Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (17 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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Lev was the only person she could talk to about how she felt. In February 1948, a few weeks after her return from Pechora, she wrote to him:
My darling Levi, I want to be with you so much but I haven’t even had any letters. I’m trying to break through to the surface and stop being angry. The word ‘can’t’ has reappeared in my vocabulary. I can’t bear seeing people who aren’t happy when objectively they have everything they need to be happy. I can’t sympathize with them; I can’t stop being sharp or impatient. Irina rang on Saturday and invited me to go to Losinka for the day but I turned her down. I can’t accept the comfort friends offer. I need all or nothing. Once again everything is black and white. But all the ‘can’ts’ can be explained by just one ‘want’. Everything inside me is becoming harder and there’s no way I can stop it. That’s why I respond harshly to Irina, hang up the receiver, and then start to cry.
Writing to Lev was an outlet for her depression. He understood her moods. ‘N. A. [Gleb’s mother] rang the other day and asked me if I was all right, and, hiding my sadness, I said that I was fine,’ she wrote to Lev on 2 March,
but the truth is that even I don’t know what to do with myself in this despondent mood. Levi, my darling, if I sometimes write nasty letters, I know I don’t have the right, but who else can I cry with except you? When I write to you, I become less tense. So, again, Levi, don’t get angry if you get such a letter. Anyway, by the time you receive it, my mood will probably have passed and I’ll be jumping for joy. All right, my darling? I never write to make you angry or increase your pain. I’ve been weeping for several days in a row now, not just when I go to sleep but as soon as I wake up, early in the mornings, before lunch and afterwards. The most important thing, Levi, the most important thing, well, you know yourself what it is …
Levi, I hope that we will never feel guilty towards each other and will forgive each other for anything important, and if it’s unimportant we’ll try not to be angry (although it’s usually those who are closest who bear the brunt).
Sveta did not want to burden Lev with the idea that her depression had anything to do with his imprisonment. He had enough to cope with as it was. And she knew she had to remain strong to help him through the coming years. In many of her letters she talked of other reasons for her low morale. ‘A depression has come over me and I’m waiting for it to end,’ she wrote to him. ‘I don’t know why January is so difficult. Maybe because at one time it was the happiest month, what with Mama’s birthday, Christmas and New Year. Maybe it’s because I’ve felt unwell since before the New Year. I get irritated, and I’m really tired all the time.’ But Sveta’s depression had nothing to do with her mother’s birthday and everything to do with the fact that she and Lev were separated, as she sometimes revealed between the lines:
Having swallowed all kinds of pills (in a real, not a figurative, sense) I’ve forgotten how to cry (so if I need to swallow something in the figurative sense, I’m prepared). I’ve been sleeping badly recently, maybe because our room is so airless – it’s been cold outside at night and Papa is scared of draughts so he keeps the windows closed. My
little window doesn’t open wide enough in any case. I’ve seen you in my dreams at least five times. Maybe it’s because the end of your sentence is becoming more real or closer. It’s probably superstition that I’m not going to see you now but for some reason will have to wait until the autumn, which may be better anyway.
little window doesn’t open wide enough in any case. I’ve seen you in my dreams at least five times. Maybe it’s because the end of your sentence is becoming more real or closer. It’s probably superstition that I’m not going to see you now but for some reason will have to wait until the autumn, which may be better anyway.
Skiing and skating lifted her mood. ‘At the moment,’ she wrote to Lev on 10 March, ‘skiing is the one thing I enjoy without reservation –better than literature, concerts, even people.’
It’s so beautiful in the forest when the sun is peeping through, so pure (in all senses of the word) that you catch yourself thinking (and then accidentally saying aloud) that it’s good to be alive. I don’t know why it is, but it is not so painful. Some kind of physiology of happiness.
Sveta wanted to spend more time doing winter sports, although her mother tried to keep her in, feeling she was physically unwell. Only Lev encouraged her to get out more, to beat back the depression by living her life. ‘Go somewhere,’ he wrote on 15 April. ‘Besides your physical well-being, there’s the matter of your inner state, which has just as much effect on your psyche as external factors and sometimes may be the original cause.’ Worried about Sveta’s health, he wrote to his Uncle Nikita, hoping that he would keep an eye on her. ‘It is very hard for her,’ he wrote to him that April, ‘hard in every way, although she does not say so directly.’
Sveta had a small circle of girlfriends in whom she could confide. Apart from Irina Krauze and Aleksandra Chernomordik there were three other women in particular with whom she spent a lot of time. Each had lost a husband and a child, yet each had found a way of living with her suffering that called forth Sveta’s sympathy and led her to identify with them. First there was a woman from her institute called Lydia Arkadevna, a keen sportswoman and mountaineer, who fostered Sveta’s enthusiasm for skiing and skating. ‘So why have I turned to Lydia?’ Sveta wrote to Lev on 25 February.
