by Mark Mazower
In the war both of them saw frontline service against the Germans, and after suffering shell shock, Nata’s hearing and balance were never the same and her hair turned white. But the most extraordinary chapter in her life was yet to come because she was reassigned by the NKVD and put in charge of medical services in the POW camp in Krasnogorsk, just outside Moscow. In January 1948 she sent Frouma a letter about her life: Written nine years to the day after the death of their mother, it was the first she had been able to send since the fighting had stopped. Nata mentioned her four-hour commute and her pride in her work. But she said nothing at all about what she was doing. With good reason: Krasnogorsk, which housed some of the most prominent German prisoners in Soviet hands, was an Anti-Fascist School, which aimed to convert erstwhile Nazis into pro-Russian “fighters for peace.” This was where the National Committee for a Free Germany was formed during the Second World War, followed by the League of German Officers. The most prominent of the inmates was Field Marshal Paulus, the most senior general in Russian hands, who had surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad: Nata was his personal physician. Paulus’s adjutant, who later rose to prominence in East Germany, mentions “Dr. Magnitova” in his memoirs in terms of some affection: She was known as “the angel of Krasnogorsk” among the prisoners not only for her medical skill but because she did her best to keep their spirits up as they waited to return home. Paulus himself, at one stage quite ill, became fond of her, and at the time she wrote to Frouma, he was still in her care. Within the family in Moscow it was a standing joke that the famously gruff and irascible Nata had finally found a kindred spirit in the Wehrmacht field marshal.
A few years later came the anti-Jewish purges, and Nata retired. It had been a hard life, and she had never really gotten over the death of her mother and her own lack of children. After her husband’s death, she moved into one room of a kommunalka in the same block as Tsalya and his family. Feeling unloved and lonely, she would return again and again to her childhood, regaling visitors with stories of growing up outside Smolensk, the family’s prosperity before the revolution, the good fortune and wisdom of her parents in educating their daughters as well as their sons—all delivered in a tone that condemned the Soviet present as it mourned the lost past. In 1985 the Krasnogorsk site opened as a museum, and Nata must have bequeathed her medical tools and other objects that she had kept from those years, for among the exhibits, along with Paulus’s fur cap and leather gloves, one can today find her official stamp as head of the medical staff, her bifocals, and a radio that some of the prisoners had made for her. A black-and-white photo of her in her prime shows her staring wistfully off in profile, her white hair defiantly wavy. She has an unmistakable air of command. But there, in the camp, she seems also gentler, less recriminatory than we ever saw her later on.3
I was too young to know any of this then; all I remember is a tougher and less smiling version of her younger sister Niura. “Elle n’était pas drôle, pas du tout,” was my cousin Patrick’s verdict. Not much fun: I can see why he might have thought that. In Paris what Nata most liked was to visit the cemeteries, especially Père Lachaise, where she paid homage to the martyrs of the Commune and came back singing revolutionary songs. She and Tsalya were now the last of the siblings left alive in Russia, and the gap in living standards between the USSR and the West, which had not been pronounced in the 1930s, had widened mercilessly.
For Frouma, living next to her daughter in a tranquil apartment overlooking the Heath, the visits to Moscow were revelatory. When she returned to London she told Dad that she realized she felt much more at home in England than in the country of her birth. The ailing Max had come to depend on her more than ever in his final years: Each afternoon he used to wait for her trolleybus as she returned from the shops and his need for her companionship was palpable. By the time he died, not only had she been running the household for years and caring for him but she had also been the main breadwinner, looking after a stream of tenants. Once she was on her own, there must have been a sense of relief. Life was finally getting easier. The Oakeshott Avenue house was rented out, and Ira found her a flat in the apartment block where she lived, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Old friends lived in the building; her grandchildren were not far away. One Christmas Eve, thinking about her old friend Mrs. S., who was separated from her husband and had ended up living alone, Frouma wrote to her brother in Paris that she felt grateful for how things had worked out. “The kids are more than attentive … As for love surrounding me, I sometimes feel that I have more of it than necessary.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ira
Each year on Christmas Day, Dad’s half sister, Ira, and her husband, Jeff, would drive over in their Jaguar, a car that marked them in our eyes even before they entered the house. Jeff, bespectacled in his sports jacket like a taller and less prickly Evelyn Waugh, would take up the rear while Ira would enter Wessex Gardens like some exotic bird—slim, tanned, dark makeup round the eyes, lipstick that took no prisoners, and an emphatic wasp-waist belt that made a statement of her figure into her sixties.
Unlike the absent André, Ira was a definite if intermittent presence in our childhood. Yet she and Dad were so dissimilar that sometimes it seemed unlikely that they could have shared even the one parent. It is not as though we were entirely foreign to elegance, but this was higher wattage than we were used to, as if an alien force that claimed kinship with us was electrifying the backwater of our home. And yet there was a tenacity to the relationship between Ira and her younger half brother, powerful enough to override the differences in their temperaments and taste: Memories of their shared years growing up on Oakeshott Avenue, the great care they both showed to their mother and aunt as they aged, and in the distance, behind this, as much an idea as any kind of reality, the Russia they both felt so attached to. The infrequency of our meetings, however, and perhaps also our disdain, made it impossible to get to know her before her death. It did not help that Ira had become quite reactionary and was given to making outrageous statements about peasants and workers. Nor did the fact that she was a published author with novels to her name raise her stock in our eyes because her genre was swashbuckling romantic fiction, and she seemed to us to be purveying little more than fantasy and wish fulfillment. Who cared about aristos and ballerinas at the court of the tsars, about devil-may-care Burgundian knights and Regency rakes? The books turned into paperbacks with lurid covers. It felt more like a literary embarrassment than a source of pride. We were very high-minded.
