My Vanished Leningrad,

Venice of the north, land of the midnight sun, white night parties, and echoes of a grand dynasty tragically romanticized by Tolstoy that I was first introduced to, you are gone.

When we first met, I was swept up by your beautiful decay, formerly grand palaces, a few sparkling gems kept pristine for the slow trickle of tourists that began pouring in from the west before your latest incarnation.

Communism was on its death bed when I arrived as a tourist, staying with locals, not given the highly curated experience of the finest, presenting a falsely painted face to the west. I saw the wrinkles when passing by the lines for potatoes, the dark circles under your eyes when there was no butter or benzine in the city, and smelled your pungent body odor while crammed into a metro car when the hot water was turned off during the Summer. I fell for you, warts and all.

That Summer of 1990, six months before you would once again be reinvented, you embraced me and made me feel beautiful. Leaving the world of Los Angeles’ unrealistic beautify standards, I was now the exotic other that caught men’s eyes. I was ochi chernye, the dark eyed, dark hair beauty that men opened doors for, raked over with covetous eyes that were enthralled by the tall, strange American woman who was just twenty-one and eager to bite the fruit of worldly knowledge only travel could impart.

You seduced me with your grand architecture, enchanting me with art that I had only ever seen in books. Like a modern girl transported to a time long past, eyes wide with wonder, I traipsed through galleries lined with Rubens and Rembrandts at The Hermitage, treading the same intricately laid parquet floors that once felt the kiss of women’s courtly silk gowns, trimmed with lace, courtesans’ necks adorned with obscenely magnificent jewels.

Sitting with strangers in restaurants who would, in lyrically cadenced broken English, ask me about my supposedly exciting life growing up in Los Angeles, I was equally entranced to learn about their own lives growing up in a culture as foreign to me as if I had been transported to a different reality.

A life lived in innocent security in suburban America, I was thrown into a world where if you wanted to hide valuables, you closed the curtains and turned off the lights before stashing the American cash you brought into the country to avoid curiously prying eyes. The family friend who you traveled to the Soviet Union with would later take hundred-dollar bills to the black market to trade for the rate of thirteen to one when the official rate was a mere six dollars to one ruble. One did not speak too loudly for neighbor snitched on neighbor, reporting snippets of overheard conversations through paper thin walls to the KGB and local police, the GAI. Even cars, a luxury in Communist Russia, side-view windows were pulled off and brought indoors to avoid being pilfered and sold on the pervasive black market, the true economic engine that ran the city beneath the facade of centrally run government control, control that was crumbling during those last few months.

I was temporarily living a life worthy of a spy thriller, traveling beyond your authorized area my visa was approved for, hoping I would not get caught. A guileless American tourist testing the edges, giving the freedom loving middle finger to your Orwellian rules. I held no romantic notions about espionage, but for the briefest of moments, I was able to live the safe version of the spy fantasy.

Walking your streets, I observed locals staring at me with curiosity and suspicion, my face reflecting my western European roots, a stranger’s face in a strange land. Towering cottonwood trees producing a dusting of white, coating the streets with small drifts of fluff coated seeds, lazily wafting down like a gentle fall of snow in Summer, lit golden by the sun.

My circadian rhythm was upended and in disarray without the dark of night to guide my body, full of boundless energy as long as the sun shone. You made me dance my mad dance, like the red ballet shoes, driven to the point of exhaustion, unable to stop with your ceaseless and never-ending tune of sun and activity.

I hear you go by St. Petersburg these days. Oligarchs in Rolls-Royces and their spoiled children in Ferraris, who never knew privation, now prowl your streets. The city you once were still lies beneath. I saw you in your hungrier days, earnestly wooing me, and that is how I’ll always remember you, when you opened my eyes and became my first foreign love.

From America with Love,

Elise