Before I was ten, I lived in only one place, and that was our apartment on Fifth Soviet. I spent my summers in only one place, and that was Shepelevo. When my spirit can’t find any solace, that’s where I return, because it’s the only place I can call home.
I wasn’t carrying Russia with me. It was carrying me.
I struggled to settle back into my life. How lucky I was that I had one and didn’t have to make one up from scratch. In this life there was no time for feelings of raw displacement. The brass weather stripping outside my balcony door had been ruined by paint thinner, and the blower above my cooktop made a racket when it was turned on. One of the bathroom door handles broke, the garage door would not close, the Texas prairie wind blew through the gaps in my warped front door and made the cavernous formal living areas cold. I made time for these details. I didn’t make time to cook blinchiki or send Yulia her photographs, or figure out who I was. Who I was didn’t matter because the black Texas clay dirt was getting in the dog kennel when it rained and something simply had to be done about that.
I kept the leftover rubles from Russia in a cubby hole in the mud room. Finally I couldn’t stand looking at them anymore, so I sent them to Ellie and Anatoly, along with the bottle of Trésor.
It was tough for Ellie before, but now that the ruble had been devalued by half and half again, how much was going to be left for her tomatoes and her borscht and her blinchiki?
I sent Viktor’s sons their Dallas T-shirts. To get his zip code, I miscalculated the time difference backward instead of forward. I thought I was calling him at 9:00 in the morning but it turned out to be 2:00 in the morning. Big difference. Viktor’s wife must have been thrilled that some woman from America was calling her husband at that hour of the night. “Oh, but honey, she is going to send our boys T-shirts.”
One night, the television news carried a picture of a well-dressed man from Leningrad. He was in his fifties, and he was wearing a suit and tie. He lived in Leningrad, but on this particular evening, he left his job at 5:00, a job for which he had not been paid in six months, and he took a tram to the outskirts of the city. At the last stop, he got off and rode the elektrichka to a town near Leningrad called Kolpino, where he went to a local cafeteria and stood in line. Back in Leningrad he had heard that in this cafeteria in Kolpino they were serving soup. So he stood in line that evening to get some soup to bring home to his family. The picture on the news was of him standing in this line. It could have been 1941. It was agonizing to see his face.
The war was not in the past. It was everywhere you looked, just as Communism was everywhere you looked. War was the baggage we all carried with us: every heartbreak, every longing, every job, every neglect, every happiness. We all went forward into the future with the wounds of Communism on one shoulder and the wounds of war on the other. We went to our outhouse and we hoped that our cucumbers wouldn’t have bitter skins this year, that our one and only chicken wouldn’t get worms and die, because then we wouldn’t have eggs.
We hoped for perch, and we hoped that the men who came to clean the outhouse would not ask for more than a liter of vodka because a liter of vodka was all we had to pay them with. And when, upon leaving, all they asked for was what we had, we thought we were lucky.
And then with our heads bent, we went to get a loaf of bread from the lady near the metro and coming back we said, let me just walk one more time among the graves of my soldiers, my brothers. Let me bow my head and let the tears in my eyes not spill over because I don’t have a free hand to wipe them with. Maybe Yuliy Gneze and I had more in common than I realized. Maybe he walked through Piskarev every day because he too couldn’t believe he had lived, had been spared. Like me.
You’d think that Russians would be more in need than Americans of artificially induced stupor, and vodka certainly did take care of the edges. In between shots, or even during, they read books and tried to write them; they baked blueberry pies, they had children, they grew their vegetables, they caught fish, they fixed what they could and left what they couldn’t. Every once in a while someone went overseas and brought back perfume or makeup or perhaps a leather jacket. They continued to live the best they could, even if it meant going to Kolpino for some soup in your best suit.
It was only right that nothing could grow on the small square of land at Nevsky Patch. The soldiers were still crying, is this what we died for, what we stood on the dark Neva for? Is this it?
In Texas, I walk out onto my balcony. Alla goes back to the Prospekt of Five-Year-Plans. Svetlana haltingly sings “Shine, Shine, My Star” as she stands in the kitchen, crying into the bowl of ground beef for stuffed cabbage, thinking about St. Petersburg, Florida, about singing arias through the palm trees.
Ina continues to rejoice that she got two large rooms for her family. She’s in those two rooms till the end of her life, and she thanks God.
The Likhobabins go to Babushka’s grave, pulling out the weeds, putting some fresh flowers on it, and then stroll arm in arm to the Gulf of Finland, to their boat.
Yulia pulls the curtain closed over the Prospekt of Veterans, where she has lived since 1968, and goes to take care of her infant daughter, hoping that she can get the baby’s father to move in with her one day. If he does, she hopes that he’ll stick around long enough to help her bring the dacha in Shepelevo back to fighting form.
Anatoly stands on his balcony over Ulitsa Dybenko, stubs out his cigarette, and goes back inside, slowly closing the door. He sits on the couch and says, “Any more of that blueberry pie, Ellie?”
