Maiden Voyages (57 page)

When we returned, the doctor was awake and Malake recounted my exploits. He laughed so uncontrollably that she questioned him.

“Why, you simpleton, this boy’s a girl, and she’s won in a game that only men play.”

Malake swung round to study me. “Of course, that explains it.”

“Explains what?” I asked.

“Why you didn’t move much during the fight. You were frightened of even lifting your arms. But come, sit down, and I’ll make some tea.”

Later the doctor went to visit some patients. Malake moved herself closer to me and whispered confidentially, now that she knew I was a woman:

“You know, I’ve just had a miscarriage.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, it must have been terrible for you.”

“Yes, I was sad. I’m longing for children. It might bring my husband closer.” She brushed an invisible speck from her skirt. “He’s often away.”

“Can’t you go with him?”

“Oh no, that’s impossible, I must look after the house. Besides I don’t know how much he wants me. Not even for children.”

“Don’t worry, Malake,” I said, not knowing either. “He probably just can’t think of children yet. His work’s preoccupying him, that’s all.”

She smiled wryly. “Well, I suppose you should know, Miss John.”

(1947–)

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It has been called the Venice of the North, the Second Paris, Babylon of the Snows, North Palmyra—the age-old romance with Asia Minor transformed into the frozen Russian North. To Peter the Great, it was his window on the West. It is a dreamer’s dream, this city built on bones. It was of Leningrad that Pushkin wrote in his epic poem
The Bronze Horseman
, “I love you, Peter’s creation, I love your severe, graceful appearance, the transparent twilights and moonless gleam of your still night.” Yet it is also of Leningrad that Mandelstam, awaiting the security police who would take him to his exile and death, wrote
in a poem named after the city he so loved, “I returned to my city, familiar as tears … Petersburg! I have no wish to die … I still possess a list of addresses … I stay up all night, expecting dear guests.”

Like a once great but troubled starlet, Leningrad has led a tormented past. For its beauty it has paid a high price. Its light possesses a dark side. Tens of thousands died building this city under Peter’s relentless command. A million and a half died trying to defend it during the nine hundred days of its siege in World War II. To the Romanovs it was the capital of the world, the seat of their absolute power. To Lenin it was a sweatshop, ready for agitation and revolution. To Stalin in his paranoia, because it was the birthplace of the 1917 Revolution he feared the city might rise up against him. He consolidated the seat of his power more firmly in Moscow. Some feel that when he knew the Nazis were planning an assault on Leningrad, he turned his back.

If it was Moscow’s fate to confront Napoleon, it was Leningrad’s to face Hitler. If it was Moscow’s fate to burn, it was Leningrad’s to starve. Neither city was conquered and both in their own way marked the defeat of the aggressor—in part because the opposing armies could not withstand the Russian winter. Yet Leningrad suffered almost beyond belief in World War II. The packing crates of the Hermitage Museum were used as coffins; children’s sleds transported the sick, the dead. When the shellings ceased, the blockade was lifted, and the starvation of half its population over, the renovation began. Its power depleted, Leningrad became a living museum.

But for me, its potency remained. As the taxi hurtled along Nevsky Prospect en route to my hotel, I was immediately captured, taken in. Perhaps it was the shock of arriving at eleven o’clock at night and finding broad daylight, for it was White Nights—that time of year in the North when, because of the angle of the earth’s axis, the sun never dips very far below the horizon. Perhaps it was the whirl of colors—the buildings of green and blue, pink and creamy white that darted by. Or the austerity of its imperial structures bathed in Northern light and reflected in the waters of the canals. Cold, expansive, indifferent. Leningrad, St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Sankt Piterburkh, or just Piter—Peter, as its denizens like to call it—casts a spell that won’t go.

In this city of madmen and poets, its grip was visceral. I myself would not have trouble in the trade-off between beauty and bureaucracy, but Leningrad once had it all—the power, the glory, the exquisite looks. Now only the façade remains, though as splendid as any I’d ever seen; there was a poignancy about this city which perhaps reflected my own state of mind, a sadness I would be hard-pressed to name.

The lobby of my hotel was filled with the most beautiful women I have ever seen, dozens of them who seemed to have sprouted spontaneously out of the city itself. Women dressed in silk of shiny mint and pale gray, electric blue and soft violet. Women in shoulder pads and spiked heels with exotic tresses of spun flax or the darkest Mediterranean shade. Women who seemed to have materialized out of the pages of
Vogue
.

These were the women of Leningrad who emerged from their stale desk jobs or secretary pools every Friday night to service the Finnish men—often fat and jowly, with coarse ways and wads of money—who arrived like clockwork for the weekends. These modern-day Cinderellas transformed themselves into the beauties that they were. My hotel lobby appeared to be the ideal spot for this salient example of free enterprise which was taking place before my eyes.

I checked into the hotel, my room a quaint study of lace curtains and dark wood, a four-poster canopy bed tucked into an alcove. But I felt restless so I walked outside. I wanted to have a drink and be among people. There was a bar next door so I went in.

The bar was also filled with these same women who sat like mannequins, lips perfectly glossed, eyelashes thick as horse hair, curled to perfection, cheeks with just the right blush. They reminded me of actresses, when the call went out for a certain type, wearily awaiting their audition. Their dead eyes gazed at me as I entered their midst dressed in jeans, a bulky shirt. I thought about turning back, but it became a matter of pride. Instead I traversed the obstacle course set up by their legs which stretched across the room.

