Marina’s rudeness toward her mother angered Alexander even more. He treated her as if she had no feelings and were a servant who had to earn her every crust of bread. The line he drew between her and the other two children became clearer with every passing day. Trying to avoid him whenever she could, Marina took refuge in the nearby home of her Aunt Musya and Uncle Vanya. There she knew she was welcome. And it was from Uncle Vanya that she acquired the bookishness that was to be her other escape.
Marina became a relentless reader. She read Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days in Russian translation. She overstrained her eyes from reading and had to have an operation. But after her recovery, she went on reading as before. She read Dumas’s Three Musketeers and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But her favorites were the novels of Turgenev, with their splendidly idealistic young women and their stories of life in the Russian countryside. These books stimulated her imagination and sharpened her perceptions, and that, in turn, increased her awareness that she was somehow different from her brother and sister, somehow different from her friends.
Marina’s closest friend was a Jewish girl named Beatya Roitshtein. Anti-Semitic feeling was high in Moldavia, but Marina insisted that she respected Beatya and preferred her over anybody else. That was no doubt true; yet as a child, and later as she was growing up, Marina deliberately chose outsiders for her friends, boys and girls who were different, as she considered herself to be different.
When they were ten, Beatya informed Marina that she had witnessed lovemaking between her parents. She refrained from describing the dreadful scene. But she wondered whether the same thing went on at Marina’s house. Although all her family shared the same room, Marina found that she did not know. But the thought of such a thing added to her dread of her stepfather and her scorn for her mother.
By the late winter of 1952, when Marina was ten, Alexander Medvedev’s five-year term of exile, if that is what it was, was over. The electric power station, whose construction he had come to supervise, was now a going concern and he was offered a job in Kishinev, the capital of Moldavia. Klavdia wanted him to take it, but Alexander declared that he had had enough of what he called “gypsy civilization.” He took Petya with him to Leningrad, the city of his birth, the city where his mother was living, in search of a job. Marina, Tanya, and Klavdia stayed behind in Zguritsa, waiting to join him.
Marina’s last memory of Zguritsa is a kind of neighborly solicitude that she had often seen in Moldavia. Her mother, Tanya, and she were packed and ready to set off for Leningrad. But there had been a heavy snowfall, the last of the winter, and the tiny houses of Zguritsa were smothered to the rooftops in snow. It would be two or three days before they would be able to leave, and they had used up all their fuel. They sat on their suitcases and shivered, waiting for the morning to come. Suddenly, they heard a knock at the door. Marina opened it to find her friend Beatya outside. Behind her was a sled loaded with wood and coal that she had dragged all the way from her home in the winter twilight.
— 3 —
Death of Klavdia
Of all the cities of the Soviet Union, Leningrad was probably the hardest to get to live in. During the heroic nine hundred-day siege of 1941–1943, Nazi shells had razed whole districts. Even when the Medvedevs came in 1952, seven years after the war’s end, the rebuilding was only getting under way. Yet such was the boredom and lackluster quality of life in the provinces, so suffocating the absence of horizons, that a torrent of men and women streamed in from all over Russia, seeking to wrest permission from the militia to live in a city that was already unbearably overcrowded.
On his arrival that winter, Alexander was immediately offered a highly skilled job as an electric repair technician at the First Coke and Gas Plant. But neither the offer of a job, the possession of desperately needed skills, nor even the fact that he was a native of the city guaranteed that the militia would permit him to register. He had to find a place to live. Here, he was fortunate. His stepfather had died a few weeks before, and space was available in his mother’s apartment. Still, the militia was free to assign that space to somebody else. By resorting to the magic of bribery, Alexander was finally allowed to register.
When Klavdia arrived, she, too, resorted to bribery. She had set aside for this purpose two woven rugs she had brought all the way from Moldavia and four new ladies’ furpieces. She carried her tribute to the housing office, where the woman responsible for passports took the booty to the district militia headquarters and somehow brought off the miracle. Thus, all the Medvedevs were finally registered as occupants of an apartment at No. 86 Obvodny Canal.
