day. And today all pretenders to the throne are fighting with one another, and the priests are fighting with the politicians, and the politicians are making conciliatory speeches about healing the rift, about repentance, redemption.

We couldn’t see anyone going inside the actual church. Did anyone even come to the funeral?

The beginning of the end began in February, 1917, when Nicholas II abdicated his throne. Afterward he and his family lived in voluntary exile in their summer residence south of Leningrad. When the Bolsheviks took power in October, 1917, he was forced deeper into Russia, to a town called Tobolsk.

He became an insurmountable problem for the Bolsheviks, who while embroiled in a bitter civil war, were deathly afraid the enemy would use the living Nicholas as a rallying cry against Communism. The Bolsheviks moved the Romanov family to Ekaterinburg, an inconspicuous city deep in the middle of Russia where they arrived in May of 1918 and were placed under effective house arrest at Ipatiev House. Nicholas was 50, his wife Alexandra, 46, their four daughters, the Grand Duchesses, were Olga, 23, Tatiana, 21, Maria, 19, and Anastasia, 17.

Their son and former heir to the throne Tsarevich Alexei was 13. Crippled with hemophilia, his limbs and joints permanently swollen and misshapen from internal bleeding. He was unable to move around by himself. His mother sat with him in the room day and night and read to him, or slept next to him.

They lived quietly for seventy-eight days until 16 July, 1918.

At midnight on 17 July, Nicholas and Alexandra were woken up and asked to get dressed and come downstairs into the basement. They were told the Bolsheviks were afraid for the family’s safety.

Because Tsarevich was so sick, Nicholas carried his teenage son to the basement himself. Twelve people piled into a subbasement room which had one small half-window. The chief guard spent some time positioning them — ostensibly for a photograph to prove they were still alive. One of the girls asked for a chair to sit on; two chairs were brought in. The mother and the young son sat in them.

The doctor, the maid, the nurse and the cook stood behind Nicholas. The youngest duchess Anastasia held in her arms the family poodle.

Eleven more guards stepped into the thirteen-by-eleven foot room. There were now twenty-four people in it, twelve of them with weapons. The chief guard took out a piece of paper and read out loud that by the order of Lenin himself, Nicholas and his family were to be executed. Nicholas turned to his family and said, “What? What?” The chief guard quickly repeated himself, then took out his pistol and shot Nicholas in the forehead. The Empress Alexandra and her daughter Tatiana started to cross themselves but there was no time. The other guards raised their rifles and opened fire on the rest of the family. The guards had been ordered to shoot for the heart and not the head to minimize the flow of blood. Many of the guards went partially or completely deaf as they fired more than one hundred and fifty shots into the royal family.

Suddenly the guards noticed that the bullets were ricocheting off three of the girls. The frantic men were stunned to discover that the girls were still alive, the bullets unable to penetrate them. Stepping closer, the guards began to shoot at them again at point blank range, yet the girls kept moaning and trying to crawl away. The maid even grabbed one of the rifles from the guards as she edged along the wall to the door. Now hysterical, the guards turned their bayonets on her and on the duchesses. Eventually the girls stopped moving.

The massacre had taken twenty minutes.

Later in the woods after the guards undressed — and touched — the duchesses, they discovered over eighteen pounds of diamonds sewn into their breast plates that the girls wore like armor. The diamonds were responsible for the initial ricocheting of the bullets that had so frenzied the shooters.

Except for the jewels, all the personal belongings of the family and their servants were placed in a heap and burned. With axes, the bodies were hacked into pieces, doused with sulfuric acid and gasoline, and then burned in a mining shaft. The following day, the executioners came back, retrieved what was left of the bodies and buried them in another mining shaft, which was then blown up.

It had taken seventy years to locate the remains. All except the Duchess Tatiana and Tsarevich Alexis were identified.

I wandered around on the cobblestones, thinking of the Romanovs lying unburied after such a death for eighty years, unburied, uncommenced to God. But not unmourned, I thought restlessly, coming up to the backs of other press agents, photographers, writers, all straining their necks to stare at the double doors. They were very attractive doors, made of solid wood, oak maybe.

“What are we looking at?” I asked a tall thin man with a camera in front of me. I just wanted him to move out of my way a little so I could see too. He turned around, gave me a haughty look, and said, in Russian, “For the dignitaries to arrive.”

