THE FATE OF THE October Revolution was decided on the streets of Petrograd. Here, the first regiments of the Red Army were formed to defend the new freedom and to vanquish the old world once and for all.”
Maria Mikhailovna pauses and tells us to close the quotation marks. Now she is going to dictate a Mayakovsky verse, she says, which we must also write as a quote. I am not sure about the meaning of the English word “vanquish,” so I skew my eyes in the direction of Tanya Puchkova’s notebook. But Maria Mikhailovna is already reciting:
They blew as always, October’s winds,
As cold as capitalism their icy blast.
Over Troitsky bridge sped cars and trams,
Snaking along the rails of the past.
The Mayakovsky poem, which we all know by heart, sounds stilted and pompous in English, and I can’t imagine repeating these lines with a serious face to a busload of touring high school students from Britain.
We are sitting around a long oval table in the House of Friendship and Peace on the Fontanka Embankment. Maria Mikhailovna, in a short, stylish jacket and scarlet lipstick, reads the text of a historical tour of Leningrad from a thick notebook she holds in her well-manicured hands. There are about thirty of us, and we sit very quietly and scribble down every word that falls from her lips because we know we are lucky and privileged to be here. A few months ago, the English schools from the whole city of Leningrad nominated their best students to be trained as tour guides for groups of English-speaking high school students. When the principal called Tanya Puchkova and me into her office to tell us we’d been selected, she talked about the great honor and responsibility. These are students from a capitalist society, she said; we will be the ones to represent our city and embody our superior way of life.
Although I have trouble seeing myself as such a large-scale embodiment of our culture, I am thrilled to be part of this program because it is my only chance to practice English with someone who didn’t learn it from textbooks.
So far we haven’t seen any English students. We are still at the end of the lecture period, coming here twice a week to write down every word Maria Mikhailovna dictates about the history of Leningrad and its architectural landmarks. When all ten lectures have been copied and memorized, we will take an exam: each of us will stand in the front of a bus filled with the rest of our group and recite a part of the tour chosen at random by Maria Mikhailovna. Those of us who pass will be allowed to be tour guides; those who don’t will sit in the back of the buses with British students, making sure order is maintained.
To me, it seems better in all respects to sit in the back of a bus than to stand in the front. Instead of clutching a microphone in sweaty hands, raking the memory for every minute historical detail and every rule of English grammar, I can gaze at the city’s landmarks from the back of the bus, possibly even exchanging a phrase or two with someone who speaks English better than red-nailed Maria Mikhailovna.
I furtively look around, at the marble columns and gilded moldings, at the curves of the fireplace mantel under a huge mirror in an elaborate frame of curly bronze. The house of Friendship and Peace occupies the former Shuvalov Palace, which means that before the Revolution this whole building, with its four floors, elaborate chandeliers suspended from six-meter ceilings, and gilded doorknobs, belonged to one family. I try to imagine what one family could have done with a space big enough for a hundred, or how they could’ve possibly used this grand room, where the table for the thirty of us on the gleaming parquet floor seems like a speck of dust.
Almost every architectural landmark Maria Mikhailovna has so far dictated to us is prefaced with the word “former.” The museum of the history of Leningrad is in the former Cathedral of the former Smolny Convent, the Naval Museum is in the former Stock Exchange building, and the Central Historical Archives are in the former Senate building. The former Kazan Cathedral is now the Museum of Religion and Atheism. The former Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theatre is now called the Kirov. The Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet occupies the former Sheremetyev Palace, and the former Estate of Counts Beloselsky-Belozersky is now a District Committee of the Communist Party.
“The request to rename the city of Petrograd after Lenin, put forward by the Petrograd workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers, is hereby granted,” dictates Maria Mikhailovna. “Let this largest center of proletarian revolution be hereafter forever linked with the name of the greatest leader of the proletariat—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.” Close the quotation marks, she says, finishing a citation from the resolution of the Second Congress of Soviets in 1924, the year of Lenin’s death.
