Lev settled back into the daily routines of the labour camp. In early December, there was a change of personnel at the power station. The old station chief, Vladimir Aleksandrovich, a former prisoner, was transferred to the central power station in the town. His replacement was Boris Arvanitopulo, another former prisoner. Lev got on well with both men. An electrical engineer with a promising career before his arrest in 1938, Aleksandrovich was a heavy-drinking, sentimental type, mournful over the death of a daughter and inclined to self-pity on account of the loss of his career, but ‘good-natured’ and ‘cultured’, in Lev’s opinion. Aleksandrovich lived with his wife, Tamara, in the settlement inside the industrial zone. He was one of the free workers who smuggled letters in and out for Lev. Sometimes he would give Lev money in exchange for clothes and other household items that Sveta would send from Moscow. When Aleksandrovich moved to the power station in the town, he tried to persuade Lev to join him there, but Lev rejected the offer, because ‘it is safer for me here’, as he explained to Sveta. He liked the new boss, Arvanitopulo, whom he found ‘intelligent, nice, not over-educated and sensible’. The Gulag authorities were sending prisoners to the remote 4th Colony newly opened in the forests to the north. The last thing Lev wanted was to be selected for one of these convoys, and he was less likely to be transferred if he stayed in his present job.
‘There have been some changes at the plant,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘They’re choosing people to send to the 4th Colony to do logging and construction on the road to it (15 km), and women are arriving here in ever-growing numbers to replace them. They’re being put into the 3rd Colony. Some of them are already working in the workshops.’ It had been a long time since he had seen such a large number of women –the camps he had been in during the war had contained separate female zones – and the sight of their being forced to do manual labour made a ‘disturbing impression’ on him. His views on women were still tinted by pre-war attitudes of veneration and romantic chivalry. Talking to these women troubled him even more. ‘Many of the women who have arrived here talk fearfully about the places they came from [other labour camps and colonies of exile],’ Lev reported to Sveta. ‘The minority who are able to recall these places without fear are themselves capable of arousing in the observer, if not fear, then a distinct feeling of uneasiness. It’s all so painful to see.’
Sveta felt deflated after her return from Pechora. Perhaps she was feeling the emotional effects of seeing Lev – the consequences he had warned about when he had wondered whether a meeting wouldn’t ‘make it even harder for you to be happy there, where others are happy’.
Her way of coping with their separation was to keep busy. She threw herself into her work, even though her heart was not in it. She inspected factories in Tblisi and Erevan; campaigned for district elections to the Moscow soviet; delivered speeches at trade union meetings; edited the wall-newspaper at the institute; took on the training of new researchers; wrote her dissertation; translated articles; went to French and English lessons; sang in a choir; practised the piano; and organized a Mathematics Club. Lev found it hard to picture her in these new settings. ‘When I think of you,’ he wrote on 3 February 1948, ‘and I think of you every minute I am free, I can see you clearly only in certain situations.’
How, after pondering something, you look up suddenly to answer. How you sit when you’re talking to somebody. How you sleep (that’s something you’re unable to imagine, even approximately!). How you quickly braid your hair (a skill that is unfathomable to me). But I can barely remember your voice – only your laughter occasionally and certain phrases and your tone. Fear prevents my imagination from picturing you in unfamiliar surroundings, fear that something will not be quite right, not how it is in reality but worse.
Sveta had a lot of news for Lev. In December, the government had devalued the rouble by nine-tenths and abolished rationing. There was a rush to purchase goods with the old cash, resulting in long queues at all the shops, but gradually the situation settled down. For relatively well-off families like the Ivanovs the new consumer opportunities were exciting. ‘Life without the rationing system has its negative side – a mass of temptations with no restraint,’ Sveta wrote to Lev on 24 January.
