Also, undoubtedly, Lenina and Lyudmila’s survival had something to do with the natural resilience of children, their ability to live in the moment. Blind to the wider world, they lived their lives in terms of the here and now, which is perhaps the most powerful weapon there is against despair. And, for Mila at least, there was the great, shielding ignorance of the past she had lost, buried in the hazy half-memories of childhood which made the reality of prison and orphanage a given, something to be endured but at least not regretted, or understood. She had been scarred, physically and mentally, but not broken. The Hershey’s chocolate and corned beef healed her body, and her spirit was intact, and ready to take on the world.
Soon after Lyudmila’s return from Solikamsk, a young tank captain named Alexander Vasin paid a visit to the Bibikov apartment on Taganskaya Square. Yakov’s wife Varvara was his aunt. Lenina was there, and shyly greeted her distant cousin. Alexander – Sasha – was healthy and handsome, with a winning smile and a loud laugh. He looked splendid in his olive-green uniform, with breeches and soft officers’ boots, epaulettes and crew-cut blond hair.
Lenina and Sasha had met briefly in 1937 during Lenina’s first visit to Moscow, just after her father’s arrest. Sasha joked how pretty his young cousin had become. Sasha offered to see her to the Metro as she left for work. Half jokingly, he flirted and tickled her on the Metro escalator, saying that he would like to marry her. They met again a few days later, on their first date, in Krasnopresnensky Park, near the Zoo. He took her to a café in the park, the first time in her life Lenina had ever been to a restaurant of any sort. Thirty-six years later, after Sasha’s death of a heart attack, his colleagues arranged his wake, by coincidence, in the same restaurant.
After two weeks of courtship, Sasha had to go back to his unit. He proposed marriage to Lenina before he left, and she accepted.
Three days after he had left Moscow, as Sasha’s car neared the front line west of Smolensk, it hit an anti-tank mine. His leg was shredded and had to be amputated at the knee with a wood saw. He was flown to one of the giant military hospitals in Ivanovo to recover. From there, Sasha wrote Lenina a strange letter. He told his fiancée that he had been in a fire and was burned and disfigured, and that she should find someone else to marry. When she got the letter Lenina ran to her uncle. Yakov, pulling strings, arranged a seat for Lenina on an American Douglas transport plane to Ivanovo, and instructed the crew to prepare to bring a wounded man back with them to Moscow. Lenina found the hospital and as she ran up the steps she saw Sasha standing in his underwear on crutches in the hospital yard, not burned but missing a leg. Lenina brought him back to Moscow and they were married three months later. She was nineteen, he was twenty-six. Strangely, after a marriage that lasted nearly four decades, Lenina cannot now remember which leg he had lost.
I remember Sasha as an overwhelmingly masculine presence, strong-jawed and decisive, with an explosive laugh and a manner which brooked no nonsense. He was in many ways a perfect Soviet man, bluff and cheerful, always seeing the good even when confronted, as every Soviet citizen constantly was, with incompetence and ugliness.
In many ways, I think, he was the opposite of his young sister-in-law Lyudmila, She was ambitious and uncompromising, always seeking to shape the world around her. He was content with simple pleasures: the respect of his friends and colleagues, his small apartment, the dacha which he built with his own hands from scrounged planks and bricks. He also knew the power of his good looks. It was as though Sasha felt that his virility was a gift which it was his duty to share among a generation of women where men were in short supply. But he never gave Lenina, who was terribly jealous, any reason to suspect infidelity. ‘Maybe he was unfaithful,’ she used to say of him in approval. ‘But he made sure I never, ever, knew a thing.’
Moscow in the closing months of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was a city close to exhaustion. Far to the west, the Red Army fought through eastern Prussia to beat the Western Allies to Berlin. But back home, the women and children waged a more banal war against hunger and cold among the ruins of a country wrecked by the war effort. They worried about their men at the front, their fear of terrible news made all the more poignant by the imminent certainty of victory.
The streets were filled with men in uniform, the evenings were dark because street lighting was, like everything else, rationed. Life was suspended pending the war’s end, everyone concentrating on survival, not daring to think of the future. Daily existence revolved around little cardboard ration cards and rumours. Varvara and her daughter stood for hours in queues at street corners on the promise of an imminent delivery of food; Lenina scrounged milk from maternity hospitals to take to her always-ravenous little sister Lyudmila. In the evenings Lenina and Sasha sat by their big radio listening to the announcer reeling off strings of Soviet victories in places with German-sounding names, and felt righteous and pleased.
Lenina was selfishly happy that her Sasha was alive, unlike the sweethearts of so many of her girlfriends at the Khodinskoye airfield. The young couple were allocated a tiny apartment in the basement of a pre-revolutionary mansion on Herzen Street. It was cramped and the small windows were high in the wall, but it was Lenina’s first home since childhood, and she was determined to make it comfortable for her new little family.
The kitchen became Lenina’s kingdom, and food was the currency of her love. A lifetime after she began to cook for herself in the tiny stove on Herzen Street, I would sit in my aunt’s kitchen on Frunzenskaya Embankment, and she would feed me the same dishes she’d first learned to cook for Sasha sour cabbage soup, pea soup, beef cutlets and fried potatoes. As I ate, she’d watch me closely for signs of appreciation. For both Lenina and my mother, food and happiness were to be closely intertwined.
In January 1945, shortly before her eleventh birthday, Lyudmila was deemed to have recovered sufficiently to be discharged from the children’s home at Malakhovka. But there wasn’t space for her in Lenina’s one-room Herzen Street apartment. Lenina was already pregnant with her first child, and Sasha’s sister Tamara was sleeping on a folding bed in the kitchen. Lenina called her aunt Varvara, but she also refused to take in Lyudmila – ‘Another scrounger on the phone,’ she told her husband when he asked who was calling. So Sasha helped find Lyudmila a place in an orphanage at Saltykovka, twenty-five miles outside Moscow. Lyudmila took with her a single cardboard suitcase filled with American Red Cross clothes, some children’s books, and a doll.
Saltykovka is a pleasant, sleepy little place. My mother and I went to visit on a dusty summer afternoon in 1988. We took the elektrichka, as my mother had often done as a child, from Kursky Station. The platform at Saltykovka was a single strip of concrete, and after the train had clanked away down its narrow canyon cut through the birch forest the only sounds were of birds and the distant revving of an engine.
‘It hasn’t changed at all,’ my mother announced as we walked, arm in arm, along the single unpaved street which ran through the village. The wooden houses were ramshackle, painted green or dull yellow, and at the end of the street stood the grand orphanage gates. Picket fences, leaning at drunken angles, framed tiny allotments and the houses were halfhidden by outsize sunflowers and jasmine bushes running wild.