From St. Petersburg, with Love
May 2002
Part 1, Breakfast of Champions
Stepping off the bus in St. Petersburg, I was again reminded of Frank, the Chicago pawnshop owner, and his warning.
“Traveling to Russia?” he had said. “You’re nuts. Do you know what happens to women over there? They’ll kidnap you, drug you, and sell you into the Eastern European slave market. No one will ever hear from you again…”
Frank had seen a documentary on the subject, which in turn made him an expert.
I soon regretted that I had mentioned my hope of going to St. Petersburg to someone like Frank, a man who decorated his business establishment with propaganda paraphernalia from the 1950s and ‘60s.
On one corner wall hung a Burt the Turtle poster urging youngsters to “Duck and Cover” in the event of a nuclear attack. On another wall was an advertisement for Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Our conversation was of the casual sort, the kind of conversation that only happens with people who barely know each other. I was on my way to usher at the theater, and I’d stopped in at Frank’s shop to check out the random treasures he’d accrued since my previous visit, which had been the first.
The trip to Russia was something I had been planning for a few months.
It all started with an experience I’d had at a public library with its copy of Breakfast of Champions.
The book wasn’t about Russia. It was about how people misunderstand reality, mistake fiction for truth, and vise versa.
The public library’s Breakfast of Champions contained words that had been scribbled out in blue and black ink. They were all references to the creator of the universe, God, and Jesus.
The effect this rendered was puzzling. It made me wonder why someone had gone through the trouble of trying to rid the pages of references to God when all it did was draw more attention to whatever had been scribbled out.
That’s when I started thinking about Russia.
Frank, I’m sure, had my best interest at heart as he shattered my dreams, adjusted his spectacles, and continued filing away odds and ends acquired through an obituary auction.
He had said it so matter-of-fact, as if it couldn’t be any other way. “No one will ever hear from you again…”
After work, I walked back to my apartment deflated and annoyed, but eventually decided I wasn’t going to let Frank dissuade me. I’d already committed, having just bought the plane ticket. Frank had probably never even left Illinois, for all I knew.
Anyway, I was determined. So I went.
Part 2
Close Encounters with the Russian Mafia
I got off the bus at an early morning hour. The streets of St. Petersburg were empty and steaming with fog. It felt otherworldly, everything written in Russian script, and bus passengers scattering like mice into the city walls.
I needed to exchange money, so I followed one of my fellow passengers into a building with a bank machine. A man standing there said something in Russian, which I didn’t understand, but nodded as if I did.
“It doesn’t work,” he said in English after I continued digging for my credit card. I smiled, “Right…Spasiba.” Spasiba was one of the few words I learned in Russian. It means “thanks.” The other words I learned were pomogite pazhalusta, which means, “Please help me.”
I wandered to the point that I finally found my bearings on the map, and routed a course towards the Neva River. Along the way, I turned down a street to find a towering orthodox cathedral. Looking around the empty sidewalks, I got out my disposable camera and took a few pictures, not wanting to seem too touristy or draw the attention of the Russian mafia, which Frank had warned were lingering everywhere.
I continued to walk towards the center of the city, and found two elderly women strolling in the same direction. They wore thick sweaters and carried aged leather purses on their arms, the kinds trendy girls in the States buy from thrift stores to accessorize.
Walking behind them made me feel safe, as if I was blending in somehow despite my massive backpack that screamed Catch me if you can!
Up ahead, a police bullhorn echoed in the empty streets, blaring something in Russian over a loudspeaker.
I looked to the women in front of me to gauge their response. They continued walking unaffected. I assumed there was nothing to fear. At one point, as they spoke to one another in Russian, I thought I heard them say, “Amerikanski.”
Before traveling, I felt that I had a fair bit of knowledge regarding Russian-U.S. relations. What I wasn’t sure of was what kind of sentiment the citizens of our former Cold War enemy would have towards Americans a decade after the fall of the Iron Curtin.
I’d done some research, consulting Rick Steves and Lonely Planet, and I hadn’t read anything alarming about lingering hostilities. As I listened to the women talking, understanding perhaps .05% of what they said, I began to fear that my presence, obviously as an American, was disturbing them.
I decided to walk a bit slower and developed some distance between the women and myself. We rounded a street corner to find a large public square functioning as a parking lot full of identical black vehicles, which I could only guess belonged to the police.
Frank’s words lit through my mind again: “Just stay away from the cops. I’m telling you, they’re the most corrupt people on the planet. They’ll take your passport away and you’ll be literally and figuratively screwed.”
Frank had really said, “literally and figuratively.”
I quickened my pace and found myself once again tailing the older women. Not only had I failed to avoid the Russian police, but I had managed to bring myself directly to their lair. I wasn’t sure if things could get much worse. I know now things can always get worse.