And then it was too late. On July 2, 1985, Jeff had a heart attack while driving; his car crashed and he was killed. Three days after his funeral service, Ira was dead too. An announcement was placed in The Times by Dad—she had no other relatives—and it was brief:
JEFFERIES—On July 11th, 1985, suddenly, Ira Jefferies, loving wife of Jeff. Funeral Service strictly private at her own wish. Please no flowers but donations to Cancer Research would be appreciated.
She had taken an overdose.
At the time of her death I was abroad, and the news barely registered: I never asked Dad about it because it did not cross my mind. Our loving family, I start now to think, had erected its own invisible frontiers and boundaries, and Ira had been rather definitely on the other side. It is not just the loneliness of Ira’s ending that now strikes me. It is also what it says about her sense of herself in the world. When her husband died, she seems to have felt it was no longer worth going on. She was not yet seventy. Dad, who had worried about her in the days after Jeff’s death, and rushed her to hospital too late, thought she was living out one of her novels. Maybe she was—fiction and fact kept colliding throughout her life—but there was steel in the way she ended it too, and it suggested that we had not seen all there was to see in Ira, nor even come close. Afterwards we learned she had left each of us, her four nephews, three gold imperial rubles, reminders of the glittering world whose vanishing haunted her every bit as much as it did André. For unlike Dad, Ira had not bee
n born in England, and in fact it was only in July 1935 that Ira Baltermanz—spelled thus in an entry in The London Gazette, she is listed as an art student “also known as Ira Mazower”—had become a British citizen.
Born in Russia in 1916, by the time she was five Ira Baltermants had lived through a world war, a revolution, and a civil war, mass epidemic and famine, and she had seen her father die in front of her eyes and witnessed people being arrested and possibly shot around her. To the sardonic, self-absorbed, willful English-speaking teenager with an artistic temperament that she became, the North London suburbs must have been insufferably tranquil.
Her earliest memories dated from the summer of 1920 when she and her widowed young mother were still living in Moscow. Lenin was in command, the grimy city had become an endless theater of speeches and parades, and they were reduced to one room of their formerly spacious flat. Her German governess read romantic literature with her, but former servants and complete unknowns shared the apartment with them, much to her disgust. In Oakeshott Avenue later she would spend hours in the small bathroom—we heard much about this long-standing grievance of Dad’s, a younger brother’s oft-told testimony to her juvenile narcissism, and thus we forged our own association between beautification and self-indulgence. Now I am inclined to see Ira’s originary sin as her effort to banish the memory of revolutionary deprivation, re-creating in the safety of an English suburb something of the comfort that had been snatched from her in childhood.
Few remnants of Ira’s Russian life made it to England, but in Dad’s shed, his sanctuary, he used to keep tools in an ancient but well-made plywood box that fastened with a leather strap. This box was the one thing Ira had carried with her out of the USSR in 1924, because it had housed her favorite teddy bear. It was for this reason that it remained precious to her, and after her death it was to him too so he kept it in the most reliable way he knew, by turning it into something useful with the same lack of sentimentalism that he showed to the gold rubles she bequeathed us in her will, each of them converted by him on our behalf into a small but tidy sum and put in the bank.
Ira had been eight when she and Frouma waved good-bye to the rest of the family, and when I try to imagine the parting at the crowded railway station, I think of the grandparents, uncles, and aunts, the entire Toumarkine clan coming to see them off in tearful farewells that for many of them would turn out to be forever. Ira herself liked to tell it differently. In a memoir designed to turn childhood pain into 1950s cocktail entertainment, she composes a kind of imaginative soufflé of a scene in which all the women of the family are “Slavic beauties,” their maids are “wenches,” and pearls and sables are plentifully scattered throughout for Russian color. The fact that the family was Jewish is not mentioned, the revolution intrudes primarily to be defeated by style and flair, and there is “the usual squat, bullet-headed Cheka type” whom her mother naturally twists around her little finger. The men are debonair, the women are adept in using their charms. The whole thing is a kind of Ballets Russes fantasy, and when the family comes to see them off it is “Russian-fashion, with enough food, flowers and last-minute gifts to fill the whole carriage, let alone our compartment.” Did she really fall asleep on a bed of roses? I find it more likely that she was, as she says, excited at the journey ahead, the prospect of “yellow motorcars, flats, ice-cream and other capitalist glories.”
This lighthearted style was very important to her and something that she worked on assiduously. It became a passport to professional success and the way she kept at bay fears, knowledge, and memories that lay close beneath the surface even much later on after her life had become settled and prosperous. Troubling recollections could return at the most unpredictable times and retained the power to transport her back instantly to the terrors of her childhood.
