Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (16 page)

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Authors: Orlando Figes

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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The couple lived in two rooms on the upper floor of one of the wooden houses in the settlement: one room was furnished, the other completely bare. ‘They brought two chairs for us,’ recalled Sveta, ‘and we sat together in the empty room while friends of Lev went off in search of another place for us to hide.’ Eventually a message came that they could stay at the Aleksandrovskys’.
The Aleksandrovskys lived in a nearby house in the settlement, but Maria, the telephonist, was living on her own there with her two small sons. Her husband, Aleksandr, was in the Pechora jail (he had got into a fight with somebody who had tried to steal from him in the railway station cafeteria and he had been charged with ‘hooliganism’). Maria was due to work the night shift at the telephone exchange on Soviet Street. In the afternoon she was expecting a visit from a guard and his wife, but once they had gone, Maria would turn off all the lights to signal that it was safe for Lev and Sveta to come to her house.
As soon as darkness fell, Lev and Sveta crept outside and moved as quickly as they could towards Maria’s house. Hiding behind a pile of logs opposite her windows, they waited for the guard to leave. While they were hiding, another guard came up to where they were. They thought he had discovered them, and feared the worst: Sveta would be arrested and charged with a crime against the state; Lev would be given extra years and sent north on a convoy. But then they heard the sound of the guard urinating on the other side of the log-pile. When he had finished he went away.
Eventually, Maria’s visitors departed. The lights went out in her house. Lev and Sveta emerged from their hiding place and made their way inside. There were only two small rooms, a single bed in one, where Maria normally slept, and a table, chairs, and bedding on the floor for her sons in the other. When Lev and Sveta came, the two boys were sleeping in Maria’s room, so Lev and Sveta took the
other. ‘That night we did not sleep at all,’ Sveta remembered. Lev added: ‘It was only when we were left on our own, the two of us together, when we had nothing more to fear and the two boys were asleep that we could act more freely, kiss and hug each other as much as we liked, and so on. But … more than that I will not say.’ What Lev would not disclose was later revealed by Sveta: ‘I asked him: “Do you want to?” And he thought and answered: “But what would happen afterwards?” ’
Lev and Sveta spent two nights together in Maria’s house. During the day, while he was working at the power station, she stayed indoors and played with Maria’s boys. On the second evening, Lev and Sveta ventured out to see Strelkov in his laboratory. Several of Lev’s friends came to say hello – they were full of admiration for this young woman who had risked so much to visit them. They all gave her letters to take away and send for them.
The next day, someone came to smuggle Sveta out; she did not remember who. She walked on her own to the railway station and waited in the hall by the ticket office, which only opened shortly before the arrival of a train. Sitting on her suitcase with her head in her hands, she fell asleep from exhaustion, waking after the train had pulled in and everyone else had boarded. Grabbing her things, she bought a ticket and ran towards the train. The passenger carriage for which she had a ticket was already full, but she was allowed to go into ‘some sort of sanitary wagon that was completely empty’. She lay down on a bench and went back to sleep.
At Kozhva she awoke. It was late at night. She went to Lev Izrailevich’s house, and slept there until morning. Before she left, Lev Izrailevich took two photographs of her as a souvenir for Lev – one of her sitting in a wicker chair against a blanket hung up as a screen, as in a studio photograph, the other of her with her coat and bags departing from his house.
From Kozhva Sveta posted this for Lev:
My darling Lev, I’m still at Kozhva. There was no direct train last night, but today I’ll try to get a ticket for one. L. Ia. [Izrailevich]
will tell you tomorrow about my departure. It was absolutely fine … I slept at the station [at Pechora] and on the journey [to Kozhva]. I got to I[zrailevich]’s at midnight and shook him awake ever so gently. And then I slept again until the morning and didn’t wake up once.
 
For the time being I’m fine, I’m not shedding any water through the little holes I look through. Maybe because everything is still like a dream. Levenka, I forgot to tell G. Ia. [Strelkov] yesterday that I didn’t find A[leksandov]skaya [Maria] at home – don’t forget to tell him … Lev, thank everyone again for me. I’m unable to express myself in words, but maybe they will understand me all the same.