Conditions in their apartment were typical. Alexander, his mother, his wife, and three children lived in a single room in what had once been a three-room apartment. Each of the other rooms was also occupied by an entire family, making a total of twelve people who shared the front door and hallway and the communal toilet and kitchen. They had to go to the public baths to bathe.
Her new home was more cramped than any other she had lived in, but Marina did not give it a thought. She shared a bed, as she always had, with either Petya or Tanya, unaware that people could live in any other way. She missed the meadows and low hills of Moldavia, but she was overwhelmed by a feeling of privilege to be living in a city once again. Soon she considered Leningrad—an island city of bridges and canals, with its cluster of magnificent baroque buildings at the center—the most beautiful place on earth.
The family quickly settled into a new routine. Alexander went to work at the gas plant, and Klavdia found a job not far from home in the laboratory of a medical clinic for railway personnel. Tanya and Petya went to kindergarten, and Marina set off each morning for a nearby school of eight or nine hundred girls, where she was in the fourth grade. Marina liked the new school, but conditions in her new home were hard. In Moldavia the Medvedevs had at least had a place of their own; here, they were squatters in the apartment of Alexander’s mother, Yevdokia Yakovlevna Medvedeva.
She was a diminutive woman, immensely fat, with a large hooked nose and tiny, shrewd black eyes. Marina liked her well enough at first, although she noticed with the sharp eyes of a ten-year-old that her step-grandmother was taking every stick of good furniture she owned and shoving it into an adjoining room that belonged to her daughter-in-law Musya. Marina soon came to realize that while Yevdokia tried to appear generous and open-hearted, she was, in reality, greedy and hypocritical. Her hypocrisy went so far that she insisted that she and all her family were of pure Russian stock. Actually, as Marina found out, Yevdokia herself was half-Jewish. Because the subject was not openly discussed, it is not clear that Alexander himself realized that he was partly Jewish, a distinction of great importance in Russia. As for his mother, she was a woman who judged others solely by appearances, by the scope of their money and possessions, not by what they were underneath. And it was obvious that she disapproved of Klavdia.
Yevdokia was not the only source of poison in the atmosphere. Her qualities were carried to an extreme by her porcine and acquisitive daughter-in-law, Musya. Marina calls this Musya, the widow of her stepfather’s brother, “bad Aunt Musya,” to distinguish her from her mother’s sister, “good Aunt Musya,” whom she had been close to in Archangel and Moldavia. Musya lived with her two sons in the next room. And like her mother-in-law, she strongly disapproved of the woman Alexander had married.
Both of them were at their worst when Alexander was not there to protect his wife. If Klavdia was tired and lay down to rest, they acted as if she were a criminal. When Alexander came home drunk, it was Klavdia who was to blame and not he. It was her fault, for giving him money to buy vodka. She did it, they hinted, only so he would continue to love her. Any token of tenderness between Alexander and his wife, as Marina describes it, was “like a bomb” to his mother and sister. If he put his arm around Klavdia, or if Klavdia sneaked him a kiss, they would say, “How disgusting!” or “Have they no shame?” and storm out of the
room. One morning the old lady went about her chores with an air of particular fury. “Humph,” she snorted, “they won’t even let me sleep with their noises.” To which Musya added, “She only holds him because she never turns him away.” Marina had never witnessed the act of which they were speaking, but she guessed from their tone that it was something dirty. She felt ashamed for her mother.
Klavdia turned the other cheek. She took it all as her due, as though she were to blame for daring to exist at all. Did someone wound her feelings brutally one day? Very well, she would work her fingers to the bone for him the next. It was obvious that she and Alexander were devoted to one another. But their love, the only cohesive and happy element in the household and one that might have been a source of strength for Marina, had its outcome in unhappiness for her instead.
Alexander hated to share Klavdia with Marina or anyone else, and no matter how Marina behaved, it only made the situation worse. If she called her mother “mamasha,” after the French novels she read, and showed the love she truly felt for her, Alexander was enraged. If, on the other hand, she was rude or disobedient, Alexander punished her for being “spoiled.” Either way, Klavdia failed to defend her. Marina continued to reproach her mother for having married him. Curiously, Klavdia did not even defend Alexander. “You’re too little,” she would say to her daughter. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t live my whole life alone. You hope things are going to turn out better, but you never know.”
