Uncertain of her own health, Klavdia was evidently anxious that her daughter be able to stand alone. She got up from her bed and accompanied Marina to school to obtain the documents she would need for her examinations. The school officials tried to dissuade them. Too many of the more promising boys and girls were leaving for work or vocational schools after the seventh grade, they grumbled. If this kept up, there would soon be hardly any of the better students left to go on to university. But Klavdia and Marina had their way.
Marina entered the examination with a light heart and a total absence of preparation. If she failed, she said to herself, she could always go back to school. She was entering the competition, after all, mainly to keep her friend Nina company. In the end, she passed with 23 of 25 possible points. The decision was made for her. She was going to pharmacy school. Nina, who had inspired the decision, failed. She went to work in a chocolate factory and eventually studied to be a nurse.
Marina had another close friend, Tamara Kumilan, who lived with her aunt and uncle in the apartment on the Obvodny Canal. One cold afternoon in November of 1956, when Marina was in her second year at pharmacy school, she and Tamara went to the public baths, as they did every week. They shivered a little as they hurried home, for a wintry wind was blowing along the canals and bleak-looking patches of snow dappled the ground. Rather shyly, Tamara opened up an unexpected topic. Marina’s mother had been talking with Tamara’s aunt about the atmosphere at the Medvedevs’ apartment. She was distressed by the way Alexander’s mother and sister were treating Marina. And all, Klavdia said, because Marina was illegitimate. “Let’s be sisters,” Tamara said. “You have no one. And neither do I.”
Marina was shocked. She had always believed that her father died at the front during World War II. She dared not ask any questions, and Tamara, anxious not to wound, spoke only allusively, in quick, shorn-off sentences, as she repeated Klavdia’s story. From her Marina learned virtually all she has ever found out about her father. He had been an engineer, and in the course of his work, he had drawn up a blueprint for a bridge or some other public project. In a mysterious effort to frame him, someone—nobody knew exactly who—tampered with the calculations on the blueprint and rendered it defective. He had been blamed, of course, and arrested as an “enemy of the people.” And he had vanished forever.
Marina refrained from asking anyone at home about Tamara’s revelation. The truth of it was only too plain. Now that she had the key, the pieces of the puzzle fit together. At no time in her life had Marina felt equal to Petya and Tanya. Now she understood Alexander’s cruelty, the taunts of his mother and Musya, the guilt her own mother seemed to feel in loving her. Under the circumstances by which she had come into being, she was of less value than other people.[2]
From the moment of her discovery, Marina spent a good deal of time wondering who her father might have been. What had happened between her mother and him? It was of crucial importance to her that their relationship had been a serious one. If it were only a chance affair, a seduction, then how could the child conceived in it be of any worth? She consoled herself with the thought that her father might have been a foreigner, a general, or somebody else of importance who had been carried off as “an enemy of the people.” She even dared hope that her mother and he had actually been married, and that after his arrest Klavdia, fearful that she, too, might be arrested, had managed to destroy the marriage document and conceal her identity.
Marina looked to her stepfather for proof that her birth had not been a shameful accident. He treated her badly, but unlike his mother and sister, he never once reproached Klavdia for anything in her life before she met and married him. To Marina, that seemed to indicate that her mother and father had been in love. Finally, she cast back for reassurance to her upright old grandmother in Archangel. Surely so straitlaced a lady would not have forgiven her daughter and consented to bring up a child who was merely the result of a short-lived attraction. Yet one thought always returned to haunt Marina. From the beginning, no one had wanted her.
Klavdia’s illness was growing even more grave. One afternoon when she was lying sick in bed, Marina entered the room unexpectedly and caught a sudden change in her mother’s expression. “You reminded me so much of your father just now,” Klavdia sighed. Marina wanted to know how. Her eyes and her mouth and the gesture she had just made, her mother replied. “Tell me about my father,” Marina begged. “Not now,” Klavdia said. “I’ll tell you when you’ve grown up a bit.”
Marina did not tell Klavdia that she had discovered the secret of her illegitimacy. But just as she had turned against her mother years before on learning that Alexander was not her real father, so she now found new reason to hate Klavdia. She could not even sympathize with her mother’s illness, and although her feelings were in guilty turmoil, she could neither conceal her hardened attitude nor change it. While the fact of Marina’s illegitimacy was never made explicit between them, Marina believes her mother saw the change in her and realized the secret was out.
During Klavdia’s long illness, Alexander was more difficult to get along with than ever. A good deal of the time he had his lips pressed tightly together, and he refused to speak to anyone at all. And he drank. Sometimes he came home from work silent and morose, only to slip into the toilet, take a nip of vodka, and come out singing. Sometimes he appeared at the front door with a bottle in his hand. Klavdia or Yevdokia would quickly snatch it away and hide it. Often Klavdia gave it back, but if she did not, he would look for it himself, or jog little Tanya on his knee, kiss her, and ask in a whisper where it was hidden. Such scenes occurred every week. But even when Alexander was drunk, he did not change toward Marina—“I made him mad any time.”
But for his drinking the family would not have been poor. Alexander gave his earnings to Klavdia every payday. Later, he would have second thoughts and beg to have some of it back for vodka. Klavdia invariably obliged, and the family had to live the second half of each month on what it could manage to borrow. Marina resented her stepfather for “drinking up” the rubles he and her mother worked so hard to earn.
Ill as she was, Klavdia became pregnant once more in the spring of 1956, and that summer she had an abortion. Again, Marina was sorry for her, yet angry as well. “Why,” she asked, in a question that was by now a refrain, “does she live an immoral life and then complain?” She was sure the abortion was a judgment of her mother’s relationship with Alexander.
After the abortion, Klavdia went to the city of Kharkov, in the Ukraine, to spend her vacation with her sister Polina. But her health failed to improve. When she returned to Leningrad, she was sent to the Academy of Military Medicine and spent the fall and early winter there. She had a series of operations, the latest treatments, the most promising new drugs—the best care the city could provide. But when she finally came home, she could get out of bed only with her husband at her elbow to support her.
Marina knew her mother was dying, and so acutely painful were her emotions that she tried to pretend she was someone else, living in some other time. She lived as far away from home as her imagination could carry her. She began doing poorly in her heavy load of courses at pharmacy school, and she endured the perpetual cruelty of her step-grandmother and step-aunt. One day Yevdokia invited a radiant and handsome woman to the apartment. They sat together in the one room they all had to share, with Klavdia lying ill on the bed. The moment Alexander came home and saw the caller, he held a whispered conference with his wife and quickly left the apartment. He stayed away for two hours. When he returned, the strange lady had gone. Tears were rolling down Klavdia’s cheeks. Alexander ordered the children to leave the room while he tried to comfort their mother.
2
For Marina, the pain of learning that she was illegitimate was in no way eased by the fact that, according to published Soviet sources, as many as 20 percent of her classmates, children born during the late 1930s and early 1940s, may also have been illegitimate.