“Oh.”

Coming up to my father, I asked, “Papa, when are the Romanovs going to be carried through those doors?”

“No,” Viktor R. stepped in. “They’re already inside the church. Remember? They were carried there yesterday.”

Yesterday, the royal remains were brought by plane from Ekaterinburg where their bones had lain on a metal slab in a laboratory since their discovery a few years ago. Quietly they rode through St. Petersburg streets towards their overdue burial.

Again politics and poverty ruled. There was not enough money in the city coffers to hire limousines to carry all five of the caskets, there was only enough money for one — to carry the Tsar’s remains.

“How did the rest get to the cathedral?” I asked Viktor R. My father had walked away, disgusted with the whole thing. “By bus?”

“No, by other means,” was Viktor’s evasive answer. Maybe that meant by taxi, by lesser cars, by cars that weren’t black hearses. I couldn’t get a straight answer standing in the courtyard of Peter and Paul’s.

Two days ago, at the Laima café, when I first had heard about the Tsar’s remains traveling across Leningrad, I said, wait a minute. I had seen horses on the Palace Square, waiting patiently for an amorous couple to rent a carriage for a half hour and ride through the streets of St. Petersburg. Why couldn’t the city rent a horse for 60 UNITS an hour, get an old carriage from somewhere, attach the carriage to the horse, and have the coffins be carried in a horse carriage to Peter and Paul’s, a couple of kilometers away? Our driver, Viktor had shrugged, so did Viktor R. It’s more complicated than that, they told me. Why? Princess Diana was pulled by several horses. Why couldn’t the Romanovs be pulled by just one?

That was England, this is Russia, they said.

I understood that.

So yesterday the Tsar was driven slowly through city streets in a black stretch limo while only a few hundred people turned out to watch him pass by. We had a larger turnout for O.J. Simpson during the 1994 slow-motion charade on Interstate 5 in Los Angeles.

During the press accreditation, we had been told that the funeral service was supposed to start at eleven in the morning, but Yeltsin had changed all that. He was supposed to arrive at eleven and speak and the funeral would start at noon.

I had been standing since ten-thirty, and my back hurt and my legs too. And my stomach. I wasn’t at all in good spirits. I was in my high heels on the uneven stones and wished I could lean against something, sit somewhere.

Surprisingly, there were toilets in the yard. PortaPotties, four of them. They would be leaving when we all left. The only reason to bring them was for the dignitaries, because, though Peter and Paul’s Fortress is a national treasure, a museum, a prison, a shrine, a cathedral, there are no permanent toilets here, as if this were not a national monument, but a field in the middle of Hecksher State Park on Long Island. Which, come to think of it, has public restrooms.

The Russian choir when it started to sing had a lovely melancholy tone. I wanted to smell the church incense, but I was not inside the church, I was on the cobblestones.

The Russian choir sang beautifully. Just like in The Deer Hunter.

We were doing nothing, saying nothing. We had no role. We just stood. My father smoked more than usual. I could tell he was frustrated by this ordeal. That’s what it felt like, an ordeal. This momentous occasion, this once in a lifetime moment, thousands of journalists from the world over, piled together on the cobblestones like old trash and just as ignored. We had nothing to see, nothing to photograph. We were barricaded away from the action, by ladders and on ladders were balanced people with cameras, ten feet deep. The only truth I was witness to was the backs of the frustrated photographers and my smoking Papa.

When Yeltsin finally arrived at noon by helicopter, a fashionable hour late, he said in his introductory speech, “This is the time for repentance.”

I wished there was a question and answer session after his speech. I wanted to ask him about Ipatiev House. Yeltsin had ordered it razed in 1977 because the people in Russia were so crazed with wanting to canonize the martyred Romanovs that a trip to Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg became a pilgrimage for many Russians. Yeltsin, who had been quite an avid communist, figured if there were no Ipatiev House there would be no pilgrimage. He was wrong.

“As a human being and as President,” he continued, “I could not not be here.”

Then the microphone went dead.

