Thankfully, it was time for us to cross the bridge over Griboyedov Canal. My father bid goodbye to his new friend. I was surprised by my dad. He was utterly unperturbed by being accosted and followed. He bought the man another Evian from a street vendor, and then walked on.
The golden onion domes of the Church on Spilt Blood filled the sky down the canal. The saxophonist continued to play. When we were quite far from him, he started to play “Speak Softly Love,” from The Godfather. My father and I stopped, looked at each other, and returned to him. Papa smiled at me. We were back in America, at the movies, at our Kew Gardens apartment, in our Ronkonkoma house, dancing together to “Speak Softly Love” at my first wedding. We didn’t move until the man finished playing. To hear the dulcet strands of Nino Rota drift through the air while walking through the streets of Leningrad on a warm sunny night, having drunk, having eaten, having lived a full life in one day, it was a halcyon snapshot of our post-Russia existence. My father and I were suspended in the air with the minor chords of the melody.
We returned to Grand Hotel Europe for a quick bathroom break, and at 10:30 set out for Decembrists’ Square and the statue of the Bronze Horseman.
As we were walking past Kazan Cathedral, my father asked me to lift my eyes. I didn’t want to look too closely. The gold of the domes was black and green; the walls of the cathedral black and dingy gray. But at the top of the dome shined a gold cross, polished and luminous. This was what my dad was drawing my attention to. Before 1991 and the fall of Communism, there were no crosses on any of the cathedrals, he told me. They weren’t houses of God but storage facilities or museums. After 1991, brand new crosses, beacons of a religion other than Communism, were placed atop all the Leningrad cathedrals. It was the only new thing on their otherwise faded façades.
We passed only an occasional pedestrian as we made our way through the deserted streets. I wanted to get another crème brûlée ice cream, but the street seller had run out. All she had was vanilla. I shook my head.
We walked down Nevsky Prospekt.
“Where is that sign?” I asked my father. “That famous sign from the blockade?”
“We’re about to pass it,” he replied. “Cross the street.” Just past the alphabetically challenged Dom Knigi, a rectangular blue and white sign hung on a wall: “COMRADES, DURING ENEMY ATTACK, THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS MORE DANGEROUS.” During the siege, the Germans aimed their missiles at Nevsky Prospekt. The bombs flew all the way from Pulkovo Heights, the site of the current airport eleven miles away, and landed on the northern side of the boulevard. The southern side was safer.
Underneath the sign was another, smaller one: “Left in memory of the besieged.”
“The war is everywhere, isn’t it?” my father said as we crossed Nevsky again and made our way to Decembrists’ Square.
“Yes,” I said. “War, poverty, beauty, white nights, Communism, our whole life.”
“Heartbreaking, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
THE BRONZE HORSEMAN
In Decembrists’ Square stood one of Leningrad’s most celebrated cathedrals, St. Isaac’s.
Its paint was so faded, its magnificence so tarnished that I was too sad to take a photo.
“It’s incredible,” my father said. “Look at it. Why aren’t you taking a picture?” I did, hoping the falling dusk would camouflage what I did not want the lens to capture.
My father told me Decembrists’ Square had been renamed Senate Square in 1992.
“Who can keep up with all the name changes?”
“Nobody,” he replied. “That’s why everybody still calls it Decembrists’ Square.”
Between St. Isaac’s and the Neva embankment stood the statue of the Bronze Horseman — Peter the Great atop his horse. In Aleksandr Pushkin’s epic narrative poem, after the Great Flood of 1830, the luckless hero Evgeni comes to stand in front of the Bronze Horseman. The stallion rears against the setting sky, comes to life and chases Evgeni through the streets of Leningrad for eternity.
The statue stood on top of Thunder Stone, a monolithic 1500 tonne red granite pedestal, said to be the largest stone ever moved by man. It took nine months to move the stone over less than four miles of land and ten miles on a barge down the Neva. On the side of the rock was engraved simply: “TO PETER I, CATHERINE II, 1782.”
