Chapter One
It was two o'clock in the morning of February 3, 1990, when the phone rang next to my bed. "I can talk for only two minutes," B said, shouting over the crackling line to make herself heard. "I'm calling from Siberia. I have my passport, and they just gave me an exit visa. There's a ticket available to America from Leningrad this Saturday, or else one for next August. Those are the only two dates available. I have to decide now. Do you still want me to come?"
"Take the ticket for Saturday," I said, trying to remuster the bravado I'd seemed to have in excess when we were last together in Russia, but which had somehow evaporated in the clear Maine winter light. "I'll drive to New York and pick you up at Kennedy. I'll be there waiting." There was no need to ask which airline or which flight. There would be only one.
I didn't have time to ask her why she was calling from Siberia instead of Leningrad, but she probably wouldn't have been able to answer anyway, with the Russian operator listening in. Nor had anything been said about how long she planned to stay. This was her first trip outside of Russia, and I knew from her last letter that she and her husband had just separated. Under those circumstances anything could happen.
By then, of course, I already knew about invitations, knew that you can't just say to someone in Russia, "I'd love to have you come visit me in America," and then forget about it. An invitation is an official gesture, requiring official documents, not just an invitation, but an Invitation, a Priglashenie, presented to the local Russian-government passport office as a request for an external passport, which, if granted, then becomes a request to the American government for a visa to enter the United States, and is followed by another request to the Russian government for an exit visa. Invitations are coveted trophies, particularly since Russians can receive permission to travel to the West only if they have a notarized invitation. People forge invitations, or buy them for astronomical sums, or agree to rent their apartments to people who are willing to give them invitations. Invitations are to Russians what green cards are to foreigners in America. This was true then, and it is still true now. Although many things have changed in Russia, the invitation has not, and Westerners who offer invitations in a general sort of way often have little idea of the leaps of heart produced by the gesture, nor do they have any idea of what they are potentially getting into.
But while I had known B for four years, she had never asked for an invitation or hinted at a desire for one. When I finally asked her to come to Maine, she didn't immediately jump at the chance, but just said calmly, "You'll have to do an official invitation," and then seemed to forget about it. Three days before I left Russia, I made the offer again, and then wrote up the letter of invitation in a rush. I had never really expected her to come.
Conversations that involved direct demands for help and immediate irreversible decisions had come to seem normal to me in Russia, a function of Russian realities, but in America, things were different. Now I had to remind myself how B had risked coming to see me at my hotel in Russia when Russians were still not allowed to set foot in hotels for foreigners, had given me her only travel bag and only pair of French stockings when my luggage was stolen at the train station and invited me to stay overnight at her and her husband's Leningrad apartment when doing so could have put both of them in jeopardy. By then we had sat up many times in her kitchen until five o'clock in the morning, drinking tea with raspberries and talking endlessly "soul to soul," and sometimes in pantomime. As the child of Russian migr parents who spoke Russian, French, Romanian, German, Polish, and some Spanish, though no English when I was born, I'd thought that I had lost irretrievably any memory of the Russian they had spoken to me as a child. But that eventually proved to be an illusion, as did so many other beliefs, which collapsed one after another in astonishing sequence over the coming years.
At any rate, like many people in rural Maine, I had a seasonal job that left me without a rigid schedule in the middle of February, or even much of a schedule at all, so there was nothing to prevent B from coming and staying as long as she wished. Nothing except the American mentality I didn't think I had.
In the end, she stayed for what turned out to be three months. When I returned to Russia again in the fall to sing Boris Godunov in the chorus of the Surry Opera Company, an amateur opera company from Maine that had annual exchanges with Leningrad, she was ready with her own invitation for me. Just as we had never talked about how long she would stay in America, we never talked about how long I would stay in Russia, or even when I would come. Whenever possible. That was all that needed to be said. With an invitation, I would be allowed to stay at her house for as long as six months. The invitation was good for a year.
Part One 1991
The train from Helsinki to Leningrad's Finland Station leaves Helsinki at 1:00 p.m. and arrives in Leningrad at 8:00 p.m., crossing the Russian border after a two-hour customs delay at Wiborg, once part of Finland but incorporated into the Soviet Union at the end of the Russo-Finnish war in 1939. There is no change in the landscape between Finland and Russia; on both sides of the border, it is almost interchangeable with the landscape of coastal Maine, even down to the scattering of islands offshore, and the rose-granite ledges at the edge of the Baltic. But the barbed wire is still there, going off at a ninety-degree angle from the landward side of the border and stretching as far as the eye can see up over the spruce-covered hills. It testifies that, although these are times of profound change in Russia, the watchtowers and the barbed wire have not yet been taken down. You are the same, the train is the same, the landscape is the same. The only difference is that you are crossing into Russia.
It is February 28, 1991, and the fifth time that I have come to Leningrad on this train, the same one taken by Lenin when he was returning to Russia from Switzerland in April 1917, and was greeted at the Finland Station by swarms of supporters: soldiers, sailors, workers. It was, in fact, from this train that the Russian Revolution was launched, with Lenin addressing the crowds at the station: "Dear comrades, I am happy to greet you in the victorious Russian Revolution, to greet you as the advance guard of the international proletarian army ... The hour is not far when ... the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters ... Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the general collapse of European capitalism. The Russian Revolution you have accomplished has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch ... Long Live the International Socialist Revolution."
The ticket counter where you purchase tickets for the train to Russia is in a shabby little room, no more than a cubicle, hardly noticeable when you walk through the Helsinki station, where tickets to Everyplace Else But Russia can be bought in a big shiny ticket office with orderly lines of people paying their money and starting off on their journeys. But the door to the Russian ticket office is closed, and when I open it, there are only two people inside, a Filipino couple from California on their honeymoon, sitting on plastic chairs. They want to go to Russia for a few hours to have their pictures taken in the Finland Station, or maybe in front of the Winter Palace, just so their friends will know they were really there, and they can't understand why no one will give them permission to do this, why they must stay for at least one day when they don't want to, why they need a visa and can't get it on the spot, why Russia is so, well, different from all of the other countries where they've had themselves photographed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Metro Stop Dostoevsky by Ingrid Bengis Copyright © 2003 by Ingrid Bengis. Excerpted by permission.
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