We heard nothing more for the rest of the funeral. Which was only fitting because we could see nothing either. Though we were told that television screens would be provided so we could watch what was happening inside while being outside, what we got was five rows of five televisions, that’s 25 screens in all, at 13 diagonal inches a piece, all adjacent to one another, and we could have been watching reruns of I Love Lucy, or the Weather Channel for all we could see in the hazy sunlight. It was like watching a movie inside a well-lit theater, but on a tiny screen. It was as if the Russians thought, hey, if we put 25 small TVs next to each other, those press idiots will think they’re getting one big screen. And we’ll only rent one microphone, because what are the chances it’ll break?

Where were the big screens that were erected in Hyde Park for Diana’s funeral? I would have taken one screen half that size. I would have taken aeven a 13-inch screen as long as it showed a picture.

It was hot on the cobblestones.

At 12:30 p.m., Papa told me to go and stand over there to see if Yeltsin would come out the front doors. I went and dutifully stood on the steps of a little boat house next to the church. There was no Yeltsin.

My feet, my back, my stomach, all hurt in unison. A gray-haired French man in front of me had dandruff that flaked off in the breeze in my direction. I stepped away. I didn’t want to see Yeltsin that badly.

Women were dressed in too tight clothes, even career women. Especially career women. Too tight clothes that didn’t match. And they smoked. Everybody smoked.

I sat down on the boathouse steps. It was the hottest day yet, eighty and humid. What a day to be standing on cobblestones. There was no more Russian church choir music. No more Yeltsin. Just a bunch of suited up people with cameras clamoring to see the closed oak doors of a church. And women in tight clothes smoking.

That was the Romanov funeral eighty years in the making.

In The Courtyard of the Cathedral

Later Newsweek had an article on the burial of Tsar Nicholas II, and People magazine had one too. I read these articles and felt a sense of propriety about that Friday morning. I wanted to say: I was there. I was there when the Tsar was buried. I saw…

Nothing. Wait: that’s not true. I saw the courtyard. What I didn’t see was what the rest of Russia saw beautifully on television. Or what the rest of the world wrote about.

The meaning of the Romanovs to history, about the power of repentance or the virtue of forgiveness. I didn’t see any of that. I saw a courtyard, and sun, and a hurting back, and aching feet, and a sick stomach, and the backs of photographers standing on ladders, straining to photograph — to photograph what? The doors of the church? The doors that remained closed for two hours, until the governor of Krasnoyarsk, Aleksandr Lebed, walked quickly through the courtyard, microphones thrust into his face. He was wearing a suit, and he looked distinguished. I saw that much.

“Quick, quick,” my father urged. “Climb up here, take a picture of Lebed for Deduska.”

I climbed up. I couldn’t get a picture of him. By the time I balanced myself atop a divider and focused the Pentax, all I saw was his back too.

I should have realized the funeral was going to be much like the accreditation process. In literature, they call it foreshadowing.

Finally Papa said, “Paullina, have you seen enough? You want to go?”

“Yes,” I instantly said, and thank you.

In the end it was not about us. It wasn’t about Viktor, or the press, or Newsweek’s lofty musings. It was about a family being buried.

I wish we could have seen it.

We left at 1:30 PM, with the funeral still in full swing. Or not. Who could tell?

Between the Funeral and the Hermitage

We dropped off Viktor R. at Radio Liberty. While we waited for our driver Viktor to come back downstairs, my father read world weather and Yankees stats to me. (87 degrees in Honolulu; Yankees, 69-21 giving them a .751 average, one of the best records in baseball history; could one dare hope it continued?).

Viktor came back. “Where to now?”

“Viktor,” my father said, “what do you suggest?” He actually asked someone’s opinion! “It is our last day in Leningrad. Tomorrow we drive to the Karelian Isthmus. We need to make today count.” He turned to me. “Do you want to go to the Defense of Leningrad Museum? It’s near the Field of Mars.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Or do you want to go to the Hermitage?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We can also take a walk along the Neva to the Summer Garden. You can’t leave Leningrad and not see the Summer Garden.”

“Yes,” I said.

Viktor studied me briefly. “Paullina, I don’t think you should go to the Defense of Leningrad Museum.”

“No?”

“No. You’ve seen too much, you’re overwhelmed.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You have been bombarded with too much information. I can see it’s becoming hard for you to absorb it all. To process it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“The museum is overkill. You will remember only five percent of what you see. What’s the point? I suggest the Hermitage.”

“Why not both?”

