Books Of Prose

Leningrad, one of Europe’s capital cities

Mirie Litvak

Published in Russian Women Sleep Naked, Sifriat Poalim, Israel, 1999.

Father said it was my opportunity to see one of Europe’s capital cities. There was something important that Father had to do in Leningrad before we left for Israel. And he wanted to take me with him.

Mother raised no objections. She agreed. But I had the feeling she wasn’t too happy about it. I didn’t know exactly what Father had to do in Leningrad. And it seemed to me that Mother did not entirely agree with Father that what he had to do in Leningrad was all that important. Apparently Father also wanted to go to Leningrad in order to say goodbye to his friends from the time when he was a student, and to say goodbye to Leningrad. Maybe that was why he attached such importance to this trip. He wanted me to see the city before we left, since in his opinion it was terribly important for children’s education that they see all kinds of artistic treasures, architecture and things of beauty, from an early age and since really beautiful things are rare and inaccessible, he wanted to use the opportunity.

From the expression on Mother’s face, I understood that there was something dangerous about this journey. Actually there was something dangerous about our lives most of the time. It was dangerous before we decided to ask to leave the country, because someone might have discovered that we wanted to go. And once we had submitted an application to the police, it was dangerous because now they could do us harm, we were definitely no good. Now, having waited so long and gotten used to this dangerous state, it was actually a little less dangerous, but still, I could see on Mother’s face, she couldn’t stop thinking something might happen, someone would suddenly come to the house, there would be a ring at the door or some document would arrive in the mail, an important telegram, and something would go wrong, something terrible would happen for which there was no remedy, and Mother was afraid, she didn’t want to remain alone without Father in the days before we left.

She didn’t say exactly what might happen during our journey to Leningrad. Apparently she didn’t know herself. Maybe she was afraid of Father being in Leningrad without her, on the trains and in the railway stations, where there are so many people, soldiers, policemen, officials, various kinds of preservers of law and order, she was afraid something might happen there to Father when she was not with him.

But this was only visible on Mother’s face and only sometimes. From here on, she was busy with all kinds of arrangements that I didn’t quite understand and didn’t take any interest in. She was terribly anxious but there was something happy about her agitation. Unlike her regular everyday chores, which were always the same, these new arrangements gave Mother a look of concentration, as though she had to preserve her strength and not use it all up in one go, but save some for later. To ensure a steady, measured use of her energy, doing everything, forgetting nothing. Sometimes it seemed very hard for Mother to keep going with the same momentum all the time, she wanted to burst out and expend all her strength in one go, to use it all up, all of it, and then rest. But no. She knew she would need her strength for tomorrow, and the next day, and she didn’t know exactly for how long. So she would have to husband her resources.

But now things were different. She was anxious and busy. But the serious concentration on her face was accompanied by a covert smile. As though she knew that now she could concentrate properly, make plans, do everything necessary and that was it, she could summon up all her strength and use it, without keeping any for later, and this kept her busy and made her happy.

Her agitation and preparations were like the period before we went away on holiday, when so many things have to be got ready, luggage and clothes and food, and the whole house is a mess. Cases and bags and other stuff are piled up by the door of the big room, the house seems to be in motion, and it’s also less important to put everything back in its place. And Mother doesn’t insist so much on all the things I’m supposed to do since anyway we shall be leaving soon.

I was glad that in the end Mother didn’t say anything to Father. At any rate, I didn’t think she had said anything, though she may have said something in the evening, when I was already asleep. I was glad that this time Father had won the argument with Mother and we were going to Leningrad, one of the capital cities of Europe. It was exciting to travel with Father, especially to a place that Father thought it was vital to see, particularly at the last opportunity, before we left the country. Up till then they had only taken me to Moscow. I mean, every summer they would put me and my little sisters on a plane at the airport, and Grand- mother would meet us at the airport in Moscow; from the age of six, before I went to school and without too much understanding, I flew in airplanes, though to a limited number of destinations.

I was also glad because I knew that this time, this was it. I would see Leningrad for the first and last time, and I didn’t care, because we were going to another place, full of sunshine and a bright sea and a cloudless sky. That’s what it looked like on the postcard we had received during the previous year. The sea was smiling, the color of turquoise, as if the sun was sitting in its stomach and shining upwards, that’s why it was so full of light, with white flecks floating here and there like ringlets on young lambs. The postcard was full of lovely glossy colors and I was sure that nowhere in the world could really be so bright and beautiful. But that was the only postcard I had seen, I had nothing else to compare with it, and that’s how things remained. Yet even if things aren’t as good as they look in the postcard, we’re leaving, there’s no turning back.

