Marina had been saying goodbye to Leningrad for some time. But she could scarcely endure the thought. She loved the city—the whole miraculous expanse of it. She loved the wind and the falling snow, the smell of the trees, even the sound the trolleys made. Looking at the shadows of the willows in the Griboyedov Canal, at the maples and oak trees in the Summer Garden, at the sunset glowing over the Neva River, she wondered sorrowfully how she could bear to go. One evening when she and Eddie were out walking, she caught sight of the red sky behind the Nikolsky Cathedral, the spot where Czar Alexander II had been murdered. The tears started streaming down her cheeks. “Must I really leave all this?” she asked.
Eddie knew of her dilemma and decided to take a hand. He advised her to go to Minsk. “Marina,” he said, “I don’t want you to go. I want what is best for you. It’s your choice whether you go or stay. But I’m older than you, and I have more experience. I don’t take advantage of you, but other men may. You fall for men very easily. I’m afraid you’ll be ruined here. With all the temptation in this city and no one to control you, it may be too much for you.” It was this Eddie feared for Marina, and this Marina feared for herself.
A few nights later an episode occurred that crystallized her fears. She and another girl were on their way home from a movie when they were picked up by a pair of young men, one of whom turned out to be a well-known soccer player. They ended up in an apartment, and Marina’s friend went to one of the rooms with her young man, leaving Marina in the other room with the soccer star. Carefully closing the door he took off the bracelet he was wearing—a gold bracelet with a little watch inside that he had won in competition in Finland—dangled it in front of Marina, and said it would be hers if she would have intercourse with him. Marina refused, and in the struggle that followed, she hit him with all her might. The couple next door were roused by the scuffle and came to her rescue.
Marina left the apartment and went home alone on the trolley. She still looked so disheveled and upset that a man who was seated nearby asked if there was anything wrong. Did she need someone to see her home? Shaking with fright, Marina rose from her seat and moved to the other end of the trolley, certain the man was trying to take advantage of her, too. “Good God!” she wondered. “Is everyone beginning to take me for a prostitute?”
She arrived home at six or seven in the morning. Still trembling, she packed everything she owned in a suitcase and sat down to await Alexander’s return from the midnight shift. When he came in, she told him: “Papa, I’m going away. But I need ten more rubles to get to Minsk.” Without a word he gave her the money. The rest of the family was at the dacha in the country, and Marina left without saying goodbye to any of them, not even her beloved Petya and Tanya.
She spent the day at the Tarussins’ with Oleg’s mother. She refused to accept any money or let Ekaterina Nikitichna come to the station to see her off. Oleg’s mother would not let her leave, however, without a stack of sandwiches, a whole chicken, cheese, chocolate, and a jar of jam—enough food to keep her going for a fortnight.
Throughout the three-day train trip to Minsk, Marina sat by herself. Only too happy to talk to strangers as a rule, she could not bear to speak to anybody now. She was filled with sorrow at leaving Leningrad. Whatever the future might hold, she was sure that happiness would be no part of it. Not one of her relatives in Minsk even knew that she was on her way.
— 5 —
Meeting in Minsk
It was early August 1959 when Marina arrived in Minsk, at two o’clock in the morning, with sixty kopeks (sixty cents) in her pocket. The railway station was shrouded in darkness, the trolley stop dark and deserted. Fortunately, a pleasant-looking young man—a violinist, it turned out—came to the rescue by lending Marina a few rubles and carrying a suitcase straight to the apartment building where her uncle Vanya and aunt Musya Berlov lived.
Although she was completely unexpected, Musya, her mother’s youngest sister, welcomed Marina joyfully. But Marina detected misgivings—and soon found out why. Musya explained that Alexander had written to Marina’s aunt in Kharkov the year before, complaining of her late-night hours and suggesting that she had become a prostitute. Clearly, Marina could not expect much of a welcome in Minsk.
