Six Days in Leningrad

When I woke up it was raining and cold. 55°F. Was it July or not July? Of course I had overslept.

I jumped out of the shower when the phone rang.

“We’re downstairs,” my father said.

“Um, not quite ready yet.”

“But Paullina,” he said, in his unhappy with me voice. “I thought I told you to be ready.”

“I know you told me that,” I said. “But I overslept.”

“Ellie wants to see your room,” he said without a pause. “I’ll send her up.”

“Papa, wait, what do you mean, Ellie? I’m completely naked.”

“Well, put something on,” he said and hung up.

Two minutes later there was a knock on the door. Ellie looked at me with my wet hair and no make-up and said I looked like the little Paullina from the home movie of our trip to Red Schel.

As she looked around the room, she clucked appreciatively, “Alla would’ve liked to see this.”

Yes, I thought, and my cousin Yulia too, and didn’t I promise your daughter Alla a little caviar with her blini from the breakfast buffet?

“Have you had breakfast?” I asked Ellie.

“Yes. You?”

“No, I just got up.”

“You must be hungry, poor thing.”

“I’m all right.” No time to even eat blini and caviar anymore. No time to write, to call home, to sleep, no time, no time. My last day in Leningrad. No time for anything.

As I put on my make-up, I asked Ellie if my father was tired last night.

“I don’t know if he was tired,” she said.

I said, “When he left me, he was ready to fall down.”

“I don’t know about that. We stayed up till three in the morning talking.”

I did a double-take. “You’re joking. Anatoly, too?”

“No, Anatoly was at our dacha. He came back this morning. Did you see the Romanov funeral yesterday?”

“Well, we were there, as you know,” I replied cryptically, scrunching mousse in my hair.

“Yes, of course I know. Do you have my dress? We saw the whole thing on television. Five hours of uninterrupted coverage. It was beautiful to watch. The service was incredible. Well, I don’t have to tell you. You were there.”

Ellie told me she wanted us on the way to my grandfather’s and father’s friends to stop at her dacha. Her dacha was in the village of Lisiy Nos, twenty kilometers north of Leningrad.

After the Germans attacked Russia in 1941, the Finns came down the Karelian Isthmus, stopping at Lisiy Nos on the outer city limits, and waited for Hitler to take Russia and Leningrad.

“Don’t worry, there are no Finns there now,” Ellie assured me.

“That’s good,” I said. “I still don’t know what Papa is going to say about us stopping there.” Actually, I knew very well what he was going to say about stopping there.

Slyly smiling, Ellie said, “I made you your favorite. Blinchiki.” Blinchiki are rolled-up meat crepes fried in butter. I do love them.

“Mmmm,” I said. My stomach was feeling better. I was hungry.

“If we stop at Lisiy Nos, I will fry them for you and your Papa. We could eat them with some tea.”

“Let’s talk to Papa, okay?” I said. “What’s in the bag you’re holding?”

“Oh, these are presents for you,” she said. “I brought little things for you to take back to your family.”

She took out three giant bags of Russian candy — one for each of my three children, some chocolate for Kevin, and two china cups with saucers for me.

“Ellie, thank you. But why did you do this? You didn’t have to. Why?”

She smiled. “It’s custom. To take back something of us with you. So you don’t forget us.”

“Little chance of that,” I said, hugging her.

When we got outside and I saw my father’s sour expression I thought it was lucky I wasn’t a child anymore because I was sure I wasn’t going to get any ice cream for the rest of the day.

Viktor drove. My father sat in front. I sat in the back squeezed in between Ellie and Anatoly.

Ellie mentioned to my father about our stopping in Lisiy Nos.

My father glared at Ellie as if she were mad. “Go to Lisiy Nos? For God’s sake, why, woman?”

Even Anatoly seemed to think it was a crazy idea, and he usually never sided with my father. Ellie was visibly upset. “But my blinchiki,” she said. “I don’t understand, I spent all day yesterday making them. I brought them for you because you all said you loved them. Paullina told me they were her favorite.”

“Paullina’s favorite is mushroom barley soup,” my father said. “Did you make that, too? You want to warm that up too at Lisiy Nos?”

“Ellie, you never make blinchiki for me,” Anatoly said.

“Oh, stop it,” she said. “I make you food every day.”

It went back and forth about blinchiki for a half hour.

I was amused. I wanted Ellie’s blinchiki.

Then Anatoly made the mistake of mentioning something harmless about the Karelian Isthmus, like, “Karelia is quite a nice place for a Soviet summer.”

My father burst out with, “Oh, the Soviets are all such hypocrites!”

Anatoly fell quiet.

My father said the Soviets were all aflutter when they were forced to give the Crimea back to the Ukrainians because the Crimea is the Russians’ vacation paradise, yet they didn’t want to give to Finland what was rightfully Finland’s, though to the Finns, the Karelian Isthmus is what the Crimea is to the Russians.

I wanted to point out that there was no hypocrisy, that the Russians simply and plainly didn’t like to give back any land, rightfully theirs or not, but I said nothing. It was raining and I wanted my blinchiki.

Conversation about Soviet hypocrisy and blinchiki ruled the small car in which five adults sat, two of them smoking adults. Ellie and I sat next to each other, until the beer store — a small supermarket in the middle of a wet nowhere that smelled strongly of fish, as did many places in Russia. The store smelled of fresh fish and smoked fish and salted fish and fish that was none of the above.

We bought some pastries and some bread, and some drinks. And of course beer.

When we got back in the car, Ellie had on her lap a large bag of ginger cookies and some soft meringues.

“Here. Want a cookie?” She looked sheepish, as she said it. I took a cookie, which turned out to be awesome. But I didn’t understand Ellie’s expression. I took three more cookies.

After a few minutes, Ellie softly confessed to the occupants of the car that it was a good thing we didn’t stop at Lisiy Nos because she had forgotten her blinchiki back at Ulitse Dybenko.

Amid much laughter, we imagined the scene in which we acquiesced to Ellie’s wishes and went to Lisiy Nos so that she could make us her blinchiki. To Lisiy Nos, an hour out of our way, on a day during which we already had two long and difficult stops.

For many miles we imagined loudly and repeatedly what we would have been saying had we gone to Lisiy Nos and discovered there was no blinchiki.

Anatoly said, “She never makes me blinchiki.”

To change the subject I asked my father how it had been for him in Ellie’s apartment without hot water. He told me that every morning he boiled a kettle and diluted the scalding water with cold water in a pan. “First I shave, and then I wash myself piece by piece.”

“Really?” I said. “And how is that for you?”

My father was cheerful, “I’ve discovered you can wash a whole person with one kettle of boiling water.”

“Depending on which parts you wash,” said Ellie

Whirling around, Papa barked, “Stop it, ladies and gentlemen! What’s gotten into you?”

As we drove north up the Karelian Isthmus, I was thinking as I stared out onto the gloomy misty distance that somewhere, on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, was my Shepelevo.

Now that I had seen it with adult eyes, would it ever mean the same to me again? I closed my eyes.

Kilometer 67

“How long is this trip?” I asked my father after what seemed to be about four hours in the cramped car.

“Forty-five minutes,” he replied. “Right, Viktor?”

“Right,” Said Viktor.

“Right,” I said.

After what seemed to be another few hours, I inquired again.

Apparently the trouble was we could not find the town of Orekhovo where my grandfather’s friends, the Ivanchenkos, lived. In trying to find their house, we may as well have been looking for a Corelware factory in the middle of Tunisia, or asking a blind South African for directions to Disney World.

Streets were unmarked, a common thing in Russia, houses unnumbered, roads barely paved, it was raining, people were stuporously unfriendly.

