Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

The family made the five-day journey by train to the Moldavian border, then by horse-drawn cart, over muddy roads, to the tiny village of Zguritsa. They set up housekeeping in a single rented room in a thatched, one-story farmhouse. The walls, the floor, and the yard outside were of clay. Sweet-smelling grass covered the floor and, over it, a rug woven with the bright geometric designs favored by the Moldavians. The walls were covered with native rugs, too, and the room was heated by an old stove, fed with a rapidly burning peat made from sunflower seeds. In the yard there were an outhouse and a shed for corn and hay, which also sheltered an old sow and her litter. Whenever Alexander wasn’t looking, Marina rode the sow around the yard, her legs sticking straight out at the sides.

  She came to love Zguritsa. She loved watching the birds glide over the low hills and the trees. She loved the fields of tall grass and wildflowers, dotted with white acacias and fruit trees of every variety. She liked the pungent aroma of smoking fuel from the outdoor stoves that had been dug into the ground in nearly every yard to use when it was too hot to cook indoors. It was the special smell of straw and cow manure. She loved going with her mother to the bazaar in the center of town where the Moldavians in colorful native costumes spread their rugs on the ground and sold live chickens and geese, cackling ducks and turkeys, goats and the sheep cheese called Brynza, milk, melons, and butter, grapes and other fruit of all kinds, corn, wine, and sunflower oil, and herbs that could cure any illness. It was a noisy spectacle, loud with the sounds of pigs screeching and hawkers trying to outshout one another.

  Moldavia, unlike Archangel with its cold and rigorous climate, was a place where Marina could spend most of her time out of doors. One of her favorite games was suggested by the Tarzan films that had been captured by the Russian armies in Germany and were being shown all over the Soviet Union. After the movie was over, Marina and her friends would race to the orchards that studded the village and hang from the trees screeching: “Me Tarzan, you Jane!” The Tarzan-boys, in noisy pursuit of the Jane-girls, would run from orchard to orchard, stealing apricots and cherries and apples and devouring them whether they were ripe or green. The children tied ropes to the trees and spent whole days swinging back and forth like their hero.

  A summer’s day seldom went by without Marina and her playmates spending hours splashing in the river, the muddy, meandering Kainar. They wore undershirts which had been resewn at the bottom by their mothers into the shape of modest one-piece bathing suits. In the river they would cover themselves with mud from head to toe to look like Negroes—an exotic race that they had heard about but never seen. Another pastime was exploring the meadow on the far side of the river where the gypsies had come to camp. There they found children dirtier than any they had ever seen before, and the music of drumbeats could be heard day and night. Of all the inhabitants of Zguritsa—Ukrainians, Moldavians, Russians, Jews—the gypsies were the most notorious. None of them worked; they made their living by stealing. Plainly, they did not think that Marx’s commandment—“He who does not work shall not eat”—applied to them. The Soviet authorities thought otherwise. In an attempt to tame the gypsies, the militia descended upon them and took away the internal passports of the few who happened to possess them. No longer were the gypsies free to steal anything they could lay their hands on, then slip away under cover of darkness to another campsite. From now on, it was thought, they would stay in one spot and work. But the gypsies went on living exactly as before. In Zguritsa, it seemed, not even pigs and horses were safe from the gypsy stealth.

  In the postwar effort to clean up the loose ends of Soviet society, the gypsies were by no means the only ones whom the authorities attempted to chasten. A few months after the Medvedevs came to Moldavia, in December 1947, the government devalued the currency in a sudden move to combat inflation before wartime rationing was ended. It was the peasants in places like Moldavia who were hardest hit. They had been free during the war to produce all the food they could and sell it on the open market. They had profited from the war and kept their bundles of rubles not in the banks but in their mattresses or some other spot at home where they thought they would be safe from confiscation. But now the old rubles had no value. The peasants were forced to turn them in at the rate of ten old rubles for one new one. Hardworking, industrious farmers were wiped out overnight. There was literally wailing and gnashing of teeth.

