Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  Marina was attracted by foreigners. For one thing, she sometimes imagined that her father had been a foreigner. Besides, foreigners behaved with a politeness she liked much better than the rough and casual ways of Russian boys. In addition, she acquired a collection of Georgians and Armenians, lean, dark-eyed young men from the southern republics of the USSR whose Mediterranean looks gave them some of the exotic appeal of the foreigner and whose jealous and possessive ways she liked. Most of these young men were in Leningrad on vacation, and Marina and her friends often met them on the beach by the Petropavlovsk Fortress. Marina did not swim; she was too conscious of her “bony, graceless” figure to do that. Then they all went to the movies or a restaurant, where they made sure that Marina had enough to eat, since she was so emaciated that she aroused the protective instincts of everyone she met. That summer, the summer of 1958, she says, “I simply lived off chance acquaintances.”

  It was not a happy summer. Alexander had started locking her out of the apartment at midnight. With the rest of the family at their dacha in the country, there was no one at home to let her in, and she spent many a night nodding on the staircase outside the apartment. She often found herself in compromising situations. One night she, Lyuda, and a boyfriend of Lyuda’s were walking in the woods along the Neva River when they stumbled on an all-night drinking party of the kind Russians call a bardak (as distinguished from an “orgy,” at which intercourse is expected of the girls). Marina was shocked to see so many drunken forms on the ground. Inexperienced in matters of sex, she was frightened—and fascinated.

  Then one evening, a foreigner she had met—a diplomat from Afghanistan—lured her to his hotel room on the assumption that she was not a virgin and tried to make love to her. Again Marina was shocked. If a stranger from abroad could so easily mistake her for something she was not, what was she in danger of becoming?

  She began to feel guilty and ashamed of the life she was leading. After the first excitement had worn off, Marina realized she was bored by the young men she was seeing. She went out with them to avoid going home, and because they enabled her to eat. She had allowed a few of them to kiss her in return. But how, she wondered, did that differ from being a prostitute? It was a harsh word to use. But sexual standards of that time were strict. Most unmarried girls were either virgins or prostitutes; there was not much in between.

  The Medvedevs did not hesitate to call her names. Musya accused Marina of trying to ruin the family’s reputation. Alexander said: “Don’t come to me bringing a baby in your skirts. Go to Minsk. You’re in my way. I don’t want any prostitutes around me!” Having concluded that the law would not support him in an attempt to get rid of Marina on the grounds that her father had been an “enemy of the people,” Alexander may have been trying to drive her at least into the appearance of prostitution, since Leningrad by now had laws allowing the deportation of “parasites,” as those who did not have jobs, including prostitutes, were called. He also wrote to Marina’s relatives in Kharkov, implying the worst about her and begging them to come and get her. From Kharkov the word spread to her relatives in Minsk.

  It was the most degrading time of Marina’s life. She “went around in a fog,” trying not to think what she was doing, or what she could easily become. She tried to avoid Maria Yakovlevna, her stepfather’s aunt and the beloved counselor of her earlier years. She felt she “could no longer look Maria Yakovlevna in the eye” because she was “not so pure as before, not the person Maria Yakovlevna wanted” her to be. As for Maria Yakovlevna, she said to Marina: “Of course I don’t believe the slander they’re dredging up about you, but I can see you’re not what you were. But you’re a big girl now. Live your own life. I won’t interfere.” To Marina the words meant that even Maria Yakovlevna no longer cared about her. And if nobody cared, then she was past salvation, and there was no depth to which she did not deserve to sink.

  It was Lyuda’s mother who helped break the vicious circle. Sometimes Marina spent the night at Lyuda’s when she was locked out at home. One morning, Lyuda’s mother said: “Marina, I don’t want you here any more. I don’t want a girl of light conduct in my home. I don’t want to feed you, and I don’t want trouble with your family. Really, you ought to get a job.” Marina was stung, but she knew Lyuda’s mother was right. It was what she had been waiting for—someone who cared enough about her to crack down on her.

