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.
If Lonya’s appeal was exotic, Marina faced another threat to her peace of mind that summer, and it came from inside her own family. In August her cousin Valentin arrived to spend his holiday at the Prusakovs’. He was the son of Klavdia’s younger sister Polina and her husband Georgy Alexandrovi, who was head of the building trust in Kharkov. The legend of Valentin’s noble looks had preceded him, and Marina found that the handsome reality very nearly lived up to the legend. They were soon deep in a clandestine and, to Marina, sinful romance, of which one of the chief delights was being seen with Valentin on the street.
Strangely enough, Valya, who could be a zealous chaperone when the occasion, or her husband, required it, had not the slightest suspicion of the flirtation that was blossoming under her very roof. She even let Valentin sleep in the living room, which was also Marina’s bedroom. Marina for once was in a quandary that she dared not share with her aunt. She enjoyed Valentin’s kisses by day, but at night she curled up in her bed like a frightened rabbit and refused to allow him near her. When Valentin left after his two-week visit, he swore he would never forget her and asked her to wait for him. She even had a passionate love letter from him, which she hid at the pharmacy. But she made herself forget Valentin, for she considered her feelings for him incestuous, and she was frightened by them.
In October Marina went to Leningrad on vacation and stayed at a government Rest House. She had been there a week before she even dared to venture back to the Medvedevs’ apartment. When she did go, laden with gifts for everyone, Petya and Tanya were overjoyed. Even Alexander seemed glad to see her, although he behaved in his usual gruff manner and before long excused himself and went to bed. Marina promised to come again, but somehow she failed to get around to it.
She spent part of her vacation in Leningrad with the Tarussins, the parents of her old suitor, Oleg. Marina had written to them regularly from Minsk, and Oleg’s mother still treated her as a prospective daughter-in-law. But when she and Oleg were reunited, it was clear that his feelings had changed. The day before her return to Minsk, Marina told his mother that the romance was over—Oleg did not love her any more. She did not love Oleg either. But it hurt her to be unwanted again.
The faithful Sasha was there to console her on her return from Leningrad. She consented to be his date for New Year’s, but she promised herself that she would dance with anyone who came along, to torment the hapless Sasha and seek revenge on the entire male species. That evening she found herself in the arms of Anatoly Shpanko, a lanky fellow with unruly, dark blond hair and a wide, appealing smile. Toyla, as she soon called him, was a twenty-six-year-old medical student who had already served his term in the army. He was whimsical, yet deferential, to Marina, and from the moment of their first kiss—they were standing in a dimly lit courtyard, with snow swirling all around them and a lantern creaking in the doorway—she was deliriously in love with him. “He was a rare person,” Marina recalls. “He was honest in everything he did.”
There was only one drawback. Attracted as she was to Anatoly, Marina did not think he was handsome. Nor did she like the way he dressed. He simply did not fit the image she had created for herself of a girl who goes out only with handsome men. Not wanting to be made fun of, fearful that her friends might think less of her, she steered Anatoly along back streets when they were together as surreptitiously as if they were engaged in a clandestine affair. But she forgot her calculations when he kissed her. His kisses made Marina’s head spin. Finally, he proposed, but there were obstacles. Anatoly had two or three more years in medical school, no money, and, even more important, no apartment. Marina consulted Valya and Ilya. “No, my girl,” Ilya said. “Let him finish the institute first. He can talk about getting married then.”
Marina was not surprised. It was what she had expected, after all. But there was something in her uncle’s words that hurt her deeply. He would not consent to her marrying anyone, no matter how superior a human being, who did not have a place of his own. It was not Anatoly, whom he had never met, he was rejecting. It was Marina herself.
In later years Anatoly’s broad grin and unruly hair would return to haunt Marina. She knew she would be lucky to have him. She admired him, she was attracted to him sexually, he had a fine future as a doctor, and he loved her. He came, moreover, with a pair of adoring parents who would have been good to her. What more on earth could she want? But Marina was having a good time, and as yet she did not feel quite ready to settle down. Or perhaps she did not feel ready for someone who treated her with Anatoly’s decency. She and Anatoly kept on seeing each other, and Anatoly kept on proposing. Marina simply shelved his proposals. “Let’s wait and see how our feelings develop,” she said. And she would see, perhaps, whether anybody else came along.
On Friday, March 17, 1961, Marina went to a medical students’ dance at the Palace of Culture, a huge building in the center of Minsk. Both Sasha and Anatoly had asked her to go with them and Marina could not make up her mind. She preferred Anatoly, of course, but Marina, as she often did, decided to let fate take a hand. If she arrived early, she would go with Anatoly. If late, it would be Sasha. She told both of them to wait for her outside.
Marina was late. That evening she spent a long time in front of the mirror doing and redoing her hair. Wearing her very best, a dress of red Chinese brocade with a tiny bodice and a bell-shaped skirt, she did not arrive at the Palace of Culture until ten o’clock. Sasha had been waiting outside for nearly three hours. Anatoly was somewhere inside, alone.
