Viktor looked across the lake. “That’s a long way.”
Yes, it seemed far, even then. It was about a mile across. It was far. In memory and in real life.
We left.
We walked back to Viktor’s car, climbed in, drove away.
I turned back to glance at Shepelevo. I saw the white smokestacks of the fishing factory rising above the trees. Rolling down my window, I inhaled the air one last time.
“Roll up the window, Paullina,” Viktor said. “They’re promising rain.”
I rolled up the window.
A few miles down the highway, we saw a woman by the side of the road selling blueberries. She didn’t have a sign or a stand. She was just sitting by the road with a ceramic jug. Had we been going faster, we would have missed her.
Viktor said, “Want some blueberries?”
“No,” I said.
“No,” my father said.
But then I remembered the five cherries I’d had for lunch, and the pickle by the lake. I remembered rowing my whole family across the lake to go blueberry picking.
“Yes.”
Viktor stopped the car and we approached the old woman. My father didn’t come.
“How much for the blueberries?” I asked.
“Thirty rubles.” About five dollars.
“With the jug?” I asked.
“No, the jug is mine.”
I exchanged a glance with Viktor. “So how am I supposed to take the blueberries home?” Where were the cute little baskets, the ones you saw at every farm stand in America? “I’ll give you thirty more rubles for the jug,” I said.
The old lady shook her head. She wore a kerchief over her gray hair. “I can’t.”
“Fifty more,” I said.
Sadly she shook her head. “Don’t you have a plastic bag in the car?”
“Blueberries in a plastic bag? They’ll get mushed. We’ll have blueberry jam by the time we get to Leningrad.”
“I think they’ll be all right,” Viktor said quietly.
I turned to the old lady. “A hundred rubles for the jug.”
She looked at her jug, looked at me and said, “Darling, don’t you think I want to sell you the jug? I do, I’d sell it to you. But where am I going to get another one? I won’t be able to pick any more blueberries. I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” I said. “I understand. I’m sorry.”
We found a plastic bag in the car and bought the blueberries. I put a few into a plastic cup and the rest in the plastic bag, which we stored in the trunk.
“Well,” said my father once we were back on the road. “How are they?”
I tasted them. “They’re okay,” I said. “They’re a little under-ripe.”
“They’re not under-ripe,” he said. “That’s what they taste like.”
“But they’re sour,” I said. I remembered the Shepelevo blueberries as juicy and sweet. “They don’t taste like American blueberries.”
Viktor and my father laughed. “You’re a fool,” my father said. “American blueberries are grown on a farm, not in the woods. Or they’re grown in Chile.”
We drove back to Lebyazhye, where we had turned into the main road and had dropped off the mosquito-eaten, mushroom-picking Olya, and then quaked through the potholes for ten kilometers.
Viktor said we were lucky it hadn’t rained, because then these holes would be filled to the brim with water, and passage would be really impossible.
I looked at the potholes, which at the moment, it was true, were only half full of sloshing liquid mud. I closed my eyes to rid myself of the holes. I wanted to see what image would rise up.
My childhood bed rose up. The bed near the wall with the ripped wallpaper. The little bed with a pillow and a blanket. Me lying in bed and looking out the window and seeing the sunrise. The window was open. I smelled Shepelevo.
WASHING THE CAR WITH THE GULF OF FINLAND
I sat up with a jolt. Viktor had suddenly stopped the car. We looked to be on the outskirts of Leningrad. My father was vigorously sleeping. While he slept, Viktor got out a white bucket and a brush he must have carried for such emergencies. Maybe he didn’t want his wife to know where he had been.
I rolled down the window. “Viktor, what are you doing?”
“I’m going to clean the car a little,” he replied. “It will only take fifteen minutes.”
I rolled the window back up and watched him jump over a short stone wall and walk down the rocks to the gulf. Beyond him I saw the Kronstadt naval base in the distance, in the open sea. I tried to imagine the sound of artillery as the Soviets barricaded in Kronstadt bombed their own coast for three years to prevent the Germans from taking the island. I was sitting right in the line of fire.
