Ten years later, it was time to find out if Vanya’s hope had come true.
The night I arrived in St. Petersburg, I checked my iPhone’s weather app to find that the only sunny afternoon in the entire coming week would be the following day. St. Petersburg is notorious for its wildly changing weather, but the row of uninterrupted raincloud icons convinced me that before I sought out Boris, Nina, and Vanya, I should take that one precious sunny day to explore.
I took the metro to bustling Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main thoroughfare, and happily began strolling. St. Petersburg had been spruced up since I lived here in the mid-nineties, but unlike Moscow, it didn’t feel radically changed. I walked past the Griboyedov Canal, with its onion-domed Church on Spilled Blood (named after the spot upon which Tsar Alexander II was killed by an assassin’s bomb), then past Dom Knigi, with its rows of books displayed in the windows. Across the street, the Kazan Cathedral gleamed in the sun, and a few blocks later, I passed by the Moika Canal and the Literaturnoye Café, where Alexander Pushkin was said to have had his last meal before being shot to death in a duel. The café had been there forever, but it did have one new element: a mannequin wearing eighteenth-century garb and a curly Pushkin wig had been propped at a window table.
A block farther, I turned right to walk toward the massive arch leading to Palace Square. Emerging onto the cobblestoned expanse, I saw the brilliant aqua-colored Hermitage and the soaring Alexander Column, topped by an angel bearing a cross. I’d always loved this glorious, historic vista, but now I noticed something unusual. The low metal fence surrounding the column was covered with piles of flowers, stuffed animals, religious icons, candles, and, most wrenchingly, photographs of smiling people and agonized notes of farewell.
This was a spontaneous memorial to the victims of Russia’s Metrojet flight 9268, which had crashed into the Sinai Desert a few days earlier. At the time, rumors abounded that the crash was the result of a terrorist attack, though the Russian government had yet to officially conclude as much. The plane had been en route from Egypt to St. Petersburg, and most of the 224 victims were from the city and its environs.
I walked across the square and past the Little Hermitage, with its massive marble Atlas statues holding up the portico. Following the curving Moika Canal, I again walked past the Church on Spilled Blood, then strolled through the Mikhailovsky Garden and crossed the Fontanka River into the neighborhood where I’d lived during those early, frustrating years of trying to become a writer. I turned left to walk up Mokhovaya Street, then stopped in front of my old building, No. 12. On the first floor of the building next door was a tiny 24-hour store, where I used to buy dill-flavored potato chips, Baltika beer, and Orbit gum. The store had also carried an item that became a staple of my 1990s Russian diet: bags of frozen broccoli.
Broccoli was a true rarity back then; I could remember having Boris and his friend Max over for dinner one night, and Max peering at the tiny green trees in wonder. He’d never had broccoli before, he told me—in fact, he’d never even seen it. He speared a piece with his fork, then held it up while giving the thumbs-up sign with his other hand. I snapped a picture—one of few that I have from that time, in the days before anyone but Gary Matoso had a digital camera.
I decided to pop into the store to see if, 20 years on, they still carried frozen broccoli. To my surprise, they did. I laughed aloud, then, feeling self-conscious, told the woman behind the counter what was so funny.
“I’m American, but I lived in building No. 12 20 years ago,” I said. “I used to buy broccoli right here in this store.”
She looked shocked. “This store was open twenty years ago?”
At that, another woman emerged from a back room. “Yes,” she said. “We opened in the summer of 1995.” Then she smiled and added, “Welcome back.”
The next day, I saw Boris. Now 45, he’d lost most of his hair, and what was left was rapidly graying. Apart from that, he looked unchanged; he was still lithe and fit, and he still reminded me of Billy Crystal.
We hadn’t seen each other in ten years, so I expected we’d spend time catching up. Instead, Boris launched into a detailed recitation of his feelings about—of all things—global warming. He declared that climate change is cyclical, and that what the world is experiencing now is nothing more than the natural result of such cycles. “Do you know why Greenland is called Greenland?” he asked. I shook my head. “Because back when it was discovered, thanks to a cyclical warming period, it was green.”
He, like Rock-n-Roll Dima in Irkutsk, also posited that volcanoes had released far more CO2 into the atmosphere than humans ever could. “And anyway,” he went on, “CO2 isn’t harmful. How can it be, when we drink sodas with CO2 bubbles in them and don’t die?” I had no answer for this. Or perhaps I did, but I didn’t see the point of arguing. It hardly mattered, anyway, because now Boris switched topics, to GMOs and hormones in food. He asked if I’d ever heard of “dark rice,” which I hadn’t, and he proceeded to explain that it’s rice treated with beta carotene, which the human body needs, though it’s less good for you, because it’s modified, and then I don’t know what else because honestly I started to zone out.
I couldn’t figure out why Boris was leaping so suddenly, and vehemently, into these subjects. I liked Boris; back in the nineties, we’d been good friends, and I remembered having all kinds of fascinating conversations with him. He was well-read, curious, and articulate, and I’d always found it interesting to hear his take on various subjects. But now, whether it was my exhaustion and waning patience at the end of a long trip, or some tone-deafness on his part, we weren’t connecting at all.
Next he brought up World War II, venturing that he wasn’t a fan of Russia’s big Victory Day celebrations. This was truly unexpected; if you can’t celebrate a victory over Adolf Hitler, especially when that victory came at the cost of 20 million lives, what can you celebrate? Boris explained: “My grandfather fought on the Eastern front, so the war didn’t end for him on May 9.” He also didn’t like the fact that in his view, Russia “acts like we did it all ourselves—like it was our war, our victory. There were fifty-three countries who fought,” he said. I wasn’t surprised that he knew the exact number.
Since we were on the topic of World War II, he mentioned that his brother Andrey was making a movie about it—and not just any movie, but the biggest crowd-funded film in Russian history. The name of the film was Panfilov’s 28 Men, and although I hadn’t heard of it, I later Googled it and discovered it was one of the most hotly anticipated Russian films in years. Given his grandmother Lia’s history during World War II, it made sense that Andrey had gravitated toward it as a subject.
I asked Boris how his mother, Nina, was doing, and he told me she’d just turned 71 the day before. She was free that evening, so we made a plan to have dinner over at her place. I’d go on the early side, to have a little time to chat with her, and Boris would join us later. He also told me that Vanya, who was now 26, was living in the Netherlands, where he was a graduate student at the Delft University of Technology. I was disappointed I wouldn’t get to see him, but Boris promised to help me connect with him so we could Skype later in the week.
That evening, I stopped by a flower shop to buy Nina a birthday bouquet. When she met me at her apartment door, I was thrilled to see that she looked healthy and fit, and not even close to 71. I’d always liked Nina, a physician who had a rare combination of a no-nonsense air and empathy: she’s the kind of woman who won’t listen to any crap, but she’ll give you a hug if she senses you need it.