At first people squander everything, then they realize that they need to be more careful, but after a new pay packet it all begins again. People have completely stopped eating black bread (we’ve had 1 kg for three days and it looks likely to last several more), and the hunt is on for white baguettes (4 roubles each – they used to be 1 rouble 40 kopeks) … At first it was impossible to get hold of pastries – but now our hunger for these has been satisfied … The late-night shops in our area are a godsend. There’s a grocery store in our building, a delicatessen by Kursk station, a Tsentrosoyuz [Central Cooperative store] by the Pokrovsky Gates. There’s never anybody there after 10 o’clock and it’s easy to buy tea, sugar and butter etc. Bread and potatoes are also available for sale in institutions’ cafeterias. Mama goes out early for meat (but that’s because she likes quality at bargain prices). There are queues for flour and more queues for milk, because in comparison with everything else it’s cheap – 4 roubles a litre … One more thing I can report is that since the New Year my pay has been rounded up to 1,000 [roubles] … Domestic life – light, gas, heating – is absolutely fine, the trams etc. have improved. There are new carriages on the Metro fitted out with what looks like redwood; there’s also lighting over the seating as well as in the middle and large windows … And on that note this bulletin comes to an end.
Sveta wanted to share this new bounty with Lev and his fellow prisoners by sending them parcels more regularly. She refused to listen to any more of his protests. ‘So, my darling, foolish Lev,’ she wrote on 30 March, ‘how can you say you don’t need anything until next year? Just the same dry crusts … Do you really think that I can sit here drinking delicious tea with jam, or nibbling on a biscuit with some milk, and not think about sending you anything?’
Lev continued to object to her sending food but he did ask for medicines for sick friends and other prisoners. Strelkov still suffered from stomach pains, which Lev described in great detail so that Sveta could get a diagnosis from her doctor friend Shura and send the appropriate medicines.
The patient is 49 years old, has a generally cheerful disposition and looks youthful … Since 1938, he’s suffered from a hernia (the size of a goose egg). In 1920, he was shot in the chest: you can still see the 5 cm scar of the entrance wound underneath his right nipple, and the 4 cm scar of the exit wound near his spine between the same ribs. In October 1947, he began to suffer from periodic attacks of acute pain in and around his stomach – a band the width of 2–3 fingers on a level with his 7th–8th rib, starting on the right-hand side about a palm’s width from the middle and moving to the left, a distance of 2–3 fingers from the middle … The pain is very intense, sharp and nagging, lasting for 8–14 hours without any real let-up. If he lies down on his back during an attack, the pain intensifies; if he clasps his knees to his chest, it lessens. His usual diet (for the past several years) has consisted of: fresh black bread; thin soup made from fine-ground barley, pearl barley or oatmeal and salt, with water; watery kasha with exactly the same ‘ingredients’ but much less concentrated; tea and coffee substitute either with sugar or without. Of these foods only fresh bread leads to an attack … There is little chance of a change in his diet.
Sveta wrote back with a diagnosis from Shura, who had consulted doctors at the First Moscow Medical Institute and agreed with them that the most likely explanation was a problem with his liver. She sent a range of medicines, some probes to take a sample of his bile, and advice on what to eat, promising to send him dried white bread.
Liubomir Terletsky, Lev’s bunk-mate, was also ill. He suffered from scurvy, the result of eight years in the labour camp, and was broken psychologically. ‘Liubka is gloomy and barely talks,’ Lev wrote to Sveta. ‘He is afraid of beauty and does not want to see it in nature or in boo
ks, because it reminds him of home.’ To fight the scurvy Sveta started sending sachets of vitamin C powder, and gradually Terletsky recovered his strength. But the crippling psychological effects of camp life were still marked. ‘My Liubka is very slowly returning to civilization,’ Lev reported to Sveta.
Today I asked him why he pulls such terrible faces when he shakes hands with people and why he greets them so awkwardly. Looking somewhat embarrassed, he replied that over the last 8 years he’d got used to the fact that people never say hello or goodbye, just mutter swear-words at one another, and only use their hands to hit somebody –and so he’s never sure if people are sincere when they extend their hand for him to shake. He offers his handshake as though he’s performing a medieval show of deference. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I catch myself doing it and sometimes manage not to appear so timid.’ With luck, in another year he’ll once again be greeting people normally.
In May 1948, Aleksandovich’s wife Tamara, who was also ill, came to Moscow to see a doctor. Sveta helped her in the capital, and, on her return to Pechora, gave her a box of medicines she had collected for Lev’s friends.
