When Ludmila asked Abarchuk about his childhood, he would frown and say, “What’s there to tell you? There wasn’t much about my childhood that was good. The family was quite comfortably off, not so far from being bourgeois.”
On Sundays he visited students in hospital, bringing them books and newspapers. He gave nearly all of his student grant to the International Organization of Aid for the Fighters of the Revolution,65 to help foreign Communists suffering under the yoke of capital.
Confronted with even the slightest infringement of the ethics of proletarian studenthood, he was implacable. He insisted that a young woman who put on perfume and lipstick before the First of May international workers’ holiday should be excluded from the Komsomol. He demanded that a “Nepman”66 student who once rode in a cab, wearing a jacket and tie, to the Livorno restaurant, should be expelled from the university. In one of the student hostels he publicly shamed a girl for wearing a cross round her neck.
Bourgeois tendencies were, he believed, ineradicable; they were etched in someone’s blood cells and brain cells. If a working-class girl married a man of bourgeois origin—even if he had tried to cleanse himself through factory work—their children would be carriers of bourgeois ideology. Even their children’s children would carry a dangerous contagion in the depths of their psyche. When asked what should be done with such people, he would reply sombrely, “First they must be isolated. Once they’ve been removed from social circulation, there’ll be time enough to decide.”
Anyone of bourgeois origin inspired in him a sense of physical disgust; if he happened, in a narrow corridor, to brush against a pretty, elegant girl student whom he suspected of being bourgeois, he instinctively shook his arm, as if to remove any least trace of her from the sleeve of his military jacket.
He married Ludmila in 1922, a year after the death of her father. The hostel commandant allocated them a room of their own, six square metres. Ludmila became pregnant. In the evenings she began sewing swaddling clothes. She bought a teapot, two saucepans and some large dishes. These acquisitions upset Abarchuk, who believed that a modern family should be liberated from the bondage of the kitchen. Husband and wife, in his view, should eat in a communal canteen and their children should be fed in nurseries, kindergartens and boarding schools. Their room should have only the simplest of furniture: two writing desks; two beds that folded up against the wall; some bookshelves; and a small recessed cupboard.
Around this time Abarchuk fell ill with tuberculosis. His comrades managed to arrange for him to spend two months at a sanatorium in Yalta, but he refused to go. Instead he gave his place to a sick student from one of the workers’ faculties.
He could be kind and generous, but the moment anything became a matter of principle he turned pig-headed and cruel. He behaved honourably in his work and he despised money and everyday comforts, but he sometimes read other people’s letters, looked at the diary Ludmila kept under her pillow and failed to return books he borrowed from friends.
Ludmila thought her husband unique; there could never be anyone like him. But once, when she was singing his praises, her mother interrupted, “No, no, I’ve seen too many young people like that—both when I was a student in Petersburg and when I was in exile in Siberia. They just don’t know how to reconcile love of humanity and love for an actual person.” “No,” said Ludmila, “you don’t understand. He’s not like that at all.”
Until their child came into the world, Ludmila subordinated herself to Abarchuk without reservation. But when this new little human being appeared, the relationship between husband and wife began to deteriorate. Abarchuk spoke less about the achievements of Ludmila’s revolutionary father and reproached her more and more often with regard to her bourgeois maternal grandfather. As he saw it, the birth of the little boy had awoken petty-bourgeois instincts that, until then, had lain dormant within her. He watched sullenly as his wife put on a white apron and wound a kerchief around her head before making a pan of kasha. He noticed how deftly she embroidered initials and delicate patterns on the boy’s clothes and bed linen, how intently she gazed at the embroidered coverlet on top of his tiny cot. A torrent of alien, hostile objects was invading their room; the apparent innocence of these objects only made the struggle against them still harder.
Abarchuk’s idea of a nursery, his plans for the boy to be brought up in a workers’ commune in an iron- and steelworks—all came to nothing.
Ludmila said she wanted to go for the summer to the dacha of her brother, Dmitry. There was plenty of space, and her mother and her two sisters would come and help her look after the boy. But around the time she was due to leave, a bitter argument erupted between her and her husband: she would not agree to have the boy named October.67
During his first night on his own, Abarchuk stripped the walls bare and restored the room to its previous, non-bourgeois state. He then sat until morning at his desk, from which he had removed the tasselled cloth, and wrote a six-page letter to Ludmila, painstakingly outlining his decision to separate from her. He himself was one of the now ascendant class; he would eradicate within him all that was personal and egotistic. She, for her part—and he now had no doubt of this—was psychologically and ideologically inseparable from the class that history had made redundant. Her individualistic instincts held sway over any sense she might have of society. He and she were not following the same path; worse, they were following entirely opposed paths. He refused to allow the boy to bear his surname; it was already clear that the boy’s psychology would be that of the bourgeoisie. Ludmila found these last words particularly wounding; she wept as she read them. Later, though, when she reread them, she felt furious—which partly healed her wounds. Towards the end of the summer, Alexandra Vladimirovna took little Tolya back to Stalingrad with her, and Ludmila returned to her studies.