When Viktor returned with his bucket filled with gulf water, I rolled my window down again.
“Viktor, but didn’t you tell me it was going to rain?”
“Yeah,” he drew out. “What do they know? Often it doesn’t rain.”
I rolled the window back up.
To pass the time I wrote in my journal and stared out onto the road. Once in a while a bus would pass. No bus looked less than half a century old. The buses came in three colors: burnt yellow, dreary olive and faded maroon. The wheels had no hubcaps and rattled, not having been aligned in decades. The buses lurched. Where the paint had peeled off, they were rusty. The windows were small and rectangular: seven on one side, six on the other.
Viktor continued to fastidiously wash the windows of his vehicle. After he got behind the wheel, he said, “I couldn’t drive a car in the city that looked like that.”
I became certain he didn’t want his wife to know what he had been up to.
My father woke up. It was 6:40 in the evening.
We passed an elektrichka. Rather it passed us. It was army green and looked brand new as it sped by.
“Papa, so how come that train is new and green?”
“What do you mean how come it’s green? The Russians built a new train.”
“Huh. No new buses, though.”
“They can’t do everything at once, Paullina,” he said.
We passed some graffiti in English that read, “Punk’s not dead.” It was scrawled on a deep yellow stucco building, next to a sign that read “Magazin.” Magazin meant store. What kind of store, the sign did not specify. Just store. The building looked abandoned, yet the magazin was open.
We stopped by an ornate Russian Orthodox Church. As I got out to take a picture, the skies began to stream down. It got dark. I quickly dived back inside the car.
Pulling away from the curb, Viktor said, “See how lucky we were that the rain held off just long enough for us to get off that dirt road.”
“Yes,” I said. “But not lucky enough for it to rain before you washed your car.”
“When did you wash your car?” my father asked.
“When you were sleeping, Yuri Lvovich,” replied Viktor.
We drove a little farther, then stopped at a tall obelisk. A sign announced: “This is the farthest point of the front in defense of Leningrad during World War II, 1941–45.” I got out and walked through the rain to the stone pillar and took a picture. The Gulf of Finland was across the highway. If the rain hadn’t been falling like a curtain over the gulf, I was sure I’d be able to see Kronstadt.
We continued on, down a bleak, treeless boulevard.
“This is the Prospekt of Veterans,” said my father.
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t you remember? Yulia used to live here with her mother.”
“Shall we go and visit her?”
My father said nothing. I wanted to talk to him about Yulia and his obvious reluctance to meet up with her, but I was too exhausted.
With tired fascination I stared at the famous Kirov Wall, which surrounded the Kirov Works Factory on the southern outskirts of Leningrad. Despite war, despite siege, despite hunger, despite all the odds, for four years the Kirov Works produced tanks for the war effort. Produc
tion slowed down when the factory was bombed nearly to the ground by the Germans, whose bombers were stationed a kilometer or two away from it at Pulkovo Heights, but it never stopped. The Soviets built a new factory under the camouflage of the ravaged old one, and churned out 200 KV-60 tanks a month.
Originally, the Kirov Works were called Putilov Works. But in 1934 Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s right-hand man, was assassinated. Many say this was done on Stalin’s direct orders. Although this has never been admitted or confirmed, it was an open secret among the intelligentsia of Russia and proof in the pudding was the Soviets renaming half the city in his honor, to cover up the tracks of the head of state of a civilized country murdering his most trusted lieutenant. After the cover-up everything became Kirov this, Kirov that.
As we drove, my father told the story of how the Soviets took a big, beautiful gilded iron fence from the Winter Palace and transported it to the Kirov Works. They wanted to set it into the ground so that the workers could marvel at it and be inspired by it, but it was much too heavy. So they ditched the project, and the poor fence was abandoned.
“Why didn’t they take it back to the Winter Palace?” I asked.