I walked out onto my balcony, thinking about the Likhobabins and their thirty-five-year-old couch. They had a thirty-five-year-old couch, but they got to smell Shepelevo every day. Did they even know what they had? What I would give to walk out on my balcony and smell Shepelevo.
Heat kills all in Texas. I breathed in the air. There was no smell.
But I am ashamed to say I like the sunshine.
I walked back inside, reminded of the words of the Russian writer Alexander Kushner: “Only those who have not paid a high price for the gentle joy of living and breathing can allow themselves feelings of melancholy, denial and lofty disdain of life.”
I had been given more than I deserved. I hoped the angels didn’t recognize that fact. Any minute now I would blink and be in Kolpino, standing in line for soup.
The doorbell chimed. It was the landscaper, wanting to know which tree I wanted him to plant in the front yard, a red oak or a live oak. I walked outside with him. It was 110°F. The prairie stretched in every direction.
“The red oak,” I said. “I like my trees deciduous. A live oak with those permanent rubber leaves just doesn’t cut it. It looks too fake. Don’t you agree?”
“Well, yeah, in the beginning,” he said. “But give it a little time and when it grows tall, a live oak looks very beautiful. Rich and green and colorful. Not at all rubbery.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, thinking about Shepelevo’s oaks standing over the neat simple grave of my great-grandmother, who gave my grandfather the last potatoes she had dug up from the fields during the blockade so he could live. “How much time do I give it?”
“Twenty-five years,” he replied.
I looked at him. I was thinking about seeing the sun set and rise on the Neva. I was thinking about 240,000 dead and their bones and their bullets on the banks of a dark river, dying for me, dying for Anatoly. We died so that you could live.
“I can’t think that far ahead,” I said. “I’ll take the red oak. The leaves will turn beautiful in the fall, right?”
“Right,” he said. “Now, what about your winter flowers? We’ll plant some pansies? They’re very hearty, will withstand any kind of weather. Even with severe frost, they’ll die down a bit, and then as soon as it thaws, they’ll come back more vibrant than ever. How would yellow pansies be?”
I am thinking about my father, who learned English in the Gulag to get us out, to get us to America, so that I could stand in front of my st
ucco house in Texas, smile and say, “Yes. Yellow pansies would be very nice in the winter.”
My father by his favorite river, July 1998.
AFTERWORD
It has been seventeen years since I wrote the book you’ve just read. At the time, I had been a published author for four years. I had written only three books. I was supposed to be writing a fourth, but instead — there was Six Days in Leningrad.
I had chided myself for taking the time — to write, to record, to set it down. Then I spent writing time I didn’t have after the trip to make it into a real book.
I wrote it, but I didn’t have a publisher who wanted to publish it. Quite the opposite. I had a deadline for a novel I had barely started, a novel I kept delaying by my endless procrastinations. I needed to do more research, I needed to read more books. I needed prescription glasses, I needed to take notes, to interview more people, to go to New York again, to talk to my grandparents. I needed to go to Russia. I needed to get over my fear of the material and what it represented to me, my life, and my fledgling career as an author. And afterward, if all that weren’t enough, I needed nearly a full year to write a book about going to Russia that no one cared about and no one had asked for. The book I had been delaying by all these various means was The Bronze Horseman.
I had hoped that The Bronze Horseman would convey my eternal struggle with loving my mother country and coming to terms with my Russian self, and yet loving my adopted country and coming to terms with my American self. I had hoped that a story of fiction could convey my sorrow at leaving behind the people I loved, the people who have never known what it is like to live in the land of plenty, the land of five thousand square foot homes and built-in heated swimming pools and restaurants and stadium seating movie theaters and malls and valet parking and beautiful cars and expensive shoes.
I justified writing this book by pretending that writing it would help me get into the soul of Leningrad during a war I had not lived through. I pretended it would help me to become part of the story I had not been part of. But it was a ruse. Six Days in Leningrad was its own means and its own end. As I lived it, and as I spent a year writing it, all I hoped and wished and prayed for was that I would be able to find the words to express the profound things I had felt during July 1998, to reflect on my subsequently transformed life.
It takes a Herculean effort to leave behind the life you know and hurl your family who speak no English to another country to begin anew. It takes something extraordinary to make that happen. In the case of my father, that extraordinary thing was an unshakeable faith in America. In the case of Alexander in The Bronze Horseman, that extraordinary thing was love.
In 1999 when I finished The Bronze Horseman, I told my agent that it was the last book I would ever write. I had left every word I knew and every feeling I felt on the page. Nervously she tittered. She said she didn’t believe me. “The last book I will ever write,” I repeated. “That’s the truth.”