The women continued down the street passing the police barracks, and I followed in tow. Up ahead, sirens blared and echoed in the cannon of apartments towering over the street. A voice again shouted in Russian through a loudspeaker. Once more, I looked towards the women in front of me for guidance, but found none.
A long convoy of black armored vehicles approached at a swift pace. Red and blue emergency lights flashed. I felt my heart race and wondered if this was it.
The Russian mafia was en route to snatch my filthy American existence from the sidewalk and make me disappear into oblivion.
I'M AN ORIGINAL CATCHPHRASE
I’m a paragraph. Double click here or click Edit Text to add some text of your own or to change the font. This is the place for you to tell your site visitors a little bit about you and your services.
The convoy passed.
I sighed with relief and picked up my pace to cross the Neva and find my hostel, departing from my two guardian babushkas.
Part 3
The Neva and “The Moment”
In May 2002, St. Petersburg, I learned, was in the throws of a preparation for the city’s 300-year anniversary, which was to come the following year. Multiple restoration projects were visible throughout the city, including a façade of the Hermitage Museum and a number of buildings along the river.
I stopped half way across the bridge to stare out at the water as it drifted and carried light along the currents. It sloshed along the barriers on both embankments. The Neva looked even broader than I had imagined. The water was murky and gray.
As I was planning the trip, I had imagined how my experience of the Neva would be. I gazed at the river in anticipation, as if waiting for the water to draw me into “the Moment.”
In Goethe’s version of Faust, the scholar does not sell his soul for wealth, wisdom, or success, as in other versions . He makes a deal with the devil for an experience of “the Moment,” a moment he never wants to depart, a moment of deep satisfaction, of purpose, of beauty.
I don’t know why, but I had believed, consciously or unconsciously, that the Neva could render a window into some otherwise unfathomable understanding that would make the distance between there and home all worthwhile.
Yet in view of that great river, with the tremendous city behind it, nothing like that was happening. The Neva was not the window of profound witness to human suffering as I had romanticized from thousands of miles away; it was just a river meandering along, minding its currents and mirroring the moods of the sky.
Part 4
Letters from Kresty Prison
On the other side of the bridge, I found my hostel was just a short distance from a square outside Finland Station where a towering statue of Vladimir Lenin pointed in the direction I had just come from.
The iron statue decorated a small garden in which various men had passed out next to empty bottles of red-lettered vodka. One of the men appeared to have wet his pants. He was lying so still I wondered if he was alive, until I saw his shoulder rise and his body shiver in the chill of the May morning.
My roommate at the hostel was a woman named Liz McGill. Liz was thin, blonde, and had a face that looked as if she was about to laugh at a joke at someone’s expense.
I learned very early on that Liz was not Scottish. She was from East Germany and had managed to escape across the Berlin Wall when she was about seventeen. Her first husband was a Polish gymnast whom she had met in the UK, and her second husband was a Scottish doctor who was very happy to finance her travels.
Liz had been everywhere. Her adventures had taken her through Africa and on multiple trips through the Middle East and Asia. She had a fantastic accent which came out especially strong when she spoke of her experiences and scorn towards Americans “with their f–in’ hot-dogs and jeans.”
It just so happened that both of us were wearing corduroys, and after that conversation I opted to carry on wearing my corduroys for the remainder of the trip.
Not far from Lenin’s statue was a large rust-colored building hedged in with a tall barbed wire fence. Liz advised me to take a close look at the building next time I walked by. A small group of women stood on the street holding white scarves, waving them ferociously towards the windows in the prison above.
From the windows of the prison, hands and pieces of cloth waved back synchronized in a way that suggested these people had devised signals with which to communicate through the walls and the wire. Occasionally, one could find little notes on the sidewalk that had been flung there from the inmates above. If one were to open any of those notes, it might say something like this:
Dear Sonya,
I loved you. Perhaps I love you still.
The flame, perhaps, is not yet extinguished,
But burns so quietly within my soul.
No longer should you be distressed by it.
Silently and helplessly I loved you.
At times too jealous, and at times too shy.
God grant you find another who will love you
As tenderly and truthfully as I.
Yours,
Dimitry
That Pushkin poem was a popular favorite among Russians, I imagine including the inmates at Kresty.
The prison, I later learned, had housed dissidents like Leon Trotsky who promoted the Bolshevik revolution. Then, a few years later, Kresty was used to imprison the counterrevolutionaries who opposed it.
Part 5
The True Identity of the Russian Mafia
After a long walk, I found myself standing outside the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, trying to decide if the wildness of the structure was appealing or just plain unsettling.
On the road from Estonia to St. Petersburg, I noticed that instead of crosses on the churches there were rooster weather panes. The crosses had all been removed.
