Yevdokia later told Marina who the strange lady was. She was Anna, a woman Alexander had courted before he married Klavdia, and Yevdokia had invited her to call with no other thought than to let Alexander see with his own eyes the contrast between the blooming and well-dressed visitor and the failing creature he had married. Marina overheard Yevdokia tell her son: “You ought to have married her and not that frivolous woman who had a child and is sick all the time.”
Klavdia had been home only a fortnight when she started running a high fever. At night she moaned pitifully so that none of the others could sleep, and it was decided that she would have to go back to the hospital. Exhausted from lack of sleep and from the very odor of illness, Marina made a remark she has never been able to extinguish from her memory. “First to the hospital,” she announced to her mother, “and then the cemetery!” Marina was thinking of her mother’s trip to the hospital for an abortion the year before. Now it would be her punishment to die.
Klavdia was taken to a hospital in Leningrad on what is called the “Vyborg Side,” an island on the opposite bank of the Neva River from the Obvodny Canal. Because of the city’s web of bridges, rivers, and canals, the journey to the hospital was circuitous, requiring several bus and trolley changes and the better part of an hour. Marina dreaded the long, cold pilgrimages to the hospital, but she tried to visit her mother as often as she could. During her first visit, Klavdia reminded her daughter of what she had said. “It made me very sad,” Klavdia told her. “Probably I will go from here to the cemetery. Some day you’ll understand that life is complicated. All your life you’ll remember your sad mama.” In tears Marina sat on her mother’s bed and protested that she did not want her to die.
On later visits Marina tried her best to be cheerful. Klavdia laughed and smiled. She promised she would be home soon and they would all be happy again. But behind her effort at gaiety, Marina could see only the sorrow and pain. She was unable to hold back her tears. “Don’t cry, Marisha,” her mother said to comfort her. “Everything will be all right.” But one day a nurse drew Marina aside. “Let’s talk like grown-ups,” she said. “Get hold of yourself. You’re a big girl now. Your mama has less than a month to live.” The name of the illness was cancer.
Even now, the merciless women at home kept up their persecution. Yevdokia and Musya urged Alexander to seek the company of other women. Alexander refused. One day, however, Musya asked Marina to inform her mother, untruthfully, that Alexander was seeing another woman. Marina, to her lasting sorrow, complied. To this day she remembers her mother’s wistful reply: “He is not the only man who has been capable of loving me.”
On April 8, 1957, Klavdia died. Marina was to have gone to the hospital the day before. But it was rainy and cold. She had only thin shoes, her clothes were not warm enough to withstand the wind, and she did not have the heart for the trip. The following day she arrived home from school to find Petya sitting by the door with tears streaming down his cheeks. To Marina’s questioning look, he said simply: “Mama’s dead.” Fifteen-year-old Marina gathered together the clothing for her mother’s burial and accompanied her stepfather to the hospital.
Later, an uncle told Marina that Klavdia’s last words were of her. “I don’t want to die,” she had said. “I have little children at home. Where is Marina? Where is Marina? I have to see her. I have something to say to her.” Then she lost consciousness and died. Marina believes that her mother intended to tell her who her father had been.
Klavdia’s mother, Tatyana Yakovlevna, the magnificent old matriarch who had given Marina her first home, came to Leningrad all the way from Minsk, where she now was living, for the burial. It was she who insisted upon the two-hour funeral service in the Russian Orthodox Church. After the service, Musya was taken by a sudden and belated seizure of remorse. Beside the open coffin she fell to her knees and wailed: “Forgive me, Klava! Forgive me!” Up marched the redoubtable Maria Yakovlevna. She drew Musya away from the coffin, admonishing her family and quite audibly to everyone, “This is no place to put on an act. You ought to have thought of it before.”
Yevdokia did not attend the service. She lay moaning in bed at home, summoned a doctor, and complained of how ill she was feeling herself. She refused Alexander the thing he wanted most—to escort his wife’s body home and hold the final leave taking there. She refused even to allow the coffin to be carried upstairs for a momentary gesture of farewell.
It was Maria Yakovlevna who uttered the final judgment on them all. To her sister, Yevdokia, she said with majestic scorn: “It was you who killed Klavdia, not the cancer. You gave her not a life, but a hell. A healthy person couldn’t have stood it, much less a sick one. You had no heart.” Before all of them, this veteran of Stalin’s wrath pronounced an epitaph for the woman who had died at the age of thirty-nine. “Klava,” she said, “was a golden human being. I could not have lived with you a single hour.”
— 4 —
Farewell to Leningrad
With Klavdia, the single bond between them, gone, relations between Marina and her stepfather took an immediate turn for the worse. It was the day after her mother’s funeral, she recalls, that Alexander said: “And when will you be taking yourself out of here?”
Stunned, Marina ran from the apartment and spent the rest of the day pacing the wintry canals near home. She had no other thought but: “Mama’s gone. He can do as he likes with me now.” This thought, this fear, grew louder and louder until it became a sort of ringing in her head like the insistent clanging of a bell. Dazed by the sound, Marina looked up and was startled to see a streetcar screaming to a stop in front of her. A volley of profanity by the driver brought her to her senses. Crossing the street like a sleepwalker, she had narrowly escaped being hit by a passing trolley.
Marina spent many hours walking along the canals as winter gave way to spring that year and the bare branches became filigreed with the first shoots of green. Rather than go home after school, she would make her way into one of the countless little parks with which the city is studded to sit by herself on a bench. She thought mostly of her mother, who now seemed to her an injured and blameless being, a Christian figure of forbearance. Marina could see her mother only through a blur or remorse. She felt that it was she who had killed Klavdia by her lack of love and, at last, by those searing words: “First to the hospital, then to the cemetery!” Marina could not forgive herself. Often she entered the flickering half-darkness of the Nikolsky Cathedral, lit a candle, and prayed.
But solitude seemed to add to her sadness. And so she forsook the lonely parks, the desolate back streets, the empty cathedral, and began to direct her footsteps to the most crowded thoroughfares of the city, and above all, to the Nevsky Prospekt. She found herself lingering by the music counters of department stores, listening to the popular rhythms of the West, which were just beginning to be heard in Russia. For a full year after the death of her mother, Marina could not bear to take a novel in her hand. Her feelings were too raw, and the contrast between her own sorrowful surroundings and the glittering world of her imagination was too abrasive. It was music that brought solace to her now.