Six Days in Leningrad Read online

  MAP

  DEDICATION

  For Yuri Handler, my darling Papa, who took me to the new

  world and gave me a new life, and then took me back to the

  old world and gave me a new heart.

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Dedication

  Glossary of Strange and Unfamiliar Russian Words

  Epigraph

  Part I: Before: The Texas Life Moving Day

  The Bronze Horseman

  In 1973 there Were Sharks

  Molotov’s Grandson

  Grand Central Station

  Fly Aeroflot!

  My Great-Grandmother’s Grave

  To Leningrad

  Part II: Hero City Day One Monday

  Day Two Tuesday

  Day Three Wednesday

  Day Four Thursday

  Day Five Friday

  Day Six Saturday

  Part III: After Russia Coming to America

  The Blue Silence

  New York in August

  Radik Revisited

  Six Hundred Photos

  Afterword

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Paullina Simons

  Photo Credits

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  GLOSSARY OF STRANGE AND UNFAMILIAR RUSSIAN WORDS

  blini: yeast dough

  crèpe: like pancakes

  Comsomols: Young Communists,

  dacha: summer house

  elektrichka: short-distance train

  khrushchyobi: residential tenement-style buildings built during the Khrushchev era

  koshmar: nightmare

  matryoshkas: nesting dolls

  metro: subway

  pelmeni: Russian meat dumplings

  perestroika: rebuilding

  Pioneers: pre-Communists

  pozhalusta: please

  Prospekt: Avenue

  Shepelevo: sheh-peh-LYO-voh

  shosse: highway

  solyanka: a thick meat soup

  Ulitsa: street

  zakuski: hot and cold appetizers

  EPIGRAPH

  We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

  — Menander

  PART I

  BEFORE: THE TEXAS LIFE

  MOVING DAY

  Kevin and I got to our brand new house at 8:20 in the morning and not a moment too soon: the moving truck was already parked in front of the driveway. We had to drive on the grass to go around it. We had barely opened the garage doors when the guys started laying down their blankets and getting out their trolleys. The next thing we knew, they were bringing stuff into the house.

  Into a house, I might add, that wasn’t quite ready yet. The builder’s cleaning crew had just arrived and were in the kitchen, scrubbing. The movers started piling boxes onto the carpet, which had not been vacuumed since the day it was installed.

  I asked the cleaning women to please vacuum the rooms before they continued with their other tasks so that the movers could pile the boxes onto clean carpets. You would have thought I’d asked them to carry heavy objects on their backs upstairs in 100-degree heat. First the diminutive ladies huffed and puffed, and then they said they spoke no Inglés. Phil, my building manager, explained to me that the women worked at their own pace and according to their own schedule. I looked at him as if he were not speaking Inglés and finally responded, “Phil, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re moving in. Please ask them to vacuum the floor in the bedroom and living room.”

  “Problem is,” Phil said, “they don’t speak any English.”

  My two young sons, Misha, three, and Kevie, one, zigzagged in front of the movers. I think they were trying to trip them. Misha was crying. “I don’t want to go to Burger King for breakfast, I don’t want to go to Burger King for breakfast.” Natasha, eleven, was reading, perched on top of a box of books, wisely ignoring everyone and everything.

  The babysitter cajoled Misha, but in the meantime, Kevie had toddled off to the pool. The dogs were barking non-stop. They wanted either to be let in, let out or shot.

  My husband ran in and said, “Please go out to the garage and talk to the movers. They need one of us there at all times to tell them where things are going.”

  “But I labeled all the boxes!”

  “Well, they don’t know where boy bedroom is or where guest bedroom is,” Kevin replied. “Every bedroom looks the same.”

  The pool guy knocked on the back porch door. “Hey, guys? Is this a bad time to show you how to use the pool equipment?”

  The one-year-old ran in from the pool, draped himself around his father’s leg and wouldn’t let go until Kevin picked him up. The babysitter pried him off eventually. The dogs continued to bark. Misha continued to scream about Burger King. Apparently he didn’t want to go, he really wanted to stay right here at the new house.

  Our builder walked in. “Well, good morning! We needed just a couple more days with this house, but that’s okay, we’ll make it work. Hey, do you have a few minutes to go over the change orders? I have your closing contract. I need both you and Kevin to sign.”

  One of the moving guys stuck his head in and said pointedly, “Mrs. Simons, could we see you in the garage right now, please?”

  The phone rang.

  How could that be? I didn’t think we’d unpacked a phone yet.

  Open boxes stood on the kitchen counter.

  The front door bell rang. It was the delivery guy from Home Depot. He’d brought the barbecue. Where would I like it?

  Another delivery truck stopped in front of the house. This one was unloading a dryer and a television.

  Another truck pulled up, with my new office desk. The two desk guys steadfastly refused to take the desk upstairs, “because we’re not insured for damage.” They asked if the moving guys could do it.

  The moving guys said they certainly weren’t insured to move a desk that wasn’t on their truck upstairs. So I told the desk guys that either they took the desk upstairs or else they could take it right back to the warehouse.