All the best, my darling. I’m kissing you farewell one more time.
 
L. Ia. [Izrailevich] is preparing a surprise for you – it’s a secret for the time being.
Lev wrote to Sveta the same day:
My own sweet Sveta, even the weather is upset today. The wind is fierce and there was hail this morning; everything is so gloomy and miserable. I’m waiting for my namesake to come – maybe he’ll come tomorrow. And I’m worried, of course … This morning I chatted a little with Gleb [Vasil’ev] until 9 o’clock. We drank tea. Everyone was at Strelkov’s and when he left I mounted
Autumn Day
22
under some glass and hung it over Strelkov’s bed and then sat under it for ‘good luck’ … Nikolai [Lileev] wanted to come this evening, Oleg [Popov] will probably drop by a little later, but I want to be alone.
Lev was eager to hear that Sveta had got back safely. There was considerable risk of her being caught on her way out. ‘My own sweet, glorious Sveta,’ he wrote two days later, ‘up to today, 3 October, I
still haven’t heard anything from you. It’s awful. And I just can’t think about anything else.’
At last the letter sent from Kotlas came with the two photographs of Sveta – the ‘surprise’ prepared by Lev Izrailevich:
My sweet, my lovely Sveta … finally! Thank goodness everything is all right. My sincerest thanks to absolutely everyone. When I read your note I guessed straight away exactly what surprise you were talking about, but it didn’t seem any less unexpected or joyful when it came. You will be just the same in 10 years’ time (in an armchair) as you are now. But you are always lovely in every way …
My truly incredibly lovely Sveta, everyone sends you their greetings but I don’t know what to send. I only want to think of you, to write about you. I’m avoiding any conversations except for a few with Liubka [Terletsky]; and reading doesn’t interest me … I look at
Autumn Day
constantly and can’t tear myself away … My sweet and gentle one, I’m squeezing your paws.
By 5 October, Sveta was back in Moscow. She did not send a telegram to Lev Izrailevich, as had been planned, because an earlier one had been intercepted by someone in the post office in Kozhva and ‘immediately became the property of all the natives’ (meaning that its content may have been communicated to the MVD). But two days later, she wrote to Lev with an account of her journey home:
For 250 roubles I was able to get a seat on a direct train. Your namesake got me the ticket and put me on the train. I took [a photograph] of your namesake’s little house, where I spent three nights, as a keepsake. At first the conductor put me in a practically empty compartment but I had barely fallen asleep when he suggested I change places with a man who had ended up in female company, and I willingly agreed. There were three sweet girls, photo technicians for an air cartography expedition. They had travelled from the end [Vorkuta] and were going all the way to Moscow. There was absolutely nothing to do – I hadn’t thought to bring a book for the return journey – and so I slept the whole way … I didn’t even wake up when the train arrived.
I got home on the morning of the 5th (at 4.30), had a little nap, and played with Alik for a while. Then I went to the banya and cooked lunch. Mama’s temperature was 39 again that day …
Moscow met me gloomily – cold and rainy (but not hopeless) and the daily worries over bread are now over potatoes, which are hard to find in the shops and at the market already cost 7 roubles (they used to be 3). Everyone is stocking up … Sugar has vanished along with pastries and bread rolls. It’s depressing. The trees have almost shed their leaves now and there are no flowers at the market stalls. Well, Levi, my dear, I’ll say goodbye for the time being. Much, much love. Everyone I’ve had time to visit here sends you their regards. Sveta.
Send my regards and thanks to everybody there.
Shortly after Sveta’s departure, winter came to Pechora. To Lev the two events seemed connected. ‘The first snow fell tonight,’ he wrote to Sveta on 13 October.
The ground has been frozen for two days and everything has suddenly become wintry. I haven’t been able to write … It’s not winter itself that’s to blame, of course, but the absence of Svet [‘light’] which comes with the winter. Winter numbs the emotions. Thoughts lose their agility; restlessness and motivation ebb away. Time itself seems to slow down and freeze in the white expanse.