“That’s the trouble, Plina,” my father said, reading the paper and half-listening. “You want to do everything.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Seeing the Hermitage in one hour,” Viktor said, “is like not seeing it at all. You’ll barely have time to pay and go up the marble staircase.”

“Plina, here’s a plan,” my father said. “We go back to your hotel, you change. Then we walk to the Hermitage, and spend a couple of hours there.”

“Three,” said Viktor. “At the very least three hours.”

“Okay, okay, three. Then we walk along the Neva to the Summer Garden, and after I will show you the courthouse where I was tried and convicted. Then we will go and have our last dinner in Leningrad. What do you think? Is that a plan?”

“Yes,” I said.

But what about Yulia? I wanted to ask. I hadn’t called her. I guess I had to forget about Yulia.

But wasn’t Yulia the only one who had kept me from feeling utterly alone? We were both only children, but when we lived in Shepelevo we lived like sisters.

Yes.

At Grand Hotel Europe I changed from my taupe suit into a black shirt, white skirt, and sandals. I looked longingly at my bed, wishing I could fall down on it and sleep until it was time to leave Russia.

We walked in the afternoon sunshine to Café Nord, where we ate smoked salmon in an open-faced sandwich. I had cream cake with bitter espresso to drink. I picked at my food. I didn’t like the espresso, didn’t like the salmon, didn’t like the bread. I was feeling glum inside and out.

In the underpass from one side of Nevsky to another, a beggar woman sat with her young infant. Another beggar woman sang Russian songs I had never heard before. Farther along, two men and a young boy played the guitar and sang.

On Nevsky Prospekt, when we crossed the street to Dom Knigi, a man came up to us. “A boat trip down the Neva, down the canals,” he said. “Very good trip. The air is fresh.”

After hearing that three times, I said, “Papa, apparently the air is fresh.”

He said he didn’t like to see Leningrad from the canals, because Leningrad is best seen from the streets. The canals are narrow and the view is poor.

“Are you feeling all right?” he suddenly asked, a remarkable question coming from my usually oblivious father.

“Great, yes, thank you,” I replied. I wasn’t about to ruin our last day together by whining about my stupid stomach and my stupid feelings.

Danaë

As we headed down Bolshaya Morskaya toward the Arc of General Stamp, we walked past the Inter-city Phone Building.

“What is that building?” I asked my father.

“It’s the Inter-city Phone Building,” he replied. “When you wanted to call another city from Leningrad, you came here.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking, how antiquated, how good to know this, how handy this information would be in my Bronze Horseman book. How provident that we were passing this ancient relic of the past. “How long ago was that?”

“Until two years ago,” replied my father.

On we went through the Triumphal Arc of General Staff, this time in daylight. Beyond that we saw the Palace Square, the Alexander Column, and the glistening green of the Winter Palace.

We stopped for a few minutes before walking through the arc and just stood. What my father was thinking I don’t know. I was thinking that I had no more place inside me for any impressions, not of beauty, not of pain, not of nostalgia. I was full up.

But the Alexander Column alone was worth some feelings. Built by Nicholas I for Alexander I who saved Russia from Napoleon, it took three years to extract the 700-ton piece of granite from the Karelian Isthmus.

As we walked past it, I touched it with my hands. It was smooth and cold.

“What a square, huh, Papa?”

“Humph,” he said, as in, well, of course, what did you expect?

But it was more than that. The French feel the same way about their Paris, and I know the Italians feel the same way about their Rome, and the British, having fought Hitler practically single-handedly from 1939 to 1941, certainly feel this way about their blitzed but still standing London.

My father and I are not French, we are not Italian, we are not British. We are Russian, and what we feel when we touch the soul of our city we don’t feel for anywhere else in the world, no matter how historic, no matter how meaningful. We feel it for Leningrad, the Calvary of Russia’s war with Hitler.

We walked on to the Hermitage.

As Kevin would say, and did, “What is the Hermitage?”

Only one of the greatest museums of the world, housed inside a palace so opulent as to defy comprehension.

“Nothing on this scale could be built today,” my father told me. The Winter Palace, the Leningrad residence of the Tsars, is an immense rectangular green stucco edifice, built around an enormous interior courtyard. The building stretches nearly a kilometer along the Neva embankment. It was built by Bartolomeo Rastrelli with lavish Baroque gusto for Elizabeth I in the late-eighteenth century, but it was Peter the Great who started the art collection in the early 1700s when he bought two paintings by Rembrandt that still hang in the Dutch Room.