The reality of my pregnancy had not yet truly sunk in, so I ordered a drink. Vodka. After a few moments, a Finnish man sat down at my table and spoke to me in Russian. I glanced at my blue jeans, my bulky shirt. I felt the eyes in the room turn on me with icy stares. “I’m
American,” I said, wondering what had prompted him to select me out of all the possibilities in the room. “Oh, I thought you looked different, but I could use a little company that’s different. These women, they’re all lonely. You know what they want more than anything else, they want to talk.”

“I can identify with that,” I said.

“What’re you doing in this place?”

“I wanted a drink,” I said, “I wanted to get out.”

“It can be taken wrong,” he muttered. He was stout with thinning yellow hair. He wore a wedding ring.

“Are you here on business?”

He laughed, “Well, my wife thinks I am. A couple times a year I get over here, but,” his hand swept the vapid faces of women, “it’s getting a little tedious.” He was a rather jovial if crass man. “But my wife, well, you know how it is.…”

Actually I didn’t know and wanted to ask him more, but he took another line of discussion. “Let me tell you something,” he spoke in a fatherly way. “You’ve got to be careful here. Oh, no one will hurt you, it’s not like that, but in this city people will buy anything. They’ll buy your jeans,” he plucked at my leg. “Your shirts, your jewelry, but mainly they want dollars, so be careful with your money. But you can trade anything you’ve got. Sunglasses, lipstick.” He slapped me on the leg, “Anything.” I was enjoying his company and was sorry when he got up to leave, though clearly he did not just want to talk.

When he was gone, I looked around and saw that except for the bartender the room was filled with women. I was hungry to talk to a woman. I looked across for sympathetic eyes and found none. Just blank stares and suspicious looks. They must have been having a slow night, or business was generally bad. Whatever it was, they wanted to know what I was doing there, intruding upon their terrain. I sat nursing my vodka, staring into its cold glass.

At two in the morning I emerged from the bar into broad daylight. Knowing I would be unable to sleep and with a long, sunny night ahead, I decided to go for a walk. I wandered to the small square near my hotel across from the Russian Museum and found myself before
the statue of Pushkin. This was his city and he was their poet, the father of Russian literature. Descended from an Abyssinian prince named Hannibal, Pushkin was (and remains) Russia’s most beloved writer. A free spirit, he lived intensely, gambled compulsively, and died in a duel with a man with whom his wife was probably in love, leaving generations of Russians to mourn. For two days after he was shot Pushkin lingered, his wounds turning gangrenous. After his death, the ordinary people of Russia filed past, dumbstruck at the premature death of their beloved poet.

As I sat beneath his statue, a disciple myself, the sun shone still bright and the wisteria were in bloom. I breathed in the nectar of lilacs. The air, fresh off the Gulf of Finland, was redolent with the smell of jasmine. Sweetness was everywhere. The park was not empty, nor were the streets as the citizens of Leningrad ambled as they would for two more weeks of White Nights, aimless and confused as a disoriented migrating herd.

With no map, I set off thinking I’d make a loop, then return along the wide boulevard of Nevsky Prospect in the direction of the river. But it was not long before I left the main street and was wandering down a side street lined with canals, across a footbridge crowned with gold-winged griffins, running my hands along the wrought iron, delicately webbed.

The buildings of imperial Russia loomed before me, painted in their shades of blue like robin’s eggs, the pink of Norwegian salmon, the soft yellow of cut wheat, the white of fresh cream, all reflected in the brownish-green waters of the canals. I cut through other side streets, crossed other bridges, passing lime-green houses, others painted a muted red. Though I kept thinking I would turn back, I found I could not, for the colors and the night and the air kept me moving along.

I walked until I stood on the cobbles of Palace Square before the astonishing Winter Palace. With hundreds of rooms, its blue-and-white façade shimmered like ice. It was here on January 9, 1905, that Father Gapon led thousands of peaceful demonstrators to petition the Czar for help for their hardships and where they were met—men, women, children—with the gunfire of the imperial guards. Bloody Sunday, as the massacre came to be called, touched off the Revolution of 1905,
and now in the middle of my first night in Leningrad I stared into its vastness and imagined the slaughter that had occurred, the dark side of all this beauty slowly revealed.

Continuing on, I reached the Neva where I paused before its wide, turbulent, exquisitely blue surface, and the stately, palatial buildings that lined its banks. Frozen solid for six months of the year, the Neva now flowed into the Gulf of Finland with a force that astounded. Along its banks in this strange, late-night splendor, I admired the handiwork of the architects and landscape architects Peter had commissioned from abroad—Trezzini, LeBlond.

I hugged the banks. Small fishing boats floated by. A barge in no hurry meandered past. Two lovers in light jackets sat on an old boat ramp, kissing with abandon as the river lapped at their feet. Gulls hovered overhead, then dived at their feet for crumbs they tossed them. It was here on the shores of this river that Russian literature came to be. All Russian writers, the saying goes, “came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’ ” In Gogol’s story that coat was ripped off a poor civil servant on the streets of Petersburg at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But it was Pushkin who immortalized the city he loved in his epic “The Bronze Horseman.” Like the American frontier to the pioneers, Leningrad to the Russians was their window on the West. Their place to imagine, to dream, and perceive other worlds.