“Dobraye utra,” they said. Hello.
Big-breasted sentries, they watched her progress down the hall, then listened as she struggled with her key. Her room was small and musty, the bedspread retaining the sorrowful smell of sleepless humans in transit. The closet door hung by one hinge. Her window looked out on a treeless park eight floors below where people carefully side-stepped manure and ran their scruffy dogs.
Ana sat down and tried to call Niki. Static, then voices shouting back and forth. A phone rang, then it stopped; the operator said the phone was out of order.
“Then … is there any other listing for a Nikolai Volenko?”
The woman laughed and spoke in fearless English. “Is very common Russian name! Maybe two hundred of this name in Moscow.”
She lay back feeling helpless, then showered and went down to dinner, where she found the cavernous dining room closed. They had run out of “tourist” food. A guard pointed her to a market half a block away and, cautiously crossing the dog park seeded with broken glass, the staggering swoon of couples, Ana entered a crowd of wild-looking men and women.
She was in a gastronom, a people’s market, not meant for tourists, gamey with the odor of stale meat, humans reeking of sausage and unwashed flesh. Valkyries in steely white hairnets and bloodstained white coats stood behind low counters, hacking at chicken parts. They flourished their knives, shouting abuse at unruly crowds as people waved chits, grabbing up greenish bottles of kefir and small knots of potatoes.
Ana turned back to the entrance door, but in the frenzy of the crowds—expressions mean, determined—she was thrown against a counter. Her cheek slid down the belly of a hanging hare, its peltless corpse flayed blue and red. She screamed but in the general shouting no one heard. Then, in the swelter of bodies, a white-coated woman leaned over a counter and hacked at a huge, singed pig, a sunflower protruding from the moldy star of its anus. In his desperate grab for a slice of pig, a man knocked Ana down, then someone knocked him down. She lay stunned in a chaos of muddy boots.
But in the obtuse violence of the crowd someone took pity on her. One of the Valkyries mounted a box and shouted, waving her knife over her head as if preparing to aim and throw it. The crowd fell back, someone helped Ana to her feet. The white-coated woman laid down her knife and leaned over the counter, offering Ana a yogurt cup.
“Eat! Be strong like Russians!” Then she stepped back, still yelling at the crowd, and slapped a big cream cheese into shape.
Working her way back through the mob, Ana made it to the door, where someone grabbed her yogurt and thrust several kopecks in her hand. She staggered out into the sodium halo of a streetlight. She had been frightened but not mortally so, for there was something palpably alive in that crowd. Something that wanted life, not death. An enormous strength that stemmed perhaps from the memory of want.
Dizzy with hunger and fatigue, she wandered down the street and entered Last Kiss Before the Revolution Café. A dark vestibule, a cavernous dance floor, and a bar. It was empty except for a couple with shaven heads. The waitress wore exaggerated platform heels that sounded a clunky staccato as she crossed the floor. She was dark and pretty like a young, Greek boy, but when she bent close, Ana smelled the fruity breath of a diabetic.
Seeing three words on the menu she understood, she pointed and ordered.
“Borscht, shashlik, I chashka chaya.” Cabbage soup, shish kebab, and tea.
“Da.” The waitress nodded vigorously and disappeared through beaded drapes into a small, dark coffin of a kitchen.
The shaven-headed couple seemed to be licking each other’s faces. The barman studied his profile in a mirror, left, then right.
It seemed only a matter of minutes before the waitress gently nudged her. “Uzhin!” Dinner.
Ana looked down at a dingy glass of beer, a tomato from which it appeared a bite had been taken. And what looked vaguely like a plate of dog ears, long mustard-colored petals covered with singed fur.
She shook her head. “Nyet. Not what I ordered.”
“Da,” the waitress insisted. “Da!”
In that moment, she remembered Niki’s words. “In Russia, logic does not apply. Only the improbable is real.”
She sighed, picked up her fork and speared one of the furred things, hoping it was some kind of vegetable. It was like chewing rubber covered with singed fur. She gagged into her napkin, ate the tomato, slowly drank the beer, and left rubles on the table.