After a week-long observation, I finally concluded that Viktor loved to stop and ask for directions. It was like a hobby, a pastime to him. Like photography, or baseball. Every several hundred feet he would stop and ask.

When he was directed to go straight for two kilometers until he hit the road we were looking for, he would go straight for 250 meters and then stop and ask someone to reaffirm the directions.

He would do this every 250 meters.

Four days ago, on the way to Shepelevo, he asked a man to confirm, “Is the A-121 straight ahead, about one and half kilometers?” And the passerby — because he didn’t know, because he didn’t want to be asked, because he had no idea — said, “Dunno.”

Discomfited, Viktor could not drive further.

“Why don’t we,” I said, “just drive ahead about one and a half kilometers to see if the A-121 is indeed straight ahead. What do you say?”

Viktor tentatively proceeded to drive another 250 meters, then stopped and asked again.

Sentimentally I reminisced about getting lost twelve years ago with Kevin who was not yet my husband on the way to an amusement park in New Jersey. The map had been poorly marked, and we drove around for half an hour missing the exit to the highway, while Kevin would occasionally mutter, “We could stop and ask for directions.”

“No!”

Finally Kevin gave up and started reading a paperback.

He was a third of the way done with his stupid book before I stopped and asked for directions.

He married me anyway.

We drove down a wrong road, drove and drove, stopping and asking for directions every 250 meters. Then we turned around and came back to the highway, and asked someone at an intersection. The man told us we didn’t go far enough. So we turned around and drove back, and drove further than before, without really knowing what we were looking for.

My father and Viktor finally told me they were looking for Kilometer 67.

“What does that mean?”

“Kilometer 67. Just that,” said my father. “The Ivanchenkos live on the 67th kilometer from Leningrad.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s the directional marker we’re going by? Kilometer 67?”

“We don’t have another one.”

“I see.”

A man and a boy told Viktor we were going the wrong way, and had to go back to the highway, go through an outdoor market and down over the railroad tracks. Why we had to stop at the market, I don’t know.

But we did stop at the market, into which Anatoly up and disappeared — ostensibly to ask for directions. We sat in the car for a few minutes, wondering what to do.

Where was he? Where did he go? And why? “Don’t worry about him,” my mother said. “He always does this.”

“So why did you let him out of the car if he always does this?” I wanted to know. “And what exactly is this?”

“This. This.” My father pointed to the market. “He goes off and disappears.”

Ellie shook her head. I reached for the door handle. “So let’s go find him.”

“Sit right there,” my father said. “He’ll be back.”

“When?”

“Don’t know.”

Ellie shook her head again.

“What’s he buying?”

“How should I know?” replied Ellie in the tone of someone who did not know the man who left the car. “He doesn’t have much money, though.”

We sat — not all of us quietly. Viktor would periodically leave the car and walk over to a passerby to ask him about the street we were looking for.

Sitting in the middle of a Russian market waiting for Anatoly and watching Viktor climb in and out of the car, oh how I missed my own obstinate days of youth.

Because in Russia, though we had stopped several dozen, perhaps even several hundred times, we weren’t any wiser. How could strangers help us when nothing was marked?

Russians can barely tell you how to get to their own house. The directions my father received from the Ivanchenkos went something like this: “Go to the railroad, then turn left. No, wait, right. There will be a sign, no, wait, the sign’s been missing since after The War, just make a left, there will be two roads, I think it’s the one closest to the railroad tracks. Make that left, then drive. We’re on a street on the right. You can’t miss it.”

Feebly, my father had asked, “Will it be the only right?”

“No, there are many rights, but our street, it has the tall trees and the purple lilacs in the spring. You’ll know when you see it.”

“But it’s not spring. What’s the name of the street?”

“It doesn’t really have one. I think it used to be called Sireneva Street.” Siren is the Russian word for lilac tree.

“What’s the number of the house?”

“Seventy-four. Or forty-seven. Can’t remember. Wait, it’s three. Yes, three. But you won’t know that. The number fell off a long time ago.”

“Let me guess. After The War?”

We sat idly and waited for Anatoly to return. “Papa,” I asked, “how does mail get to these people?”

“It doesn’t,” he snapped, puffing on another cigarette. “There is no mail here.”

Viktor saw another passerby and jumped out of the car to ask for directions.

At last Anatoly returned — without any purchases. Everyone in the car yelled at him. He said he had found a local street map and now knew exactly where to go. Apparently we needed to go over the railroad tracks straight ahead and Sireneva Street would be right there.

We drove to the railroad station, half a kilometer away. Viktor stopped and asked for directions three times. No one knew where Sireneva Street was. This did not inspire us with confidence. Finally near the station we stopped in the middle of the street blocking the road and sat with the engine running and rain hammering outside.

Russians filed past us fresh from the train. Anatoly and Viktor kept getting out of the car and asking people where Sireneva Street was. No one knew. But we got plenty of dirty looks from people who had to go around our car in the rain.

Finally a man told Viktor to turn around and go back. This was precisely what Viktor wanted to hear so we turned around and went back — to the outdoor market. My father kept smoking and shaking his head. Ellie was trying not to laugh. I had to go find a bathroom — of course.

I was a little concerned the way Viktor kept tailgating, keeping barely six feet between himself and the car in front of him in the slick rain, at thirty miles an hour. Leaning forward, I said, “Viktor, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a chance to brush up on the immutable laws of physics, but the laws clearly state that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.”

Papa laughed. Viktor, sensing the joke was at his expense, slowed down ever so slightly. The outdoor market loomed ahead.

“Can we really afford Anatoly disappearing into the market again?” I asked.

After a glare in my general direction, my father said, “I see that I have to take matters into my own hands. This time I’m going with him.”

So my father, Anatoly, and Viktor — who could not keep still — set out to look for another street map. Five minutes later when they came back, my father was yelling at Anatoly and shaking his head. “The man doesn’t know how to read a map! Did you read it upside down? It was clear as daylight where the street was. We went completely the wrong way. One hundred and eighty degrees from where we were supposed to go. Mother of God, what am I going to do with these people?”

Anatoly looked sheepish and said nothing except, “I got us here, and now everyone is yelling at me.”

We drove away from the market and the railroad. Viktor stopped four times to ask directions. The last time he stopped to ask where Sireneva Street was, the man stared at Viktor briefly, then pointed directly to the left of us and said, “Right here.”

We made a left and found a green house.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” I said. “What the hell time is it?” It felt as if we had been in the car for weeks.

“Two,” said Ellie.

It had been three hours.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” my father said. “A fair word of warning. We can’t stay long. I told Radik we would be at his house by two. We’re running late.” He glared at me again. “If only you had gotten ready on time like I told you.”

“Of course,” I said. “It must be my fault it’s so late.”

They were waiting for us, my grandparents’ old friends, Nikolai and Valia Ivanchenko.

The Ivanchenkos lived in a small dacha with a large wet yard full of tall wet pines and birches. They had a vegetable garden, and a little hammock. The hammock reminded me of the one I used to play on with Yulia in Shepelevo when we were children.

Valia and her husband Nikolai were so happy we had come, I knew immediately it had been the right thing to do. Apparently though there had been some confusion. My father had originally told them we were coming four days ago on the 14th of July, so Nikolai went back to the city from the dacha and spent all day by the phone waiting for my father’s phone call. When my father didn’t call, Nikolai thought we weren’t coming. When my father did call — on the 15th July — confusion again. Nikolai thought we were going to arrive to his dacha yesterday. I wanted to tell him that we might have — had it taken us less time to find him.

To me it sounded for a moment as if they didn’t know we were coming.

Yet, when I walked inside their house, I saw that the table on the veranda was set for ten people. “Oh, no. Please,” my father said. “We can only stay for a little while.”

