Everybody at the American embassy, though, helped me to feel better. Robert and I went there as soon as I got my visa and they all seemed so happy that I was going to Robert’s country and would some day be an American citizen. Everybody in the embassy knew there are two kinds of marriages between Russian woman and American man. One is when Russian woman’s aim is to get everything she can from the American man because of the hard life, and the other one is for love. Everybody knew Robert’s and my marriage was a real love.
Now we had to decide whether Robert would come with me to America. This was a very serious decision, for Robert recently had become chief of the NBC bureau in Moscow and broadcast over the radio. Robert said if I am afraid he will come with me, but I said absolutely not, for I understood how
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important this new job was for him. I never thought until now how brave I was to come here alone.
Freddy Rhinehardt, the first secretary of the embassy, made out an affidavit for me for, of course, when I renounced my Russian citizenship I had to give up my passport. It was a long paper with my name and a photograph and a description of me, and it had a big, red stamp on it and was rolled and tied with a red ribbon; it was really a very beautiful document.
I first went from Moscow to Vladivostok, which took nineteen days as our train had to leave the main tracks frequently to let pass trains with troops going to the front. At Vladivostok I caught a small freighter for Japan, then from Japan I went to Shanghai, and from Shanghai I sailed for San Francisco, and from San Francisco, as I told you in the very beginning, to New York and the three-room apartment on Twenty-first Street.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tat’iana Fesenko, War-Scorched Kiev
Please see note to the previous Fesenko entry.
It’s Sunday morning and father is at his favorite pastime, fiddling with the radio trying to get the world news. “War,” he says. “Today German airplanes bombed Post Volynskii [a major railroad center west of Kiev]. Molotov1 will address the nation at noon.”
It is evening. As usual, Shura [diminutive of Aleksandr or Aleksandra] is here in the orange glow of our cozy living-room lamp. He and father are talking.
“It’s not as simple as you think, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, and it’s too early to be gleeful. Russia is a tough nut to crack, especially since we’ve been preparing for war all these years.”
“Pavel Pavlovich, I can’t believe that the moment has finally come when we’ll be rid of our beloved and wise leader with all his faithful shock workers and devoted communists. The German troops which went through Europe in a flash will do the same against the red commanders into whose skulls, Tania, you can’t even pound ten English phrases, despite all your enthusiasm. Then Russia without the Soviets will again become our great and beautiful motherland.”
Shura’s serious eyes shone with such joy that one wanted to believe him. But I did not. He was forty and he knew another Russia. He remembered and yearned for it. But we, contemporaries of the Great October Revolution, had only one motherland: the motherland of the Soviet Union, of brave aviators, gigantic construction projects, a motherland with secure borders, with the invincible Red Army, with the romance of the distant Civil War. Most of us
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were convinced, as the song said, that “No one in the world// Can love or laugh like us.”
Even those like myself who had seen the villages of the Ukraine starving to death in ‘33; who had not slept nights on end expecting the common fate of the intelligentsia, a “visit” from the NKVD during Ezhov’s Terror, even we wanted to believe in a happy future. We tried to view everything that was dark, difficult and often hypocritical as inevitable “growing pains” which had to be lived through. I loved my country, though I did not like many things about it. And now my heart contracted with heavy foreboding.
How sad all the days had become. Every morning brought news of losses. The familiar and beloved world was collapsing. Faith, nurtured over many years, was collapsing. The “secure borders” were violated on the very first day. The “invincible Red Army” surrendered city after city, and a horrible question beat at one’s brain: was it all a lie? We denied ourselves everything, our standard of living was much lower than that of Europe, but we were a land of giants. Courageous aviators soared in our skies, shocking the world with their daring records. The defensive might of our enormous country had grown day by day. Yet, now the arches of the Dnieper hydroelectric dam had fallen, dynamited by the retreating Soviet army. The dead, black smoke stacks of the destroyed plants at Kramatorsk stood ominously. The once aggressive “little falcon” warplanes had become shapeless, burnt-out hulks on their bomb-pitted aerodromes. With a heavy and confident tread the German armies swept across the endless Ukrainian plains, squeezing the Soviet troops, cutting off the retreating forces, seizing cities. The youth of the Soviet Union went to the front but was unable to stop the enemy onslaught.
On the very next day after the declaration of war Lenia [diminutive of Leonid], my sweet and gentle friend from graduate school, left for the front. It seemed only yesterday that he sat by my hospital bed, shyly fingering a large box of my favorite rum cherries in chocolate which the doctor had strictly forbidden after my operation. He was planning his summer vacation then. Now he was far away, somewhere out there, as a military interpreter.
Gone into an armor unit was Kolia, a blue-eyed, fun-loving engineer, my first love. My girlhood, my first secrets from mother, the first dreams of my own nest were all tied to him. Since that time the lilacs had bloomed many times in the gardens of Kiev but carefully hidden in my desk was a withered branch—the first awkward gift from an infatuated boyfriend. And now, as he kissed my tear-filled eyes, I said farewell to my carefree youth, to my familiar and beloved world.
