Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  But solitude seemed to add to her sadness. And so she forsook the lonely parks, the desolate back streets, the empty cathedral, and began to direct her footsteps to the most crowded thoroughfares of the city, and above all, to the Nevsky Prospekt. She found herself lingering by the music counters of department stores, listening to the popular rhythms of the West, which were just beginning to be heard in Russia. For a full year after the death of her mother, Marina could not bear to take a novel in her hand. Her feelings were too raw, and the contrast between her own sorrowful surroundings and the glittering world of her imagination was too abrasive. It was music that brought solace to her now.

  When school was out that summer, Marina journeyed to Minsk to visit her grandmother, Tatyana Yakovlevna, now an old lady in her sixties, who was living there with her eldest son Ilya and his wife Valya. Marina’s Aunt Musya and Uncle Vanya Berlov, whose home had been her refuge in Moldavia, were also living in Minsk. They were the only family she had left, and Marina was glad to be with them, especially her grandmother. Tatyana had old-fashioned, even crotchety, ways. She did not allow Marina to dress in slacks and insisted that she wear her hair long as in Russia nice girls—and little girls—did. But Marina accepted her strictness. With her mother gone, she knew that her aged grandmother was probably the one person on earth who genuinely loved her.

  That summer, Marina for the first time met a young man who caught her fancy. His name was Vladimir, and he took her to the movies and the park, played French love songs to her on the guitar, and taught her how to kiss. He was twenty-two and she was barely sixteen. She wished she were more grown up. Then one afternoon, as she was trying on a new dress, Marina was incredulous that the vision she beheld in the mirror was herself. She had grown up. But another vision intruded. She imagined that she saw a man standing behind her. He was gazing at her image in the mirror with approval, even admiration. She had never seen the man before. He was a stranger. But she knew who he was. He was her father.

  They held a long and fanciful conversation. “What a splendid daughter I have!” she imagined him exclaiming. “So pretty and so grown up!” He begged her to come and live with him as his daughter. But with that, Marina grew stern and reproving. “You ought to have thought of it before,” she said. “You’re not my father at all. I grew up without any help from you. You made Mama and me very sad. Another man brought me up. He is my father now.”

  But in her loyalty to her stepfather, Marina soon suffered a cruel disappointment. At the time of her sixteenth birthday, while she was in Minsk, Tatyana wrote the registry office at Severodvinsk, Marina’s birthplace, requesting copies of her birth certificate and other documents. She also wrote Alexander to ask for copies of the papers he had signed upon his formal adoption of Marina. For it was known among Alexander’s and Klavdia’s relatives alike that he had adopted his wife’s oldest child. Marina herself had been informed of it as a matter of certainty. In fact, she carried Alexander’s surname, Medvedev, with his first name as her patronymic, Alexandrovna. Neither in school nor anywhere else had she been known by any other name. But the formal documents—the birth certificate and the adoption papers—were needed now so that Marina could receive the internal passport for identification and travel within the country that is issued to every Soviet city dweller on reaching the age of sixteen.

  All of them, Marina, her grandmother, and the rest of her relatives in Minsk, were thunderstruck by the answers Tatyana received. From Leningrad, Alexander wrote denying that he had adopted Marina. And from the registry office at Severodvinsk came the reply that there was no birth certificate or other documents for a Marina Alexandrovna Medvedeva, only for a Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova. (Marina’s real father had been named Nikolai and her mother’s maiden name was Prusakova. If the father does not claim, or the mother prove, paternity, a child born to an unmarried Soviet mother is given the father’s first name as a patronymic and the mother’s maiden name as a surname.)

  Together, the two replies converging from different corners of the country confirmed Marina’s worst fears. Not only had she been abandoned by her own father, she had also been repudiated by the man who had taken his place. It was a cruel blow. To this day Marina refuses to accept it fully, clinging still to the idea that she was, in fact, Alexander’s adopted child, that he was lying when he denied it, and that he had merely hidden the documents of adoption. But whatever she made of his denial, she had still to face the terrible fact of his rejection.

  This new discovery had humiliating consequences for Marina. Legally, she had to take the name inscribed on her birth certificate—Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova. Teachers and older friends of the family who had always addressed her as Marina Alexandrovna now had to call her Marina Nikolayevna. She had to change her pharmacy school registration from “Medvedeva” to “Prusakova” and endure the teasing of the other girls. As if this were not embarrassment enough, the space on her new passport for her father’s name was left blank—to any Soviet child the ultimate token of illegitimacy, carrying a stigma of which he or she is painfully reminded on the innumerable occasions when the passport is presented as identification.

  When Marina returned to Leningrad that autumn for her third and final year at pharmacy school, she found matters in her stepfather’s household in no way improved. Not that Alexander interfered with her freedom or tried to dictate what she should do. On the contrary, he ignored her, at least at first. Mourning for Klavdia, he spent hours at her grave, his dark skin darker still from the sun, building a little monument and creating a flower bed there. Neither he nor his mother gave the slightest sign of caring at what hour Marina came home at night. To a sixteen-year-old girl, living in a large and rather rough city, this indifference to the hours she kept could mean only one thing. It was the ultimate token of abandonment. Marina knew that she was utterly alone.