I took exactly three pictures. Then my film ran out. I didn’t have another in my purse. I was so foolish. I had used up two rolls, on Schlisselburg, on the Road of Life, on Lake Ladoga, and reserved barely three clicks for the Bronze Horseman.
My father was already ahead, walking toward the Neva embankment, smoking. I circled the statue with acute regret, then followed him to the river. He seemed to be searching for something.
“Is there anywhere to buy film around here?” I asked.
There was a bar, where young people sat outside, drinking their beer, laughing, talking. Somewhere else on the plaza, music blared. The Beatles were singing “The Things We Said Today”, one of my favorites.
My father didn’t answer.
“Do you see across the river?” he pointed. “Along the embankment is Leningrad University. That’s where I studied as a young man. See that resplendent building right there? Right in front of us across the river?” My father laughed. “That is not the university. That is Menshikov’s mansion. Do you know who Menshikov was?”
I shook my head.
“Peter the Great’s chief deputy. Peter told him to build Petersburg University, as it was then called, on the banks of the Neva. Then Peter left for the country, thinking he was the Tsar, and his orders would most certainly be followed. But Menshikov decided to take matters into his own hands and built himself a mansion instead, overlooking the river. He built the university perpendicular to the river, as you can see, so just the short sides of the buildings are exposed to the river, while his house spreads out gloriously right along the shoreline. When Peter came back and saw what had been done, he was upset, of course. He threatened banishment, and worse, but the deed was done.”
The anecdote was funny, but as my father gazed across the river at the university of his youth, his Russian life was in his eyes.
We resumed our stroll down the embankment.
“Do you want to get a beer or something?” I asked.
“No. I’m getting tired. We have such a long way back. But I just can’t leave. Look at this river, Plinochka.”
“I’m looking, Papa, I’m looking.”
We stood at the Neva and watched the northern sun ignite the sky as it set in front of us behind Leningrad University. My eyes traveled to the right, to Peter and Paul’s Cathedral, where we were going to bury the Tsar tomorrow, the hazy sunrise already glimmering behind its golden spire. There it was: the sky ablaze with sunset in front of me but sunrise just upstream, all in the same lapis lazuli Leningrad sky. It was after midnight.
In 1984, when I had gone to live in England, I sent home a photo of the glum, cloudy Colchester sky with the inscription, “The sky is the same all over the world.”
I was wrong. The sky was not the same all over the world.
When my dad asked, “Isn’t it beautiful?” he was seeing his youth. He closed his eyes and saw himself young and handsome, in love with many girls, funny, brilliant, popular. Of course it was beautiful. It was mystifying. It was mystical.
“Yes,” I said, wanting so much to see what he saw. But what I saw was what mattered to me. The war, the water, the midnight sun. I saw the streets not of my youth but of my fiction. I hadn’t loved in Leningrad. I was a child in Leningrad. But now, by his side, for the first time I saw streets of passion, of adult drama, of lovers, of heartbreak. I saw the streets of my Alexander and Tatiana.
“Tonight,” my father said, “is the last official night of white nights. Tomorrow the streetlights are turned back on.”
“Then it’s good we are here.”
We sat down on a bench by the river. No sooner had we sat down than my father sprang up ag
ain, and said, “We must go.”
I willed myself up. Suddenly I was old, and my papa was young.
Taking a deep drag of his cigarette, he said, “Thank you, Plinka. Thank you for making me walk the streets of my life with you.”
I couldn’t speak for a moment. I placed my hand on his back.
“But Papa,” I finally said, “you’ve been to Leningrad three times since 1991. You must have already walked these streets.”
“Never,” he said. “I have never walked here since the day we left Russia in 1973.”
“How can that be?” I was incredulous.
“That’s how it is.”
“Not even when you came here with Mama?”
“Never.”
