Mountaineering in Old Familiar Places

As homecomings go, my return to Russia from Paris was remarkable.

It was a brief trip back, and I sat next to a colorful American couple who were traveling to St. Petersburg for the second time in ten years to adopt a baby Russian boy. After they told me their story, I told mine: Russian language, one semester. They looked at me as though I was mad and asked if I was excited to go back. I hesitated, as I’d been doing lately when thinking about that question, and eventually said: “I don’t really know.” Although St. Petersburg itself was beautiful, three months of cold, commonly grey, and perpetually grumpy Russia had begun to weight on me (and everyone else). And after the material abundance of Western Europe (i.e. Paris in spring), returning felt something like dragging oneself back out into a desert after lounging in an oasis with all the cool, drinkable tap water you could want. I told them this and they nodded sympathetically and stared off into a space a while, before going back to their napping or reading. Later, the husband leaned in and asked – breath sweet from his latest Coca-Cola, sweat on the tip of his round and pitted nose – if they had any “American” places to eat yet. He explained that he didn’t want to be served boiled cow tongue again when he asked for red meat. It was hard not to laugh as I told him that there are many McDonaldses and Pizza Huts in Petersburg. He heaved a huge and happy sigh (which shook his barrel-like belly), and said: “Oh thank God.” As we were disembarking, I grinned, waved, and wished them all the luck in the world. The last I saw of the two, they were tangled up in the red tape of Russian passport control.

But Erica and I breezed on through with our multi-entry visas and none of the anxiety we had felt during our first arrival; instead, we chuckled at the charming ineptitude of our newfound friends. As I stood waiting the short while for our luggage to appear, the significance of what we had just accomplished occurred to me: Over the last three months, the mesmerizing mystery and near terror Russia once raised in our minds had been, more or less, subsumed by fondness. I found my crippled bag (Parisian streets had somehow ground down the left wheel) and carried it along, feeling for it the same kind of lopsided love that I suddenly felt for Russia. In the airport’s only coffee shop, I bought a latte and thought about how it was good to be in a place where I had some grasp on the language, where I could at least successfully say things like, “This lid doesn’t work. I don’t think it’s the right size. Can I get another?”

It was nearly midnight when I arrived back at my homestay, but my host mom emerged from her room and exclaimed, “Ah, the Parisian is back!” She remarked at how smart my new leather jacket and linen scarf looked (“Very French; very beautiful.”), needlessly made me dinner, and packed me off to bed saying that I was very tired and could tell her all about my trip at breakfast. But I didn’t go to sleep immediately.

Instead, I went to stand in front of my wide bedroom, momentarily poised there at exactly one in the morning, as though atop a mountain of time: perhaps a minor peak in the long, chronic range of a lifetime, but a towering one in this short semester: I was glad to be back in Russia. Really glad – despite (or because) of all of her faults and quirks, and despite the siren song of Paris or anywhere else. I was glad to be back where poets are superstars who can fill soccer stadiums, shopping malls always seem surprising, mushroom hunting is a major autumnal pastime, and plans often crumble to dust. When I finally wrapped myself up in blankets and darkness and drifted off to sleep, I dreamt of clowns, of cats in costume, of butterfly-haunted fields. And overnight, a metamorphosis began in Petersburg.

Maybe it’d happened earlier, but we’d slipped in so late at night that I hadn’t noticed: the snow had mostly melted away. A few dirty mounds lingered here and there, and actual grass was still a good ways off – although an occasional dash of green glinted in the dark, rugged topsoil (tossed and turned by plows). But the strength of the sun had been dialed up ten-fold, and the sky, once anemic, was blindingly blue. The city looked completely different, as though she’d shed her clothes in the warm weather.

April sailed by in a flurry of lacy clouds, long sunsets, fleeting showers, and shining sun: an endless parade of improvements. One day there was still a heavy mantle of ice on the Neva and every canal, and the next, that layer cracked apart and was swept away to the Gulf of Finland, revealing smoothly flowing water. Sunlight refracted off the polished gold points of Peter and Paul Fortress prickled the air; those already majestic palace facades seemed to swell up in pride; the blue of Smolny practically crackled and spit sparks it was so bright; and my host mom turned to me one morning to ask if I’d heard the nightingale singing at midnight. I had not then, but now I heard them all the time.

And as the air and ground began to thaw, so did the people. Suddenly, kids everywhere rocketed around on rollerblades and couples walked their cats. Parks slammed shut for spring cleaning, and crews of workwomen combed trash and dirt out of dead grass; masons tore up and replaced huge clumps of sidewalk; street repairs that had languished under ice were suddenly, startlingly finished. Everything was polished, primped, pumped up. They even repainted pipes running up and down the sides of buildings. One evening, on my way home, I saw a woman walking along with her head tilted back. She was smiling vaguely at the richly pink and violet sky. It was a look of happiness, a sigh of relief – a surge of love.

