Throughout the three-day train trip to Minsk, Marina sat by herself. Only too happy to talk to strangers as a rule, she could not bear to speak to anybody now. She was filled with sorrow at leaving Leningrad. Whatever the future might hold, she was sure that happiness would be no part of it. Not one of her relatives in Minsk even knew that she was on her way.
— 5 —
Meeting in Minsk
It was early August 1959 when Marina arrived in Minsk, at two o’clock in the morning, with sixty kopeks (sixty cents) in her pocket. The railway station was shrouded in darkness, the trolley stop dark and deserted. Fortunately, a pleasant-looking young man—a violinist, it turned out—came to the rescue by lending Marina a few rubles and carrying a suitcase straight to the apartment building where her uncle Vanya and aunt Musya Berlov lived.
Although she was completely unexpected, Musya, her mother’s youngest sister, welcomed Marina joyfully. But Marina detected misgivings—and soon found out why. Musya explained that Alexander had written to Marina’s aunt in Kharkov the year before, complaining of her late-night hours and suggesting that she had become a prostitute. Clearly, Marina could not expect much of a welcome in Minsk.
Musya tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll telephone Uncle Ilya tomorrow and see how the land lies.” If Marina was to stay in Minsk, it was Ilya, her mother’s eldest brother, who would have to take her in. Musya and Vanya had four children and lived in a small apartment; Ilya and his wife Valya possessed a three-room apartment and had no children.
Musya telephoned Ilya the next day and received an ungracious response. Why had Marina arrived “like snow off the roof,” without letting anybody know? “It was you she came to,” he said to Musya. “You look out for her.”
Reluctantly, Ilya invited them to tea, and on a hot midsummer Sunday, Marina, dressed as demurely as she knew how, went with her aunt Musya to his apartment. She received a chilly reception. She had no job, and her uncle told her, without one she would be unable to obtain a residence permit. When Musya asked Ilya to help, he replied: “Let her do it herself.”
Musya rose, her eyes brimming with tears. “Come on, Marina. It’s no use our staying here!”
Marina spent the next two or three weeks with Musya and Vanya. They were a loving pair, loving of one another and of their niece. Marina would happily have stayed on, but August was coming to a close and their children were due back from camp. Once again Ilya was approached. “Tell her to come on over,” he said with resignation.
Ilya’s reluctance was understandable. Only the very privileged had as much space as he did, but until recently he had been forced to share it. Tatyana Prusakova, Marina’s grandmother, had lived with him and Valya until her death the year before, and his sister Lyuba and her husband had only just moved out. Ilya was still savoring his privacy, and he had no desire to be overrun by another relative, above all not a marriageable girl who might soon acquire a husband and, with a new family of her own, gain the right to live with him indefinitely.
Ilya also had his official position to consider. Not only had he risen to become a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, he was also a lieutenant colonel and head of the Timber Administration of the Belorussian Republic’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, known by its initials as the MVD. He was an engineer, and Marina believes that he supervised the use of convict labor in the timber industry of the area. He held a sensitive post, therefore, although not nearly as sensitive as if he worked in the secret police ministry, the KGB. But Ilya had to be careful, even if it meant closing his heart to a relative in need.
The neighborhood in which Ilya and Valya lived was also charged with political vibrations. Their apartment building was set aside specially for high officials. The Suvorov Military Academy was just across the street. Also across the street was a wooden dwelling with a stockade that had once belonged to Marshal Timoshenko, one of Russia’s great heroes of World War II, and had just been taken over by Kirill Mazurov, head of the Belorussian Communist Party. It was an area that must have been carefully watched, and if Marina was the kind of girl her stepfather said she was, she could jeopardize the career to which Ilya had dedicated his life.
Marina had doubts of her own about going to live with the Prusakovs. She knew that she was unwanted. Moreover, she was fearful they would clip her wings and force her to live “like a nun.” Her fears were justified, at least at first. Life at Valya and Ilya’s was “just like a corrective labor colony.” One evening when two young men who happened to be her only friends in Minsk dropped by to take her out, Ilya exploded, “You’re not to give people your address. I don’t want your friends coming here.” Like many other members of the Soviet elite, he was afraid of losing his privileges if outsiders saw the way he lived.
Marina found Minsk a polite enough place, but she was lonely and so homesick that night after night she went to the terminal to wave off the 9:30 bus for Leningrad. One night when Ilya was out of town, Valya woke to a stirring in the living room, where Marina was supposed to be asleep. She found her niece in tears, packing to go back.
Valya sat down, and the two had a long talk. Marina told her of the way she had been treated by her stepfather, and Valya wept. “My poor child,” she said. “I want you to feel this is your home. We never had children. We love you like our own. You must understand Uncle Ilya. He loves you and worries about you. But he’s a man. He can’t show how he feels.” For the first time in her life, Marina began to feel that perhaps she was wanted after all, perhaps she was not “in the way.”
Ilya was still stern and aloof, but for Valya having a niece in the house was the next best thing to having a daughter of her own. Marina trusted her aunt and confided in her as she had in no one before. She even asked Valya the story of her father and mother. Who had her father been? Valya could not help. She had tried to pry the story from Ilya, but he had declined to tell her anything.
When Marina set out to obtain a residence permit to remain in Minsk, she had not only a rigorous set of housing regulations to contend with but the requirement that she show proof that she already had a job. Here she came up against the rock-ribbed character of her Uncle Ilya. He was what Russians call poryadochny, a person who prefers to go through regular channels or do without rather than use his official position to seek privilege, even so minuscule a one, in his case, as obtaining firewood. But he finally unbent a little for Marina. He took what was for him the precedent-shattering step of having a spravka, or job permit, made up at the MVD. Armed with Ilya’s document and a written statement from the manager of the apartment building that her uncle had room for her, Marina went to the city and district militia headquarters to fill out countless questionnaires. After a suspenseful wait of two weeks, she received a permit to reside at her uncle’s address, Apartment 20, No. 38–42 Kalinin Street. Without knowing it, Marina had vaulted from the middle to the upper class.
Her next task was to find a job. She had left Leningrad without the proper documents from the Pharmacy Institute, and even though trained pharmacists were in great demand in Minsk, she could not be hired. Finally, luck came to her rescue, and through a friend of her Aunt Lyuba’s, she was given a job at the Third Clinical Hospital. She became one of four pharmaceutical assistants, all girls, who filled prescriptions for doctors and nurses in the hospital.
Marina loved the work. She loved mixing powders and pills, and she enjoyed the easygoing spirit of the place. She especially liked the head of the pharmacy, Evgenia, a radiant, handsome, magnificently garbed woman, whose special genius lay in wheedling and politicking scarce supplies out of warehouses all over town. Evgenia was lenient in the extreme, and even Marina’s habitual lateness failed to get her in trouble. If she fell behind in her work, the other girls pitched in to help her catch up.