Then Zoika was gone into the army as a medic. Always laughing, always devoted to her work, she assured us that even in the eyes of her beloved man she would first look for symptoms of conjunctivitis. Gone was Viktor, lanky
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and fun-loving, the favorite at all our picnics and parties. He had just become the father of as lively and fair-haired a boy as himself. Iura [diminutive of Georgii], too, was gone. My friend of many years who patiently would inquire every three months whether I’d go down to city hall with him and get married. And who instead went with me to all the theaters and movie houses and who kept all my great and lesser secrets. On a summer’s evening I saw off Tolia [Anatolii], the husband of a close friend. Just recently we had celebrated their first wedding anniversary, and now he was off “with a spoon, tin cup, and change of underwear,” as prescribed in the draft board notice.
Our house had become unusually empty and still. Occasionally my weeping girlfriends would come by to share their doleful news. I tried to console and hearten them, not knowing that my own greatest loss was still before me.
Nevertheless, I passed my last exam. Father beamed with a restrained but proud smile. When I arrived at the Military Academy where I had been teaching, a sentry snapped to attention and said with a swagger: “Comrade instructor, all classes have been postponed till the end of the war.” All of a sudden I had a lot of time, empty and useless. I tried reading, then embroidering. But books would fall from my hands and the whimsical, bright embroidery patterns brought no joy.
One morning, having returned from center-city, I found a huge bouquet of red carnations in my room and a figure all in white—it was Andrei.
“It took me eight days to get here from Moscow,” he said animatedly. “You can’t get on a train. It’s all soldiers going to the Ukrainian front. Finally, I squeezed into one. German planes strafed us on the way. Went to the Moscow draft board, thought I’d go straight to the front. But they wouldn’t take me. Had to go to my place of residence. But they won’t take me here either. I’m an odd case: with a university education I
belong in the officer corps, but since I haven’t been in the army I can’t be a commander. So they told me to wait for induction papers.”
How good it was that at least one friend arrived in these days of partings. We shared our grief and apprehension, but he brought me small comfort. He said that the mood on the home front was depressed, that the virtually unopposed German invasion had made everyone despondent. We walked the streets and parks, rustling with their luxuriant greenery, and spoke of a strange dichotomy creeping into our souls. We greedily read the papers, seeking hope and assurance in them. But the meager bulletins spoke of deeper penetration into new territory, without even mentioning the names of surrendered cities. On the third of July, Stalin came out with his famous speech. He called for livestock to be driven off, for grain to be burned, for the enemy to be denied everything of value. While reading the speech I had no inkling that
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within some twenty-four hours our home was to lose what, indeed, was most precious.
The night from the fourth to the fifth of July I awoke with a strange, agonizing feeling. It seemed that some icy hand had gripped my heart so it barely beat. I turned on a light and glanced at the clock—it wasn’t yet four. “There will probably be an air raid, it happens a lot at dawn now,” I thought to myself, opened a shutter and began to listen intently to the silence. A dog barked somewhere, another responded nearby. A vehicle passed by—probably transporting the wounded. The garden gate clicked and steps were heard on the flagstone walk, closer and closer, followed by an impatient knocking on our door. I’m throwing on a dress but mother is already unhooking the door chain with trembling hands. Poor mama, she always worries—it’s probably just the usual identity papers check.
The raspberry bands of NKVD service caps flamed up in the electric light. Two of them enter without greeting, and demand that we hand over any weapons and radios. We have never had weapons and the radio had been turned in long ago. A search begins. One of the unexpected guests, dark and morose, plunges into closets, flinging out books and undergarments. The more polite one approaches father’s bed, produces a small, white arrest warrant and says: “Get dressed.” These words freeze my innards. What I feared so much in those terrible nights of 1937–38, when black automobiles stopped at almost every door, has come. Destiny had mercy on our family then.
But an unexpected blow is all the more painful. Mother became stone still, her hands fell into her lap, her face froze. I begin to ready papa for the sorrowful journey. I pack underwear and food. Crazily, it seems awfully important to include a needle and thread. Papa is so neat; he won’t stand a missing button or the smallest hole. But it turns out that prisoners are not permitted anything sharp, not even needles. Remove the penknife from your pocket, surrender the razor, even if it is a safety razor. Money is allowed: 180 rubles, all that we have. Finally, everything is ready but I must treat papa to some tea: strong, with milk, the way he likes it. I have put the teapot on long ago and now, while the NKVD finish their paperwork, pour tea into a pot-bellied blue cup. Papa smiles meekly, drinks. He is given the papers to sign. They are in a hurry. “There’s a lot of work today,” says the dark one. Nothing, of course, was found during the search. They take papa’s passport, employment ID and those beautiful gold-lettered commendations which he had been awarded for his scientific work.
It is time to part. Mother cleaves to father and I am afraid to look at her. Papa kisses her quickly, once again, then carefully moves her aside and says to me: “My little Tania, I entrust mother to you, keep her from harm.”
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Rest assured, daddy, my dear, my beloved friend. I will do everything in my power. How desperately we hold ourselves in control, both he and I, not wanting to make things more painful in these dreadful moments.
“You may come on the eighth,” says the lieutenant.