  It was not the end of their troubles. Early one morning in the summer of 1949, Marina and her family were awakened by the sound of shrieking in the street. They ran out of doors to find women weeping and tearing their hair. “What kind of kulaks are we?” the women wailed. “Everything we had, we earned by our own sweat.” The Medvedevs did not know what happened. Then they learned that trucks full of Soviet soldiers had rumbled into the village during the night. Moving with unerring accuracy, the soldiers had stalked into the houses of the richer peasants; arrested all the men; seized the pigs, cattle, and household chattels; and told the women that the houses were no longer theirs. Some of the soldiers found it hard to carry out their orders in the face of so much misery, for they were from peasant families themselves. Marina heard one of them tell a weeping woman with sympathy in his voice: “Little mother, we’re not to blame. They told us to do it. We’re only following our orders.” However the soldiers may have felt, it was a fact that the long-dreaded dispossession of the kulaks, or rich peasants, had begun.

  No one in Moldavia was unaffected, not even the Medvedevs. By this time they had moved to a bigger and better place, a solid house of stone with a wooden floor. Their landlord was a kulak. Both he and his son, the miller of Zguritsa, had been arrested and carried off in the night. Their house was converted into a health center for the district, their lands confiscated and turned over to a collective farm, or kholkhoz. To Marina it seemed unjust because she had loved their landlord and was sure the charges against him were untrue. Her mother agreed with her. The Medvedevs had to find another place to live, and Marina remembers that there was no gaiety in the village any more, only sadness.

  She learned a lesson about another form of injustice in Zguritsa. The Russian residents of Moldavia, her own family among them, enjoyed privileges that were not granted to the natives. When Moldavia belonged to Rumania, everyone remembered life as rich and happy. Having seized the area on the eve of World War II, the Russians were there as colonists. They were on the top, and Moldavians were on the bottom. Nostalgia for the old order was keen and resentment of the Russian overlord deep.

  The position of the Russians was less enviable than that of the Moldavians in only one way. They held most of the responsible jobs and were therefore much more exposed to political disaster. The fate of a Russian who fell out of favor was even more swift and brutal than the arrest and deportation of the Moldavian kulaks. A neighbor or a friend might suddenly disappear for no apparent reason. Some were exiled, some were shot in the rising tide of political purges of the late 1940s, just as the nightmare memories of the war were beginning to fade.

  To the eyes and ears of a child, it was very puzzling. It had to do with “politics,” Marina learned at a very early age, and politics was something that was discussed only in whispers. If a child ran into the room during talk with even the faintest political overtones, he was told to go out and play. No one dared to take a chance of being overheard. Even the most innocent rumors could spell arrest and exile. In Archangel Marina had listened to angry words between her grandmother and her Uncle Ilya about politics. There was something mysterious, something political, about her stepfather’s past and the family’s move to Moldavia. Now she witnessed the unjust treatment of the Moldavians and saw Russian friends and neighbors sent to prison—all for politics. She grew to fear and hate the very word.

  In one respect only were the horrors of politics mitigated, and that was because they were living in a provincial backwater. When someone was caught in the cruel fate—arrest, exile, even execution—that was becoming a more and more common occurrence, the rest of the community
, far from shunning the children and relatives of the victim, pitched in and did what they could to help. The atmosphere of fear that was causing a kind of numbness among educated people and Communist Party professionals in the larger cities had not seeped down to out-of-the-way places like Zguritsa. Each time the blind mechanism of terror struck, the first thought was not, as it tended to be in the cities, “Next time it may be me.” People did not turn their backs out of fear of contamination. They were still human to one another, very often in touching ways. And whenever such misfortunes did occur, Marina’s mother was one of the kindest and most decent.

  Marina was not yet six when she also became aware of injustice in her own home. Perhaps because of his old troubles in the army, or simply because he found life difficult, Alexander Medvedev started to drink. And his attitude toward Marina changed. She was expected to take care of Petya while her parents were at work, and one day she took him by the hand and led him to the kindergarten she was to attend that fall. The teacher allowed them to stay, and Klavdia was frightened when she came home to find her children missing. She soon traced them to the kindergarten, but that night Alexander struck them both as punishment. Marina remembers it as the first time Alexander ever hit her, and the last time he was to treat her equally with her brother.