Musya tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll telephone Uncle Ilya tomorrow and see how the land lies.” If Marina was to stay in Minsk, it was Ilya, her mother’s eldest brother, who would have to take her in. Musya and Vanya had four children and lived in a small apartment; Ilya and his wife Valya possessed a three-room apartment and had no children.
Musya telephoned Ilya the next day and received an ungracious response. Why had Marina arrived “like snow off the roof,” without letting anybody know? “It was you she came to,” he said to Musya. “You look out for her.”
Reluctantly, Ilya invited them to tea, and on a hot midsummer Sunday, Marina, dressed as demurely as she knew how, went with her aunt Musya to his apartment. She received a chilly reception. She had no job, and her uncle told her, without one she would be unable to obtain a residence permit. When Musya asked Ilya to help, he replied: “Let her do it herself.”
Musya rose, her eyes brimming with tears. “Come on, Marina. It’s no use our staying here!”
Marina spent the next two or three weeks with Musya and Vanya. They were a loving pair, loving of one another and of their niece. Marina would happily have stayed on, but August was coming to a close and their children were due back from camp. Once again Ilya was approached. “Tell her to come on over,” he said with resignation.
Ilya’s reluctance was understandable. Only the very privileged had as much space as he did, but until recently he had been forced to share it. Tatyana Prusakova, Marina’s grandmother, had lived with him and Valya until her death the year before, and his sister Lyuba and her husband had only just moved out. Ilya was still savoring his privacy, and he had no desire to be overrun by another relative, above all not a marriageable girl who might soon acquire a husband and, with a new family of her own, gain the right to live with him indefinitely.
Ilya also had his official position to consider. Not only had he risen to become a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, he was also a lieutenant colonel and head of the Timber Administration of the Belorussian Republic’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, known by its initials as the MVD. He was an engineer, and Marina believes that he supervised the use of convict labor in the timber industry of the area. He held a sensitive post, therefore, although not nearly as sensitive as if he worked in the secret police ministry, the KGB. But Ilya had to be careful, even if it meant closing his heart to a relative in need.
The neighborhood in which Ilya and Valya lived was also charged with political vibrations. Their apartment building was set aside specially for high officials. The Suvorov Military Academy was just across the street. Also across the street was a wooden dwelling with a stockade that had once belonged to Marshal Timoshenko, one of Russia’s great heroes of World War II, and had just been taken over by Kirill Mazurov, head of the Belorussian Communist Party. It was an area that must have been carefully watched, and if Marina was the kind of girl her stepfather said she was, she could jeopardize the career to which Ilya had dedicated his life.
Marina had doubts of her own about going to live with the Prusakovs. She knew that she was unwanted. Moreover, she was fearful they would clip her wings and force her to live “like a nun.” Her fears were justified, at least at first. Life at Valya and Ilya’s was “just like a corrective labor colony.” One evening when two young men who happened to be her only friends in Minsk dropped by to take her out, Ilya exploded, “You’re not to give people your address. I don’t want your friends coming here.” Like many other members of the Soviet elite, he was afraid of losing his privileges if outsiders saw the way he lived.
Marina found Minsk a polite enough place, but she was lonely and so homesick that night after night she went to the terminal to wave off the 9:30 bus for Leningrad. One
night when Ilya was out of town, Valya woke to a stirring in the living room, where Marina was supposed to be asleep. She found her niece in tears, packing to go back.
Valya sat down, and the two had a long talk. Marina told her of the way she had been treated by her stepfather, and Valya wept. “My poor child,” she said. “I want you to feel this is your home. We never had children. We love you like our own. You must understand Uncle Ilya. He loves you and worries about you. But he’s a man. He can’t show how he feels.” For the first time in her life, Marina began to feel that perhaps she was wanted after all, perhaps she was not “in the way.”
Ilya was still stern and aloof, but for Valya having a niece in the house was the next best thing to having a daughter of her own. Marina trusted her aunt and confided in her as she had in no one before. She even asked Valya the story of her father and mother. Who had her father been? Valya could not help. She had tried to pry the story from Ilya, but he had declined to tell her anything.
