Oswald's Tale (6 page)

3

White Nights

Now that Marina is in her early fifties, she remembers her grandmother as snobby. She doesn’t know from what kind of roots Tatiana came, maybe peasant stock like practically everyone else, but Grandmother was snobby. Maybe she had married a little bit better than her peasant relatives. Her husband was a sea captain, and she was a strong woman. Marina can picture her grandmother even better than she remembers her mother. Her grandmother always smelled good to her, clean and crisp. She was very Victorian, very opinionated. And here was Marina, born from a woman who wasn’t married, Tatiana’s own daughter Klavdia, yet her grandmother never disowned mother or child.

They all lived in Arkhangelsk. Marina wonders if it’s as lovely a wooden city as she remembers. But, of course, to a child, even birch trees smell good after a rain. When you are a child, you are closer to earth, so you are near to all those smells of flowers and herbs, and Marina remembers playing in a park on the day she met her stepfather, Alexander Medvedev. He came and said, “Hello, I’m your father.” She remembers it was just after the war ended in 1945, and she can still recall how happy people were and how happy she was.

Yet, after this war she would have nightmares. And she remembers that her grandmother’s household was so strict. When she was five years old, she hated to go by herself to the bathroom, because God could see everything. “I was embarrassed. If I’m going to tee-tee—and God sees it—that’s not proper to do, you know?” When people used profanity, she would try to close her ears. She never could bring herself to repeat ugly words; it burned her ears.

Grandmother was religious. For Marina, when she was young, everything good was with Grandmother, and everything outside was devil’s work. Komsomol and the Communist Party—garbage.

Her grandmother used to say, “You know, if I want to keep an icon in my house, there will be an icon. Come and arrest me.”

With her grandma, it was always what is best for Marina. Her grandma would tell her fairy tales and point out the moral. Grandma would teach her not to lie. “Maybe that’s what keeps me going,” says Marina now. “Not that I am always truthful, but I am not comfortable in lying—you can catch me like that. I betray myself very quickly.”

When Marina would disobey her grandmother, she would be kept indoors for several days, and her mother never dared to interfere.

Marina can no longer remember when she learned that her stepfather was not really her father, but she did not find out from her mother. A girlfriend had overheard Klavdia talking about it to her mother, so Marina came home and confronted Klavdia with what she had just learned, but her mother’s only answer was: “I don’t want to talk about it. Later.” Marina says: “I guess we think that later on a child will understand, but I felt hurt, and I rebelled against my mother. I punished her. I loved her, but I made her suffer deliberately. I was testing her: How far can I push to see if she loves me? My mother said, ‘When you grow up, I’ll explain to you everything, but now you’re just too young to know.’ I thought what she had done was sloppy, even dirty.”

After her mother died, Marina found some papers. Her mother had been looking for Nikolaev. It was after Stalin died and amnesty was given to former prisoners. So her mother had been filling out papers, looking for Marina’s real father. Marina remembers that when her mother was close to dying, she still wanted to punish her. Klavdia was in a hospital, and Marina would bring her cruel messages from Alexander’s mother, Yevdokia. This mother-in-law didn’t like Klavdia. Some messages would even say that Alexander was fooling around—which he never did. His mother was lying, but Marina didn’t know—she thought Yevdokia had proof. Of course, she also knew it was going to hurt her mother. Marina would say, “Well, Papa is probably seeing someone healthier.” Her mother started crying. Then she said, “Don’t worry, Marina, it won’t be long. We’ll find out who really loved us.” That’s what she said. “Between love and hate,” says Marina, “is a thin line. I didn’t hate my mother; I wanted all her love. I didn’t want to share her. That’s how possessive I was of my mother, let’s put it that way. Yevdokia was cruel. She was evil enough to know that I would be a good messenger for her cruel words. You know how teenagers are.”

After her mother’s death, Marina wouldn’t live by her stepfather’s rules about curfew. She felt he wanted a new woman in his apartment and Marina was in the way. She doesn’t know if this was true, but that’s how she felt. If she came home late at night, her stepfather would lock her out. He grieved over her mother so much, however, that Marina doesn’t think her stepfather was really a mean person. She looks at him differently today. “Now that I’m fifty-two, I walk in my mother’s shoes. After my mother died, it haunted me. That remark I made to her in the hospital. She was always lovey-dovey with my stepfather, and I was jealous.” She had overheard too many intimacies between her stepfather and her mother. When she would hear the bedsprings squeak, she would put pillows over her head. She couldn’t think of her mother as a woman until she had her own children. Until then, she didn’t think women were supposed to have such needs. It was such innocence. How could her mother allow that to happen when other people were present in a room, even though the room was dark? Marina wasn’t embarrassed for herself; it was that her grandmother was sleeping there, and Marina had to think, “What if she heard?” Since they all lived in one room, Marina thought it was awful, and she was embarrassed for her mother. Just like dogs; couldn’t wait. It wasn’t that frequent, but . . .

In later years, when her mother was sick, she could overhear her stepfather’s mother, Yevdokia, saying, “Why did you have to marry that woman? You could have got a healthy woman. Why do you bother to cater to this one?” And all the while Marina was thinking that if her mother had married Alexander in order to give her child a name, she had not succeeded so well. She was still Marina Prusakova. Alexander had never adopted her. That was another blow.

After her mother died, she had nobody to come home to. She might be free, but she felt like a slave. She didn’t know what to do with freedom.