This is our last lecture, the history of the Lenin Museum, located in the former Marble Palace. Maria Mikhailovna has covered everything from 1703, when Peter the Great laid a stone in the foundation of the Peter and Paul Fortress, to 1917, when the former Winter Palace, the residence of the tsar and then the Provisional Government, was stormed by workers and peasants. There seem to be very few architectural monuments built after 1917 that are worthy of foreign eyes.
Reflected in gilded-framed mirrors, Tanya and I descend the marble staircase, and the heavy entrance doors of the former Shuvalov Palace slam behind us. The waters of the Fontanka River are like lead, the same color as the sky, and we walk to the bus stop through the April dusk, past a dock for tour boats abandoned now and until the end of May.
Tanya lives two buildings away from me, so we get off at the same stop. “Maklin Prospekt,” announces the driver as the bus turns to our street and screeches to a halt. Our English teacher told us yesterday that Comrade Maklin, whose name our street bears, was not Russian, as I’ve always assumed from the name’s “-in” ending, but an Irishman named McLean. I don’t know why they would name a Leningrad street after an Irishman, unless he was a revolutionary and somehow made his way here from Ireland in 1917 to assist in overthrowing the tsar.
I am in the eighth grade, and I am cynical. I no longer believe in the cause of the Young Pioneers, the organization we parted with last year, when we all turned fourteen, to become members of the Young Communist League, or Komsomol. I had strong doubts about joining the Komsomol, which I’d expressed at home prior to our exchanging the red Pioneer kerchiefs for pins with a bonfire and a profile of Lenin.
“It’s all a bunch of vranyo,” said my sister. “All this hypocrisy and mendacity.” Marina likes big, theatrical words she’s learned from plays. “All this Communist delirium about paradise on Earth and equal labor. They pretend they pay us, and we pretend we work.”
“Do you want to go to college?” asked my mother.
I don’t know a single person who hasn’t gone to college, except our school janitor Aunt Lusya, so I knew my mother had asked that question to make a point.
“You won’t get into college without a Komsomol pin,” said my sister. “It’s the third question on the application, after your name and ethnicity.”
Now Tanya and I both wear our Komsomol pins on a black uniform apron cinched at the waist around a brown dress. Despite our cynicism and our doubts, we both want to go to college.
WE ALL PASSED THE exam, said Maria Mikhailovna, all thirty of us. This means that when school is over and the first bus tour comes from England, we must take turns being tour guides.
The first group of British high school students, our age, arrives in the middle of June and stays in a hotel away from the city center. The hotel building looks as if it belongs in the new districts at the end of the metro line, so I am not even sure it is a hotel for foreigners. It could be a notch below that, a hotel for high-ranking Russians, with white corridors and peeling paint, yet with rooms that boast a towel and a bar of soap.
This, of course, is all speculation. We are not allowed to enter the hotel doors, as Maria Mikhailovna has warned us, reciting a litany of rules. We must arrive early and wait outside. We must wear clean clothes and have our hair washed. It’s better if we don’t accept any gifts, and under no circumstances can we accept foreign money.
The law is clear on the possession of foreign currency—punishment by imprisonment. But some other tenets of Maria Mikhailovna’s rules aren’t so unequivocal. What’s the definition of clean clothes and washed hair, for example? I wash my hair once a week, like most others, on Saturday. Tanya, I know, washes it on Sunday, when she goes with her mother to a public bathhouse because they don’t have a tub at home. So if the British arrive on a Tuesday, is my hair considered washed or already dirty? I wish someone would explain how this dilemma would be resolved in England, but the only person privy to Western life is Maria Mikhailovna, and there is no way I’m going to ask her.
Tanya and I arrive early and wait outside. I watch the sun glint in her blonde, shiny hair, which means that she washed it under the kitchen faucet last night. We stand by the six tour buses lined up across from the hotel. Maria Mikhailovna comes out of its doors with a sheaf of papers in her hands and assigns us to the buses. We’ve both been assigned to sit in the back.
I say to myself I should be relieved, but I am disappointed. How is Sveta Kurdina, who blinks nervously in the front of the bus as she tries to adjust a microphone, a better tour guide than me? What criteria did the House of Friendship and Peace apply to separate the front from the back?
