Back at reception and ready to pay, I asked Svetlana how much the blow-dry cost. “Two hundred and twenty,” she told me.
I churned this for thirty seconds.
“Two hundred and twenty units?”
“Yes,” Svetlana replied — then followed up with a quick “No!” when she saw my face. “Rubles,” she said. “Rubles.”
That was it. Rubles. How much was two hundred and twenty rubles? I didn’t know how many rubles made a dollar. I could not exchange dollars for rubles in the United States before I left, since the Russian government did not and still does not allow their rubles to be exported.
I pretended to think about it for another minute as Svetlana and the masseur stared at me.
Finally, helpfully, Svetlana said, “About six rubles to a dollar.” I conjured up a thoughtful face, to create the impression I was trying to work out the conversion in my head. Truth was, I was falling asleep right in front of them as I leaned against the counter.
To end my suffering, Svetlana took mercy on me. “About thirty-five dollars,” she said.
I paid up, and went back to my room — for just a second, I told myself. It was noon, and outside was a lovely day. I had three and a half hours to myself before I had to meet my father, and I couldn’t wait to go out for a meander.
I looked at one of the down-covered twin beds. I had chosen the one closest to the window, the other one having already become a storage surface. It was covered with information packets, a map of Leningrad, the room service menu, the hotel’s alphabetical list of services, my three purses, and an Olympus pocket camera.
I wanted to go out. But my twin bed had a down quilt on it, and down pillows, and a down mattress pad. The room was full of daylight. It was noon, my first day in Russia. I went to the window. The two smoking road warriors must have run out of cigarettes because the street was empty and quiet.
I sat down on the bed. Then I lay down on the bed — just for a sec, I told myself, and careful, don’t mess up your hair.
When I opened my eyes and looked at my watch, it said 3:15.
I jumped up. My father was going to be here in fifteen minutes!
PAPA
I tried to dress thoughtfully. I didn’t want to overdress. But I didn’t want to underdress either. I was about to meet my father’s oldest friends, Anatoly and Ellie, and their daughter, Alla, my best friend once upon a time. Two years older than me, she now had a husband and two children — by Russian standards a tremendous number of children. I put on a white denim skirt, a brown V-neck shirt, and low-heeled, strappy sandals.
At precisely 3:30 the phone rang. It was my father. “I’m waiting downstairs,” he said.
I hadn’t seen my father since our trip to New York the previous summer, when we had first broached the idea of going to Russia together. Out in the street in broad daylight he nodded in my direction, smiled even, and I gave him a hug outside the doors of Grand Hotel Europe. Were these the same doors he had wheeled my baby carriage through when he was smuggling books from his American acquaintance? It had been winter then, cold and dark. Now, the sunlight was very bright.
My father looks a lot like me. If I were a man, twenty-seven years older, a few pounds heavier, smoked, and drank lots of beer, I would be my father. I get my curly hair from him, and my Russian features. I have three-quarters of his memory, half his intelligence and a quarter of his sense of humor. He is of medium height and always dresses extra nicely. He is freshly shaved and smells clean. On this occasion, he was wearing jeans with suspenders and a button-down shirt. As his cousin and my aunt Tania once told me — she who knew my father well, for they had been close growing up — “Your Papa, when he was an adolescent, was always trying to find himself, to reinvent himself. He didn’t know if he wanted to be Gérard Philipe or Clark Gable, but he knew he wanted to be someone great and important. And as ever — humor oozed out of his every pore.”
Papa studied me silently. Finally he said he didn’t recognize me. “What did you do to your hair? Why is it straight? Why are you always trying to be something you’re not? And you’re not really dressed for the weather, are you? Where is your coat?”
“But it’s so warm,” I said.
He shook his head.
As we arrived at Viktor’s car, my father said, “Get in the back. It’s easier for you to get into the backseat. I will sit in the front.” It might have been easier for me to get into the backseat, but it was much harder to see anything from the tiny rear window of the Volkswagen.
After we started driving, I casually asked where Fifth Soviet street was, so I would know where to go another day. I felt such regret for sleeping. I could sleep any time. But to walk to Fifth Soviet by myself, on my first day back in Russia — how often could I do that?
Well, now never.
Papa asked Viktor to drive us to Fifth Soviet, so that we could see for ourselves. “Just for two minutes, Viktor, all right?” my father said. “Because we must go to Anatoly’s. They’re expecting us. They are very excited to see you again, Paullina.”
The road was bumpy and in the backseat, I felt quite thrown about. I saw a man in a dress shirt standing on a corner, smoking a cigarette. He looked as if he had nowhere to go. He could’ve been one half of the road crew jackhammering outside my hotel. Or he could’ve been homeless. It was impossible to tell the difference. The homeless were well dressed in Leningrad. They looked like normal people in suits. I watched him until the traffic light changed, and we zipped away.
I saw little of Leningrad out of the car’s narrow window. But the back of my father’s head, his cigarette, and the traffic lights out in front I could see perfectly. While Viktor navigated the streets to Fifth Soviet, my father and I digressed into his reasons for arriving to Russia so late on July 13. Viktor had just picked up him from the airport.