  Alexander grew increasingly critical of Marina. If she toyed with her food, he said harshly, “Who do you think you are—a princess? You’ll eat what’s set in front of you!” When she fell ill with whooping cough one winter, Alexander, annoyed by her constant bark, would snap: “For God’s sake, stop that.” They all slept in the same room, and when Marina coughed at night, Alexander scolded: “Be quiet. You’re not letting anybody get any sleep.” Alexander was afraid she would infect Petya, who shared the bed with her, and Marina at last realized that her father was drawing a line between her and Petya. For some reason that she did not understand, Petya meant more to him. And when Petya finally did catch whooping cough, Alexander made no secret of his anger. “You gave it to him,” he accused Marina.

  Alexander clearly favored Petya whenever he and Marina had some childish dispute. He began to strike Marina more often now, and once when she failed to weed a corn patch to his satisfaction, and lost his knife besides, he grew red with fury. He marched Marina home and beat her ten strokes over the backside with his leather belt. Her mother was powerless to protect her.

  Marina did not know it, but Klavdia was pregnant again. She was often sick in bed, and Marina, who was only seven, was expected to help with the household chores, washing dishes and laundry, grazing the pig, and drawing water from the village well. If she neglected her chores to run outdoors and play games with her friends, Alexander was there to punish her when she returned.

  Then one afternoon when Klavdia was lying sick in bed, Marina’s grandmother, Tatyana Yakovlevna, suddenly appeared. She had come from Archangel to spend the summer with her daughter and son-in-law, Musya and Vanya Berlov, who had moved to Moldavia soon after the Medvedevs. Tatyana Yakovlevna visited for a while, and when Alexander thought she had left, he shouted to Marina: “Why haven’t you shined my shoes yet?” Marina, thinking she was safely out of earshot in the kitchen, grumbled: “All day long it’s Marina this and Marina that. The others are all out playing, and I’m supposed to be pasturing the pig. Your Petya doesn’t have jobs to do. Polish the shoes yourself!”

  Alexander heard her. “I’ll show you,” he shouted, and hurled his shoe at Marina’s head.

  At that moment Tatyana Yakovlevna reappeared in the doorway. “I’m taking Marina with me,” she told Alexander firmly. “You have no idea how to treat children. She isn’t a hired hand. She’s not big enough to work in a cornfield. I won’t let you hit her.”

  She took Marina by the hand and led her away, without so much as asking Klavdia. Marina spent the rest of the summer with her grandmother and her Aunt Musya and Uncle Vanya. Each day at lunchtime or after work, her mother came by to see her. She wanted to take Marina home, but Tatyana Yakovlevna would not hear of it. Marina was grateful to her grandmother for defending her, yet she wanted to be home with her mother. Then August came and Tatyana Yakovlevna announced that she intended to take Marina back to Archangel with her. Klavdia, in tears, saw them off at the station.

  And so the next year, when she was eight years old, Marina was again in Archangel with her grandmother and her Uncle Ilya and Aunt Valya. She was in the second grade and spent the greater part of each day in school, but once again she was “spoiled” by Tatyana Yakovlevna and exposed to her grandmother’s old-fashioned views and her outspoken dislike for the Communist system. Tatyana still took her granddaughter to church, and there, one afternoon, they met Marina’s teacher, a graying woman in her fifties. The three of them walked home together and Tatyana remarked that she was glad to see a teacher in church. At least a few people still believed in God. The teacher sighed: “In school, you have to tell the children there isn’t any God. But in your heart, you believe otherwise.”

  To Marina, the encounter seemed to prove the truth of what her grandmother had been saying, that in school she was taught nothing but lies. And if her teachers lied about God, were they telling the truth about Stalin? At school she was taught that Stalin was a good, kind man who loved children. But at home her grandmother told her, with every bit as much assurance, that he was a demon let loose among men. What was she to believe?

