Paullina Simons - Six Days in Leningrad

The artsy guy with black eyes sitting next to me smoking was deeply irritating me, so I excused myself, and he had to get up and move his cigarettes that fell and his charcoal pencil that smudged his seat and his coat and notebook. The lighter dropped under the seat. I smiled sweetly as I squeezed past him and went to wait by the OCCUPIED lavatory.

When I came back to my seat, I read Anatoly’s novella.

Anatoly thought his wife was beautiful. She was, and still is.

I was only interested in my mother and father, but there was disappointingly little of them in the book. The story, if you could call it that, had only one main character, and that was Anatoly’s heartbreaking nostalgia for a youth long gone. Everything else was subordinated to this thread of loss for the past that eventually wound into my own throat too.

Though Anatoly had told me that he and my father were both in love with Ellie when they first met, I would not have gleaned it from his book. It was too impenetrable for such clarities as a love triangle. Ellie had chosen Anatoly over my father, and this created a rift between the three of them during which for two years they did not speak. Eventually things got back on track. Again, I knew that only from what Anatoly had told me; these details were murkily invisible in the pages I read. What was clear though, absolutely perspicuous, was Anatoly’s jealousy about the episode to this day, some forty years later.

I put his manuscript down and closed my eyes. Maybe youthful hurt never mends. How can it not? How can it not mend? How can you still feel pain about a forty-year-old incident?

Bet I know how. I have my own youthful hurts, and though they don’t feel raw anymore, I still carry them with me.

As I carry Leningrad with me. I carry Leningrad with me in a little box near my heart. The smell of Shepelevo, my bed, my mother and me having dinner alone, my father taking me to the movies on Saturdays as if I were a child of divorce. I have that inside me.

Shepelevo is with me whenever I walk outside and smell the air. What I want to smell is smoking fish and fresh water and burning firewood and nettles. But In Texas I smell hardly anything but heat. That has its own, somewhat limited, appeal. Texas carries no history for me.

In New York, on wet days, I smelled Leningrad. And in Fort Wilderness in Disney World, lying in the hammock by Bay Lake, I smelled fresh water and pine cones that momentarily would remind me of Shepelevo and my box would be opened. Then we would leave. I ache to smell it everywhere I go.

The smell of childhood.

In Russia I didn’t live a life of constantly wanting something I didn’t have, of wanting something else, something new. As Sinead O’ Connor wisely wrote, I do not want what I haven’t got. I just lived and breathed in the air. I was a child with no dreams. Except for France and D’Artagnan, but that’s another book.

That’s what Russia and Shepelevo meant to me. I wanted the child back in my heart. I wanted the sunrise and the fishing on the gulf. I wanted to be happy again, not ashamed, not anxious, not worried about money and jobs, or about how to pay for this and how to live without that. I wanted to ride my rusted wobbly bike and smell the fish and the pines and believe I was lucky.

Too much time to think; the last thing I needed. I opened my eyes and turned to my smoking companion.

The stewardess gave us a hot wet napkin and beef or salmon.

The scruffy artist next to me shook my hand, announcing he was Andrew.

Andrew was a chain-smoking 24-year-old unkempt artistpaintersculptor with fingers permanently blackened by his charcoal pencil or tar from the cigarettes; I wasn’t sure.

He offered me a cigarette. “No, thank you,” I said, suppressing a judgmental cough. He smiled. “Your bad luck to be sitting next to a chain-smoker, huh?”

“No, no, it’s fine.”

Andrew was Catholic and an art dealer, not that the two had some kind of conjoined significance. He was the middle son of an Atlanta businessman, engaged to a Russian woman named Olga, who apparently spoke perfect English. Andrew told me he didn’t care about money and was eventually going to live in St. Petersburg with Olga because he didn’t like government, any government, but especially the U.S. government. His three-month visa had just expired and he was reluctantly returning to his art gallery in the hated U.S. “Russia is so pure,” he said. “There is no pretense.”

“Well, they can’t afford it.”

“Yes, but that’s the beauty of it. The people have to make up their own reality.”

I laughed, perhaps too loud. He looked at me very seriously, and then half-chuckled. “I was totally serious.”

“Of course you were.”

Andrew loved Michaelangelo (“he’s a god”) and Florence. He hated working at an art gallery. “I’m not meant to work there, I know. Soon I’ll be fired, and then I’ll have to go back to Russia. I’ll be fired because I can’t stand the bullshit. People come in and they want to buy paintings to go with their furniture. It drives me crazy. Once a lady came in and said, ‘Do you have anything blue? I’ve got a blue couch I’m trying to match. I want that blue painting.’ I said to her, ‘Lady, get out of here. Don’t buy something blue from me. What’s going to happen when you get tired of your blue couch? The painting is still going to be on your wall.’ I got into a lot of trouble with my boss but people just don’t understand art. They don’t understand real art doesn’t go with anything. It has to be something that you walk by every day and see. Every day. Every time you walk by. If you never forget to look at it as you walk by, then it’s art. Forget the couch,” he laughed. “I almost got fired.”

“Really?” I said. “For a painting? How much was it?”

“A hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.”

After an hour and a half, I was done listening to him, so I read my Defense of Leningrad book in Russian, then slept, really slept, waking after a dream with a hurting neck. I dreamt about giving my cleaning lady a raise. I woke up groggy at 10:20 in the evening Leningrad time.

Time to come home to Grand Hotel Europe.

They fed us a second time on the flight. Oily fish. Ham, same salad we had for dinner, same little rolled-up cake, poundcake with chocolate fondant. Coffee. Ginger ale for my funny tummy.

Actually they forgot to feed Andrew and me. They were going around with coffee when Andrew and I looked at everyone else eating, and went, huh . There was a grumbling non-apology and some food.

When we landed, Andrew got up, walked off and didn’t even say, see ya. He was too busy smoking.

I went to the bathroom at Kennedy Airport. I couldn’t believe how clean the toilets were, how they flushed, how soft the toilet paper was. This was in Kennedy airport , for God’s sake, where thus I marveled.

Made beautiful time getting to LaGuardia. Almost, almost made the earlier flight to Dallas, but didn’t get to the clearly marked gate fast enough. It was okay. I had time to sit and stare out the LaGuardia window. Three hours to sit and stare.

I sat at the airport Marketplace, having spent $40 on GNC pills and a pair of fantastic Walkman earphones. I was back home.

Everyone spoke English.

I spent $20 on a kids travel CD and another $10 on Chinese food of dubious quality. I was happy to be back in America. In the Russian duty-free I couldn’t spend $70. Here in LaGuardia I spent $100 in five minutes.

I wished I had time to go see my grandparents on Long Island.

WPLJ played Nimrod’s Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) from their Green Day album. Not exactly in the Russian spirit but the song got stuck in my throat.