After the war, mother and son returned to Leningrad. As a victim of political misfortune, she could find work only as a janitor in a large factory on the Neva River. It was hard work for a lady of distinguished upbringing, but Maria Yakovlevna never complained. She had recovered her religious faith. “Life,” she would say, “gave me back my faith in God, and now no one will ever make an atheist of me again.”
Perhaps it was because her existence had been such a memorably difficult one that Maria Yakovlevna met life with such candor and openness. She had touched bottom already, and nothing now could make any difference. She had no fear of anyone, certainly not Alexander Medvedev. He had only to speak unkindly to the children for her to answer him in his own rough coin. And when he hit Marina in her presence or when she heard about his treatment of her from others, she scolded: “You cannot treat her that way, Sasha. Have you forgotten that you had a stepfather, too?”
She stood up for Klavdia, too. When Musya, who was very fat, asked mockingly: “What is there to love in her? She’s nothing but a bag of bones!” Maria Yakovlevna retorted tartly that “elephants aren’t to everyone’s taste.” Sometimes Musya boasted, in one of her jealous asides, that she, unlike Kladvia, was perfectly able to get along without the love of a man. “Has it never occurred to you,” Maria Yakovlevna inquired, “that it’s not you who can get along without a man, but men who can get along without you?”
Maria Yakovlevna urged Marina to be more loving and thoughtful of her mother, and Marina promised to try. It meant a great deal to her to feel that she had been weighed in the esteem of so just a woman and found worthy. “She helped me,” Marina recalls, “because I knew that there was one person who loved me and trusted me and looked on me as a human being.” It was not to Klavdia, not even to her beloved grandmother in Archangel, but to Maria Yakovlevna that Marina believes she owes “nearly all the good” that is in her. “It was she,” Marina says, “who taught me to love truth and hate lies, to value people for their real worth and not for their money.”
Maria Yakovlevna also added to Marina’s growing distrust of politics and the “truths” of the Communist system. Everyone was told that Stalin loved the people. But how could anyone who loved the people, Marina wondered, allow them to live in the squalor that afflicted them all? Housing was wretched, there was not enough food, everyone was poor. These thoughts, half-thoughts really, were tucked away so unobtrusively at the back of Marina’s mind that she was almost unaware that she had them.
Suddenly, when Marina was nearly twelve, Stalin fell ill. Over the somber midnight airwaves came tidings that the mighty ruler of all the Russians had been struck down, just as an ordinary man might be, by a hemorrhage of the brain. From the moment of the announcement, the men and women Marina knew behaved as though they, too, were stricken. Many would neither eat nor drink. An entire people were frozen in a state of sorrowful suspense. Marina knew only one exception—Maria Yakovlevna. “Let him,” she announced, “die as quickly as possible.” And when news came that Stalin was indeed dead, Maria Yakovlevna remarked: “Thank God for delivering the people from Judas!” Marina could hardly believe her ears. Yet, as young as she was, she knew that, as always, Maria Yakovlevna was speaking the truth.
Marina was growing up a skeptic and a rebel. At school she looked on political subjects with distaste. She preferred history and literature. She gobbled up stories by the great Russian writers—Gogol, Chekhov, and Pushkin. And she was engaged, as the innocently flirtatious Princess Mary, in an imaginary love affair with Pechorin, the fatalistic and self-pitying central figure of Mikhail Lermontov’s story, A Hero of Our Time. Vengeful and cold, Pechorin is forever spinning webs of intrigue that destroy all those whose lives touch his own. As the ideal man of her imagination, Pechorin was to cast a very long shadow over Marina’s future.[1]
At home, Marina read Russian translations of Jack London, Mark Twain, and Thomas Hardy, and she often forgot her homework. In spite of her lack of preparation and her mischievous behavior in class, she got good marks in school. The teachers viewed her as a wayward prodigy. And when the girls’ school she attended became coeducational, the boys quickly found a nickname for her. It was “Spichka” or “Matchstick,” first, because she was thin and second, because she would flare up in an explosion of words whenever anyone addressed her.
Marina had an especially close friend at school, Nina Samilyuk, a girl with lucent hazel eyes and hair the color of a sheaf of wheat. Nina had no father and no idea who her father might have been. She was ashamed of her own illegitimacy and of her mother’s poor reputation. Marina believed that her situation was not like Nina’s since she had both a stepfather and a real father who had died “at the front.” Yet it was plain to her all the same that she and Nina had common ground. Both of them were “different.”
In the summer of 1954, the Medvedevs moved from their apartment on the Obvodny Canal to a large new building on the outskirts of Leningrad. The authorities were opening their assault on the housing shortage by repairing the decrepit buildings in the heart of town, and accordingly, the occupants were emptied, like objects from a cornucopia, into a new, four-story apartment complex called Sosnovaya Polyana. Two years later the repair of the old building was completed, and its former residents were allowed a choice of moving back or remaining at Sosnovaya Polyana. The Medvedevs returned to the Obvodny Canal. But after the “repair” and “redecoration,” Marina recalls, the pipes leaked worse, the floors sloped more, and the place was darker than before.
During this time, Marina’s mother became seriously ill. Klavdia had always been frail, and for a woman with three young children and uncertain health, her existence was a taxing one. She was up every morning by 7:30 A.M. and left almost immediately for work. After a ten-hour day, she went shopping every evening, never arrived home before seven, then had to cook supper for her husband and children. She was always limp and worn out by ten, ready to drop into bed.
When Marina was about twelve, Klavdia began coming home at night white with exhaustion. Alexander would turn down the sheets of their bed and beg her to lie down. But fearful of what her mother-in-law might say, Klavdia at first would demur. Her husband refused to take no for an answer and listened to the taunts of Musya and his mother as he cooked supper. He treated his wife, as always, with the utmost tenderness. But as time went by, Klavdia started running a temperature of 99 or 100 degrees nearly every day, and finally became too weak to climb out of bed.
Klavdia had been ill for two years when Marina completed the seventh grade. It was the end of her compulsory schooling, and Klavdia hoped that her eldest and cleverest child would finish the full ten-year course that comprises a Soviet high school education. Attracted by drawing and the arts, Marina planned to study fashion design, which would require the ten-year diploma. But one afternoon in the early summer of 1955, she came home, perched on her mother’s bed, and suggested another idea. A friend at school, Nina Samilyuk, was about to take examinations for pharmacy school, and Marina wanted to try, too. All her life, she told her mother, she had admired the white coats pharmacists wore and the spotless cleanliness of apothecary shops. To Marina’s surprise, her mother was enthusiastic.
1
To an outside observer, Marina does resemble Princess Mary, who was moody, intelligent and flirtatious. And Pechorin bears resemblances to the man Marina was to marry, Lee Oswald. Pechorin shunned emotional contact with other people. “How many times have I played the part of an axe in the hands of fate!” he boasted, adding that, “Fame is a question of luck. To obtain it, you only have to be nimble.” (
Marina indignantly rejects any comparison between Pechorin and the man she married. She says that Pechorin was the much better man. He destroyed Princess Mary and others, but through his destructiveness he found himself, and she admires him for this. Oswald, on the other hand, failed to find himself through his destructiveness, and for this she holds him in contempt.
Thinking about Marina’s later life, an observer might wonder, unfairly perhaps, whether Marina married her Pechorin or created him. Did she marry Oswald sensing that he had some of Pechorin’s destructive qualities or, having married Oswald, did she herself unwittingly reinforce his destructiveness?