Yakov moved his family into a larger, more stylish apartment. He had acquired a trophy Mercedes looted from Germany on a trip otherwise devoted to dismantling German rocketry laboratories and shipping them back wholesale to the Lavochkin Construction Bureau in Moscow. The Mercedes was a huge black shining beast, the mark of giddying rank. Yakov would drive around Moscow giving lifts to young girls in his car, a pastime which Varvara eventually discovered and which threw her into violent frenzies of jealousy. Yakov’s new job as head of the Soviet Union’s fledgling rocket programme, staffed by captured German scientists, opened a world of privilege to his family, which they were in no hurry to share with their poor relatives. For Lenina and Lyudmila, the drabness of wartime austerity continued for years after the end of the war. But there were plenty of bright parades full of gaudy paper slogans and banners, and a great sense of pride and achievement. Whenever Lenina and Sasha, medals arrayed on his chest, would walk with their new baby Nadia it seemed that she had, at last, escaped the wreckage of her childhood.
* * *
Boris Bibikov was due to be released from prison in June 1947, according to his official sentence of ‘ten years without the right of correspondence’. Despite the slim chance that he could have survived the camps and the war, Lenina continued to hope that he would return.
Even after what they had been through, the Bibikov family retained a naïve faith in the essential probity and rightness of the Soviet system. Like tens of millions of other relatives of the victims of the Purges, they believed that their loved one had suffered an injustice which was exceptional. Boris’s mother Sophia wrote letters to the Interior Ministry asking for news of her son in the unshakeable belief that justice would eventually prevail. For years she received no answer, yet the faith remained. But Boris’s release date came and went with no news.
In the winter of 1948, Lenina, pregnant with her second child, went to stay for a few months with Sasha’s mother Praskovia in a village twenty miles from Kaluga, in central Russia where fresh milk was plentiful and where the village women could look after young Nadia as Lenina waited for the new arrival. Sasha was studying law in Moscow; every Saturday night he’d take the train to Kaluga with a battered bicycle he’d repaired himself, cycle (with one leg) to the village, spend the day with his family, and cycle back in the evening to catch the Moscow train.
One day Sasha brought a letter postmarked KarLag. It had no envelope; instead it was folded into a triangle and tucked into itself, in the manner of the time. It was from Martha. She wrote that she had been released from prison the previous spring and was living close to the camp under ‘administrative detention’. She had a newborn baby boy called Viktor. The child’s father was a priest, she said, whose life she’d saved in the camp. But he’d been released and gone back to his own family in the Siberian region of the Altai.
Now, Martha said, she expected to receive permission to leave Kazakhstan soon, but wondered where she could go since she had no passport. Though she didn’t spell it out, Lenina knew what her mother meant – her travel documents marked her as a political prisoner, she was not allowed to live closer than 101 kilometres to a major city. There was precious little room for her in Lenina’s tiny apartment in Moscow, but Sasha’s mother Praskovia insisted: Lenina must do everything she could to get Martha to Moscow. Lenina wrote a letter telling her mother to disregard the 101 kilometres and come to live with them in the capital as soon as she was able. Sasha posted the letter from Moscow the next day.
The locomotive pulled slowly into Kursky Station belching soot and steam. Because of a shortage of rolling stock the train was made up of cattle wagons instead of carriages. Martha hadn’t been allowed to buy a ticket on the normal train from Semipalatinsk because of her lack of papers, so she came on an unscheduled train full of passport-less human driftwood like herself, sending a brief telegram to her daughter as she embarked warning of her arrival. The train disgorged streams of bedraggled travellers, most of them ex-convicts, exhausted and stinking after their five-day journey.
Lenina’s abiding memory of her mother was as a fashionable Party housewife. Now, as she staggered down the platform, Martha looked like a beggar woman. She was filthy and lousy and wore a convict’s black padded jacket. She had no luggage except for a dirty bundle of clothes. She was alone.
