Alexander clearly favored Petya whenever he and Marina had some childish dispute. He began to strike Marina more often now, and once when she failed to weed a corn patch to his satisfaction, and lost his knife besides, he grew red with fury. He marched Marina home and beat her ten strokes over the backside with his leather belt. Her mother was powerless to protect her.
Marina did not know it, but Klavdia was pregnant again. She was often sick in bed, and Marina, who was only seven, was expected to help with the household chores, washing dishes and laundry, grazing the pig, and drawing water from the village well. If she neglected her chores to run outdoors and play games with her friends, Alexander was there to punish her when she returned.
Then one afternoon when Klavdia was lying sick in bed, Marina’s grandmother, Tatyana Yakovlevna, suddenly appeared. She had come from Archangel to spend the summer with her daughter and son-in-law, Musya and Vanya Berlov, who had moved to Moldavia soon after the Medvedevs. Tatyana Yakovlevna visited for a while, and when Alexander thought she had left, he shouted to Marina: “Why haven’t you shined my shoes yet?” Marina, thinking she was safely out of earshot in the kitchen, grumbled: “All day long it’s Marina this and Marina that. The others are all out playing, and I’m supposed to be pasturing the pig. Your Petya doesn’t have jobs to do. Polish the shoes yourself!”
Alexander heard her. “I’ll show you,” he shouted, and hurled his shoe at Marina’s head.
At that moment Tatyana Yakovlevna reappeared in the doorway. “I’m taking Marina with me,” she told Alexander firmly. “You have no idea how to treat children. She isn’t a hired hand. She’s not big enough to work in a cornfield. I won’t let you hit her.”
She took Marina by the hand and led her away, without so much as asking Klavdia. Marina spent the rest of the summer with her grandmother and her Aunt Musya and Uncle Vanya. Each day at lunchtime or after work, her mother came by to see her. She wanted to take Marina home, but Tatyana Yakovlevna would not hear of it. Marina was grateful to her grandmother for defending her, yet she wanted to be home with her mother. Then August came and Tatyana Yakovlevna announced that she intended to take Marina back to Archangel with her. Klavdia, in tears, saw them off at the station.
And so the next year, when she was eight years old, Marina was again in Archangel with her grandmother and her Uncle Ilya and Aunt Valya. She was in the second grade and spent the greater part of each day in school, but once again she was “spoiled” by Tatyana Yakovlevna and exposed to her grandmother’s old-fashioned views and her outspoken dislike for the Communist system. Tatyana still took her granddaughter to church, and there, one afternoon, they met Marina’s teacher, a graying woman in her fifties. The three of them walked home together and Tatyana remarked that she was glad to see a teacher in church. At least a few people still believed in God. The teacher sighed: “In school, you have to tell the children there isn’t any God. But in your heart, you believe otherwise.”
To Marina, the encounter seemed to prove the truth of what her grandmother had been saying, that in school she was taught nothing but lies. And if her teachers lied about God, were they telling the truth about Stalin? At school she was taught that Stalin was a good, kind man who loved children. But at home her grandmother told her, with every bit as much assurance, that he was a demon let loose among men. What was she to believe?
Marina was plagued by another uncertainty. Nearly every school-child belonged to the Pioneers, the Soviet organization for children. But since she hated everything about the Soviet system, Tatyana Prusakova told Marina not to join. The child did not know what to do. She felt that she would be betraying her grandmother if she joined. On the other hand, it was hard to refuse.
Marina found an alibi; she would join when she returned home to Moldavia. But there, too, she kept on stalling until the end of her third-grade year. Even though she had hardly any choice by then, she felt that she had betrayed her grandmother. When Tatyana Yakovlevna came to Zguritsa that summer, Marina hid her red neckerchief, the badge of the Pioneers, in shame. At last the old lady caught sight of it and said just one thing: “Humph! Is that a devil’s tongue they’ve stuck on you?”
When she returned to Moldavia after the year in Archangel, Marina found a new child in the family, a chubby little girl called Tanya. From the outset Alexander was devoted to the baby, who strongly resembled Klavdia. The family alignment had changed again. Petya was no longer the favorite and was now in the same boat as Marina when it came to punishment.
Marina had more chores than ever. As always, she had to pick up Petya at kindergarten, but now she had to fetch Tanya at the public nursery, too. She had to help with the ironing, the bed making and floor washing, help make pelmeny (jam or meat dumplings), peel potatoes, and draw heavy bucketfuls of water from the well. If something she did displeased Alexander, she received a cuff on the face or backside with a remark like, “It’s all your grandmother’s doing” or “A fine young lady she wanted you to be, you and your lily-white hands!”
Then, one spring day just before her tenth birthday, Marina made a startling discovery. It was a holiday, and the village streets were deserted. Marina and a classmate called Emma were off to school for the celebration. On the way, Emma turned to Marina and said: “Guess what? My mama was talking to your mama last night. And your mama said your papa isn’t your real papa at all!”
Just then they came to Emma’s house, and she went in to pick up something she had forgotten. Marina did not wait for her. She ran away. Stunned, she did not want anyone to witness her turmoil. She came to a wide dirt road and followed it. There was a meadow with bluebells and yellow dandelions on one side and a cornfield stretching into the forest on the other. Marina walked and walked. She cried until she was tired of crying. She was hungry, but she did not want to go home. She found a clump of cherry trees and climbed one of them. Then she lay on a branch, plucked green cherries, and ate them. Gazing through the branches at the sky, she thought, “Other children are happy and play.” But she had no right to be happy. She did not have a father.
Finally, it was time to go home for supper. Marina found her mother in the kitchen and started peeling potatoes. She worked in silence for several moments. Then she could not stand it any longer. “Mama,” she asked, “where is my real papa?”
“Who told you?” Klavdia inquired with a startled expression.
“One of my friends,” Marina replied.
“Your papa died at the front,” her mother answered simply.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Marina asked.
Her mother spoke hesitantly now: “You were too little to understand.”
Even today Marina thinks that her discovery changed her outlook forever. Now she understood why Alexander treated her differently; he was not her father. She could no longer feel affection for the man she had once been proud to call “Papa,” even though she bore his patronymic and surname, Marina Alexandrovna Medvedeva. Nor could she feel the same way about her mother. She continued to love her, but she became more critical of her with every passing day. She blamed her mother for marrying Alexander and begged her to leave him. “You silly,” her mother would smile, “where could I go all alone with three children? You’re only a little girl. You don’t understand.”
Klavdia was in anguish over the change in her daughter’s behavior. Whenever Alexander was not looking, she kissed Marina and tried to reassure her. But Marina avoided her caresses, much as she longed for them, because she was hurt that her mother dared kiss her only on the sly. When she was punished by Alexander, she blamed her mother for failing to stand up for her. Where she once thought her mother the most beautiful person on earth, now she considered her sloppy, even dirty. She was even annoyed by her mother’s poor health. Marina knew that her mother loved her, perhaps even better than Petya and Tanya, but she wanted her to prove it again and again.