Sveta was herself unwell. She was losing weight, sleeping badly, feeling irritable and tearful – all clear signs of depression, though no one talked about such things in the Soviet Union, where optimism was compulsory and people who had problems were expected to pull their socks up and get on with it. The Ivanov family had many friends who were doctors, and Sveta went to see a lot of them. They all assumed that the problem was physical. They took blood tests, thought they had detected an inflammation of the thyroid and sent her to endocrinologists, who gave her iodine and Barbiphen (phenobarbital), but no one asked her how she felt emotionally. Sveta did not know what to make of what the doctors said. She was unsure whether there was anything wrong with her physically. All she knew was that she felt and looked unwell. She wrote to Lev:
The endocrinologist said she has no doubt there’s an increase in thyroid activity (headaches, temperature, cardiodynia, weight loss, nervousness, etc., etc., including some kind of peculiar shine to my eyes – in my opinion that’s just because of the temperature). I would be happy with such a diagnosis – I really hate uncertainty. She has prescribed pure iodine tablets, to be taken together with iodine potassium, Barbiphen, bromine, camphor and valerian extract. I have to take them all for 20 days, then stop for 10 days, then take them for another 20 days and go back to see her. Everything’s fine apart from the fact that there’s currently no valerian, so it’s not possible to start the treatment. I went to see our doctor again today to give him the test results and tell him about my visit to the endocrinologist. He was really surprised at my sed rate.23 He probably thought that all my ailments were caused by nerves, but nervousness alone doesn’t increase the sed rate. He referred to the endocrinologist’s prescriptions quite condescendingly: ‘It will do you good to take them, but in my opinion it’s not the most important thing.’ (He didn’t say what is.) ‘My advice is to be sure to take cod-liver oil until the summer.’ (And if it doesn’t help?) I can’t find any scales to weigh myself on, so I can’t ascertain objectively whether I’ve actually lost weight or whether my weight loss is all in the subjective opinion of others. It seems to me that I’m not any thinner than I’ve been, and I was thinner last summer, but it’s true my face is looking pinched, which really doesn’t suit me and is making everyone sigh and exclaim: ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Both to my face and behind my back they talk about how I was when I went to Khromnik24 (‘a captivating girl’) and how I am now (obviously implying that I’m old and ragged, that I’ve become a hag).
Lev was the only person she could talk to about how she felt. In February 1948, a few weeks after her return from Pechora, she wrote to him:
My darling Levi, I want to be with you so much but I haven’t even had any letters. I’m trying to break through to the surface and stop being angry. The word ‘can’t’ has reappeared in my vocabulary. I can’t bear seeing people who aren’t happy when objectively they have everything they need to be happy. I can’t sympathize with them; I can’t stop being sharp or impatient. Irina rang on Saturday and invited me to go to Losinka for the day but I turned her down. I can’t accept the comfort friends offer. I need all or nothing. Once again everything is black and white. But all the ‘can’ts’ can be explained by just one ‘want’. Everything inside me is becoming harder and there’s no way I can stop it. That’s why I respond harshly to Irina, hang up the receiver, and then start to cry.
Writing to Lev was an outlet for her depression. He understood her moods. ‘N. A. [Gleb’s mother] rang the other day and asked me if I was all right, and, hiding my sadness, I said that I was fine,’ she wrote to Lev on 2 March,
but the truth is that even I don’t know what to do with myself in this despondent mood. Levi, my darling, if I sometimes write nasty letters, I know I don’t have the right, but who else can I cry with except you? When I write to you, I become less tense. So, again, Levi, don’t get angry if you get such a letter. Anyway, by the time you receive it, my mood will probably have passed and I’ll be jumping for joy. All right, my darling? I never write to make you angry or increase your pain. I’ve been weeping for several days in a row now, not just when I go to sleep but as soon as I wake up, early in the mornings, before lunch and afterwards. The most important thing, Levi, the most important thing, well, you know yourself what it is …
Levi, I hope that we will never feel guilty towards each other and will forgive each other for anything important, and if it’s unimportant we’ll try not to be angry (although it’s usually those who are closest who bear the brunt).