I was waiting to see Leningrad, the town I had learnt about at school, the city of the old Russia, with its literary salons, the court of the Tsar, and the Revolution, though I knew that the Revolution and the great battleship and the capture of the Winter Palace were of no interest to Father. I would see the town they talk about so much and write about in all the books. I imagined Father and me traveling in the train that had carried Countess Vronsky and Anna and Alexei Vronsky himself, and I thought maybe the railway station where Father and I would alight was the same station where Anna suddenly saw Vronsky getting down from the carriage and understood that he had come after her on the day following the ball in Moscow. And there, just there, he says to her: “You ask why I am traveling? I have to be where you are. You know that. I cannot do otherwise”. And Father and I will get down from the carriage, which is not of course the same one, but maybe there is something in the railway station, something that will remind me of the place where he said that to her, and maybe among the huge gray buildings, one box after another. And the pictures of Brezhnev and Lenin and all kinds of slogans that have no meaning, hanging from the buildings, five storeys high, and everything dirty because the snow has melted, it’s cold at night and there is a sudden frost, the snow freezes, during the day the sun comes out a little and it melts again, there is mud, mud and slush, it’s dirty and you don’t know whether to put on your winter boots, for which the snow has to be dry, or your autumn rubber boots for the wet dirty mud. Maybe in all the gray muck I’ll manage to see a bench, a black iron lamp on a thick post with decorations like the branches of an old tree, or the remains of some structure that you can tell is from those days, even though it hasn’t been repaired and is half ruined, everything flaking off in the terrible dampness after the winter winds, and I shall know: here, in this place, he said it to her, and she got down, and saw her husband through the carriage window and said to herself: “Why does he have such big ears? Can I never have noticed that before?” This is where it began. I shall see the place there, in Leningrad, and we’ll stay there a few more days, and meet Father’s friends and Father will show me the university where he studied, and the theater. And then we’ll come home and Mother will be glad we’re back and a little later we’ll leave, leave everything and go to Israel, where there is sea and sun and never come back here ever again.

There was sea in Leningrad. It was dull and grim and the sky was gray and cloudy. The clouds looked like the gray beard of a stern, angry man, like the pictures of God in the story books. A severe-looking old man whose beard was not yet entirely white. Not like the beard of Santa Claus, which is full and soft and generous, but thin and gray, full of angry knots. He sits in the sky, grumbling all the time, and that is why the clouds are such a dark gray color, because he is angry and bitter and dissatisfied.

The sea was inside the city, not on the edge or the outskirts. I thought that was impossible, sea inside a city. Previously it was only my little sisters who had been taken on a visit to the Black Sea and I knew that the sea meant summer. It was warm and nice and lots of soft, bright sun and people who had left their places of work and their dark apartments, and the stuffy buses and swaying, rattling trams, crammed with people smelling of cheap alcohol, and crowds of people in the streets, and short evenings and long dark nights and pale gray mornings and there they were, by the summer sea. Milady is walking her lapdog along the promenade and men and women cast covert glances at each other that others don’t see and everyone knows that parks and gardens and the promenade by the sea are the places for glances, for in more open areas glances can be cast and then vanish among the trees and under the sunshade of the lower branches, but they reach the person they are intended for without being intercepted, without anyone else seeing them. Such glances are found beside the warm, summer sea, how could they exist under gray skies, when it can rain at any minute and a sharp wind slashes the eyelids, hands are rough and hardened, and you always have to be on the move, either going somewhere or jumping on the spot, you can’t possibly just stand and gaze at the sea and the sky, standing still is cold.

So this can’t be the sea. The sea means not wearing stockings, bare legs, not even short socks, just sandals and bare feet. But suddenly here the sky is gray and there’s the city and the sea is vast and gray and flat and angry. And I said to myself, over there, where we are going, in Israel, there is sea and maybe it’s like this, just like this, gray and angry? I tried to imagine something like that but all the time I had this smiling picture of clear blue skies without a trace of cloud and I didn’t know how it could be.

