Claire Kelly
"Nina Vasilievna"
The living room, which doubled as her dining room, steadily grew darker as the weak northern sun set. We sat at the small table together, a veritable feast spread before us: herring, pepper salad, potatoes, borshch , homemade wine, stuffed apples, meat-filled blini .Today it was just the two of us, Nina Vasilievna and myself, because her daughter who lived in the neighboring apartment block was busy with other tasks. The day before the three of us had sat at this table together; I realized that the food before us today was the leftovers from yesterday-I remembered, guiltily, that Nina Vasilievna was a widow living on a Russian pension. She could not afford to treat Americans every day of the week. Despite her exhortations to load my plate again, I could not bring myself to eat what represented all the food from her kitchen.
Nina Vasilievna wore rose-colored glasses. I'm not using a figure of speech: the thick lenses in their plastic frames were tinted a deep, deep pink, almost maroon. They made her look younger than her seventy-five years. She loved to crack jokes; I laughed politely at all of them, since most Russian humor is beyond me.
I returned to her apartment because on the previous day I had learned that Nina Vasilievna had lived through the Leningrad blockade, the 900 day siege of the city of St. Petersburg, the longest continual siege in world history, the siege that killed nearly one million people-one-third of the city's citizens. Nina Vasilievna and her mother spent those three years in their apartment building. At the end of the siege, they were the only people left alive in the entire building. She was ten years old in August of 1941 when the Germans encircled her city.
When I learned that Nina Vasilievna had lived through the siege, I went into paroxysms of nerdery. The history of the Soviet Union in World War Two (its Russian name is the Great Patriotic/Fatherland War) is my favorite area of Soviet history, and the blockade of Leningrad fascinates me above all other topics. The deprivation, the difficulty, the sacrifices of the Russian people, and the stories of survival in extraordinary circumstances awake the historian within me. To have the opportunity to meet one of these blockade survivors, whose number decreases yearly as old age claims them, whose stories have not been told because of Russian and Soviet historical reticence.! I was in seventh heaven.
After dinner I began asking my questions. What was it like in the city during the siege? What happened that first winter, one of the coldest on record? Were her friends and family evacuated? How did she and her mother survive?
I realize now that I was looking for tabloid fodder, some stories of the grotesque, her descriptions of seeing bodies piled by the side of the road. That was what all the books were about, and I wanted to hear it from someone who had seen it first hand. I didn't stop to think that this was a ten-year old girl I was talking to. I didn't understand that I was forcing Nina Vasilievna to become that child again, a young girl left with only her mother to watch her world collapse around her, a young girl whose father vanished at the front. I just wanted stories. I didn't want to think about the person telling them to me.
Nina Vasilievna indulged me for a brief time, maybe ten minutes or so. When she told me of one day in the summer of 1942 she witnessed a Nazi bomb fall on a fully loaded trolley car, and of the aftermath and carnage following the explosion, she began to weep. She took off her rose-colored glasses and hid her face in her hands. Suddenly, with her glasses off, I saw who she really was: she was an old woman weighed down by memories. Her skin was wrinkled and nearly translucent, her hair was white, her hands shook, her eyes were pale blue and cloudy. She was an old woman, she could be my grandmother, and this American girl was trying to get her to relive the worst years of her life, when friends and family died of cold and starvation as she watched helplessly.
After I realized what I was doing, I wanted to flee the apartment. I had never felt so ashamed of anything in my entire life. I wanted to apologize, disappear, never have met her, hug her.do something, anything.
The conversation did not last long after that. I left around 8 pm, in tears. I had broken the first and most basic rule of Russian hospitality for guests, which is to bring flowers or a similar small gift anytime you visit someone who is not a close friend or family member. I had not brought Nina Vasilievna flowers. And I had made an old woman cry.