It seemed a little odd that the crosses had been replaced by a rooster, of all things, owing to its relevance in the crucifixion narrative. The emblematic reminder of the divine’s sacrifice for humanity had been exchanged for a symbol of humanity’s denial of the divine.
This church still had its crosses.
A handsome street vender came along and began making conversation. I noticed he was selling key chains and booklets about the cathedral and asked if I could take a look at one.
“How long have you been in St. Petersburg?” he asked.
“Not long,” I said flipping through the pages. “I just got here.”
“Ah, you’re following your president, I see.”
“My president?” I stopped looking through pamphlet.
“Yeah, your great president Bush. He was here just now, at the church. You just missed him.”
My mind reeled back to a news clip I’d seen in Estonia about Bush en route to Moscow. I hadn’t thought much of it until that moment. Then I remembered the stream of black armored vehicles and the police bullhorns.
“He was here just now?”
“Yes. He’s on his way to the Hermitage.”
The mafia I’d encountered earlier had actually been a US presidential convoy.
The street vendor, whose name was Mikhail, insisted I call him Mike and asked if I’d be interested in joining him for a coffee. Inside a small trailer near the cathedral, a number of vendors sat and relaxed, conversing back and forth together. Mike brought me a coffee and invited me to sit at their table.
I noticed a woman across from me who appeared pleasant and interesting. I wished that I could have understood what she was saying. When she spoke with the others, it made them laugh but she seemed sad and distant as she drank her coffee.
I wondered if she had children at home, and what her life had been like, and I thought of the pubic library’s Breakfast of Champions. She noticed that I was studying her, so I pretended to be interested in something else in the room while she spoke to Mike. The others left one by one.
“She says you look cute,” Mike said to me of the woman as she got up to leave.
“I’m sorry…?” I thought that Mike had actually said, “She says your luck cut.”
“She likes you,” he said. The woman left the trailer and the door squeaked and shut with a wicket thud. “She’s lezbeen.”
Part Six
Russian Tony Bennett
After the coffee at the cathedral, I thanked Mike and his friends and wandered across Nevsky Prospect to a park where older gentlemen sat with their legs crossed, playing chess and smoking cigarettes. The park led towards a theatre of some kind, so I strolled along and went to see what was playing.
It turned out to be a historical opera about the life of Peter the Great. I found a seat next to a man who looked like a Russian mix of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. He wore a nice suit and had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. We exchanged smiles and pleasantries in our limited knowledge of each other’s languages.
“Hello,” he said.
“Spasiba,” I said.
He called over a friend of his and instructed her to translate the play to me although I was happy enough to listen to the music and try to figure it out myself. It turned out she was a primary school teacher of English.
As the lights dimmed, she started translating pieces of the play, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. It seemed like she would start in English and then, losing her way, switched halfway through to Russian. I nodded emphatically and smiled, trying to relieve her of her duties, but she insisted.
The Peter the Great opera dramatized a tragedy of some sort; that much I understood. The rest was lost to me between my diligent translator’s whispers of Russian to Russian.
After the play, moved by my eagerness to exercise solidarity with his people by sitting through the operatic tragedy, the Russian Tony Bennett stood up, took my hand, and moved to kiss me on the cheek.
Confused, I reacted which led to my new acquaintance missing my cheek and meeting my lips in an awkward moment that took us both a few moments to recover from.
Outside the theater, we took a picture of ourselves together and said goodbye. I never saw Russian Tony Bennett or my translator friend again.
Part 7
Pomogite Pazhalusta
A few days later, late in the afternoon, I made my way to a grocery store and bought a loaf of bread and a jar of red jelly. At the end of Nevsky Prospect was a little park where I sat and prepared to eat. The bread was nice, but the jam, I then discovered, was in fact pink pickled cabbage.
Three men walked past me wearing leather jackets. I became curious and decided to see where they were headed. They wandered through the park to the entrance of a cemetery where a number of famous Russians were buried, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
Outside the entrance of the cemetery were a number of children in wheelchairs holding their hands out and saying, “Pomogite pazhalusta.”
Earlier that day, I had met a man in a wheelchair at the Russian Museum. His name was Saul and he was from Brooklyn. Saul and I began conversing in front of a painting by Ilya Repin called, “What Freedom!” of a young couple strolling through the waves of the sea.
Saul, at one point, told me to turn around as he unzipped his pants and took out $60 worth of Russian rubles. He gave me the money and told me to get a tour of the city.
I told him that I couldn’t accept his money, but he insisted. Perhaps there was something about me that said, “Pomogite pazhalusta.”
Next to the graveyard was a large structure that looked like a church. The men with leather jackets walked inside, and so did I. A choir was singing somewhere. Their music echoed throughout the empty spaces and sounded both haunting and heavenly.
I studied the walls and arches. At one point, a young man appeared at the end of the hallway and said something in Russia, and then asked in English if he could help me.
