Inside the terminal, I joined the line to have my American passport checked. Behind me, two women clucked away in Russian. I made a mental note to stop being surprised at hearing Russian all around me. The women were talking about the missionaries. One of them said, “Yeah, I wish them well, but I think they’re going to have a hard time over here.”
At the luggage carousel, my garment bag appeared almost instantly. On my customs form, I declared that I was bringing in six hundred American dollars and a camera.
While I was waiting in line, the customs officer at the head of the queue suddenly got up from his desk and wandered off. I stood dumbly for about five minutes, and then concluded he was not coming back any time soon, so I joined another line. Good call, for he had permanently disappeared.
The international arrivals area was jammed with people, none of whom would let me pass. I came to an impasse with one man: he glared at me, then at my bag, before finally stepping half a hostile foot back. I may have run over his foot with my bag as I wheeled by.
I saw a sign in Russian that said, . I went over to the sign. It was held by a skeletally thin man of indeterminate age with big lips and blue eyes. He was Viktor Smirnoff, our driver for the week.
When we reached his little white Volkswagen in the parking lot, we found it trapped between four other vehicles. There were no marked parking spaces; drivers parked wherever they felt like. We were stuck.
After we sat in the car for some minutes, staring at the terminal building as if for guidance, the car in front of us mercifully pulled out and we started to drive away. Before we could get anywhere, however, another car approached to take up the empty space in front of us. Viktor and the other driver glowered at each other. Viktor motioned in the direction of . . . I don’t know. Possibly the exit, although it was hard to tell where the exit was.
The other man motioned back.
Viktor nodded.
The other driver rolled his eyes, but reversed his car a few feet, barely enough to let us pass. We pulled out of the parking lot and were soon on the Pulkovo shossé, or highway, on our way into St. Petersburg.
All I wanted to do was look at the countryside. Pulkovo is twenty kilometers south of St. Petersburg. The Germans bombed the city from Pulkovo Heights for the duration of the war — before the airport had been built. I expected to see the foliage of northern Maine in the trees and the leaves and the fields. My father told me that’s why so many Russians settle in Maine — because it looks a lot like Russia. I’ve been to Maine many times, but I didn’t recognize that state in the countryside near Pulkovo. Here was flat and slightly swampy, more like Holland than Maine. With the overgrown uncut grasses, it looked unkempt like a neglected village, not the entranceway to Russia’s second largest city. Certainly there were no skyscraper pines of Maine, or the sugar maples of New England, or any white cedar-shingled farmhouses with their silver grain silos.
It stopped raining. The sun was peeking out.
On a map, Leningrad looks like a glob of cotton candy surrounded on two sides by water — Gulf of Finland to the west, Lake Ladoga to the east. The city was built on the narrow neck of a wide isthmus, on the banks of the Neva River.
To the north is Karelia and beyond that, Finland. The Finns and Russians have fought bitterly over the Karelian Isthmus for three hundred years, ever since Peter the Great built St. Petersburg in the swampy mud and then decided he wanted to put some distance between his spanking new capital and the Finns. The Karelian Isthmus changed hands a number of times, the last time during World War II. Today, nearly all of Karelia belongs to Russia. Unlucky Finland had sided with Hitler, and to the victor went the spoils.
No one knows this except Russians, but Lake Ladoga is the largest lake in Europe. The river Neva forms in this lake and flows seventy-three kilometers or about forty-five miles to empty into the Gulf of Finland, just outside Leningrad city limits. In fact, the Gulf is the city limits. To the south is the rest of Russia.
In blockading Leningrad from 1941 until 1944, the Nazi Panzer tanks formed a semi-circle just south of the city. The German–Russian southern front looked like a smile on the face of death. The Germans knew they didn’t have to encircle the entire city. Finland, a German ally, stood ready to fight the Red Army in Karelia, and to the east and west there was water. The Nazis had to worry only about the south. It looked so certain that Leningrad would starve and surrender, that Hitler had booked the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad for a victory celebration. The invitations had been printed, with the exact time of the party. Only the date had been left blank.
