Marina and Lee
Page 7
Marina was growing up a skeptic and a rebel. At school she looked on political subjects with distaste. She preferred history and literature. She gobbled up stories by the great Russian writers—Gogol, Chekhov, and Pushkin. And she was engaged, as the innocently flirtatious Princess Mary, in an imaginary love affair with Pechorin, the fatalistic and self-pitying central figure of Mikhail Lermontov’s story, A Hero of Our Time. Vengeful and cold, Pechorin is forever spinning webs of intrigue that destroy all those whose lives touch his own. As the ideal man of her imagination, Pechorin was to cast a very long shadow over Marina’s future.1
At home, Marina read Russian translations of Jack London, Mark Twain, and Thomas Hardy, and she often forgot her homework. In spite of her lack of preparation and her mischievous behavior in class, she got good marks in school. The teachers viewed her as a wayward prodigy. And when the girls’ school she attended became coeducational, the boys quickly found a nickname for her. It was “Spichka” or “Matchstick,” first, because she was thin and second, because she would flare up in an explosion of words whenever anyone addressed her.
Marina had an especially close friend at school, Nina Samilyuk, a girl with lucent hazel eyes and hair the color of a sheaf of wheat. Nina had no father and no idea who her father might have been. She was ashamed of her own illegitimacy and of her mother’s poor reputation. Marina believed that her situation was not like Nina’s since she had both a stepfather and a real father who had died “at the front.” Yet it was plain to her all the same that she and Nina had common ground. Both of them were “different.”
In the summer of 1954, the Medvedevs moved from their apartment on the Obvodny Canal to a large new building on the outskirts of Leningrad. The authorities were opening their assault on the housing shortage by repairing the decrepit buildings in the heart of town, and accordingly, the occupants were emptied, like objects from a cornucopia, into a new, four-story apartment complex called Sosnovaya Polyana. Two years later the repair of the old building was completed, and its former residents were allowed a choice of moving back or remaining at Sosnovaya Polyana. The Medvedevs returned to the Obvodny Canal. But after the “repair” and “redecoration,” Marina recalls, the pipes leaked worse, the floors sloped more, and the place was darker than before.
During this time, Marina’s mother became seriously ill. Klavdia had always been frail, and for a woman with three young children and uncertain health, her existence was a taxing one. She was up every morning by 7:30 A.M. and left almost immediately for work. After a ten-hour day, she went shopping every evening, never arrived home before seven, then had to cook supper for her husband and children. She was always limp and worn out by ten, ready to drop into bed.
When Marina was about twelve, Klavdia began coming home at night white with exhaustion. Alexander would turn down the sheets of their bed and beg her to lie down. But fearful of what her mother-in-law might say, Klavdia at first would demur. Her husband refused to take no for an answer and listened to the taunts of Musya and his mother as he cooked supper. He treated his wife, as always, with the utmost tenderness. But as time went by, Klavdia started running a temperature of 99 or 100 degrees nearly every day, and finally became too weak to climb out of bed.
Klavdia had been ill for two years when Marina completed the seventh grade. It was the end of her compulsory schooling, and Klavdia hoped that her eldest and cleverest child would finish the full ten-year course that comprises a Soviet high school education. Attracted by drawing and the arts, Marina planned to study fashion design, which would require the ten-year diploma. But one afternoon in the early summer of 1955, she came home, perched on her mother’s bed, and suggested another idea. A friend at school, Nina Samilyuk, was about to take examinations for pharmacy school, and Marina wanted to try, too. All her life, she told her mother, she had admired the white coats pharmacists wore and the spotless cleanliness of apothecary shops. To Marina’s surprise, her mother was enthusiastic.
Uncertain of her own health, Klavdia was evidently anxious that her daughter be able to stand alone. She got up from her bed and accompanied Marina to school to obtain the documents she would need for her examinations. The school officials tried to dissuade them. Too many of the more promising boys and girls were leaving for work or vocational schools after the seventh grade, they grumbled. If this kept up, there would soon be hardly any of the better students left to go on to university. But Klavdia and Marina had their way.