Even before Sveta starts to breathe into the microphone, I study the occupants of the bus, those capitalist high school students who warrant so many rules. No doubt, they are different: they’re wearing blue jeans, they have washed hair, they chew gum, and they all speak English. It is their English that lifts them above everything I’ve seen before. It is their English that fills me with both euphoria and melancholy. Although the sounds of this language are intoxicating, like New Year’s champagne, I know that no matter how hard I study, I will never be able to speak like these students. My own English will forever be confined to Maria Mikhailovna’s lectures on the history of former palaces. So the best I can do is sit quietly and humbly, inhaling the sweet smell of exhaust fumes, in the midst of this linguistic heaven. The best I can do is listen and, if I dare, maybe even speak.
As the bus begins to move and Sveta launches into her rendition of Peter the Great’s plan for the city, Tanya aims a conspiratorial smile at me. “We’re like two spies,” she whispers in Russian so no one will understand, “like two paratroopers in the Nazi rear.” Of course Tanya and I both know that what she said is ironic, that the British fought on our side in the war, but we still can’t help feeling surrounded by the enemy, by a species alien to our own, by creatures from a different universe.
Half-turned toward Tanya, I realize that I’m sitting with my back to the boy next to me, that I’m breaking one of Maria Mikhailovna’s rules: don’t turn your back on a visiting Brit. “Excuse my back,” I say, as Maria Mikhailovna taught us. I’m astonished at my own voice, at the English words leaving my mouth, exposed to someone who can immediately detect their lack of phonetic accuracy.
“Never mind,” says the boy and smiles. “It’s lovely.” Lahvly, he says, showing his white teeth, looking straight into my face with his dark Western eyes.
I’ve been put here to maintain order, I remind myself, so I must act responsibly and suppress a foolish giggle. I must pull together all my resources and arrange the words I know into the correct sequence of English morphology and syntax. “How do you do,” I say, like a character in a dialogue from our textbook. “My name is Lena. What’s yours?”
“Kevin,” says the boy. Or did he say Calvin? The sounds bubble in his mouth and stick together, like overdone buckwheat kasha. I’m hopeless, and Maria Mikhailovna was right not to allow me in front of the microphone. I shoot Tanya a glance of desperation, but she is now busy talking to a girl on her other side.
Besides introducing myself, I don’t know what else to say, so I feel grateful that Sveta announces our first stop. We must all get off the bus, she commands, and stand in a semicircle opposite the entrance to St. Isaac’s Cathedral to have a proper view of the massive granite columns in the front.
To Sveta’s frustration, the English students don’t want to form a semicircle as she told them to do. They stand as they please, in a small crowd, listening politely as she gives the exact number of kilograms of gold used to gild the cathedral’s dome. One hundred kilograms, she says, and some of the students whistle, and some make a noise as if they exhale.
I think this piece of information about the amount of gold is in questionable taste because what we have been told to convey on this tour is a sense of the city’s artistic, inner beauty. But perhaps Maria Mikhailovna included it precisely because she thinks people from capitalist countries are materialistic, uninterested in the lofty and the ideal.
I pretend to examine the sculptures on the portal of the cathedral, but I am really looking at Kevin, or Calvin. He is a bit taller than I am, with black hair longer than any boy in my school is allowed, a thick neck and a big, craggy chin. He looks like a rugby player, whatever rugby is. I watch him poke in his ear, then scuff the asphalt with the side of his shoe. Then he suddenly looks up, and our eyes meet for a second before I turn away and pretend to stare at the monument to Tsar Nicholas I, which is still allowed to stand in the middle of the square only because of its unique artistic value.
I can’t wait to get back into the bus to sit next to the boy again. He asks if all our churches are covered with so much gold. Our former churches, I correct him in my mind. Goold, he says, suh moch goold. The simplest words in his mouth seem to tangle into alien shapes, so hard to decipher I strain my ears. Maybe he doesn’t have the pronunciation I expected because he is from Scotland or Northern Ireland. Maybe I should ask him about the revolutionary McLean, whose name hangs on the corner of my street.