Marina did understand—in her own way. To her, Klavdia’s inability to stand up to Alexander when he was cruel to her could mean only one thing, that her mother did not love her. Afraid to kiss Marina in front of her husband, Klavdia showed her affection for her daughter only on the sly. And Marina resented it so much that she became unable to allow her mother to kiss her at all. “I bristled like a little porcupine,” she says.
Looking back on it later, Marina said, “My mama was happy in only one respect. She loved her husband, and he loved her. It was just ‘Sashenka, Sashenka’ all the time. I think she loved him more than her children. She showed her weak side too much. My mama wasn’t smart. She let everyone trample on her. She didn’t dare stand up for her children. She wasn’t sensible in her love; she was like a blind mother hen. I don’t like weak people. I can’t bear it if a mother doesn’t stand up for her children.”
In accented, slightly ungrammatical English, she continues: “I am so sorry, but this makes me mad. I had reached a difficult age, an age at which children begin to judge. A child looks at her mother, hoping to find an ideal to make part of herself. If a child looks at her mother and doesn’t find an ideal, then it hurts her spirit for the rest of her life.”
Eyeing herself in the mirror, Marina says, “Everything I dislike in my looks comes from my mama.” She remembers lying awake at night clutching her nose to keep it from growing long like her mother’s. She was ashamed of her mother’s tall, angular build, even embarrassed to be seen with her on the street. And at home, in a turmoil of love and resentment, Marina behaved toward her mother with a sort of involuntary cruelty. In that household, with its multiple possibilities for treachery, she found her own torn-up emotions fitting all too neatly into the designs of Yevdokia and Musya, who used Marina as a “blind weapon” to wound her mother. Witnessing her mother’s suffering, Marina felt unspeakable love and sorrow. She was tormented by remorse over her behavior. And yet she was powerless to change it.
The conduct with her mother that had begun in Moldavia grew sharper in Leningrad, and in the highly charged atmosphere of that crowded apartment, Marina detected something new—she was her mother’s Achilles’s heel. Klavdia felt guilty for having her at all. This, and Alexander’s harsh treatment, imbued Marina with a conviction of her own abasement, a feeling that she was worse than other people, although she had no idea why. That conviction, and the memory of her mother’s many failures to stand up for her, ricochet through Marina’s recollections of her childhood like a cruel and obstreperous echo.
Only one member of the family understood. She was Maria Yakovlevna Arsentyeva, Alexander Medvedev’s aunt. A rotund and tiny woman, she had alert brown eyes and silver hair, gathered in a severe bun at the nape of the neck. She always wore an old-fashioned dark dress with a single piece of jewelry, a round ornament of Estonian silver, which hung on a chain around her neck. But Maria Yakovlevna’s real adornment, Marina thought, was her air of openness and kindness, which contrasted sharply with the mean and suspicious manner of her sister Yevdokia.
The children were overjoyed whenever Maria Yakovlevna came to the apartment. She took them on outings: to children’s concerts or the ballet; to the zoo and botanical gardens; to Pushkin’s Dubrovsky, staged to all appearances with real fire and smoke; and to the great museums of Leningrad. Together they saw the magnificent buildings of the czars, and she instilled in the children a love of the city that had been the capital of Imperial Russia. She taught them to venerate works of genius and to distinguish such works from the ugliness and mediocrity of the modern city.
Maria Yakovlevna had been born to the middle class, but because of her keen intelligence, she had been selected to attend the Smolny School for young ladies of noble birth in St. Petersburg, as Leningrad was called before the Revolution. The school was under the personal patronage of the czar. Maria Yakovlevna described to Marina the great occasions when Nicholas II—young and handsome he was, too—visited the school for lunch. She had been part of the choir that sang for him. Marina listened with fascination to stories about the glittering balls Maria Yakovlevna had attended and about the decorous way young ladies and gentlemen behaved—“so different from the behavior of young people today.”