“What did you two do when you came here?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing. When Mama came by herself, she walked. She walked everywhere, but not with me.”
No film in the camera for these irretrievable seconds of my life, walking along the Neva with my papa.
“Oh, Paullina,” he said, moving more and more slowly. It was nearly one in the morning. “What are you doing to me?”
Back in my room, I undressed, lay on the bed and prayed for sleep.
Getting up, I opened the window to hear the sounds of Leningrad, and to air out my room, because a pungently malodorous cleaning lady had been in it. A mosquito flew in. It was three in the morning.
I found myself thinking in Russian, something I hadn’t done in years. I was not only thinking in Russian, but thinking in Russian words I didn’t know I knew.
I suddenly realized why I could never remember the bon mot in English: because my brain was Russian, and my Russian brain scrambled the signals. The neuron was Russian and I tried to send English electrical impulses across it. Every once in a while, the neurons rebelled.
I thought back to this morning. What did I do? Morning, morning, morning. Ulitsa Dybenko . . . sunshine . . . the highway . . . Mama’s gall bladder . . . the scrap-steel yard at Schlisselburg . . . the stolen metal doors of the outhouse . . . the bride under the Broken Ring . . . crème brûlée . . . kvas . . . Ladoga . . . Maui . . . caviar . . . in one cloak we are huddled together . . . speak softly love . . . in memory of the besieged . . .
You the living — Know this! We didn’t want to leave this land, And we didn’t. We stood to the death on the banks of the dark Neva. We died so you could live.
Not them. You. We died so that you could live, Paullina.
I tossed, sleeplessly, mournfully. I wanted to cry. I’m not a Cimmerian, why can’t I sleep? I thought about my Bronze Horseman and Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, and remembered a verse from his poem.
At last, his eyelids heavy-laden
Droop into slumber . . . soon away
The night’s tempestuous gloom is fading
And washes into pallid day.
DAY FIVE
Friday
THE IPATIEV HOUSE
When I woke up at eight in the morning I was sick.
I must have drunk the Leningrad water the day before. Somewhere in our travels, the Neva water must have run unfiltered into me.
Grimly I got ready for the Romanov funeral. I couldn’t believe we were in Russia — I was in Russia — on the day of their funeral. What coincidence, what irony, what destiny.
I put on my taupe pant suit, my taupe shoes. I threw some makeup on my face and stumbled out to meet my father.
“Tired, Papa?” I asked. Remarkably, he looked fresh, shaved, and happy to see me. He was all dressed up in a dark blue suit, white shirt and tie. Our driver Viktor was also in a suit.
Peter and Paul’s Cathedral is a slender, beautiful old yellow stucco church, set into a cobblestone courtyard, which was itself set into the middle of Peter and Paul’s Fortress — a tiny island on the Neva that for many years stood as the sentinel of Leningrad and then became a prison. Most fortresses in Russia became prisons. Peter and Paul’s, Oreshek. Like Alcatraz but not as well appointed.
Before the guards would let us inside the grounds of the fortress, we had to stand and wait behind the police barricades like groupies in line to glimpse the stars at the Oscars.
No one knew exactly what we were waiting for. The people with press credentials like us, and the people without, like the woman in front of me from Novgorod, were all standing in the same line. At the front were two metal detectors, but no one knew which one we were supposed to go through.
“With invitations here, without invitations there,” the puzzled guard said doubtfully, as if he himself wasn’t sure. The line wasn’t moving. What did he mean, invitations? I broke through the crowd and made my way toward the guard.
“What invitations?” I started to ask, but he cut me off immediately. “Please go back to the sidewalk. Get off the road.”
I got off the road. We waited, wondering if our press credentials were going to mean squat.
“Papa, what are we waiting for?”
“Damned if I know.”
Finally, the guard spoke to the restless block of tightly packed people. “Those of you with press credentials, move over here. The rest of you will not be able to get in. Unless you have an invitation.”