After a stop in Palace Square, the boy turns to visual aids. He empties his wallet into my hands: two cardboard stubs (tickets for something?), a blue plastic rectangle with numbers, a picture of a girl (his sister?), a card with his own picture and his name (Kevin!). The tickets, he explains, are for a movie he saw just before the trip (movie? Does he mean cinema?); the piece of plastic is a Visa (a visa for what? To enter the Soviet Union?); the girl is his girlfriend (girl friend?); and the card with his picture is his ay-dee.
I am not sure the visual aids are helping much. “What’s an ay-dee?” I ask, starting with the most incomprehensible.
“It’s an ay-dee,” Kevin says, throwing his head back, trying to find the words to explain the obvious. “A document to get into a school. A paper to show the police.”
The word “police” helps. “Like a passport?” I ask.
“No,” says Kevin. “A passport is to come here. An ay-dee is for England.”
I smile, letting him know that I understand. But I don’t. Not completely. Here, when I turn sixteen, I’ll get a passport at a local militia office. But I won’t need it to get into a school. I’ll keep it in my mother’s drawer, along with her own passport and her war medals until I am twenty-one and it will be time to get a new one. Right now I don’t have any document certifying that I am me. Everyone in my school knows who I am, and why would our militia, out of the blue, ask me for a document to confirm my identity? They are busy cordoning off the streets for official motorcades or standing in big intersections with zebra-colored batons in their hands making sure we don’t cross against the light. It is odd to carry such a document around, but maybe it’s one of the characteristics of capitalism, in addition to homelessness and unemployment.
We bump over the tram tracks, to the other side of the Neva to look at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Dostoyevsky and Lenin were imprisoned for their revolutionary activities. The day, sunny in the morning, has crumbled into the usual leaden Leningrad day, with sheets of clouds and blasts of wind tearing through the red banners lined along the embankment. Sveta herds us into the fortress’s prison yard and then into a solitary stone cell with a narrow iron bed and no windows, exemplifying, according to Maria Mikhailovna’s lectures, the injustice and cruelty of the tsarist regime. We don’t all fit into the cell, so Kevin and I stand in the cobblestone corridor, next to a life-size figure dressed as a tsarist prison warden.
“I wonder if this works,” says Kevin and wraps his hand around the warden’s gun. I’m glad that the museum babushka is busy watching the group inside the cell because one of the worst things you can do, as everyone knows, is touch a museum exhibit. “Rukami ne trogat,” says a sign in big letters. “Do not touch with hands.” But what if Kevin had touched the gun with his elbow? I wonder about the possible repercussions of our language differences. Whereas the Russian word ruka includes everything from fingers to shoulder, the English hand only goes as far as the wrist. Does the sign, in its English version, really mean “Do not touch with hands or arms?” Or are the English-speaking tourists exempt from the elbow-touching prohibition?
I would like to share this linguistic inquiry with Kevin, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to pull together enough grammar and vocabulary. I’m so glad I understood completely Kevin’s phrase about the gun that I don’t want to risk another language embarrassment.
Kevin isn’t very talkative, and I am grateful. As we walk back to our bus, he kicks pebbles and whistles, not even bothering to look at the spire of the Fortress, which is probably covered with no fewer kilograms of gold than the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral.
I don’t know what I would do if the impossible happened and I could go on a similar tour of London. Without doubt, I wouldn’t whistle, or kick pebbles, or grab museum guns. I don’t even know if I would recognize the real Trafalgar Square from a dusty picture in our English textbook or have the nerve to open my mouth and speak.
From Peter and Paul Fortress we drive past the cruiser Aurora, which shot a blank in October 1917 to start the storming of the Winter Palace. It is an ancient ship, with black smokestacks and fake-looking cannons on the deck. Not interested in the cruiser Auroraor Sveta’s story, Kevin is counting the money he’s pulled out of his pocket because we are approaching the end of our route, a Beriozka shop. I watch him casually handle the pound bills, so strange-looking and infused with such dangerous power if they somehow should migrate into my hands, or Tanya’s hands, or even the hands of Maria Mikhailovna. One of many statutes of the Criminal Code forbids possession of foreign currency.