“Well, then, let’s hurry and eat,” Valia said.

Their dacha was very small. I don’t know where Valia and Nikolai slept but with them also lived their daughter, their daughter’s husband and their daughter’s two children, a 3-year-old boy and a shy 16-year-old girl.

“Is there an upstairs?” I asked.

“Yes, but we only have the downstairs,” said Valia. “Somebody else lives upstairs. Are you looking for something in particular?”

I had learned my lesson well and in the morning had no water, no coffee, no liquid of any kind. But feminine demands being what they are, I desperately had to use the facilities. Every three hours or else. Or else the laws of hydrophysics pertaining to liquids taking up all available space and then flowing elsewhere would instantly follow. Unlike Viktor I’ve learned to respect the laws of physics over the years.

What kind of modern woman plans a trip to Russia during the most inconvenient time of the month? The kind who says I will have mastery over my body. I will not be ruled by centuries of discomfort and subservience, I will act as a man, undaunted and free. Well, here I was. Free. Undaunted. “Toilet?” I inquired.

Valia Ivanchenko’s face struck the same expression as Svetlana’s had in Schlisselburg at the Diorama museum. As if they all knew it was going to be awful, but there was nothing they could do about it, and frankly wished I hadn’t asked.

Valia pointed to a green wood structure in her yard. In the rain, I walked across the soggy ground.

I had to hold my breath and hoped it would take me less than four minutes to do what I had to do because I absolutely could not breathe out and then in again.

The toilet in the outhouse was a wooden platform at thigh level with a hole in the middle. In Shepelevo we had one of these too, except ours was an outhouse in the house. We were so hip and with it.

What disturbed me here was not the hole in the ground which I had expected, but the brevity of time between liquid leaving my body and making a thudding, dense sound below me. I couldn’t help but look because it sounded uncomfortably close. Usually the hole in the outhouse was dug three meters in the ground.

This time it actually was close. Two feet below me stood a bucket filled with human waste.

Yet inside the house there was running water. Cold running water. I was able to wash my hands.

As Valia got lunch ready, I quietly asked Ellie why there would be nothing but a canister in the outhouse.

Ellie loudly explained that in many villages when the canister got filled up, they took it out and used the contents for fertilizer. “Oh,” I said, wondering — very silently — if feminine dressings made good fertilizer.

The Ivanchenkos’ half of the house included the veranda, where we were to be eating, a small kitchen/hallway, and one bedroom. Maybe there was another bedroom somewhere? It all was so small.

What did I mean when I said small? Small compared with what?

With my house in Texas?

With my dacha in Shepelevo?

With any other dacha I’d ever seen?

The Winter Palace?

What was I comparing it with? I was ashamed. It wasn’t small. It was their life, and they seemed happy in it.

Valia was bubbly and despite being 78, looked like a young energetic girl. Nikolai was 82 (“a baby,” my 91-year-old grandfather called him), and reminded me of my grandfather. He just sat with quiet dignity and watched everyone. Much like his 3-year-old grandson.

I gave the little boy Eugene the T-shirt I had brought him from Texas. He immediately took it, mumbled a thank you, and disappeared into his bedroom. When he emerged seconds later, the T-shirt was no longer in his hands.

Where did the boy play? I wondered. Where were his toys? Outside there was a hammock, but today was cold and raining. There was nowhere to go. He sat silently on his father’s lap. His father was about two heads shorter than his mother. They made for an odd looking couple.

Sunny and animated, Valia moved quickly, carrying large pots of food. Nikolai just sat and watched, as if he were above the fray. I saw why my grandfather liked him so much.

We had black caviar on bread with butter, beef Stroganoff, cucumbers and tomatoes. We also had hot potatoes with dill, sardines, some ham, and then coffee with unchewable stale waffle cake.

“I didn’t know you liked sardines, Paullina,” Ellie said when she saw me ladling the sardines onto my plate.

“Love ‘em.”

“I would have opened up two cans for you. We have so many. Too bad you’re leaving tomorrow.”

“It is too bad, isn’t it, Ellie?”

“Next time you come you have to stay for longer. You can stay at our dacha. Bring your whole family and stay for as long as you want.”

“Thank you.”

Nikolai said to me, “I am so glad and proud you are sitting next to me. I should be so lucky as to have a writer, a real-life novelist, sit to my left. But Paullina, your books, they’re theoretical, aren’t they? I’ve never seen one in Russian. Are there any in Russian?”

My father promised he would send Nikolai my books in Russian as soon as he returned to Prague.

Then he raised a glass of vodka to Nikolai. “I just want to say that I am so glad we came here today to see you. I remember you so well from when I was a small child, and it means so much to me…” He couldn’t finish the toast. He just downed his vodka.

Nikolai turned to his wife and said, “Is there anything for me to drink, Kotik?”

Kotik is a Russian endearment literally meaning kittycat, but the connotation is one of great tenderness, like my sweetest beloved darling. You would not say kotik to anyone you did not completely and unconditionally adore. It was inspiring to hear a husband call his wife kotik after 50 years of marriage.

After the savory food, we had tea and coffee, the stale cake and some cookies. The Russian way was to finish everything on your plate, because of The War, but I just didn’t know what to do with my stale cake. When Ellie wasn’t looking, I slipped it onto her plate. Now it was her problem.

Viktor finished the film in my camera, taking pictures of us by Nikolai’s house, outside in the cold rain. Just as I was thinking that my grandfather would love all these pictures with Nikolai and Valia, and of their house, I opened my camera wanting to load a fresh roll, thinking — erroneously — that Viktor would have rewound the film. He hadn’t. I had inadvertently exposed the film How much of it would be lost now? And what would I tell my father when he asked for photos of the Ivanchenkos in front of their green dacha?

We said our good-byes and drove to Radik’s house, also on the Karelian Isthmus but closer to the Gulf of Finland. I was afraid to ask. “Papa,” I said, “So about how long to Radik’s house from here?”

“Like I know,” he said.

“Forty-five minutes,” Viktor told me.

“Paullina, you’ll be happy,” said Ellie. “Radik’s house has a toilet inside the house. You’ll see.”

“Paullina,” Anatoly said, “I promise you that when you come back to see us in Russia, my dacha in Lisiy Nos will have a toilet that flushes. I’m working on that right now. You will have it when you come.”

My father promptly said that the key to civilization is a shower. Ellie, who never forgot anything, said, “But Yura, you just said you can wash your whole self with a kettle.”

My father grunted and fell asleep.

On the way to Radik’s dacha, Ellie talked to me only of Radik. The gist of it was: “Radik when he was young was the most handsome man you ever saw. Now he is older, you know he is nearly 60, or is 60. He has gained weight, but still. Yes, still, but not like before.”

“Before what?” I ventured.

“Before he was just, you could not stop looking at him. Well, you tell me what you think.” She stopped. “How can you not remember him?”

“I was very young,” I said. “I was nine. What did I know of handsome? I had my own father. I remember Radik’s son, though, Korney.”

Korney

Korney was born in August to my November of 1963. My mother and his mother Lida, Radik’s wife, were pregnant girlfriends together. We grew up knowing each other. My parents had only one child — me, and Korney’s parents had only one child — Korney. But in 1973, we left Russia, and they stayed behind.

And that had made all the difference.

In 1984 Korney died of acute alcoholism. He had remained Radik and Lida’s only child and when he died, they were childless. Rather than tear them apart, Korney’s death brought Lida and Radik closer together; at least that’s what Ellie told me.

Ellie told me that no one could ever understand what Radik saw in Lida, because as he is extraordinary, she is plain and apparently has always been on the heavy side.

“I don’t know if he’s ever been unfaithful to her, but I think so,” Ellie said, “because women threw themselves at Radik all his life.”

