We were headed for the south coast of the Gulf of Finland. First Peterhof, then Oranienbaum, then Big Izhora, Little Izhora, Lebyazhye, then Gora-Valday, and then at the crest, right before the shore curved — Shepelevo.
Just past Shepelevo a larger town, Sosnovy Bor. The Soviets built a nuclear reactor there in the early 1980s and restricted all access down the coast. That’s why my mother did not go to Shepelevo when she visited Russia in 1987. In 1992 the reactor in Sosnovy Bor had a serious radiation leak and was now in the process of being dismantled.
All I wanted to do was look out the window in silence, and daydream, but my father was telling Viktor and me about the Russians who got rich when Communism fell.
Through small bribes, he said, some enterprising Russians acquired Soviet buildings on the cheap in the early 1990s, when they saw what was about to become of Communism. The buildings were cheap, yes, but they were also falling apart. With a few connections and some foreign capital investment, the Russians renovated the buildings, and then leased them out in the new post-Communist Russia. They made millions. Most of this reconstruction was in Moscow but there was some in Leningrad, too.
I half listened.
“Any questions?” my father asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Tell me again why we couldn’t go to Shepelevo by public transportation?” I so fondly remembered taking the train and bus to Shepelevo. It would take us fifteen minutes on the metro, and then before boarding the train Papa or Mama would buy me a crème brûlée ice cream, the best thing in the world. Sometimes they’d be out, and I’d be forced to get disappointing vanilla. We would take the elektrichka — the short-distance train — for forty-five minutes to Lomonosov (now Oranienbaum), where we would wait for a bus that would take an hour to get to Shepelevo. I suspect that today all I really wanted out of the public transportation experience was the crème brûleé ice cream, but I couldn’t confess this to my father.
“I’m too old to take public transportation,” he said.
But when we were driving through Lomonosov, the train station, a big old yellow stucco building, struck big weepy chords in both of us. “Take a picture for your mama,” my father said. “She’ll cry.”
That’s exactly why we should have taken the train and the bus, I thought. I remembered waiting in front of that station with my mother. I remembered sitting on the dusty bench that was still there, just as dusty.
A bus pulled up. It didn’t so much ride in as hobble in, as if perhaps one of the tires was blown. The wine-colored paint was peeling and the bus’s undercarriage was rusted out. The small, opaque windows were firmly shut. The bus made a reluctant-sounding engine noise.
“Is that the kind of bus we used to take?” I asked.
“This one is worse,” said my father.
We bought some drinks in a little shop next to the station. Viktor bought a jar of pickles.
The shop was new, my father said. There had been nowhere to buy anything before; not pickles and certainly nowhere selling Coke and Sprite and Perrier spring water.
“What did they sell?”
“Nothing.”
We drove on.
“Papa,” I asked him, “what am I going to do, how am I going to write about Russia during the war? It was sixty years ago!”
“Write, write,” he said. “Everything is exactly the same.”
“Did the Germans get to Shepelevo?”
My dad told me they did not. They trampled through Peterhof — Peter the Great’s summer palace, a rich man’s Versailles — from which they stole rugs to line their miserable trenches. Forty kilometers before Shepelevo, they were stopped by the Red Army at Lomonosov, the town we’d just left, which remained in Soviet hands throughout the war.
“Were they stopped because of Kronstadt?”
“Exactly,” replied my father, with slight surprise that I even knew what Kronstadt was.
Kronstadt was a tiny island in the middle of the narrow entrance to the Gulf of Finland. It housed a Soviet naval base. From this base, the Soviets bombarded the Germans to the south and the Finns to the north with artillery fire. Kronstadt saved Leningrad.
Just past Lomonosov, on the edge of the Gulf of Finland, Viktor stopped to ask for directions.
Gazing out onto the Gulf, I said to Papa, “I wonder where Kronstadt is?”
He pointed to a bit of land some way out into the Gulf. “Right there.”
