Mishka Ben-David - Forbidden Love in St. Petersburg

The truth was that Russia, faraway, cold, huge, with its inspiring poetry, its novels, its soul, and St Petersburg, built to be the most beautiful of cities, were for me the fount of a veiled, indefinable, attraction. I’d been sent to forge commercial contacts in the former Soviet Union without even having to make a profit from these connections. I didn’t at all feel like someone embarking on a mission.

In fact, I didn’t feel anything. That was also how I responded to Ariel, who didn’t know what to say and so simply wished me well. For the first time I didn’t have a yardstick by which to measure success.

An hour before I left for the airport he had shaken my hand warmly. His presence there had proved to be so unnecessary that I thought he’d been sent from Israel simply to verify that I hadn’t changed my mind at the last minute and decided to settle in Canada.

On the plane, with the expansive dawn still visible through the window, the first hesitant buds of understanding surfaced within me. They were not the kind of feelings that could melt a block of ice. The sadness over my mother was no longer a running sore. She was living in a world of her own that only Madeleine, who I’d arranged would look after her, could understand–a world in which I had no part to play. I no longer felt sad about my father. Yehiel had promised to care for his grave and say Kaddish in my place on the first anniversary of his death. Nor was I grieving over Orit and the love we had which died an agonizing death, certainly more agonizing than that of the cluster of cells that were destroyed on her orders and which could have been our child. Now, deep in the block of ice within me which the combination of all these events and circumstances had created, the first signs of life appeared.

When the blue of the sky spread across the whole window, the colours of the dawn disappeared, giving way to the bright light of day. The ocean sparkled below us. At that moment I fell fast asleep. When I woke, the mountainous and wooded landscape of Scandinavia was visible from high up. The pilot announced that preparations for landing were underway and informed the passengers of the local time, nine o’clock in the evening.

We crossed the Gulf of Finland and descended through clouds that became denser and denser the closer we got to the city. The plane shook, passengers put on their seat belts and the long-legged, flat-chested stewardesses hurried to their seats.

When we dropped out of the clouds, light suffused the cabin. This was the middle of summer and the northern sun was late in sinking below the horizon. From the window I could see forests, vast fields, creeks, as well as clusters of rural houses and dachas in the coves of the meandering rivers.

Along the length of the runways of Pulkovo 2, St Petersburg’s international airport, stretched a line of modern luxury jets, obviously belonging to the new class of oligarchs, as well as a number of old and dismantled helicopters.

A bus took us to the antiquated terminal building where we were greeted by two signboards, one with the city’s name Sankt Peterburg in Russian and the other in English. Despite the Russian language course I’d taken I had difficulty in deciphering the Latin ‘c’ as an ‘s’ and the letter ‘p’ as an ‘r’. For me this served as a short introduction to the many names of the city which in the operations order was referred to simply as ‘Peterburg’, as it is called in Israel.

Inside the small building, workers were in the process of erecting a skeleton of metal and glass which in a few years time would become the new arrivals and departures terminal.

A secret agent is supposed to be somewhat anxious as he enters the bastion of the KGB but my emotions were rather different. I had the feeling one gets before a blind date with a woman who, it’s been promised, would be beautiful. Perhaps it was the smile on my face that made it possible for me to get through passport control so quickly. The one baggage carousel and my suitcases also played a helpful hand and within minutes I was in a taxi.

The city boundary stretched almost to the airport and all along the route into the centre were newly constructed car supermarkets stocking the products of the best European automobile manufacturers. A monument commemorating the Nazi Siege of Leningrad, a tall column surrounded by statues of the fighters and the besieged population marked the official entry point into the city.

Stalin’s buildings, said the driver as we came into Moskovsky Prospekt, the boulevard that leads to the centre of town, and pointed to massive structures on either side of the street adorned with pillars and crescents. Stalin knew how to give the street the appearance of dignity and power that was not diminished by the grey and beige colour of the buildings themselves.

When we reached the city’s majestic centre, I was surrounded by glorious buildings in a riot of colours–red and green, blue, beige and yellow, which produced an inexplicable sense of joy in me. The magnificent mansions, once the palaces of the nobility who Peter the Great brought with him to the city, had been converted into offices, restaurants, and shops, including well-known international clothing and food chains. We drove past big bridges spanning the web of canals that interlace the city, making our way through a brisk traffic of both vehicles and pedestrians. It was by then after ten and still daylight.

The Grand Hotel Europe excited me from the moment I got out of the taxi and the doorman in a red jacket hurried towards me with a trolley on which he loaded my two suitcases. I’d stayed in more sumptuous hotels than this, in line with the needs of any given trip. But this hotel was housed within a number of elegant old buildings, with architectural and decorative features that I remembered being described in Russian period novels, and lined with cafés and prestigious shops.

The registration process reminded me of where I was. The receptionist asked for my passport and immigration form, scanned the documents and sent them to the immigration authority or ministry of the interior. I could only hope that the Mossad had done its work properly and that no problems would arise from the passport and the details recorded in it.

I took a suite on the top floor. I knew that I would be spending a few weeks there until I found an apartment and wanted to start my new life surrounded by ancient beauty. I was pleased when the doorman, who’d glued himself to me, opened the door with a big key rather than a magnetic card; to be welcomed by the smell of old wood; happy to see the suite’s pleasant sitting-room with a working corner, a lounge area, and thick carpeting throughout; and pleased when the young man took my suitcases into the bedroom with its huge canopied bed standing in the middle, a bed in which, given my modest dimensions, I could sleep either lengthwise or crosswise.

When I drew back the heavy curtains and then the more flimsy lace curtains, the view from my room was of a garden in bloom and at its centre a big statue. It took me a minute or so to register what I was looking at. The statue was of Pushkin with his arm raised, pictures of which I’d seen in albums when getting ready for the journey. Behind the statue I could see the yellow palaces of the Russian Museum and of the Mikhailovsky Theatre with their porticos of white pillars. What particularly caught my eye however, were the amazing onion-shaped domes on top of the Church of the Spilled Blood, visible beyond the palaces. Some of the domes were gilded and some, painted with diagonal and square patterns of blue, white, yellow and gold, looked as if they were the work of kindergarten children. A slight cough reminded me that at the door to my room stood the lad in a red jacket waiting for his tip.