Martha barely smiled as she saw her daughter, heavily pregnant with her second child, waddling towards her. They embraced, and wept. Lenina asked what had happened to her mother’s new baby. ‘Eh, it died,’ Martha said, dismissively, and pushed off into the crowd heading towards the exit. They rode the Metro in silence to Barrikadnaya Street, where Lenina took her mother straight to a public bathhouse near the Zoo to get her cleaned up and de-loused.
At home that evening in the basement apartment on Herzen Street with Lenina, Sasha and their daughter Nadia, Martha seemed to recede into a kind of stupefied shock. She complained that the bed they had made for her was too soft and that her granddaughter was crying too loudly. By the end of the evening, Lenina was in tears, being comforted by Sasha as his mother-in-law paced, sleepless, in the kitchen.
The next day Lenina took the elektrichka to Saltykovka to fetch Lyudmila, When the two girls arrived at Herzen Street, Martha was waiting impatiently by the apartment door. The apartment was at the end of a long corridor, and the first glimpse Martha had of her younger daughter was a crippled silhouette at the end of the hall. Martha called out Lyudmila’s name, and howled as the little girl ran lopsidedly towards her. Lyudmila remembered that awful wail all her life – the wail of a woman who had last seen her daughter as a plump, happy toddler and then lost her for eleven years, only to find her again as a hobbling, emaciated fourteen-year-old.
Martha held her for a long time, weeping. Mila, when she recalls the meeting now, shakes her head as she searches for any trace of the emotions she felt at the time. But she felt nothing. ‘I probably hugged her. I probably said “mother”. But I can’t remember.’
For Mila, the word ‘mother’ had become little more than an abstraction. It had no place in the world of orphans in which she had spent her childhood. She had no memory at all of her parents, except for the one image of the night of her mother’s arrest and the ghost of a memory of her father. She had written a dutiful letter to her mother in Karlager as soon as Lenina had told her that their mother was alive and well. But the assurances of devotion in the letter were, in truth, just an invention. Mila really had no idea, except from books, what a real mother was like, or how one should feel about her.
When she left in the late afternoon to return to Saltykovka, Lyudmila’s overwhelming emotion was gratitude for the large meal Martha had cooked for them. Years later, she wrote to her fiancé that she had wept when she first heard that her mother was alive, but had ruthlessly suppressed her tears as a sign of weakness.
Martha never became a real mother to Lyudmila, The bond broken in December 1937 would not be re-formed. Mila often came to Lenina’s apartment, but quickly found she couldn’t bear Martha’s brooding manner and flashes of anger. Within months of Martha’s return to Moscow, they slipped into a dutiful rhythm. Most weekends, Martha and Lenina would come out to Saltykovka. Lenina would collect her sister from the orphanage for a walk; Martha, still officially a nonperson, would wait by the village pond for her daughters. They’d walk and talk, and Martha would hand over the sweets and biscuits she’d bought or made, which Mila would share with the other children.
Lyudmila loved her mother ‘like a dog loves the person who feeds it,’ she told me on a hot summer night at my home in Istanbul. ‘I understood the Party, Stalin, the People. But I never knew what the word “mother” meant.’
Though her mother was alive, Mila remained, in her heart, an orphan. But long before Lyudmila became a mother herself, she was obsessed with the idea of motherhood, and what kind of mother she would be herself. She would often write to my future father about their unborn children, and the awful fear she had of losing her children as
Martha had lost hers.
‘All night I dreamt I was carrying a small boy in my arms, our son,’ Mila wrote to my father in 1964. ‘He was very gentle and affectionate. But the road was very difficult and long, it went up and down and into underground labyrinths. Carrying him was very hard but I couldn’t leave behind such a wonderful being in whom everything was yours, even his voice, nose, hair, fingers. For some reason we came to the old Moscow State University building on Mokhovaya Street and an old man was choosing the best children out of a crowd and my boy was one of them. Everyone was happy that their children were being chosen, but I was crying bitterly because I didn’t believe they would return him to me.’