  They took the desk upstairs.

  “Mrs. Simons!”

  In the garage, the four large moving guys stood with their arms folded and impatiently told me they were having a problem with the cleaning ladies, who really needed to stay out of their way. “We cannot do our job, Mrs. Simons.”

  The dogs were still barking. My young sons were now running around in the street as the babysitter chased after them, trying to corral them into the minivan.

  Pressing my fingers into my temples, I glanced at my watch. 8:45 a.m.

  The phone rang again. It was my father calling from Prague.

  “Hey, Papa,” I said weakly.

  “Well?” he asked. “Are you excited?”

  “What?”

  “About our trip. It’s no small thing, you know, you going back to Russia for the first time in twenty-five years. Are you thinking about it?”

  “Absolutely, Papa,” I said. “I’m thinking about it right now.”

  My newly-built house in Texas, June 1998.

  July 1998.

  THE BRONZE HORSEMAN

  We had been planning our trip to Russia for a year. Ever since the summer of 1997, when I told my family that my fourth novel, The Bronze Horseman, was going to be a love story set in World War II during the siege of Leningrad. I said I couldn’t write a story so detailed and sprawling without seeing Russia with my own eyes.

  My family had listened to me carefully, and then my grandfather said, “Plina, I hope I’m not going to be turning over in my grave reading the lies you’re going to write in your book about Russia.”

  “I also hope not, Dedushka,�
� I said. “Though you’re not dead.” He was only ninety, a “spring chicken” in his own words.

  Going to St. Petersburg was not an option before the summer of 1998. The logistics of the trip had been too overwhelming. How would I get a non-Russian-speaking husband and three non-Russian-speaking kids, one of them barely walking, to Russia? And what would they do there? Either my husband would be watching the kids full-time in a foreign country — and not just any foreign country, but Russia! — or we would be watching them together, and I wouldn’t be doing any research.

  I didn’t need to go all the way to Russia to take care of my kids. I could stay home in Texas and do it. Kevin and I considered leaving them and just the two of us going, but in the end decided that was a bad idea. Leave the kids with a babysitter for ten days? Too much: for them, for us.

  Still, thoughts of Russia would not go away. Also, there was no book. Eighteen months earlier there had been a nebulous vision of two young lovers walking in deserted Leningrad on the eve of a brutal war, but a vision did not an epic story make. How could I not go to Russia?

  I finally said to Kevin that it looked like I would have to go on my own. He didn’t love the idea, my going to “a place like Russia” by myself. He said I should take my sister.

  I ran the idea by my father. “Kevin thinks I should take Liza to Russia with me,” I said.

  My father was quiet on the phone for what seemed like an hour, smoking and thinking. Then he said, “I could come with you.”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  A girlfriend of mine said, “Oh, that’s neat! When was the last time you and your dad took a trip together?”

  “Never.”

  During the course of a year, the trip gradually took shape. My father told me he was planning to retire from Radio Liberty at the end of May, 1998. “We have to go before I retire.” My father was the Director of Russian Services for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a government-run radio station where my father worked his entire American life since we left Russia and came to New York in 1973. Working had defined and consumed him. Working was his life. And with good reason. For the last quarter-century, he and his team of writers translated Western news, both political and cultural, into Russian and then broadcast it over shortwave to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They broadcast to Russia 24/7, with twelve hours of original programming every day. He had been stationed at the New York bureau until 1991 when Communism fell. In 1992 he was made Director of Russian Services, the largest of Radio Liberty’s bureaus and transferred to Munich, and then Prague, where he was at the moment. In my opinion four people were responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall and Communism: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and my father.

  But May was not a good month for me. After much discussion, my father agreed to postpone his retirement and we settled on July, 1998. It was the perfect time to go, my dad told me, because we stood a chance of having some nice weather. Also the nights would be white. “That’s a sight to see. You do remember white nights, Plina?”

  “Pfft, of course, Papa.” I didn’t want to tell him how little I remembered them. I was just a kid then. In the city, at ten in the evening, I was already asleep.

  How long could I be away and not traumatize my kids? I figured a day to travel there, a day to travel back, and then six days in St. Petersburg. But even then, when it was almost finalized, I vacillated, procrastinated, delayed.

  Truth was, I didn’t want to go back.

  In Vienna, September 1973, in a coat my mother hand-knitted for me.

  IN 1973 THERE WERE SHARKS

  I was born in St. Petersburg when it was still called Leningrad and came to America when I was ten. We left Leningrad one fall day and lived in Rome while waiting for our entry visa to the United States.

  Those were blissful months we spent in Rome. Every Thursday my mother gave me a few lire, enough to go to the movies by myself and buy a bag of potato chips. I’d never eaten anything so delicious in Russia as potato chips. The movies were all in Italian of course, of which I spoke exactly three phrases: bella bambina, bruta bambina and mangiare per favore. Cute baby, ugly baby, and food please. It was two more phrases than I spoke in English.