After one of the first lectures of the new term, Abarchuk went up to her, held out his hand and said, “Greetings, comrade Shaposhnikova!” She quietly shook her head and put her hand behind her back.
In 1924 there was a purge of the student body; students of bourgeois origin were to be excluded. Ludmila heard from a friend that Abarchuk had demanded that she herself be excluded. He told the commission about their marriage and the reasons for their divorce. This was a time when students used to joke, “Vanya was lucky with his parents—he’s the son of two peasant women and one factory worker!” And there was a little ditty:
Oh tell me where I can go
To buy a factory-worker dad
And a mother who pulls the plough!
In any event Ludmila was not excluded. There were, however, two young men—Pyotr Knyazev and Viktor Shtrum—who had not worked before entering university and had not even been members of a trade union. These two, dubbed “inseparable companions,” were excluded. Their teachers, however, intervened on their behalf, asserting that both these young men were exceptionally talented. Three months later the Central Commission rescinded the faculty’s decision and Shtrum and Knyazev were reinstated. But Knyazev fell ill and did not re-enter the university even after he got better; instead he went back to live with his parents, somewhere far from Moscow.
While the purge was being conducted, Ludmila was interviewed several times, and she crossed paths with Viktor. When Viktor reappeared in the middle of the third term, she congratulated him and said how glad she was to see him.
They talked for a long time in the half-dark anteroom to the dean’s office. Then they went to the canteen and had some buttermilk; then they sat together on a bench in the little university park.
Viktor turned out to be very different from how Ludmila had imagined him—far from being a mere bookworm. His eyes were nearly always laughing, only entirely serious when he talked about something funny. He loved literature, went regularly to the theatre and didn’t miss a single concert. He often went to beer houses, enjoyed listening to gypsy singers and adored the circus.
It emerged that at some time in the past their parents had been frien
ds. Viktor’s mother had studied medicine in Paris when Alexandra Vladimirovna and her husband had been living in exile there. Ludmila said, “I heard my mother come out with the name Shtrum, but it never entered my head that you could be the son of the woman she once stayed with for a whole month.”
That winter Ludmila and Viktor went together to theatres and to the “Giant” cinema in the Conservatory. In the spring they went on outings to Kuntsevo and the Sparrow Hills or for boat trips on the River Moscow. A year before graduating, they married.
Alexandra Vladimirovna was astonished to see her old friendship with Anna Semyonovna Shtrum being reaffirmed by the young couple. The two mothers wrote letters to each other, repeatedly expressing their surprise and delight.
Ludmila’s second marriage was very different from her first. Viktor had never gone out to work, nor did he have to support himself during his studies; his mother sent him eighty roubles a month, and three substantial parcels each year. It was clear from these parcels that she still saw her son as a little boy. The plywood box usually contained apples, sweets, an apple strudel, some underwear and a few pairs of socks embroidered in red with Viktor’s initials. Beside Abarchuk, Ludmila had felt like a little girl, but now she felt like a woman of the world, treating her young child of a husband with condescending indulgence. Viktor wrote to his mother once a week. If ever he missed a week, Ludmila would receive a telegram: Was Viktor in good health?
If Viktor asked her to add a few lines at the end of one of his letters, she would reply crossly, “Heavens, I don’t write this often even to my own mother. Sometimes I don’t write for two months on end. Who am I married to—you or your mother?”
Abarchuk completed his degree a year after Ludmila and Viktor, having taken time off because of his work as an activist. Ludmila gradually forgot her resentment and came to take an interest in her first husband’s career. He was doing well—publishing articles, giving lectures and, at one point, even occupying an important position in the Science and Scholarship section of the Commissariat of Enlightenment.
At the beginning of the first Five Year Plan, Abarchuk, now an industrial manager, moved to western Siberia. Ludmila came across his name now and then in articles about the construction of some huge factory, but he never wrote to her or asked after Tolya. Then came a period when she heard nothing at all. She saw newspaper articles about the official inauguration of the factory he had been in charge of constructing, but he was not mentioned even in passing. A year later, Ludmila learned that he had been arrested as an enemy of the people.
In 1936 Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum—the youngest of that year’s candidates—was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences.68 After the celebratory dinner, when all the guests except Zhenya and Krymov had left, Krymov said something that Viktor and Ludmila would never forget.
Viktor, still jealous of Abarchuk, had said boastfully, “Here’s a story for you, a simple little tale. Once there were two students. The first wanted to decide the fate of the second. He pronounced that the second had no right to be studying in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics. And now, today, that second student has been elected to the academy. While the first student . . . What has he achieved in the world?”
“No,” Krymov had replied. “Your little tale is more complicated than you think. I’ve met that first student several times. Once, in Petersburg, he was leading a platoon attacking the Winter Palace. He was full of fire and passion. I saw him a second time in the Urals. Kolchak’s men had stood him in front of a firing squad, but somehow he got away with his life. He lay in a pit till nightfall, then crawled out and made his way, covered in blood, to our revolutionary committee. Just as before, he was full of fire and passion . . . No, the laws that govern our lives are far from simple. That first student carried out his duty when the revolutionary future of Russia—and perhaps of the entire world—was being decided. He carried out his duty honourably—and he paid with his sweat and blood.”
