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.
But solitude seemed to add to her sadness. And so she forsook the lonely parks, the desolate back streets, the empty cathedral, and began to direct her footsteps to the most crowded thoroughfares of the city, and above all, to the Nevsky Prospekt. She found herself lingering by the music counters of department stores, listening to the popular rhythms of the West, which were just beginning to be heard in Russia. For a full year after the death of her mother, Marina could not bear to take a novel in her hand. Her feelings were too raw, and the contrast between her own sorrowful surroundings and the glittering world of her imagination was too abrasive. It was music that brought solace to her now.
When school was out that summer, Marina journeyed to Minsk to visit her grandmother, Tatyana Yakovlevna, now an old lady in her sixties, who was living there with her eldest son Ilya and his wife Valya. Marina’s Aunt Musya and Uncle Vanya Berlov, whose home had been her refuge in Moldavia, were also living in Minsk. They were the only family she had left, and Marina was glad to be with them, especially her grandmother. Tatyana had old-fashioned, even crotchety, ways. She did not allow Marina to dress in slacks and insisted that she wear her hair long as in Russia nice girls—and little girls—did. But Marina accepted her strictness. With her mother gone, she knew that her aged grandmother was probably the one person on earth who genuinely loved her.
That summer, Marina for the first time met a young man who caught her fancy. His name was Vladimir, and he took her to the movies and the park, played French love songs to her on the guitar, and taught her how to kiss. He was twenty-two and she was barely sixteen. She wished she were more grown up. Then one afternoon, as she was trying on a new dress, Marina was incredulous that the vision she beheld in the mirror was herself. She had grown up. But another vision intruded. She imagined that she saw a man standing behind her. He was gazing at her image in the mirror with approval, even admiration. She had never seen the man before. He was a stranger. But she knew who he was. He was her father.
They held a long and fanciful conversation. “What a splendid daughter I have!” she imagined him exclaiming. “So pretty and so grown up!” He begged her to come and live with him as his daughter. But with that, Marina grew stern and reproving. “You ought to have thought of it before,” she said. “You’re not my father at all. I grew up without any help from you. You made Mama and me very sad. Another man brought me up. He is my father now.”
But in her loyalty to her stepfather, Marina soon suffered a cruel disappointment. At the time of her sixteenth birthday, while she was in Minsk, Tatyana wrote the registry office at Severodvinsk, Marina’s birthplace, requesting copies of her birth certificate and other documents. She also wrote Alexander to ask for copies of the papers he had signed upon his formal adoption of Marina. For it was known among Alexander’s and Klavdia’s relatives alike that he had adopted his wife’s oldest child. Marina herself had been informed of it as a matter of certainty. In fact, she carried Alexander’s surname, Medvedev, with his first name as her patronymic, Alexandrovna. Neither in school nor anywhere else had she been known by any other name. But the formal documents—the birth certificate and the adoption papers—were needed now so that Marina could receive the internal passport for identification and travel within the country that is issued to every Soviet city dweller on reaching the age of sixteen.
All of them, Marina, her grandmother, and the rest of her relatives in Minsk, were thunderstruck by the answers Tatyana received. From Leningrad, Alexander wrote denying that he had adopted Marina. And from the registry office at Severodvinsk came the reply that there was no birth certificate or other documents for a Marina Alexandrovna Medvedeva, only for a Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova. (Marina’s real father had been named Nikolai and her mother’s maiden name was Prusakova. If the father does not claim, or the mother prove, paternity, a child born to an unmarried Soviet mother is given the father’s first name as a patronymic and the mother’s maiden name as a surname.)
Together, the two replies converging from different corners of the country confirmed Marina’s worst fears. Not only had she been abandoned by her own father, she had also been repudiated by the man who had taken his place. It was a cruel blow. To this day Marina refuses to accept it fully, clinging still to the idea that she was, in fact, Alexander’s adopted child, that he was lying when he denied it, and that he had merely hidden the documents of adoption. But whatever she made of his denial, she had still to face the terrible fact of his rejection.
This new discovery had humiliating consequences for Marina. Legally, she had to take the name inscribed on her birth certificate—Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova. Teachers and older friends of the family who had always addressed her as Marina Alexandrovna now had to call her Marina Nikolayevna. She had to change her pharmacy school registration from “Medvedeva” to “Prusakova” and endure the teasing of the other girls. As if this were not embarrassment enough, the space on her new passport for her father’s name was left blank—to any Soviet child the ultimate token of illegitimacy, carrying a stigma of which he or she is painfully reminded on the innumerable occasions when the passport is presented as identification.
When Marina returned to Leningrad that autumn for her third and final year at pharmacy school, she found matters in her stepfather’s household in no way improved. Not that Alexander interfered with her freedom or tried to dictate what she should do. On the contrary, he ignored her, at least at first. Mourning for Klavdia, he spent hours at her grave, his dark skin darker still from the sun, building a little monument and creating a flower bed there. Neither he nor his mother gave the slightest sign of caring at what hour Marina came home at night. To a sixteen-year-old girl, living in a large and rather rough city, this indifference to the hours she kept could mean only one thing. It was the ultimate token of abandonment. Marina knew that she was utterly alone.
