Marina’s rudeness toward her mother angered Alexander even more. He treated her as if she had no feelings and were a servant who had to earn her every crust of bread. The line he drew between her and the other two children became clearer with every passing day. Trying to avoid him whenever she could, Marina took refuge in the nearby home of her Aunt Musya and Uncle Vanya. There she knew she was welcome. And it was from Uncle Vanya that she acquired the bookishness that was to be her other escape.
Marina became a relentless reader. She read Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days in Russian translation. She overstrained her eyes from reading and had to have an operation. But after her recovery, she went on reading as before. She read Dumas’s Three Musketeers and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But her favorites were the novels of Turgenev, with their splendidly idealistic young women and their stories of life in the Russian countryside. These books stimulated her imagination and sharpened her perceptions, and that, in turn, increased her awareness that she was somehow different from her brother and sister, somehow different from her friends.
Marina’s closest friend was a Jewish girl named Beatya Roitshtein. Anti-Semitic feeling was high in Moldavia, but Marina insisted that she respected Beatya and preferred her over anybody else. That was no doubt true; yet as a child, and later as she was growing up, Marina deliberately chose outsiders for her friends, boys and girls who were different, as she considered herself to be different.
When they were ten, Beatya informed Marina that she had witnessed lovemaking between her parents. She refrained from describing the dreadful scene. But she wondered whether the same thing went on at Marina’s house. Although all her family shared the same room, Marina found that she did not know. But the thought of such a thing added to her dread of her stepfather and her scorn for her mother.
By the late winter of 1952, when Marina was ten, Alexander Medvedev’s five-year term of exile, if that is what it was, was over. The electric power station, whose construction he had come to supervise, was now a going concern and he was offered a job in Kishinev, the capital of Moldavia. Klavdia wanted him to take it, but Alexander declared that he had had enough of what he called “gypsy civilization.” He took Petya with him to Leningrad, the city of his birth, the city where his mother was living, in search of a job. Marina, Tanya, and Klavdia stayed behind in Zguritsa, waiting to join him.
Marina’s last memory of Zguritsa is a kind of neighborly solicitude that she had often seen in Moldavia. Her mother, Tanya, and she were packed and ready to set off for Leningrad. But there had been a heavy snowfall, the last of the winter, and the tiny houses of Zguritsa were smothered to the rooftops in snow. It would be two or three days before they would be able to leave, and they had used up all their fuel. They sat on their suitcases and shivered, waiting for the morning to come. Suddenly, they heard a knock at the door. Marina opened it to find her friend Beatya outside. Behind her was a sled loaded with wood and coal that she had dragged all the way from her home in the winter twilight.
— 3 —
Death of Klavdia
Of all the cities of the Soviet Union, Leningrad was probably the hardest to get to live in. During the heroic nine hundred-day siege of 1941–1943, Nazi shells had razed whole districts. Even when the Medvedevs came in 1952, seven years after the war’s end, the rebuilding was only getting under way. Yet such was the boredom and lackluster quality of life in the provinces, so suffocating the absence of horizons, that a torrent of men and women streamed in from all over Russia, seeking to wrest permission from the militia to live in a city that was already unbearably overcrowded.
On his arrival that winter, Alexander was immediately offered a highly skilled job as an electric repair technician at the First Coke and Gas Plant. But neither the offer of a job, the possession of desperately needed skills, nor even the fact that he was a native of the city guaranteed that the militia would permit him to register. He had to find a place to live. Here, he was fortunate. His stepfather had died a few weeks before, and space was available in his mother’s apartment. Still, the militia was free to assign that space to somebody else. By resorting to the magic of bribery, Alexander was finally allowed to register.
When Klavdia arrived, she, too, resorted to bribery. She had set aside for this purpose two woven rugs she had brought all the way from Moldavia and four new ladies’ furpieces. She carried her tribute to the housing office, where the woman responsible for passports took the booty to the district militia headquarters and somehow brought off the miracle. Thus, all the Medvedevs were finally registered as occupants of an apartment at No. 86 Obvodny Canal.
Conditions in their apartment were typical. Alexander, his mother, his wife, and three children lived in a single room in what had once been a three-room apartment. Each of the other rooms was also occupied by an entire family, making a total of twelve people who shared the front door and hallway and the communal toilet and kitchen. They had to go to the public baths to bathe.
Her new home was more cramped than any other she had lived in, but Marina did not give it a thought. She shared a bed, as she always had, with either Petya or Tanya, unaware that people could live in any other way. She missed the meadows and low hills of Moldavia, but she was overwhelmed by a feeling of privilege to be living in a city once again. Soon she considered Leningrad—an island city of bridges and canals, with its cluster of magnificent baroque buildings at the center—the most beautiful place on earth.
The family quickly settled into a new routine. Alexander went to work at the gas plant, and Klavdia found a job not far from home in the laboratory of a medical clinic for railway personnel. Tanya and Petya went to kindergarten, and Marina set off each morning for a nearby school of eight or nine hundred girls, where she was in the fourth grade. Marina liked the new school, but conditions in her new home were hard. In Moldavia the Medvedevs had at least had a place of their own; here, they were squatters in the apartment of Alexander’s mother, Yevdokia Yakovlevna Medvedeva.
She was a diminutive woman, immensely fat, with a large hooked nose and tiny, shrewd black eyes. Marina liked her well enough at first, although she noticed with the sharp eyes of a ten-year-old that her step-grandmother was taking every stick of good furniture she owned and shoving it into an adjoining room that belonged to her daughter-in-law Musya. Marina soon came to realize that while Yevdokia tried to appear generous and open-hearted, she was, in reality, greedy and hypocritical. Her hypocrisy went so far that she insisted that she and all her family were of pure Russian stock. Actually, as Marina found out, Yevdokia herself was half-Jewish. Because the subject was not openly discussed, it is not clear that Alexander himself realized that he was partly Jewish, a distinction of great importance in Russia. As for his mother, she was a woman who judged others solely by appearances, by the scope of their money and possessions, not by what they were underneath. And it was obvious that she disapproved of Klavdia.
Yevdokia was not the only source of poison in the atmosphere. Her qualities were carried to an extreme by her porcine and acquisitive daughter-in-law, Musya. Marina calls this Musya, the widow of her stepfather’s brother, “bad Aunt Musya,” to distinguish her from her mother’s sister, “good Aunt Musya,” whom she had been close to in Archangel and Moldavia. Musya lived with her two sons in the next room. And like her mother-in-law, she strongly disapproved of the woman Alexander had married.