Lev’s spirit had soared with Sveta’s visit. But her departure had left him sadder than before. It underlined what he had been missing for so long – what he would now have to live without. ‘Svetinka,’ he wrote six days after she left, ‘the more I think about you, the more I forget your face. I cannot picture you in my imagination any more –I see only little bits of you. I think I want to weep.’ Self-pity was alien to Lev but he was clearly suffering. ‘Well, that’s enough,’ he went on. ‘I’m going to stop whimpering now, although in truth all I want to do is write your name, Sveta, in all its grammatical variations, formal and familiar. I’ll pull myself through somehow.’
Three weeks later, Lev was still accepting of his fate, having given up all hope of his release:
You once asked whether it’s easier to live with or without hope. I can’t summon any kind of hope, but I feel calm without it. A little bit of logic and observation do not leave room for fantasy. I don’t know why I just wrote that but, since I did, I’ll leave it. It’s not exactly what and not exactly how I’m feeling, but I can’t convey anything in
its entirety at the moment – for that it’s necessary to think, and it’s much better not to think.
But then he sent another letter with some thoughts on happiness, a feeling he had rediscovered when Sveta was with him. His reflections were prompted by the news that Uncle Nikita and his wife Elizaveta had been disappointed by a visit from their son Andrei on military leave:
It’s a truism that people are rarely able to make use of what they have and even more rarely able to notice their own happiness. It’s sometimes necessary to look at yourself from the outside and report to yourself – consciously, not intuitively – on what’s what. To say, what I have is happiness – more than I’ve ever had, so that any change will probably be for the worse … I’m grateful to fate and to nature, to you and to myself, for the happiness I was granted, that I was able to see it, at the time and not just when it had passed.
Lev settled back into the daily routines of the labour camp. In early December, there was a change of personnel at the power station. The old station chief, Vladimir Aleksandrovich, a former prisoner, was transferred to the central power station in the town. His replacement was Boris Arvanitopulo, another former prisoner. Lev got on well with both men. An electrical engineer with a promising career before his arrest in 1938, Aleksandrovich was a heavy-drinking, sentimental type, mournful over the death of a daughter and inclined to self-pity on account of the loss of his career, but ‘good-natured’ and ‘cultured’, in Lev’s opinion. Aleksandrovich lived with his wife, Tamara, in the settlement inside the industrial zone. He was one of the free workers who smuggled letters in and out for Lev. Sometimes he would give Lev money in exchange for clothes and other household items that Sveta would send from Moscow. When Aleksandrovich moved to the power station in the town, he tried to persuade Lev to join him there, but Lev rejected the offer, because ‘it is safer for me here’, as he explained to
Sveta. He liked the new boss, Arvanitopulo, whom he found ‘intelligent, nice, not over-educated and sensible’. The Gulag authorities were sending prisoners to the remote 4th Colony newly opened in the forests to the north. The last thing Lev wanted was to be selected for one of these convoys, and he was less likely to be transferred if he stayed in his present job.
‘There have been some changes at the plant,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘They’re choosing people to send to the 4th Colony to do logging and construction on the road to it (15 km), and women are arriving here in ever-growing numbers to replace them. They’re being put into the 3rd Colony. Some of them are already working in the workshops.’ It had been a long time since he had seen such a large number of women –the camps he had been in during the war had contained separate female zones – and the sight of their being forced to do manual labour made a ‘disturbing impression’ on him. His views on women were still tinted by pre-war attitudes of veneration and romantic chivalry. Talking to these women troubled him even more. ‘Many of the women who have arrived here talk fearfully about the places they came from [other labour camps and colonies of exile],’ Lev reported to Sveta. ‘The minority who are able to recall these places without fear are themselves capable of arousing in the observer, if not fear, then a distinct feeling of uneasiness. It’s all so painful to see.’
Sveta felt deflated after her return from Pechora. Perhaps she was feeling the emotional effects of seeing Lev – the consequences he had warned about when he had wondered whether a meeting wouldn’t ‘make it even harder for you to be happy there, where others are happy’.
