Both of them were at their worst when Alexander was not there to protect his wife. If Klavdia was tired and lay down to rest, they acted as if she were a criminal. When Alexander came home drunk, it was Klavdia who was to blame and not he. It was her fault, for giving him money to buy vodka. She did it, they hinted, only so he would continue to love her. Any token of tenderness between Alexander and his wife, as Marina describes it, was “like a bomb” to his mother and sister. If he put his arm around Klavdia, or if Klavdia sneaked him a kiss, they would say, “How disgusting!” or “Have they no shame?” and storm out of the room. One morning the old lady went about her chores with an air of particular fury. “Humph,” she snorted, “they won’t even let me sleep with their noises.” To which Musya added, “She only holds him because she never turns him away.” Marina had never witnessed the act of which they were speaking, but she guessed from their tone that it was something dirty. She felt ashamed for her mother.
Klavdia turned the other cheek. She took it all as her due, as though she were to blame for daring to exist at all. Did someone wound her feelings brutally one day? Very well, she would work her fingers to the bone for him the next. It was obvious that she and Alexander were devoted to one another. But their love, the only cohesive and happy element in the household and one that might have been a source of strength for Marina, had its outcome in unhappiness for her instead.
Alexander hated to share Klavdia with Marina or anyone else, and no matter how Marina behaved, it only made the situation worse. If she called her mother “mamasha,” after the French novels she read, and showed the love she truly felt for her, Alexander was enraged. If, on the other hand, she was rude or disobedient, Alexander punished her for being “spoiled.” Either way, Klavdia failed to defend her. Marina continued to reproach her mother for having married him. Curiously, Klavdia did not even defend Alexander. “You’re too little,” she would say to her daughter. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t live my whole life alone. You hope things are going to turn out better, but you never know.”
Marina did understand—in her own way. To her, Klavdia’s inability to stand up to Alexander when he was cruel to her could mean only one thing, that her mother did not love her. Afraid to kiss Marina in front of her husband, Klavdia showed her affection for her daughter only on the sly. And Marina resented it so much that she became unable to allow her mother to kiss her at all. “I bristled like a little porcupine,” she says.
Looking back on it later, Marina said, “My mama was happy in only one respect. She loved her husband, and he loved her. It was just ‘Sashenka, Sashenka’ all the time. I think she loved him more than her children. She showed her weak side too much. My mama wasn’t smart. She let everyone trample on her. She didn’t dare stand up for her children. She wasn’t sensible in her love; she was like a blind mother hen. I don’t like weak people. I can’t bear it if a mother doesn’t stand up for her children.”
In accented, slightly ungrammatical English, she continues: “I am so sorry, but this makes me mad. I had reached a difficult age, an age at which children begin to judge. A child looks at her mother, hoping to find an ideal to make part of herself. If a child looks at her mother and doesn’t find an ideal, then it hurts her spirit for the rest of her life.”
Eyeing herself in the mirror, Marina says, “Everything I dislike in my looks comes from my mama.” She remembers lying awake at night clutching her nose to keep it from growing long like her mother’s. She was ashamed of her mother’s tall, angular build, even embarrassed to be seen with her on the street. And at home, in a turmoil of love and resentment, Marina behaved toward her mother with a sort of involuntary cruelty. In that household, with its multiple possibilities for treachery, she found her own torn-up emotions fitting all too neatly into the designs of Yevdokia and Musya, who used Marina as a “blind weapon” to wound her mother. Witnessing her mother’s suffering, Marina felt unspeakable love and sorrow. She was tormented by remorse over her behavior. And yet she was powerless to change it.
The conduct with her mother that had begun in Moldavia grew sharper in Leningrad, and in the highly charged atmosphere of that crowded apartment, Marina detected something new—she was her mother’s Achilles’s heel. Klavdia felt guilty for having her at all. This, and Alexander’s harsh treatment, imbued Marina with a conviction of her own abasement, a feeling that she was worse than other people, although she had no idea why. That conviction, and the memory of her mother’s many failures to stand up for her, ricochet through Marina’s recollections of her childhood like a cruel and obstreperous echo.
Only one member of the family understood. She was Maria Yakovlevna Arsentyeva, Alexander Medvedev’s aunt. A rotund and tiny woman, she had alert brown eyes and silver hair, gathered in a severe bun at the nape of the neck. She always wore an old-fashioned dark dress with a single piece of jewelry, a round ornament of Estonian silver, which hung on a chain around her neck. But Maria Yakovlevna’s real adornment, Marina thought, was her air of openness and kindness, which contrasted sharply with the mean and suspicious manner of her sister Yevdokia.
The children were overjoyed whenever Maria Yakovlevna came to the apartment. She took them on outings: to children’s concerts or the ballet; to the zoo and botanical gardens; to Pushkin’s Dubrovsky, staged to all appearances with real fire and smoke; and to the great museums of Leningrad. Together they saw the magnificent buildings of the czars, and she instilled in the children a love of the city that had been the capital of Imperial Russia. She taught them to venerate works of genius and to distinguish such works from the ugliness and mediocrity of the modern city.
Maria Yakovlevna had been born to the middle class, but because of her keen intelligence, she had been selected to attend the Smolny School for young ladies of noble birth in St. Petersburg, as Leningrad was called before the Revolution. The school was under the personal patronage of the czar. Maria Yakovlevna described to Marina the great occasions when Nicholas II—young and handsome he was, too—visited the school for lunch. She had been part of the choir that sang for him. Marina listened with fascination to stories about the glittering balls Maria Yakovlevna had attended and about the decorous way young ladies and gentlemen behaved—“so different from the behavior of young people today.”
On the heels of the Revolution, Maria Yakovlevna, a devout believer in the tenets of the Russian Orthodox Church, had met and married a man whose faith in the new religion of Communism was every bit as fervent as her own faith in God. He was a Communist in the best and most idealistic spirit of those Revolutionary times, and she, too, became an atheist and enthusiast of Communist power. Their marriage was a happy one, although only one of their four children survived. Maria Yakovlevna’s husband did well. He was an engineer and rose to become head of an institute in Leningrad. Then came the purges of 1936–1937. Like so many other true believers who had survived the early days, Maria Yakovlevna’s husband was swept away.
The arresting officers came under cover of night, but one of them took pity on Maria Yakovlevna. “Hide your treasures, little mother,” he whispered. She owed her life to his advice. She salvaged some bracelets of pearl and some antique jewelry of rubies and gold before being dispatched, with her little son, to cold and lonely exile in the southwest Urals. It was only by selling off the jewelry, piece by piece, that they were able to survive. Maria Yakovlevna never heard from her husband again. She knew only that he died, innocent of the charges against him, a victim of torture in a barren prison somewhere.