“They did, huh? All women?”

“Without exception,” she said.

We sat quietly.

“You know the famous story of Radik, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “I know no story. I don’t even know who Radik is.”

“When Marilyn Monroe was in Russia with her husband Arthur Miller, shooting a film—”

“What film?”

“I don’t know what film. Her latest film. Radik was one of the people working on the set. When Marilyn Monroe saw him, she said, ‘Oh yes! I want to act with him in my next movie.’”

So there it was. A man wanted by Marilyn Monroe. “Really?” I said. I wanted to say that Marilyn Monroe had never gone to Russia with Arthur Miller, that it was Arthur Miller’s third wife Inge Morath who had gone to Russia with him in the mid-sixties, and Inge was no actress, but a photographer, and in fact, Marilyn Monroe had been years dead by this point. But I said nothing, except, “Oh.”

“Paullina,” Ellie said, as if I hadn’t understood. “He was handsomer than Alain Delon.” As if saying Alain Delon ended the entire matter of the debate on Radik’s looks. That was a barometer that was to be understood by everybody.

“Of course, Alain Delon,” I said, smiling only slightly. Ellie with her little round face and youthful freckles was contagiously enthusiastic.

She could not stop talking about Radik. Even I, with my overwhelmed feelings of exhaustion, affection and heartache, discovered that I had room for one more emotion — curiosity.

Now the conversation I overheard my father have with Radik a few days ago on the phone made more sense to me. My father was trying to be coy and wouldn’t answer Radik’s questions directly, because I was standing next to him. All he would say was, “You’ll see for yourself on Saturday. You’ll see for yourself.”

After what Ellie just told me about Radik, I could only imagine what his question might have been.

All this in the crowded backseat of a Volkswagen, traveling on a country road, with the Gulf of Finland through the birch trees and the pines. We passed a beautiful old-style Russian, tall-spired, round domed church in Zelenogorsk. A little further north, in Ushkovo, we made a left onto an unpaved road. We didn’t ask anyone how to get to Radik’s. We just found him.

Radik

He was standing out in his front yard in the rain, waiting for us, and on his face was the biggest smile I ever saw.

He was extremely happy to see my father. They hugged, and then he came to me with open arms and said, “Plinochka, let me look at you!” After giving me a bear hug, he pulled away to look at me again, and as he scrutinized me the smile never left his face.

I didn’t remember Radik even from pictures when he was young. I didn’t have Ellie’s memories or any of my own. I only had 18 July, 1998, and on that day he was fifty-nine years old, and he was still striking. He was tall and tanned and broad-shouldered and brown-happy-eyed. He didn’t at all look like a hobbled man whose only son had tragically died. Aside from his physical presence, he had a confident manner that had obviously charmed many over the years. A well-used, smiling, casual manner that said, “I know what I am. I don’t have to even try. I’m just going to smile.” He was so happy to see me. It lifted my heart to know that despite all the things I had wanted to do on my sixth and last day, we had done the right thing by coming to visit the people who loved us.

We were still outside getting soaked when Radik’s wife Lida came down the porch steps, a huge smile on her face also. She came to me fast, hugged me tight, pulled away, and then both she and Radik stood very close with their arms around me, and Lida said to Radik, “Look at her, Papulya, isn’t she something?”

She said it, as if they had talked about me many times before, as if they had seen me before, but how could they have? What were they expecting? What were they looking forward to when they told my father they would never forgive him if he didn’t spend one sixth of our trip to St. Petersburg coming to see them at their rented dacha?

I was confounded.

Confusion reigned inside the house as well.

For one, it was chock full of people.

Ellie’s daughter Alla and her husband Viktor were there, without their kids. Anatoly’s brother Viktor and his wife Luba were there. I barely gathered my verbal skills together to grunt in their direction. And, I was still puzzling over the glance Radik and Lida exchanged as they pulled away to look at me and Lida touched my hair.

And three, the men started talking about going to the public baths.

“The what?” I said.

“The public baths,” replied Radik, as if that was explanation enough.

“Papa, are you crazy?”

“Why? Why do you say this?” he asked.

“Has anyone noticed it’s raining and cold?”

“So? In the baths it’s warm and hot.”

“And wet.”

“How far are these baths?”

“I don’t know. Radik? How far?”

“Not far. Maybe half a kilometer. I go all the time in the rain. Paullina, it’s refreshing.” He smiled. “It makes me feel young.”

“Hey, girls,” I said. “Maybe we should go swimming in the Gulf of Finland.”

“You’re welcome to do it,” exclaimed Radik. “Have you brought your bathing suit? What a pleasure it is to swim in the Gulf, am I right, Lida?”

“Yes, Papulya. But we’re not going swimming,” she said, frowning. “It is raining.”

But the men, Anatoly, Viktor, Viktor, Viktor, and Radik did indeed leave and walk half a kilometer in the cold rain, got naked, went into the steam room and beat each other with bundles of birch twigs.

Meantime us girls sat in the warm glow of a little ceramic wood-burning stove, and chatted. The first thing Lida did was take me into her bedroom to show me a picture of her son at age 20 with their family dog. Both were dead now.

She said that to me. “Both are dead now.” And sighed, showing me another picture on her desk of Korney as a child.

“He is a very good looking boy,” I said.

“Yes,” she said sadly. “He was.” And then she smacked her lips and looked upward as if to say, “Ah, life.”

Lida was coarse around the face and her features were broad, but there was an air about her that was alive and funny and natural that I instantly liked. She was a true woman — beaten by life but not defeated, and still apparently in love with her husband. Whatever it was Lida gave Radik she had given it to him for thirty-five years because he had remained steadfastly married to her.

“Lida,” I said, “I hate to ask, but do you have a bathroom?”

“Do we have a bathroom? What do you think, we live in the woods?” And she gave a hearty laugh as she took me to a room behind the kitchen. Because they did in fact live in the woods.

Maybe once upon a time Radik’s toilet was flushable. Lida didn’t tell me when, and in any case, I doubted very much the veracity of the flushable toilet story. For that you would need running water.

Lida showed me the toilet, the bucket of water next to the toilet and a small metal pot in the bucket. “You do your business, and after you’re done, you take the pot and use it as a ladle, all right? Fill it with water from the bucket and pour it into the toilet.”

Grinning, I said, “All right.”

So that’s what Ellie had meant by flushable.

The toilet paper could not be thrown away into the toilet but into a receptacle provided with a helpful note attached, “For paper.”

The look of the note suggested to me permanence.

To wash my hands I pressed on a short metal nozzle that was attached to a quart-size tank above the sink. Cold water poured on my hands.

To give credit where credit was due, the toilet paper, first existed, and second was soft. Also, the bathroom tried to smell clean. There were cleaning supplies in the bathtub, the first I’d seen all week.

I went out on the covered veranda to look at the dinner table that was set for us.

“Hungry, Plinochka?” Lida asked, carrying the wine and cognac to the table.

“Starving. And I am so happy you have marinated mushrooms. They’re my favorite.”

“I wish I had known!” exclaimed Lida. “I would have opened another jar. But I’m going to put them in front of you, and I want you to eat all of them.”

I walked into Lida’s kitchen, saw the dog on the twin bed in the kitchen, and just as I was about to go to the dog, and also to inquire about the twin bed in the kitchen, my nose got a whiff of something so wretched that I needed to get out of there instantly.

Before I could move, Ellie cornered me near the bed and the odor. I held my breath, but I didn’t want her to think I didn’t want to smell her so I exhaled. Bending me to her four foot ten inch frame, she whispered to me, “Plina, don’t laugh, but I brought my blinchiki after all.”

