Eight Pieces of Empire (3 page)

NINA NIKOLAEVNA’S GRANDMOTHER
was a well-known Leningrad museum curator, Darya Ivanovna Trufanova. The Leningrad authorities appointed Darya Ivanovna and other curators with the sacred task of hurriedly collecting masses of priceless art, icons, artifacts, and even imperial heirlooms—including Empress Catherine II’s dresses—from museums and czarist summer residences, which were vulnerable to Nazi bombing runs.

It was often a dangerous job. Nazi troops were already within the outskirts of the city, where most of the former czarist estates were located. Darya Ivanovna was often accompanied by her daughter, Nina Nikolaevna’s mother, Evgenia Timofeyevna Smirnova. “The last time my grandmother went to the outskirts of the city to collect more heirlooms, she heard voices speaking in German,” Nina explains. Several of the palaces were later captured by the Nazis and destroyed before the art-gatherers got there. The Nazis shipped their contents to Germany before torching them.

Once collected, the icons and artwork had to be stored in places relatively safe from Nazi bombings. One was the massive St. Isaac’s Cathedral in the city center, an edifice cut from incredibly thick granite and possessing a deep basement, rendering it practically bomb-proof. This
gave the three—Grandmother Darya Ivanovna; her daughter Evgenia Timofeyevna, and the young Nina Nikolaevna—the privilege to dwell in that cathedral basement, safe at least from Nazi bombings.

But not safe from starvation. And so amid the collection of priceless luxuries and national heirlooms, the young Nina Nikolaevna withered away. She lay on a cot in the basement of St. Isaac’s, too weak and hungry to walk, as the sawdust-bread rations grew smaller.

So Nina Nikolaevna lay away on her cot starving amid the empire’s riches. Now she was within days or at most a couple of weeks of death.

But then there appeared that miraculous gift of sustenance from nowhere—or rather, from the Leningrad Zoo. After all the other animals had long been devoured, there remained two once-playful seals. That they would ultimately be slaughtered was not in doubt; there was no food or fish left to feed them. The dilemma was not this, but rather whom the seals would save with their ultimate sacrifice. Who would be the chosen ones, those to receive precious bits of fat-rich seal blubber?

How would this momentous decision be taken? After all, it was a zero-sum question. That couldn’t be denied. A lucky few would be selected. The seal blubber might bring them back from death’s doorstep. Certainly there were scores—no, hundreds—of others whose lives would
not
be spared by the ultimate choice.

A family friend knew one of the zookeepers. A hunk of the seal blubber would be Nina’s; the difference between life and death.

More than forty-five years after the end of the blockade, Nina describes the sensation fully, as if the taste of seal blubber is returning to her parched lips and tongue. She describes how a man, a family acquaintance, slipped into the basement of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and handed the chunk of seal fat to her mother, who gently placed it in Nina’s mouth. Nina chewed the fatty seal blubber slowly in that basement room stuffed with icons, washing it down with a bit of sawdust-bread and rainwater, waiting for the magic effect to set in, druglike, until the next day the swelling in her legs began to ease. She gradually got up and stood on her own two feet again.

The Leningrad Blockade may be a miracle of survival for some, but
tales of surviving it are rarely paraded about. Even today, the subject is spoken of in whispers and serious conversations. Images of it are so harrowing that they are usually absent even in the bravado of Soviet World War II films. Along the city’s main Nevsky Prospekt, I notice a plaque or two dedicated to the victims, and there are monuments here and there, but far fewer than one would expect of such a brutal experience. Nina’s survival story is so gruesome, the knowledge that hundreds of other Leningraders were not the lucky ones saved by the magical slaughtered zoo seals, that she reveals the details reluctantly. She confesses she has never even told her own daughter, the exile Mila, the full story of the seals, a fact Mila later confirms to me.

BUILDINGS LEVELED BY
artillery shells, carpet bombings, and whole districts engulfed in an inferno of flames—these are physical inflictions triumphantly rebuilt in defiance and victory. But the famine left no visible destruction. Perhaps that explains the reticence of survivors like Nina. A city being rebuilt after a pummeling to the ground is heady with a sense of renewal. Workers scurrying about, repairing bomb holes and collapsed walls. A sense of having prevailed!

