At the kitchen table her mother Martha fussed over a packed lunch for her husband Boris: roast chicken, boiled eggs and cucumber, some biscuits, a pinch of salt wrapped in newspaper, all packed in greaseproof paper. Boris was due to stop by on his way to the station to pick up his luggage before setting off to go on holiday at a Party sanatorium in Gagry, on the Black Sea coast. It was to be his first holiday in three years.
Martha was complaining to no one in particular that her husband was late again, which was typical, just typical. Boris was so obsessed with work that he couldn’t even take the morning off on the day his holiday was due to begin. He always seemed to have more time for his Party committees than for his family.
Martha was a tall, sturdy woman, already running to the plumpness Russian peasant women often acquire along with motherhood. She was wearing a dress of imported cotton and carefully applied make-up. Her voice seemed always to be nagging, or so it seemed to Lenina, who was dreading the idea of a week alone with her mother without her father to intercede. At the sink stood Varya, the family’s long-suffering housemaid, a sturdy country girl who wore a wide sarafan, the Russian peasant woman’s traditional dress, with a starched apron pinned to the front. Varya slept in a kind of cupboard at the end of the hall, but she earned money and was fed, so she put up with Martha, and worse. She winked at Lenina when they caught each other’s eye as Martha rushed out of the kitchen, grumbling, to check Boris’s luggage, which was standing in the wide hallway.
Lyudmila – or Mila for short – was as devoted to her elder sister Lenina as a little dog, and preferred not to let her sibling out of her sight. The girls had a complicity with their father, a mutual defence pact which Martha disliked and didn’t understand.
Lenina, at the window, saw her father’s big black car round the corner and roll to a halt in front of the apartment block. There was a clatter on the stairs and Boris bounded in to the apartment. He was a powerfully built man, running to fat, prematurely bald with a shaved head. He wore self-consciously proletarian clothes, plain linen shirts in summer and sailor’s striped vests in winter. He looked much older than his thirty-four years. He was already the second most powerful man in the city, Secretary for Propaganda and Agitation of the Communist Party’s Regional Committee. A noted political agitator, rising star within the Party, a holder of the Order of Lenin, Boris was serving his apprenticeship in a provincial administration as a prelude to a powerful post in Kiev or even Moscow. He was a man going places. Ignoring his wife’s tirade of scolding and advice, he quickly kissed his two daughters goodbye.
‘Be good, look after your mother and sister,’ he whispered to Lenina.
He silenced his wife with a quick embrace, exchanged a few parting words with her, grabbed his packed case and lunch and ran downstairs. Lenina rushed to the window and saw her father’s driver standing by the car, smoking a cigarette, which he tossed away as he heard his boss coming down the stone staircase. Lenina waved frantically as her beloved Papa climbed into his car, and he waved back, quickly, a sweeping gesture more like a salute. It was the last time she ever saw him.
After she had seen her husband off, Martha went across the landing to see if anything was wrong with the neighbours. She hadn’t heard the usual thud of their door closing as the family went to work in the morning, and nobody had come home for lunch. When Martha returned Lenina noticed she was pale and nervous. There had been no response when she rang their doorbell. Then she’d seen a stamped paper pasted on to the door bearing the seal of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD. She knew immediately what it meant. The Bibikovs’ neighbours, the family of a colleague of her husband’s, had been arrested in the night.
The next morning there was a tiredness in Martha’s eyes as she dressed little Lyudmila, a peremptoriness in her tone as she dragooned the children for a shopping expedition, squashing cotton summer cloche hats on to their heads.
On the way to the market, Martha stopped to tie little Lyudmila’s shoelace. As she crouched, a young girl about Lenina’s age walked silently up to them. She leaned over to Martha’s ear and whispered something, then walked hurriedly away. Instead of standing up, Martha sank down on to her knees on the pavement like a shot animal. Her children tried to help her up, alarmed. In a few moments she recovered, stood, and turned back home, dragging Lyudmila as she stumbled to keep pace. Years later, Martha told Lenina what the girl had said: ‘Tonight they will come with a search warrant.’ Nobody knew who the girl was, or who had sent her.
Back in the apartment, Martha began to cry. She had been parted from her husband only once in their twelve years of marriage, when he went away to serve in the Red Army soon after they had met. And now he was gone, and the world they had made was about to fly apart.
That night the children went to bed hungry after a supper of kitchen scraps their mother had hurriedly thrown together. Martha couldn’t sleep, she told Lenina later, and spent half the night doing laundry. Then she sat by the open window listening for the sound of a car. She fell asleep just before dawn, and never heard it.
Martha was woken by a sharp knocking on the door. She looked at her watch; it was just after four in the morning. Martha pulled on a dressing gown and opened the door. Four men stood outside, all wearing black leather jackets with pistol belts, and leather boots. Their officer showed her a search warrant and an arrest warrant for her husband. He asked if Bibikov was at home. Martha said no, he was away, and began pleading for an explanation. The men pushed past her and started to search the apartment. The children were woken by the sound of voices. Lyudmila began crying. A man opened the door of their room, switched on the light briefly, looked around and told the children to be quiet. Lyudmila got into bed with Lenina and cried herself back to sleep. Their mother distractedly came in to comfort them to the sounds of drawers being rifled through and cupboards emptied in the next room.
The men stayed for twelve hours, systematically searching every book, every file in Boris’s study. The men did not allow Martha to go to the kitchen to feed the children. Lenina remembers their faces, ‘hard as their leather coats’. When they had finished the search, confiscating a boxful of documents they made Martha sign for, the NKVD officers sealed the apartment’s four rooms and left Martha and her children in the kitchen, still in their nightdresses. As the door slammed shut, Martha collapsed on the floor in tears. Lyudmila and Lenina also began bawling, hugging their mother.
When Martha managed to pull herself together, she went into the bathroom and wrung out a wet dress. Wiping her face in the bathroom mirror, she told Lenina to look after her sister, and left the house. She ran to the local NKVD headquarters, sure that their family had been the victim of some terrible mistake. She came back to the children late that night, empty-handed and desperate. She had found out almost nothing, except that she was just one of dozens of panicking wives who had besieged the stony-faced receptionist with questions about their missing husbands, only to be told that the men were ‘under investigation’ and that the women would be kept informed.