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” she said. “They’ll laugh me out of the house when they come back from the baths and find out.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How did you miss them the last time you looked?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie replied. “They must have fallen in the trunk behind the ginger cookies.”

“What are we going to do with these blinchiki now?”

Ellie asked Lida if she could fry the blinchiki after dinner for me to take back to my hotel.

Of course, said Lida.

The men came back, wet and flushed. Everyone was wearing their coats; everyone but Radik, who strolled in wearing just his shorts and no shirt, exposing his wet tanned body as he stood in the doorway laughing. A blurred picture could not do justice to the life Radik breathed into that small kitchen when he walked in.

Lida gazed at him with a delighted expression and laughed with him, saying he was just crazy for being half-naked in this cold. “I always come back from the baths like this,” Radik said to me. “It’s so rejuvenating.”

It was time for dinner. Radik demanded that I sit next to him, cattycorner. That’s how Radik wanted it, so that’s how it was.

I wanted to be next to my father, who sat several people away at the rectangular table. I was becoming acutely aware that after this dinner, I was going to get into the car and Viktor was going to take me back to Leningrad, and my trip with my father would be over.

We ate canned herring and tongue with horseradish.

Radik spooned the horseradish onto my plate himself. He made sure I had some tongue and some herring and all the cucumbers I wanted. Lida must have told him about my affection for marinated mushrooms, because every ten minutes, he would ladle some more on my plate, with the words, “Eat, eat.”

He poured me the cognac, glass after glass, as he made the toasts and we all drank with him.

Alla sat on the other side of me, and Lida next to Alla. Alla’s husband Viktor was next, then my father, and on the opposite side of the table from us was Ellie who watched us hawkishly, and Anatoly. Viktor and Luba sat by him. Alla tried to talk to me. She would start, “Plinochka, my daughter Marina wrote your Natasha a letter in English.” And Radik would tap on my shoulder and say, “Plinochka, a toast, I would like to say a toast.” After he would say a toast, we would drink, and then Alla would say, “Plinochka, I hope Marina wrote the letter correctly. She is learning English and she wanted to make a good impression on Natasha. I asked her if there were any mistakes, and she said no. It’s hard for me to tell.”

Radik would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Plinochka, I have a story, listen to this story.” And I would turn from Alla to him. Toast after toast after toast, anecdote after anecdote, he talked and we listened and laughed and commented. My father talked too, but less than usual. Radik ruled that table.

We ate cucumbers, tomatoes, warm boiled potatoes with dill and garlic, marinated mushrooms. I ate plenty of those.

My driver Viktor, who sat on Radik’s right, hung on to his every word and laughed loudly at every small joke Radik made. Viktor didn’t just hang on Radik’s words, he could not take his eyes off Radik. Finding this amusing, I looked at Luba who was also glued to Radik, and then at Ellie, who was also glued to Radik, and then at Lida, who was heartily eating potatoes, glued to them. Smiling I turned to Alla, who was glued to Radik, and asked her what she was planning on doing with the kids at her dacha for the rest of the summer. Before she could answer, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

Radik addressed my father, and he addressed me. Occasionally he and his wife exchanged a small remark about food. “Lidochka, this borsht is very good. Very good. Let me drink a toast to this soup,” he would say. Or she would ask, “Papulya, do you think it’s time for the stuffed peppers yet?” Papulya, a diminutive of Papa, must have been what Korney had once called his father. It was a vestige of the old days, and fourteen years later, Lida couldn’t go back to just Radik, as if calling him something other than Papulya would remind them both of something they wished to God to forget.

Alla mentioned how handsome Radik had been. I studied Radik. He shrugged with an unimpressed face. “Ah, youth,” he said.

I turned to Lida and asked her what she thought, and she said, getting up for her stuffed peppers, “You’re asking the wrong person. I’m biased.” Which I thought was an easy going response. Not sexy, not sexual, not suggestive, and not really in love, more like, “This is my life and it’s all I know.”

Viktor could not stop staring at him. Ellie never glanced at anyone else, certainly not at her husband, who sat next to her. Every time Radik cracked a joke, Viktor was the first to laugh. Sometimes Ellie beat him to it. Anatoly finally went out for a long smoke.

I went out with him to use the bathroom. As I was coming back to the dinner table, Anatoly cornered me on the veranda. “I’ve been thinking that I want to show you something,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, staring longingly at the door.

“Yes. I want you to read my novella. What do you think?”

“I’ll be happy to.”

“Your father is in it also.”

“That’s fine.”

“As a young man.”

“I’ll be glad to read about my father as a young man.”

“And as a grown man too.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“Yes, but,” he stumbled on his words and stopped.

“What is it?”

“It’s just that…” He paused again. “I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable…”

“What kind of stuff is in there?” I smiled. “Something saucy?”

“Well, I don’t know if you know this, but before Ellie and I got together your father had quite a crush on her.”

“Really?” I didn’t know that.

“Yes. How do you feel about that?”

“It’s all right,” I said, wondering how he wanted me to feel about it. He was obviously bothered by something.

“When I found out he liked her, it almost ruined our friendship. We didn’t talk for two years. He didn’t want to talk to me either.” He spoke about it as if it happened last week. The discomfort was all over his face.

“Tolya,” I said, patting him on the arm. “It’s in the past now. Ellie married you.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I wonder how your father feels about it.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. “I’m sure,” I said slowly, “that it’s in the past for him too. Has he read it?”

Shrugging, Anatoly said, “He did, or not. I don’t know. Maybe he read some of it, maybe most of it. I don’t think he read the whole thing. He didn’t seem to like it. I think it’s because of the Ellie stuff. He thought it was too personal.”

“Well, the more personal the better. Personal makes for very good drama,” I said. “I’ll be glad to read it. Now let’s go back to the table.”

Pensively looking out onto the wet yard and stepping away from me, Anatoly said, “I’ll stay here for a minute.”

I went back to the table.

Radik quickly poured me another drink, made a toast to my father’s and mother’s good health, and we drank.

Radik did not talk to Ellie once, he did not talk to Alla, or to Luba. It was as if they were not at the table. The other men, Anatoly and the three Viktors were, if possible, even more invisible.

The subject of the Russian Revolution came up. My father said, “Yes, my wife was due to give birth to Paullina on November seventh, the anniversary of the Bolshevik uprising. I told her if she gave birth on that day, I would have no choice but to leave her.” He laughed heartily. “I was only half-joking,” he added. “But my wife took me very seriously in those days, and gave birth the day before.”

“The day before what?” Radik asked, filling my cognac glass.

“The day before November seventh,” replied my father.

“Oh my God,” Radik said to me, “What day were you born?”

“Umm, November sixth.”

“No,” he said. “Can’t be. So was I.”

I had never in my life met anyone else who was born on 6 November. I studied him for a moment. “Well, well,” I said. He raised his glass and we drank to our birthdays.

“Plinka,” Radik said, smiling, “I will always think of you now on my birthday. We will have this bond because we were born on the same day.”

Sometime before the stuffed pepper was brought to the table, Radik leaned over to me and said in a quieter voice but not a whisper, “Plinka, no, but you are very beautiful.”

What could I say? I smiled politely. My father sat across the table, Radik’s wife was just one other wife away.

“Thank you.”

“You are. You are,” he said. “Do I embarrass you by talking like that?”

There was nothing I could say. “No, of course not.”

Lida served the stuffed pepper.

Radik drank a toast to the stuffed pepper.

Then Radik and Papa drank a toast to fishing together tomorrow on Birch Island.

Lida served us all, getting up, going around the table, hardly sitting down. She was lovely.

She did everything while Radik sat and drank and ate and presided. No one could fault him for that. As if anyone had ever faulted him for anything. He certainly acted like a man whom no one ever faulted.

