Martha, who had been rejected by her father and abandoned her sister, in her turn rejected her own daughters. It was as though she believed that by meting out hatred and extinguishing love and hope in those around her she could somehow revenge herself on the world which had treated her so cruelly. She seemed to be driven by some inner perversity to create a world of spite around herself.
Yet at the same time she was capable of acts of great generosity, her old, better self fighting through all the bitterness. When I was born, in 1971, Martha wrote to congratulate Mila, and told her that she’d opened a bank account for me, and was earning money by cooking lunches for her local parish priest which she’d faithfully deposit in the account. When she came to visit us in 1976, she brought the deposit book to show Lyudmila, It was a kind of peace offering, a way of atoning for her daughter’s own loveless childhood. When Martha died Lenina couldn’t find the deposit book. She suspected Martha’s Ukrainian relatives of stealing it. But I think of Martha standing, day after day, by a stove cooking cutlets and soup, thinking of the child in London she had met for only a few weeks, and then lumbering down to the post office to deposit her kopecks for her grandson.
Lyudmila was spared the worst of her mother’s demons, seeing her only at weekends. Lenina was less lucky. She earned a few extra rubles by donating her copious breast milk to a hospital for abandoned infants on the other side of Herzen Street, and she managed to get Martha a job as a cook at the hospital, which kept her out of the house for most of the day. But at night she would sit in the kitchen and mutter evilly at her daughter. Martha would ask Lenina sarcastically why she had married ‘a cripple instead of a general’ and try to persuade Sasha and Lenina to leave each other. She flirted openly with Sasha, provoking furious fights with her daughter. Several times Martha attacked Lenina with a knife; once, Lenina broke her mother’s finger trying to restrain her after a hysterical battle which left half of Lenina’s prized crockery smashed. At night Martha would weep and curse Boris as a ‘treacherous fool’ for having brought down such misery on her, saying she never wanted to see him again and hoped he was dead.
‘We tolerated it all,’ remembers Lenina. ‘But how much blood she drankl She lived off our suffering.’
It took months for the story of how Martha had spent the previous decade to emerge, and even then the stories were spat out, accompanied by cynical comments. Martha had been convicted within weeks of her arrest. She seems to have had some kind of nervous breakdown under interrogation, and confessed to whatever she was told, including to her husband’s guilt. She was given ten years’ hard labour for being an ‘accessory to anti-Soviet activity’. Martha and several hundred other women prisoners were put on cattle trucks and sent to a remote railhead in Kazakhstan. There, they were marched across the steppe to Semipalatinsk, a primitive camp of tents, and put to work building their own prison from rough timber and barbed wire.
A friend of my wife’s family, the son of a Gulag prisoner, once told me about how his father had survived in the camps. Forget your past life as though it was a dream, the old man had said, give up hope about getting back, empty your mind of anger and regret and dissolve in the present, appreciate the joys of camp life, a hot stove, soap at the banya, the watery Siberian winter dawns and the silence of the forest, the discovery of a clump of cranberries in the taiga, a small kindness of one’s cellmate. But it took a strong personality, maybe even superhuman strength, to actually live like that, and most men and women who faced the test were destroyed by it.
Martha almost never spoke of her life in the camp. She told Lenina only one story, one so cruel and grotesque that she had little desire to hear any more. One autumn, before the war, the camp’s cows were calving. After every calf was born, Martha had to gather up the steaming placenta and caul in a bucket and throw them in a barrel outside, and cover them with carbolic acid to prevent the rats from eating them. Martha went inside to attend another calving, and when she came out she found two men, little more than skeletons, writhing in agony by the refuse barrel. They were newly arrived convicts from another camp, all former priests, now more dead than alive. They had crawled to the cowshed to eat the raw placentas. Martha pulled one of the men into the shed and fed him fresh milk to counteract the carbolic acid. He survived. The other died where he lay. Later, after they were both released, Martha lived with the man she had saved; he was the father of the child who died before Martha returned to Moscow.
After the final calving that night Martha had to help collect the bodies of the convicts who had died on arrival. She and another woman loaded them on to a cart, which Martha then drove alone into the steppe to the camp’s remote burial ground. Martha told Lenina that steppe jackals got wind of the dead meat in the wagon and chased her. To save herself, Martha told her daughter, she had thrown one of the bodies to the wild dogs.
Martha finished her sentence in early 1948, but was not allowed to return home. First she was released into ‘administrative detention’, which meant that she was forced to stay in a village of ex-convicts not far from the camp. She and the priest, whose name she never told Lenina, created a new life for themselves in a log cabin on the outskirts of KarLag, tending a tiny vegetable plot and doing odd jobs for the camp’s personnel.
She almost never spoke of her camp ‘husband’ or of their child Viktor, who Martha said had died just before her return to Moscow. But Lenina always suspected that Martha had given the child away after her priest had left her to return to his own family, handing over the infant to local doctors or an orphanage. Lenina never cited any evidence for this belief; she just suspects that it is so, for no other reason than ‘I see it with my heart.’ In Moscow in 2007 she encountered a local prosecutor called Viktor Shcherbakov; but after close examination by my aunt the man turned out to be not her long-lost half-brother but a stranger who shared her mother’s surname. After a few days’ reflection Lenina decided, at the age of eighty-two, not to pursue Viktor, the little boy lost in 1948. ‘What if I find him and he’s just a bum?’ she asked. ‘He doesn’t have Boris’s blood, which made us all great. He has Martha’s blood, and we don’t need any more of that.’
Instead of a normal passport, Martha was given a piece of paper confirming her release and a special passport restricting her from living in or near a major city for life. The Soviet Union of the 1940s abounded with such people, whose freedom of residence was limited – they were condemned to a life as a nonperson because of the fatal stamp in their passport.
Luckily for Martha, her son-in-law Sasha was already working as a junior lawyer in the Ministry of Justice. He saved her by a loophole in the paperwork. Martha’s family name appeared in the prison paperwork as ‘Shcherbakova’, the Russianized, female version of her surname. But on her birth certificate she was ‘Shcherbak’, the neuter Ukrainian spelling. Sasha convinced his local police office to issue a passport to Martha Shcherbak, an innocent person with no police record and no official ‘limit’ on her existence. On paper, then, she was an upstanding Soviet citizen. Inside, it seemed to those around her, her soul had been shredded.
Most of the children of Lyudmila’s orphanage finished their schooling at fourteen, and after a year’s technical training in the sewing room at Saltykovka were sent to the textile mills of Ivanovo, 120 miles north of Moscow, to work as seamstresses, or to noxious chemical factories in central Asia. Lyudmila’s teachers petitioned the local authorities to have her sent to another local school where she could study three more years and have a chance of applying to university. Permission came through, though Lyudmila had to earn her keep at the orphanage by teaching some of the younger classes and organizing amateur dramatics. This is where she first practised the emphatic pedagogical manner she has today, singing out instructions syllable by syllable as she drills classes of slightly terrified English students in the arcana of the Russian verb, brooking no nonsense or error during the class, but then gushing with unexpected emotion for years afterwards at her pupils’ successes.