Yet it’s harder to know how to impart triumph into honoring a dead man, his hands out in his last moments, or mouth open, taking in those breaths, as he slowly starves to death. Even a man whose country was eventually miraculously victorious.

Perhaps that is why Nina insists the Soviet Union will survive—for she has survived. The country won “The Great Patriotic War,” World War II. She has endured the privations, the exile of her dissident daughter, and despite a respectable career as a lawyer, she is confined to her crumbling communal. How can the Soviet Empire
not
survive?

OUR COMMUNAL

T
he communal is a
place where perfect strangers are forced into an uneasy common existence, where even all whispers are audible. These total strangers inhabit a perpetually cramped virtual elevator. Every imaginable slice of Soviet society tossed together. Teetotaling gold-toothed engineers from Central Asia across the hall from beer-guzzling Siberians. Bespectacled spinsters with icons hidden under their beds treated to the nightly arias of the rail station whore next door. Notions of personal property blurred beyond recognition. Everyone “borrows” everything from everyone else, from sugar to socks, from tram tickets to tea. Everyone, from (former) royalty to (former) black-earth serfs, obliged to spit their words through the same brown-stained telephone receiver, line up outside the one toilet-for-all, and wait for someone else to replace the burnt-out lightbulb in the foyer.

“They—or rather ‘we’—all lived in communal apartments. Four or more people in one room, often with three generations all together, sleeping in shifts, drinking like sharks, brawling with each other or with neighbors in the communal kitchen or in a morning line before the communal john, beating their women with a moribund determination, crying openly when Stalin dropped dead, or at the movies, and cursing with such frequency that a normal word, like ‘airplane,’ would strike a passerby as something elaborately obscene,” wrote Brodsky in 1976.

There is a solitary doorbell, as the apartment was once the property of some baron and his family. Now, the once-stately spread is divided
into five individual rooms. There’s a makeshift system to keep up with socialist reality, with each of the five rooms in our communal having its set designated number of bell rings.

For Nina Nikolaevna, it’s two turns of the old bell. It resembles the gentle “I’m behind you!” warning bell on the handlebar of children’s bikes that you ring with your thumb.

Caution is advised in ringing the communal bell, because if you ratchet the dial a touch too fast, a third or fourth ring is emitted, rousing an annoyed neighbor who mistakenly thinks the ring is for him. But don’t be too gentle—for if you stop at one ring, an equally perplexed resident is produced, thinking he is the subject of the summons.

There is a single telephone in the hallway placed next to a bench. Our number is 233-4832. Only two cities in the USSR of 1989 have seven-digit numbers—Leningrad and Moscow. The elite seven-digit designation is a source of pride. As for using the phone, the cardinal rule is that no one is allowed to monopolize it for more than a few minutes at a time. That’s usually not a problem. Where the problem arises is that there are
two
Nina Nikolaevnas in our communal—my host, Nina Nikolaevna Slotina, and the Widow Nina (whom I will henceforth refer to only as “The Widow”) across the hall, some twenty-five years younger, and whose patronymic is also Nikolaevna. Some callers use the surname of the Nina Nikolaevna they want to converse with to ease the confusion, but not all. Cases of calling the wrong Nina Nikolaevna to the phone can be humorous during the day, but seldom at night or toward dawn.

In addition to the five one-room apartments that make up our communal, there are also common areas. If residents do not really “own” their apartments, then no one “owns” the common areas, which in reality means that no one has any motivation to take care of them.

Down the hallway, for example, is the communal toilet. To get there, you must negotiate your way by the dim glow of a single, dust-encrusted orb. The wallpaper is stained and falling away in places. The floorboards have been sopped with dozens of coats of paint over the decades—dark reds and greens, mostly—that have been chipped and gouged and worn into grooves by the contact of a million heels.

There is one toilet for everyone, with no permanent seat. Rather, each room or family possesses its own personal wooden perch. Five of the wooden contraptions adorn the wall of the WC, hanging on long nails driven into the wall. Once, I used the wrong seat. Worse, I left it on the toilet, rather than hanging it back up on the wall. I won’t describe the scandal that ensued—suffice it to say that if a long incarceration were a legal remedy for this crime, the offended would have demanded its swift application.