He poured me another glass. “Radik, please,” I said. “I can’t drink any more. How many have we had?”

How many had we had? We drank to me first, then to my father, then to my mother, then to my father and me, then to the borscht, to the stuffed pepper, to our birthdays, to fishing. And to my parents’ good health. Perhaps I was leaving some toasts out.

“Please,” Radik said. “You have to drink to this one. Yura, please, you too, where is your glass?”

My father carefully poured himself half a glass.

Radik stood up. “I want to drink to my beloved friends, my old friends.” He sat down, and teared up. The way my father had teared up at Nikolai Ivanchenko’s house, and for the same reason: for the passing of time, the loss of those he loved, for sentimentality, nostalgia, love, heartache. For Russia.

Some of us needed to leave Russia to have a life, but the rest of us stayed and took our hits and went to our rented dachas. We fished and picked berries and our wives cooked our food, and we worked without getting paid, and we cried for old friends that had flown to all corners of the globe.

My father raised his glass. “We are all getting old. We have known each other forty years. Who knows when we will all be together again. Who knows if we will ever be together again. This could be the last night we are all together. Tonight I drink to my lifelong friends, Radik, Anatoly. Let’s promise to bury each other when we die.”

There was not a dry eye at the table.

“Yura?” said Radik. “Do you remember New Year’s Eve, 1971?”

My father rolled his eyes. “Do I remember New Year’s Eve, 1971. I never forget anything.”

My ears immediately pricked up. “What happened New Year’s Eve 1971?” In the chronology of my life, it was my penultimate New Year’s in Russia.

Radik said, “Plinochka, listen to this story. It’s a good story, and it’s about your father. New Year’s Eve, 1971, I took my son Korney to a pioneer camp for New Year’s school holiday week. The camp was in Tolmachevo, a hundred and one kilometers south of Leningrad.”

“So you would say that Tolmachevo was on the 101st kilometer?” I asked.

“That’s exactly what it’s called, the 101st kilometer,” said Radik. “Now listen.”

I smiled at the droll way Russians measured distance.

Radik continued. “It was about twenty degrees below zero Celsius, and I was wearing a long wool coat with an Astrakhan fur collar. As I was slowly coming back to the train station, I ran into a man in a torn, dark coat with god-awful black and injured hands. On his head he wore a shabby black hat.” Radik looked at me. “It was your Papa.”

“Yes, yes,” my father said. “My hands really were terrible looking. I hurt them.”

Radik went on. “‘Yura!’ I said. ‘What a coincidence! What are you doing here?’” Your papa told me he was in exile on the 101st kilometer, working and living in a factory that made the concrete and steel telephone posts. We hugged. He showed me his injured hands all blue from the cold. I asked him how he hurt his hands. He said he worked as a cutter of reinforced steel fittings for the concrete posts and cut himself.

“We went to a local cafeteria where they were serving three selections for dinner and some wine. After we had plenty to drink, your Papa asked if I could take him with me from Tolmachevo, so he could spend New Year’s with you and your mother. ‘Let’s try,’ I replied, and together we went to speak to his parole officer, the captain of the local militia.

“But we couldn’t go empty-handed, so first we went to a store and bought bottles of cheap wine that we put in a mesh carry bag, so that the captain could see what we had brought him.”

Lida interjected “And you should have seen Radik then, oh, my. The militia man took one look at him and stood up. Radik was so tall and his coat was so beautiful. He looked like a captain in the army.”

I glanced at Radik to gauge his reaction. He was utterly unmoved. Yes, that was me, his expression said. What of it? Can we get on with the story? I know what I am.

He continued. “Your Papa’s parole officer sat behind a desk in a dark, dirty, extremely well-heated small room, in the middle of which was an iron cylindrical wood-burning stove. The room was poorly lit which cast the officer’s expression in a pale, mournful tone. It was 31st of December and he was on duty behind an empty desk probably all night. He was not a happy man.”

“But when Radik walked in,” Lida said, “looking so handsome and tall in his coat, the man stood up.”

“Lida, wait,” said Radik. “Can I?”

Lida just smiled and waved him on. I could see most people in the room had heard the story before. Radik was telling it for me.

“So I said, ‘Hello to you,’ to the parole officer, standing before him and holding out my hand to him. In my other hand I held the bag of the cheap but delicious wine, Rubin.

“Because it was I who extended my hand to him and not vice versa, he was impressed and perceived me as someone who occupied an important post. People who come into a stranger’s office to ask for favors never do that, because they already feel themselves dependent on the stranger’s goodwill. It’s a very important psychological moment, and as a rule, the supervisor won’t even think to ask who is this self-important bird who just walked in to see him. I was counting on that, and that is what happened. I shook his hand and said to him, ‘Sit down, sit down.’ He sat down.”

Everyone laughed.

“I handed him the bag with the wine and said, ‘This is my present to you for New Year’s.’ Then I pointed to your Papa. ‘You know this man?’ The officer said, ‘Of course I know him. It’s Gendler.’

“I said, ‘Well, this man is my brother, and I have come here especially to take him home with me. He would like to spend the holidays with his family. Say five days or so. I hope you will let him go. If you want, I can leave you my passport as a guarantee of his return.’

“The parole officer opened my passport and read my last name. ‘Tikhomirov,’ he read. “Why is Gendler your brother?’

“‘Our mothers were flesh and blood sisters.’

“The captain immediately hid the bottles of wine under his desk and returned my passport to me. ‘Take him,’ he said. ‘But make sure he is back at work by January second!’

“As soon as we left the man’s office, your father and I bought some more wine for ourselves and went to wait for the steam train, on which we cheerfully rode to Leningrad, drinking wine and talking in English so that your father could get some practice in. He already knew he wanted to go to America. So — happy end,” finished Radik.

Thus my father spent New Year’s Eve 1971 with us. My mother had been happy beyond belief to see him. Her happiness was a faint memory. The only thing I clearly remembered was her saying to me, “Look how our poor Papochka hurt his hands.”

My father raised another glass of vodka and with a stricken face said, “To my old friends, still in Russia.”

“Forever in Russia,” said Radik resignedly.

Lida told a joke over tea and cognac. “A man’s wife has left him for his best friend,” she said. “Both his children have died and he lost his job. Finally he felt he had had enough, and decided to kill himself. He went to a hotel room, planning to hang himself in the bathroom. When he stood on the edge of the bathtub to tie the rope to a hook in the ceiling, he saw on top of the cabinet a hidden bottle of vodka. There was a little left at the very bottom. He took off the cap and drank what was left. “Better,” he said. “Okay, now I’m ready.” He jumped back up onto the edge of the bath, tied one end of the rope to the ceiling hook and the other to his neck. As he was about to jump and hang himself, he saw on the floor near the bath a cigarette butt. Getting down, he picked it up, found a match in his pocket, and lit the butt. Sitting down on the edge of the bath, with the noose still around his neck, he inhaled the smoke from the cigarette butt into his throat, and said, “Yesss… life is slowly returning to normal.”

And then Lida took a swig of cognac and laughed uproariously and everyone laughed with her.

“Yura, why aren’t you drinking?” Radik asked my father indignantly before we were served dessert. “Why are you drinking like a woman?”

My father, refusing more drink, said, “Forget it. I don’t want to get drunk in front of my daughter. Wait till she leaves. Wait till tomorrow.”

Radik threw back his head in laughter.

For dessert Lida made blueberry cobbler and raspberry meringue pie. Radik asked his wife to pass him some dessert. I thought, how nice, he enjoys sweets. But he spooned it all onto my plate and poured himself some cognac instead.

When I lifted the jug with the blueberry compote to pour myself a glass, Radik practically ripped it out of my hands to do it for me.