“Papa,” I said, “so tell me again why you couldn’t meet me any earlier than today?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, you were so adamant that I couldn’t come any earlier than today. Even today was too early. Why was that again?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he repeated, taking a long drag of his cigarette.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “So tell me, how was the World Cup Final yesterday?”
Pause. “Fine,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Did you enjoy watching it?”
“Very much. Zinedine Zidane was a marvel. I invited some people over to my Prague apartment. France has never won the World Cup before. It was a momentous occasion. If you knew anything about anything, you would have been glued to your television, not gallivanting around the globe.”
“So why didn’t you just tell me this is what you were up to?”
Viktor was smiling, but my father kept a straight face. He sort of flung his head in my direction, to pretend to look at me. “What?” he said. “I have to report to you now?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “Here we are going to Russia, and I thought you were delayed and limited by work . . .”
“What do you care what I’m delayed and limited by? I told you no earlier than Monday, but you of course don’t listen.”
“I just want to know how your World Cup Final was, that’s all.”
Viktor was trying not to laugh as he drove.
We stopped at a red light on Ligovsky Prospekt. On the corner was a four-story redbrick building, partially concealed by a tall iron fence and large, leafy trees.
“See there?” my father said. “That was the hospital where we took you after you swallowed a whole bottle of aspirin. You were two. We took you right there. And do you know what you did as soon as we brought you back home? I come into the room and you are standing on our bed, and your mouth is filled with more aspirin! You must have hidden the bottle somewhere, and as soon as we got home, you retrieved it.”
I sat back and listened to him.
“Oh, and here? See these cobblestones? This is where I dropped yo
u on your head out of your carriage. Do you remember that?”
“Oddly, no.”
“How you cried. We brought you to the same hospital. And you were so scared when the doctors took you from me, you stretched out your arms and cried, ‘Papochka, come, let me carry you.’” He laughed fondly.
Up ahead was a large concert hall. My father told me was the October Concert Hall.
“No, Papa,” I corrected him. “That’s the Grechesky Concert Hall.”
“I can’t believe you’re arguing with me,” he said. “What do you know? It’s October Hall.”
Viktor didn’t help any: he agreed with my father.
“But I know it’s Grechesky Hall,” I insisted, “because I used to play on the steps over there.”
“You might have played there, but you obviously didn’t know what it was called,” said my father.
I let it go. Seeing the big, beige, ugly building, childhood came flooding back. When I was five, I performed in that concert hall with my kindergarten class. I held a giant red cube in my arms, a cube bigger than I was, and I danced. My mother was in the audience. My father was already gone. He was in prison.
On the weekends, when my mother was cleaning or cooking, she would send me out to Grechesky Concert Hall to play. I would cross Grechesky Prospekt by myself, hoping some other kids would be there. Sometimes there would be, but sometimes there was no one there at all. After all, it wasn’t a playground, just a flight of steps.
There was one girl I had really liked. I can’t remember her name now or how I knew her, but she was a few years older than I was. She always let me play with her and her friends.
One day she must have noticed I was cold. Was I shivering? Was I blue?
“Are you cold?” she asked. I nodded. And she said, “Oh, my baby!” She knelt in front of me and hugged me to her, and rubbed my back to warm me up, and I remember being stunned by the long embrace, by the comfort of it. Afterward, every time we played, I would tell her I was cold, or hungry, or that something hurt, because I wanted her to hug me again. She reminded me of my friend Alla.
When I was a child, Grechesky Prospekt seemed extremely wide to me. A tram ran through it. Now, as an adult, I saw that the street was really quite narrow. With the sun setting down its length, it looked almost rural.
There were hardly any people on the street. Then as now.
Across from the Concert Hall, on the corner of Grechesky and Fifth Soviet, I saw an olive-green stucco building.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” I cried.
“Yes, that’s our building,” my father said. “Listen, don’t get too excited. When I came to St. Petersburg last time, I walked by here and the building was closed off. They were doing renovations or repairs. I don’t know. It could be anything now. Condos. Business. Anything. You won’t be able to go inside. You’ll see. I wasn’t.”
We turned across Grechesky and pulled up outside our old building. We sat quietly for a few moments. Viktor did not turn off the engine, or even put the car into park.
“Well, this is it,” my father said. “Do you remember it?”
What a funny question. This building was one of the few things I remembered vividly. He knew that. He was asking to be dramatic.
I was surprised to discover the building was green. I don’t remember it being green. But the location of the building, I remembered exactly. Even the address. House no. 3, apartment 4.
I didn’t remember it looking so old. The intricate stucco trim was chipped, and the glossy cream front doors hung loose and unevenly on their hinges. They looked as though one hard push would send them falling right off.
“I thought you said they were renovating the building?”
“Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s what they said.”
From the backseat, I peered out at the cream double doors. I remembered walking through them and going up three flights of stairs.
“Well, we’ve seen it,” my father said. “Ready to get going?”
I didn’t answer.
“Or . . .” He sounded uncertain. “Or what? Do you want to get out?”