  We spent my tenth birthday in Rome. My parents asked me what I wanted, and I said gum. So I got gum. Also some strawberry gelato, and then we went to the American theater across town to see the 1966 Oscar winner A Man for All Seasons. I liked the gum better than the movie. I didn’t understand a word of it, but at the end, the man for all seasons had his head cut off.

  We came to America two days before Thanksgiving 1973. Our first big American meal was turkey and mashed potatoes and something called cranberry jelly. We celebrated in Connecticut, at the home of a young man we had met briefly in Vienna and who’d invited us to his house for the holidays. We gave thanks for our amazing luck, for getting out of Russia, for coming to America. America seemed like heaven. True, first you had to die, to leave behind the only life you knew how to live, but then you had — America! The death was leaving Russia. Because once you left, you could never go back. My father had told me that when we were leaving.

  America was life after death.

  That Thanksgiving, when everyone else was done with their meal, my father walked around the table and finished the food the Americans had left behind on their plates. My mother was so embarrassed. “What are you doing?!” But my father calmly explained what we all knew to be true: Russian people of a certain age born in Leningrad do not leave food on their plates.

  Our second American meal was the lasagna our landlady brought up to our apartment in Woodside, Queens. Don’t ask me how this is, but during our stay in Rome, Italy, I had not tasted tomato sauce once. I had not had lasagna. I had not had pizza. I did not know tomato sauce until our Italian landlady knocked on our door.

  In America there was Juicy Fruit gum, and chocolate ice cream, which I had never had, and corn, which I also had never had, and something called Coca-Cola. And television. I found a children’s cartoon: Looney Tunes. I’d never seen anything like it. In Russia, we had black-and-white war movies, black-and-white news. There was some animated programming, but it looked like war movies, just less interesting.

  War movies and news. And the Olympics, which was the single most exciting thing on Soviet television — unfortunately the Olympics came only once every four years.

  Suddenly there was Looney Tunes! Bugs Bunny! Elmer Fudd! Porky Pig! Our first TV set was black and white, but the cartoons were straight out of someone else’s Technicolor dream. The war movies in Russia were set in gray tents and invariably starred two gray men who talked non-stop until there was a battle, followed by more dialogue, all concluding in a blaze and eventual victory for Mother Russia. The movies lasted, it seemed to me, as long as the war itself.

  In Queens, the Looney Tunes bunny blew up a pig, blew up a hunter, ran away, blew up a cave and fell off a cliff, all in eight minutes. Then he disappeared and was instantly replaced by a lady selling towels made of paper. Towels made of paper? The cartoon was over, so I turned off the TV, utterly disappointed.

  It took me many weeks to discover that the cartoon did not end but was merely interrupted by the lady selling towels made of paper. Imagine my happiness!

  I used to read in Russia, and who could blame me? What else was there to do? Now that I had Bugs Bunny, all reading stopped for four or five years.

  In school I would occasionally be asked to talk to the other students about my experience of life in the Soviet Union. That’s how it was put: “Your experience of life in the Soviet Union.” I wanted to say even then that it wasn’t my experience of life, it actually was my life, but I didn’t. Instead, I gave my little talk in broken English: about the communal apartment, the small rooms, the cockroaches falling on my bed while I slept, the bed bugs and the smell like a decomposing skunk they made when I accidentally squished them, about the lack of food, the lack of stores, the lack of my father.

  When
I was asked, “How did it feel living with that kind of deprivation?” I would shrug and say, “I didn’t know it was deprivation. We all lived the same way. I thought it was just life.”

  My American friends grew up with Coca-Cola and Jesus Christ.

  I grew up with hot black tea and the astronaut Yuri Gagarin — the first man in space.

  My husband grew up watching I Dream of Jeannie and Star Trek.

  I watched Gagarin’s funeral, and a 120-part series called Liberation — full of burning tents and dark winter nights — which they rebroadcast every December because Decembers near the Arctic Circle weren’t bleak enough.

  I’d never seen a palm tree, I’d never seen an ocean, I’d never heard a church service, I’d never read Charlotte’s Web. I read The Three Musketeers, Les Misérables and a Russian writer named Mikhail Zoshchenko. By the time I was ten I had read all of Anton Chekhov and Jules Verne, but what I wanted, though I did not know it, was Nancy Drew and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  What was baseball? What was peanut butter? I didn’t know. I knew what soccer was, what mushroom barley soup was, what perch was.

  And who was this Jesus Christ?

  I, who had not grown up with Christmas carols, cookies, decorations and a divine baby in a cave, had only a dim understanding of what Jesus had to do with Christmas. My first Christmas Eve in New York my parents went out, leaving me alone to joyfully watch Bonanza — or so I thought. But to my great dismay, Michael Landon (on whom I had quite the crush) was replaced on Channel 11 by a log burning on a fire and instrumental muzak. As you might imagine, my Pavlovian reaction to the discovery that this Christmas was responsible for ousting my Michael Landon was less than spiritually appropriate.

  While my husband was vacationing near Lake George, I was learning how to swim in the icy Black Sea.