As he was enthusiastically spooning the blueberries onto my plate, some of the blueberries fell and stained my cream-colored pants. I was to be traveling back to the States in these pants the next day, so I wished he hadn’t done that.

Minutes later, Radik stood, motioning me to come with him.

The two of us got up and left the table. The rest of the guests continued to sit, everyone continued to chat and no one said anything, as if no one had noticed.

Radik took me into one of the bedrooms, the one with his son’s photo in it, and told me to sit down on the bed. Before I could ask him why, he took out something from his closet. It was a laundry stick. “This will get the blueberry out. This is the best thing for stains. It’s from the west,” he said. “You’ll see. I’ll get the stain out for you.”

He knelt down in front of me and rubbed at the blueberry on my thigh with this stain stick. After five minutes of this, he got up, left, came back with a wet rag, knelt back down and rubbed my thigh with a wet rag.

We talked about the stain stick, and about how it was supposed to remove all the blueberry, if we scrubbed hard enough. “It’s from the west,” Radik kept repeating. “You’ll see. It’ll work.”

Outside the bedroom, Viktor. Ellie, Anatoly, and Lida started to mill around, bringing dirty plates into the kitchen.

Needless to say, the blueberry did not come out but the stain did become much larger and wetter.

Radik shrugged, got up off the floor, threw the stain stick emphatically into the garbage and went to get more cognac.

Lida came to me, holding a large glass jar of marinated mushrooms. “This is for you,” she said.

“Lida, I can’t take this.”

“You can and you will.”

“Where am I going to put it?”

“In your suitcase.”

“What if the jar breaks?”

“Then carry it onto the plane.”

That opened everyone else up. Suddenly Alla out of nowhere procured gifts for me and my family. There was a letter for my daughter from her daughter written in perfect English, and there were coloring books for my young boys, and there was a LARGE box of chocolate covered prunes. Then Viktor and Luba gave me rocks to take home with me and a book of poems. Anatoly stuffed a manuscript of his novella into my coat pocket. “This is for you,” he whispered.

I wanted to cry.

I didn’t know if I wanted to cry because they had nothing and I must have seemed to them as someone who has everything, and yet here they were giving me things while I couldn’t even buy enough T-shirts for everyone. Or did I want to cry because I couldn’t tell them about my garment bag, the only piece of luggage I had brought that could not properly fit even my seven pathetic little skirts, much less chocolate covered prunes.

Anatoly hadn’t been paid in four months. They got vouchers for the apartment they couldn’t afford to live in, and because Anatoly hadn’t been paid they lived on Ellie’s pension. Her 360 rubles a month pension.

She told me she felt happy until she spent all her money and then she was miserable until the next check came. I understood that. Living check to mouth when the check did not last a month. As she fried the blinchiki for me to take home, Ellie told me Alla and Viktor were in better shape financially. They were considered middle class in Russia, whereas Ellie and Anatoly were considered poor.

And here she was, giving me gifts.

Meanwhile my father handed out my T-shirts from Texas to the few people who merited them (a list that did not include Alla’s husband Viktor).

Radik gave me his business card, and told me that if I needed anything in terms of research on the Russian book, he would be more than happy to help me. That was his gift — his business card. Radik, I decided, was more used to others giving him gifts. That was all right with me. I had bought him a T-shirt with a cactus on it from Dallas.

It was time to go, but Alla and Viktor wouldn’t let me. They kept talking about coming to visit me and my family in Texas, how we would go about it, what kind of visa they would need, who could come, what I would have to do.

Anatoly pulled on my sleeve and said, “Read it, read my novel when you can, but soon, and tell me what you think, write or call and tell me what you think, whatever it is, but tell me the truth.”

I promised him I would read it.

Ellie continued to fry the blinchiki.

Anatoly’s brother Viktor read aloud to me one of his own poems out of the poetry book he had given me.

Lida cleaned up.

Lida’s dog lay on the twin bed in the kitchen and growling bared his teeth at anyone who got within a foot of him. Since the kitchen was only 7 feet wide and there were ten of us, that was pretty much everybody. Finally the mongrel bit one of the Viktors. Lida came to the dog and in the tenderest of tones said, “Darlinkin, Vasia, what’s the matter, bunny rabbit? Too many people for you?”

Viktor rubbed his finger and stayed away from the bed.

It was nine in the evening.

I didn’t want to leave.

Eventually we walked outside and took a few pictures. A whole roll of pictures. Some with Radik, standing next to me, beaming. Some with Radik and Lida. Some with my father.

The good-byes proceeded ever so slowly: too many people to say good-bye to. When you haven’t seen your friends in twenty-five years, you are saying good-bye promising to write to call to visit soon, but you can’t help thinking that it may well be another twenty-five years before you come back, and who is going to be alive then?

Radik walked around filming with his video camera.

Everyone else was leaving too, except for my father who was staying. Lida said, “No one leaves before Plinka. She leaves first.”

Viktor and Luba wanted me to get in touch with their son who was in Princeton. I knew it was because in the Russian mind, Princeton was just over there from Dallas. A car ride away.

Several times Viktor and Alla reminded me not to forget to give my daughter their daughter’s letter.

I looked behind Alla. “What’s that?” I pointed.

She turned around. “It’s a well.”

“A what?”

“A well. Have you never seen a well?”

“In movies,” I said. “In my children’s Hansel and Gretel book.”

“There was a well in Shepelevo,” Alla said.

“Really? I don’t remember.”

“Where do you think you got your water from?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I never thought about it. Is this a working well?”

“Of course. Didn’t you notice there was no running water in the house?”

Oh yeah.

I asked them to take a picture of me by the well. Unfortunately I had used up the last of the film with the endless permutations of Paullina with him and with her and with them. And I had to give my father back his camera, anyway.

Anatoly looked at me with moist eyes as he hugged me. He loved me. All the pictures of me as a baby I have only because of Anatoly. I have a film of my parents falling in love. Anatoly is the recorder of my life.

As Ellie said good-bye to me, I could tell she wanted to ask me something.

I thanked Lida for the dinner and for the mushrooms which I was carrying along with the other gifts in a heavy plastic bag. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “You’re like our family. We feed you for life.”

There were only my father and Radik left to say good-bye to. Radik put down his video camera, waved everyone else away and opened his arms.

He hugged me and kissed me, and shaking his head without letting me go, said, “Plinka, I can’t believe it, not only are you beautiful but you smell great too.”

I said nothing. He still wasn’t letting go of me. How far that charm must have gotten him in his life.

Stepping away, I patted him gently on the chest. When I glanced at our audience, they were singularly and completely unfazed. They all knew him.

I saw Ellie’s sparkling eyes. I felt stabs of pain for Anatoly. Could he help that he was wracked with misery? Why wasn’t Radik? Anatoly still had his only child with him. Why didn’t the death of his only son hunch Radik’s shoulders and make him weak in the world? Why did he still entertain on a grand scale in his rented dacha without running water as if he were still Marilyn Monroe’s first choice?

Finally I hugged my father. He actually hugged me back. Maybe he was moved too. I could not tell with him.

I was about to get into the car, everyone was waiting for me to leave when Ellie pulled me aside. “So what do you think?” she whispered.

I played dumb. “What do I think of what?”

She lowered her whisper a notch. “Of Radik.”

I nodded. “What can I say? You’re right. He is handsome.”

“I told you,” Ellie said. I thought she might start to giggle. “He is really something, isn’t he?”

“He certainly is.”

Slowly Viktor drove away, honking. I rolled down my window, kept waving. It was gloomy and cold. I saw them waving back in the distance.

