Marina wanted to be liked by her coworkers, but most of all she wanted their attention. They might all be seated at a table, filling prescriptions, and Marina would entertain them by recounting some of her escapades in Leningrad, usually those that involved smoking, wearing slacks, and going to restaurants with men—things that “nice girls” did not do. Her coworkers decided that she was “fast,” and that she was judging them as provincial. Marina did think they were provincial, and she was at war, too, with the hypocritical “brother’s keeper” mentality that she found on every side. But before long she realized that the other girls considered her a snob. “Look,” she said. “I’m just homesick. That’s why I talk about Leningrad.” Nevertheless, as Marina describes it, not without a certain pride, her colleagues “looked on me, ironically, askance, like a creature from another planet. We had different interests and different ideals. We inhabited different worlds.” Her reaction to the suggestion that she join the Komsomol was typical. In theory, at least, the Komsomol was the flower of the Soviet younger generation. But Marina doubted that the description fitted her, and joining would not alter that fact. She had learned to hate the hypocrisy of her elders. It was no better among the young. “I thought ‘Komsomol’ ought to mean the ‘best,’” she says. “I knew I wasn’t the ‘best,’ and someone just sticking a label on me wouldn’t make me so.”
Eventually, Marina joined, but only after pressure from her peers and a good deal of passive resistance. As a first step, she had to memorize the Komsomol Charter and answer a number of questions about the organization, Soviet policies, and herself. Marina got by on the coaching of friends. Then at a solemn meeting staged in the headquarters of the Belorussian Communist Party Central Committee, she had to answer questions put to her by the “big wheels” of the Belorussian Komsomol. The hardest question was the last: Why did she want to join? Marina, like everyone, said that she “wanted to be in the front rank of Soviet Youth.” The truth was that it would have been awkward to refuse.
The formalities over, she was told to fill out a questionnaire and return a week later, bringing a photograph for her membership card. Marina filled out the questionnaire but forgot the photograph. Rather, she put it off from week to week and as a result never received a membership card. But she paid the monthly dues of thirty kopeks (thirty cents), and from time to time put in an appearance at meetings of the Komsomol aktiv, or cell, of the hospital. The meeting were usually devoted to disciplinary matters or boring lectures on foreign affairs. Occasionally, there were picnics or dances, but Marina considered them dull and avoided them whenever she could.
As the months went by, Marina made many friends. Because of them, and because of her uncle and aunt, it was the happiest time of her life. She soon had an assortment of admirers, one of them a good-looking young man by the name of Sasha Peskaryov. A medical student, Sasha came from what was considered a “good family,” and Ilya made him an exception to the rule that his niece was not to bring young men to the house. Sasha put Marina on a pedestal, where she felt distinctly out of place. “He thought I was an angel,” she recalls. To cool his ardor she told him that she had a lover and a child back in Leningrad, but Sasha assured her that he would cheerfully marry her anyway. He was Marina’s faithful standby, the doormat she trampled on and broke dates with whenever someone more interesting came along.
Marina had met Misha Smolsky on one of her summer visits to Minsk years before, and it was through him that she was introduced to a new group of friends. Misha was not Russian at all, but half-Tartar and half-Pole, a tall, heavy-set, red-haired young man who was the scion of a distinguished father and grandfather both and somewhat oppressed by his heritage lest he fail to match their achievements. He was a flashy dresser, and one day he stopped by the pharmacy to pick up Marina wearing a hip-length overcoat, a pair of pointed English shoes, and a towering karakul cap. He was smoking a pipe, and as he led Marina off, he draped his arm casually over her shoulder as if he had proprietary rights. The other girls were horrified and were bristling with questions the next day. “Are you his mistress?” one of them asked.
Misha was the presiding genius of a circle of young people who were both unconventional and irreverent toward the values of their elders. And yet they were also well educated and took a serious interest in music and literature. When Dr. Zhivago became the scandal of the day because the author, Boris Pasternak, was awarded a Nobel Prize for the book that had been forbidden in Russia, one of the members of Misha’s group got hold of a Russian-language edition printed in Paris, and each patiently waited his turn to read it.
The group’s “all for one, one for all” camaraderie was rather like the spirit of the characters in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the novelist most of them preferred over all others at that time. His books were just then beginning to appear in superlative Russian translation, and Hemingway’s staccato style had an enormous appeal compared with the wooden dialogue and the long-winded, moralistic tales of Soviet writers.
Marina’s favorite novel, as it happened, was not by Hemingway but was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The “tomorrow we die” outlook of Remarque’s characters, the antiwar spirit, the author’s sympathy for the common soldier whose fate is determined by the forces of history and the self-deluded leaders above him all struck a sympathetic chord among millions of Soviet young people. But Marina has another explanation for the rage that swept the Soviet Union for Remarque and Hemingway. The level of sexual morality among her contemporaries was “not very high,” she says, and in the novels of these writers they found the moral sanction they were seeking. Hemingway and Remarque gave sex an explicit quality the younger generation was longing for and pointed the way toward reconciling reality with romance.
Since foreign writers and foreign ways meant so much to them, and since all of them knew foreign languages, it was hardly surprising that foreign words crept into the slang of Misha Smolsky and his friends, words like “Broadway” for the main street of Minsk, “pad” for Misha’s family’s apartment, and “do” or “carouse” for an ordinary evening get-together. At these gatherings of the group, the boys would exchange tidbits of news from abroad that they had gleaned from the Voice of America or the BBC. The girls would huddle over a French fashion magazine, and they would dance to the music of Elvis, Eartha Kitt, or Louis Armstrong. “A thing had only to be forbidden,” Marina recalls, “for us to get hold of it somehow.”
Her favorite escort among the young men in the group was Leonid. Lonya was an architect, and to Marina, everything about him was darkly appealing, from his dark lashes and hair to his black eyes and swarthy skin. Lonya was a Jew—once again Marina had chosen an outsider. As the winter of 1960 faded into spring, she was often in Lonya’s company, and in June he asked her to live with him. Marina was horrified. When a man and a woman wanted to live together, she pointed out in an injured tone, they usually talked about getting married. Lonya could not consider it. He was poor. He did not have an apartment. And he had thought Marina was above such bourgeois ideas. They saw less of one another after that. But the attraction did not wear off.