“I want to get out,” I said instantly.
Papa looked at Viktor apologetically. “Okay, Viktor? Just for a second.”
“Of course.” Viktor was unflappable. He switched off the engine.
We got out, and my father looked up. “There are our windows. Over there, on the third floor, on the left. Do you see them?”
I looked up. I felt weak.
It was at that moment that I got a queasy helpless feeling. I began to feel unmoored in a brew of strong sentiment. Looking up at the windows of the rooms where I used to live, it occurred to me then and there that I may have gotten in over my head. Though with undeniable curiosity, I had come mostly as an intellectual exercise. But what if the memories of the life I used to have, memories deliberately untouched by me for all these years, unrelived and unrelieved, turned out to be too much for me?
Frozen, I continued to look up. I remembered those windows as being large and majestic. But they were small and old, with cracked frames.
I didn’t know what to say.
“Papa,” I finally managed, “didn’t you once try to walk along the ledge from one window to the other?”
“Yes,” he said, with a sheepish chuckle. “We were celebrating. I had a little too much to drink. I can’t believe you remember that.”
I walked away from my dad and Viktor to the street corner. This was not how I wanted to see the place where I grew up. Not with Papa standing and smoking, in a hurry to get going. Not with Viktor waiting for us, puzzled and not understanding. Who could explain it to him, anyway? I didn’t understand either why seeing two old windows would fill my insides with such anguish.
I would’ve preferred to come by myself. To cross Grechesky Prospekt as a grown woman, to linger at the Concert Hall, remembering the little girl who tried to find some friends to play with while her mother cooked dinner.
My father came up to me, watching me, waiting for my reaction. I hoped my face was blank.
I stared at the street and my father stared at me.
“Okay?” he said. “Ready to go?”
“Absolutely,” I replied, turned and got back into the car.
As we drove away down Fifth Soviet, he pointed to a little park at the end of the street where he used to walk me in the stroller.
“I don’t remember that park,” I said.
“You were a baby.”
Briefly I caught sight of the avenue flanking the other side of Fifth Soviet, Suvorovsky Prospekt. Seeing Leningrad this way, from the backseat of a car, was surreal, as we whizzed away and soon crossed the Neva. It was as if I were looking at the city through the myopic viewfinder of a stranger’s camera.
We were driving through a part of town I’d never been to before. That was better. It wasn’t hitting as close to home. I focused on looking out of the window onto a deserted treeless street.
To avoid thinking — to avoid feeling — I asked Viktor what time the sun set in Leningrad these days.
“Oh,” said Viktor, thinking. “Right now it sets, I guess, around nine in the evening.”
“Nine?” I was mildly surprised. We had come to Leningrad on July 13 — the day after the World Cup Final — so that we could see the famous white nights. In Texas in summertime, the sun sets around nine, and there certainly weren’t any white nights in Texas.
“There are no more white nights,” Viktor said firmly. “No. It’s quite dark by about ten.”
The disappointment was a welcome distraction from the other things I was feeling.
As we drove through the southeastern part of town, away from the city center, the buildings got taller and shabbier. We passed balconies filled with hanging clothes, firewood and debris. Nothing had been painted. The windows were rotted out.
“When were these apartments built?” I asked carefully. I didn’t want to offend anyone. Viktor might live in one of these
buildings. My father smoked and said nothing.
“Some in the sixties, some in the seventies,” Viktor said.
I couldn’t help but say the wrong thing. “The nineteen-sixties?”
“Of course,” Viktor said.
Finally my father spoke. “You remember your Babushka and Dedushka’s apartment building?”
“Of course.”
“It was exactly like one of these buildings.”
I didn’t believe it. I told him that. Their apartment on Polustrovsky was so luxurious — the dank staircase with the drunk man passed out on the landing notwithstanding.
“I’m telling you, Paullina,” my father repeated quietly. “Exactly like one of these buildings.”
We turned a corner near an outdoor market; it looked like a harmless rural shopping strip, its tables piled with vegetables. Viktor told us it was a hotbed of drug activity.
Anatoly and Ellie lived near this market on a street called Ulitsa Dybenko. Their street was lined with concrete tenement structures, once painted white, now grimy. They looked like dilapidated city projects about to be demolished. The sidewalks were unswept, the grass unmowed, the trees sloppy. Across the street from the ramshackle high-rises was nothing but fields.
What St. Petersburg needed, I decided, was a community association like the one we had in Stonebridge Ranch, Texas. The association told us how high our grass could grow. It regulated the size and color of our children’s play fort in the backyard. Didn’t I just get a third stern letter from the association, warning me of severe penalties if we didn’t immediately plant shrubs in front of our exposed air-conditioning units? That’s what St. Petersburg needed. Foliage police.
First, though, they would need to get some air-conditioning units.
ANATOLY
It took us a few minutes to find Anatoly and Ellie’s apartment. Their group of buildings looked discouragingly the same as all the others. My father had trouble locating the right one.
“What street is this?” Papa asked Viktor. “Is this still Dybenko?”