In the borough of Kirov there is a movie theater, and every once in a while, on Saturdays, this movie theater shows American movies. What a treat! That particular Saturday they are showing The Wizard of Oz.
We get to the theater at noon.
The movie isn’t starting until four.
There was no way to check the movie times. Russian newspapers do not carry that kind of information; certainly there is no one to call.
My father says, “I’m sorry. Let’s go home.”
“Papa, please!”
“Plinka,” he says. “What are we going to do here for four hours?”
I shrug my shoulders. Like that is my problem.
He looks around. “There is nothing for us to do.” There really isn’t. The theater is in the middle of a concrete industrial park. There are no gardens, no trees, no playgrounds, no bars, no stores — naturally.
The sun is shining.
“Plinka!”
“Papa.”
We stay.
We stay for four hours.
Finally we are inside, and the movie starts. Imagine my rank disappointment when it is in black and white. I am crushed. If we wanted to see a black and white movie, we could have stayed home and watched another war movie on television, or gone to the theater on Sixth Soviet. I fold my arms.
Then Dorothy lands in Oz.
She opens the door of her fallen house, and through the narrow opening I see joyous, vibrant color. Oh the elation.
When I glance at my dad, he is smiling. As if he had known all along.
“Paullina, do you want to go for a walk?” It had stopped raining, but it was cool. I did not have a coat.
“Sure, Papa.” It was 11:20 at night. We had just emerged from the restaurant.
Wearing his navy nylon jacket, he glanced at my short-sleeved shirt.
“Are you going to be cold?”
“Absolutely not,” I said, hoping the light was too dim for him to see the goosebumps on my arms.
We strolled in the wet dusk down Nevsky Prospekt toward the Neva.
I was not terribly impressed by Nevsky Prospekt. Oh, I know that the famous Russian writer Nikolai Gogol wrote in 1836 that there was “nothing finer than Nevsky Prospekt,” but I wondered if he had ever been abroad. “At least not in St. Petersburg,” Gogol had added. Even then I had to disagree, having seen the Neva embankment with its glorious bridges in the fiery midnight twilight. When Gogol finally got down to the details of what precisely was so “resplendent” about Nevsky Prospekt, he mentioned “how spotlessly clean its pavements were swept.”
I’ll give him that. It was swept pretty clean.
But otherwise there was something utilitarian about it: wide and treeless, it lacked the atmosphere of Paris, Amsterdam or London. The French built boulevards like nobody else in the world. Amsterdam (like Leningrad, a city built out of the swamp) was lousy with trees and canals. (Leningrad has as many canals as Amsterdam. The difference is in the greenery.) London’s stucco houses gleam wet white — when you can glimpse them through the thousand-year-old oaks. Why had London come through the Blitz with its ancient trees still standing, while Leningrad had hardly any remaining? Had people burned the oaks for fuel? Fifth Avenue held the promise of Central Park. Even Rodeo Drive had palm trees. What did Nevsky Prospekt have to offer?
Well, for one, it offered me a walk with my father on a summer night.
A young woman, long-haired and distraught, approached my father, sticking a rose in his face and asking him if he would like to buy it for his young woman. My father stopped walking and said, “This is not my young woman. This is my daughter.” If he thought that would put her off, he was wrong. The girl stared at me, then at my father, as if she couldn’t comprehend what he had just said. Maybe she was trying to find a family resemblance. Maybe she thought he was lying. Slowly she offered the rose to him again. I kept walking, as behind me I heard my father repeat, “This is my daughter. One does not buy roses for his daughter.” The girl persisted. When I glanced back, I could tell that my dad, at a loss for words, was about to lose his temper. Our lovely long-awaited walk down Nevsky Prospekt was being ruined by a dimwitted flower girl. I ran back, stuck myself brusquely between him and the girl, and said, “No! But thank you.” Taking hold of my father’s arm, I dragged him away. She trailed behind us for half a block with a rose in her hand until we crossed Moika Canal and lost her.