Mila was filled with the need to protect her own children, even before we were born. But her mother Martha seemed, at times, consumed with an irrational hatred of hers. There were moments when, irritated by something Mila had done or said, Martha snapped at her that she was an ‘orphanage cripple’. Hysterical, she would call her elder daughter ‘Jew-spawn’ and swear in the most filthy prison language she could summon. At other times she lapsed into hysterical displays of self-pity and affection, clutching at her children in a torrent of tears.
Martha had gone mad in the camps. That much seems obvious from her behaviour after her return from Kazakhstan. But such was the general fear and ignorance of psychiatry then that no one thought that she needed treatment, and the family suffered her self-hating craziness in silence. ‘Psychiatrists were worse than the NKVD to us,’ Lenina says. Martha always had a vicious streak. Life in the camps had turned her rage at the world into an uncontrollable force.
Martha, who had been rejected by her father and abandoned her sister, in her turn rejected her own daughters. It was as though she believed that by meting out hatred and extinguishing love and hope in those around her she could somehow revenge herself on the world which had treated her so cruelly. She seemed to be driven by some inner perversity to create a world of spite around herself.
Yet at the same time she was capable of acts of great generosity, her old, better self fighting through all the bitterness. When I was born, in 1971, Martha wrote to congratulate Mila, and told her that she’d opened a bank account for me, and was earning money by cooking lunches for her local parish priest which she’d faithfully deposit in the account. When she came to visit us in 1976, she brought the deposit book to show Lyudmila, It was a kind of peace offering, a way of atoning for her daughter’s own loveless childhood. When Martha died Lenina couldn’t find the deposit book. She suspected Martha’s Ukrainian relatives of stealing it. But I think of Martha standing, day after day, by a stove cooking cutlets and soup, thinking of the child in London she had met for only a few weeks, and then lumbering down to the post office to deposit her kopecks for her grandson.
Lyudmila was spared the worst of her mother’s demons, seeing her only at weekends. Lenina was less lucky. She earned a few extra rubles by donating her copious breast milk to a hospital for abandoned infants on the other side of Herzen Street, and she managed to get Martha a job as a cook at the hospital, which kept her out of the house for most of the day. But at night she would sit in the kitchen and mutter evilly at her daughter. Martha would ask Lenina sarcastically why she had married ‘a cripple instead of a general’ and try to persuade Sasha and Lenina to leave each other. She flirted openly with Sasha, provoking furious fights with her daughter. Several times Martha attacked Lenina with a knife; once, Lenina broke her mother’s finger trying to restrain her after a hysterical battle which left half of Lenina’s prized crockery smashed. At night Martha would weep and curse Boris as a ‘treacherous fool’ for having brought down such misery on her, saying she never wanted to see him again and hoped he was dead.
‘We tolerated it all,’ remembers Lenina. ‘But how much blood she drankl She lived off our suffering.’
It took months for the story of how Martha had spent the previous decade to emerge, and even then the stories were spat out, accompanied by cynical comments. Martha had been convicted within weeks of her arrest. She seems to have had some kind of nervous breakdown under interrogation, and confessed to whatever she was told, including to her husband’s guilt. She was given ten years’ hard labour for being an ‘accessory to anti-Soviet activity’. Martha and several hundred other women prisoners were put on cattle trucks and sent to a remote railhead in Kazakhstan. There, they were marched across the steppe to Semipalatinsk, a primitive camp of tents, and put to work building their own prison from rough timber and barbed wire.
A friend of my wife’s family, the son of a Gulag prisoner, once told me about how his father had survived in the camps. Forget your past life as though it was a dream, the old man had said, give up hope about getting back, empty your mind of anger and regret and dissolve in the present, appreciate the joys of camp life, a hot stove, soap at the banya, the watery Siberian winter dawns and the silence of the forest, the discovery of a clump of cranberries in the taiga, a small kindness of one’s cellmate. But it took a strong personality, maybe even superhuman strength, to actually live like that, and most men and women who faced the test were destroyed by it.