Because she’s smart, quick-witted, lively, strong, interested in a lot of things, etc. etc. She is a marvellous skier and she goes skating often, and she does all that even though she’s nearly 10 years older than me, her husband perished during the war, she lost her 14-year-old son a year ago (in a terrible street accident)
25
and she remains alone in the world. I watch and learn.
25
and she remains alone in the world. I watch and learn.
There was also a younger woman, called Klara, a technical assistant at one of the institutes, whose family had been repressed before the war. Klara herself had been expelled from the Kharkov Chemical-Technological Institute during her first year of studies, after which she had spent some years in exile, judging from Sveta’s comment in one of her letters that an ‘over-acquaintance with geography’ was the root of Klara’s problems. There had been several attempts to force her out of the institute, but she clung to her position, badly paid though it was. Klara had also lost a child. Her husband was a prisoner in Pechora, and she had travelled there on more than one occasion to see him, staying with Tamara Aleksandrovich. Lev thought well of Klara and defended her against Vladimir Aleksandrovich’s claim that she was waiting for her husband only because he came from a well-to-do family. Lev’s personal impressions of her, though, were ‘too superficial’ for him to be sure (‘nice-looking, almost bland, with a vampirish manicure and rings … she seems moderately intelligent, hardly capable of such low calculation’). Sveta’s comments about Klara were typically blunt and self-revealing:
I can imagine that Tamara likes Klara more, because of her greater femininity, her love of order, of comfort, clothes, etc. They’re probably also close because they’re both mothers and they’ve both lost children, whereas I’m just a grass bride.
26
That’s probably the real difference,
but I find it difficult to decide which is worse. Also, Klara is affectionate, and I’m not. Klara, of course, has cried on her shoulder, whereas I have not.
26
That’s probably the real difference,
but I find it difficult to decide which is worse. Also, Klara is affectionate, and I’m not. Klara, of course, has cried on her shoulder, whereas I have not.
Finally there was Nina Semashko, Lev and Sveta’s friend from the Physics Faculty, who had lost her husband, Andrei, in the war, and then her baby son. Writing to Lev about the death of Nina’s child, Sveta touched on her own suffering:
It’s always difficult to bury someone but somebody small and young is a different thing entirely. An outsider perceives a child only in the present, but for the mother the present stretches back into the past and envelops everything in the future. There’s not just the 9 months of waiting and the 11 months of feeding but, long before that, the desire or reluctance (or anxiety about whether it’s even possible). I don’t know if I’m being clear, but this future is everything, all plans and dreams, right up to and including the desire to have grandchildren. And so [the death of a child] rips out such a chunk of this everything that it seems there’s nothing left to fill it with. Fortunately the world is such that the pain dulls over time … Nina is still young enough – and she has the freedom – to decide that another child may fill that void, but now is not the time to talk to her about it. At the moment she just says that if a person is unlucky, there’s no point in striving for anything or searching for happiness.
Sveta longed to have a child. She was thirty years old. She knew that she would have to wait eight more years, at least, for Lev to be released and that he might not return at all. Perhaps that was what she meant when she wrote that she was waiting for her ‘life to start’. After her trip to Pechora, Sveta was certain that her future – her ‘everything’ –was tied to Lev. But they had decided not to have a child as long as he remained a prisoner. Lev reflected on their decision years later:
I didn’t want to compromise her future with my present or future. I did not want her, out of love for me, to sacrifice herself, to tie herself
to my fate. That’s why I didn’t want us to be bound by children. No one knew what would happen as long as Stalin was alive. I could expect nothing good. To burden Sveta with a child in such a situation –in which I could not help her and might subject her and the child to a terrible existence – was not something I could do. In Stalin’s time, prisoners released from the labour camps, ‘enemies of the people’ like myself, could not live normal lives. They were often rearrested or sent into exile … I couldn’t burden Sveta and her family with the terrible difficulties, the unhappiness, they were certain to suffer if we had a child. But Sveta wanted one.
to my fate. That’s why I didn’t want us to be bound by children. No one knew what would happen as long as Stalin was alive. I could expect nothing good. To burden Sveta with a child in such a situation –in which I could not help her and might subject her and the child to a terrible existence – was not something I could do. In Stalin’s time, prisoners released from the labour camps, ‘enemies of the people’ like myself, could not live normal lives. They were often rearrested or sent into exile … I couldn’t burden Sveta and her family with the terrible difficulties, the unhappiness, they were certain to suffer if we had a child. But Sveta wanted one.
Sveta invested all her maternal affection in Alik, Yara’s son. Her letters contained regular reports on her nephew, whom she obviously adored. ‘Leva’, she wrote, ‘Alik is turning seven, not eight, and we celebrated his birthday on Sunday.’
Today Lena [Alik’s mother] brought him with us to see Obraztsov’s
Puss in Boots
. He said he liked that it was so short, and although he understands that the animals aren’t real (he’s a good enough actor himself to know that) he nevertheless thought that people climb into (put on) the puppets – which means he didn’t notice that they were too small. He’s already been to real theatres – he went to
Tales
at the Children’s Theatre. Do you remember
Terem-Teremok
and
About the Goat
?
