One day Sasha brought a letter postmarked KarLag. It had no envelope; instead it was folded into a triangle and tucked into itself, in the manner of the time. It was from Martha. She wrote that she had been released from prison the previous spring and was living close to the camp under ‘administrative detention’. She had a newborn baby boy called Viktor. The child’s father was a priest, she said, whose life she’d saved in the camp. But he’d been released and gone back to his own family in the Siberian region of the Altai.
Now, Martha said, she expected to receive permission to leave Kazakhstan soon, but wondered where she could go since she had no passport. Though she didn’t spell it out, Lenina knew what her mother meant – her travel documents marked her as a political prisoner, she was not allowed to live closer than 101 kilometres to a major city. There was precious little room for her in Lenina’s tiny apartment in Moscow, but Sasha’s mother Praskovia insisted: Lenina must do everything she could to get Martha to Moscow. Lenina wrote a letter telling her mother to disregard the 101 kilometres and come to live with them in the capital as soon as she was able. Sasha posted the letter from Moscow the next day.
The locomotive pulled slowly into Kursky Station belching soot and steam. Because of a shortage of rolling stock the train was made up of cattle wagons instead of carriages. Martha hadn’t been allowed to buy a ticket on the normal train from Semipalatinsk because of her lack of papers, so she came on an unscheduled train full of passport-less human driftwood like herself, sending a brief telegram to her daughter as she embarked warning of her arrival. The train disgorged streams of bedraggled travellers, most of them ex-convicts, exhausted and stinking after their five-day journey.
Lenina’s abiding memory of her mother was as a fashionable Party housewife. Now, as she staggered down the platform, Martha looked like a beggar woman. She was filthy and lousy and wore a convict’s black padded jacket. She had no luggage except for a dirty bundle of clothes. She was alone.
Martha barely smiled as she saw her daughter, heavily pregnant with her second child, waddling towards her. They embraced, and wept. Lenina asked what had happened to her mother’s new baby. ‘Eh, it died,’ Martha said, dismissively, and pushed off into the crowd heading towards the exit. They rode the Metro in silence to Barrikadnaya Street, where Lenina took her mother straight to a public bathhouse near the Zoo to get her cleaned up and de-loused.
At home that evening in the basement apartment on Herzen Street with Lenina, Sasha and their daughter Nadia, Martha seemed to recede into a kind of stupefied shock. She complained that the bed they had made for her was too soft and that her granddaughter was crying too loudly. By the end of the evening, Lenina was in tears, being comforted by Sasha as his mother-in-law paced, sleepless, in the kitchen.
The next day Lenina took the elektrichka to Saltykovka to fetch Lyudmila, When the two girls arrived at Herzen Street, Martha was waiting impatiently by the apartment door. The apartment was at the end of a long corridor, and the first glimpse Martha had of her younger daughter was a crippled silhouette at the end of the hall. Martha called out Lyudmila’s name, and howled as the little girl ran lopsidedly towards her. Lyudmila remembered that awful wail all her life – the wail of a woman who had last seen her daughter as a plump, happy toddler and then lost her for eleven years, only to find her again as a hobbling, emaciated fourteen-year-old.
Martha held her for a long time, weeping. Mila, when she recalls the meeting now, shakes her head as she searches for any trace of the emotions she felt at the time. But she felt nothing. ‘I probably hugged her. I probably said “mother”. But I can’t remember.’
For Mila, the word ‘mother’ had become little more than an abstraction. It had no place in the world of orphans in which she had spent her childhood. She had no memory at all of her parents, except for the one image of the night of her mother’s arrest and the ghost of a memory of her father. She had written a dutiful letter to her mother in Karlager as soon as Lenina had told her that their mother was alive and well. But the assurances of devotion in the letter were, in truth, just an invention. Mila really had no idea, except from books, what a real mother was like, or how one should feel about her.
When she left in the late afternoon to return to Saltykovka, Lyudmila’s overwhelming emotion was gratitude for the large meal Martha had cooked for them. Years later, she wrote to her fiancé that she had wept when she first heard that her mother was alive, but had ruthlessly suppressed her tears as a sign of weakness.
Martha never became a real mother to Lyudmila, The bond broken in December 1937 would not be re-formed. Mila often came to Lenina’s apartment, but quickly found she couldn’t bear Martha’s brooding manner and flashes of anger. Within months of Martha’s return to Moscow, they slipped into a dutiful rhythm. Most weekends, Martha and Lenina would come out to Saltykovka. Lenina would collect her sister from the orphanage for a walk; Martha, still officially a nonperson, would wait by the village pond for her daughters. They’d walk and talk, and Martha would hand over the sweets and biscuits she’d bought or made, which Mila would share with the other children.
Lyudmila loved her mother ‘like a dog loves the person who feeds it,’ she told me on a hot summer night at my home in Istanbul. ‘I understood the Party, Stalin, the People. But I never knew what the word “mother” meant.’
Though her mother was alive, Mila remained, in her heart, an orphan. But long before Lyudmila became a mother herself, she was obsessed with the idea of motherhood, and what kind of mother she would be herself. She would often write to my future father about their unborn children, and the awful fear she had of losing her children as Martha had lost hers.
‘All night I dreamt I was carrying a small boy in my arms, our son,’ Mila wrote to my father in 1964. ‘He was very gentle and affectionate. But the road was very difficult and long, it went up and down and into underground labyrinths. Carrying him was very hard but I couldn’t leave behind such a wonderful being in whom everything was yours, even his voice, nose, hair, fingers. For some reason we came to the old Moscow State University building on Mokhovaya Street and an old man was choosing the best children out of a crowd and my boy was one of them. Everyone was happy that their children were being chosen, but I was crying bitterly because I didn’t believe they would return him to me.’
Mila was filled with the need to protect her own children, even before we were born. But her mother Martha seemed, at times, consumed with an irrational hatred of hers. There were moments when, irritated by something Mila had done or said, Martha snapped at her that she was an ‘orphanage cripple’. Hysterical, she would call her elder daughter ‘Jew-spawn’ and swear in the most filthy prison language she could summon. At other times she lapsed into hysterical displays of self-pity and affection, clutching at her children in a torrent of tears.
Martha had gone mad in the camps. That much seems obvious from her behaviour after her return from Kazakhstan. But such was the general fear and ignorance of psychiatry then that no one thought that she needed treatment, and the family suffered her self-hating craziness in silence. ‘Psychiatrists were worse than the NKVD to us,’ Lenina says. Martha always had a vicious streak. Life in the camps had turned her rage at the world into an uncontrollable force.