The academic headmaster, Robert Neiman, gave Marina something she needed even more—encouragement to believe in herself. He was a gifted, outgoing man of twenty-eight or twenty-nine with dark hair and swarthy skin that were tokens of mixed Russian, Polish, Jewish and gypsy ancestry. When he learned Marina’s story, Robert spent hour after hour with her, cajoling her, teasing her, reasoning with her, and above all, reassuring her, in an effort to induce her to go back to pharmacy school. “You’re young. You like your work now,” he told her. “But this is no life for you.”
Instinctively, Marina agreed, but she was held back by fear—fear that she might be turned away, or else that she might be readmitted, only to fail once again. It was Robert who helped her surmount her fear. He told her that when she was ready to reapply, he would see to it that she got in. And it was Robert who made Marina feel that she could make something of herself if she would try. Finally, in December, after three months of work in cafeterias, Marina decided she was ready. With misgivings, and without a word to Robert, she went to the Pharmacy Institute and asked to be taken back. The school officials did not accept her right away. Instead, they gave her a job at the Central Pharmacy on the Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare of Leningrad. Marina knew she was being tested, but she was only too grateful to exchange the white coat of a cafeteria helper for the white coat of a pharmacy worker.
Robert Neiman was not the only man who influenced Marina’s decision. That autumn she had started seeing a good deal of Oleg Tarussin, a blond, curly-headed philology student. Ambitious to enter the Soviet diplomatic service, Oleg had a reputation at the University of Leningrad as a hardworking young man of promise. Marina had lied to Oleg when they met. Implying that she already had her degree, she told him she was working in a pharmacy, and he was under that misconception when he took her to meet his parents.
Oleg was the only son and, Marina suspected, the adopted son of Ekaterina Nikitichna Tarussina, a fine-boned woman with warm blue eyes, and a slender, retiring father. The mother, Marina gathered, worked in a factory or a hotel, and the father was a highly skilled plumber. Although the jobs they held were modest, they enjoyed exceptional good fortune: they had a one-room apartment for just the three of them, to say nothing of a dacha outside the city and, almost unheard of, a small private car—a Moskvich.
Marina met the Tarussins when Oleg invited her to spend the November 7 holiday, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, at their apartment. From then on, she was a frequent visitor. She quickly came to love the Tarussins’ airy apartment with its cozy, overstuffed Victorian furnishings. This was as much a home to her as any place she could imagine. She even loved the sprawling, rundown old dwelling in which the apartment was situated, reachable, just as in a rabbit warren, only by a succession of inner courtyards and corridors. It was not long before it was comfortably taken for granted that she and Oleg would one day be man and wife. In a word, Marina became a daughter of the house. “They were,” she says, “too good to me. Better than I deserved.”
But close as they all became, Marina still had not confessed that she was a cafeteria worker, not a pharmacy graduate. Her fear of losing Oleg was one reason she decided to go back to the Pharmacy Institute and actually earn her diploma. But in December, when Marina, unknown to her family, had started working in a pharmacy but had not yet been admitted to the institute, the truth came out. She fell ill and lay for three days on the Tarussins’ sofa, shaking with fever. Ekaterina Nikitichna went to the Medvedevs’ to let them know where Marina was staying. When she returned, she said, “My dear child, I know all about you. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Marina acknowledged everything.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” Ekaterina Nikitichna soothed her. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.” She promised to say nothing to Oleg.
When Marina heard in January 1959 that she had been readmitted to the Pharmacy Institute, it was not to her home that she went with the news but to the Tarussins’. It was an occasion of family rejoicing. Marina asked Oleg to forgive her for not telling the truth. Oleg answered that she had been a “little goose” to think that he would break off with her because she worked in a cafeteria. He had known all along, it turned out, and had merely been waiting to hear it from her.
Oleg depended on Marina and wanted to have her near him when he was studying, but he considered her “bourgeois.” He thought that she would never understand him or his world. His world was politics—already he was in trouble over a minor political incident at a student party—and he acted as if, compared with important things like politics, his personal life did not matter at all. He seldom took Marina on a date, and such money as he had he spent on books for himself, not on her. When they were with outsiders, he spoke of Marina as his “fiancée.” Yet he had never even told her that he loved her, much less asked her to marry him.
The prospect of marrying Oleg and moving in with him and his family was an appealing one. “Where else,” Marina asks, “could I have found such a mother-in-law?” It was her feelings for Oleg that she doubted. She felt as if he had suffered an inner hurt of some kind and that she ought to take care of him. He was not the “knight from a bygone century” she was looking for. They gradually subsided into a sort of brother and sister relationship, with an occasional flare-up of romantic feeling on one side or the other. Marina did not marry Oleg, but remembering him now, she is aware of similarities between him and a man with the same nickname, “Alik,” whom she did marry two years later—Lee Harvey Oswald.
By the end of January, Marina was back at the Pharmacy Institute, attending classes from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon and working at the pharmacy from four to eleven at night. It was a grueling schedule. But her colleagues at the pharmacy were what Marina calls “a wonderful collective. They made allowance for everybody’s difficulties.” At the institute, too, the teachers went out of their way to help. They were aware that Marina, unlike most of the other girls, had to work full time for a living.
Now that Marina was both working and going to school, the disfavor of the Medvedevs was muted a bit. She was allowed to take meals with the family again, and when Alexander locked her out at night, his old mother, Yevdokia, got up and let her in. Marina knew that Yevdokia was a hypocrite and a grasping woman, who contributed her share to the mean and miserly atmosphere of the household, but she came to feel sorry for her. There was even a momentary break in the hostility between Marina and Alexander. Nine-year-old Tanya, his favorite child, was lying ill with a high fever, and after all his efforts to fill a prescription for her had failed, Alexander appealed to Marina for help. She immediately went to the pharmacy and made up the prescription herself. Later, she and Alexander were standing by Tanya’s bed. Suddenly, to her astonishment, she felt her stepfather’s hand on her shoulder. She heard him say, as if thinking aloud: “Our Marina is a good girl after all. Thank God she’s grown up at last!”
Marina could not endure the touch of his hand. She ran away to the toilet and there gave way to tears. Why had he spoken to her like that? Could it be sex that he wanted? She was more frightened than if he had hit her.
Yet Marina had sympathy for him, too. She suspected that Alexander had a greater share of inner refinement than he was able to show in the squalid atmosphere of that apartment. She sensed in him somewhere a kindred spirit, a man who longed to rise higher and was forever held down by his surroundings. She thought that he was a gentler, more chivalrous man than he would let her see and that he, like she, had dreams of a more gallant and courtly life. And it was an idea that would not go away. After Klavdia died, Alexander eventually took a mistress. He dressed up for her, took her to the best restaurants in town, and treated her with more respect than many men treat their wives. His mother and his sister taunted him for it, but Marina stood up for him. “We hated each other, he and I,” she says, “but I felt sorry for him, too. I knew that he needed someone.”