Tatyana Yakovlevna was apparently glad to have a child to take care of. The war had scattered her large family to the four winds. Her husband Vasily Prusakov, a lanky, mustachioed man, had worked for a British shipping company before 1917. So valued were his services that his employers had offered to move the whole family to London to escape the Revolution. But Tatyana had flatly refused to leave Russia, and Vasily was now the captain of a Soviet commercial vessel plying the northern seas and was seldom home. One of their seven children, the youngest son Nikolai, had gone straight to the army from school and had been killed on the Leningrad front soon after the war broke out. For years Tatyana refused to admit that he was dead and expected him to return at any moment.
Klavdia went back to her job in Molotovsk, and Marina was left in her grandmother’s care. The only other member of the household was Klavdia’s sister Lyuba, a flirtatious young woman who worked for a restaurant trust. Tatyana Yakovlevna disapproved of Lyuba, whom she considered too easily deceived by men. With a shake of her head, she sometimes called her “my wayward daughter” or “my bad girl.” Free to devote her formidable energies to bringing up her granddaughter, Tatyana Yakovlevna was determined that Marina would be a good girl.
In spite of the war, it was a peaceful, even privileged home. Marina, her grandmother, and her Aunt Lyuba shared a three-room apartment with a kitchen and a bath. Marina remembers it, even during Archangel’s endless Artic winter, as a place filled with warmth and sunshine, with rubber plants, geraniums, flowering tearoses, and mimosa. There was a row of copper pots in the kitchen and a heavy brass samovar, polished to shine like gold.
Then there was Tatyana Yakovlevna herself, an altogether commanding presence. Tall and dark-haired still, clad in a long dress with flowers embroidered on the front, she moved unhurriedly through the day’s tasks, propelled by some invisible list of chores in her head. Every morning, no matter how cold it was outside, she threw open the windows to air out the apartment. Each day she scrubbed the floors, did the washing, and polished the copper, brass, and silver. She pressed clothes the old-fashioned way, with hot coals inside a heavy iron. She made clothing and bed linen on an old Singer sewing machine purchased before the 1917 Revolution when the company had a factory in Leningrad.
If Tatyana Yakovlevna was scrupulous keeping the apartment clean, she was no less scrupulous about her grandchild. Every night she heated water on the stove, bathed her, and then tucked her into the bed the two of them shared in the living room. Marina said her prayers, and the last sight she saw as she dropped off to sleep was her grandmother sitting by the samovar, stirring jam into her evening tea.
In spite of unyielding ways that made her a figure of awe to nearly everyone, Tatyana Yakovlevna bent a little when it came to Marina, whom she called “little daughter” or “little granddaughter.” Marina was said to be her favorite. Marina, for her part, admired her grandmother’s pale skin and her unvarying fragrance of kindling and soap and perfume. She loved nestling next to her in bed at night. “Grandma,” she would say, “you smell so sweet. May I kiss you?” Her grandmother never turned her away.
Their apartment building, a sprawling L-shaped structure of whitewashed stucco close to the heart of Archangel, had a courtyard to play in. Marina was also allowed to play in a little park across the street where there was a merry-go-round and a zoo with seals cavorting in a fountain, rabbits, foxes, a wolf, and a big brown bear. As she grew older, she got to know more of Archangel. She became aware of cobblestone streets and of sidewalks paved, after the fashion of the cities of the Russian north, with wood. She became familiar with the smell of birches—the birches of the park, the birches of the woods outside the city, and, above all, the birch smell the sidewalks gave off whenever they were wet with rain. On the outskirts of the town there were wooden houses so close to the edge of the sea that they had to be set on stilts. Beyond the town lay frozen Arctic tundra and thick virgin forest where wolves and bears had their lairs.
Archangel was a busy port in wartime, one of the principal cities in Russia where the Allies could land supplies. Unlike almost any other provincial Soviet city at the time, Archangel was filled with sailors and foreigners from every nation. There were Englishmen, Chinese, and Americans, even Negroes, whom few Russians had ever seen. With so many foreigners, with foreign music and foreign cloth and foreign canned goods to buy and sell, Archangel had a muffled wartime lilt and, in its own gray, Soviet way, a little of the feel of an icebound honky-tonk town.
All of this spelled privilege. One of Marina’s early recollections, for example, is of eating American Spam. Another is of the green-and-red-striped peppermint sticks that arrived in a tin box at intervals from her Aunt Taisya, an accountant who traveled back and forth on a Soviet ship between Russia and America. Each time a new box came, Marina thought: “What a lucky country!” To her, America was like a big box of candies. Or a gingerbread house in the forest, filled with good things to eat while Russia had almost nothing.
In spite of the terrible wartime shortages, Marina never went hungry, for her grandmother was an ingenious cook in the old Russian style, skilled at making the most of fresh fish, and mushrooms and berries from the outlying forests. Nor did Marina have to wear the shabby, somber ready-made clothes that were all the stores of Archangel had to offer. Her grandmother sewed her full smock dresses and a dark blue coat with a white fur collar and cap. She also had a half-dozen bright, flowered dresses bought by her Aunt Taisya in America.