  Then one day soon after she came back from Minsk, Alexander informed her through his mother—he did not bother to tell her himself—that he would no longer tolerate her presence at meals with the rest of the family. “You’re grown now,” Yevdokia said. “You have relatives of your own. Let them look out for you.” Later, Alexander put it more bluntly. “You’re not my daughter,” he said. “I’m under no obligation to feed you.”

  Marina did not know how she would eat. Luckily, someone told her that she was entitled to an orphan’s pension of 16 rubles a month. She was already receiving a student stipend of 18 rubles a month, and on the combined sum of 34 rubles (about $34) a month, plus small sums her grandmother in Minsk was able to scrape together and send her, she tried to feed and clothe herself.

  Unwelcome at home, Marina was exposed as never before to the temptations of the city of Leningrad. She was exposed, moreover, at an age when she was exceptionally vulnerable and almost wholly inexperienced. Her distractions were innocent enough at first; she went to the movies or sat in a cafeteria by the hour, chatting with friends from pharmacy school. But it was a struggle just feeding and clothing herself, to say nothing of paying for tickets to the movies. And so during the New Year holiday, Marina found a job delivering telegrams through the wintry streets of the city. Cold and often hungry, she was made even more miserable by the sight of gaily ornamented New Year’s trees winking behind warm, curtained windows.

  Like any sixteen-year-old, Marina craved gaiety. She started going to student dances on Saturday nights at the University of Leningrad. On other nights she went to mixers and get-acquainted dances at the Technological Institute and the Institute of Railway Transport. She never had an escort. She went, as Soviet girls often do, with a friend or two from school. But even at these casual get-togethers, Marina was painfully self-conscious about her unbecoming hand-me-down dresses. On several poignant occasions she was passed over in favor of girls who were not as pretty as she but who had blouses of German nylon or shoes of Czechoslovak make to give them a look of prosperity or glamour.

  A young man named Leonid invited her to attend the New Year’s Eve dance in his
dormitory at the University of Leningrad. Of all the schools in the city, the university was the most prestigious. Its students were the finest in the country. In the competitive scramble of Soviet student life, they were the elite. Marina accepted Lonya’s invitation with alacrity.

  Ordinarily, the ramshackle university dormitory buildings were brilliantly lit in what Marina calls an effort to “guarantee the morality of Soviet youth.” On New Year’s Eve, however, the ingenuity of the students proved equal to the occasion. Every lightbulb that could be reached had been twisted from its socket; the rest had simply been smashed. The corridors and rooms were dark and crowded with couples, and phonographs played music of a sort Marina had never heard before. There were the strains of rock ’n’ roll, newly fashionable in the West but still virtually unknown in Russia. There was the “Lullaby of Broadway,” which Marina was later to hear so often that she calls it the “theme song” of her youth. There were the unfamiliar voices of Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole, all of them banned under Stalin but by this time recorded on the sly from broadcasts of the Voice of America. Marina’s enthusiasm for this new music was wholehearted. She considered it, and the young men who were its possessors, to be the last word in sophistication.

  But her late date Lonya was just an uncouth boy. He got Marina alone in a bedroom, locked the door, switched off the light, and tried to force himself on her. Marina succeeded in wrenching herself free, but the incident was a revelation nonetheless. This was not the kind of “love” she had read about in books. She had supposed that love and sex were identical. She was frightened and repelled.

  Even while Marina was fighting Lonya off, another thought had crossed her mind: “How will I face Mama in the morning?” But her mother was dead. Later, when she had time to reflect, she realized that it had been not fear of her mother, but fear of being like her, that had caused her panic. She must stop herself before it was too late, or she would end up doing the same terrible thing for which she had so long condemned her mother.

  As far as Yevdokia and Musya were concerned, Marina’s late hours meant that she was already a fallen woman. Meanwhile, her bitter quarrels with Alexander continued. He reminded her again and again that he did not want her living at home after she had finished school. Often he threatened: “If you won’t go of your own free will, I’ll find a law to make you go!”

  Marina answered weakly that if he tried to make her leave, she would appeal to the police or to a court.

  “Just try it,” Alexander said. “I know all about you. I’ll tell them who your father was, and they’ll listen to me.”

  “Who was my father?” Marina asked.

  Alexander spat out her father’s name—Nikolai, and a surname that Marina would not remember until years afterward. “He was a traitor!” Alexander shouted.

  Touched at her weakest, most vulnerable spot, Marina sobbed. “I never saw him. I never knew him. Children aren’t responsible for what their parents do.” She crumpled up on the sofa and cried.

  Marina had no idea that there could be any family secrets left for her to discover. Then one day she came upon one that cast new light on her stepfather’s behavior. Rummaging through an old suitcase of her mother’s, she found a set of legal documents about a court case for child support. They showed that Alexander himself had had an illegitimate daughter in Moldavia before he and Klavdia were married. The child’s name was Alla, and she was only a year younger than Marina.