There is a large, dark kitchen with two ancient cast-iron gas stoves. Twinning them are two loudly snoring thirty-year-old refrigerators. Cooking is done in shifts; first come, first served. A constant smell of reused lard, potatoes, and onions (the mainstay of my diet during that summer of ’89) wafts about, some of the few groceries possible to procure without waiting in long lines.

The Petrogradskaya Storona (the Petrograd Side), our district, is one of Leningrad’s most beautiful, and that’s no easy feat. We live in sight of the glassy Neva River, on one of the 101 islands that the city and its endless run of neoclassical facades are built upon. “Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam, it’s as if the city were constantly being filmed by the river … no wonder that sometimes this city gives the impression of an utter egoist preoccupied solely with its own appearance,” wrote Brodsky in “Guide to a Renamed City.” (The erstwhile imperial city smells of faded elegance and expropriated fortunes—a result of its status as a former haunt of the czarist empire’s wealthiest citizens.)

Some owned ten-room spreads on two floors, replete with servants’ quarters, dwarfing my imaginary baron’s five-room spread on the fifth floor across from St. Vladimir’s. Then came the February 1917 overthrow of the Romanovs, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution of November that same year, and everything changed.

With Russia facing a massive housing shortage after World War I, the Bolsheviks summarily relieved many previous owners of everything save a single room in their own mansions. Paper-thin walls—often only sheets or canvas strung from ceiling molds—slashed grand dining rooms
of classic dimensions into weirdly shaped (and cramped) living shafts of two and three and even four units, now home to refugees and indigents.

Communist Party ideologists concocted theories about the communal as a quintessentially “socialist” concept: “consolidation”—the intentional comingling of former class enemies—served to break down social barriers.

In reality, the communal was a strictly utilitarian invention: You could pack more people into a small space if you gave it the right kind of name.

My communal neighbors, in addition to Nina Nikolaevna, include her husband, Igor. He is so quiet and overshadowed by her forceful presence as to be virtually invisible, and thus easy to forget. Is he a failure? Does he regard himself as one? With the entire Soviet system stacked up against anyone trying to get ahead (the Communist Party elite
“nomenklatura”
excepted, of course) and forced to live like laboratory rats in tiny Ferris-wheel cages, it is little wonder so many men turn to drink and women to religion. What would I do if this were
really
my life?

Other neighbors include a young man nicknamed “The Colonel,” who occasionally mutters from behind his door about very dark things. I repeatedly turn down joining some dreamy scheme he rattles on about: smuggling rare Alexandrite gemstones out of the USSR, getting us both filthy rich.

There is also a quiet older man down the hall—another drinker—who rarely emerges, and an owlish old woman and her middle-aged son, who live next to the bathroom and tend to avoid me, the whispered reason being that a close relative works at a “secret” munitions factory.

Finally, there is the Widow. She’s about forty, with a head of long black curly hair. The Widow exudes a frantic air of unrealized eroticism. She has two puberty-age sons. They take turns stomping in the hallway, ravenously laughing and explaining they are playing hide-and-seek with hamsters living under the floorboards—usually when I want to sleep. The Widow spends hours helping me practice my Russian late into the night and often, after her boys are asleep in the same room, tells me about every problem she has or is likely to have in the future. It seems that she
thinks I might be part of the solution of relieving her of some of that burden, or banishing it altogether.

Each of the neighbors befriends me in their own way—even the folks with kin working at the munitions factory come around. One takes me to the traditional Russian
banya
, or bathhouse, across the street, where I receive my first beating with birch branches to open my pores to sweat and sweat and sweat. The grime-covered shower in our communal is not for the fainthearted. In stark contrast to—or perhaps because of—the decrepitude of the communal hallway, toilet, and kitchen, Nina Nikolaevna’s room is fastidiously clean. She is always on guard against anyone entering without the little slippers known as
topochki
that are de rigueur in a Russian household. No matter how ill fitting, no matter how tattered, they must be worn. Eschewing them is tantamount to shaking hands with someone over the threshold of a doorway—a deadly omen that most Russians avoid by ripping their hands away if a foreigner makes the mistake of proffering his.