Her way of coping with their separation was to keep busy. She threw herself into her work, even though her heart was not in it. She inspected factories in Tblisi and Erevan; campaigned for district elections to the Moscow soviet; delivered speeches at trade union meetings; edited the wall-newspaper at the institute; took on the training of new researchers; wrote her dissertation; translated articles; went to French and English lessons; sang in a choir; practised the piano; and organized a Mathematics Club. Lev found it hard to
picture her in these new settings. ‘When I think of you,’ he wrote on 3 February 1948, ‘and I think of you every minute I am free, I can see you clearly only in certain situations.’
How, after pondering something, you look up suddenly to answer. How you sit when you’re talking to somebody. How you sleep (that’s something you’re unable to imagine, even approximately!). How you quickly braid your hair (a skill that is unfathomable to me). But I can barely remember your voice – only your laughter occasionally and certain phrases and your tone. Fear prevents my imagination from picturing you in unfamiliar surroundings, fear that something will not be quite right, not how it is in reality but worse.
Sveta had a lot of news for Lev. In December, the government had devalued the rouble by nine-tenths and abolished rationing. There was a rush to purchase goods with the old cash, resulting in long queues at all the shops, but gradually the situation settled down. For relatively well-off families like the Ivanovs the new consumer opportunities were exciting. ‘Life without the rationing system has its negative side – a mass of temptations with no restraint,’ Sveta wrote to Lev on 24 January.
At first people squander everything, then they realize that they need to be more careful, but after a new pay packet it all begins again. People have completely stopped eating black bread (we’ve had 1 kg for three days and it looks likely to last several more), and the hunt is on for white baguettes (4 roubles each – they used to be 1 rouble 40 kopeks) … At first it was impossible to get hold of pastries – but now our hunger for these has been satisfied … The late-night shops in our area are a godsend. There’s a grocery store in our building, a delicatessen by Kursk station, a Tsentrosoyuz [Central Cooperative store] by the Pokrovsky Gates. There’s never anybody there after 10 o’clock and it’s easy to buy tea, sugar and butter etc. Bread and potatoes are also available for sale in institutions’ cafeterias. Mama goes out early for meat (but that’s because she likes quality at bargain
prices). There are queues for flour and more queues for milk, because in comparison with everything else it’s cheap – 4 roubles a litre … One more thing I can report is that since the New Year my pay has been rounded up to 1,000 [roubles] … Domestic life – light, gas, heating – is absolutely fine, the trams etc. have improved. There are new carriages on the Metro fitted out with what looks like redwood; there’s also lighting over the seating as well as in the middle and large windows … And on that note this bulletin comes to an end.
Sveta wanted to share this new bounty with Lev and his fellow prisoners by sending them parcels more regularly. She refused to listen to any more of his protests. ‘So, my darling, foolish Lev,’ she wrote on 30 March, ‘how can you say you don’t need anything until next year? Just the same dry crusts … Do you really think that I can sit here drinking delicious tea with jam, or nibbling on a biscuit with some milk, and not think about sending you anything?’
Lev continued to object to her sending food but he did ask for medicines for sick friends and other prisoners. Strelkov still suffered from stomach pains, which Lev described in great detail so that Sveta could get a diagnosis from her doctor friend Shura and send the appropriate medicines.
The patient is 49 years old, has a generally cheerful disposition and looks youthful … Since 1938, he’s suffered from a hernia (the size of a goose egg). In 1920, he was shot in the chest: you can still see the 5 cm scar of the entrance wound underneath his right nipple, and the 4 cm scar of the exit wound near his spine between the same ribs. In October 1947, he began to suffer from periodic attacks of acute pain in and around his stomach – a band the width of 2–3 fingers on a level with his 7th–8th rib, starting on the right-hand side about a palm’s width from the middle and moving to the left, a distance of 2–3 fingers from the middle … The pain is very intense, sharp and nagging, lasting for 8–14 hours without any real let-up. If he lies down on his back during an attack, the pain intensifies; if he clasps his knees to his chest, it lessens. His usual diet (for the past
several years) has consisted of: fresh black bread; thin soup made from fine-ground barley, pearl barley or oatmeal and salt, with water; watery kasha with exactly the same ‘ingredients’ but much less concentrated; tea and coffee substitute either with sugar or without. Of these foods only fresh bread leads to an attack … There is little chance of a change in his diet.