Entering a Beriozka shop, like speaking English, lifts us above the crowd. We are among the select few Russians who are allowed to go in. Beriozka means birch tree, a symbol of Russia. It is a store exclusively for Westerners, selling items only for hard currency, that of capitalist countries. I don’t know why the Eastern European socialist countries, with their more reliable, planned economies, do not have currencies as trustworthy as those of the unstable, dying, capitalist West.
Or perhaps I do know. Perhaps it’s part of the same old game, vranyo. The game we all play: my mother, my sister, my teachers at school, my friend Tanya, who is talking to a girl in Reebok sneakers, and even Maria Mikhailovna—or maybe especially Maria Mikhailovna—with her well-tailored suits and lectures on Leningrad, the cradle of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.
The store’s windows are shuttered so that no one from the street is able to see what’s inside. If they could see, they would storm in, through the steel turnstile, past the bored cashier, to the shelves with instant coffee, Polish ham, French cognac, and poems by Pasternak.
I follow Kevin to a display with souvenirs: rows of matryoshka dolls, bears carved out of wood, hand-painted, lacquered boxes from Palekh, busts of Lenin. He doesn’t seem to be interested in cans of something called shrimp, or bottles of liqueur with floating golden specks, or skinny logs of hard salami I haven’t seen since elementary school. He isn’t interested in the shelf with Russian books, volumes with semi-banned Tsvetayeva and Mandelstam, with Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which my sister says is the epitome of Russian twentieth-century literature, as underground as Solzhenitsyn. I pick up each book, hold it, then put it back. While the British students are gawking at samovars and wooden spoons, I stand next to the shelf with these book treasures, so close and so out of reach.
“WUDJA LIKE TGO FOR a waak?” asks Kevin when we get off the bus back near his hotel. The British students are crowding around Sveta, who has an embarrassed look on her face, not knowing what to do with packages of pantyhose and ballpoint pens they are handing to her. I don’t know what I would do, either. Although Sveta has never seen Western pantyhose, she hesitates to take them. I wish these jean-clad students would be a little more insightful and give her a book of poetry from Beriozka or, at least, a can of something called shrimp.
Would I like to go for a walk with Kevin? This is a rhetorical question, but I don’t answer right away because I’m thinking about Maria Mikhailovna, with her laundry list of rules. Is walking outside as gross a violation as going inside a hotel? Is it a violation at all if a British tourist initiates the invitation? I’d like to ask my friend Tanya, but she is busy scribbling her address on a piece of paper for the girl in Reebok sneakers. I look at Kevin, who is staring at me with his dark Western eyes, waiting for an answer, and something tells me—a little sly voice—that in the official game of vranyo, it would be a legitimate move to take a walk with this boy, despite the fact that he is a capitalist, the worst kind of foreigner of all.
The wind has ripped holes in the sheets of clouds, and the sun has revealed some interesting things: the outside of our bus is covered with a layer of dirt, the puddles in the sidewalk sparkle with a rainbow film of gasoline, and Kevin’s eyes are hazel, not black. I look around: the British students have gone inside the hotel, and there is no Maria Mikhailovna in sight. Tanya makes big eyes when I tell her I’m going for a walk with Kevin, but I can see she is envious.
We take the metro to the city center, to places worth parading in front of a visitor. As we glide down an escalator, down and down, underneath all that swamp Peter the Great decided to turn into a city, Kevin’s eyes widen in surprise and his mouth drops open to expose straight English teeth. “It’s a mile deep!” he exclaims with the same glee I saw in his face when he grabbed the museum gun in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Down at the metro platform, he stands stunned, gaping at the crystal chandeliers, marble columns, and mosaic walls. “This is a bloody palace,” he says, turning around to examine every piece of granite and inlaid marble that spells the station name.
I know that “bloody” doesn’t mean “bloody.” I know it’s a curse, and I promptly file the word into the English compartment of my head, a corner where I am no longer a law-abiding tour guide for the House of Friendship and Peace but someone completely different, someone whose vowels are called diphthongs, whose l’s lilt and r’s roll, and whose sentences, unlike those in our docile Russian, soar at the end.