Today, the Hermitage is home to a thousand years of art and collectibles, and 23 more Rembrandts.

“Can we see all of it?” I asked my father.

“Yes. It will take us nine years, and we will only be able to spend thirty seconds on each exhibit, but yes.”

“Huh,” I said slowly. “What if we spend fifteen seconds on each? Listen, some I don’t really want to see.”

“Wait till you see the doors,” my father said. “You won’t believe the doors.”

“Can we see Picasso?”

“We won’t have time. It’s already three. We’ll try. Wait till you see the doors.”

Each handcrafted, gilded 20-foot solid walnut door must have cost a million dollars and there were hundreds of them all over the palace.

We decided to limit ourselves to a couple of halls, a couple of Throne rooms, one coffin room, a little Italian art, and one Rembrandt. “Oh, and we have to see the Fabergé room,” my father said.

“I hear he makes nice eggs.”

My father glared at me as we walked up the Grand Staircase.

He led me to one of the windows in the Catherine the Great Hall on the second floor. “Come, I want to show you something. Do you know why the curtains are drawn?”

“To block out the sunlight?”

He shook his head. “I have been coming to the Hermitage for fifty years, since 1946. Today I haven’t looked outside yet, but I just want to show you that I’m right about this. What do the Americans say? They say, the devil is in the details. Look at the courtyard.”

He pulled open the curtain. Outside in the rear courtyard of the Hermitage I saw dump-trucks with garbage. Old chairs, dirt, mess, weeds, large rusted pipes The decorative lions on the windows were not gilded and restored as they were on the outside. It looked like the backyards of Shepelevo on a slightly grander scale.

“Fifty years and they still haven’t moved those pipes,” my father said. “On one side of the Great Hall, a beautiful garden. A fantastic garden built on the second floor, imagine building a garden with earth and trees on the second floor. But on the other side of the hall, this. That’s Russia for you. Nothing has changed.”

“Why don’t they clean it up?”

“Why? Why should they? They just keep the curtains drawn.”

My father quite liked Catherine II’s second floor garden, “with lilacs!” He had mentioned lilacs a few days ago also when we had passed the Field of Mars, just after he told me he cooked meat over the eternal flame. “It was spring,” he had said. “And the lilacs were blooming.”

My father is partial to lilacs and saxophonists.

In the Italian section we found a sculpture of Michaelangelo, called his “grouchy” boy (crouching boy), two Raphaels and two DaVincis.

The Fabergé exhibit had unfortunately closed an hour early, but the Gregorian Hall was quite a sight with splendid gold columns and veined marble floors.

When we had bought the tickets for the Hermitage, the sign said, if you want to take pictures, please pay now, five dollars per picture. Eight dollars to use video. Well I didn’t know how many pictures I would take. Maybe none. So I didn’t pay. But when I saw the Gregorian Hall, I knew that I had to take a picture for my Natasha to show her that this was the famous hall where Duchess Anastasia danced with her daddy in the animated film Anastasia.

No, my own daddy said. You cannot take a picture. You didn’t pay, so now you can’t.

Thinking he was joking, I turned on the camera to take one picture. My father took it out of my hands and turned it off. “I said no. I told you to buy the use of the camera. You said no. Well, now you can’t take the picture.”

“Papa,” I said, “they wanted five dollars per picture. How did I know how many pictures I wanted to take?”

“No,” he corrected me. “They said, five dollars for use of camera. You didn’t pay. Now you can’t use it.”

It seemed so absurd, standing in the middle of the immoderate Gregorian Hall, arguing. “Fine,” I said. “Wait here. I will go and buy the right to take this one picture.”

He relented, and I took the picture. And then two more. He was all right after that.

“Look at the doors,” he said. “How do you like the doors? I told you about the doors. What do you think about them?”

“The doors are spectacular, Papa,” I said. “But this whole place is something. It’s all made of gold or marble.”

In the Napoleonic Hall we found a portrait of Shepelev, one of the Russian lieutenants who served in the war of 1812 against Napoleon. My dad and I concluded it must have been the Shepelev for whom our Shepelevo was named.