Walking back to her hotel, she saw a solitary window lit up in the dark and, midst a white meringue of curtains, an old pressed flower of a face. It smiled, then waved its hand, a tiny envelope of bones. Ana waved, then crossed the dog park, trying vainly to grasp this mysterious, timeless heartache of a city.
Exhausted, she undressed and sank into a sleep that seemed a series of interrupted naps. Russia was in its “White Nights” of summer when, for a week or so, the sun barely set. Night was a pinkish dusk that lasted several hours before the sun rose again. She woke and dozed fitfully, Niki’s face appearing and dissolving.
BY THE NEXT DAY PETER BEGAN TO OVERWHELM HER. A CITY OF too much exhausted beauty, too much history. She could absorb it only in sidelong glances, little sips, finding similarities to her islands.
Zora explained how rough-hewn Peter the Great had envisioned his city as a “window on Europe,” and how his successors had followed him. Aristocrats of early St. Petersburg had learned French and English, and married their children off to European nobles, hoping to absorb their dress and manners. Studying the portraits of Russian “noblemen,” Ana recalled the history of Hawaiian kings and queens, how they had copied the British to the point of adulation.
In 1882 when Kalakaua had completed construction of ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu, he had even crowned himself king with a full coronation ceremony. His successor and cousin, Queen Liliu‘okalani, a friend of England’s Queen Victoria, had dressed exactly like the queen. And like England’s queen, Liliu‘okalani had been a noble and imperious ruler, so threatening to Americans they had dethroned and imprisoned her.
As they progressed through the Hermitage, Zora expanded on Russia’s history.
“Please understand opposing forces of our geography. Always we are being pulled two different ways. Pull of Europe on western borders. Pull of Asia on eastern borders. This is making us always a little what you are calling … schizophrenic.”
Ana thought how Hawaiians, too, had been pulled in different directions. Set in the heart of the Pacific, they had always felt the ancient pull of Asia, and after being colonialized, the massive influence of the United States.
That evening at their hotel, Ana quietly took Zora aside.
“I’m trying to reach a friend in Moscow. The hotel operator says the phone is out of order. But I heard it ring! Could you please make the call for me again? Perhaps, since you speak Russian …”
The woman stared at her until her silence seemed extreme. “Sorry. I am guide only. I do not tamper in such things.”
THE NEXT DAY SHE STOOD IN A FADED PINK CATHEDRAL MIDST flickering tapers and the rich brocade vestments of an Orthodox priest lifting high in the air the ikonostasis. Beside him acolytes swung urns of smoky incense. Engulfed in a sea of babushki, Ana listened to the soaring of old Slavonic chants as hundreds of voices sang out in quavering trebles archaic words of adoration.
After seven decades of silence they were allowed to worship openly again, to fill a human need for beauty and pageantry, a sense of the miraculous. A need that had proven indestructible in most Russian hearts. She closed her eyes, dizzy and nauseous from the suffocating odor of incense, acrid candle wax, the oils of tired human flesh. And with no sense of it, she prayed. Please. Help me find him. I will not ask for anything again.
Each evening she asked at the reception desk for messages. It seemed to amuse the security guards. Now, when they saw her, they grinned broadly, and shouted, “No messages!”
When she finally got through to Rosie, her cousin’s rel
ief was palpable. “Thank God you’re all right. What is it like?”
“It’s not like anything. I’ve seen real palaces … and people begging in the streets. Have you heard from my mother? There’s a man who’s supposed to contact me …”
The connection was broken. She tried several times, but could not reconnect.
AT PUSHKIN MUSEUM ON THE MOIKA CANAL ANA STARED AT A life-size portrait of Alexander Pushkin. Dark-skinned, almost swarthy, a broad forceful nose, he looked more Mediterranean than Russian, even somewhat Polynesian. The docent explained in perfect English.
“His great-grandfather was Ethiopian, a black slave brought from Constantinople as a gift to Peter the Great. Peter educated him and he became a general, for which Pushkin was very proud.”
At first the young poet had led a gilded life, then his poetry began to speak of the abject poverty of Russian peasants. For a time he had been exiled to Odessa as a revolutionary, fighting to abolish serfdom.