“Too heavy to move.”
“But they moved it once.”
“That’s how they found out it was too heavy to move.”
“So where is it now?”
“Lying on its side somewhere, rusting.”
It was still raining when Viktor dropped us off at Grand Hotel Europe. My father told Viktor to go home, although Viktor didn’t want to leave us. I think he wanted to make sure Papa got back to Ulitsa Dybenko safely. We made plans to meet at ten the next morning.
Papa came upstairs with me to my room. “Nice room,” he said, walking around. “Is there a bathroom?”
I showed him the bathroom. “This is not a bathroom,” he said. “This is Ellie’s whole apartment.”
While he was in the bathroom, I checked my hotel voicemail messages. There was one from my three-year-old son. “Mommy . . . Mommy . . . just calling to see how you were . . .”
I sat on the bed, head bowed, and looked at my hands. Did I have time to call home? What time was it there? I tried to figure out the time difference, but an image kept intruding: Yulia and me, walking on tiptoes on the railroad ties in Shepelevo, carefully avoiding the pebbles between ties because if we stepped on them, we would lose. Lose what? Lose, that was all.
My father, meanwhile, was appraising my shoe collection, which was arranged in pairs on the carpet. “Paullina! You said you had no room in your suitcase for T-shirts for my friends, but look at all the shoes you brought!”
I looked. “What? It’s not that many,” I said. “One pair of shoes for each day I’m here.”
He shook his head disbelievingly. Damn. Now my dumb shoes would end up as a story around the dinner table with my father’s buddies.
For dinner we went to the dimly lit Caviar Bar. I didn’t want my father to worry about money, so I told him dinner was on me, a sort of belated birthday present.
Approvingly, he took out his pack of Marlboros.
“Papa, what are you doing?”
“What?” he exclaimed. “There is no smoking here?”
“Papa,” I said to him in condescending dulcet tones. “It’s a restaurant.”
When the waitress came, he asked if he could smoke. She looked at him as if he had just asked if he could eat.
“But of course,” she said in condescending dulcet tones.
All I wanted for dinner was black caviar and pelmeni. My father ordered salmon roulettes and sturgeon with onions and mushrooms.
“We’ll share, all right?” he said. “You get the caviar and pelmeni, and I’ll have the salmon roulettes and the sturgeon, and we’ll split it.”
I agreed.
His roulettes, with smoked salmon, dill sauce, shrimp and red caviar, were to die for. He allowed me one tiny bite. He didn’t even taste my poor man’s caviar.
As we ate, my father talked and I listened. I’d had plenty of practice. Both my parents are similar in this way; only the subject matter is different. They talk and I listen. I know, I know — you wouldn’t think it from meeting me, because I seem like a talker — but it’s only because I was trained by the best. Around my family, my whole life, I sat and listened.
Tonight, I was glad to let my father do the talking. I was tired. We did not talk about Shepelevo. Like not a word.
In between a double vodka and a beer chaser, my father told me stories about World War II. He tells very good stories.
He talked about Stalin’s unheeded warnings — all one hundred and ninety-four of them — to his Communist colleagues about Hitler’s planned invasion of Russia.
He talked about Hitler’s impassioned speech in response to Roosevelt’s diplomatic one, which my father said made him realize that Roosevelt was a politician but Hitler a madman. A madman who sent ten million German boys to their deaths on a point of principle.
“What was the principle, Papa?”
“The principle?” he asked, as if surprised by the question. “Why, that German supremacy was all, of course. That Aryan supremacy would be achieved at all cost.”
Then he started talking about the final solution, how it undermined Hitler’s war effort and in the end cost him the war, because so many of his resources were fed into the extermination machine.
“Instead of transporting arms and weapons and soldiers to the Eastern front, he transported Jews to Poland. It cost him the war.”
“I’m surprised,” I said, “that he didn’t build more concentration camps in Germany.”
“He built them,” my father said, “where there was least resistance.” He paused. “And the largest number of Jews.”