We filed past Peter the Great’s throne and stopped at a solid silver casket made for Alexander Nevsky engraved with intricate sculptures of all his battles. “Wouldn’t you like to be buried in a coffin like that?” My father whispered. “I would.”

“I prefer not to have to be buried at all,” I whispered back. “But Papa,” I said, slowly, thoughtfully. “If Nevsky’s coffin is here…?”

He just looked at me and shook his head.

“I’m just saying.”

“Stop it,” he said.

In the Dutch Art section, a whole room was given over to one painting called Danaë. Finally! A Rembrandt.

Back in 1986 some rotten bastard spilled acid all over the Danaë, ruining it. The museum spent six painstaking years restoring it. Now it was behind glare-free glass.

Danaë was King Acrisius’s daughter. Because the Delphic Oracle prophesied that Danaë’s future son was going to kill Acrisius, the king, having no sense of humor about that sort of thing, had his daughter locked up in a tower of brass, which is where Remrandt painted her, lying on a bed, naked, waiting for Zeus. Sure enough, Zeus, being a god, was not going to be kept away by a flimsy tower of brass, so he broke in, and found Danaë naked. Nine months later, Danaë bore Zeus a son. She named him Perseus. Acrisius, afraid for his own life, set mother and son adrift to sea in a chest.

Zeus rescued them. Perseus upon growing up, did indeed kill his grandfather, by accident and without meaning to during a friendly game of catch. The moral of that story? As the Hindus say, do what you like because the result will be exactly the same.

As I bought some Danaë postcards, I wondered why women were always naked in the old days. No wonder they were having babies all over the place.

I found out that Russian art consisted mainly of icons but also included some dishes. My father said by way of commentary, “Your mother bought better dishes at Karlovy Vary.” (a resort in the Czech Republic.) There were Russian paintings by unknown artists, Russian swords, and some precious stones.

The Malachite room impressed me. I concluded that as a stone, the sparkling vivid green malachite is magnificent, one of the best. Could I get a kitchen counter made of it? That’s right, because that’s how I wanted to live, in a museum made of stone and gold, with rusted pipes and trash outside my gilded windows.

It was nearly five and the Hermitage was closing. Tired, my father sat while I went to get some souvenirs. I bought a book for my daughter and four pastel prints of Leningrad for the breakfast nook of my Texas house.

I wanted to buy an ornate Easter Egg with Nicholas II on it, but it was 95 UNITS, and I decided to draw the line at the egg.

We were on the way out of the Hermitage at 5:30 when Papa announced he was going to the bathroom.

“They have bathrooms here?” Really, only a quarter of a joke.

“Yes,” my father said, deadpan. “I know that for a fact, because I used to drink vodka with my buddies in the bathrooms.”

“Is that right after you cooked the shish-ke-bob in the Field of Mars?”

He looked at me as if he had no idea what the hell I was talking about.

Along the Neva

We spilled out on the granite Nevá embankment and strolled north along the river, sun on the water. Through clouds, the gilded spire of Peter and Paul’s Cathedral across from us was bathed in light. The Romanovs’ sacred remains can rest there now, in peace, the old communists having repented, having begged for forgiveness. Water, stucco buildings, whizzing cars, Winter Palace, Peter and Paul’s, Palace Bridge, the University where my father studied when he was a young man. It was all in front of us and we were flooded with Leningrad. We didn’t speak to each other.

As we walked along the embankment I wondered if at least some of these buildings besides the Winter Palace could have been restored. There was one building on the Neva that was being renovated as we walked past it. The façade overlooking the river had already been re-stuccoed and re-painted pink and yellow. All the window frames were replaced. The doors were new. The Baroque-design window molding was restored to white gleaming ornate beauty. The front of the building looked like it belonged in Kensington Gardens, a ritzy part of London. But the side of the building — well, that was another story. That belonged squarely in Russia.

My father must have read my mind, because he said, “You know, when you and Kevin and the children come back, maybe in five years, you come back to Leningrad, the whole city will look like this. It will be a different city. They will renovate it for the tercentennial celebration in 2001.”

He paused. “But it’s beautiful nonetheless, isn’t it? Look at the Neva, look at Leningrad around it.”

“Yes, Papa,” I replied quietly.