“Oh, I’ll come. Of course, I’ll come. I’ll do everything. I’ll get to everyone. Dear daddy, don’t worry.”
“It’s useless,” he shakes his head wearily.
And so, they take papa away. I want to walk with him, at least another several steps together. But they don’t let me. It is dawning, and I see how papa, his shoulders hunched, walks down the path. He looks back, then hastens. How hard it is for him. The door slams, the engine turns over. . . . He’s gone . . . The NKVD, did in fact, have little time. That night some five thousand members of the Kiev intelligentsia, engineers, doctors, agronomists shared my father’s fate.
I walked back to the empty house; tried to comfort and quiet my mother; mechanically put the strewn items in their proper places. If only morning would come. I’d call Shura. He is my “valerian drops,” my tranquilizer, as I jokingly referred to him. A true and devoted friend, he would think of something, give sound advice. But Shura was powerless. Nor did my visits to the waiting rooms of the NKVD amount to anything. When I came on the eighth, the assigned day, I was told what hundreds of others were told: “It is wartime. No information about particular individuals can be given out.” I came again and again only to receive the same response. I fought my way to the district attorney and to the military prosecutor. The first said laconically: “He’s not on our lists.” The second looked through his papers, called his secretary, made a phone call and finally said: “There is no such case.” Then he glanced at my white knuckles and said in a softer voice that the NKVD had simply removed my father as an “unreliable.”
Oh yes, he was unreliable—my father. After all, thirty years ago he had studied in Germany and did not hide the fact. He spoke German well, never went unshaven, and despite warnings from the party secretary at work, wore a gold wedding band. The nature of his crime was clear.
The administrators at the draft board were astounded by father’s arrest. They tried to convince me that it was a misunderstanding which would soon be corrected, but refused to pay for the days my father had worked. At the publisher’s where he was owed more than two thousand rubles for his latest book, they also refused to pay. It was useless to argue. All institutions were feverishly preparing for evacuation. Hardly any employees came to work. The offices were empty, the desks gutted. Stoves were crackling everywhere. Mountains of papers, documents, account books, engineers’ calculations were
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being burned. Kiev was covered by black snow: droplets of soot and flakes of charred paper spun in the air and spread over the ground.
I stopped by the university; the scene was the same there. In a heap of documents on the floor I accidentally found my own file. Luckily, I had already received documentation of having passed my Master of Arts exams. The classrooms and offices stood starkly open. Here and there newly cobbled-to-gether crates gave off an aroma of pine. The dean’s office, always crowded and noisy, was totally empty. Not quite, a stove was blazing in the corner and the young, fashion-plate associate dean was carefully feeding it neat file-folders from his desk.
“Oh, Tat’iana Pavlovna,” he said. “There’s nothing new I can tell you. We weren’t assigned any railroad cars, unfortunately. All the students, graduate students, and some of the faculty are evacuating on foot to Poltava, and then we’ll see . . .”
He pressed my hand firmly, and I left through the echoing, empty corridors and stairwells. What was I to do? Neither mother nor I could go on foot. We both had weak hearts, and I was just recovering from surgery. We both were born and had lived all our lives in Kiev, and we had no one outside the city. And most importantly, there was father. Maybe he was here somewhere, nearby. How could we leave him? For there was nothing to fear from the enemy anymore; the greatest wound had been inflicted by our own people.
It was unbearable at home, especially at night. One neighbor, a major, was somewhere at the front. Another neighbor was stranded somewhere on an official trip. Mother asked Andrei to move into one of our empty rooms. Troops were occupying the university dormi
tories anyway, and it felt safer with a man in the house. Everybody was queuing up around the clock, lugging home candy, cooking oil, pearl barley. We had no money and could not stock up on anything. I tried selling a thing or two, but goods were worthless now, with hardly any takers. As always, Shura came to our aid, forcing some money on us until “better times.”
Everywhere in and out of town people were digging trenches and tank traps. At first, we also took part, conscientiously hauling dirt, helping to camouflage the pits. But then, like everyone else convinced of the hopelessness of the task, we tried to avoid the zealous police. At that point, they began rounding people up everywhere—in movie houses, in food queues, right on the street. Many men began to grow the notorious “trench” beards to look older and visibly prove that they were past the established age for digging trenches.
The parks and gardens of Kiev seemed turned up by giant moles. People hurriedly dug slits in the soil and hid there the moment they heard the drone of airplanes and waited for death from the implacable German bombs. But the
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bombs did not fall. Every day flocks of enemy birds would appear over the city. They drew incomprehensible smoke signs in the sky and occasionally dumped a rain of white leaflets. People would watch with trepidation as these white moths circled languidly earthward. Then they would send children to gather the messages from the enemy (or was it friend?) and would avidly read the meager information. “Not a single bomb will fall on your beautiful city” they read, and fear would leave them, and fewer of them would crawl into the raw earth and more and more would watch the powerful silver birds float by in the sky, occasionally engaging the Soviet fighter planes. The results were always the same: smoky balls of explosions would dance near the silvery wings, but they, rocking gently, would calmly disappear in the distance, invulnerable.
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