When Marina set out to obtain a residence permit to remain in Minsk, she had not only a rigorous set of housing regulations to contend with but the requirement that she show proof that she already had a job. Here she came up against the rock-ribbed character of her Uncle Ilya. He was what Russians call poryadochny, a person who prefers to go through regular channels or do without rather than use his official position to seek privilege, even so minuscule a one, in his case, as obtaining firewood. But he finally unbent a little for Marina. He took what was for him the precedent-shattering step of having a spravka, or job permit, made up at the MVD. Armed with Ilya’s document and a written statement from the manager of the apartment building that her uncle had room for her, Marina went to the city and district militia headquarters to fill out countless questionnaires. After a suspenseful wait of two weeks, she received a permit to reside at her uncle’s address, Apartment 20, No. 38–42 Kalinin Street. Without knowing it, Marina had vaulted from the middle to the upper class.
Her next task was to find a job. She had left Leningrad without the proper documents from the Pharmacy Institute, and even though trained pharmacists were in great demand in Minsk, she could not be hired. Finally, luck came to her rescue, and through a friend of her Aunt Lyuba’s, she was given a job at the Third Clinical Hospital. She became one of four pharmaceutical assistants, all girls, who filled prescriptions for doctors and nurses in the hospital.
Marina loved the work. She loved mixing powders and pills, and she enjoyed the easygoing spirit of the place. She especially liked the head of the pharmacy, Evgenia, a radiant, handsome, magnificently garbed woman, whose special genius lay in wheedling and politicking scarce supplies out of warehouses all over town. Evgenia was lenient in the extreme, and even Marina’s habitual lateness failed to get her in trouble. If she fell behind in her work, the other girls pitched in to help her catch up.
Marina wanted to be liked by her coworkers, but most of all she wanted their attention. They might all be seated at a table, filling prescriptions, and Marina would entertain them by recounting some of her escapades in Leningrad, usually those that involved smoking, wearing slacks, and going to restaurants with men—things that “nice girls” did not do. Her coworkers decided that she was “fast,” and that she was judging them as provincial. Marina did think they were provincial, and she was at war, too, with the hypocritical “brother’s keeper” mentality that she found on every side. But before long she realized that the other girls considered her a snob. “Look,” she said. “I’m just homesick. That’s why I talk about Leningrad.” Nevertheless, as Marina describes it, not without a certain pride, her colleagues “looked on me, ironically, askance, like a creature from another planet. We had different interests and different ideals. We inhabited different worlds.” Her reaction to the suggestion that she join the Komsomol was typical. In theory, at least, the Komsomol was the flower of the Soviet younger generation. But Marina doubted that the description fitted her, and joining would not alter that fact. She had learned to hate the hypocrisy of her elders. It was no better among the young. “I thought ‘Komsomol’ ought to mean the ‘best,’ ” she says. “I knew I wasn’t the ‘best,’ and someone just sticking a label on me wouldn’t make me so.”
Eventually, Marina joined, but only after pressure from her peers and a good deal of passive resistance. As a first step, she had to memorize the Komsomol Charter and answer a number of questions about the organization, Soviet policies, and herself. Marina got by on the coaching of friends. Then at a solemn meeting staged in the headquarters of the Belorussian Communist Party Central Committee, she had to answer questions put to her by the “big wheels” of the Belorussian Komsomol. The hardest question was the last: Why did she want to join? Marina, like everyone, said that she “wanted to be in the front rank of Soviet Youth.” The truth was that it would have been awkward to refuse.
The formalities over, she was told to fill out a questionnaire and return a week later, bringing a photograph for her membership card. Marina filled out the questionnaire but forgot the photograph. Rather, she put it off from week to week and as a result never received a membership card. But she paid the monthly dues of thirty kopeks (thirty cents), and from time to time put in an appearance at meetings of the Komsomol aktiv, or cell, of the hospital. The meeting were usually devoted to disciplinary matters or boring lectures on foreign affairs. Occasionally, there were picnics or dances, but Marina considered them dull and avoided them whenever she could.