  It was August, summer was ending, and Marina knew that she had to find work. She was leaving a cheap cafeteria one day when she spotted a “Help Wanted” sign. “A princess like me,” she said to herself wryly, “won’t lose her crown if she washes a dish or two.” She went back and applied. The manager, a gray-haired man in his fifties, examined her documents and asked her a great many questions. Then, with a thoughtful look, he turned her hands over in his. They were soft, white hands, not the hands of a girl accustomed to heavy work. “My dear child,” he said, “this is no work for you. It’ll land you in the hospital in a day.” But he gave her a job. “You won’t earn much,” he said, “but at least you can eat for free.”

  Marina became a cleaner-up in the cafeteria of a large boys’ school. The boys were a rough lot, and they made no secret of their raucous delight at having a pretty new face around. But the supervisor, an officious woman, disliked Marina and soon lodged a formal complaint that she was too slow at scrubbing floors and ought to be fired. A special commission arrived to investigate, and Marina was transferred to a new school and a new cafeteria.

  Marina was happier there. She still had heavy work to do, but her new supervisor was a compassionate woman who treated Marina like a daughter. After the first snowfall, she presented Marina with a pair of mittens she had knitted specially for her.

  The academic headmaster, Robert Neiman, gave Marina something she needed even more—encouragement to believe in herself. He was a gifted, outgoing man of twenty-eight or twenty-nine with dark hair and swarthy skin that were tokens of mixed Russian, Polish, Jewish and gypsy ancestry. When he learned Marina’s story, Robert spent hour after hour with her, cajoling her, teasing her, reasoning with her, and above all, reassuring her, in an effort to induce her to go back to pharmacy school. “You’re young. You like your work now,” he told her. “But this is no life for you.”

  Instinctively, Marina agreed, but she was held back by fear—fear that she might be turned away, or else that she might be readmitted, only to fail once again. It was Robert who helped her surmount her fear. He told her that when she was ready to reapply, he would see to it that she got in. And it was Robert who made Marina feel that she could make something of herself if she would try. Finally, in December, after three months of work in cafeterias, Marina decided she was ready. With misgivings, and without a word to Robert, she went to the Pharmacy Institute and asked to be taken back. The school officials did not accept her right away. Instead, they gave her a job at the Central Pharmacy on the Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare of Leningrad. Marina knew she was being tested, but she was only too grateful to exchange the white coat of a cafeteria helper for the white coat of a pharmacy worker.

  Robert Neiman was not the only man who influenced Marina’s decision. That autumn she had started seeing a good deal of Oleg Tarussin, a blond, curly-headed philology student. Ambitious to enter the Soviet diplomatic service, Oleg had a reputation at the University of Leningrad as a hardworking young man of promise. Marina had lied to Oleg when they met. Implying that she already had her degree, she told him she was working in a pharmacy, and he was under that misconception when he took her to meet his parents.

  Oleg was the only son and, Marina suspected, the adopted son of Ekaterina Nikitichna Tarussina, a fine-boned woman with warm blue eyes, and a slender, retiring father. The mother, Marina gathered, worked in a factory or a hotel, and the father was a highly skilled plumber. Although the jobs they held were modest, they enjoyed exceptional good fortune: they had a one-room apartment for just the three of them, to say nothing of a dacha outside the city and, almos
t unheard of, a small private car—a Moskvich.

  Marina met the Tarussins when Oleg invited her to spend the November 7 holiday, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, at their apartment. From then on, she was a frequent visitor. She quickly came to love the Tarussins’ airy apartment with its cozy, overstuffed Victorian furnishings. This was as much a home to her as any place she could imagine. She even loved the sprawling, rundown old dwelling in which the apartment was situated, reachable, just as in a rabbit warren, only by a succession of inner courtyards and corridors. It was not long before it was comfortably taken for granted that she and Oleg would one day be man and wife. In a word, Marina became a daughter of the house. “They were,” she says, “too good to me. Better than I deserved.”