I tried to imagine Father and Mother when young, strolling along this promen- ade under God’s sullen sky, I wanted to see whether perhaps it was still possible to be nice and happy, strolling along the promenade beside the sea, past metal railings with a black wrought iron ornamental lattice, like the pattern in the fence of the Jardins du Luxembourg or the Tuileries, or maybe here, beside a stormy gray sea, you don’t stand and look at the sky, you run and rush about and you feel like embracing people and rubbing up against them because it’s cold, but after running together with a strong wind buffeting, you’re afraid you may be swept into the water, like a love letter held in the hand, and the wind fiercely grabs hold of it, as though playing a game, and it flies away and disappears into the sea. And I saw Father as he appears in the photographs in the family album, a tall, very thin young man with curly hair climbing slyly up and up, like a mutinous cloud striving to rise higher and higher into the sky, unwilling to remain all the time in the same place and lie quietly above his smooth forehead. And I though about Mother, who is not so short, but beside him looks really tiny, they must have been a funny-looking couple running against the wind, along the grim, angry promenade in the park by the sea with the black railings of the Jardins du Luxembourg.

In Leningrad we went to see a friend of Father’s, an elderly man, I thought he might have been his teacher at the University, he seemed far too old to have been just a friend. He opened the door and let us into the house, a stone building with high ceilings. I know that all the houses were built of stone but in this one it was particularly noticeable. The stone stood out from the ceiling and the walls, cold and quiet, like a church when you come in from a busy street in the center of town and there aren’t many people inside, since it’s not the time for a service, there are no religious rites being performed. And the church is cold and empty, and dark, and every small step echoes and re-echoes and I begin to be afraid someone is watching me and I cannot see him and I’m afraid to do anything which someone might think improper, something forbidden, without my knowing I’m doing something bad and forbidden, and I begin to be frightened by everything I do. There were no other people in the house of Father’s friend and Father explains to me that the man’s wife is dead and he lives alone.

He sat us down beside a table and we sat and waited till the food was ready. From time to time he would raise himself heavily from his chair, go to the kitchen and come back, sit down again and listen to Father, who was talking at a tremendous speed, and the old man listened in comfortable silence, without replying, saying hardly anything, but I was watching him and I was well aware he was paying great attention and understood absolutely everything, including what Father didn’t say, what slipped away from Father in the cracks between the words, and fell and disappeared. And Father was in a hurry to speak, since he knew this was the last time, they would never see each other again, we were on our way to Israel and his friend would remain in Leningrad, and Father skipped some of the words and some of the things he wanted to say slipped between the cracks in the words and he was in such a hurry he couldn’t stop to pick them up, retrieve them and replace them in order to tell him everything, he knew and understood that he wouldn’t succeed, it was impossible to say everything, there wasn’t time.

But this man, Father’s friend, could see the things that fell through the cracks, he just gave them a small, sad glance, as if he wanted to say to Father: “Never mind, I saw it fall, I know more or less what it was. I only caught a glimpse, but I have a good idea, don’t worry”. The man also knew that time was up, there would be no more, but he wasn’t sad. He didn’t become angry, he said nothing. He just sighed from time to time, the kind of sigh of wise, old men who have often seen their words fall between cracks and disappear as though into the ocean, the abyss, which isn’t all that clean beneath the cracks, and later there’s no time to look for them. And such men know, they understand that you have to let go. That’s best, there’s no alternative, not to be angry, not to cry, not to have regrets.

The man rose slowly, lifting his weight and his old age, rose and went into the kitchen and came back carrying in his pale swollen hands a plate of soup which he gently placed on the table in front of me as if he were my grandfather who has always known and loved me, and slowly said: “This is for you, Marishinka”. I heard his voice call me by a name that no one had ever used for me before, it was as though I now had another name, maybe my grandfather really could have used that name if he had known me and were still alive. I could feel the steam from the soup rising in my face and smell it and feel the hunger in my belly and I was sure it was very tasty soup. It smelt like home-made soup and I thought about Mother worrying back home what would happen to Father, let him come back with nothing having gone wrong, and then we’ll be able to leave for Israel, I wanted to ask Father if there was anything dangerous in what we were doing, I knew there were people it was dangerous to meet, people it was dangerous to visit at home and there were people who didn’t come to visit us for the same reason.