Nevsky Prospekt buckled at the Neva and Palace Bridge. To the left of the bridge stood the slender-spired Admiralty building. To the right of the bridge, on the embankment, sat the Winter Palace, with its famous green stucco and Russian Baroque façade. Just behind the Winter Palace was the enormous and sprawling Palace Square — the Palace’s backyard, so to speak.
“Paullina, you’ve seen Palace Square, right? You remember it? Let’s go. This is one of the best spots in the city,” my father said. That may have been, but I was exhausted.
We turned right on a short, narrow street called Bolshaya Morskaya. We were the only ones walking. Ahead of us I saw the Arc of the General Staff Building, and through it Alexander’s Column in the middle of Palace Square. Beyond it glowed the Winter Palace.
“Well, what do you think? What do you think?”
I thought it was dark. The sky was cloudy. There was no sun. I could barely place one foot in front of the other.
“It’s incredible,” I said.
Crossing the Palace Square as if we were in Doctor Zhivago, as if Warren Beatty were about to storm the Winter Palace to help the Bolsheviks take power in Reds, we came out onto the Neva embankment.
“Look at this river,” said my father, his voice full of yearning. He lit a cigarette.
What was he yearning for? I didn’t want to ask him and ruin his moment. He was feeling things; I just wished I knew what they were.
After we passed the palace, my father stopped on a bridge over a small canal emptying into the Neva. “This is the Winter Canal Bridge. The canal separates the old Palace from the new Palace. Here, Pushkin’s Liza fell to her death, in his story The Queen of Spades. Do you remember that story?”
“Of course,” I said. “You named both your daughters for that story.”
He laughed. “That’s right. Liza and Paullina.”
We stood and stared at the rippling water. “Well, let’s walk along the Moika,” my father said. “Then we better head back. It’s late, and it’s a long way.”
“If you say so.” How many more times in my life would I have a walk like this with my dad?
“Look at the Neva, Paullina,” my father repeated. “Isn’t it so beautiful?”
The night bleached out what the eyes did not want to see. The night was God’s denial. So there was nothing to stop me from saying, “Yes.” And meaning it with all my heart.
It was after midnight and there was no one on the streets. On Moika Canal we passed Aleksandr Pushkin’s house. Pushkin is the greatest of all Russian poets; his poetry is the embodiment of the soul of the Russian people. Pushkin wrote the poem The Bronze Horseman, having been inspired by the monument to Peter the Great that Catherine the Great commissioned in 1792.
I stopped and touched the door to Pushkin’s house. “Papa, I really want to come back here another day.”
“Yes, because we have infinite time,” my father said, without stopping.
After Pushkin’s house, we crossed Griboyedov Canal and came to stand in front of the place Tsar Alexander II was slain by revolutionaries in 1881. In his memory, a glorious cathedral was built called Spas Na Krovi — Church of the Savior on Spilt Blood.
The church was closed.
“I really would like to come back here another day.”
“Paullina, you cannot do everything.”
“I don’t want to do everything,” I said. “I just want to come back here.”
The sky was darker than it had been yesterday and the clouds obscured the setting sun. But at midnight it still looked like dusk in New York on a summer
evening.
We were walking more and more slowly. By the time we got to my hotel, we were barely inching forward.
I attempted to get my father a taxi in front of Grand Hotel Europe, but the bell captain talked me out of it, saying it would cost a prohibitive amount, so much that he didn’t want to tell me how much.
“I don’t want to frighten you,” he said.
“Frighten me.”
Shaking his head, he told us to go to the corner of Mikhailovskaya and Nevsky and hail a cab from there.
“Be sure to negotiate before getting in,” he added.
We did as he said. My father walked up to an idling taxi.
“How much to Ulitsa Dybenko?”
The driver appraised my father. “A hundred rubles.”
“Done.”
“Nice negotiating,” I said.