Marina entered the examination with a light heart and a total absence of preparation. If she failed, she said to herself, she could always go back to school. She was entering the competition, after all, mainly to keep her friend Nina company. In the end, she passed with 23 of 25 possible points. The decision was made for her. She was going to pharmacy school. Nina, who had inspired the decision, failed. She went to work in a chocolate factory and eventually studied to be a nurse.
Marina had another close friend, Tamara Kumilan, who lived with her aunt and uncle in the apartment on the Obvodny Canal. One cold afternoon in November of 1956, when Marina was in her second year at pharmacy school, she and Tamara went to the public baths, as they did every week. They shivered a little as they hurried home, for a wintry wind was blowing along the canals and bleak-looking patches of snow dappled the ground. Rather shyly, Tamara opened up an unexpected topic. Marina’s mother had been talking with Tamara’s aunt about the atmosphere at the Medvedevs’ apartment. She was distressed by the way Alexander’s mother and sister were treating Marina. And all, Klavdia said, because Marina was illegitimate. “Let’s be sisters,” Tamara said. “You have no one. And neither do I.”
Marina was shocked. She had always believed that her father died at the front during World War II. She dared not ask any questions, and Tamara, anxious not to wound, spoke only allusively, in quick, shorn-off sentences, as she repeated Klavdia’s story. From her Marina learned virtually all she has ever found out about her father. He had been an engineer, and in the course of his work, he had drawn up a blueprint for a bridge or some other public project. In a mysterious effort to frame him, someone—nobody knew exactly who—tampered with the calculations on the blueprint and rendered it defective. He had been blamed, of course, and arrested as an “enemy of the people.” And he had vanished forever.
Marina refrained from asking anyone at home about Tamara’s revelation. The truth of it was only too plain. Now that she had the key, the pieces of the puzzle fit together. At no time in her life had Marina felt equal to Petya and Tanya. Now she understood Alexander’s cruelty, the taunts of his mother and Musya, the guilt her own mother seemed to feel in loving her. Under the circumstances by which she had come into being, she was of less value than other people.2
From the moment of her discovery, Marina spent a good deal of time wondering who her father might have been. What had happened between her mother and him? It was of crucial importance to her that their relationship had been a serious one. If it were only a chance affair, a seduction, then how could the child conceived in it be of any worth? She consoled herself with the thought that her father might have been a foreigner, a general, or somebody else of importance who had been carried off as “an enemy of the people.” She even dared hope that her mother and he had actually been married, and that after his arrest Klavdia, fearful that she, too, might be arrested, had managed to destroy the marriage document and conceal her identity.
Marina looked to her stepfather for proof that her birth had not been a shameful accident. He treated her badly, but unlike his mother and sister, he never once reproached Klavdia for anything in her life before she met and married him. To Marina, that seemed to indicate that her mother and father had been in love. Finally, she cast back for reassurance to her upright old grandmother in Archangel. Surely so straitlaced a lady would not have forgiven her daughter and consented to bring up a child who was merely the result of a short-lived attraction. Yet one thought always returned to haunt Marina. From the beginning, no one had wanted her.
Marina did not tell Klavdia that she had discovered the secret of her illegitimacy. But just as she had turned against her mother years before on learning that Alexander was not her real father, so she now found new reason to hate Klavdia. She could not even sympathize with her mother’s illness, and although her feelings were in guilty turmoil, she could neither conceal her hardened attitude nor change it. While the fact of Marina’s illegitimacy was never made explicit between them, Marina believes her mother saw the change in her and realized the secret was out.
During Klavdia’s long illness, Alexander was more difficult to get along with than ever. A good deal of the time he had his lips pressed tightly together, and he refused to speak to anyone at all. And he drank. Sometimes he came home from work silent and morose, only to slip into the toilet, take a nip of vodka, and come out singing. Sometimes he appeared at the front door with a bottle in his hand. Klavdia or Yevdokia would quickly snatch it away and hide it. Often Klavdia gave it back, but if she did not, he would look for it himself, or jog little Tanya on his knee, kiss her, and ask in a whisper where it was hidden. Such scenes occurred every week. But even when Alexander was drunk, he did not change toward Marina—“I made him mad any time.”