Spring had come to the Venice of the North.
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I passed those first invigorating weeks with a slew of activities and the usual minor struggles. First, it seemed that I had forgotten about half of the already limited vocabulary I’d had before going off to Paris. In that first week back, I had to throw up my hands at nearly every dinner and my host mom (jokingly, I think) asked if I’d unlearned all my Russian in France. Grammar class left me feeling like a monkey who would have to mime what he wanted for the rest of his life, and phonetics became a joke. I moped a little more than needed, and kept telling myself that it would get better. Surprisingly, it did.

Within the next week my brain miraculously clicked into gear. I could understand everything my host mom and almost anyone else said. I spent one whole curious evening chattering to myself in all the Russian I knew. (I use chattering because I think it most aptly reflects how I probably looked and sounded to actual Russians: like a demented ten-year old.) The next week, I could only understand three-fourths of what my host mom asked me; soon it became one-half, then nothing, then three-fourths again. The pendulum continues to swing back and forth – between getting everything and nothing, everything and nothing. I wonder if this is how people with multiple personalities feel: at a complete loss for control, but wildly exhilarated because you’re always going somewhere different.

Outside of haphazard language learning, I spent a fair clump of time looking at houses: Anna Akhmatova’s house, tucked back behind a palace and facing the calm of a little park; Pushkin’s place (on a canal within sight of the Winter Palace), where he – after being wounded in a famous duel – died at age thirty-seven; and the Nabokovs’ town house. The first two houses had little to offer in the way of connection with those brightest stars of Russia, except for a few carefully copied relics. (I however did see the actual bed on which Pushkin spent his last hours. Or so they say.) But the last, the only museum to Vladimir Nabokov, proved a startlingly powerful experience.

I went with seven or eight of my fellow Americans, on an after-hours (all-Russian) tour arranged by CIEE. Our guide led us up and down a short stretch of rooms, and pointing to butterfly books colored in by V.N. himself, butterflies collected by V.N. himself, a framed array of famed books by V.N. himself, yellowed note-cards and stubs of yellow pencil, and the beautiful, multi-shade, jigsaw-puzzle woodwork of the walls and ceilings. When we’d finished with the public part of the museum, we tiptoed upstairs into the museum offices – which were also once lived-in rooms. There is a very impressive stove in one of them, and an excellent view of the wide street below, which opens out into the cobblestone Square of St. Isaac’s.

Seeing actually used objects was thrilling, of course. Nonetheless, peering into glass cases at fairly indistinct pieces of a person’s life is a common museum activity and nothing really special (although our guide’s quiet enthusiasm helped hugely). But when we entered what used to be the family library, we were met with a connection more palpable. V.N. describes it in Speak Memory: “The place combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves. Fat armchairs stood alongside the book lined walls. An elaborate ‘punching ball’ affair purchased in England…gleamed at one end of the room.” Nothing exists of those books, gloves, and punching bag now, except faint outlines traced by our guide of where they once might have stood. In their place is a projector and screen; several rows of chairs; two small bookcases filled with copies Lolita, Pale Fire, and all the rest; and, of course, a library-like table.

Cool afternoon light streamed in through the window. You could almost taste the dust and sweet leather. On the table was a chess board, only half of its squares occupied. We sat around the table and talked about Nabokov’s love of puzzles. Here, for example, are two anagrams that appear in his books: Vivian Darkbloom (a character) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (title of V.N.’s first English novel; answer is chess-related). How can they be unscrambled? We leaned in, discussed, fidgeted with handily placed Scrabble pieces. Words began to form. I felt a tingle, like a ghost of lightning low on the horizon, run through me. We were joined together, the seven or eight of us – and joined also to Vladimir Nabokov. Our minds were all engaged with coaxing out his secret; with sliding it out of its dark velvet pouch and into the daylight. We thought furiously. Suddenly, something subtle snuck into place and the full answer almost immediately followed. We clapped heartily.

Next, we turned to the curiously arranged chess board. It was a chess equation, also formulated by Nabokov. Most of us didn’t know much about chess problems or the game itself, and so nothing happened. After a while, our guide reached down and – with two or three deft moves – solved it. The solution had striking elegance in both intellectual and physical form. We clapped again, marveling at Nabokov’s playful and ingenious mind. After that, we settled in with tea and cookies and watched an engaging black-and-white interview with the man himself; part of it was filmed in a sunlight meadow, with snow-capped mountains in the background. After the half-hour interview was up, we all agreed to meet back at the museum the following week to watch Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of Lolita, which is exactly what we did. Thus, I am now part of an infrequent club Набокова.

On another warm night the preceding week (was it?), all of CIEE got dressed up in hoop skirts and uniforms out of a different century, and danced the night away.

