Ordinarily, the ramshackle university dormitory buildings were brilliantly lit in what Marina calls an effort to “guarantee the morality of Soviet youth.” On New Year’s Eve, however, the ingenuity of the students proved equal to the occasion. Every lightbulb that could be reached had been twisted from its socket; the rest had simply been smashed. The corridors and rooms were dark and crowded with couples, and phonographs played music of a sort Marina had never heard before. There were the strains of rock ’n’ roll, newly fashionable in the West but still virtually unknown in Russia. There was the “Lullaby of Broadway,” which Marina was later to hear so often that she calls it the “theme song” of her youth. There were the unfamiliar voices of Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole, all of them banned under Stalin but by this time recorded on the sly from broadcasts of the Voice of America. Marina’s enthusiasm for this new music was wholehearted. She considered it, and the young men who were its possessors, to be the last word in sophistication.
But her late date Lonya was just an uncouth boy. He got Marina alone in a bedroom, locked the door, switched off the light, and tried to force himself on her. Marina succeeded in wrenching herself free, but the incident was a revelation nonetheless. This was not the kind of “love” she had read about in books. She had supposed that love and sex were identical. She was frightened and repelled.
Even while Marina was fighting Lonya off, another thought had crossed her mind: “How will I face Mama in the morning?” But her mother was dead. Later, when she had time to reflect, she realized that it had been not fear of her mother, but fear of being like her, that had caused her panic. She must stop herself before it was too late, or she would end up doing the same terrible thing for which she had so long condemned her mother.
As far as Yevdokia and Musya were concerned, Marina’s late hours meant that she was already a fallen woman. Meanwhile, her bitter quarrels with Alexander continued. He reminded her again and again that he did not want her living at home after she had finished school. Often he threatened: “If you won’t go of your own free will, I’ll find a law to make you go!”
Marina answered weakly that if he tried to make her leave, she would appeal to the police or to a court.
“Just try it,” Alexander said. “I know all about you. I’ll tell them who your father was, and they’ll listen to me.”
“Who was my father?” Marina asked.
Alexander spat out her father’s name—Nikolai, and a surname that Marina would not remember until years afterward. “He was a traitor!” Alexander shouted.
Touched at her weakest, most vulnerable spot, Marina sobbed. “I never saw him. I never knew him. Children aren’t responsible for what their parents do.” She crumpled up on the sofa and cried.
Marina had no idea that there could be any family secrets left for her to discover. Then one day she came upon one that cast new light on her stepfather’s behavior. Rummaging through an old suitcase of her mother’s, she found a set of legal documents about a court case for child support. They showed that Alexander himself had had an illegitimate daughter in Moldavia before he and Klavdia were married. The child’s name was Alla, and she was only a year younger than Marina.
Marina came across another set of documents in the suitcase. They were papers filed by Klavdia with the Inquiry Bureau in Leningrad in what had almost certainly been an effort to find her real father. With her own life fading, and little hope that her daughter would be treated gently by the Medvedevs when she was gone, Klavdia had evidently tried to find him—if he had survived his sentence in Siberia or the Far North—so that he could help Marina after she was dead.
Neither of these discoveries gave Marina any comfort at all. The realization that Klavdia at the time of her death had been searching for her father only seemed to prove to Marina, probably erroneously, that what she had been dreading was true—she was the child of a casual liaison after all and her father had simply abandoned her. The discovery deepened Marina’s curiosity about herself, while at the same time deepening her conviction that the further she tried to dig, the greater the likelihood that what she might find out about herself would be the very truth she feared most.
As for the discovery that Alexander had a daughter of his own who was nearly the same age as she, it failed to soften in any way the harsh facts of his treatment of her, and it never occurred to Marina that perhaps it was not she, but that other girl who was at the heart of his anger toward her.
Taken together, both discoveries deepened Marina’s skepticism about the truth of things as they are presented on the surface. She had grown up in a household which was electric with lies, reticences, and outspoken brutality. Yet the outspokenness had failed to guarantee that what was being said was true.
At last Marina’s troubles caught up with her. With barely enough money for food and clothing, and with no one to love or care for her, she became passive and apathetic. She lost the will to shoulder her heavy load as a third-year pharmacy student: six hours of classes a day, plus four hours’ training in a pharmacy. She started cutting classes, ignored her homework, and embarked on an orgy of movie going. By the middle of the school year, her marks had dropped so sharply that she lost her stipend and had to get by on her orphan’s pension plus whatever her grandmother happened to send from Minsk. For a while she had only 18 rubles a month to live on, and with nothing to eat but rice kasha, she quickly contracted a disease of malnutrition that caused abscesses to erupt all over her body. She went regularly to a medical clinic for shots of penicillin, glucose, and vitamins and for treatments from an ultraviolet lamp. Venereal diseases were also treated there, and Marina was deeply embarrassed by the disapproving glances she received.
At school Marina’s classmates did their best to cover for her absences. Even the teachers and administrators tried to make allowances for her. The elderly professor who was in charge of the students in the third and final year was especially kind. Boris Zakharovich, whose initials had been transformed by the girls into the nickname “Bizet,” bent all the rules for Marina. Not only did he mark her “present” at classes she had cut, he also repeatedly gave her a B for recitations she had not given. Gently, tactfully, with endless patience, he took her on, she says, “like a nanny,” and tried to wheedle her through school.
“Marina Nikolayevna,” he told her, “you’re one of the finest students in the class. I think very highly of you. You can become a brilliant pharmacist if you’ll only try. You’re having a hard time, I know, but keep trying just a little longer. Graduate, and I’ll find you one of the best jobs in the city.”
Marina did not respond. In May, only two weeks before the final examinations that might have entitled her to graduation, a job, and a room in a young people’s hostel, she was expelled for “academic failure and systematic nonattendance at class.”
She was far more upset at being expelled than she was willing to show. She knew she had to find a job, but she tried only lackadaisically to look for one. Why bury herself in a factory or pharmacy all summer when her student friends were enjoying themselves without a shadow of self-reproach? Marina thought she could get by somehow.
Everyone at home knew that she was virtually penniless, and when some silver disappeared from the cupboard, Alexander, Musya, and Yevdokia accused her of taking it. They locked up their possessions and kept a careful watch on even the food, down to the last crust of bread. The silver later reappeared, and this time Marina was accused of having pawned it. She suspected that it was Alexander who was guilty, but she had no way either of proving her suspicions or of clearing herself.