In 1955, for example, more than three decades had elapsed since she said had good-bye to Moscow. Lenin was long dead, Stalin had passed away a couple of years earlier and his successors were keen to spread Russia’s prestige into the Third World. The Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin made a state visit that year to independent Burma. On the second day of their trip they were escorted out of Rangoon to a new Peace Pagoda that recently had been built by Premier U Nu. Their motorcade swept out of the city and came to a halt in front of a red carpet that had been laid across the field to the temple. The two Soviet VIPs, sweating in their crumpled tropical suits, emerged and began to ascend the temple steps. Momentarily they came to an unscheduled halt and the security men looked around nervously. Khrushchev, quicker on the uptake, whispered in Russian to Bulganin that they were expected to take off their shoes. A well-dressed English brunette who happened to be visiting with a group of foreign businessmen began to giggle. Face-to-face with the most powerful man in the USSR she suddenly said to him in fluent Russian: “Take yours off right here.” It was Ira.
Bulganin bent down with difficulty, she wrote later, and did as she told him, and as he did so: “Over his bent back I found myself looking straight into the eyes of one of the Security men. My heart jumped like a rabbit and for one suffocating moment I was in the skin of the woman I would have been had I lived out my life in Russia—looking into the eyes of a Security man who could kill or torture or imprison me at will for my nonsense …” What had begun as an entertaining tour of the region with her husband had suddenly become a reminder of what she had escaped.
Throughout her life Ira pursued an ideal of beauty and glamour as if seeking to wipe out her earliest memories and revive what they had effaced, but perhaps as a result her first years in London were not happy ones for her, or for those around her. Always close to her mother—though she often drove Frouma mad with her self-centeredness—she did not find Max easy, nor he her. Moody and frustrated in her ambitions, obsessed for a long time with keeping her weight down—by 1946 she was so skeletal that doctors put her on the diet they had developed for the surviving inmates of Bergen-Belsen—she left school as soon as she could, ignoring her mother’s desire for her to go to college in order to earn a living as a commercial artist. She had many talents and when she was still young, she won a competition to design a poster for the League of Nations and saw her work featured at Radiolympia, the national radio exhibition that enjoyed immense popularity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Gifted with the pen, she freelanced for an advertising agency in the West End because, for all its sleazy associations, advertising provided one of the very few avenues of professional employment open to single women between the wars. It was also of course a line of work which injected romance into capitalism.
Real romance was something else. She met Morris, an easygoing man—a tailor’s cutter, glamorous enough for a teenager in a hurry, a nonentity her mother thought—and in the summer of 1935, about the same time that her naturalization papers came through, she married him. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. He had a car and earned well and in those days the tailor’s cutter was a respected figure. Her mother’s disapproval bounced off her. Her best friend Mari Stevenson had already gotten married and Ira was determined to do the same thing. It was a mess, as it was bound to be. Mari died in childbirth and Ira was so unhappy with the reality of intimacy with Morrie that she returned home within weeks, although he continued to hang hopefully around her for years. There is a photograph of her in the garden of Oakeshott Avenue in which she and Dad are sitting next to each other on the grass with their parents. He is an eleven-year-old schoolboy in shorts. Ira’s impossibly long legs are stretched out, and she has certainly not given up her dreams of a life more exciting, romantic, and freer than that available inside the dark and cramped quarters of Oakeshott Avenue, where her aging stepfather sits morosely in the corner worried about business, and her mother’s devotion is increasingly lavished on the little brother who has not yet disappointed her.
In the male world of interwar London marketing, Ira must have been an exotic element. But without a steady income she lived at home, and the tensions accumulated. While
her mother scrubbed, mended, sewed, shopped, and cooked, Ira spent the days curled up in her bedroom with a book, subsisting on a diet of apples. Frouma wrote to her sister in Paris at this time that her daughter was “her normal self, messy, always living in an unreal world and 100% selfish.” Only once the war broke out did life become more exciting for Ira—as it did for many young women—and she would head out in the early morning in high heels and stockings to work on government campaigns to safeguard the nation’s health, which was ironic, given her own difficulties with food. “Those who have the will to win / Cook potatoes in their skin / Knowing that the sight of peelings / deeply hurts Lord Woolton’s feelings.” It was the time of the Dig for Victory campaign, and Ira’s drawing of Potato Pete played a small but iconic role. Each evening, Ira changed into what she described as a “smart blue uniform” and headed up West Hill to do her bit at the local fire service headquarters.
The move into fashion that followed was a good example of her talent for turning life at home into something stylish and stylized. Her mother and her aunts were handy dressmakers and cared about what they wore. Frouma made dresses for friends, and would take Ira to be fitted out in London and occasionally to Paris. But Frouma’s ceaseless round of domestic duties left her little time: The clothes one wore were a practical matter and making them saved money and sometimes brought some in—that was her approach. Her daughter shared her attentiveness to dress but converted it into a source of fantasy and then, against the odds, into a living because as the war wound down, she was offered the position of art editor of Everywoman, a popular fashion magazine. It was her big break.