He spoke at length about the madness of World War I, fought over a misunderstanding over nothing, a war that was continued twenty-one years later to the cost of half of the world’s young men.
As soon as I brought up the U.S. Civil War and the casualties America had suffered in it, he lit a cigarette and changed the subject: to his impending retirement to Hawaii.
“Does it scare you, Papa, retiring?” I asked. “You’ve worked for so many years.”
“In America, Munich, and Prague, altogether twenty-five. I will have worked two months short of twenty-five years for Radio Liberty. My whole American life. Does it scare me? Well, what do you think? But —” and here he shook his head, and lit another cigarette after a long pause. “There is no other way. I have to go. Your mother won’t have it any other way.”
“She says you should work, make more money,” I said teasingly. Actually, my mother really did say that. She said, “I tell him to keep working, but all he wants to do is to leave that place. His sanity is at stake, Paullina.”
“Your mother’s sanity is at stake, Paullina,” my father said. “She needs me. So I’m going.”
After his retirement in early August we were all meeting up in New York for a couple of weeks before my parents flew out to Hawaii. I tried to convince him to drive cross-country to California instead of flying, so he could stop over in Texas and visit me, see my incredible new house.
He declined — not for the first time. His health wasn’t good, he said. There were a million other reasons why he wanted to go straight to Maui and get himself in order. Then, with renewed vigor, once he was well settled into his retirement, he and my mother would consider traveling around the mainland.
“There is so much of our beautiful country we have never seen. I can’t wait. All those western states. Your mother of course wants Las Vegas.” He rolled his eyes. “I’ll get fly-fishing in Montana, she’ll get Las Vegas. Everybody wins.”
Remembering what my mother had told me the day before I left for Russia about Maui’s red dust, I tried to prepare him.
“Maybe Hawaii is not the paradise everyone thinks it is,” I said cryptically. “Maybe there are problems you haven’t seen yet.”
“What kind of problems?” he asked
incredulously, suspiciously.
“You’ll be all alone with Mama. That’s one. When was the last time you did that?”
“In Prague.”
“And how did that turn out? Exactly. On Maui there’s also wind. Have you considered that it might be windy?”
He waved his cigarette in my face. “I’m going to make Maui my permanent home. Your mama and I are going to have a wonderful time. We don’t need anybody else.”
“What about fishing?”
“There is plenty of fish in the ocean, Paullina.”
“What about your garden?” Gardening and fishing were what my father loved best. Just like his father.
“I won’t garden. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not a young man anymore.”
“Yes,” I said. “Your own father, who does garden, is not a young man either. He just turned ninety-one.”
“Yes, well. Maybe when I turn ninety-one, I’ll garden too.”
He then proceeded to tell me, aside from ocean fishing and not gardening, what he was going to do every day on Maui. I found this to be the most amusing part of our evening discussion. Him laying out on the table a strict regimen for his and Mama’s daily life. He would get up at seven and before coffee or a cigarette he would walk down to the ocean and go for a swim. He would come back, have his coffee and cigarette and make himself and Mama a beautiful breakfast. Then he would head to the market to buy fresh fruit for lunch and something for dinner. In the afternoon, he and Mama would browse the shops and swim. He would have a short nap at four, before dinner and his sunset stroll to the ocean. In the evening they would watch baseball and movies.
But Papa, I wanted to tell him, nowhere in this daily schedule do you mention wiping red dust off the furniture.
He must have smoked fifteen cigarettes as he spoke of his plans.
For dessert I drank too-sweet tea and ate passable tiramisu. For dessert my father had another cigarette.
One Saturday when I am eight and my dad is home on weekend leave from his post-Gulag exile in Tolmachevo, he and I go out, just the two of us. It takes us a long time to get where we are going. He takes me by bus and by tram to the remotest part of Leningrad, to the borough of Kirov, past the Kirov Wall, not far from the soccer stadium where his favorite team, Zenith, plays.
Six Days in Leningrad Page 12