Sveta wrote back with a diagnosis from Shura, who had consulted doctors at the First Moscow Medical Institute and agreed with them that the most likely explanation was a problem with his liver. She sent a range of medicines, some probes to take a sample of his bile, and advice on what to eat, promising to send him dried white bread.
Liubomir Terletsky, Lev’s bunk-mate, was also ill. He suffered from scurvy, the result of eight years in the labour camp, and was broken psychologically. ‘Liubka is gloomy and barely talks,’ Lev wrote to Sveta. ‘He is afraid of beauty and does not want to see it in nature or in books, because it reminds him of home.’ To fight the scurvy Sveta started sending sachets of vitamin C powder, and gradually Terletsky recovered his strength. But the crippling psychological effects of camp life were still marked. ‘My Liubka is very slowly returning to civilization,’ Lev reported to Sveta.
Today I asked him why he pulls such terrible faces when he shakes hands with people and why he greets them so awkwardly. Looking somewhat embarrassed, he replied that over the last 8 years he’d got used to the fact that people never say hello or goodbye, just mutter swear-words at one another, and only use their hands to hit somebody –and so he’s never sure if people are sincere when they extend their hand for him to shake. He offers his handshake as though he’s performing a medieval show of deference. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I catch myself doing it and sometimes manage not to appear so timid.’ With luck, in another year he’ll once again be greeting people normally.
In May 1948, Aleksandovich’s wife Tamara, who was also ill, came to Moscow to see a doctor. Sveta helped her in the capital, and, on
her return to Pechora, gave her a box of medicines she had collected for Lev’s friends.
Sveta was herself unwell. She was losing weight, sleeping badly, feeling irritable and tearful – all clear signs of depression, though no one talked about such things in the Soviet Union, where optimism was compulsory and people who had problems were expected to pull their socks up and get on with it. The Ivanov family had many friends who were doctors, and Sveta went to see a lot of them. They all assumed that the problem was physical. They took blood tests, thought they had detected an inflammation of the thyroid and sent her to endocrinologists, who gave her iodine and Barbiphen (phenobarbital), but no one asked her how she felt emotionally. Sveta did not know what to make of what the doctors said. She was unsure whether there was anything wrong with her physically. All she knew was that she felt and looked unwell. She wrote to Lev:
The endocrinologist said she has no doubt there’s an increase in thyroid activity (headaches, temperature, cardiodynia, weight loss, nervousness, etc., etc., including some kind of peculiar shine to my eyes – in my opinion that’s just because of the temperature). I would be happy with such a diagnosis – I really hate uncertainty. She has prescribed pure iodine tablets, to be taken together with iodine potassium, Barbiphen, bromine, camphor and valerian extract. I have to take them all for 20 days, then stop for 10 days, then take them for another 20 days and go back to see her. Everything’s fine apart from the fact that there’s currently no valerian, so it’s not possible to start the treatment. I went to see our doctor again today to give him the test results and tell him about my visit to the endocrinologist. He was really surprised at my sed rate.
23
He probably thought that all my ailments were caused by nerves, but nervousness alone doesn’t increase the sed rate. He referred to the endocrinologist’s prescriptions quite condescendingly: ‘It will do you good to take them, but in my opinion it’s not the most important thing.’ (He didn’t say what is.) ‘My advice
is to be sure to take cod-liver oil until the summer.’ (And if it doesn’t help?) I can’t find any scales to weigh myself on, so I can’t ascertain objectively whether I’ve actually lost weight or whether my weight loss is all in the subjective opinion of others. It seems to me that I’m not any thinner than I’ve been, and I was thinner last summer, but it’s true my face is looking pinched, which really doesn’t suit me and is making everyone sigh and exclaim: ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Both to my face and behind my back they talk about how I was when I went to Khromnik
24
(‘a captivating girl’) and how I am now (obviously implying that I’m old and ragged, that I’ve become a hag).

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