But it wasn’t the truth. I wrote Six Days in Leningrad in 1998–99, The Bronze Horseman in 1999, The Bridge to Holy Cross (the alternate universe version) in 2000 and the screenplay for The Bronze Horseman also in 2000. I wrote The Bridge to Holy Cross (published version) in 2001 and The Queen of Lake Ilmen in 2002. The Girl in Times Square, much of it to do with my mother and father’s time on Maui, came in 2003. I wrote The Summer Garden in 2004–05, the cookbook Tatiana’s Table in 2008, Children of Liberty in 2011–12, Bellagrand in 2013, and Lone Star in 2014. Altogether that is over a million and a half words that flowed out of the six days I spent with my father. As in Pushkin’s eponymous poem, indeed that horseman had come to life in Leningrad and has never stopped chasing me since.
In 2001 I had a child whom I named Tatiana. As she says to her friends when they ooh and ahh, aww, Tania, your mom named a character in her book after you, isn’t that special, “Oh no,” my Tania says. “You have it wrong. She named me after a character in her book.”
We left our halcyon life in Texas and now live more modestly in a seaside town in New York. The children — four of them now, not three — twenty-eight, twenty-one, nineteen and fourteen are growing, growing, grown . . .
But not gone, she adds with a smile.
St. Petersburg underwent a major renovation to prepare for the tricentennial celebration of the city’s birth in 2003. The old rusted tram tracks were pulled up, roads were repaved, buildings painted, new windows installed, the domes as well as the crosses re-gilded. There are new Western stops on Nevsky Prospekt, there’s a Zara and a Starbucks. There are many more cars on the road. Yet, despite these improvements, my building on Fifth Soviet away from the center of town is still falling apart, seventeen years later, the concrete foundation still crumbling, the façade unpainted, the windows rotting. However, the road on Fifth Soviet has been repaved.
These six days is the only time in the last forty-two years I’ve been back to the place of my birth.
My grandfather died in 2007 at ninety-nine, three months before his centennial birthday. My grandmother died two years later in 2009. She was ninety-seven.
Radik Tikhomirov died of pancreatic cancer in August 2005. He was sixty-seven.
Lida lives. Ellie lives. Anatoly lives. Yulia lives — in the same apartment with her two now-grown children.
After my father retired, he joined my mother in Hawaii. Their spell on Maui was depressingly brief. They never did hop on a plane and fly three hours to San Francisco and travel the United States. They never did visit me in Texas. They came back stateside less than a year later in 1999, and settled in the southernmost corner of western North Carolina, where they lived alone and unhappily until my mother died in 2010.
A month after we buried her, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had been sick for a long while, sick but undiagnosed. He had lost all his weight and stopped eating, and couldn’t fetch and carry like he used to, or cook for my mother anymore, or fish in the lake. The lake lost its water, and the fish died. In January 2011, he died.
There is not a day that goes by when I don’t think of him. There is not a single thing in my life that has been made better because he is gone, not a single thing I can point to and say, well, at least there is this. Many things are significantly worse. I am worse. Yet on the pages of the book you’ve just read, my remarkable dad lives, funny, quirky, loquacious, thoughtful, sentimental, growing older, yes, but still full of energy and memory. I am so grateful that I have this chronicle of the few precious days we had spent together.
It took seventeen years to bring it into your hands. You have Shona Martyn and James Kellow at HarperCollins Australia to thank for that. Write them a note. Thank them. It should give you hope that some unlikely things are worth doing, worth waiting for, worth battling for. May 29, 2016 will have been my father’s eightieth birthday. This book arrives just in time, as a small tribute to him, and a priceless gift for me.
The four pastel prints of Leningrad I bought at the Hermitage to this day hang in gilded frames on my bedroom wall. They are the last thing I see when I go to sleep and the first thing I see when I wake up.
I am Russian. I am American. I was lucky.
I’m still lucky.
Paullina
New York
2015
My dad on Maui, June 1999.
PHOTOS SECTION
The apartment building on Fifth Soviet where I was raised.
Feast at Anatoly’s. From left, Viktor (Alla’s husband), Alla, Papa, Ellie, Anatoly, Viktor (Anatoly’s twin brother), Luba (Viktor’s wife).
Anatoly’s building, one of thousands built by Khruschev in the 1960s to improve the Soviet standard of living.
Our dacha in Shepelevo. From left, Vasily Likhobabin, Papa, me, Maria Likhobabina.
My “bedroom” in Shepelevo that was actually once a kitchen.
The Gulf of Finland in Shepelevo where Yulia and I swam every day in the summer.
The Likhobabins with my father in Shepelevo.
The
front door to our Fifth Soviet apartment building and the passageway to the interior courtyard.
Our communal kitchen, just as we left it in 1973.
The stairway in the Fifth Soviet building, unrenovated since the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Fifth Soviet corridor gives whole new meaning to the phrase “revolutionary floor tile.”
The beginning of the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga. The truck tire tracks are part of the memorial.
Yuliy Gneze standing between mass graves in Piskarev Cemetery.
What 125 grams of bread baked with sawdust and cardboard looks like.
With Papa on Catherine Canal on Lake Ladoga in Schlisselburg. Behind us is Oreshek Island, instrumental in the fight against the Germans in World War II.
Six Days in Leningrad Page 33