She had a neighbor, a girlfriend who had a bad reputation, and Marina knew it. She liked this girl anyway. Her name was Irina, and she had an illegitimate daughter and worked to support her child. Irina’s man had not wanted to marry her. He had said he wasn’t sure the child was his. Irina was a young girl and she had given him all her heart, so when this man saw that Irina’s baby daughter did look exactly like him, he changed his mind and was ready for marriage, but Irina said, “No thanks. Not after I went through all that embarrassment.” So when everybody told Marina, “Don’t talk to this girl, she’s no good,” she and Irina would meet anyway, not in their neighborhood, but away, and they would talk. She found out about another side of Irina, who said, “Yes, I work from nine to five, but at night I dress up and sleep with men. They are doctors and lawyers, and they pay. I slice myself up for the whole world because that’s how I can get what is best for my daughter, I love her that much.” And Marina thought to herself, “A dedicated mother.” She was almost seventeen then, and Klavdia had died a year ago.

Now, it was April, two months away from the White Nights, when even at midnight it is still close to twilight, and Marina came back from an outing with other kids on the outskirts of the city. A telegram was there; her grandmother’s funeral was taking place, and Marina didn’t have money to buy a ticket to go to Minsk for her burial. That was a stab to her heart. Everything she loved was gone with Klavdia and now, a year later, it was gone again with her grandmother, and she thought about Irina, who sacrificed her reputation for her daughter’s sake.

One time when she was out with Irina, it was late. Marina knew that Alexander would lock her out if she was not home by eleven, but Irina said, “I met some guys who just came in from Vitebsk, a soccer team. They brought some fresh fruit. Let’s go there and have a drink.” Marina said she’d have no place to sleep because her door would be locked, but one of the soccer people overheard, and told her, “We have a room, everything will be all right, don’t worry.” So she thought she would just sit up with some of the players and go home by morning. You cannot sleep on a landing all the time.

But as soon as she undressed and lay down in a bedroom by herself, her door opened and a guy came in, strictly naked, and jumped on her. She fought with him, even if he was a soccer player, and finally she jumped out of bed and stood by an open window. It was moonlight outside and she was standing, trembling by a large fourth-floor window, and she said, “One step closer and I jump.” At that moment she really thought she would jump through the window rather than submit to that man. And maybe she screamed. Because other soccer players walked in and dragged him out. She was shaking badly, but they said, “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen.”

On nights when she got back only five or ten minutes late, Alexander would open the door for her, but any more than that—well, she didn’t want to have to listen to all their crap. Maybe she slept on the landing ten times. She had to hope no cleaning lady would see her; it would even be embarrassing for her family that they were treating her so badly. On such nights she would just sit on the stairs; she couldn’t sleep. Or she would go to stay with Irina.

It was a lazy summer until Irina’s mother talked to her in hard words. This mother ran a pawnshop and sometimes, since she was not working, Marina would spend a day with her, and young boys might come and pawn things and flirt, and maybe she would make a date with them and go out to a restaurant and get a meal, and then come back to Irina’s house and sleep with Irina in her bed. This went on—she doesn’t know, a month? Two weeks? Two months? Whatever. One day, Irina’s mother took Marina into her kitchen and said, “My husband died during the war and I was left with two children. I had to work to support them. I don’t mind giving you shelter for a little while; I know you have hardship at home. But to continue this way, to eat at my home and take advantage of me—no, go find some work. You’re welcome here, but not for freeloading.” Marina turned red; it was true. She apologized—and she never stayed there again.

It was a dose of strong medicine, but this woman really did her a favor. Because it happened after Marina had been thrown out of pharmacy school. She hadn’t been attending classes. Plus, she felt sick. She supposed it was a vitamin deficiency or something. She had shingles; she still has scars from those big boils all over her head and body. She had to go to a clinic called Place for Curing of Contagious and Venereal Diseases, and she used to wait in line for her medicine and hear everyone whispering, “So young!” and Marina realized they thought she had VD. Actually, she had to take lamp treatments and glucose and vitamin shots. She was terribly undernourished. And she never had VD, of course not, but it was painful that people thought so.

Over a year before that, before most of the trouble with her stepfather, there had been one boy she actually fell in love with. She was sixteen and visiting Minsk just for the summer, two years before she went there to live; she met a boy named Vladimir Kruglov. Since every window was open in Valya’s apartment because of the heat, Marina could hear Kruglov playing a guitar upstairs. Marina heard from Valya that Vladimir, who was a student at Leningrad University, was lonesome in Minsk. He was older than her, but since he was always playing his guitar, Marina thought he was serenading her. She fell in love.

One night she and Vladimir got tickets for a movie, and when they came out, it was pouring rain, and Vladimir said, “I have a friend who lives near here,” so they went to that apartment and dried themselves with towels and sat together and that became the first time she was kissed. First time in her life. She started crying. She was only sixteen, and Vladimir Kruglov said, “What is this trouble?” and she said, “Volodya, I’ve never been kissed before.” He said, “If I had known that, I never would have done it. Who could know that you would have such a reaction?” But she was in love, so she stayed there for a little while, although she was scared to death; and early next morning, like five o’clock, she went for a walk and a little later she told herself she would never wash her face again because it was her first kiss and she had to keep it forever.

After that summer, when she went back to Leningrad, things were not so fine. At that time, she was still studying at pharmacy school, but little by little, her stepfather began to isolate her. At table, they began to give her scraps. She had a little money from her grandmother, a small pension divided among her younger brother, her younger sister, and herself, but now, if she was hungry and bought dinner for herself two or three days in a row, her money was gone. She was having to find ways to make out. After such a bad winter in Leningrad, a lot started to happen. A fine spring followed, and a wild summer. She still remembers one night when her boyfriend, Eddie—a man twice her age—got off a boat with her and it was early morning. People were still cleaning the streets; the sun was shining; everything sparkled. She and Eddie were both in a good mood because the White Nights had been beautiful and their boat had gone out to the Gulf of Finland. Music had been playing all night, and you could dance and maybe smooch a little.