  But close as they all became, Marina still had not confessed that she was a cafeteria worker, not a pharmacy graduate. Her fear of losing Oleg was one reason she decided to go back to the Pharmacy Institute and actually earn her diploma. But in December, when Marina, unknown to her family, had started working in a pharmacy but had not yet been admitted to the institute, the truth came out. She fell ill and lay for three days on the Tarussins’ sofa, shaking with fever. Ekaterina Nikitichna went to the Medvedevs’ to let them know where Marina was staying. When she returned, she said, “My dear child, I know all about you. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  Marina acknowledged everything.

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” Ekaterina Nikitichna soothed her. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.” She promised to say nothing to Oleg.

  When Marina heard in January 1959 that she had been readmitted to the Pharmacy Institute, it was not to her home that she went with the news but to the Tarussins’. It was an occasion of family rejoicing. Marina asked Oleg to forgive her for not telling the truth. Oleg answered that she had been a “little goose” to think that he would break off with her because she worked in a cafeteria. He had known all along, it turned out, and had merely been waiting to hear it from her.

  Oleg depended on Marina and wanted to have her near him when he was studying, but he considered her “bourgeois.” He thought that she would never understand him or his world. His world was politics—already he was in trouble over a minor political incident at a student party—and he acted as if, compared with important things like politics, his personal life did not matter at all. He seldom took Marina on a date, and such money as he had he spent on books for himself, not on her. When they were with outsiders, he spoke of Marina as his “fiancée.” Yet he had never even told her that he loved her, much less asked her to marry him.

  The prospect of marrying Oleg and moving in with him and his family was an appealing one. “Where else,” Marina asks, “could I have found such a mother-in-law?” It was her feelings for Oleg that she doubted. She felt as if he had suffered an inner hurt of some kind and that she ought to take care of him. He was not the “knight from a bygone century” she was looking for. They gradually subsided into a sort of brother and sister relationship, with an occasional flare-up of romantic feeling on one side or the other. Marina did not marry Oleg, but remembering him now, she is aware of similarities between him and a man with the same nickname, “Alik,” whom she did marry two years later—Lee Harvey Oswald.

  By the end of January, Marina was back at the Pharmacy Institute, attending classes from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon and working at the pharmacy from four to eleven at night. It was a grueling schedule. But her colleagues at the pharmacy were what Marina calls “a wonderful collective. They made allowance for everybody’s difficulties.” At the institute, too, the teachers went out of their way to help. They were aware that Marina, unlike most of the other girls, had to work full time for a living.

  Now that Marina was both working and going to school, the disfavor of the Medvedevs was muted a bit. She was allowed to take meals with the family again, and when Alexander locked her out at night, his old mother, Yevdokia, got up and let her in. Marina knew that Yevdokia was a hypocrite and a grasping woman, who contributed her share to the mean and miserly atmosphere of the household, but she came to feel sorry for her. There was even a momentary break in the hostility between Marina and Alexander. Nine-year-old Tanya, his favorite child, was lying ill with a high fever, and after all his efforts to fill a prescription for her had failed, Alexander appealed to Marina for help. She immediately went to the pharmacy and made up the prescription herself. Later, she and Alexander were standing by Tanya’s bed. Suddenly, to her astonishment, she felt her stepfather’s hand on her shoulder. She heard him say, as if thinking aloud: “Our Marina is a good girl after all. Thank God she’s grown up at last!”

  Marina could not endure the touch of his hand. She ran away to the toilet and there gave way to tears. Why had he spoken to her like that? Could it be sex that he wanted? She was more frightened than if he had hit her.

  Yet Marina had sympathy for him, too. She suspected that Alexander had a greater share of inner refinement than he was able to show in the squalid atmosphere of that apartment. She sensed in him somewhere a kindred spirit, a man who longed to rise higher and was forever held down by his surroundings. She thought that he was a gentler, more chivalrous man than he would let her see and that he, like she, had dreams of a more gallant and courtly life. And it was an idea that would not go away. After Klavdia died, Alexander eventually took a mistress. He dressed up for her, took her to the best restaurants in town, and treated her with more respect than many men treat their wives. His mother and his sister taunted him for it, but Marina stood up for him. “We hated each other, he and I,” she says, “but I felt sorry for him, too. I knew that he needed someone.”

