After nearly two weeks of worry, Martha decided the only thing left to do was to send Lenina to Moscow to her husband’s well-connected brothers. Surely they could pull some strings and find out something about what had happened? She had no money to buy a ticket, so she wrapped a pair of silver spoons from the kitchen in a napkin and went to the station to beg a seat from a conductress on one of the Kiev-Moscow expresses which passed through Chernigov late at night. The conductress stowed Lenina on a luggage rack and told her not to move. She also told Martha to keep the spoons. Martha ran down the platform as the train pulled out, keeping pace as it gathered speed until she couldn’t keep up any more.
Ten years before, Martha’s father had sent her away from the home where she’d grown up. On a station platform in Simferopol, she had abandoned her dying sister to her fate. Now, as she stood watching the lights of the train bearing her elder daughter to Moscow recede into the night, Martha realized that the new family she had made was falling apart. She went to the telegraph office and sent a short telegram to her husband’s relatives in Moscow telling them that Lenina was on her way. Then she walked home. She found Lyudmila asleep on a blanket on the kitchen floor, picked her up in her arms and, she told Lenina later, ‘howled like a wounded animal’.
At Kursky Station in Moscow Lenina was met by her uncle Isaac, Boris’s younger brother. Their other brother, Yakov, an Air Force officer, was serving on the Far Eastern Staff in Khabarovsk, near Vladivostok, and was still unaware of Boris’s arrest. Isaac was twenty-three, a promising engineer at the Dynamo aircraft engine factory. He embraced his young niece and told her to save her story till after they’d ridden home on the tram to the small apartment he shared with his and Boris’s mother, Sophia. In the kitchen they listened to Lenina’s story in silence. Lenina began crying, sobbing that she didn’t know what her father had done wrong. Isaac tried to reassure her. It was all a misunderstanding, he told her, he knew people who could sort it out.
The next day Isaac spoke to a friend of his at the Dynamo factory, one of the resident NKVD political officers. The man had until recently been one of the personal bodyguards of a senior NKVD general. The political officer said he’d ask his old colleagues and see if he could arrange an interview to sort out what he was tactful enough to call a ‘terrible mistake’.
Two days later, Isaac came home early, told Lenina to put on her best summer dress and took her by the hand to the tram stop. They travelled to the NKVD’s headquarters on Lubyanka Square in silence. The Lubyanka itself was a huge and bourgeois building which had once housed a pre-revolutionary insurance company. By 1937 it had been extended, its cellars converted to a sizeable prison and interrogation centre which was by then bursting with the Purge’s nightly crop of new victims. Isaac and his niece went in to the main entrance, presented Isaac’s passport to the desk sergeant and were shown upstairs to a waiting room. A man in a dark green NKVD uniform, with breeches and leather boots, came to speak briefly to Isaac – evidently the friend who had arranged the meeting.
When they were finally shown in to the office Lenina first thought it was empty. There was a huge dark wooden desk, with a bright lamp on it. The heavy curtains were half drawn, despite the summer sunshine outside. There were tall windows and a thick carpet. And then she noticed, behind the desk, a small, balding, bespectacled head. The general, Lenina thought, ‘looked like a gnome’.
The gnome looked up at Isaac and the little girl, and asked why they were there. Isaac, faltering, began to explain that his brother, a good and loyal Communist, had been arrested due to some mistake, some oversight, perhaps excessive zeal on the part of his men in rooting out the enemies of the state. The general picked up a flimsy file from his desk as he listened, flipped through it as Isaac talked, and said one word: ‘Razberemsya’ – ‘We’ll sort it out.’ That was the end of the meeting. Isaac, shaken, took Lenina home and the next day put her on a train back to Chernigov. A few days later, Martha sold whatever kitchenware she could and bought train tickets for herself and her children to the Crimea, to stay with her elder sister Feodosia. But before she left she dutifully filed her whereabouts with the Chernigov NKVD, so that her husband wouldn’t worry when he returned to an empty apartment after the misunderstanding was rectified.
Winter closed in, and there was still no news. Martha and the children lived in the kitchen of Feodosia’s small wooden house on the outskirts of Simferopol. It was a rude fall from grace after their life as members of the pampered Party élite in Chernigov. Martha got a job as a nurse in a children’s hospital for infectious diseases, and would bring leftover food from the hospital home for the children.
The climate of the Crimea is milder than European Russia, but the winter brings a cold sea wind off the Bay of Sevastopol. Feodosia’s draughty house was heated with a small metal stove known as a burzhuika – a ‘bourgeois’ stove which burned hot and quickly, but was cold by morning. The children weren’t allowed to light it during the day while Martha was at the hospital, and they sat by the window, huddled in sweaters, watching the rain fall on the small orchard which surrounded their house.
Life was elsewhere, Lenina thought, during those slow months. She missed the bustle of their life in Chernigov, their neighbours and her school friends and the endless stream of officials and friends who would sit late into the night in their kitchen. But most of all she missed her father, who had been her refuge and her best friend. She never stopped believing that he was alive and well, somewhere, missing her as she missed him.
Lyudmila had always been a quiet child, but now she seemed to withdraw into herself. She played with her dolls in a corner of the floor of Feodosia’s kitchen, next to the trunk on which Lenina slept, trying to stay out of the way of her scolding mother and aunt. Martha came home late and exhausted, her hair a straggling mess. Since her husband’s arrest she had given up on her appearance.
In early December Lyudmila fell ill with measles. It seems she had caught it from the food, or maybe from her mother’s hospital clothes. As the child’s fever climbed Martha stayed at home to look after her. She would send Lenina to the chemist for mustard plasters to ease her sister’s coughing, and eye drops for her swollen eyes.
On the third or fourth night of Lyudmila’s fever there was a sharp knock on the door. Feodosia went to open it. Several men in dark uniforms with pistols on their belts pushed inside the house. They demanded to see ‘Citizen Bibikova’. Martha, Lyudmila in her arms, scrambled to her feet as they opened the kitchen door.
‘Get up!’ one of the men ordered Lenina, and threw open the trunk she had been sleeping on, spilling her and the blankets on to the floor. Martha began to scream in protest, grabbing the officer by the arm. He pushed her backwards, toppling her into the open trunk with her three-year-old daughter in her arms. Lenina remembers the screaming, everyone screaming, her mother struggling to get up from the trunk, a moment of grotesque farce within the unfolding nightmare. The NKVD men pulled Martha out, held her arms behind her back and bundled her out of the house and into the garden, still in her nightdress. On the street they pushed her into one of two police cars ‘ Black Crows’ – waiting for them. Another officer followed with the two children, Lyudmila under his arm and leading Lenina by the hand. As they reached the street, Lenina struggled free from the grip of the man who held her and tried to run to her mother; she was caught and bundled with her sister into the second car. As they drove away Lenina clutched her feverish little sister, who was crying hysterically. At the end of the street the two cars turned in different directions. The girls were not to see their mother again for eleven years.