“I believe I’m lost. Could you tell me where I am?”
“This is the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. What exactly are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
The man smiled. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “They’re serving dinner at the moment. You could join me if you’d like.”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
The young man, I learned, was from Poland and had come to St. Petersburg to study to become an orthodox priest.
“I’m Tomas,” he said as we walked through the back hallways of the building and through a garden. At the other side was a dining hall where a number of elderly people were seated throughout, eating their dinners.
One of them stood up and greeted Tomas as we passed. She looked so happy to see him. They stood and chatted for a moment before we continued on to a table nearby.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“He is risen,” Tomas replied. He went and brought us two bowls of bread and white stew.
It tasted like the best food I’d had in a long time. I studied the old woman as she got up to leave, a woman who had been born and lived through the Soviet eradication of all references to religious faith.
For the exchange she had just had with Tomas, she could have been sent to Kresty Prison, left to wave a white rag at loved ones on the street below.
In that moment, as the woman walked across the room at a slow pace, I felt as if I was watching the Neva as I had imagined it from home, and I wanted to stay in that place for a long time.
Part 8
Coming Home
A few weeks after I got back from my trip, I went to give plasma at a clinic on the north side in Chicago.
A nurse took me to a waiting room and asked me a few questions. She had a familiar accent, and I asked her where she was from.
“Russia,” she said, still writing. Her ‘R’ was thick, as if she was saying the word with her whole tongue.
“I was just in Russia!”
“How long were you there?” The nurse looked up with a raised penciled-in eyebrow.
“About seven days.”
“Seven days?” the nurse smiled to herself and shook her head. “You have never been to Russia.”
She continued scribbling. Then she informed me that I was ineligible to give plasma because I had been traveling.
As much as I wanted to protest, and tell her of the fascinating people I’d met, the experiences I’d had--and that she was wrong--I knew she was telling me something about herself, and I had no choice but to believe her.
What did I know of Russia?
Had I done anything more than walk through the cemetery for the 900,000 men, women, and children who starved to death in the siege of Leningrad? Had I ever closed my mouth and withheld the thoughts of my heart for fear that my closest friend was an informant for the KGB? Did I ever wait in line for food rations? Did I ever pay a bribe for a necessary government issued document? Had I been there to experience the collapse of an ideology that a whole country had suffered for and invested in for two generations? Had I waded through the hollow gravity of the aftermath?
No, I hadn’t. I’d never been to her Russia.
A few months later, I was walking down Wells Street across the steal bridges, and I realized I was not far from Frank’s shop.
I made my way down the side road and saw the sign from across the street. Inside, Frank stood behind the counter and discussed something with a customer with wild gesticulations. He struck me as someone who would find speaking difficult if he was handcuffed for any reason.
I walked across the street and peered through the window. I’m here, Frank, I wanted to tell him. I made it there and back. See? You were wrong, Frank.
He smiled and waved as the customer left. In the stillness of his shop, Frank sat on his stool, and looked at the wall in front of him, decorated with messages and free ideas.
There in the comforts of his sanctuary, he was the lone expert, the guru of all the random trinkets discarded from other people’s lives.
I walked through the door.
“Hello, there,” he said with a practiced smile.
“Hello.” I walked over to the counter, about to tell Frank about my close encounter with the mafia/president of the United States when he started to cough uncontrollably into a handkerchief.
I turned and walked to another part of his shop, and pretended to look at the merchandise until the coughing fit subsided.
In the corner, there was a shelf of books I hadn’t seen before.
With Frank still recovering in the front, I skimmed the covers of every shelf. On the third shelf from the bottom was a yellowed copy of Breakfast of Champions.
I picked it up and thumbed through the pages, beautiful, aged, and clean of public library scribbles.
“Ah, Vonnegut. He’s one of my favorites,” Frank said from the counter.
“Mine too. How much is this?”
“A buck fifty.”
“Sounds like a deal.”
I walked to the counter and couldn’t help smiling. I wanted to tell Frank my story, and his place in it, but instead floundered in awkwardness.
“Weren’t you that girl going to Russia?” Frank said handing me the book.
“Me? Well, yes, I did go to Russia.”
“How was it?” Frank asked. Although I had thought about the question for a while, I wasn’t sure how to answer in that moment.
“It was…a fascinating place. I’m glad I went.” I fidgeted with a book in my hand and a mafia story on my lips. “Have you done much traveling?”
“Yes, some. Served in the military, went to ‘Nam in ’69…”
I smiled and shifted back and forth. Another customer walked in. I looked him in the face, and nodded with gratitude.
“Well, thanks again for the book, Frank.”
A version of this story was published under the title “The Passing of Pawns” in the May/June 2015 edition of Pilcrow and Dagger.