In the half-kilometer drive to the paved highway, Viktor stopped twice to ask for directions. It was a straight line to the highway, but he wanted to be sure. The second time was merely to confirm the first set of directions.

I wanted to give the blinchiki Ellie gave me to Viktor with whom I’ve spent all this time, but then I said, hey, instead let’s eat them tomorrow morning together. My flight was early and we wouldn’t have time for breakfast.

He agreed.

We drove quietly in the rain.

I was unspeakably sad. I turned away to my window, to glimpse a peek at the miraculous Gulf of Finland, but all I saw was white. The Gulf was white. The sky was white too. White gray. I didn’t see the horizon. The sky and the sea were one, the sky, the water, they were all gray, just like me.

On the way back to the hotel, Viktor expressed regret for not taking me to the Inform Bureau, a radio station that reported during The War, using a generator from a sunken ship. He said it would have been invaluable for me to see. “Oh, well,” he said. “Maybe next time?”

“Viktor, do we have time to go to Nevsky Patch?” I asked. “It’s on the way, isn’t it?”

He almost laughed. “It couldn’t be farther away from us. It’s on the southeastern shore of the Nevá. We’re up northwest.”

“We have time,” I said. “Papa’s not here.”

“Have you packed?”

It was ten at night. “Not really,” I said. Not at all, actually. “Hey, maybe next time?”

We talked about the importance of radio during The War. The radio station would get reports from the front and broadcast them daily; that’s how everyone knew what battles were being fought, “with a spin on them, of course,” said Viktor, “and a spin on who was winning.”

“Were there war lists of the dead?”

“Of course,” Viktor said.

“Wounded? Missing in action?”

“Of course.”

I fell quiet.

“So many dead,” Viktor said, “that sometimes the news didn’t get to families for a long time.”

“I’m sure.”

Viktor had treated me so well. I was grateful to him. I gave him one of the four blinchiki.

I got back to my room around eleven. It took me two and a half hours to pack one garment bag. Don’t ask.

The mushrooms were in my purse, right underneath my journal and my Siege of Leningrad book.

Last Night in Leningrad

The sponge of my heart had been filled up sometime last evening and had begun to drip.

I couldn’t remember anything. I was going back to Texas tomorrow. I remembered that.

Kevin called. “Are you looking forward to our routine?” he asked. “To Cici’s Pizza?”

I was so far from that life.

“I feel a little bit bad,” he said, “because you’re having this incredible experience, and I’m not part of it.”

“I wouldn’t describe it as incredible,” I said.

“How would you describe it?”

“It hard for me to tell you over the phone. How can I?”

“You’ll show me the pictures,” he said. “It’ll be great.”

Yes, great, I whispered, lying down, looking at my suitcase.

After we hung up, it was nearly two in the morning. I was supposed to be getting up at seven to leave Russia.

Truth was, I didn’t want to leave Russia. I didn’t want to stay in Russia, I was just afraid I was going to leave me in Russia.

“Sit on my lap,” said my grandmother, crying. “Sit, Plinochka.”

I was nine years old, nearly ten. I stayed with them on my last night in Leningrad. The next day we were flying to the new world, to a new life in America. “Babushka,” I said, “you told me I was too big to sit on your lap. You told me that two whole years ago.”

“Please sit, darling,” she said, pulling me onto herself. “The last weight is never heavy.”

I sat on her lap through the whole movie, a black and white film about The War. She tearfully kept patting my back. I did not get up.

Jumping up I put on my coat and went out. I hoped it wasn’t raining.

It wasn’t. It was cold and wet and dark, and the streetlights were on.

I walked down Nevsky Prospekt to the Neva. There was no one on the street. Occasionally a car would pass by. I remembered my father’s admonition about not going out by myself late at night but I didn’t care. I wanted to see the Neva one last time when I could imagine that it was still a shiny white night and the sun was setting down on my father’s university and rising on the final resting place of the Romanovs.

On the embankment in front of the Winter Palace, I found a damp bench and sat down. I was cold, but it was nothing compared to what I was feeling inside. Tightly I wrapped my arms around my chest and rocked back and forth. The Nevá was dark. The embankment was poorly lit.

The beginning of my trip seemed so long ago. A lifetime ago. Six days ago I was an American but with a dim memory of my Russian childhood. I had come to Russia with an academic interest. I came to do “research” for my Russian book, looking for fact and inspiration. When I left Dallas, my mind was filled with brass knobs and carpeting and handscraped floors.

It took one flight on Aeroflot to forget all that. And then I, like Dorothy in the subsequent Wizard of Oz books, went back through the wet dark tunnels, by boat and by foot, standing waist deep in cold underground water, until I was underneath the Land of Oz. But my fairytale was all cramped into one room on Fifth Soviet and into one dacha in Shepelevo, into one smell, and another, and into the sidewalk. I was embedded in the wet sidewalk of Leningrad, on the street I used to walk home with my sullen mother, on the Concert Hall concrete steps where I played as a child as the polar sun set on Grechesky Prospekt. I became a child again now — broken and patched together from the pieces into a fractured whole.

Broken, I would be returning home. I didn’t have a deeper understanding, I had lesser understanding. I didn’t have greater appreciation, I had greater shame.

I didn’t want for it all to be different. It all what? I wanted for me to be different.

I wanted for Alla to have a future. I didn’t want Anatoly to be hunched over by his life. I didn’t want Ellie to keep an empty bottle of Tressor on her nightstand.

I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t fix any of it, not even my insides.

How could so many Russias be flying inside me all at once? There was the Russia of my childhood, the nearly forgotten, small-child Russia, mute mother, absent father, Shepelevo, Fifth Soviet.

There was the Russia of my grandparents, the impoverished, war-torn Russia, full of death, Stalin, purges, soldiers, evacuation, starvation.

There was the Russia of my parents, Dzhubga in the Caucasus Mountains where they first met, before I was even a gleam, my mother and father falling in love by the Black Sea. Me and your mother, we had a great love.

There was the Russia of Anatoly, of the tenement halls and the flowers wrapped in newsprint, and the wallpaper from Europe, and the lack of hot water for three weeks in the summer.

There was the Russia of Shepelevo, of the village life, without chocolate, without clothes, without laundry or running water. Still. Ever.

There was the Russia I saw now, by turns exquisite and stupefying, the glory of the northern river emptying out into the cold Gulf waters, the colorful stucco buildings lining the river for centuries, since the days of Peter the Great, standing with dignity by the river, bent, bowed, broken, just worse for the wear, their crumbling exposed brick a testament to the ages.

There were the white nights, an astonishing act of God, and then even a more astonishing act of God, there was me, coming from Russia and ending up in Texas, on the prairie. How did I, of all people, come to be blessed by my life? Why wasn’t it Anatoly and Ellie’s life? Why wasn’t it Alla and Viktor’s? Radik and Lida’s? Didn’t they deserve it too?

Certainly if they didn’t, I didn’t.

That’s what it was. I had been given something I absolutely did not deserve. And only here in coming back did I realize what I had been freely given.

Why was I given it? What was I going to do with it now that I knew I had it?

I didn’t want to go to sleep. I didn’t want this to be my last night. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to understand, and after I understood, to feel better.

In the last Wizard of Oz book, before she goes back to Kansas, Dorothy asks the Good Witch if she will ever come back to the Land of Oz, and the Good Witch replies, no, child. You will never come back. Dorothy starts to cry. The Good Witch says, don’t worry. Soon the pain of it will fade, and the memory of it too. Eventually it will become so distant, and then it won’t even seem like yours any more. You won’t even remember you had lived through it. It will be just like a fairy tale.

It was so cold. I was shivering.

By the time I stumbled back to the hotel, and fell asleep fully dressed, it was after three in the morning — outside, inside.