He left me to go talk to two fishermen standing with their lines in the river.

We were at the wrought iron gates of Letniy Sad or Summer Garden. I bought a vanilla ice cream (they didn’t have crème brûlée) and sat down on a bench to rest, while my father remained with the fishermen.

Letniy Sad, alongside the Fontanka canal was a breathtaking Sad, so green and alive with straight paths and majestic canopy trees, and elongated sculptures out of Aesop’s fables. Ice cream in one hand, I bought a photo postcard from a woman named Catherine.

“Where are you taking this photograph?” she asked me. “Back to Moscow?” No, I said; to Texas. She couldn’t believe it. I was happy my Russian was good enough to be thought of as a Muscovite.

One Aesop sculpture in particular impressed me. It was of Saturn devouring his own child. I had always liked that one. I used to have a postcard of Saturn and his half-chewed offspring hanging on my wall at college, a pointed reminder of the French and Russian Revolutions. It hung next to a photo of my baby sister jumping off the diving board in our American house.

My father came to the bench where I was sitting and had a drink of my water. We saw a woman in a wedding dress at the gated entrance to Letniy Sad.

“Papa, look, another bride. They’re everywhere.”

“Yes,” my father said. “The divorced ones are all in bars.”

“Why was there a bride at Lake Ladoga and now one here?”

He got up. “It’s custom. Don’t you know? Every Russian bride and groom go to a national monument on their wedding day. It’s tradition.”

“Where did you and Mama go?”

“To the beer bar.”

We walked along the Fontanka canal to City Court or Gorsud where my father was tried and convicted in three days back in 1969.

“For what, Papa?” It must have been the first time I asked him that question directly. “What were the charges against you?” My mother once told me he was arrested for writing letters. My father once confirmed he was arrested for writing a letter to the newspaper Pravda advocating rule of law. Another time he told me, “For good cause, Paullina, for good cause.” Another time he told me, “I was lucky I didn’t go away for longer, and wasn’t found out sooner.”

Today he said proudly, “For anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda with the aim of undermining Soviet power and workers rights.” Then he laughed.

I photographed him at the wrong building at first. He forgot where it was momentarily. “Paullina, I didn’t go to Gorsud by the front door if you know what I mean. They brought me in handcuffs the back way. How do I know what the building looks like?”

The streets branching from the Fontanka embankment were all deserted. Where was everyone?

We cut across to the red Mikhailovsky Palace built on the locus of Fontanka and Moika canals. I was so busy walking with my father, thinking about Gorsud tummy Romanovs hunger Leningrad Ladoga Lomonosov Shepelevo Schlisselburg that I whizzed past Mikhailovsky Palace without a glimpse at its impregnable red stucco walls inside which Paul I was assassinated by his own men in 1801 so his son could ascend to the throne.

“Take a picture of that palace,” my father said. “It’s worth it.” I trudged back, took a picture.

I saw a sign on one of the passing rusted trams cheerfully proclaiming, “Leningrad Trams! 90 Years Old!”

I wondered if the writers of that sign were aware of the irony.

Moreover, these 90 year-old trams schlepped through Leningrad on rails not embedded in concrete but seemingly suspended above ground because the low-quality concrete around the rails had disintegrated, leaving clefts in the road. You had to be careful while crossing, because your foot, heck, your whole body, could easily get stuck in the gaping hole. You’d disappear and wouldn’t be found again until more of the concrete broke off.

It was amazing — the whole city seemed untouched in 80 years. What was the Soviet government doing for nearly a century? Vacationing in the Crimea?

I say untouched, but the Soviets did build. They built the KGB building next to my father’s prison. They built hotels — obscene industrial rectangular gray concrete boxes. The hotels were the shape — and size, it seemed — of the state of Kansas. Hotel Leningrad and Hotel Moskva were perfect examples of the Stalinist-Khruschevian aesthetic architectural style — Doric Ugly. I thought they could have built one less hotel and with the concrete they saved, they could have fixed all of the potholes on the city roads so the 90-year-old trams could ride on rails fully embedded in cement.

We had nearly stopped, we were walking so slowly, by the time we entered Alexander’s Park at the back of the Church of the Spilt Blood, where we collided with a large gathering about the Romanovs. I couldn’t tell if the priest was for or against. There were many Russian words strung loosely together. I felt like I was listening with my legs. My father didn’t want to listen. He had had enough. Either that or he was hungry. It was after seven thirty in the evening and we had only eaten that little half-sandwich at Café Nord. He was tired of the whole thing.

