All of this spelled privilege. One of Marina’s early recollections, for example, is of eating American Spam. Another is of the green-and-red-striped peppermint sticks that arrived in a tin box at intervals from her Aunt Taisya, an accountant who traveled back and forth on a Soviet ship between Russia and America. Each time a new box came, Marina thought: “What a lucky country!” To her, America was like a big box of candies. Or a gingerbread house in the forest, filled with good things to eat while Russia had almost nothing.
In spite of the terrible wartime shortages, Marina never went hungry, for her grandmother was an ingenious cook in the old Russian style, skilled at making the most of fresh fish, and mushrooms and berries from the outlying forests. Nor did Marina have to wear the shabby, somber ready-made clothes that were all the stores of Archangel had to offer. Her grandmother sewed her full smock dresses and a dark blue coat with a white fur collar and cap. She also had a half-dozen bright, flowered dresses bought by her Aunt Taisya in America.
Marina’s clothes nearly brought her to grief. One day she was playing alone in the park when a strange woman promised her a mechanical toy if she would come with her. Marina trotted after her, but on the street she became frightened and burst into tears. A passerby noticed her, managed to get her away from the woman, and took her home by the hand. When Tatyana Yakovlevna heard what had happened, she told Marina that she must never listen to the stories strangers told. So difficult were conditions during the war that there were people who roamed the streets kidnapping children for their clothes. They would sell the clothing and leave the children to starve in the woods.
As World War II came to an end in 1945, Marina’s life began to change. It is difficult to fix with precision the sequence in which hitherto unknown relatives appeared in the Archangel apartment. But the sheltered life Marina had known with her grandmother became less tranquil, and the cast of characters whose lives touched her own grew larger.
One of those who appeared was Alexander Medvedev, the man whom Marina’s mother had married during the war. So far as is known, they had met in Leningrad before the war. But the romance occurred afterward, when Marina was a baby, in a hospital somewhere in western Russia where Alexander was a wounded soldier and Klavdia a laboratory worker. They were married in September 1942, when Marina was fourteen months old. Alexander Medvedev, then, was Marina’s stepfather. She was told, however, that he was her real father, who had been away at the front.
She met him for the first time in the early spring when she was not yet four years old. She remembers it as if it were a fairy tale. Early one morning she was on her way to the park to ride on the merry-go-round. But when she got there the gate was still locked, and she reached up as far as she could, trying to undo the latch from inside. Suddenly a stranger appeared. He had on civilian clothes and was carrying a suitcase. “Will you open the gate for me, please?” Marina asked.
“Do you want to get in very much?” the man said.
“Yes!” she replied.
“And what will you do there?” he asked.
“I want to ride on the merry-go-round,” Marina said.
“Where do you live?”
“In that house,” Marina said, pointing to the apartment building.
“What is your name?”
“Marinochka.”
“And is your mother called Klava?”
“Yes.”
“Where is your papa?” the man said.
“Papa’s at the front,” Marina replied. “He’s coming home soon.”
“Do you want him to come very much?”
“Very much,” Marina said.
“Well,” the man said, “he’s here.”
Marina buried herself in his arms and kissed him. Then she raced across the street to the courtyard of her building shouting: “Papa’s here! Papa’s here!” She was overjoyed to see her father at last. He had dark hair and blue eyes, and she thought he was wonderfully handsome. He had been wounded in the leg by a bullet, and he showed Marina the scar and the place where his toe was missing. She lifted her dress and showed him her scar that had been left by a childhood infection.
Alexander Medvedev did not stay in Archangel long. About a month later, he vanished to Murmansk, taking Marina’s mother with him. Marina was left behind, but a short time later her grandfather, Vasily Prusakov, came home from sea for the last time, fatally ill with cancer of the throat, and Marina went to stay in Murmansk.
Her recollection of this first visit alone with her mother and stepfather is a happy one. Marina thought that her mother, with her soft, brown hair and huge, sad green eyes, was the most beautiful person alive. She remembers the leather smell of Alexander Medvedev’s windbreaker as he took her, perched on his shoulders, coasting downhill on a toboggan. She remembers that he warmed her cot with an electric heater before she went to bed at night and wrapped her up in a scarf whenever she went outdoors to shield her face from the wind.
On September 3, 1945, Klavdia gave birth to a son, Pyotr (called Petya) Medvedev. While her husband remained in Murmansk, Klavdia returned to her mother’s apartment in Archangel, bringing Marina and the new baby with her. Pyotr was christened, as Marina had been, in Tatyana Yakovlevna’s green porcelain bowl. Marina no longer had her grandmother all to herself.
Soon other members of the family began to appear. In December 1945, Tatyana Yakovlevna’s oldest son, Ilya, came back from the war, his tour of duty with the Soviet army in Germany at an end. Tall, slender, about thirty-seven years old, with a tired smile and a face like a kindly eagle, he brought candy and toys and dresses from Germany. He also brought his wife Valya, a jolly, good-looking woman in her early twenties.
Marina’s grandmother did not approve of Valya. Tatyana Yakovlevna considered her son a paragon, and pretty and kindhearted as Valya was, Tatyana thought she was too simple, too poorly educated—in short, not good enough for Ilya. And so she was treated as an inferior member of the household. She scrubbed floors and polished copper and did as she was told. But she always found time to sing to Marina, tell her stories, and help her draw pictures. Despite his mother’s attitude, Ilya was devoted to his wife, and they were destined to play an important role in Marina’s life later on.
With so many of the family at home, the three-room apartment was very crowded. Marina still slept with her grandmother in the living room, Aunt Lyuba was alone in the second room, while the third was jammed with Klavdia and Petya in one bed, and Ilya and Valya in the other. Privacy was impossible, and disagreements inevitable. But there was no question of who had the final say. When Valya read aloud to the family in the evenings, the only writers Tatyana Yakovlevna consented to hear were pre-Revolutionary writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Leo Tolstoy. What she really wanted was to have the same passages in War and Peace read aloud to her again and again. She refused to have the names of Soviet writers even mentioned in her presence.
Tatyana Yakovlevna hated everything modern and called airplanes “the devil’s own handiwork.” She had a lofty contempt for her country’s Communist overlords and nursed a certain nostalgia for the czar and his family. “Poor souls,” she said. “The brutes killed them all. For nothing. They turned everything upside down. What for? It’s all for the worse! It was better under the czar.” With a majestic disdain for the all-powerful Stalin, she called him a “demon let loose on earth” and could never hear his name without giving a little spit of derision.
She often lost patience with her son Ilya, a rising member of the Communist Party. Still, she respected his convictions and his party membership, remarking that Ilya alone knew what was best for him. But when it came to her own old-fashioned ideas and religious beliefs, she would yield no quarter, not even to her favorite son. “I’m an old woman,” she would say. “It’s too late to make me over. You young people may live any way you please. But leave me in peace.” She would not give up her Bible, her visits from the black-bearded Orthodox priests, nor her icons and the holy lamp that burned night and day in a special corner of the apartment where they were only too likely to be noticed by Ilya’s Communist Party friends.