Before he got in, he asked me to call Anatoly and Ellie and tell them he would be arriving in twenty minutes. He told me to ask one of them to go downstairs and wait for him, because he did not want to wrestle with the front door in the dark.
“Sure, I’ll call them,” I said. I forgot as soon as I got back to my room.
I remembered after I ran my bath. When I called, Ellie answered. “He’s already here.”
My father was going to be pleased with me.
Before I got into the bath, I called my grandparents in New York. Babushka picked up the phone.
“Babushka,” I said, “you can’t talk, you can’t say a word, because it’s costing me five dollars a minute to call you, but I just wanted to tell you, we found Babushka Dusia’s grave.”
My grandmother started to cry.
“You think it’s Yulia? You think Yulia is taking care of it?” she asked with hope.
I thought of our decrepit blue dacha.
“Not sure, Babushka. But the Likhobabins will take care of it now.”
I fell asleep in the bath. At one point I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I was still in the water. I had made it too hot to soothe my aching joints. When I crawled out, something was hurting, breaking me up inside.
I slept with the windows open, the light from the dawning sky streaming in.
Lake Gora-Valdaisko. I rowed across it every summer in that boat. My dad is in the water.
The room on Fifth Soviet where I grew up. I shared this room with my parents, my aunt and uncle and my cousin Yulia.
DAY THREE
Wednesday
MARBLE PALACE
I hadn’t talked to my children since I left New York. I missed them. It was hard to believe it had only been three days and not three years.
The time difference meant that when I woke up at eight in the morning, it was eleven in the evening in Dallas, and the kids were sleeping. When I came home at one in the morning, it was four in the afternoon Dallas time, and the kids were napping.
When I told my grandmother that it was costing me five dollars a minute, I didn’t really know. I just picked a number out of my head and said it for emphasis. In the morning I checked the rate card by the phone.
It had cost me EIGHT UNITS A MINUTE to call her.
Once I got over the initial shock, I didn’t mind the phone call to her; it was worth it. But when I called Kevin, I told him that from now on he had to call me, because otherwise the phone calls were going to put us out of our new house before our first mortgage payment was due.
It took me an hour to get ready. I was achy and slow.
For breakfast, I had my usual buffet of blini with red caviar.
Before I met up with my dad, I went to a room off the glass mezzanine, labeled Business Services, and inquired about a computer.
The helpful blonde behind the desk told me it would cost me FIFTEEN UNITS per hour. “Would you like to book the computer now?” she asked. They only had the one.
I looked around. There was no one in the room.
“Is there a need, um, to book?” I inquired.
“Oh, yes, we get quite busy. Especially if you want two hours. We can book now if you want.”
I booked for the following day at eight o’clock in the morning. When else could I sit down and write? But I felt I needed to. The few scribbled pages at the end of the night just weren’t enough. Too many things were filling up my day and my head. I didn’t want to forget any of it.
My father must have struggled with getting up himself, because he was quite late, picking me up at quarter past eleven. I waited a long time for him on the street.
He met me with our driver Viktor and another man, whose name was of course also Viktor. He was Viktor Ryazenkov, a dark, bearded, neatly dressed colleague of my father’s from Radio Liberty’s bureau in Leningrad.
When my father introduced us, he said, “Paullina, this is the infamous Viktor who forgot to tell me about the guard post on highway A-121.”
Viktor R. looked sheepish. Then he kissed my hand.
I smiled. “Viktor, do you think it could have anything to do with that nuclear reactor spill in Sosnovy Bor in 1992?”
Raising his voice, my father exclaimed, “This is six years later! Why are they letting people go the back way if they’re trying to keep outsiders from Sosnovy Bor?”
“You tell me, Papa,” I said. “I’m just asking the questions here.”
We had planned to head down to Piskarev Cemetery and the Siege of Leningrad Museum. But my father told me the first thing we had to do was go to the Marble Palace with the two Viktors to get press accreditation for the Romanov funeral on Friday.