“Eventually the Tsar conspired against him, arranged a duel where he was shot, and died. We have a saying. ‘Tsars come and go. Regimes come and go. Pushkin is forever.’ ”
Later, Ana stood on a bridge overlooking the Moika, watching sunlight turn the water rose. And she thought of the poet whose ancestor had been brought to Russia in chains as a “gift” for the emperor. When, she wondered, had the young Pushkin, the dandy, turned his back on his life of excess? What moment of stillness had served as a kind of pivot? Perhaps it was a woman’s glance, making his dark skin unignorable. Or perhaps it was simply the whispering in his blood.
Ana lingered there so long, she missed her tour bus and began walking back to her hotel along Nevsky Prospekt, passing shops for rich tourists and a smart café where they sat draped at windows, sipping drinks. She stopped on a hunch, retracing her steps. The café was located in Hotel Europa which she had heard was frequented by expats and internationals.
Conscious that she was dressed in khakis and running shoes, she drew her wide shoulders back, hoping she looked robust and confident as she entered the café. She sat at the bar, where she ordered a beer and stared at her reflection in a mirror; against a white shirt, her tan skin seemed pronounced. Scanning the crowd, Ana noticed a loud group in a corner. Journalists, sounding world-weary and blasé.
Finally, she approached them, introduced herself, and asked if they had heard of Nikolai Volenko, a documentary filmmaker. They shook their heads, inviting her to sit down, and Ana told them how she was trying to reach him, how frustrating it was.
A Brit leaned over, patting her hand. “My dear, it’s Russia. Remember, they were serfs. You must tell them what to do.”
One of the Americans took Niki’s number, went to a phone and spoke in Russian, then came back, shaking his head.
“Disconnected. You need to go to his place in Moscow. Don’t trust the phones.”
Desperate, she looked round the group. “Would the American Embassy help me?”
A few of the journalists laughed.
“What about … Intourist?”
They laughed again.
The American walked her to the lobby. “Maybe you should give up. After all, he chose to come back. This thing with Russians … they always come back.”
Along Nevsky Prospekt, crowds grew denser. Legless men whipped by on skateboards, signs pinned to their fatigues: AFGHANI VET. The nasal litany of vendors selling rotgut. Curbside, Alsatian dogs warning off gas thieves were chained to car bumpers, orange flakes of fender rust glittering in their fur.
Ana pressed on, passing old folks with their hands out, hoping for a kopeck. Niki had said the country was in chaos, but she had not fully understood. Now she saw people so starved they were beginning to show advanced signs of dystrophy, the disappearance of muscle when the body begins to devour itself. Their hands were clawlike, their faces skeletal. Avoiding a congested intersection, she followed crowds down steps to an underpass.
A man yelled after her, “Hey, tourist! You are entering Tunnel of Starvation.”
Here masses of old folks stood propped against filthy concrete walls, their eyes completely blank with want. Dozens of them, some so weak they had collapsed, still holding out their wares, selling anything they had. A jar of teeth. A rusty birdcage. A rotting, blue brassiere. A woman with bleeding ears seemed to be pushing her granddaughter out to strangers, a child marked with the premature wrinkles of malnutrition. Ana shoved rubles in their hands and fled.
Exhausted and depressed, she made her way home through a vast park dotted with toppled statues until she was slowed by a young Circassian with Rasta braids playing a kind of bouzouki-mandolin. The sound was so plaintive and haunting it seemed to produce a wavering light, a place to rest the eyes. People paused and listened.
Amber Hindus in white muslim, dark handsome Moldavians with their black, sooty brows. Even a family of Uzbekis, men in sandals and threadbare, quilted coats, their wives holding children in vests and embroidered skullcaps. While the young man sang, bystanders swayed rather dreamily. Perhaps it was a song about a traveler far from home, and perhaps they were remembering a road, a hut, someone left behind.
A breeze lifted Ana’s hair and there was suddenly a spiraling down, a cherry tree showering white blossoms on the face of a child, leaving petals on his skullcap. The boy closed his eyes, then opened them and laughed. The mother smiled, shifted the child in her arms, and slowly followed her husband from the park.
