Paullina Simons - Six Days in Leningrad

I had a view of the Italian Gardens, right across from the Russian Museum.

The road crew was repairing the street underneath my windows. What they were repairing didn’t look so much like a pot hole as a crater. The crew was two men, both wearing white dress shirts. The men were taking a smoking break, and then they picked up their jackhammers and got back to work, making the crater even larger. I wondered if they were building an underground bomb shelter. All was quiet on a St. Petersburg Monday morning, aside from the two JACKHAMMERS right below me on the street. As a soundtrack to sitting on a ledge looking out onto the tall leafy oaks of the Italian Gardens, this did not work. I was about to close the window when the noise suddenly stopped. The work men were taking another smoking break.

As I was closing the window, I noticed a sign on the latch that said, “To keep the insects out of the room, kindly keep windows closed.”

What insects? I thought.

The room was the nicest I’d ever been in. The bathroom not only had a separate shower and a bath but was the size of a bedroom.

My first experience with the Soviet toilet was a pleasant one in my hotel room. The toilet was a magnificent feat of ingeniously simple technology. It didn’t look quite as nice as the toilet at the Boardwalk Villas at Walt Disney World, but then what does?

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 on childhood intuition, find Fifth Soviet, the street where I had lived for the first ten years of my life?

I decided to have breakfast. I was feeling hungry, and my eyes were getting that sandpaper glassy feeling of being up too long. I walked down one flight of stairs to the health club that advertised a number of different services: massage, acupuncture, sauna, weight room, small pool, pedicures, facials. I was interested in a blow-dry and a massage. So I scheduled a massage from ten to eleven and a blow-dry at eleven. My hair is at best unruly, and if my father’s friend and his entire family were turning out to see me for my first return to Russia in 25 years, I intended to have my hair conquered by a professional.

I rushed to have breakfast. Opening the doors of the stairwell, I thought I had walked outside, yet it wasn’t chilly. When I looked up I saw a glass ceiling a hundred feet up that gave me 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 have their finger sandwiches and read their newspaper, as if they were on a warm Rue de Paris, surrounded by fresh flowers, all the while untouched by Arctic weather.

It was the famous glass mezzanine of Grand Hotel Europe, a partial floor between two stories.

At the end of the mezzanine were two restaurants — the Caviar Bar, and the opulent European. The Caviar Bar was open for breakfast, but the European was offering a breakfast buffet which included red caviar and blini — yeast-raised pancakes.

I love blini and caviar. I took two. They were costing me 24 u. That’s 12 units per blini, which were fat and small, like silver dollar pancakes, instead of more crepe-like, as blini are supposed to be.

Everything in the Grand Hotel Europe was in units. Not rubles, not dollars, but units. I asked the hostess about it, and she cheerfully told me that units were indeed dollars. “So nothing is in rubles?”

Smiling courteously she shook her head. “Not in this hotel,” she replied. “Outside yes. But the dollar is a more stable currency at the moment.”

After wolfing down my blini with caviar and some sautéed mushrooms with potatoes, I bolted to the health club. It was a few minutes after ten and I didn’t want to be late. Svetlana, the girl behind the counter, gave me a towel and a robe and told me I could use the sauna while I waited.

“Waited?” I said. “Waited for what?”

“For the masseuse, of course.”

“Oh,” I said. “I won’t be waiting long, right?”

“No, no.”

In an American health club, you come in for your appointment a few minutes late, and the masseuse is already waiting for you, towel in hand, tapping her foot on the floor.

I sat disrobed for ten minutes in an empty locker room. I was about to fall asleep, so I stood up and came back out to the reception area. “Will it be long?”

“No, no, not long,” Svetlana assured me.

I went to look at the pool. It was an oversized Jacuzzi. There was no one else but me at the club. Not even the masseuse.

After another ten minutes, I began to feel like I did waiting for the missionaries on Aeroflot while the captain made his vague apologies in Russian.

The difference: I was impatient and cranky, tired of waiting and of being awake. And of being half-naked for no good reason.

“Svetlana,” I said. “Listen, if there is a problem, maybe I can come back later.”

“There is no problem.”

“I’ve been waiting twenty minutes, and I need a full hour, but I have a hair appointment that you made for me in forty minutes. I don’t want to wait anymore. So how about if we reschedule, okay?” But it wasn’t a question. I had already turned around to go get dressed.

Just as I was coming back out to the reception area, the masseuse ran in panting, “I’m sorry. That traffic. They’re fixing the roads.”

“Yes, they certainly are,” I said.

I was relieved that he was late and that I was already dressed, because the masseuse was a man, and I’d never had a massage by a man before. I sold this Russia trip to my husband under the auspices of research and sentiment and desperately needed wisdom. I knew that the aforementioned husband would not be especially keen to learn that five thousand miles away from home, his wife lay half naked while being rubbed down by a panting Russian man.

I had my hair blow-dried instead. It took an hour, almost like a massage — a very long hour — during which I nearly fell asleep in an upright position.

The stylist looked all of twelve. I was surprised to see what a good job she did straightening my hair.

Back at reception, I asked Svetlana how much the blowdry was and was told two hundred and twenty .

I churned this for thirty seconds. “Two hundred and twenty UNITS?”

“Yes,” Svetlana replied, then a quick no when she saw my face. “Rubles,” she said. “Rubles.”

And that was it. Rubles . As if the rest was up to me. How much was two hundred and twenty rubles? I didn’t even know how many rubles made a dollar. I could not exchange dollars for rubles in the United States, since the Russian government did not and still does not allow their rubles to be exported.

I pretended to think about all this for another minute as Svetlana and the masseuse stared at me.

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 as I stood leaning against the counter. I didn’t think Svetlana would understand. Finally, to end my suffering, she said, “About thirty five dollars.”

After paying I went back to my room, just for a second, I said to myself. It was noon, and outside looked like 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 my down-covered twin bed. I had chosen the one closest to the window, while the other one had already become a storage surface. It was covered with information packets, a map of Leningrad, the room service menu, listing of the restaurants in the hotel, the hotel’s alphabetical list of services, my three purses and a pocket Olympus camera.