On the heels of the Revolution, Maria Yakovlevna, a devout believer in the tenets of the Russian Orthodox Church, had met and married a man whose faith in the new religion of Communism was every bit as fervent as her own faith in God. He was a Communist in the best and most idealistic spirit of those Revolutionary times, and she, too, became an atheist and enthusiast of Communist power. Their marriage was a happy one, although only one of their four children survived. Maria Yakovlevna’s husband did well. He was an engineer and rose to become head of an institute in Leningrad. Then came the purges of 1936–1937. Like so many other true believers who had survived the early days, Maria Yakovlevna’s husband was swept away.
The arresting officers came under cover of night, but one of them took pity on Maria Yakovlevna. “Hide your treasures, little mother,” he whispered. She owed her life to his advice. She salvaged some bracelets of pearl and some antique jewelry of rubies and gold before being dispatched, with her little son, to cold and lonely exile in the southwest Urals. It was only by selling off the jewelry, piece by piece, that they were able to survive. Maria Yakovlevna never heard from her husband again. She knew only that he died, innocent of the charges against him, a victim of torture in a barren prison somewhere.
After the war, mother and son returned to Leningrad. As a victim of political misfortune, she could find work only as a janitor in a large factory on the Neva River. It was hard work for a lady of distinguished upbringing, but Maria Yakovlevna never complained. She had recovered her religious faith. “Life,” she would say, “gave me back my faith in God, and now no one will ever make an atheist of me again.”
Perhaps it was because her existence had been such a memorably difficult one that Maria Yakovlevna met life with such candor and openness. She had touched bottom already, and nothing now could make any difference. She had no fear of anyone, certainly not Alexander Medvedev. He had only to speak unkindly to the children for her to answer him in his own rough coin. And when he hit Marina in her presence or when she heard about his treatment of her from others, she scolded: “You cannot treat her that way, Sasha. Have you forgotten that you had a stepfather, too?”
She stood up for Klavdia, too. When Musya, who was very fat, asked mockingly: “What is there to love in her? She’s nothing but a bag of bones!” Maria Yakovle
vna retorted tartly that “elephants aren’t to everyone’s taste.” Sometimes Musya boasted, in one of her jealous asides, that she, unlike Kladvia, was perfectly able to get along without the love of a man. “Has it never occurred to you,” Maria Yakovlevna inquired, “that it’s not you who can get along without a man, but men who can get along without you?”
Maria Yakovlevna urged Marina to be more loving and thoughtful of her mother, and Marina promised to try. It meant a great deal to her to feel that she had been weighed in the esteem of so just a woman and found worthy. “She helped me,” Marina recalls, “because I knew that there was one person who loved me and trusted me and looked on me as a human being.” It was not to Klavdia, not even to her beloved grandmother in Archangel, but to Maria Yakovlevna that Marina believes she owes “nearly all the good” that is in her. “It was she,” Marina says, “who taught me to love truth and hate lies, to value people for their real worth and not for their money.”
Maria Yakovlevna also added to Marina’s growing distrust of politics and the “truths” of the Communist system. Everyone was told that Stalin loved the people. But how could anyone who loved the people, Marina wondered, allow them to live in the squalor that afflicted them all? Housing was wretched, there was not enough food, everyone was poor. These thoughts, half-thoughts really, were tucked away so unobtrusively at the back of Marina’s mind that she was almost unaware that she had them.
Suddenly, when Marina was nearly twelve, Stalin fell ill. Over the somber midnight airwaves came tidings that the mighty ruler of all the Russians had been struck down, just as an ordinary man might be, by a hemorrhage of the brain. From the moment of the announcement, the men and women Marina knew behaved as though they, too, were stricken. Many would neither eat nor drink. An entire people were frozen in a state of sorrowful suspense. Marina knew only one exception—Maria Yakovlevna. “Let him,” she announced, “die as quickly as possible.” And when news came that Stalin was indeed dead, Maria Yakovlevna remarked: “Thank God for delivering the people from Judas!” Marina could hardly believe her ears. Yet, as young as she was, she knew that, as always, Maria Yakovlevna was speaking the truth.
Marina and Lee Page 6