“Maybe,” Viktor had said lamely, “but he almost ate me alive.”
“Things happen,” Krymov had replied.
29
THE SHTRUMS’ Kazan apartment was a typical evacuee home. In the first room, as if to indicate that the inhabitants were nomads, suitcases had been piled against the wall and a long line of boots and shoes stretched out beneath the bed. Poking out beneath the tablecloth were the lower halves of crudely planed pine table legs. The space between the table and the bed was filled with stacks of books. And in Viktor’s room, beside the window, stood a large writing desk, its surface as empty as a runway for a heavy bomber; Viktor liked to keep his working space free of clutter.
Ludmila had written to her family in Stalingrad, inviting them—if they had to leave the city—to come “en masse” and join her and Viktor in Kazan. She had already worked out how to arrange the camp beds. There was only one corner she was determined to keep clear. This was for Tolya: one day he would return from the army and she would bring his bed down from the attic. There was also a suitcase in which she kept his underwear, a supply of his favourite tinned sprats and a small pile of letters from him, tied with a ribbon. The uppermost was a page from a child’s exercise book, almost filled by the four words, “Hello Mama Come Soon.”
Ludmila often woke during the night and lay there thinking about Tolya. She wanted passionately to be with him, to protect him from danger with her own body, to work day and night digging deep trenches for him in heavy clay or in stone—but she knew this was impossible.
Her love for her son was, she believed, something extraordinary, different from the love of any other mother. She loved her son for not being handsome, for his large ears, for his awkward gait and general clumsiness, for being so shy. She loved him for not daring to learn to dance, for the way he snuffled as he got through twenty sweets, one after another. When, looking down at the floor, he told her about a low mark he had got for a literature exam, she felt a still greater tenderness towards him than when, muttering, “It’s nothing” and frowning in embarrassment, he showed her his physics or trigonometry work with its unvarying “Excellent!”
Before the war, Viktor had sometimes got angry with her for allowing Tolya to go to the cinema instead of helping around the home. “That’s not the way I was brought up,” he would say. “I was certainly never mollycoddled like that!” He seemed unaware that his mother had been at least as protective of him as Ludmila was of Tolya, and that she had spoiled him in just the same way.
When she was cross, Ludmila would sometimes make out that Tolya did not love his stepfather, but she knew that this was not true.
Tolya’s love of the exact sciences had become quickly apparent. He had no interest in literature, nor did he care for the theatre.
And yet, one day not long before the war, Viktor had found Tolya in front of the mirror. Wearing his stepfather’s hat, tie and jacket, he was dancing, then bowing to someone and smiling graciously.
“I feel I hardly know the boy,” Viktor said to Ludmila.
Tolya’s half-sister, Nadya, was very devoted indeed to her father. Once, when she was ten, she had gone with her parents to a shop. Ludmila wanted a length of velvet for curtains and she asked Viktor to calculate how many metres she needed. Viktor began multiplying the length, width and the number of curtains but instantly got in a muddle. The shop assistant did the calculation in a few seconds, smiled condescendingly and said to Nadya, who was deeply embarrassed, “Your papa doesn’t seem to be much of a mathematician.”
Ever since, Nadya had believed deep down that her father’s work did not come easily to him. Once, looking at sheets of manuscript covered from top to bottom with signs and formulas, with countless deletions and corrections, she had said with genuine compassion, “Poor Papa!”
Ludmila sometimes saw Nadya go into her father’s study, steal up to his armchair on tiptoe and cover his eyes with her hands. For a few seconds he would remain motionless; then he would turn, put his arms round his daughter’s shoulders and
kiss her. When they had guests in the evenings, Viktor would sometimes look round and find he was being observed by two large, sad and attentive eyes. Nadya read a great deal, and quickly, but there was much she did not take in. Sometimes she was strangely absent-minded. Lost in thought, she would answer questions in a way that made no sense at all. Once she had gone to school in socks that didn’t match; after that, their cleaning woman used to say every now and then, “Our Nadya seems a little melancholical.”
If Ludmila asked Nadya what she wanted to be when she grew up, Nadya would reply, “I don’t know. Nobody.”
She and Tolya were very unlike each other and, when they were little, they quarrelled constantly. Nadya knew how easy it was to tease Tolya and she tormented him mercilessly. He would get angry and pull her long plaits. This upset her but did not silence her. Doggedly, sullenly, in tears, she would carry on mocking him, calling him “Our blue-eyed baby” or by a strange nickname that particularly enraged him: “Pigsty!”
Not long before the war Ludmila realized that her children had, at last, made peace. She mentioned this to two elderly friends of hers. They smiled sadly and, with one voice, replied, “They’re getting older.”
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