Hitler never set foot in the Astoria.
At first, in 1941, he was too busy keeping his men from frozen collapse during the invasion of Moscow. Moscow would not surrender. Stalingrad would not surrender. And Leningrad would not surrender. After Hitler lost the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Battle of Leningrad, it was just a matter of time.
Time and twenty million Soviet dead.
As we neared the city limits, the shossé turned into a prospekt, which is an avenue or a boulevard. Moscovsky Prospekt, also called Prospekt of Victory, runs in a straight line from the south of St. Petersburg, all the way into the heart of the city. Finally, I saw something familiar: a wide road flanked by four-story buildings.
The buildings were in pretty bad shape, though. Their faded pastel façades were finished in stucco: blues, greens, yellows, grays. The paint looked to be pre-war — not that I would know what prewar paint looked like.
Everywhere I looked, I saw rotting window frames and unhinged doors. I wanted to look away, but there was nowhere to look.
In the movie White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Leningrad was so beautiful — and pristine. Had the film been made in a different city? I hear my father’s voice from years ago: “Of course it wasn’t filmed in Leningrad. Who would allow them to come inside Russia to make a movie about that defector Baryshnikov of all people? It was filmed in Helsinki. That’s why it looks so beautiful.”
There were very few trees. In the center of the wide boulevard stood a low concrete divider and barricaded behind it, tram tracks: a bus on rails.
The tram tracks were set in concrete that was in varying states of disrepair, from badly cracked to ravine-like. The rails were uniformly rusted. Oxidation had removed so much of the rails, it was a wonder electricity still surged through them.
There was something else, too. The streets were empty of people. Where was everyone? I looked at my watch.
10:45.
My mind was blank. 10:45 what? Was it morning or night? Had I already changed my watch to Russian time? My attention was temporarily diverted from the window as I tried to subtract nine hours from 10:45, then add nine hours to 10:45. After five minutes I gave up and asked Viktor. He told me it was 7:45 on Monday morning. Viktor was quiet. Telling me the time was the first phrase he spoke all car ride.
I know well Monday mornings in New York City — teeming with chaotic, purposeful life.
Here, nothing looked open and no one was out.
Well, why should they be out? Nothing was open.
But didn’t they have work to go to?
There were a few stores. I was baffled by the large-scale billboards — SONY, and SANSUI, and NOKIA — some translated into Russian, some bilingual, some left solely in the Latin alphabet. Were there stores in Russia selling cellular phones and consumer electronics and small appliances?
“Viktor, these stores weren’t here before, when I lived here, were they?” I asked.
“Of course not. There was nothing here then. It’s much better now.”
I nodded — and my head nearly went through the roof as the car dived into a pothole.
My father told me, after I had emailed him with a possible title for this book — Thinking About Leningrad — “Paullina, please, don’t ever call it Leningrad. Call it St. Petersburg.”
I tried.
In my defense, my book The Bronze Horseman is set during World War II, an
d in those days St. Petersburg was Leningrad.
My Aeroflot tickets stated that I would be landing at LED. When I asked the helpful airline attendant what LED stood for, she looked at me like I was the weirdo and brusquely said, “Leningrad.” As if, duh.
After Communism fell, four million citizens voted by referendum and overwhelming majority to restore their city’s original name. They had been waiting eighty years to call Leningrad St. Petersburg. The affectionate name all Leningraders use for the city is Peter.
We drove past Moscow Station — one of the five major railroad stations in St. Petersburg, and a very famous building in its own right. It is a large, imposing blue building with white window frames, apparently the twin, in every detail, of the Leningrad Railroad Station in Moscow. It also looked fifty years unpainted.
Directly opposite the station, across the big city square, is another large, imposing blue building. On its roof, in monumental Cyrillic letters that light up at night, stand the words (HERO-CITY LENINGRAD).
Viktor told me the sign was there to greet travelers arriving from the rest of Russia as they emerged from the train station. Hero-City Leningrad. Those three words scream in the night: We starved and we fought and we died, but we did not surrender.
