Paullina Simons: Six Days in Leningrad

I don’t know what I could have been thinking. That all the smokers would be behind me, far away? That the non-smoking air would fill my close-to-non-smoking seat?

She handed me my boarding pass. It had no gate number on it.

“What gate?”

“Gate?”

“Gate, yes. Where is the plane departing from?”

“Oh.” She waved me over to the central terminal. “Ask passport control. They’ll tell you.”

My brain cloudy, I went and waited on the passport control line so they could stamp my passport and take my visa.

I waited fifteen minutes. It was 9:55 AM. “It’s five minutes past my scheduled flight time.” I said to the passport lady.

“It is?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” She looked at something on her desk. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I hope they’re holding the flight. I’d hurry.”

“Great,” I said. “What gate please?”

“Gate?”

“Yes, gate.”

“Didn’t they tell you at check-in?”

“No, they said you would know.”

“I don’t know why they would say that. I don’t know. Go and check the departure and arrival board. It should be up there. You have a few minutes. Don’t worry.”

“It’s past departure time,” I said. “They’re holding the flight, right?”

She shrugged. “I hope so.”

I had to go through yet another metal detector, this time for my carry-on luggage.

I went to the off-duty shop because my father had told me to. He said, “Take the remainder of your rubles, how many do you have?”

“Six hundred.”

“Take them and buy yourself black caviar in the duty-free shop at the airport.”

“But, Papa,” I said, “doesn’t caviar need to be refrigerated?”

“Yeah? So?”

Russians were not big on refrigeration.

“Eat it as soon as you get home,” he said.

Eat 600 rubles worth of Beluga when I got home. Through the glass door of the refrigerator I stared at the caviar, squinting to read how much I could buy for 600 rubles. Ellie lived on 360 rubles a month. Six hundred rubles was almost two months of living expenses for her. I could buy six ounces of Beluga for six hundred rubles. An ounce for a hundred rubles. Sixteen dollars. I opened the case to take a jar, but I couldn’t stop thinking of Ellie who kept my mother’s empty bottle of Trésor on her nightstand. Knowing my mother, I bet she didn’t even buy the Tressor for Ellie but gave her one of her gently used dozen since she had eleven more at home, fuller and newer.

I closed the refrigerator. Somehow it didn’t seem right that I should buy six hundred rubles worth of caviar when I hadn’t bought a “I’ve been to St. Petersburg” T-shirt for my husband and kids.

Rushing, I bought four T-shirts. I didn’t get myself a souvenir. Time was ticking. It was after ten. I couldn’t be sure how long the flight would be “held.” Neither could anyone else, I suspected. After the T-shirts, I still had over 300 rubles left. This duty-free would be the last place I could spend the Russian money.

I looked at the caviar one last time and instead decided to buy a bottle of Trésor perfume for Ellie.

I would still have 200 rubles left.

I couldn’t spend another second thinking about it anymore.

As I was paying for the Trésor, I asked the duty free clerk when my flight was. She looked at her schedule. “Nine fifty.” She eyed me with some alarm. “I think you’d better hurry.”

It was 10:03 AM.

I ran out of the shop to the flight information board.

The board had information about other flights, just not mine. I wanted some mention, any mention, that a flight such as mine even existed. I rushed to a representative sitting behind the metal detector and asked him. He spoke no English and refused to help.

Don’t ask me why I didn’t ask him in Russian. Because I thought, what if I didn’t speak any Russian? My husband doesn’t. My friends don’t. What would they do? I don’t know why I felt now was the time to stand on linguistic principle, but the fact of the matter was I didn’t ask him in Russian. Besides, some Russians only respect an English-speaking person, though clearly not he.

I went to another Pulkovo employee. He said in Russian, “No English.” I gave up and asked him in Russian.

He replied, in his most apathetic Russian “Dunno.”

“Who knows?” I asked feverishly.

“Dunno,” he said.

Seconds later, he lazily pointed to the flight information board. “Ask over there. People are walking there.”

That was without question.

People were certainly walking. None of them were actual representatives of an international airport, Russian or English speaking. Not that I didn’t try to ask them in my desperation. Needless to say, no one had any idea that there even was a LED–JFK flight.

I ran up the escalator. I would describe my state by now as three notches above frantic. I flew up the escalator. There was no sign of any gate information. I ran down the escalator, past the metal detector and finally asked someone at passport control.

“Oh, you’re on the New York flight!” the woman exclaimed.

I didn’t like the panic in her voice.

She talked quickly into the walkie-talkie. “Sergei! We have another one!” Then to me, “Hurry, hurry, upstairs to the left.”

I airlifted myself up the escalator, sprinted through double doors on the left. At last a hundred yards down the hall I saw a small sign above an actual gate “New York.”

There was no one at the gate. There was, however, a soldier on the gangplank. He checked my passport. Then the woman who had checked me in at 9:50 a.m. took my boarding pass, ripped it in two and impatiently pointed me to the plane, where the stern stewardess demanded to know where the other half of my boarding pass was.

My seat was 35K — five rows from the very back. Didn’t the check-in woman tell me I’d be sitting at the start of the smoking section?

I felt in Russian, I did everything else in English. Right then, I was feeling tense — in any language. I couldn’t find the words for tense in Russian. Hyperventilating, breathless, shaking, nerve-wracked, none of them were coming to mind.

I sat down and the electricity switched off. I find it a bad sign when the electric power goes off on an airplane waiting for take off to fly four and a half thousand miles. Don’t they need electricity for their black box or something?

By 10:20 AM we still hadn’t taken off. The captain informed us that the baggage handlers were having a difficult time loading all the luggage onto the plane. Apparently the crew had underestimated the quantity of luggage on an international flight from St. Petersburg to New York. The baggage personnel needed five or ten extra minutes to load the luggage.

Outside my oval window was incessant, driving rain. Not driving the people loading the luggage to move any faster, of course…

The captain helpfully announced it was 10:30 in the morning, and 55°F; already the day seemed two hours too long and 30 degrees too cold.

The young man in the aisle seat next to me was dark, extremely hirsute, and busy drawing in a notebook. Then he was busy snoring, with his hairy elbow on my armrest. I longed for my own armrest. But at least I had a window. When he woke up he chain-smoked.

When I had asked to be put at the beginning of the smoking section, it didn’t occur to me that the man sitting next to me would smoke. Duh, I thought, coughing up nicotine into my sleeve.

I wished I had Viktor’s zip code. I wanted to send his sons T-shirts. But I didn’t have it, and to get it I would have to call him. Months would go by, the impetus would fade, and then, instead of my father , it would torture me the rest of my life that I promised and didn’t deliver. I knew we should have told my father.