I like the English compartment of my head because it feels like Theater. It feels like I’m playing a role, pretending to be someone confident and bold. That’s what my sister must feel like when she is onstage—liberated from everyday drudgery and imbued with the power to be someone else. It is thrilling and a little dangerous.
This thrill, to my surprise, makes English words spring from memory and align themselves into grammatically correct sentences. I tell Kevin all about the construction of the Leningrad metro, about pushing and drilling through the marsh of the Neva delta. I tell him about the granite slabs hauled from the north, just as they had been dragged by serfs for the construction of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Pointing guide-like to the chandeliers and the marble, I see that the people around us, loaded with string bags on their way from work, turn around to look. They look at Kevin because he is obviously a foreigner and at me because I’m speaking English—in the way they look at actors when they come out of the stage door after a performance, in a way I can only call deferential.
Kevin marvels at the digital clock, which clicks off seconds between trains, and at the train, which arrives before the clock registers one minute. It’s rush hour, I explain. Ordinarily, the intervals between trains are up to two minutes. I know I sound formal and stilted, with words like “intervals” and “ordinarily,” but Kevin nods vigorously, letting me know he understands.
We are carried up another mile-long escalator and spat out the glass doors onto Nevsky Prospekt.
“D’ya wanna have a cup of coffee?” asks Kevin.
I don’t know where he thinks he can find a cup of coffee on the main avenue of Leningrad, but I don’t flinch. That is another thing Maria Mikhailovna has taught us: never show you’re surprised, no matter how improbable or far-fetched a question may seem. Do we have bears roaming the streets? No. What percentage of the population is unemployed? Zero. Are there places to have a cup of coffee? I don’t know of any. We must pretend we are sophisticated and erudite, above the naïve or materialistic questions of British high school students, above drinking coffee on Nevsky Prospekt.
I see a line snaking around the corner, and Kevin sees it, too. The House of Friendship and Peace can’t do anything about the lines. There are a couple of feeble strategies Maria Mikhailovna suggested during our practice tours. You can distract the tourists’ attention by pointing to a former church or palace. You can make a joke. When Maria Mikhailovna took us to the Hermitage to practice her museum lectures, she demonstrated what to say if your group asks to use a bathroom. These toilets are museum pieces, too, she said. Preserved from the time of Catherine the Great.
The line Kevin is now gawking at is for toilet paper. It stretches around the corner into the side street, three or four rows thick, elbowing under a banner that reads, “Thanks to the party for the people’s welfare.” I hope Kevin doesn’t insist on turning into that street because the location of the slogan is just too pathetic, as if someone deliberately put it there to make a point so obvious it’s not worth translating. But he isn’t interested in the slogan. He is staring at two women approaching from the front of the line, both wearing necklaces of toilet-paper rolls they’ve threaded on a rope for easy carrying.
“Can I take a picture?” he whispers, lifting his camera, a glee in his hazel eyes.
I don’t think the two women in toilet-paper necklaces would like it. I don’t think the babushka behind an ice cream cart, who is already eyeing us with a frown, would like it. I don’t think the militiaman directing traffic would like it. No one would appreciate having this picture taken, but Kevin is daring: he lowers the camera and snaps shots from his hip, pretending to examine the colonnade of the former Kazan Cathedral. He thinks he is a genius, having come up with such a brilliantly distracting maneuver, but in the area of pretense no British student can compete with our decades of daily practice. All of us—the ice cream seller, the toilet-paper-bedecked women, and the militiaman, if he were to drop his zebra baton and look in our direction—would, in a blink of an eye, see right through Kevin’s trick.
I have to think fast, and do something, because the babushka has planted her fists on her hips and is getting ready to start shouting while one of the women with toilet paper around her neck is pointing in our direction. Another minute, and the militiaman will turn around to investigate who is creating all this commotion, yelling in the middle of the city’s historical center. I grab Kevin by the elbow and tell him to walk fast, very fast, tell him to run, run until we are a block away, lost in the human current of Nevsky Prospekt.