Marina’s clothes nearly brought her to grief. One day she was playing alone in the park when a strange woman promised her a mechanical toy if she would come with her. Marina trotted after her, but on the street she became frightened and burst into tears. A passerby noticed her, managed to get her away from the woman, and took her home by the hand. When Tatyana Yakovlevna heard what had happened, she told Marina that she must never listen to the stories strangers told. So difficult were conditions during the war that there were people who roamed the streets kidnapping children for their clothes. They would sell the clothing and leave the children to starve in the woods.
As World War II came to an end in 1945, Marina’s life began to change. It is difficult to fix with precision the sequence in which hitherto unknown relatives appeared in the Archangel apartment. But the sheltered life Marina had known with her grandmother became less tranquil, and the cast of characters whose lives touched her own grew larger.
One of those who appeared was Alexander Medvedev, the man whom Marina’s mother had married during the war. So far as is known, they had met in Leningrad before the war. But the romance occurred afterward, when Marina was a baby, in a hospital somewhere in western Russia where Alexander was a wounded soldier and Klavdia a laboratory worker. They were married in September 1942, when Marina was fourteen months old. Alexander Medvedev, then, was Marina’s stepfather. She was told, however, that he was her real father, who had been away at the front.
She met him for the first time in the early spring when she was not yet four years old. She remembers it as if it were a fairy tale. Early one morning she was on her way to the park to ride on the merry-go-round. But when she got there the gate was still locked, and she reached up as far as she could, trying to undo the latch from inside. Suddenly a stranger appeared. He had on civilian clothes and was carrying a suitcase. “Will you open the gate for me, please?” Marina asked.
“Do you want to get in very much?” the man said.
“Yes!” she replied.
“And what will you do there?” he asked.
“I want to ride on the merry-go-round,” Marina said.
“Where do you live?”
“In that house,” Marina said, pointing to the apartment building.
“What is your name?”
“Marinochka.”
“And is your mother called Klava?”
“Yes.”
“Where is your papa?” the man said.
“Papa’s at the front,” Marina replied. “He’s
coming home soon.”
“Do you want him to come very much?”
“Very much,” Marina said.
“Well,” the man said, “he’s here.”
Marina buried herself in his arms and kissed him. Then she raced across the street to the courtyard of her building shouting: “Papa’s here! Papa’s here!” She was overjoyed to see her father at last. He had dark hair and blue eyes, and she thought he was wonderfully handsome. He had been wounded in the leg by a bullet, and he showed Marina the scar and the place where his toe was missing. She lifted her dress and showed him her scar that had been left by a childhood infection.
Alexander Medvedev did not stay in Archangel long. About a month later, he vanished to Murmansk, taking Marina’s mother with him. Marina was left behind, but a short time later her grandfather, Vasily Prusakov, came home from sea for the last time, fatally ill with cancer of the throat, and Marina went to stay in Murmansk.
Her recollection of this first visit alone with her mother and stepfather is a happy one. Marina thought that her mother, with her soft, brown hair and huge, sad green eyes, was the most beautiful person alive. She remembers the leather smell of Alexander Medvedev’s windbreaker as he took her, perched on his shoulders, coasting downhill on a toboggan. She remembers that he warmed her cot with an electric heater before she went to bed at night and wrapped her up in a scarf whenever she went outdoors to shield her face from the wind.
On September 3, 1945, Klavdia gave birth to a son, Pyotr (called Petya) Medvedev. While her husband remained in Murmansk, Klavdia returned to her mother’s apartment in Archangel, bringing Marina and the new baby with her. Pyotr was christened, as Marina had been, in Tatyana Yakovlevna’s green porcelain bowl. Marina no longer had her grandmother all to herself.
Soon other members of the family began to appear. In December 1945, Tatyana Yakovlevna’s oldest son, Ilya, came back from the war, his tour of duty with the Soviet army in Germany at an end. Tall, slender, about thirty-seven years old, with a tired smile and a face like a kindly eagle, he brought candy and toys and dresses from Germany. He also brought his wife Valya, a jolly, good-looking woman in her early twenties.
Marina’s grandmother did not approve of Valya. Tatyana Yakovlevna considered her son a paragon, and pretty and kindhearted as Valya was, Tatyana thought she was too simple, too poorly educated—in short, not good enough for Ilya. And so she was treated as an inferior member of the household. She scrubbed floors and polished copper and did as she was told. But she always found time to sing to Marina, tell her stories, and help her draw pictures. Despite his mother’s attitude, Ilya was devoted to his wife, and they were destined to play an important role in Marina’s life later on.
With so many of the family at home, the three-room apartment was very crowded. Marina still slept with her grandmother in the living room, Aunt Lyuba was alone in the second room, while the third was jammed with Klavdia and Petya in one bed, and Ilya and Valya in the other. Privacy was impossible, and disagreements inevitable. But there was no question of who had the final say. When Valya read aloud to the family in the evenings, the only writers Tatyana Yakovlevna consented to hear were pre-Revolutionary writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Leo Tolstoy. What she really wanted was to have the same passages in War and Peace read aloud to her again and again. She refused to have the names of Soviet writers even mentioned in her presence.
