ST. PETERSBURG - It had been too long since the writer wandered this city's cloaked streets and pondered lives locked in iron and granite and concrete.
In the slushy midnight calm of a recent Sunday, the man, his beard black and full, his coat set hard upon his shoulders, was alive again.
Sergei Borisovich Lebedev would look in one direction, at a palace, a cathedral, a lamp, then rewind his story to a different place, a different idea, and begin.
He led with expressions like, "Now, I will tell you something you do not know. . . ."
Or, "You will see. . . ."
After only a few minutes of walking, Lebedev, also a historian, stopped in St. Isaac's Square, beneath a statue honoring Tsar Nicholas I. Fascinating, Lebedev noted, that the statue's black horse, standing upon two hind hooves, did not topple during this young city's hardest century.
As St. Petersburg prepares to celebrate its 300th birthday, memory and monuments still reel from the past 100 years: two bloody revolutions, terror, under Bolsheviks and Stalin, decades of political repression, and a transition to the chaos of capitalism. Amid all that, the 900-day German siege during World War II killed an estimated 800,000 residents. Nothing, Lebedev said, matched that war.
"The victims of this city in the 20th century," he said, "they are screaming."
The screams do not rise in a clamorous, anguished roar. They do not knock the city, built upon swamps in 1703 on the orders of Peter the Great, back into the Neva River delta.
No, they are muffled by majesty, whether the birthday cake beauty of the Hermitage Museum, housed in the former Winter Palace, or the bustling sweep of Nevsky Prospekt, an old world boulevard with a capitalist face lift.
Suffering fades further beneath the white nights of June, when tourists bathed in endless daylight promenade along canals and in parks, pretending, perhaps, to be an emperor, someone from a day too far away to feel real.
But listen.
A veteran army officer gently talks about volunteers who hunt for World War II soldiers' remains, including those of 541 bodies found months ago in a deep grave. Identifying the remains, he says, brings the soldiers' souls "from non-being, back to being."
Over a dinner of chicken cutlet in a bustling restaurant, a young woman, normally upbeat and confident, lets her eyes drift as she mentions that her grandfather was sent to a prison camp.
Over a hot bowl of solyanka in a modern cafe, an aging politician who struggled against the communist regime for decades quietly nods to confirm that his uncle was arrested, sentenced, and shot by his own countrymen.
To begin to understand, follow Lebedev, who wandered from St. Isaac's Square into a basement cafe.
"Is your mother alive?" Lebedev asked me.
I told him yes.
"Then you are still young," he said.
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