Martha almost never spoke of her life in the camp. She told Lenina only one story, one so cruel and grotesque that she had little desire to hear any more. One autumn, before the war, the camp’s cows were calving. After every calf was born, Martha had to gather up the steaming placenta and caul in a bucket and throw them in a barrel outside, and cover them with carbolic acid to prevent the rats from eating them. Martha went inside to attend another calving, and when she came out she found two men, little more than skeletons, writhing in agony by the refuse barrel. They were newly arrived convicts from another camp, all former priests, now more dead than alive. They had crawled to the cowshed to eat the raw placentas. Martha pulled one of the men into the shed and fed him fresh milk to counteract the carbolic acid. He survived. The other died where he lay. Later, after they were both released, Martha lived with the man she had saved; he was the father of the child who died before Martha returned to Moscow.
After the final calving that night Martha had to help collect the bodies of the convicts who had died on arrival. She and another woman loaded them on to a cart, which Martha then drove alone into the steppe to the camp’s remote burial ground. Martha told Lenina that steppe jackals got wind of the dead meat in the wagon and chased her. To save herself, Martha told her daughter, she had thrown one of the bodies to the wild dogs.
Martha finished her sentence in early 1948, but was not allowed to return home. First she was released into ‘administrative detention’, which meant that she was forced to stay in a village of ex-convicts not far from the camp. She and the priest, whose name she never told Lenina, created a new life for themselves in a log cabin on the outskirts of KarLag, tending a tiny vegetable plot and doing odd jobs for the camp’s personnel.
She almost never spoke of her camp ‘husband’ or of their child Viktor, who Martha said had died just before her return to Moscow. But Lenina always suspected that Martha had given the child away after her priest had left her to return to his own family, handing over the infant to local doctors or an orphanage. Lenina never cited any evidence for this belief; she just suspects that it is so, for no other reason than ‘I see it with my heart.’ In Moscow in 2007 she encountered a local prosecutor called Viktor Shcherbakov; but after close examination by my aunt the man turned out to be not her long-lost half-brother but a stranger who shared her mother’s surname. After a few days’ reflection Lenina decided, at the age of eighty-two, not to pursue Viktor, the little boy lost in 1948. ‘What if I find him and he’s just a bum?’ she asked. ‘He doesn’t have Boris’s blood, which made us all great. He has Martha’s blood, and we don’t need any more of that.’
Instead of a normal passport, Martha was given a piece of paper confirming her release and a special passport restricting her from living in or near a major city for life. The Soviet Union of the 1940s abounded with such people, whose freedom of residence
was limited – they were condemned to a life as a nonperson because of the fatal stamp in their passport.
Luckily for Martha, her son-in-law Sasha was already working as a junior lawyer in the Ministry of Justice. He saved her by a loophole in the paperwork. Martha’s family name appeared in the prison paperwork as ‘Shcherbakova’, the Russianized, female version of her surname. But on her birth certificate she was ‘Shcherbak’, the neuter Ukrainian spelling. Sasha convinced his local police office to issue a passport to Martha Shcherbak, an innocent person with no police record and no official ‘limit’ on her existence. On paper, then, she was an upstanding Soviet citizen. Inside, it seemed to those around her, her soul had been shredded.
Most of the children of Lyudmila’s orphanage finished their schooling at fourteen, and after a year’s technical training in the sewing room at Saltykovka were sent to the textile mills of Ivanovo, 120 miles north of Moscow, to work as seamstresses, or to noxious chemical factories in central Asia. Lyudmila’s teachers petitioned the local authorities to have her sent to another local school where she could study three more years and have a chance of applying to university. Permission came through, though Lyudmila had to earn her keep at the orphanage by teaching some of the younger classes and organizing amateur dramatics. This is where she first practised the emphatic pedagogical manner she has today, singing out instructions syllable by syllable as she drills classes of slightly terrified English students in the arcana of the Russian verb, brooking no nonsense or error during the class, but then gushing with unexpected emotion for years afterwards at her pupils’ successes.
Stalin's Children Page 11