The woman from Novgorod in front of me, in a housecoat and unkempt hair, waved her invitation, or whatever it was, at the guard, and said, “I’m here to see the Tsar. I’m here to see the Tsar.”
At long last, we passed through the metal detector and walked over a short bridge and through a portico to the interior square. The church’s canary stucco had faded, giving the courtyard the look of ancient Rome or Marseilles.
Marseilles has a church, Notre Dame a La Garde, set on top of a high mountain overlooking the city. That church looks like it’s from the days of Francis of Assisi. Why did the faded paint seem endearing in Marseilles yet so heart-rending in Leningrad?
My father’s colleague Viktor Ryazenkov was waiting for us in the square.
“So what are we supposed to do now?” I asked.
“We wait,” he said. “It’ll start soon.”
“Will we be able to hear the funeral from here?”
“Yes, they’ve set up microphones and a television set,” he replied.
“Where?”
“Right there? Do you see?”
“I don’t see the television.”
“Do you see the screens?”
“Yes, but they’re not turned on.”
“Be patient. See the cameras on the crane? They’ll be televising who is coming inside the church, all the church proceedings, and all the speeches.”
“Where will the sound come from? There are no loudspeakers.”
He pointed off into the distance. “Right there is a loudspeaker.”
I saw a solitary loudspeaker hanging from a light post. “Okay,” I said. “We wait. Is there anything to drink?”
“Nope.”
“Is there anywhere to sit down?”
“What’s the matter with you?” my father said. “We just got here. You just woke up.” He tutted. “You never did like standing.”
Viktor R. gave me some warm mineral water that tasted like Gatorade.
I walked around, trying to shake off my crippling stomach blues and the nagging sense that this grand occasion might not be the dignified commemoration I’d been expecting.
The political in-fighting surrounding the burial of the Romanovs was vast and petty. No one could let Nicholas II and his family rest, even eighty years later, even in death. Not the people who loved them, not the people who couldn’t care less. They died a bad death, the worst death, yet somehow that wasn’t suffering enough.
In one night, on July 17, 1918, three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty were wiped out. Eighty years ago to the day. And now, all the pretenders to the throne were fighting with one another. The priests were fighting with the politicians; the politicians were making conciliatory speeches about healing, repentance, redemption, while playing their political games.
I
couldn’t see anyone going inside the church. Had any of these big shots even come to the funeral?
The beginning of the end for poor Nicholas II began in February 1917, when he abdicated his throne. Afterward he and his family lived in voluntary exile in their summer residence south of Leningrad. When the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, he was forced deeper into Russia, to a town called Tobolsk.
Nicholas became an insurmountable problem for the Bolsheviks, who were embroiled in a bitter civil war. They were deathly afraid their enemies would use the living Nicholas to rally opposition to Communism. In May 1918 the Bolsheviks moved the Romanov family to Ekaterinburg, an inconspicuous city deep in the heart of Russia, where the family was placed under house arrest at a building known as Ipatiev House. Nicholas was fifty, his wife Alexandra forty-six. Their four daughters, the grand duchesses, were Olga, twenty-three, Tatiana, twenty-one, Maria, nineteen, and Anastasia, seventeen.
Their son, the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Alexei, was thirteen. His body was ruined by hemophilia, his limbs and joints permanently swollen and misshapen from a lifetime of internal bleeding. He was unable to move around by himself. His mother sat with him in the room day and night and read to him, or slept next to him.
They lived quietly for seventy-eight days until July 17, 1918.
At midnight on July 17, Nicholas and Alexandra were woken up and asked to get dressed and come downstairs into the basement. They were told the Bolsheviks were afraid for the family’s safety.
Because Tsarevich was so sick, Nicholas carried him to the basement himself. Twelve people piled into a sub-basement room with one small window. The chief guard spent some time positioning them — ostensibly for a photograph to prove they were still alive. One of the girls asked for a chair to sit on; two chairs were brought in. The mother and the young son sat down.