But for his drinking the family would not have been poor. Alexander gave his earnings to Klavdia every payday. Later, he would have second thoughts and beg to have some of it back for vodka. Klavdia invariably obliged, and the family had to live the second half of each month on what it could manage to borrow. Marina resented her stepfather for “drinking up” the rubles he and her mother worked so hard to earn.
Ill as she was, Klavdia became pregnant once more in the spring of 1956, and that summer she had an abortion. Again, Marina was sorry for her, yet angry as well. “Why,” she asked, in a question that was by now a refrain, “does she live an immoral life and then complain?” She was sure the abortion was a judgment of her mother’s relationship with Alexander.
After the abortion, Klavdia went to the city of Kharkov, in the Ukraine, to spend her vacation with her sister Polina. But her health failed to improve. When she returned to Leningrad, she was sent to the Academy of Military Medicine and spent the fall and early winter there. She had a series of operations, the latest treatments, the most promising new drugs—the best care the city could provide. But when she finally came home, she could get out of bed only with her husband at her elbow to support her.
Marina knew her mother was dying, and so acutely painful were her emotions that she tried to pretend she was someone else, living in some other time. She lived as far away from home as her imagination could carry her. She began doing poorly in her heavy load of courses at pharmacy school, and she endured the perpetual cruelty of her step-grandmother and step-aunt. One day Yevdokia invited a radiant and handsome woman to the apartment. They sat together in the one room they all had to share, with Klavdia lying ill on the bed. The moment Alexander came home and saw the caller, he held a whispered conference with his wife and quickly left the apartment. He stayed away for two hours. When he returned, the strange lady had gone. Tears were rolling down Klavdia’s cheeks. Alexander ordered the children to leave the room while he tried to comfort their mother.
Yevdokia later told Marina who the strange lady was. She was Anna, a woman Alexander had courted before he married Klavdia, and Yevdokia had invited her to call with no other thought than to let Alexander see with his own eyes the contrast between the blooming and well-dressed visitor and the failing creature he had married. Marina overheard Yevdokia tell her son: “You ought to have married her and not that frivolous woman who had a child and is sick all the time.”
Klavdia had been home only a fortnight when she started running a high fever. At night she moaned pitifully so that none of the others could sleep, and it was decided that she would have to go back to the hospital. Exhausted from lack of sleep and from the very odor of illness, Marina made a remark she has never been able to extinguish from her memory. “First to the hospital,” she announced to her mother, “and then the cemetery!” Marina was thinking of her mother’s trip to the hospital for an abortion the year before. Now it would be her punishment to die.
Klavdia was taken to a hospital in Leningrad on what is called the “Vyborg Side,” an island on the opposite bank of the Neva River from the Obvodny Canal. Because of the city’s web of bridges, rivers, and canals, the journey to the hospital was circuitous, requiring several bus and trolley changes and the better part of an hour. Marina dreaded the long, cold pilgrimages to the hospital, but she tried to visit her mother as often as she could. During her first visit, Klavdia reminded her daughter of what she had said. “It made me very sad,” Klavdia told her. “Probably I will go from here to the cemetery. Some day you’ll understand that life is complicated. All your life you’ll remember your sad mama.” In tears Marina sat on her mother’s bed and protested that she did not want her to die.
On later visits Marina tried her best to be cheerful. Klavdia laughed and smiled. She promised she would be home soon and they would all be happy again. But behind her effort at gaiety, Marina could see only the sorrow and pain. She was unable to hold back her tears. “Don’t cry, Marisha,” her mother said to comfort her. “Everything will be all right.” But one day a nurse drew Marina aside. “Let’s talk like grown-ups,” she said. “Get hold of yourself. You’re a big girl now. Your mama has less than a month to live.” The name of the illness was cancer.
