Paullina Simons: Six Days in Leningrad

Anatoly stands on his balcony over Ulitsa Dybenko, stubs out his cigarette, and goes back inside, slowly closing the door. He sits on the couch and says, “Any more of that blueberry pie, Ellie?”

I walked out onto my balcony, thinking about the Likhobabins and their 35-year-old couch. Yes, but they smell Shepelevo every day. Do they even know what they have? What I would give to walk out on my balcony and smell Shepelevo. Smell anything.

Heat kills all in Texas. I breathed in the air. There was no smell.

But I am ashamed to say I like the sunshine.

I walked back inside, reminded of the words by Russian writer Alexander Kushner: “Only those who have not paid a high price for the gentle joy of living and breathing can allow themselves feelings of melancholy, denial and lofty disdain of life.”

I had been given more than I deserved. I hoped the angels didn’t recognize that fact. Any minute now I would blink and I’d be in Kolpino standing in line for soup.

The doorbell chimed. It was the landscaper who wanted to know what two trees I wanted him to plant in the front yard, a red oak or a live oak. I walked outside with him. It was 110 degrees. The prairie stretched in every direction.

“A red oak,” I said. “I like my trees deciduous. A live oak with those permanent rubber leaves just doesn’t cut it. It looks too fake, don’t you agree?”

“Well, yeah, in the beginning,” he said. “But give it a little time and when it grows tall, a live oak looks very beautiful. Rich and green and colorful. Not at all rubbery.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, thinking about Shepelevo’s oaks standing over the neat simple grave of my great-grandmother who gave my grandfather her last potatoes she had dug up from the fields during the blockade so he could live. “How much time?”

“Twenty-five years or so,” he replied.

I looked at him. I was thinking about seeing the sun set and rise on the Neva. I was thinking about 240,000 dead and their bones and their bullets on the banks of the dark river, dying for me, dying for Anatoly. We died so that you could live .

“I can’t think that far ahead,” I said. “I’ll take the red oak. The leaves will turn beautiful in the fall, right?”

“Right,” he said. “Now, what about your winter flowers? We’ll plant some pansies? They’re very hearty, will withstand any kind of weather. Even with severe frost, they’ll die down a bit, and then as soon as it thaws, they’ll come back more vibrant than ever. How would yellow pansies be?”

I am thinking about my father who learned English in the Gulag to get us out, to get me to America so that I could stand in front of my stucco house in Texas, smile blithely and say, “Yes. Yellow pansies would be very nice in the winter.”