When school was out that summer, Marina journeyed to Minsk to visit her grandmother, Tatyana Yakovlevna, now an old lady in her sixties, who was living there with her eldest son Ilya and his wife Valya. Marina’s Aunt Musya and Uncle Vanya Berlov, whose home had been her refuge in Moldavia, were also living in Minsk. They were the only family she had left, and Marina was glad to be with them, especially her grandmother. Tatyana had old-fashioned, even crotchety, ways. She did not allow Marina to dress in slacks and insisted that she wear her hair long as in Russia nice girls—and little girls—did. But Marina accepted her strictness. With her mother gone, she knew that her aged grandmother was probably the one person on earth who genuinely loved her.
That summer, Marina for the first time met a young man who caught her fancy. His name was Vladimir, and he took her to the movies and the park, played French love songs to her on the guitar, and taught her how to kiss. He was twenty-two and she was barely sixteen. She wished she were more grown up. Then one afternoon, as she was trying on a new dress, Marina was incredulous that the vision she beheld in the mirror was herself. She had grown up. But another vision intruded. She imagined that she saw a man standing behind her. He was gazing at her image in the mirror with approval, even admiration. She had never seen the man before. He was a stranger. But she knew who he was. He was her father.
They held a long and fanciful conversation. “What a splendid daughter I have!” she imagined him exclaiming. “So pretty and so grown up!” He begged her to come and live with him as his daughter. But with that, Marina grew stern and reproving. “You ought to have thought of it before,” she said. “You’re not my father at all. I grew up without any help from you. You made Mama and me very sad. Another man brought me up. He is my father now.”
But in her loyalty to her stepfather, Marina soon suffered a cruel disappointment. At the time of her sixteenth birthday, while she was in Minsk, Tatyana wrote the registry office at Severodvinsk, Marina’s birthplace, requesting copies of her birth certificate and other documents. She also wrote Alexander to ask for copies of the papers he had signed upon his formal adoption of Marina. For it was known among Alexander’s and Klavdia’s relatives alike that he had adopted his wife’s oldest child. Marina herself had been informed of it as a matter of certainty. In fact, she carried Alexander’s surname, Medvedev, with his first name as her patronymic, Alexandrovna. Neither in school nor anywhere else had she been known by any other name. But the formal documents—the birth certificate and the adoption papers—were needed now so that Marina could receive the internal passport for identification and travel within the country that is issued to every Soviet city dweller on reaching the age of sixteen.
All of them, Marina, her grandmother, and the rest of her relatives in Minsk, were thunderstruck by the answers Tatyana received. From Leningrad, Alexander wrote denying that he had adopted Marina. And from the registry office at Severodvinsk came the reply that there was no birth certificate or other documents for a Marina Alexandrovna Medvedeva, only for a Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova. (Marina’s real father had been named Nikolai and her mother’s maiden name was Prusakova. If the father does not claim, or the mother prove, paternity, a child born to an unmarried Soviet mother is given the father’s first name as a patronymic and the mother’s maiden name as a surname.)
Together, the two replies converging from different corners of the country confirmed Marina’s worst fears. Not only had she been abandoned by her own father, she had also been repudiated by the man who had taken his place. It was a cruel blow. To this day Marina refuses to accept it fully, clinging still to the idea that she was, in fact, Alexander’s adopted child, that he was lying when he denied it, and that he had merely hidden the documents of adoption. But whatever she made of his denial, she had still to face the terrible fact of his rejection.
This new discovery had humiliating consequences for Marina. Legally, she had to take the name inscribed on her birth certificate—Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova. Teachers and older friends of the family who had always addressed her as Marina Alexandrovna now had to call her Marina Nikolayevna. She had to change her pharmacy school registration from “Medvedeva” to “Prusakova” and endure the teasing of the other girls. As if this were not embarrassment enough, the space on her new passport for her father’s name was left blank—to any Soviet child the ultimate token of illegitimacy, carrying a stigma of which he or she is painfully reminded on the innumerable occasions when the passport is presented as identification.
When Marina returned to Leningrad that autumn for her third and final year at pharmacy school, she found matters in her stepfather’s household in no way improved. Not that Alexander interfered with her freedom or tried to dictate what she should do. On the contrary, he ignored her, at least at first. Mourning for Klavdia, he spent hours at her grave, his dark skin darker still from the sun, building a little monument and creating a flower bed there. Neither he nor his mother gave the slightest sign of caring at what hour Marina came home at night. To a sixteen-year-old girl, living in a large and rather rough city, this indifference to the hours she kept could mean only one thing. It was the ultimate token of abandonment. Marina knew that she was utterly alone.
Then one day soon after she came back from Minsk, Alexander informed her through his mother—he did not bother to tell her himself—that he would no longer tolerate her presence at meals with the rest of the family. “You’re grown now,” Yevdokia said. “You have relatives of your own. Let them look out for you.” Later, Alexander put it more bluntly. “You’re not my daughter,” he said. “I’m under no obligation to feed you.”
Marina did not know how she would eat. Luckily, someone told her that she was entitled to an orphan’s pension of 16 rubles a month. She was already receiving a student stipend of 18 rubles a month, and on the combined sum of 34 rubles (about $34) a month, plus small sums her grandmother in Minsk was able to scrape together and send her, she tried to feed and clothe herself.
Unwelcome at home, Marina was exposed as never before to the temptations of the city of Leningrad. She was exposed, moreover, at an age when she was exceptionally vulnerable and almost wholly inexperienced. Her distractions were innocent enough at first; she went to the movies or sat in a cafeteria by the hour, chatting with friends from pharmacy school. But it was a struggle just feeding and clothing herself, to say nothing of paying for tickets to the movies. And so during the New Year holiday, Marina found a job delivering telegrams through the wintry streets of the city. Cold and often hungry, she was made even more miserable by the sight of gaily ornamented New Year’s trees winking behind warm, curtained windows.
Like any sixteen-year-old, Marina craved gaiety. She started going to student dances on Saturday nights at the University of Leningrad. On other nights she went to mixers and get-acquainted dances at the Technological Institute and the Institute of Railway Transport. She never had an escort. She went, as Soviet girls often do, with a friend or two from school. But even at these casual get-togethers, Marina was painfully self-conscious about her unbecoming hand-me-down dresses. On several poignant occasions she was passed over in favor of girls who were not as pretty as she but who had blouses of German nylon or shoes of Czechoslovak make to give them a look of prosperity or glamour.
A young man named Leonid invited her to attend the New Year’s Eve dance in his dormitory at the University of Leningrad. Of all the schools in the city, the university was the most prestigious. Its students were the finest in the country. In the competitive scramble of Soviet student life, they were the elite. Marina accepted Lonya’s invitation with alacrity.