  Marina came across another set of documents in the suitcase. They were papers filed by Klavdia with the Inquiry Bureau in Leningrad in what had almost certainly been an effort to find her real father. With her own life fading, and little hope that her daughter would be treated gently by the Medvedevs when she was gone, Klavdia had evidently tried to find him—if he had survived his sentence in Siberia or the Far North—so that he could help Marina after she was dead.

  Neither of these discoveries gave Marina any comfort at all. The realization that Klavdia at the time of her death had been searching for her father only seemed to prove to Marina, probably erroneously, that what she had been dreading was true—she was the child of a casual liaison after all and her father had simply abandoned her. The discovery deepened Marina’s curiosity about herself, while at the same time deepening her conviction that the further she tried to dig, the greater the likelihood that what she might find out about herself would be the very truth she feared most.

  As for the discovery that Alexander had a daughter of his own who was nearly the same age as she, it failed to soften in any way the harsh facts of his treatment of her, and it never occurred to Marina that perhaps it was not she, but that other girl who was at the heart of his anger toward her.

  Taken together, both discoveries deepened Marina’s skepticism about the truth of things as they are presented on the surface. She had grown up in a household which was electric with lies, reticences, and outspoken brutality. Yet the outspokenness had failed to guarantee that what was being said was true.

  At last Marina’s troubles caught up with her. With barely enough money for food and clothing, and with no one to love or care for her, she became passive and apathetic. She lost the will to shoulder her heavy load as a third-year pharmacy student: six hours of classes a day, plus four hours’ training in a pharmacy. She started cutting classes, ignored her homework, and embarked on an orgy of movie going. By the middle of the school year, her marks had dropped so sharply that she lost her stipend and had to get by on her orphan’s pension plus whatever her grandmother happened to send from Minsk. For a while she had only 18 rubles a month to live on, and with nothing to eat but rice kasha, she quickly contracted a disease of malnutrition that caused abscesses to erupt all over her body. She went regularly to a medical clinic for shots of penicillin, glucose, and vitamins and for treatments from an ultraviolet lamp. Venereal diseases were also treated there, and Marina was deeply embarrassed by the disapproving glances she received.

  At school Marina’s classmates did their best to cover for her absences. Even the teachers and administrators tried to make allowances for her. The elderly professor who was in charge of the students in the third and final year was especially kind. Boris Zakharovich, whose initials had been transformed by the girls into the nickname “Bizet,” bent all the rules for Marina. Not only did he mark her “present” at classes she had cut, he also repeatedly gave her a B for recitations she had not given. Gently, tactfully, with endless patience, he took her on, she says, “like a nanny,” and tried to wheedle her through school.

  “Marina Nikolayevna,” he told her, “you’re one of the finest students in the class. I think very highly of you. You can become a brilliant pharmacist if you’ll only try. You’re having a hard time, I know, but keep trying just a little longer. Graduate, and I’ll find you one of the best jobs in the city.”

  Marina did not respond. In May, only two weeks before the final examinations that might have entitled her to graduation, a job, and a room in a young people’s hostel, she was expelled for “academic failure and systematic nonattendance at class.”

  She was far more upset at being expelled than she was willing to show. She knew she had to find a job, but she tried only lackadaisically to look for one. Why bury herself in a factory or pharmacy all summer when her student friends were enjoying themselves without a shadow of self-reproach? Marina thought she could get by somehow.

  Everyone at home knew that she was virtually penniless, and when some silver disappeared from the cupboard, Alexander, Musya, and Yevdokia accused her of taking it. They locked up their possessions and kept a careful watch on even the food, down to the last crust of bread. The silver later reappeared, and this time Marina was accused of having pawned it. She suspected that it was Alexander who was guilty, but she had no way either of proving her suspicions or of clearing herself.

  Treated like a criminal at home, liberated by the casual atmosphere of summer, and without even the requirements of school or a job to restrain her, Mar
ina stayed out later than ever and started to make friends quite different from her classmates. One was a girl named Lyuda, three years older than Marina and bold as brass. She had a job as deputy director of a commission shop that dealt not in the shoddy, mass-produced goods turned out by Soviet factories but in items that were old or unusual: clothing and cosmetics from abroad or finely wrought jewelry and porcelain that had been changing hands ever since the Revolution. It was thanks to her job in the commission shop that Lyuda could deck herself out, to the envy of all her friends, in Czechoslovak handbags and English lipsticks.

  Marina created a home for herself, of sorts, at the commission shop, helping Lyuda fill out invoices and keep books, or fixing herself a new hairdo at the back of the shop while Lyuda dealt with the customers out front. It was a lively place, a headquarters for sailors of the Soviet commercial fleet, mainly Latvians and Estonians, who came in with foreign shoes, cigarettes, or cloth to sell at bloated prices. Most of them were mere boys, poorly educated boys at that, who asked nothing better than to take pretty girls like Lyuda and Marina to the best restaurants in town and spend stacks of rubles treating them to caviar, shish kebab, and champagne. Marina remembers one two-week period during which she never missed an evening in the restaurants of the Astoria or the Evropeiskaya hotel. She had no respect for these young sailors because of their poor education; and because she went out with them just to get a free dinner, she began to lose respect for herself.