Then one day soon after she came back from Minsk, Alexander informed her through his mother—he did not bother to tell her himself—that he would no longer tolerate her presence at meals with the rest of the family. “You’re grown now,” Yevdokia said. “You have relatives of your own. Let them look out for you.” Later, Alexander put it more bluntly. “You’re not my daughter,” he said. “I’m under no obligation to feed you.”
Marina did not know how she would eat. Luckily, someone told her that she was entitled to an orphan’s pension of 16 rubles a month. She was already receiving a student stipend of 18 rubles a month, and on the combined sum of 34 rubles (about $34) a month, plus small sums her grandmother in Minsk was able to scrape together and send her, she tried to feed and clothe herself.
Unwelcome at home, Marina was exposed as never before to the temptations of the city of Leningrad. She was exposed, moreover, at an age when she was exceptionally vulnerable and almost wholly inexperienced. Her distractions were innocent enough at first; she went to the movies or sat in a cafeteria by the hour, chatting with friends from pharmacy school. But it was a struggle just feeding and clothing herself, to say nothing of paying for tickets to the movies. And so during the New Year holiday, Marina found a job delivering telegrams through the wintry streets of the city. Cold and often hungry, she was made even more miserable by the sight of gaily ornamented New Year’s trees winking behind warm, curtained windows.
Like any sixteen-year-old, Marina craved gaiety. She started going to student dances on Saturday nights at the University of Leningrad. On other nights she went to mixers and get-acquainted dances at the Technological Institute and the Institute of Railway Transport. She never had an escort. She went, as Soviet girls often do, with a friend or two from school. But even at these casual get-togethers, Marina was painfully self-conscious about her unbecoming hand-me-down dresses. On several poignant occasions she was passed over in favor of girls who were not as pretty as she but who had blouses of German nylon or shoes of Czechoslovak make to give them a look of prosperity or glamour.
A young man named Leonid invited her to attend the New Year’s Eve dance in his dormitory at the University of Leningrad. Of all the schools in the city, the university was the most prestigious. Its students were the finest in the country. In the competitive scramble of Soviet student life, they were the elite. Marina accepted Lonya’s invitation with alacrity.
Ordinarily, the ramshackle university dormitory buildings were brilliantly lit in what Marina calls an effort to “guarantee the morality of Soviet youth.” On New Year’s Eve, however, the ingenuity of the students proved equal to the occasion. Every lightbulb that could be reached had been twisted from its socket; the rest had simply been smashed. The corridors and rooms were dark and crowded with couples, and phonographs played music of a sort Marina had never heard before. There were the strains of rock ’n’ roll, newly fashionable in the West but still virtually unknown in Russia. There was the “Lullaby of Broadway,” which Marina was later to hear so often that she calls it the “theme song” of her youth. There were the unfamiliar voices of Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole, all of them banned under Stalin but by this time recorded on the sly from broadcasts of the Voice of America. Marina’s enthusiasm for this new music was wholehearted. She considered it, and the young men who were its possessors, to be the last word in sophistication.
But her late date Lonya was just an uncouth boy. He got Marina alone in a bedroom, locked the door, switched off the light, and tried to force himself on her. Marina succeeded in wrenching herself free, but the incident was a revelation nonetheless. This was not the kind of “love” she had read about in books. She had supposed that love and sex were identical. She was frightened and repelled.
Even while Marina was fighting Lonya off, another thought had crossed her mind: “How will I face Mama in the morning?” But her mother was dead. Later, when she had time to reflect, she realized that it had been not fear of her mother, but fear of being like her, that had caused her panic. She must stop herself before it was too late, or she would end up doing the same terrible thing for which she had so long condemned her mother.
As far as Yevdokia and Musya were concerned, Marina’s late hours meant that she was already a fallen woman. Meanwhile, her bitter quarrels with Alexander continued. He reminded her again and again that he did not want her living at home after she had finished school. Often he threatened: “If you won’t go of your own free will, I’ll find a law to make you go!”
Marina answered weakly that if he tried to make her leave, she would appeal to the police or to a court.
“Just try it,” Alexander said. “I know all about you. I’ll tell them who your father was, and they’ll listen to me.”
“Who was my father?” Marina asked.
Alexander spat out her father’s name—Nikolai, and a surname that Marina would not remember until years afterward. “He was a traitor!” Alexander shouted.
Touched at her weakest, most vulnerable spot, Marina sobbed. “I never saw him. I never knew him. Children aren’t responsible for what their parents do.” She crumpled up on the sofa and cried.
Marina had no idea that there could be any family secrets left for her to discover. Then one day she came upon one that cast new light on her stepfather’s behavior. Rummaging through an old suitcase of her mother’s, she found a set of legal documents about a court case for child support. They showed that Alexander himself had had an illegitimate daughter in Moldavia before he and Klavdia were married. The child’s name was Alla, and she was only a year younger than Marina.