  Marina was plagued by another uncertainty. Nearly every school-child belonged to the Pioneers, the Soviet organization for children. But since she hated everything about the Soviet system, Tatyana Prusakova told Marina not to join. The child did not know what to do. She felt that she would be betraying her grandmother if she joined. On the other hand, it was hard to refuse.

  Marina found an alibi; she would join when she returned home to Moldavia. But there, too, she kept on stalling until the end of her third-grade year. Even though she had hardly any choice by then, she felt that she had betrayed her grandmother. When Tatyana Yakovlevna came to Zguritsa that summer, Marina hid her red neckerchief, the badge of the Pioneers, in shame. At last the old lady caught sight of it and said just one thing: “Humph! Is that a devil’s tongue they’ve stuck on you?”

  When she returned to Moldavia after the year in Archangel, Marina found a new child in the family, a chubby little girl called Tanya. From the outset Alexander was devoted to the baby, who strongly resembled Klavdia. The family alignment had changed again. Petya was no longer the favorite and was now in the same boat as Marina when it came to punishment.

  Marina had more chores than ever. As always, she had to pick up Petya at kindergarten, but now she had to fetch Tanya at the public nursery, too. She had to help with the ironing, the bed making and floor washing, help make pelmeny (jam or meat dumplings), peel potatoes, and draw heavy bucketfuls of water from the well. If something she did displeased Alexander, she received a cuff on the face or backside with a remark like, “It’s all your grandmother’s doing” or “A fine young lady she wanted you to be, you and your lily-white hands!”

  Then, one spring day just before her tenth birthday, Marina made a startling discovery. It was a holiday, and the village streets were deserted. Marina and a classmate called Emma were off to school for the celebration. On the way, Emma turned to Marina and said: “Guess what? My mama was talking to your mama last night. And your mama said your papa isn’t your real papa at all!”

  Just then they came to Emma’s house, and she went in to pick up something she had forgotten. Marina did not wait for her. She ran away. Stunned, she did not want anyone to witness her turmoil. She came to a wide dirt road and followed it. There was a meadow with bluebells and yellow dandelions on one side and a cornfield stretching into the forest on the other. Marina walked and walked. She cried until she was tired of crying. She was hungry, but she did not want to go home. She found a clump of cherry trees and climbed one of them. Then she lay on a branch, plucked green cherries, and ate them. Gazing through the branches at the sky, she thou
ght, “Other children are happy and play.” But she had no right to be happy. She did not have a father.

  Finally, it was time to go home for supper. Marina found her mother in the kitchen and started peeling potatoes. She worked in silence for several moments. Then she could not stand it any longer. “Mama,” she asked, “where is my real papa?”

  “Who told you?” Klavdia inquired with a startled expression.

  “One of my friends,” Marina replied.

  “Your papa died at the front,” her mother answered simply.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Marina asked.

  Her mother spoke hesitantly now: “You were too little to understand.”

  Even today Marina thinks that her discovery changed her outlook forever. Now she understood why Alexander treated her differently; he was not her father. She could no longer feel affection for the man she had once been proud to call “Papa,” even though she bore his patronymic and surname, Marina Alexandrovna Medvedeva. Nor could she feel the same way about her mother. She continued to love her, but she became more critical of her with every passing day. She blamed her mother for marrying Alexander and begged her to leave him. “You silly,” her mother would smile, “where could I go all alone with three children? You’re only a little girl. You don’t understand.”

  Klavdia was in anguish over the change in her daughter’s behavior. Whenever Alexander was not looking, she kissed Marina and tried to reassure her. But Marina avoided her caresses, much as she longed for them, because she was hurt that her mother dared kiss her only on the sly. When she was punished by Alexander, she blamed her mother for failing to stand up for her. Where she once thought her mother the most beautiful person on earth, now she considered her sloppy, even dirty. She was even annoyed by her mother’s poor health. Marina knew that her mother loved her, perhaps even better than Petya and Tanya, but she wanted her to prove it again and again.