“Can tourists go there?”
“They can now.”
“They can?” I became excited. “I really want to go.”
“Paullina,” my father exclaimed, sounding exasperated, “you should’ve come to Russia not for six days but sixty.”
Viktor returned and informed us that just a few kilometers up ahead, past a town called Big Izhora, was a border patrol point. Without special permission, no one was allowed through.
“Oh, koshmar! Koshmar!” said my father. “That’s it. Everything fell through, Paullina. All our plans. What a nightmare. What a horror. That’s it. Well, it’s all over.”
We drove on anyway, but slower. For fifteen minutes, my papa continued to lament. “I can’t believe it. I asked him if we needed permission. He said, No, go right ahead, they’ll let you through. I could have gotten permission so easily. No, he said, you don’t need it. Well, that’s it now. It’s all over. What a tragedy. Nothing to do. Ah, hell.”
Who this he was, I didn’t know and was afraid to ask.
There was no Let’s see what we can do. Let’s try. Maybe there is another way we can go.
No. Apparently it was all over, and he was to blame.
The border patrol booth was manned by two young, extremely able bodied soldiers in full uniform with guns strapped to their waists. The gate was a manual one: to let a car through, the soldiers had to push the gate open with their bodies.
The three of us sighed as we parked the car and got out. Slowly we walked up to one of the soldiers, who listened carefully to our pleas to let us pass and then shook his head. My father handed the soldier his business card and said something about coming from America to see his grandmother’s grave in Shepelevo.
The soldier looked at my father’s passport and his business card. He looked at my passport. He studied each of us, and then shook his head again.
I didn’t understand what the border post was for. What border? We weren’t on the border of anything. We were in the middle of a two-lane highway, between nowhere and nothing, traveling alongside the Gulf of Finland from one Russian village to the next.
The soldier disappeared to make a phone call. My father shook his head and again mumbled something about some man named Viktor who should have told him about needing permission. I looked at our Viktor, the driver.
“You?” I mouthed silently.
He shook his head. Loudly he said, “Another Viktor who works at Radio Liberty.”
“Papa,” I asked, “isn’t this the road the bus used to go down?”
“Of course it is.”
“Well, what’s the checkpoint for?”
“How do I know? Viktor, do you know?”
He didn’t.
“Nobody knows. Maybe it has something to do with the nuclear reactor in Sosnovy Bor, but probably not. The soldiers themselves most likely have no idea. That’s Russia for you.”
As we waited for the soldier to return, through the pines I glimpsed the dark waters of the Gulf of Finland.
It was on this highway thirty-three years ago that my mother and I took a taxi to Shepelevo because the hourly bus hadn’t come in three hours. I was two. I looked out the window and watched the water appear and disappear behind the trees, for an hour saying only: “Yes Gulf. No Gulf. Yes Gulf. No Gulf. Yes Gulf. No Gulf.” My mother told me that my hypnotic repetition of those three words had a barbiturate effect on our taxi driver, who fell asleep behind the wheel.
“Did we stop?” I asked my mother. “Did we stop to let him sleep?”
“Oh no,” she replied. “We kept dr
iving.”
I’d heard the story many times. It happened on this road, the road we were not allowed on.
And by the way, it wasn’t that they weren’t letting anyone through. Villagers? Yes. Summer residents? Sure. Fishermen? Of course. Drivers with permission? Absolutely. Just not us.
Could it really be that our quest for Shepelevo was going to end in failure? I refused to believe it. What if I never got another opportunity to return to Russia?
The soldier hung up the phone, came back and shook his head for the third and final time.
“They won’t let you through,” he said. “It is very strict. I can’t disobey. But if you want, you can go the back way. You can go around. Go back where you came, to the Tallinn Shosse, and take the road through the woods that will connect you back with this road twelve kilometers farther down. Near Lebyazhye.” The soldier was serious and unsmiling. The other soldier, in the meantime, a big strapping guy, was unhappily pushing and pulling the two gates open and closed by himself, earning his soldier’s pay. As he passed from one gate to the other, he glared at me. I stared back.