The Palace of Culture contained within it a vast, impersonal hall with immense white columns and several glittering chandeliers. It was not a place for intimacy. The orchestra was deafening and brassy. Dancing with Sasha, her eyes sweeping the floor for Anatoly, Marina was approached by another medical student, an acquaintance of hers and Sasha’s by the name of Yury. He had a dark-haired stranger in tow, and as Yury began the introductions, the stranger stuck out his hand to Marina, grinned, and said simply: “Alik.” A moment later he asked Sasha for permission to dance with her.
Marina could not have cared less. They had been dancing in silence a minute or two when the stranger said, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch your name.”
She told him.
“What a pretty name!”
Marina thought he was giving her a line. Still, he was a good dancer, and he was very well dressed. He was wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, and a white tie of some funny foreign material. The tie and his accent told her immediately that he was not a Russian. He must be from Latvia or Estonia.
“It’s not just your name that’s pretty,” the stranger continued. “You’re pretty, too. I saw you when you came in. I was trying to figure out how to meet you, but you had a crowd around you. I’m glad we finally met.”
Alik danced with her again and again, as if he could not bear to lose her for a moment or let her dance with anyone else. The second the music stopped, he asked for the next dance, and Sasha barely had a chance. When she did dance with Sasha, Alik did not dance with anybody else. He waited for her to be free. That was all right with Marina. This Alik was a good dancer. He was clean and polite. And his accent amused her.
But she still was looking for Anatoly, hoping to make him jealous. To teach him a real lesson, she suggested to a group of young men, all standing around waiting to dance with her, that they go to the bar. “It’s boring here. Let’s get some champagne!”
It was the climax of Marina’s career as a single girl. She felt like a princess, resplendent in her red brocade and her elaborate hairdo. Never had she looked so pretty. Never had she had so many admirers. They all drank champagne and were on their way back to the dance floor when Marina finally saw Anatoly. “You go on back,” she said to her entourage. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Her performance had had the desired effect. Anatoly was angry and insisted on taking her home. Marina refused. She returned to Sasha and her other admirers, and when the dance was over, she brushed past Anatoly, who was waiting for her at the door, with five young men in tow, the stranger Alik among them. All six of them set off down the street. A few paces behind, to Marina’s intense satisfaction, was Anatoly. He called out to her twice. Marina paid no attention. He caught up with her, put his hand on her shoulder, and pleaded: “Marina! I’ve got to talk to you.”
“I can’t talk now. Can’t you see? Go away!”
Alik was a witness to the scene; Alik, the stranger with the funny accent. Long afterward he told Marina that he had made up his mind that night. “I got what I wanted,” he boasted. “I got you away from them.”
The group of young people went to Yury’s apartment, where his mother, who was a professor of microbiology, was waiting up for them. That night, before the dance, she had given a lecture on America, which she had just visited as part of a delegation. Suddenly, Marina realized that Alik was American. Yury had asked him to the lecture, hence the dance, to hear his mother talk about America.
They all sat together in the living room asking Yury’s mother questions. Alik listened carefully but did not say anything. Finally, Yury’s mother went to bed, and the boys turned to Alik. They wanted to know what was right and what was wrong in Yury’s mother’s description of America.
Marina remembers his tone. He was pleasant and self-confident. He dismissed some of her remarks as “propaganda.” The rest, he said, was fair enough. Yury’s mother had been struck by the absence of lines in American stores. She attributed it to those two vices of the capitalist system, unemployment and overproduction, and concluded that Americans were too poor to buy. Alik politely disagreed. The stores seem empty, he said, because there is plenty for everyone at a price each can afford. “Your mother is right, though,” he said to Yury. “Unemployment is a problem.”
Marina liked the way he talked. She especially liked the way he stuck up for his country. She asked him if he loved America. He did, he said, but he did not love everything about it. He disliked unemployment and racial discrimination and added that education and medical care cost far too much. But he noted that housing was better than in Russia and that the ordinary apartment was bigger. Of the two countries, Russia and the United States, he thought America was more democratic because everyone can say what he thinks.
For a while Alik and two of the boys spoke English. Marina, who had seldom heard it spoken before, was enthralled. When it was time for Sasha to take her home, he offered to drop Alik off afterward. The three of them left the apartment together.
When she reached home, Marina rang the doorbell and called out excitedly, “I’m not alone, Aunt Valya. Sasha’s here.” Properly warned, Valya unlatched the door in her nightgown and quickly scuttled back to bed. Marina followed her into her room.
“Aunt Valya,” she whispered, her eyes very large. “Sasha’s in there. Sasha and another boy, an American. He’s really nice. Come in, and I’ll introduce you.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Valya said. “Bringing an American here and the place in such a mess?” She was afraid to meet him. “I look too awful,” she said, then groaned, “Oh, my God, an American was the only thing lacking in your collection.”
Before he left, Alik asked Marina if he might see her again. He begged her to name the time and place, adding that he seldom missed a dance at the Palace of Culture.
“Maybe I’ll go there next week,” she said.
With that the young man said good-night, and as Marina closed the door behind them, she tried to remember Alik’s name. It had a German-Jewish sound to her, something like “Oswald.”