Sveta did not want to burden Lev with the idea that her depression had anything to do with his imprisonment. He had enough to cope with as it was. And she knew she had to remain strong to help him through the coming years. In many of her letters she talked of other reasons for her low morale. ‘A depression has come over me and I’m waiting for it to end,’ she wrote to him. ‘I don’t know why January is so difficult. Maybe because at one time it was the happiest month, what with Mama’s birthday, Christmas and New Year. Maybe it’s because I’ve felt unwell since before the New Year. I get irritated, and I’m really tired all the time.’ But Sveta’s depression had nothing to do with her mother’s birthday and everything to do with the fact that she and Lev were separated, as she sometimes revealed between the lines:
Having swallowed all kinds of pills (in a real, not a figurative, sense) I’ve forgotten how to cry (so if I need to swallow something in the figurative sense, I’m prepared). I’ve been sleeping badly recently, maybe because our room is so airless – it’s been cold outside at night and Papa is scared of draughts so he keeps the windows closed. My little window doesn’t open wide enough in any case. I’ve seen you in my dreams at least five times. Maybe it’s because the end of your sentence is becoming more real or closer. It’s probably superstition that I’m not going to see you now but for some reason will have to wait until the autumn, which may be better anyway.
Skiing and skating lifted her mood. ‘At the moment,’ she wrote to Lev on 10 March, ‘skiing is the one thing I enjoy without reservation –better than literature, concerts, even people.’
It’s so beautiful in the forest when the sun is peeping through, so pure (in all senses of the word) that you catch yourself thinking (and then accidentally saying aloud) that it’s good to be alive. I don’t know why it is, but it is not so painful. Some kind of physiology of happiness.
Sveta wanted to spend more time doing winter sports, although her mother tried to keep her in, feeling she was physically unwell. Only Lev encouraged her to get out more, to beat back the depression by living her life. ‘Go somewhere,’ he wrote on 15 April. ‘Besides your physical well-being, there’s the matter of your inner state, which has just as much effect on your psyche as external factors and sometimes may be the original cause.’ Worried about Sveta’s health, he wrote to his Uncle Nikita, hoping that he would
keep an eye on her. ‘It is very hard for her,’ he wrote to him that April, ‘hard in every way, although she does not say so directly.’
Sveta had a small circle of girlfriends in whom she could confide. Apart from Irina Krauze and Aleksandra Chernomordik there were three other women in particular with whom she spent a lot of time. Each had lost a husband and a child, yet each had found a way of living with her suffering that called forth Sveta’s sympathy and led her to identify with them. First there was a woman from her institute called Lydia Arkadevna, a keen sportswoman and mountaineer, who fostered Sveta’s enthusiasm for skiing and skating. ‘So why have I turned to Lydia?’ Sveta wrote to Lev on 25 February.
Because she’s smart, quick-witted, lively, strong, interested in a lot of things, etc. etc. She is a marvellous skier and she goes skating often, and she does all that even though she’s nearly 10 years older than me, her husband perished during the war, she lost her 14-year-old son a year ago (in a terrible street accident)25 and she remains alone in the world. I watch and learn.
There was also a younger woman, called Klara, a technical assistant at one of the institutes, whose family had been repressed before the war. Klara herself had been expelled from the Kharkov Chemical-Technological Institute during her first year of studies, after which she had spent some years in exile, judging from Sveta’s comment in one of her letters that an ‘over-acquaintance with geography’ was the root of Klara’s problems. There had been several attempts to force her out of the institute, but she clung to her position, badly paid though it was. Klara had also lost a child. Her husband was a prisoner in Pechora, and she had travelled there on more than one occasion to see him, staying with Tamara Aleksandrovich. Lev thought well of Klara and defended her against Vladimir Aleksandrovich’s claim that she was waiting for her husband only because he came from a well-to-do family. Lev’s personal impressions of her, though, were ‘too superficial’ for him to be sure (‘nice-looking, almost bland, with a vampirish manicure and rings … she seems moderately intelligent, hardly capable of such low calculation’). Sveta’s comments about Klara were typically blunt and self-revealing:
Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag Page 15