We turned the car around and drove back a few kilometers to what we thought was the Tallinn Shosse. Since none of the roads, even the major highways, were marked, Viktor had to stop for directions before we could be sure. He called out to some teenagers walking along the shoulder and asked if this was the Tallinn Shosse. Like they knew. They shrugged and said, “Think so.” Great.
We turned on this possible Tallinn Shosse and soon came to an army truck and a red Mercedes parked in the middle of the road at odd angles. The two drivers were angrily gesticulating to each other. Only when we passed did we see that the Mercedes was caved in along the passenger side.
After driving for a few kilometers, we turned onto an unmarked road that led into the forest of tall birches and reedy pines. It smelled good, of pine cones and wet moss and butterflies.
“No,” said Viktor. “This isn’t right.” I wondered how he could tell.
He asked a handful of people. They all pointed him toward the woods up ahead.
Suddenly, there was no more paved road. We were driving on a dirt road, the likes of which I’d never been on. I’m not saying roads like this don’t exist in other places. I’m just saying I haven’t seen them. Once when I was fourteen, I was taken for a ride on a motorcycle on an unpaved road in Canada. That road seemed as unpaved as a road could get. However, it was like freshly poured tarmac compared to the lunar craters we now found ourselves navigating. This road had potholes every three yards, potholes about three yards in diameter, all filled with muddy water. The holes alternated — one on one side of the road, one on the other. Viktor had to zigzag around them, like a skier on a giant slalom course.
“This cannot be right, Viktor,” I said. “This can’t possibly be right. Turn back at once.”
He continued to drive.
For five kilometers.
After five kilometers I was sure we were going the wrong way. I could not believe the nice young soldier would have told us to take a road like this. He didn’t say, You’ll need a four-wheel drive. He didn’t say, You might have to push your car through the bushes. He didn’t say the dinosaurs had walked through here and left footprints. He said “a road.” All my definitions of the word “road” involved asphalt or cement. We had to be going the wrong way.
“Give me the map,” I said.
Yet, there it was, a beige line on Viktor’s map — ten kilometers long. On the map legend, the color beige stood for “dirt road.”
My father cheerfully called it “forest road.”
As we shuddered along, I studied the map. Beige lines crisscrossed all over the place.
Feeling nauseated, I put away the map and stared straight ahead, trying not to vomit.
The unpaved road forked in quite a few places. We bore to the right. At one point, Viktor declared we were going the wrong way, turned around, drove back to the fork and went left instead of right.
How he knew which way to go was a mystery to me.
After seven kilometers, we saw a woman by the side of the road. We stopped for her.
“Why do we have to stop?” I asked a little petulantly.
“She’ll take us to the highway,” Viktor said. “She’ll tell us where to go. She looks like she knows where she’s headed.” The woman was wearing orange knee-high rubber boots, light blue sweatpants, a dirty white long-sleeved shirt, and over it an old ski vest. Every inch of her body, other than her face, was covered by clothing.
She told us she and her two male comrades, standing dumbly nearby, had been picking mushrooms all night. They were heading to the train station, three kilometers away. We put her mushrooms in the trunk, and she climbed into the back seat with me.
When my father asked if we should give the men a lift, too, Viktor said, “They’re men. They can walk three kilometers.”
As the woman got in, a swarm of mosquitoes got in with her. I saw that her face had been bloodied by insect bites in a few dozen places. And it was a small face.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Olya,” she said, and smiled, flashing all four of her teeth, yellow with black holes, as if the mosquitoes had drilled through them, too. I spent the next three kilometers killing mosquitoes and trying not to look inside Olya’s friendly, smiling toothless mouth.
