In April Marina quit her job at the pharmacy. Boris Zakharovich or “Bizet,” the kindly teacher who had helped her the year before, came to her rescue once again and had her stipend restored so that she could devote all her time to studying for the approaching examinations. Midway through June she took the exams. In her appearance before the oral examiners, Marina was able to answer only two of four questions in chemistry, and she all but ran from the room after the ordeal, convinced that she had failed again. But to her astonishment she learned that she had passed everything but chemistry, and thanks to the compassion of one of the examiners, she was allowed to appear again. This time she was asked pointedly easy questions. The examiners even coached her. Marina protests a trifle indignantly that “I didn’t need all the help they tried to give me.” She passed and was awarded her diploma.
The Tarussins held a banquet in her honor, but by this time Marina had a new boyfriend. The White Nights had descended upon Leningrad, the period from late May to July when the city is cloaked in midnight sun and, scorning sleep, young and old alike stroll night after night along the canals and embankments. One evening when she was supposed to be studying, Marina slipped out to a movie, and there she met a dark-haired stranger of about thirty who escorted her back to the trolley. Marina liked his sleek, self-satisfied good looks and his humorous and sophisticated conversation. He was Armenian, and his name was Eddie.
Before long Oleg was forgotten, and Marina and Eddie were together constantly. Early in July, with her diploma miraculously in hand and the White Nights beginning to wane, they went on half a dozen all-night boat trips around the city, dancing and talking until six in the morning. Eddie informed Marina that she did not know how to kiss, and he proceeded to teach her. To measure her progress as a pupil, he gave her a mark with each kiss.
Eddie was very generous, and when Marina’s eighteenth birthday came around on July 17, he took her to a restaurant, treated her to dinner, and presented her with a ring. Unlike Oleg, he made her feel cherished and desired. He lavished rubles upon her and presented her with flowers and even nylon underclothing from East Germany. Moreover, Eddie, a documentary film operator associated with one of the big Leningrad studios, had an apartment to himself for the summer.
On evenings when they were alone in the apartment, Eddie and Marina danced to the music of Lolita Thorez, an Argentine singer who was then the rage. Later, Eddie would play Scheherazade softly on the Victrola, turn down the lights, and spread pillows on the floor. He and Marina would lie there by the hour, watching shadows from the fire. Then he would kiss her, long kisses that made her head reel. Soon, Marina says, everything had happened between them except the final act of sexual intercourse. Even that, she would not have refused. It was Eddie who refused. Marina likes to believe that he was so experienced, so “delicately depraved,” that he simply preferred hours and hours of “petting” to the sexual act itself. But Eddie explained that she was too young, that she had too many troubles already, and he did not want to add to them.
Marina trusted Eddie, even when she pieced together from an odd fact here and there that he was married and had a wife and small son at a dacha in the country. He made her feel wanted, and for the first time Marina lost her shyness and shame. She was in love, or at least infatuated, with Eddie. Yet at the same time she was disappointed in herself. She knew Eddie was not free to marry her, and she was afraid that she was capable of arousing only sexual desire, not love.
Reality, meanwhile, was forcing her to make choices. As a final act of kindness, “Bizet” and the other teachers at the institute helped Marina get one of the best job assignments available to a member of the graduating class. She started in on the usual two-week trial period at the Central Pharmaceutical Warehouse but soon began to skip work. She wanted to spend all her time with Eddie. Finally, she told her superiors she did not want the job. It was a risky decision, for Alexander had given her an ultimatum. She could go to a hostel in Leningrad for which her job had qualified her or to her mother’s family in Minsk. It made no difference to him, just so long as she left his roof.
Marina had been saying goodbye to Leningrad for some time. But she could scarcely endure the thought. She loved the city—the whole miraculous expanse of it. She loved the wind and the falling snow, the smell of the trees, even the sound the trolleys made. Looking at the shadows of the willows in the Griboyedov Canal, at the maples and oak trees in the Summer Garden, at the sunset glowing over the Neva River, she wondered sorrowfully how she could bear to go. One evening when she and Eddie were out walking, she caught sight of the red sky behind the Nikolsky Cathedral, the spot where Czar Alexander II had been murdered. The tears started streaming down her cheeks. “Must I really leave all this?” she asked.
Eddie knew of her dilemma and decided to take a hand. He advised her to go to Minsk. “Marina,” he said, “I don’t want you to go. I want what is best for you. It’s your choice whether you go or stay. But I’m older than you, and I have more experience. I don’t take advantage of you, but other men may. You fall for men very easily. I’m afraid you’ll be ruined here. With all the temptation in this city and no one to control you, it may be too much for you.” It was this Eddie feared for Marina, and this Marina feared for herself.
A few nights later an episode occurred that crystallized her fears. She and another girl were on their way home from a movie when they were picked up by a pair of young men, one of whom turned out to be a well-known soccer player. They ended up in an apartment, and Marina’s friend went to one of the rooms with her young man, leaving Marina in the other room with the soccer star. Carefully closing the door he took off the bracelet he was wearing—a gold bracelet with a little watch inside that he had won in competition in Finland—dangled it in front of Marina, and said it would be hers if she would have intercourse with him. Marina refused, and in the struggle that followed, she hit him with all her might. The couple next door were roused by the scuffle and came to her rescue.
Marina left the apartment and went home alone on the trolley. She still looked so disheveled and upset that a man who was seated nearby asked if there was anything wrong. Did she need someone to see her home? Shaking with fright, Marina rose from her seat and moved to the other end of the trolley, certain the man was trying to take advantage of her, too. “Good God!” she wondered. “Is everyone beginning to take me for a prostitute?”
She arrived home at six or seven in the morning. Still trembling, she packed everything she owned in a suitcase and sat down to await Alexander’s return from the midnight shift. When he came in, she told him: “Papa, I’m going away. But I need ten more rubles to get to Minsk.” Without a word he gave her the money. The rest of the family was at the dacha in the country, and Marina left without saying goodbye to any of them, not even her beloved Petya and Tanya.
She spent the day at the Tarussins’ with Oleg’s mother. She refused to accept any money or let Ekaterina Nikitichna come to the station to see her off. Oleg’s mother would not let her leave, however, without a stack of sandwiches, a whole chicken, cheese, chocolate, and a jar of jam—enough food to keep her going for a fortnight.