“That was close!” he says, catching a breath, beaming from his adventure. I can hardly share his excitement: the thought of unrealized possibilities involving the militiaman makes my blood run cold. Maria Mikhailovna and my mother would cringe at the headline—“Detained: A Foreigner and His Unauthorized Guide.” We march briskly, hidden inside the crowd, for another block. I am horrified at what could have happened. I am horrified at being horrified, at my own cowardice and fear.
But none of this can I show to Kevin. He lives in London, where there are no yelling babushkas, no militia, and no shortage of toilet paper. I have to pretend to be a guide again. I show him the Moika Embankment as we walk past the House of Books with a turret and a glass globe on top, and past Pushkin’s apartment, where the poet lay dying after the duel he’d fought to protect his wife’s honor.
Kevin likes the House of Books, but he has never heard of Pushkin.
Along Trade Union Boulevard and past the Palace of Labor, we make our way to Decembrists’ Square on the Neva, where Peter the Great, on a rearing horse, in a laurel wreath and with royal grandeur, reaches toward the water. Two and a half centuries ago, he willed the city into existence, hammering pilings into the marsh, transforming the islands of the windy Neva delta into a port with only one goal in mind: to open a window on Europe. It is appropriate, I think, to come to this monument with Kevin, who, by standing here, provides irrefutable evidence that this thoroughfare still functions, even if only in one direction.
As Kevin snaps pictures, completely legitimate, of the Tsar and the Admiralty’s golden spire, I lean on the parapet and look into the churning, zinc-colored water. If my mother hadn’t decided to marry my father in 1950, which involved moving here from the provincial town of Ivanovo, I wouldn’t be parading all this architectural beauty in front of a boy from England. I wouldn’t be standing here, surrounded by the wide bridges spanning the granite embankments, by the lace of iron banisters and fences, by spires, domes, and the robust curves of Italian baroque.
What prompted my mother to accept my father’s proposal, I wonder, while Kevin is looking for an angle from which to photograph the Bronze Horseman across the street. Was it a search for a better life, as practical as she is: giving my sister a father, having another child, moving to a capital city? Or was it rather that she was running away from something? After all, as I know from one of her stories, she was summoned to the Ivanovo NKVD headquarters after the war, after her uncle Volya had already been arrested and shot, and forced to spy on the chairman of the anatomy department where she worked. Dr. Zlotnikov, Moisey Davidovich, her PhD adviser and a Jew. Every month she was ordered to come to a certain address (an empty apartment that could be used to house a whole family, she thought bitterly), where an NKVD officer was waiting for her with a pen and a stack of blank paper. She couldn’t refuse, she said, so every month she came to this secret place and wrote about the most mundane, innocuous things that involved Dr. Zlotnikov: a conversation about the percentage of enlarged thyroids at the Ivanovo textile factory for her dissertation in progress, a shortage of scalpels at a dissection class, a lab assistant’s alcoholic son. But a fear always clawed in the back of her mind that even those benign things would be twisted and mauled, just like Uncle Volya’s joke, and then Dr. Zlotnikov’s arrest would weigh on her conscience forever.
For a year she came to that apartment once a month, as though to an illicit, sordid rendezvous that had to be kept secret from the honest world and, under the gaze of the young, plain-clothed NKVD man, filled scores of pages with her squared handwriting. So when my father proposed marriage and said they’d have to move to Leningrad, she not only saw it as an escape from her harsh, provincial past, but also as a return to decency and peace of mind.
Two years after she moved, Stalin was dead. Once again, the future bled on the horizon, another hint at the bright dawn promised by the Revolution. Her move to Leningrad worked out the way she’d envisioned: Dr. Zlotnikov retired without having been arrested; she had a baby and a teaching job.
Would I ever be able to move away from here—the only place I’ve ever known—as my mother moved away from Ivanovo? It is one thing to exchange a provincial town for the second biggest city in the country. But what place could possibly trump Leningrad?