For weeks before, several devoted people had been breathlessly planning and preparing for this ball: teaching everyone how to do (or passably pretend to do) the polonaise, waltz, and other dances; teaching the girls how to use the fan as a method of communication; pulling together food and music and champagne. The point of the whole affair was to spend a star-spangled night as it would have been in eighteenth century St. Petersburg (i.e. Pushkin’s period), in a building roughly dating back to that time (i.e. Smolny – where we go to school). We all rented costumes from a woman who ran a shop out of her cramped Soviet-era apartment. All the dresses smacked of Disney princess or a charming version of prostitute, and the uniforms ranged from foppish Musketeer to Hussar cavalryman and, in my case, a matador (no pun intended). Golden tassels were the bling of the day. Knee high boots. Hairspray by the gallon. Feathered fans, silver swords. We paraded into the high-ceilinged ballrooms, preened proudly, hopped to the left and again to the right, bowed, skipped, sipped, smiled, laughed hysterically, and ended our evening by rocking out (as was the tradition) to Lil’ Wayne and Lady Gaga. It was a grand time. When we finally left for home, the sun had only just set and the sky was still cooling from electric blue to smooth black. A party of a different kind followed two days after.

I woke up on my host mom’s birthday and had four or five hours before her family and friends started to arrive, so I went for a walk. By eleven in the morning, the sun – which practically sits on my windowsill every morning – had chased away all the lingering, damp and cool shadows; it got positively hot. I wound my way through the senseless maze of apartment buildings, and happily took stock of every sizable bit of grass and budding bush. And since it was Sunday, people were out in droves. A girl blew wearing rollerblades whizzed by me, streaming bubbles from a pink plastic wand. Children swirled around playground pieces, screaming happily; their parents sat on benches and chatted. An elongated arrowhead of geese shot in from the south, zoning in on a tame park and pond which I later passed. Past that park rose a strange Soviet tower that reminded me of something out of The Lord of the Rings (Orthanc, perhaps). Just beyond its milky concrete and spiked crenellations was a mammoth forest-park: the largest of its kind in the city. I followed a woman pushing a baby carriage down one of the wide (somewhat muddy) paths, and eventually lost her after turning onto another.

It was mostly quiet except for birds. The occasional mountain-biker or elderly couple – the latter almost always holding hands, and picking their dainty way through the mud – would shimmer into sight through the trees, but always disappear again or pass me by. After a while of wandering down those wider byways, I went off on one of the hundred footpaths that led off into the woods. I followed a sluggish stream, half expecting to find a windowless hut on chicken legs and Baba Yaga. Instead, I found a stand of birch trees, all lyrical lines and glowing white skin. The sun fell through their half-bare branches onto my stream, fallen logs, and ragged, golden or olive-colored grass. I was alone in that kind of wildly beautiful place which would have shot Pushkin through with inspiration. It was perfectly still for a long time. But then I heard voices and laugher, looked up, and saw a large group of picnickers threading their way toward me. I left quietly, treading tenderly, feeling myself very Russian.

On the way home, I bought my host mom three purple lilies. (Giving flowers is very big here. There are flower shops on nearly every block.) When I got back to the apartment, a whole crowd of family was there. I re-met my host mom’s three adult children and their significant others, her mother, one of her good friends, and her father (who greeted me in English with, “I am very pleased to meet you.” I replied in Russian: “I’m glad to meet you too.”) We all squeezed into what is usually my host mom’s bed room (the largest room in the apartment) and sat at a table that groaned with food. There was juice, sickly-sweet cognac, kvass; stew, bread, multiple salads, and a platter piled high with radishes, cucumbers, and tomatoes – all staple Russian food and drink. When the meal wound down, an hour later or so (it was by then four o’clock), we leaned back and I listened drowsily to my surrogate family chat in lazy circles. When I was asked a rare direct question, I could answer – but beyond that, I kept silent; it was pleasant just to listen and not worry about how blurry my syntax is or lacking my vocabulary. Sometimes I caught the drift of conversation, and other times it slid on by. They mentioned modern movies and apartments. They laughed when the little granddaughter squealed in delight at my red hair and could not take her eyes off of it. We ate cake with tea and turned on the television to see how the Petersburg soccer team was doing in its latest match. The game ended in a tie as dusk settled.

After most everyone had left, the dishes were cleared away and cleaned my host mom and her friend. My help was refused, and so I sat in my room with an unopened book and the yellow light on overhead. I was glad that I’d been able to be a part of this family’s celebration, to elicit their smiles and listen to their table-talk. Just then, a wave of sweet night air blew in through my open window. Loud laughter burst from the kitchen.

And suddenly I knew again, with infinite certainty, as on that pinnacle of time in the night just one month ago, when the air grew thin and my breath caught short, as the snare snapped shut and the realization first struck: Even if I never get the chance to visit her again, this country will always own half of my heart.

It’s enough to make one howl from the rooftops.