Paullina Simons - Six Days in Leningrad

blini:yeast dough crepe-like pancakes

Comsomols:young communists

dacha:summer house

electrichka:short-distance train

Khrushchyobi:residential tenement-style buildings built during the Khrushchev era

koshmar:nightmare

matryoshkas:nesting dolls

metro:subway

pelmeni:Russian meat dumplings

perestroika:rebuilding

Pioneers:pre-Communists

Pozhalusta:Please

Prospekt:Avenue

Shepelevo:sheh-peh-LYO-voh

Shosse:highway

solyanka:a thick meat soup

Ulitsa:street

Zakuski:hot and cold appetizers

Kevin and I got to our new house at 8:20 in the morning and not a moment too soon because the moving truck was already parked in front of the driveway. We had to drive on the grass to go around it. We had barely opened the garage doors when the moving guys started laying down their moving blankets and getting out their wheeling carts. The next thing we knew, they were moving stuff into the house.

Into a house, I might add, that wasn’t ready yet. The builder’s cleaning crew had just arrived. The cleaning women were in the kitchen, scrubbing. The movers started piling boxes onto the carpet that had not been vacuumed since the day it was installed. So, in other words, never .

I asked the women to please vacuum the rooms before they continued with their other tasks so that the movers could pile the boxes onto clean carpets. You would have thought I had asked them to carry heavy objects on their backs upstairs in 100-degree heat. First the diminutive ladies huffed and puffed, and then they said they spoke no Inglés. Phil, my building manager, explained to me that the women worked at their own pace and according to their own schedule. I looked at him as if he were not speaking Inglés to me and finally said, “Phil, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re moving in. Please ask them to vacuum the floor in the bedroom and the living room.”

“Problem is,” Phil said, “Most of them don’t speak any English.”

“Could you find one that does?”

My two young sons, Misha, three, and Kevie, one, zigzagged in front of the movers. I think they were trying to trip them. Misha was crying, “I don’t want to go to Burger King for breakfast, I don’t want to go to Burger King for breakfast!” Natasha, eleven, was wisely reading, perched on top of a book box, ignoring everyone and everything.

The babysitter cajoled him, but in the meantime, the one-year-old had toddled off to the pool. The dogs barked non-stop. They either wanted to be let in, be let out or be shot.

My husband ran in and said, “Please go to the garage and talk to the movers. They need one of us there at all times to tell them where things are going.”

“But I labeled all the rooms!” I protested.

“Well, they don’t know where to go,” Kevin said.

The pool guy knocked on the back porch door. “Hey, guys? Is this a bad time to show you how to use the pool equipment?”

One-year-old Kevie ran in from the pool, draped himself around his father’s leg and wouldn’t let go until dad picked him up. The babysitter pried him off with difficulty. The dogs continued to bark. Three-year-old Misha continued to scream about Burger King. Apparently, he wanted to stay right here at the new house.

Our builder walked in. “Well, good morning! We needed just a couple of more days with this house, but that’s okay, we’ll make it work! Hey, do you have a couple of minutes to go over the change orders? I have your closing contract. I need both you and Kevin to sign.”

One of the moving guys stuck his head in and said pointedly, “Mrs . Simons, could we see you in the garage, please?”

The phone rang.

How could that be? I didn’t think we’d unpacked a phone yet.

Open boxes were on the kitchen counter.

The front door bell rang. It was the guy from Home Depot. He had brought the barbecue. Where would I like it?

Another delivery truck stopped in front of the house. This one was unloading a dryer and a television.

Another truck pulled up, this one with my office desk. The two desk guys steadfastly refused to take the desk upstairs, “because we’re not insured for damage.” They asked if maybe the moving guys could move my desk upstairs.

The moving guys said they certainly weren’t insured to move the desk upstairs. So I told the desk guys that either they moved the desk upstairs or else they could take it right back to the warehouse.

They moved the desk upstairs.

“ Mrs. Simons !”

In the garage, the four large moving guys stood with their arms folded and impatiently told me they were having a problem with the cleaning ladies who really needed to stay out of their way. “We cannot do our job, Mrs . Simons.” Again punctuating my marital status.

The dogs were still barking. My sons were now running around in the street as the babysitter ran after them trying to corral them into the minivan.

Pressing my fingers into my temples, I looked at my watch. It was 8:45 AM.

The phone rang again. It was my father. “Hey, Papa,” I said weakly.

“Are you excited about our trip?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Our trip to Russia? It’s not a small thing, you know, you going back for the first time in twenty-five years. Are you thinking about it?”

“Oh, absolutely, Papa. I’m thinking about it right now.”

We had been planning our trip to Russia for a year. Ever since the summer of 1997 when I told my family that my fourth novel The Bronze Horseman was going to be a love story set in WWII Russia during the siege of Leningrad. I said I couldn’t write a story so detailed and sprawling, if only in my mind, without seeing Russia with my own eyes.

My family had listened to me very carefully, and my 90-year-old grandfather said, “Plina, I hope I’m not going to be turning over in my grave reading the lies you’re going to write in your book about Russia.”

“I hope not, Dedushka,” I said. “Though you’re not dead.”

Going to St. Petersburg was not an option before the summer of 1998. The logistics of the trip were too overwhelming. How would I get a non-Russian-speaking husband and three non-Russian-speaking kids, one of them barely walking, to Russia? And what would they do there? Either my husband would be watching the kids full-time in a foreign country — and not just any foreign country, but Russia! — or we would be watching them together, and I wouldn’t be doing any research.

I didn’t need to go all the way to Russia to take care of my kids. I could stay home in Texas and do it. Kevin and I considered leaving them and going just the two of us, but in the end decided that was a bad idea. Leave the kids with a babysitter for ten days? Too much; for them, for us.

Still, thoughts of Russia would not go away. Also, there was no book. Eighteen months earlier there had been a nebulous vision of two young lovers walking in deserted Leningrad on the eve of a brutal war, but a vision does not an epic story make. How could I not go to Russia?