Marina came across another set of documents in the suitcase. They were papers filed by Klavdia with the Inquiry Bureau in Leningrad in what had almost certainly been an effort to find her real father. With her own life fading, and little hope that her daughter would be treated gently by the Medvedevs when she was gone, Klavdia had evidently tried to find him—if he had survived his sentence in Siberia or the Far North—so that he could help Marina after she was dead.
Neither of these discoveries gave Marina any comfort at all. The realization that Klavdia at the time of her death had been searching for her father only seemed to prove to Marina, probably erroneously, that what she had been dreading was true—she was the child of a casual liaison after all and her father had simply abandoned her. The discovery deepened Marina’s curiosity about herself, while at the same time deepening her conviction that the further she tried to dig, the greater the likelihood that what she might find out about herself would be the very truth she feared most.
As for the discovery that Alexander had a daughter of his own who was nearly the same age as she, it failed to soften in any way the harsh facts of his treatment of her, and it never occurred to Marina that perhaps it was not she, but that other girl who was at the heart of his anger toward her.
Taken together, both discoveries deepened Marina’s skepticism about the truth of things as they are presented on the surface. She had grown up in a household which was electric with lies, reticences, and outspoken brutality. Yet the outspokenness had failed to guarantee that what was being said was true.
At last Marina’s troubles caught up with her. With barely enough money for food and clothing, and with no one to love or care for her, she became passive and apathetic. She lost the will to shoulder her heavy load as a third-year pharmacy student: six hours of classes a day, plus four hours’ training in a pharmacy. She started cutting classes, ignored her homework, and embarked on an orgy of movie going. By the middle of the school year, her marks had dropped so sharply that she lost her stipend and had to get by on her orphan’s pension plus whatever her grandmother happened to send from Minsk. For a while she had only 18 rubles a month to live on, and with nothing to eat but rice kasha, she quickly contracted a disease of malnutrition that caused abscesses to erupt all over her body. She went regularly to a medical clinic for shots of penicillin, glucose, and vitamins and for treatments from an ultraviolet lamp. Venereal diseases were also treated there, and Marina was deeply embarrassed by the disapproving glances she received.
At school Marina’s classmates did their best to cover for her absences. Even the teachers and administrators tried to make allowances for her. The elderly professor who was in charge of the students in the third and final year was especially kind. Boris Zakharovich, whose initials had been transformed by the girls into the nickname “Bizet,” bent all the rules for Marina. Not only did he mark her “present” at classes she had cut, he also repeatedly gave her a B for recitations she had not given. Gently, tactfully, with endless patience, he took her on, she says, “like a nanny,” and tried to wheedle her through school.
“Marina Nikolayevna,” he told her, “you’re one of the finest students in the class. I think very highly of you. You can become a brilliant pharmacist if you’ll only try. You’re having a hard time, I know, but keep trying just a little longer. Graduate, and I’ll find you one of the best jobs in the city.”
Marina did not respond. In May, only two weeks before the final examinations that might have entitled her to graduation, a job, and a room in a young people’s hostel, she was expelled for “academic failure and systematic nonattendance at class.”
She was far more upset at being expelled than she was willing to show. She knew she had to find a job, but she tried only lackadaisically to look for one. Why bury herself in a factory or pharmacy all summer when her student friends were enjoying themselves without a shadow of self-reproach? Marina thought she could get by somehow.
Everyone at home knew that she was virtually penniless, and when some silver disappeared from the cupboard, Alexander, Musya, and Yevdokia accused her of taking it. They locked up their possessions and kept a careful watch on even the food, down to the last crust of bread. The silver later reappeared, and this time Marina was accused of having pawned it. She suspected that it was Alexander who was guilty, but she had no way either of proving her suspicions or of clearing herself.
Treated like a criminal at home, liberated by the casual atmosphere of summer, and without even the requirements of school or a job to restrain her, Marina stayed out later than ever and started to make friends quite different from her classmates. One was a girl named Lyuda, three years older than Marina and bold as brass. She had a job as deputy director of a commission shop that dealt not in the shoddy, mass-produced goods turned out by Soviet factories but in items that were old or unusual: clothing and cosmetics from abroad or finely wrought jewelry and porcelain that had been changing hands ever since the Revolution. It was thanks to her job in the commission shop that Lyuda could deck herself out, to the envy of all her friends, in Czechoslovak handbags and English lipsticks.
Marina created a home for herself, of sorts, at the commission shop, helping Lyuda fill out invoices and keep books, or fixing herself a new hairdo at the back of the shop while Lyuda dealt with the customers out front. It was a lively place, a headquarters for sailors of the Soviet commercial fleet, mainly Latvians and Estonians, who came in with foreign shoes, cigarettes, or cloth to sell at bloated prices. Most of them were mere boys, poorly educated boys at that, who asked nothing better than to take pretty girls like Lyuda and Marina to the best restaurants in town and spend stacks of rubles treating them to caviar, shish kebab, and champagne. Marina remembers one two-week period during which she never missed an evening in the restaurants of the Astoria or the Evropeiskaya hotel. She had no respect for these young sailors because of their poor education; and because she went out with them just to get a free dinner, she began to lose respect for herself.
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, almost 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 music 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.
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.