Rename that, I thought. Change that.
I felt better about not adjusting easily to calling Leningrad St. Petersburg.
The letters on the sign were twenty feet tall and shakily faced every which way. They looked as if they were about to fall down on the street and kill somebody. Oh, sure, all glory to the hero-city, but the letters were not to be straightened out.
We are still on the outskirts, I assured myself. It had only been seven years since the fall of Soviet Union. They just hadn’t gotten around to repairing it yet. Viktor, as if reading my mind, said, “Don’t worry. Everything is better in the center of town.”
Then we got to the center of town.
The road we needed to take to get to my hotel was cordoned off for repairs. It looked every bit as rough and full of holes as the road we’d just been driving on.
Viktor smiled. “They’re fixing it, see? They do little by little. They’re starting at the center and working their way out.”
I nodded.
“It’s much better than before,” he said, as if on the defensive.
My father was right about my hotel, Grand Hotel Europe. It couldn’t have been in a better location, on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt, the Rodeo Drive of St. Petersburg, and Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa. In 1991, the hotel had been extensively renovated and was now run by Kempinski, the oldest luxury hotelier in the world. The side of the hotel that faced Nevsky Prospekt was freshly painted yellow stucco with white window trim. The side that faced Mikhailovskaya was freshly painted brown stucco, with ornate window detail. Inside and out, the hotel looked as if it belonged on the streets of Paris.
Dutifully I offered Viktor money, just as my father had instructed, but he flatly refused, saying we would take care of it later. As per my father’s directive, we agreed to meet at 3:30 that afternoon.
The desk clerk spoke to me in courteous, accented English as he took my passport and visa, promising to return them to me in a few hours. I asked him why he needed them. “You’re going to be exchanging currency,” he replied, as if that explained anything.
“Yes, that’s true,” I said.
Self-satisfied, he smiled.
“But I’m not exchanging currency now.”
“Yes, but later.”
Ah, yes, later. So he took my passport and visa, and I went to my room.
“Will there be more bags, madam?” said the bellman.
“No,” I replied, all puffed up and proud of myself. “Just the one.”
It was Monday morning, 13 July 1998, 8:30 a.m. Russian time, or 11:30 p.m. Sunday, Dallas time. Aside from less than three hours of drunken sleep and an hour’s tense nap on the Aeroflot flight, I hadn’t slept — in any time zone — since Saturday morning. How many hours was that? Thirty-six? Forty-four? Then and there, I made myself a promise to stop counting after thirty hours of sleeplessness.
My room had a large entranceway, and was taller than it was wide. It had twenty-foot ceilings, a crystal chandelier, and gilded ceiling trim. The two twin beds had down pillows, down mattress pads, and down quilts. I was reluctant to sit on either bed, for fear that I would fall asleep sitting up. I didn’t come to St. Petersburg to sleep. I was going to call Kevin, unpack, and explore.
The window had a sill about eighteen inches deep. How thick the walls must be, I marveled, comparing them with the two-by-fours that I’d just watched frame our house in Texas. It had looked like a house of sticks before the sheetrock and the stucco went up.
I opened the window. It had a side view of the leafy Italian Gardens and beyond them the Russian Museum.
A road crew was repairing the street below. What they were repairing didn’t look so much like a pothole as a crater. The repair crew was two men, both wearing white dress shirts. They were taking a cigarette break, and then they picked up their jackhammers and got back to work, making the crater even larger.
I perched on a stone ledge beneath a crystal chandelier, and gazed out onto the tall oaks of the Italian Gardens for about a minute. All was quiet in St. Petersburg — aside from the two deafening JACKHAMMERS going full bore right below my window. As a soundtrack, it didn’t work. I was about to close the window when the noise suddenly stopped. The men were taking another cigarette break!
Just then, I noticed a sign on the window latch: “To keep insects out of the room, kindly keep the windows closed.”