  In April Marina quit her job at the pharmacy. Boris Zakharovich or “Bizet,” the kindly teacher who had helped her the year before, came to her rescue once again and had her stipend restored so that she could devote all her time to studying for the approaching examinations. Midway through June she took the exams. In her appearance before the oral examiners, Marina was able to answer only two of four questions in chemistry, and she all but ran from the room after the ordeal, convinced that she had failed again. But to her astonishment she learned that she had passed everything but chemistry, and thanks to the compassion of one of the examiners, she was allowed to appear again. This time she was asked pointedly easy questions. The examiners even coached her. Marina protests a trifle indignantly that “I didn’t need all the help they tried to give me.” She passed and was awarded her diploma.

  The Tarussins held a banquet in her honor, but by this time Marina had a new boyfriend. The White Nights had descended upon Leningrad, the period from late May to July when the city is cloaked in midnight sun and, scorning sleep, young and old alike stroll night after night along the canals and embankments. One evening when she was supposed to be studying, Marina slipped out to a movie, and there she met a dark-haired stranger of about thirty who escorted her back to the trolley. Marina liked his sleek, self-satisfied good looks and his humorous and sophisticated conversation. He was Armenian, and his name was Eddie.

  Before long Oleg was forgotten, and Marina and Eddie were together constantly. Early in July, with her diploma miraculously in hand and the White Nights beginning to wane, they went on half a dozen all-night boat trips around the city, dancing and talking until six in the morning. Eddie informed Marina that she did not know how to kiss, and he proceeded to teach her. To measure her progress as a pupil, he gave her a mark with each kiss.

  Eddie was very generous, and when Marina’s eighteenth birthday came around on July 17, he took her to a restaurant, treated her to dinner, and presented her with a ring. Unlike Oleg, he made her feel cherished and desired. He lavished rubles upon her and presented her with flowers and even nylon underclothing from East Germany. Moreover, Eddie, a documentary film operator associated with one of the big Leningrad studios, had an apartment to himself for the summer.

  On evenings when they were alone in the apartment, Eddie and Marina danced to the musi
c of Lolita Thorez, an Argentine singer who was then the rage. Later, Eddie would play Scheherazade softly on the Victrola, turn down the lights, and spread pillows on the floor. He and Marina would lie there by the hour, watching shadows from the fire. Then he would kiss her, long kisses that made her head reel. Soon, Marina says, everything had happened between them except the final act of sexual intercourse. Even that, she would not have refused. It was Eddie who refused. Marina likes to believe that he was so experienced, so “delicately depraved,” that he simply preferred hours and hours of “petting” to the sexual act itself. But Eddie explained that she was too young, that she had too many troubles already, and he did not want to add to them.

  Marina trusted Eddie, even when she pieced together from an odd fact here and there that he was married and had a wife and small son at a dacha in the country. He made her feel wanted, and for the first time Marina lost her shyness and shame. She was in love, or at least infatuated, with Eddie. Yet at the same time she was disappointed in herself. She knew Eddie was not free to marry her, and she was afraid that she was capable of arousing only sexual desire, not love.

  Reality, meanwhile, was forcing her to make choices. As a final act of kindness, “Bizet” and the other teachers at the institute helped Marina get one of the best job assignments available to a member of the graduating class. She started in on the usual two-week trial period at the Central Pharmaceutical Warehouse but soon began to skip work. She wanted to spend all her time with Eddie. Finally, she told her superiors she did not want the job. It was a risky decision, for Alexander had given her an ultimatum. She could go to a hostel in Leningrad for which her job had qualified her or to her mother’s family in Minsk. It made no difference to him, just so long as she left his roof.