Kevin, finished with photography, wants to walk along the Neva, past the Hermitage, past the arch of the Winter Canal, where Pushkin’s desperate Lisa jumped from the stone staircase into the black water. We walk by the wrought-iron fence of the Summer Gardens, another Pushkin landmark, a favorite strolling place of Onegin and the poet himself. But Kevin doesn’t know Pushkin, so he tells me something about rugby and then something about driving, although it’s hard to understand why at fifteen he would even bother thinking about such an impossible thing.
“I’m saving to buy a car,” he says.
That’s funny, the notion of being able to save enough in one’s lifetime to buy a car. I chuckle, but Kevin’s eyebrows mash together in a frown. Now I need to explain that I’m not laughing at him for saving money to buy a car. I’m laughing because I think of a joke my sister told me. Even in Russian telling a joke is tricky, and I pull all my linguistic resources together to help Kevin understand.
Three drivers—an Englishman, a Hungarian, and a Russian—all drive down the same road. The Englishman wrecks his car on a tree, gets out, and shouts, “Damn, this car was six months’ salary!” The Hungarian hits the same tree and yells, “This car was five years’ salary!” The Russian crashes into still the same tree and wails, “This car is thirty years’ salary!” The Brit turns to the Russian and asks, “Why do you buy such expensive cars?”
Kevin narrows his eyes, and I can almost see him thinking. I must have translated the joke so badly that I should probably explain to him it isn’t about expensive cars. But after a few moments of silence he slaps himself on the forehead and grins, although I’m still not sure he understands or just pretends to.
We take the metro back. It’s seven-thirty and I don’t want him to be late for supper. From the metro station to the hotel we walk in the sun, which, since we are in the period of white nights, will stay up for another four hours before it dips below the horizon, only to re-emerge an hour later. Deprived of the architectural prompts the city center offers, we no longer know what to say to each other.
“Can I take your picture?” he asks finally, and I stand blushing in front of an archway where another babushka, a street cleaner, is hitting the pavement with a bunch of twigs attached to a stick.
When we do the compulsory address exchange—pen-pal friendship, as Maria Mikhailovna calls it—Kevin fumbles in his jeans pocket and produces a bracelet, real silver, with intricate burnished flowers stamped into the metal. I’ve only ever seen real silver in my grandparents’ set of teaspoons my mother takes out of a silk-lined box twice a year for holidays. I know Kevin bought the bracelet in the Beriozka, while I was staring at the books.
“It’s for you,” he says, and then adds, “Please, take it.”
I’ve never owned any jewelry, especially something made from silver. It is an insanely generous gift, my first gift from a boy, if I don’t count the mandatory pocket erasers and combs I’ve received in my eight years of school for International Women’s Day. I feel my face turn red, and I can do little not to look dumbstruck.
Sparkling on my palm, the bracelet is a reminder of the exclusive status that permits me to enter a Beriozka shop with all its forbidden treasures. But is it really a privilege to stand next to shelves with foods I can’t eat and books I can’t read? I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if it is better to learn about Kevin’s hometown from my text called London: The City of Contrasts or spend a day there, riding the underground and taking pictures. What I do know is that all this thinking is just that, thinking. It changes nothing. No matter how many jokes I tell, no matter how cynical I’ve become, this is the way things are here. Contrary to my mother’s hopes for a better future, I will never travel to London, or save for a car, or taste shrimp.
The British students, with their Beriozka souvenirs and clean hair, are going to pack into buses tomorrow and leave. Despite a postcard I’ll receive from Kevin in response to my long letter, elegantly composed and meticulously copied onto a pretty piece of paper, I will never see him again. Tomorrow morning he’ll walk through Peter the Great’s “window on Europe” guarded by the armed border patrol of Pulkovo International Airport. Tomorrow afternoon he’ll cross over to the other side—London, the city of contrasts.
I thank Kevin with all the expressions of appreciation I know in English, but there is an embarrassing question scratching in the back of my mind like an ungrateful cat. Would I rather have a silver bracelet or Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita? I wiggle my wrist, now shackled in cold silver. “Exquisite,” I say to Kevin, who thinks I am sincere, who doesn’t know this is just a little instance of vranyo.