Even now, the merciless women at home kept up their persecution. Yevdokia and Musya urged Alexander to seek the company of other women. Alexander refused. One day, however, Musya asked Marina to inform her mother, untruthfully, that Alexander was seeing another woman. Marina, to her lasting sorrow, complied. To this day she remembers her mother’s wistful reply: “He is not the only man who has been capable of loving me.”
On April 8, 1957, Klavdia died. Marina was to have gone to the hospital the day before. But it was rainy and cold. She had only thin shoes, her clothes were not warm enough to withstand the wind, and she did not have the heart for the trip. The following day she arrived home from school to find Petya sitting by the door with tears streaming down his cheeks. To Marina’s questioning look, he said simply: “Mama’s dead.” Fifteen-year-old Marina gathered together the clothing for her mother’s burial and accompanied her stepfather to the hospital.
Later, an uncle told Marina that Klavdia’s last words were of her. “I don’t want to die,” she had said. “I have little children at home. Where is Marina? Where is Marina? I have to see her. I have something to say to her.” Then she lost consciousness and died. Marina believes that her mother intended to tell her who her father had been.
Klavdia’s mother, Tatyana Yakovlevna, the magnificent old matriarch who had given Marina her first home, came to Leningrad all the way from Minsk, where she now was living, for the burial. It was she who insisted upon the two-hour funeral service in the Russian Orthodox Church. After the service, Musya was taken by a sudden and belated seizure of remorse. Beside the open coffin she fell to her knees and wailed: “Forgive me, Klava! Forgive me!” Up marched the redoubtable Maria Yakovlevna. She drew Musya away from the coffin, admonishing her family and quite audibly to everyone, “This is no place to put on an act. You ought to have thought of it before.”
Yevdokia did not attend the service. She lay moaning in bed at home, summoned a doctor, and complained of how ill she was feeling herself. She refused Alexander the thing he wanted most—to escort his wife’s body home and hold the final leave taking there.
She refused even to allow the coffin to be carried upstairs for a momentary gesture of farewell.
It was Maria Yakovlevna who uttered the final judgment on them all. To her sister, Yevdokia, she said with majestic scorn: “It was you who killed Klavdia, not the cancer. You gave her not a life, but a hell. A healthy person couldn’t have stood it, much less a sick one. You had no heart.” Before all of them, this veteran of Stalin’s wrath pronounced an epitaph for the woman who had died at the age of thirty-nine. “Klava,” she said, “was a golden human being. I could not have lived with you a single hour.”
— 4 —
Farewell to Leningrad
With Klavdia, the single bond between them, gone, relations between Marina and her stepfather took an immediate turn for the worse. It was the day after her mother’s funeral, she recalls, that Alexander said: “And when will you be taking yourself out of here?”
Stunned, Marina ran from the apartment and spent the rest of the day pacing the wintry canals near home. She had no other thought but: “Mama’s gone. He can do as he likes with me now.” This thought, this fear, grew louder and louder until it became a sort of ringing in her head like the insistent clanging of a bell. Dazed by the sound, Marina looked up and was startled to see a streetcar screaming to a stop in front of her. A volley of profanity by the driver brought her to her senses. Crossing the street like a sleepwalker, she had narrowly escaped being hit by a passing trolley.
Marina spent many hours walking along the canals as winter gave way to spring that year and the bare branches became filigreed with the first shoots of green. Rather than go home after school, she would make her way into one of the countless little parks with which the city is studded to sit by herself on a bench. She thought mostly of her mother, who now seemed to her an injured and blameless being, a Christian figure of forbearance. Marina could see her mother only through a blur or remorse. She felt that it was she who had killed Klavdia by her lack of love and, at last, by those searing words: “First to the hospital, then to the cemetery!” Marina could not forgive herself. Often she entered the flickering half-darkness of the Nikolsky Cathedral, lit a candle, and prayed.