The room was the nicest I’d ever been in. The bathroom was the size of a bedroom, with a separate shower and tub. The toilet was a standard white toilet, a magnificent feat of ingeniously simple technology. It wasn’t quite as nice as my all-time favorite hotel toilet, at the BoardWalk Villas at Walt Disney World — but then what was?
I unpacked slowly. I wasn’t sure what to do with my bounty of alone-time. Should I go for a walk? Should I, without a map, just using childhood intuition, find Fifth Soviet, the street where I lived for the first ten years of my life?
I decided to have breakfast. I was hungry, and my eyes were getting that glassy, sandpapery feel from being up too long. But first I walked down a flight of stairs to the hotel health club, which advertised a number of different services: massage, acupuncture, sauna, weight room, small pool, pedicures, facials. I booked a massage for 10 a.m. and a blow-out for eleven. My hair is untamed at best; if my father’s friend and his entire family were turning out to see me, I intended to have my wild hair conquered by a professional.
Bookings made, I rushed downstairs to breakfast. Stepping out of the stairwell, I thought I’d walked outside, yet I wasn’t chilly. When I looked up, I saw a glass ceiling a hundred feet above me. It gave the illusion of being outside, without any of the disadvantages of, say, rain or wind. The patrons of the hotel could sit and sip their tea and eat their finger sandwiches and read their newspapers, as if they were on a warm rue de Paris, surrounded by fresh flowers, untouched by Arctic weather. It was the famous glass mezzanine of the Grand Hotel Europe, a partial floor between two stories.
On the mezzanine were two restaurants — the Caviar Bar, and the opulent European. Both were open, but the European offered a breakfast buffet that included red caviar and blini — yeast-raised pancakes. I opted for caviar. I love blini. I took two. They cost me twenty-four units per blini, fat and small, like silver-dollar pancakes, instead of thin and crèpe-like, as blini are supposed to be.
Everything in the Grand Hotel Europe was charged in units — not rubles, not dollars, but units. When I asked the hostess about it, she cheerfully told me that units were dollars.
“So nothing is in rubles?”
Smiling courteously, she shook her head. “Not in this hotel,” she said. “Outside, yes. But the dollar is more stable at the moment.”
After my blini with caviar and sautéed mushro
oms and potatoes, I bolted to the health club. It was a few minutes past my appointment time, and I don’t like to be late. Svetlana, the girl behind the counter, gave me a towel and robe and told me I could use the sauna while I waited.
“Waited?” I repeated. “Waited for what?”
“For the masseuse, of course.”
“Oh. I won’t be waiting long, right?”
“No, no. Not too long.”
In an American health club, if you arrive for your appointment a few minutes late, the masseuse is already waiting for you, towel in hand, tapping her impatient foot on the floor.
I disrobed, sat for ten minutes in an empty locker room, caught myself falling asleep. I went back to the reception area.
“Will it be long?”
“No, no, not long,” Svetlana assured me.
I ambled over to the pool. It was an oversized Jacuzzi. There was no one else but me in the club. Not even the masseuse.
Impatient and cranky, I was tired of waiting and of being awake. Also of being half-naked for no good reason.
“Svetlana,” I said, “if there is a problem, I can come back later.”
“There is no problem.”
“I’ve been waiting twenty minutes, and I need a full hour massage, but I have a hair appointment, which you made for me, in forty minutes. I don’t want to wait anymore. How about we reschedule.” It wasn’t a question. I had already turned around to go get dressed.
Just as I returned to the reception area, fully dressed, the masseuse ran in, panting. “I’m sorry. That traffic. They’re fixing the roads.”
“They certainly are,” I said.
I was relieved that he was late and that I was dressed, because the masseuse was actually a masseur, a man, and I’d never had a massage by a man before. I’d sold this trip to my husband as one for research and sentiment and desperately needed wisdom. I knew that the husband would not be especially keen to learn that 5000 miles away from home, his wife lay half-naked while being rubbed in oil by a panting Russian man.
I had my hair blow-dried instead. It took an hour, like a massage — a very long hour. The stylist looked all of twelve years old. But she did an impressively good job of straightening my hair.