“It won’t take but a minute,” my father said.
The words Marble Palace meant nothing to me until I walked inside and saw the wide gray marble stairs leading up to a hall on the third floor. When I saw the stairs an instant feeling rose up in my heart, an unpleasant, hazy recollection. Something had happened on these stairs.
That’s impossible, I thought. I’ve never been here before. But the emotion remained: a vague discomfort, a disturbance. I poked it a little, turned it around, and saw that it resembled fear.
Fear? Looking at the stairs was making me afraid. I couldn’t move.
I heard my father’s voice. “Paullina, let’s go, why are you always dawdling?”
Dimly an old memory relit: my young teacher had fainted here. I saw her fall down, saw her crumpled body on the marble stairs. I was so small, I didn’t understand what fainting was. I had never seen anyone faint before. I thought she was dead.
In twenty-five years I had never thought about the Marble Palace. I’d forgotten I had ever been here.
I looked at the steps again. I saw the cracked marble under my old brown shoes as I climbed the stairs in my brown uniform and white apron. Every year on January 21, my school would go to the Marble Palace to commemorate the anniversary of Lenin’s death.
We would climb the stairs and stand in the great big marble hall, listening to songs and speeches about Lenin.
The Neoclassical palace was completed in 1785, renamed the Lenin Museum during Communist rule, and after 1991 changed back to its original moniker. The Marble Palace now contained a permanent exhibition about the Romanovs. When I came with my dad, the palace was in the process of being restored. Either that or it was in chaotic disarray. Restoration and disarray look remarkably the same in Russia. The same peeling paint, the same chipped stucco, the same dirt and dust and rotted window frames. And outside in the courtyards, the same haphazard clutter.
On the third floor I caught up with my father in a vast rectangular room with forty-foot ceilings, thirty-foot windows, marble floors and marble columns. The Marble Room. It was grand yet shabby. In one corner, a crowd of people milled around a table and a bulletin board. In another corner, another confused cluster of people stood dumbly. No one was directing traffic, so at random, we joined the group on the right. After standing for five minutes, we moved to the group on the left. Five minutes later, we asked the person ahead of us what we were waiting for. He shrugged.
We asked another man. He
didn’t know either. We were all here to get an accreditation for the Romanov funeral, but no one knew the procedure.
Viktor R. went off and came back five minutes later with some information.
“We have to stand in the line to the right until we reach the table. We give them our name and then we go to the line on the left to take our photo.”
“And then?” Papa asked.
“Then we go to the third line in the middle to get our accreditation pin.” This mystical third line had not been formed yet.
We waited for ten minutes. The girl behind the table, giddy with knowledge and self-satisfaction, told us we had been standing in the wrong line. “Before we take your photo, you need to give your name to the girl over there,” she said pointing to the girl sitting directly next to her.
“Can we just give her our name now?” I said. “She is sitting right here.”
“No!” the first girl said. “You have to stand in her line. You give her your name, and she will look it up in her logbook to verify that you have filled out an accreditation application.”
My father turned to Viktor R. “Have we filled one out?” he asked, not at all sure that we had.
Viktor R. nodded. “I filled it out for all of us last week.”
Resentfully we shuffled off to stand in the other line.
“I got my press pass here yesterday,” Viktor R. said. “There was nobody here. It took fifteen minutes. Today is the deadline. That’s why everyone is here.”
“So why are you here if you already did yours yesterday?” my father asked.
“Why, to help you out, Yuri Lvovich.”
For the lack of anything to do, I read the notices on the bulletin board next to us.
“Now why,” I asked no one in particular, “couldn’t we have a small, tiny, notice regarding the procedure for accreditation? I’m not saying anyone should remove these long letters from members of the Romanov family to the media that no one besides the really bored is tempted to read. God forbid. I’m saying, right alongside the Romanov letters, couldn’t we have even a little handwritten note about what we are supposed to do?”
Six Days in Leningrad Page 13