Treated like a criminal at home, liberated by the casual atmosphere of summer, and without even the requirements of school or a job to restrain her, Marina stayed out later than ever and started to make friends quite different from her classmates. One was a girl named Lyuda, three years older than Marina and bold as brass. She had a job as deputy director of a commission shop that dealt not in the shoddy, mass-produced goods turned out by Soviet factories but in items that were old or unusuaclass="underline" clothing and cosmetics from abroad or finely wrought jewelry and porcelain that had been changing hands ever since the Revolution. It was thanks to her job in the commission shop that Lyuda could deck herself out, to the envy of all her friends, in Czechoslovak handbags and English lipsticks.
Marina created a home for herself, of sorts, at the commission shop, helping Lyuda fill out invoices and keep books, or fixing herself a new hairdo at the back of the shop while Lyuda dealt with the customers out front. It was a lively place, a headquarters for sailors of the Soviet commercial fleet, mainly Latvians and Estonians, who came in with foreign shoes, cigarettes, or cloth to sell at bloated prices. Most of them were mere boys, poorly educated boys at that, who asked nothing better than to take pretty girls like Lyuda and Marina to the best restaurants in town and spend stacks of rubles treating them to caviar, shish kebab, and champagne. Marina remembers one two-week period during which she never missed an evening in the restaurants of the Astoria or the Evropeiskaya hotel. She had no respect for these young sailors because of their poor education; and because she went out with them just to get a free dinner, she began to lose respect for herself.
Marina was attracted by foreigners. For one thing, she sometimes imagined that her father had been a foreigner. Besides, foreigners behaved with a politeness she liked much better than the rough and casual ways of Russian boys. In addition, she acquired a collection of Georgians and Armenians, lean, dark-eyed young men from the southern republics of the USSR whose Mediterranean looks gave them some of the exotic appeal of the foreigner and whose jealous and possessive ways she liked. Most of these young men were in Leningrad on vacation, and Marina and her friends often met them on the beach by the Petropavlovsk Fortress. Marina did not swim; she was too conscious of her “bony, graceless” figure to do that. Then they all went to the movies or a restaurant, where they made sure that Marina had enough to eat, since she was so emaciated that she aroused the protective instincts of everyone she met. That summer, the summer of 1958, she says, “I simply lived off chance acquaintances.”
It was not a happy summer. Alexander had started locking her out of the apartment at midnight. With the rest of the family at their dacha in the country, there was no one at home to let her in, and she spent many a night nodding on the staircase outside the apartment. She often found herself in compromising situations. One night she, Lyuda, and a boyfriend of Lyuda’s were walking in the woods along the Neva River when they stumbled on an all-night drinking party of the kind Russians call a bardak (as distinguished from an “orgy,” at which intercourse is expected of the girls). Marina was shocked to see so many drunken forms on the ground. Inexperienced in matters of sex, she was frightened—and fascinated.
Then one evening, a foreigner she had met—a diplomat from Afghanistan—lured her to his hotel room on the assumption that she was not a virgin and tried to make love to her. Again Marina was shocked. If a stranger from abroad could so easily mistake her for something she was not, what was she in danger of becoming?
She began to feel guilty and ashamed of the life she was leading. After the first excitement had worn off, Marina realized she was bored by the young men she was seeing. She went out with them to avoid going home, and because they enabled her to eat. She had allowed a few of them to kiss her in return. But how, she wondered, did that differ from being a prostitute? It was a harsh word to use. But sexual standards of that time were strict. Most unmarried girls were either virgins or prostitutes; there was not much in between.
The Medvedevs did not hesitate to call her names. Musya accused Marina of trying to ruin the family’s reputation. Alexander said: “Don’t come to me bringing a baby in your skirts. Go to Minsk. You’re in my way. I don’t want any prostitutes around me!” Having concluded that the law would not support him in an attempt to get rid of Marina on the grounds that her father had been an “enemy of the people,” Alexander may have been trying to drive her at least into the appearance of prostitution, since Leningrad by now had laws allowing the deportation of “parasites,” as those who did not have jobs, including prostitutes, were called. He also wrote to Marina’s relatives in Kharkov, implying the worst about her and begging them to come and get her. From Kharkov the word spread to her relatives in Minsk.
It was the most degrading time of Marina’s life. She “went around in a fog,” trying not to think what she was doing, or what she could easily become. She tried to avoid Maria Yakovlevna, her stepfather’s aunt and the beloved counselor of her earlier years. She felt she “could no longer look Maria Yakovlevna in the eye” because she was “not so pure as before, not the person Maria Yakovlevna wanted” her to be. As for Maria Yakovlevna, she said to Marina: “Of course I don’t believe the slander they’re dredging up about you, but I can see you’re not what you were. But you’re a big girl now. Live your own life. I won’t interfere.” To Marina the words meant that even Maria Yakovlevna no longer cared about her. And if nobody cared, then she was past salvation, and there was no depth to which she did not deserve to sink.
It was Lyuda’s mother who helped break the vicious circle. Sometimes Marina spent the night at Lyuda’s when she was locked out at home. One morning, Lyuda’s mother said: “Marina, I don’t want you here any more. I don’t want a girl of light conduct in my home. I don’t want to feed you, and I don’t want trouble with your family. Really, you ought to get a job.” Marina was stung, but she knew Lyuda’s mother was right. It was what she had been waiting for—someone who cared enough about her to crack down on her.
It was August, summer was ending, and Marina knew that she had to find work. She was leaving a cheap cafeteria one day when she spotted a “Help Wanted” sign. “A princess like me,” she said to herself wryly, “won’t lose her crown if she washes a dish or two.” She went back and applied. The manager, a gray-haired man in his fifties, examined her documents and asked her a great many questions. Then, with a thoughtful look, he turned her hands over in his. They were soft, white hands, not the hands of a girl accustomed to heavy work. “My dear child,” he said, “this is no work for you. It’ll land you in the hospital in a day.” But he gave her a job. “You won’t earn much,” he said, “but at least you can eat for free.”
Marina became a cleaner-up in the cafeteria of a large boys’ school. The boys were a rough lot, and they made no secret of their raucous delight at having a pretty new face around. But the supervisor, an officious woman, disliked Marina and soon lodged a formal complaint that she was too slow at scrubbing floors and ought to be fired. A special commission arrived to investigate, and Marina was transferred to a new school and a new cafeteria.
Marina was happier there. She still had heavy work to do, but her new supervisor was a compassionate woman who treated Marina like a daughter. After the first snowfall, she presented Marina with a pair of mittens she had knitted specially for her.