In Leningrad I went with Father to a large, dark subway station where he met a man and a woman, they were standing by a narrow window that had long black metal bars with a small decoration at the top. The man and the woman gave several quick glances around and then stood in the faint light by the window and Father stood in front of them. Father had managed to tell me only that the stone structure of the subway station had once been part of a large railway station, and then he began to talk to the man and woman. I thought maybe this was the railway station where Vronsky and Anna had met, where Prince Karenin had been waiting for Anna with his carriage, and she saw him through the compartment window, and I wanted to ask Father, but he was totally absorbed in his conversation and I reckoned this might be what he had wanted to come to Leningrad for, a few days before we were due to leave for Israel.

The pale light from the window that relieved the gloom of the railway station fell on the broad, sad face of the woman. Large bones stood out beneath the covering of skin, but there was no movement. It was like Mother’s face, as it used to be, before she got involved in the arrange- ments for the journey, the face that had to preserve some strength for later.

Lots of people went past us and the noise of their footsteps echoed loudly under the stone roof as in an empty church, and I didn’t think Father was being very careful, and Mother was right to worry, since if you couldn’t meet such people in their homes, it meant it was forbidden, and this really was dangerous, maybe this was what Mother was afraid of. Mother knew there were some dangerous things that had to be done, she agreed with Father about this, but perhaps what she was afraid of was actually something not so terribly dangerous, that both she and Father had done plenty of times before, but now, when we had nothing more to fear and were on the point of leaving, she didn’t want this something-not-so-terribly-dangerous to suddenly have an effect on Father, like the sight of the torn body lying on the railway lines that is recalled later by Anna, at the end, because of her old memory of the railway station, where it all began. Precisely because of this memory she suddenly understands what she has to do, and gathers together all the strength that remains to her from the beginning, after she has used up nearly everything, but she summons up what is left and jumps, and it’s over.

I wanted to stop Father, to interrupt him and tell him to think about Mother as well, not just about this sad man and woman, and not to forget that we were going to Israel, but Father went on talking and talking, not looking around, not worried that someone might see him with these people. He held me by the hand, and I knew that at that moment I could have run away if I had wanted to, he had completely forgotten my existence, I could have gradually withdrawn my hand from his and vanished. But I didn’t want vanish away from Father. I could feel his large, warm hand and I thought how sometimes he would stroke my hair and face, it was a soft, gentle hand and the long fingers were no longer like sharp pencils but more like thick warm strands of wool, like a soft scarf that covers the mouth in winter. When he strokes me like that and the softness of his hands is visible on his face, I know this happens only because he is looking at me. That is why he becomes so cheerful, smiling, happy and gentle, with such soft, tender hands. The expression on his face is like when there is something he wants to show me that he loves very much, that he is terribly excited about. And I hang on to his hand and won’t let go, and I feel he is no longer holding me at all, he is so involved in his conversation with the man and woman, and I hold on tight, I want to hint to him that nothing must happen that might stop us leaving, Mother is waiting for us at home happy with all the arrange- ments and nothing must go wrong at the last moment, we have to be able to get away from here. I grasp his large hand, I want to remind him not to stay too long with these sad people. Tell them what you have to, just understand that time is up, it’s impossible to tell them everything. But Father goes on talking and talking and they listen, occasionally answering briefly and quietly and the woman adjusts her bony face and looks through the window, as though she can see something there, and the man looks at the floor all the time. And Father talks and talks, as though what he failed to tell his friend, the old grandfather, he is trying to find now under the floor in the dirty cracks and tell them. I want to stop him, to tell him I know it’s impossible, it’s like at the railway station when you have to summon up your strength, all your strength, the way Mother does, and choose the moment to say goodbye and let the old train leave, not to delay it, otherwise you might stay on and on, you simply have to decide to stop, and then you begin to feel the regular rhythm of the engine, the funny noise it makes, like the grandfather God grumbling in the pictures in the story books, fuming and raging at the people who all the time want more and more and more, saying all the time “just a moment” or “wait a second”, delaying the train. And I started pulling at Father’s arm, little jerks of the hand, let’s go already, you have to finish, if you get on the right train and it starts moving, it’s something new, there’s plenty of time till you arrive, a bright spring sun shines through the carriage windows, dazzling everybody, you can look through the window and think of the place that awaits you, imagine it well in the bright spring sunshine, and you can rest.

Translated by Eddie Levenston September 2002