We let her out near the station. She told us our highway was just half a kilometer up the road. My father shook her hand. When he got back into the car, he turned to me. I lifted my eyebrows.
“She has the teeth of poverty,” he said.
I said nothing.
Viktor drove five yards, and stopped to ask a group of people where the highway was. Half a kilometer down the road, they told him.
Finally we were back on A-121, and this time there was no border patrol, no gate — just the highway, the pines, and the Gulf of Finland peeking through them.
No Gulf. And now, yes Gulf.
SHEPELEVO
“Papa,” I asked, “what is the lake called in Shepelevo?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think it has a name. Even your Dedushka never called it anything but the lake. It doesn’t have a name, I’m sure.”
I looked at Viktor’s map. It was called Lake Gora-Valdaisko. Gora-Valday was the town just east of Shepelevo.
“Papa, the lake is called Gora-Valdaisko. It says so here on the map.”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said, as if it didn’t really matter to him.
I thought to myself then that I couldn’t wait to tell my grandparents when I got back home. It would matter to them. But when I had returned to New York and told them, they said, oh, that’s right, as if it didn’t really matter to them either.
We had left Leningrad around eleven in the morning and it was now about three in the afternoon. We hadn’t eaten, and I hadn’t gone to the bathroom. My father and Viktor had twice availed themselves in the woods.
Finally we passed a sign for Shepelevo.
I said, “Papa, where can we get some lunch? Maybe a little Chinese take-out?”
He spun around and glared at me. “Are you joking?”
I wanted to continue with the tease, but thought better of it. “Yes.”
He and Viktor were trying to work out where to park. I stared out the window, trying to spot the dirt road that led down to my village from the highway.
There was nowhere to park, although of course I was half-expecting a little paved lot somewhere — next to a convenience store, perhaps. We parked right off the highway, on the grass, by the side of the cemetery where my great-grandmother was buried.
I couldn’t wait to get out of the car. The first thing I did was smell the air. I closed my eyes and took a breath, the biggest breath of my life, knowing I was taking the biggest breath of my life. I was taking a breath to smell Shepelevo. Inhaling Shepelevo into my lungs was like hitting the right note on the piano. There was only one right note.
When
I was a child, Shepelevo was the smell of nettles, of salted smoked fish, of fresh water from the Gulf of Finland, and of burning firewood, all wrapped up in one word: Shepelevo.
As it had been then, so it was now.
Across two continents, a dozen countries, twenty cities, three colleges, two marriages, three children, three books, and twenty-five years of another life, I breathed in and smelled the air. For me nowhere else in the world had quite the same smell. How well I recalled it, how familiar and just right it was. It was as I had wished it — the first thing so far this trip that was.
“Papa,” I said, my voice breaking. “Do you think we could photograph the smell?”
He gave me a funny look and then laughed.
I walked along the edge of the highway, stepping carefully on the pine needles and dirt. I picked up a handful of both and smelled them. Papa and Viktor were in front of me, heading toward the gate of the cemetery, but I was in no rush. I was getting light-headed from breathing so deeply.
The cemetery was ancient and fairly small, maybe fifty yards across, completely covered by a canopy of oaks and pines. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d miss it. Though it had been bitter bright sunshine on the highway and warm, the cemetery was dark and noticeably cooler.
My grandmother had given me very clear instructions regarding her mother’s grave. “Somewhere on the right-hand side, toward the back.” We had to find it. We could not fail.
The problem was, the cemetery had been expanded in the twenty-one years since my great-grandmother’s death. What once had been the back was now the middle. We could tell it had been expanded because the old crumbling fence ended and a new, slightly less crumbling fence began. But we didn’t give up: we walked up and down, looking for the back, or the middle, or the front.
We could not find a gravestone marked with my great-grandmother’s name. Every once in a while, my father would exclaim, “I think this is it!” But it never was.
When we had walked through all the gravestones on the right-hand side of the cemetery, we started on the gravestones in the middle.