The Birch, Fall 2005

St. Petersburg

Monica Finley

The moist, mosquitoed air of St. Petersburg is the most efficient tool to erode the fa ade of your aloofness, for her crumbling paws of sovereignty gouge long scars upon your heart. With all the stateliness of declined gentry and the bitterness of Soviet grit, Petersburg is a riot of cobwebbed doorways, puddles of laughter, boiling samovars and neat vodka. St. Petersburg is the lump in your throat when you remember triumphs of imperialism, collapsed arteries of history, the sallow coughs of old age. It is a city that rarely crackles, but always rustles, echoing in sighs and faded tinsel. You see the memories of aristocracy here, jostling for position with the Nevskii Prospekt McDonald’s; they are supporting the eves of the Hermitage and are stained with cigarettes and smog. The birth of the avant-garde becomes a flickering candle in the windows of the artists’ institute; Malevich’s Black Square is a mystery sketched in brittle shadows; the rhymes of suprematism are in shattered Sovetskoe bottles matted in canal ice.

On winter nights, the bars and cafes groan with suppressed mirth and the streets sigh with snowflakes, flirting with battered streetlamps. The warm ambiguity of the bar leaves you in content abstraction as American voices battle Russian ones in a friendly troika around the room. The air, filled with the acrid smoke of cheap cigarettes and melted snow, is thick with the scent of sour pickles and buried drama. You feel a warm, wet lip graze your cheek and steamy laughter in your ear, and the cafe full of functional furniture is awash with Katyusha’s warm glow. The music batters on through the night, and eyes meeting eyes create a cobweb of emotions and glances across the crowded cafe. A jumbled network of hands raises forth, sloshing Baltika and Sovetskoe bottles and between the arms you see a patchwork of merry faces, red mouths erupting with Katyusha and Za Rossiyu! A sleek girl with shady eyes and stiletto boots allows a tight, collapsed smile and leans into the curve of a sinewy young man’s arms.

Doorways always seem full of bubbling crowds at night, and the doorman releases the valve and soon everyone floods out into the velvety night, pinned with stars and dyed midnight blue and sparkling white. The pastel buildings are silent and muted grey, at once humble and vainglorious. The sky feels like a tent of aged epochs, held up by intermittent streetlamps. The ruddy-faced crowd with powdered snowballs and trailing scarves stumbles toward the axis of St. Petersburg, like a magnet drawing on flecks of iron.

And no matter which holiday celebrations you’ve experienced, there are few sights as memorable and heartbreakingly glorious as this sudden elka, as if the Triumphal Arch were a curtain parted to unveil a magical creature arrived from space. All the crippled beauty of this majestic city is healed by one sight of this rich, piney Christmas tree. Scarf trailing in the snow, you pause, startled by both this nostalgia for Petersburg’s imperial glory and the humbleness of such an offering to her citizens.

As if the elka i tself cast a spell over the tremulous moment, one by one the group grasps hands, shouting raucously, "Kalinka, Kalinka, Kalinka moia" and allowing the words to shatter and explode in the great silence, galloping around the tree in breathless laughter. And before you know it, your song has become a ragged scrap of silvery music in the immensely still air; and then you’re asking the bemused policemen for a limp cigarette; and then you find a small stuffed bear with a shirt that reads "I love you," half buried in the snow; and then you allow yourself one last twirl through the square, looking longingly at the contrasts of royalty, sky and snow. Just one more twirl, and the Alexander Column seems to be curving so high into the sky it’s about to topple over on top of you and you howl, "Do svidaniia! Ya budu skuchat po vam!" Suddenly, the interior of a chastnik closes around you, and all you can do is allow one last hot tear to slide down your icy cheek, because tomorrow morning at nine a.m. you’re flying back to America, and you don’t know when you’ll see this home again.