Tatyana Yakovlevna hated everything modern and called airplanes “the devil’s own handiwork.” She had a lofty contempt for her country’s Communist overlords and nursed a certain nostalgia for the czar and his family. “Poor souls,” she said. “The brutes killed them all. For nothing. They turned everything upside down. What for? It’s all for the worse! It was better under the czar.” With a majestic disdain for the all-powerful Stalin, she called him a “demon let loose on earth” and could never hear his name without giving a little spit of derision.
She often lost patience with her son Ilya, a rising member of the Communist Party. Still, she respected his convictions and his party membership, remarking that Ilya alone knew what was best for him. But when it came to her own old-fashioned ideas and religious beliefs, she would yield no quarter, not even to her favorite son. “I’m an old woman,” she would say. “It’s too late to make me over. You young people may live any way you please. But leave me in peace.” She would not give up her Bible, her visits from the black-bearded Orthodox priests, nor her icons and the holy lamp that burned night and day in a special corner of the apartment where they were only too likely to be noticed by Ilya’s Communist Party friends.
Tatyana Yakovlevna always had time for her granddaughter. She was a stern disciplinarian, but she called Marina a “genius” and a “marvel of intelligence.” She took her to church and, like so many Russian grandmothers, kept her at home long past the age when most children were in kindergarten. She did not want her granddaughter subjected to the influence of the Soviet system a single moment before the age of seven, when it became legally imperative that she go to school.
Many years later, her Aunt Valya told Marina that she had been “spoiled” by her grandmother. It was true. As early as Marina can remember, her grandmother had made her feel special. And as long as she, her grandmother, and her Aunt Lyuba were the only ones who lived there, she felt that she was the center of affection in the household and had no sense of deprivation at its incompleteness.
Now things had changed. The apartment was filled with adults, as well as the new baby Petya. Marina used to go to bed early in the living room, and sometimes during the evening she would wake up and hear sounds of merriment in the kitchen, sounds from which she was excluded. The grown-ups were drinking tea from the samovar and listening to American records. Marina heard music, songs like “Blue Moon” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” and the tears would come streaming down her face. For the first time in her life five-year-old Marina was beginning to feel alone.
She was not sure to whom she belonged. She hardly knew Alexander Medvedev, the man she supposed to be her father, and she saw little of her mother. Marina loved her mother, whom she remembers as a wistful-looking woman and very loving. But Klavdia was away all day at work, her health was frail, and much of her time at home was devoted to the new baby. She loved her bright and pretty little daughter and called her a “wunderkind.” But even in her mother’s behavior, there was something that made Marina feel different.
Afterward, long afterward, Klavdia was to say to her: “If I had known what you were going to grow up into, I wouldn’t have taken such good care of you. I’d have just let you die.”
— 2 —
Moldavia
In the early spring of 1947, Alexander Medvedev appeared in Marina’s life again. He left Murmansk, came to Archangel, and then he and Klavdia went away, evidently in search of a job. When they returned a few weeks later, they had found one in Moldavia, over a thousand miles from Archangel. They packed their belongings, got Marina and Petya ready for the long journey, and said their goodbyes. It was the beginning of their life together as a family.
Tucked between Rumania and the Ukraine, in the southwestern corner of the USSR, Moldavia was then a primitive agricultural area. Most of the countryside still had no electric power or light. It appeared quite natural and in the order of things that Alexander, a skilled electrical technician, should have found a job in the tiny village of Zguritsa setting up an electric power station.
With its mild winters; long, hot summers; and fertile black earth, Moldavia was one of the richest sections of the Soviet Union. Taken over from Rumania on the eve of the war and quickly overrun by the Germans, it had not yet been organized into collective farms. The peasants were free to buy up land, to till their own soil, and hawk their produce to the highest bidder at the bazaar. Private initiative flourished and with it the countryside. Wartime rationing was still in force, but food was plentiful. Marina’s mother used to say that they went to Moldavia “to eat our fill” after the rigo
rs of war.
There may, however, have been another reason the Medvedevs went to such an out-of-the-way place as Moldavia. Marina later recalled something she scarcely noticed at the time. Countless wives and children of political prisoners were in rural Moldavia, trying to blend in to the landscape and hoping the authorities would lose sight of them. Apparently, Alexander, too, was in trouble and in need of a quiet spot where he could wait for the dust of disgrace to settle. Marina recalls that her stepfather had snipped the officer’s insignia off his uniform and seldom spoke of his years in the army. When he did, it was to describe the terror he felt in shooting his first German and the psychological attacks that had caused his hair to go gray. She surmises that he must have committed some offense, such as a self-inflicted wound or refusal to obey an order, for which he had been broken in rank, sentenced to serve in a penal battalion in Murmansk, discharged in dishonor, and then required to “disappear” in a rural backwater for five years or so. It was a frequent form of punishment in the Soviet Union.
Marina and Lee Page 4