We walked with agonizing slowness back to my hotel, where he had a shower and I explored dining possibilities.

Our Last Dinner in Leningrad

When I came back to the room, my father was standing outside in the hallway, smoking. “You know,” he said to me, “I think a shower is the key to civilization.”

Nodding, I said, “It’s not the shower, Papa. It’s running water.”

“Well, what is a shower then?”

“A perfect example of running water.”

Though we liked the menu at the European Restaurant, we settled on the Caviar Bar after we found out the elegant European had the same menu as the Caviar Bar but was 30% more expensive. So we could have gone there and paid more, but we decided not to.

In the Caviar Bar we had Russian zakuski, borscht with no meat or potatoes, beef Stroganoff (with potatoes but no noodles). Papa had Kamchatka — lobster with sauce. It was delicious. He said it was the most delicious lobster he’d ever eaten.

Thinking of Leningrad, I said, “Someday, the city will have money. Things will improve. Roads will be renovated. Buildings restored.”

My father shook his head. “It won’t matter. No matter how much money there will be, it won’t matter. Look at Stalingrad. Never was a city more destroyed by war than Stalingrad. There was a heavy machinery factory there, demolished. It was rebuilt after the war from scratch. So what did the Soviets do? They rebuilt it exactly the same. Same obsolete technology, same dated architecture. That’s just how they work. It’s a fallacy to think things would be different. They won’t be any different.”

As we were finishing up, I said, harking back to Maui, “Papa, you know, it’s the beginning of the rest of your life. It’s a very exciting time for you. You go to Maui, get your health back, settle in, see how you like it. But Papa, if you don’t like it, that’s okay too. In a year, two years, whenever, you can always sell your condo and move back to the continent and find yourself another place to live.”

He shook his head vigorously. “I am never leaving Maui.”

“Don’t say never. What if you don’t like it?”

“What’s not to like?”

“What if you get lonely?”

“I won’t. I’ll have Mama. I’m not leaving.”

My stomach pretended to be all right so long as I wasn’t eating, but as soon as we had dinner, I felt awful again. We had had a long day and all I wanted to do was get back to my room, instantly.

But my father asked if I wanted to walk with him to the monument to Catherine the Great just down Nevsky. I could not say no to my father, even though I was nearly falling down.

A few times around the statue I thought I was actually going to faint.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s wonderful,” I said. “Can we go back?”

“Tired, Paullina?”

“Tired, Papa.”

Crossing Nevsky, I lagged behind, and I saw his hand reach out behind him, just as he did when we used to go on our walks when I was little. I extended my own hand and took his. I think he had forgotten himself, how old he was, how old I was, where we were. As soon as I took his hand, he let go.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “tomorrow, we’re going to pick you up extra early because we’re going to the Karelian Isthmus. We have a very big day.”

“Oh, not like the days we’ve been having.”

“Just be ready.”

Back in my room I felt better.

Running water was great so long as it didn’t enter my mouth.

I took off my makeup.

Soon it was two in the morning again.

My Copper Penny

Kevin called. In the movie Somewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve traveled through time from 1979 back to 1912 to be with his beloved, but when he accidentally pulled out a penny from 1979, he was instantly transported back to the future, parted forever with the love of his life.

“Are you thinking of what movie you want to watch when you come back?” Kevin asked.

“I’m sorry, no.”

How far my other life was from me. I was all in my past and here in Russia in my present. There was no Texas, no yellow stucco house, no heat. There was a yellow stucco church, though. Cobblestones. Endless daylight. A river. My father.

“I’ll get back in the swing of things soon,” I said without feeling. When I hung up the phone, I thought, will I?

Outside the lights had been turned on. No more white nights.

I lay in bed and regretted not buying the Nicholas II Easter egg for $95. I would never find it again.

A fly buzzed around. When would it be it three days from now? Flies die in three days. The fly would still be alive, but I would no longer be in Russia.

Would I still be alive?

How big was the wall around our breakfast nook? Would the wall in Texas hold my four watercolors of Leningrad?

Sleep, please, merciful sleep.