As the months went by, Marina made many friends. Because of them, and because of her uncle and aunt, it was the happiest time of her life. She soon had an assortment of admirers, one of them a good-looking young man by the name of Sasha Peskaryov. A medical student, Sasha came from what was considered a “good family,” and Ilya made him an exception to the rule that his niece was not to bring young men to the house. Sasha put Marina on a pedestal, where she felt distinctly out of place. “He thought I was an angel,” she recalls. To cool his ardor she told him that she had a lover and a child back in Leningrad, but Sasha assured her that he would cheerfully marry her anyway. He was Marina’s faithful standby, the doormat she trampled on and broke dates with whenever someone more interesting came along.
Marina had met Misha Smolsky on one of her summer visits to Minsk years before, and it was through him that she was introduced to a new group of friends. Misha was not Russian at all, but half-Tartar and half-Pole, a tall, heavy-set, red-haired young man who was the scion of a distinguished father and grandfather both and somewhat oppressed by his heritage lest he fail to match their achievements. He was a flashy dresser, and one day he stopped by the pharmacy to pick up Marina wearing a hip-length overcoat, a pair of pointed English shoes, and a towering karakul cap. He was smoking a pipe, and as he led Marina off, he draped his arm casually over her shoulder as if he had proprietary rights. The other girls were horrified and were bristling with questions the next day. “Are you his mistress?” one of them asked.
Misha was the presiding genius of a circle of young people who were both unconventional and irreverent toward the values of their elders. And yet they were also well educated and took a serious interest in music and literature. When Dr. Zhivago became the scandal of the day because the author, Boris Pasternak, was awarded a Nobel Prize for the book that had been forbidden in Russia, one of the members of Misha’s group got hold of a Russian-language edition printed in Paris, and each patiently waited his turn to read it.
The group’s “all for one, one for all” camaraderie was rather like the spirit of the characters in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the novelist most of them preferred over all others at that time. His books were just then beginning to appear in superlative Russian translation, and Hemingway’s staccato style had an enormous appeal compared with the wooden dialogue and the long-winded, moralistic tales of Soviet writers.
Marina’s favorite novel, as it happened, was not by Hemingway but was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The “tomorrow we
die” outlook of Remarque’s characters, the antiwar spirit, the author’s sympathy for the common soldier whose fate is determined by the forces of history and the self-deluded leaders above him all struck a sympathetic chord among millions of Soviet young people. But Marina has another explanation for the rage that swept the Soviet Union for Remarque and Hemingway. The level of sexual morality among her contemporaries was “not very high,” she says, and in the novels of these writers they found the moral sanction they were seeking. Hemingway and Remarque gave sex an explicit quality the younger generation was longing for and pointed the way toward reconciling reality with romance.
Since foreign writers and foreign ways meant so much to them, and since all of them knew foreign languages, it was hardly surprising that foreign words crept into the slang of Misha Smolsky and his friends, words like “Broadway” for the main street of Minsk, “pad” for Misha’s family’s apartment, and “do” or “carouse” for an ordinary evening get-together. At these gatherings of the group, the boys would exchange tidbits of news from abroad that they had gleaned from the Voice of America or the BBC. The girls would huddle over a French fashion magazine, and they would dance to the music of Elvis, Eartha Kitt, or Louis Armstrong. “A thing had only to be forbidden,” Marina recalls, “for us to get hold of it somehow.”
Her favorite escort among the young men in the group was Leonid. Lonya was an architect, and to Marina, everything about him was darkly appealing, from his dark lashes and hair to his black eyes and swarthy skin. Lonya was a Jew—once again Marina had chosen an outsider. As the winter of 1960 faded into spring, she was often in Lonya’s company, and in June he asked her to live with him. Marina was horrified. When a man and a woman wanted to live together, she pointed out in an injured tone, they usually talked about getting married. Lonya could not consider it. He was poor. He did not have an apartment. And he had thought Marina was above such bourgeois ideas. They saw less of one another after that. But the attraction did not wear off.
Marina and Lee Page 10