27
I think you and I saw them the last time we were together, not counting our final trip to the cinema – I can’t remember what the film was. Alik has grown a lot, so he’s got thinner, but he’s not skinny at all. His physical courage and self-possession are improving slowly … [He] gets As in Russian and arithmetic, but Bs in physical education. I told you already that he understands that 1/7 is less than 1/5, and Lera [from his school] has taught him how to subtract fractions (not too difficult ones) from whole numbers. Now he’s become interested in engineering – he’s always trying to take
something apart and climb inside and put it back together in reverse. He’s not noted for his tidiness. But I don’t have any idea how to ‘educate’ a child.
Puss in Boots
. He said he liked that it was so short, and although he understands that the animals aren’t real (he’s a good enough actor himself to know that) he nevertheless thought that people climb into (put on) the puppets – which means he didn’t notice that they were too small. He’s already been to real theatres – he went to
Tales
at the Children’s Theatre. Do you remember
Terem-Teremok
and
About the Goat
?
27
I think you and I saw them the last time we were together, not counting our final trip to the cinema – I can’t remember what the film was. Alik has grown a lot, so he’s got thinner, but he’s not skinny at all. His physical courage and self-possession are improving slowly … [He] gets As in Russian and arithmetic, but Bs in physical education. I told you already that he understands that 1/7 is less than 1/5, and Lera [from his school] has taught him how to subtract fractions (not too difficult ones) from whole numbers. Now he’s become interested in engineering – he’s always trying to take
something apart and climb inside and put it back together in reverse. He’s not noted for his tidiness. But I don’t have any idea how to ‘educate’ a child.
In fact, Sveta’s mother, Anastasia, had suggested that she consider working as a teacher at a nursery. Sveta doubted her own abilities as a scientist, and her mother thought she might be happier if she spent more time with small children. Lev encouraged the idea. But Sveta decided against it in the end, on the grounds that she lacked experience of mothering and did ‘not know how children grow’.
Meanwhile she loved it when Alik came to stay with her. His naughtiness reminded Sveta of her own childhood:
Alik is capable of waking me up at 6 o’clock (after he himself has already had a good night’s sleep, of course). He loves to make noise, forgets to wash his hands, plays happily with a bicycle that spends most of its time upside-down, and climbs fully dressed into a wash tub full of soap suds. I don’t know whether I’d be upset and angry if I’d been a goody two-shoes myself, but I remember all too well how we made the apartment ours, turning all the chairs over, crawling under the beds and tables. And nobody yelled at me, even when I was jumping around and broke my tooth on the headboard or cut my head against the radiator (maybe Yara was told off, but I wasn’t). You see, I’m quite a poor mentor and childminder, since I rely on heredity and the natural course of things in the belief that it’s simply not possible for anything truly bad to grow out of something so small and glorious. But the worst thing is that I’m a ‘theoretician-childminder’, far removed from practical experience.
By coincidence, Lev was also playing the role of ‘mentor and childminder’. On 5 October, the day Sveta arrived back in Moscow from Pechora, Lev had received a visitor:
A young girl came to the power station and I said, ‘Are you coming to see us?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, come on then.’ Looking suspiciously at
Nikolai Bogdanov [a mechanic at the power station], she asked me: ‘Why aren’t you dirty, mister?’ And, taking hold of my belt, she led me around the generator room and began to ask whether the machines were resting and why there were so many clocks everywhere and whether there would be light if the furnaces weren’t stoked. We quickly became friends and I learned that her name is Tamara Kovalenko, she comes from the Vinnytsa region, and her father works at the stables.
Nikolai Bogdanov [a mechanic at the power station], she asked me: ‘Why aren’t you dirty, mister?’ And, taking hold of my belt, she led me around the generator room and began to ask whether the machines were resting and why there were so many clocks everywhere and whether there would be light if the furnaces weren’t stoked. We quickly became friends and I learned that her name is Tamara Kovalenko, she comes from the Vinnytsa region, and her father works at the stables.
Tamara was eleven years old. She had an older sister called Lida and a younger brother, Tolik (Anatoly). They were ragged, shoeless children neglected by their mother, who worked as a laundress, and always hungry, because their father spent most of the household income on vodka. The Kovalenkos were among the 500 ‘special exiles’ in the wood-combine, many of them living in the barracks of the 1st Colony, just outside the prison zone, but children like Tamara were free to roam around the labour camp. They were never stopped or searched by any of the guards, so they could run errands for the prisoners, who gave them sweets and money or made them wooden toys in the workshops. The town children would search for toys near the prison-zone perimeter, where prisoners sometimes threw them over the fence. These anonymous gifts were found in many homes around the labour camp, where they served as a reminder of the prisoners’ longing for their own children, winning human sympathy for them.
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