Ana dropped rubles in the young man’s hat as he gazed after the family. “Refugees. But very tough. They come from the famine steppes of Uzbekistan.”
He dipped into his hat and bowed, grateful for the rubles, then made a place for her to sit beside him. Softly fingering his mandolin, he told her how he had been traveling for years, how he had walked to St. Petersburg from his home in far Circassia, a country in southwest Russia on the northeast coast of the Black Sea.
“An old man when I began, wanting to see all Russia then I die.” He grinned, pointing to his youthful face. “Instead my life lived backward. I grow young!”
She smiled, not quite believing as he told what he had seen. Towns where horsemen wore necklaces of human knuckles, where they used human skulls for pillows. Towns where the smell of wet newborns brought wolves in from the night. How their placentas were flung out to the wolves to draw them in.
“So in winter, warm coats of bristling wolfskin.”
He had never held a fork, never been inside a running-water house. For a year he had lived in silence and that was when life came clean, and he grew young again.
Now he turned to Ana. “You are journeying, too. Yes?”
She nodded. “I came to Russia to find someone. He’s ill. He needs my help.”
He leaned close, his dark eyes searched her face. “But no. This journey is for you.” His finger touched her cheek. “You have been old. At journey’s end you will be youth again. Believe.”
She wandered in a daze until she found a bridge that crossed the Neva. Dusk now, outside a subway entrance near her hotel, vendors threaded raw mutton onto shashlik skewers. Old women sold bunches of hyacinths and tulips. Ana watched crowds carry off red tulips like bright torches in the dusk, remembering folks in a far valley going forth to borrow fire.
That night people strolled along the Neva singing old Russian songs, accompanied by bayans and guitars. Ana threw open her window, smelling jasmine and forsythia. The sun hung just below the horizon where it would stay till it rose three hours later. As far as the eye could see, the river was a flowing pink, and it seemed as if, for these few hours, people slowed down and contemplated life. Perhaps the shimmering twilight gave them hope. That there would be a tomorrow, that it would be better.
A NIGHT AT MARIINSKY THEATRE, A PERFORMANCE OF LA BAYADèRE, the dancers so graceful they seemed to float a finger’s breadth above the floor. Overhead, tiers of balconies and chandeliers were gilded with inordinate amounts of gold—another Tsarist building that had barely survived the Germans. Sitting in ol
d plush seats, Ana imagined the place half-bombed and boarded up with plywood. Niki had told her of a concert here, the first of only three held during the long siege. She glanced at the audience in the dark, at phantoms that seemed to sit amongst them.
… Musicians limp across the stage. In slippers and ragged boots, their feet are swollen from scurvy … They wear holey mittens while tuning their instruments. The cellist has blue lips. No heating, the Mariinsky is ice-cold. But who would miss tonight, no one! …
… The conductor enters. Thin and tired, he is greeted with applause … People struggle to their feet, they feebly shout. Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky. During the performances, they weep … Sergei, Niki’s father, takes Niki’s mother’s hand …
… It has been a winter of starvation. They know the war is going to continue … millions might die. Yet, right now they are alive! Partaking of something beautiful, immortal …
• • •
When Ana returned to her hotel she glanced round the lobby, looking for an American, a man who might be looking for her. She called San Francisco, a connection that took only five minutes, much easier than calling Moscow.
“I haven’t heard from Eric,” her mother said. “I promise you. He’s doing all he can …”
THEIR LAST DAY IN PETERSBURG ANA BROKE OFF FROM THE GROUP. Breathing in the moldy air of Peter’s rivers and parks, she made her way to the intersection of Nevsky Prospekt and Griboyedov Canal. Remembering its description from Niki’s letter, she followed the canal until she stood in sunlight reflected off the golden, outspread wings of great bronze lions guarding one end of a black filigree suspension bridge spanning the canal. At the opposite end, another pair of winged lions sat, the four of them holding in their mouths two gracefully swooping chains supporting the bridge. Along the canal, misty rococo willows hung over the embankment, carrying the eye to the horizon. A beautiful and haunting scene.
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