Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (9 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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Sveta had a busy schedule: English lessons after work on Mondays and Thursdays, technical training on Tuesdays and Fridays, lectures on high polymers on Wednesday evenings, and compulsory lectures on ‘Diamat’ (Dialectical Materialism) on Saturdays. On Sundays she went food shopping with her ration card (meat, eggs, sugar, dairy products and sometimes even bread continued to be subject to wartime rationing) or travelled out of town to the dacha allotment where her family grew vegetables.
Sveta sought distraction in her social life. Yet it did not always bring her joy. So many people she and Lev had known in their student days had been killed during the war. ‘I don’t often meet with our old friends from the university,’ she wrote to Lev, ‘it’s just too painful.’ Most of her girlfriends were already married with small children – a source of envy for Sveta – and she found it bittersweet to go to places she had visited with Lev. ‘Today, after lectures,’ she wrote to him, ‘the Academic Secretary suggested that we walk along the Moscow riverbank. We got as far as the Stone Bridge and crossed it to go through the Aleksandr Gardens to the Lenin Library Metro. It made me feel so sad.’
Sveta did her best to put old friends in touch with Lev. She knew
it would be good for his morale to hear from them. The first to write was Aleksandr Zlenko on 19 September; he had been with Lev in the Leipzig POW camp.
Dear Lev, hello! It turns out you are still alive? I don’t know if you’re healthy, but it seems you are alive? I received a postcard from Svetlana telling me that you had resurfaced, but nothing else except your address and something about medicines (ask her yourself)!
Naum Grigorov, Lev’s friend from the Physics Faculty, sent a letter with a photograph of his recently born son, a risky thing for him to do, since he was a member of the Party and a researcher in subatomic physics at Moscow University. Then a letter came from Evgenii Bukke, Lev’s oldest friend (they had shared a desk from their first year at school) and a colleague at the Physics Institute. It was soon followed by a letter from Evgenii’s mother, the actress Ksenia Andreeva, that gives an insight into Sveta’s state of mind towards the end of the war. Despairing of ever seeing Lev again, Sveta had distanced herself from Evgenii’s family, which at first had puzzled Ksenia:
I was very surprised and offended by Svetlana, who suddenly stopped coming to see me, and I could not explain it. I even went to the university to try to find her, but that was very difficult because I knew nothing except her name. I thought something had happened to her. But now I understand why she did not come.
Lev was worried that many of his friends and distant relatives would not want to correspond with a prisoner. ‘I’m afraid of being an unwanted guest,’ he wrote to Sveta on 23 October. ‘Not everybody perhaps finds it pleasant to receive greetings from our corner of the world … Maybe you feel you are the better judge of that, but I’m afraid that you may be mistaken, for not everybody shares your feelings.’ Sveta was annoyed with Lev for harbouring such doubts. In her fifteenth letter she gave him a ‘dressing-down’:
On to the matter of umbrellas.
12
Tell me, Levi, if a person knocked on your door, would you let him in, even if he wasn’t very close to you and regardless of where he had come from? Of course you would. So why do you have the right to think worse of others than you do of yourself? I know that’s not what you have in mind, but that’s what it amounts to. Maybe it’s because I’ve been spoilt a little, and maybe it’s not a good thing, but I don’t find it hard to accept favours or concern and help, sometimes even considerable help, and I don’t try to pay for it. My conscience allows me to do this because I will do the same (or would if the need arose), not necessarily for the same person but for somebody else. Levi, you need to be kinder and go easier on people – the same goes for certain events and issues. Humiliation is to blame, as well as pride, Lev. Forgive me for giving you advice and lecturing you on common truths while I sit here at home.
Lev replied in his sixteenth letter, on 14 November. Her words triggered an outpouring of anguished thoughts he had not disclosed before. Five years of imprisonment had made him doubt whether he mattered to anyone:
I read your dressing-down, Sveta, and it was hard for me to agree with you. If I were in your position, I would probably have said the same, but being here sometimes makes you think differently and look at things in such a tortured and suspicious way that it drives you mad. Psychic trauma is to blame – it can turn a lot of things inside out … Do you understand? Do you believe me? … When you’ve been seeing with your memory, and only your memory, for five years, not knowing whether something (or someone) from the past still exists and not knowing how they are living or have lived, everything that you suppose to be true is supposed in ignorance. It’s not out of pride or humiliation that you suppose the worst, Sveta, but out of ignorance, which is the root of doubt. And then all the logic that you bring to bear, the natural logic even I can use, is cancelled
out … Yet from the moment I received Aunt Olya’s letter, everything suddenly started to become clearer. Every word was like a resurrection. I’m now writing quite wildly, not as I should be; I’m scratching my right ear with my left hand and I’m not making anything simpler. Forgive me, Svet.
Lev was uplifted by the knowledge that his friends had not abandoned him. ‘It’s very good, Sveta, really very good, that our fate has not offended any of our friends,’ he wrote after she had sent him greetings from her old schoolmates Irina and Shura.
But even more than knowing he had friends who cared for him, it was Sveta’s love that sustained Lev. He lived through her letters. ‘Your two letters make up my entire library,’ he wrote to her in October, when he was still waiting for a third, ‘they are with me constantly and are a substitute for everything I’m missing – people, music, books.’ The arrival of a letter would always excite him, as he later confessed to Sveta:
When I see my name on the envelope and it’s written in your hand, I always feel the same sensation – a mixture of disbelief, astonishment, joy and certainty – when I realize that it really is for me – and really hers. Yours, that is. There’s been no point to this confession –and now I am afraid that, having thought about it logically, you’ll start to send me empty envelopes.
Lev would read her letters before he went to sleep – ‘covering my head with the blanket so that my idiotic blissful smile would not cause those around me to doubt my sanity and get me carted off to the infirmary’.
Sveta’s letters gave him hope. She said that was her aim – to make him feel wanted – in the letter he received on her birthday:
Listen, Lev, in order to decide whether to be part of life or not you need to have left it, but a five-year absence doesn’t mean you’ve left it at all: it’s clearly not enough for the people who watched you
grow up, and it’s not enough for me either. Maybe for colleagues at university and work you are just a memory, but life is life, and you’re my life because not a day goes by when you’re not on my mind morning, afternoon and evening.
Lev replied by acknowledging that they had exchanged roles. Before the war, he had been the one instilling optimism in Sveta, but now it was the other way around. Succumbing to despondency, he thought there was ‘little ground for optimism’ – no hope that he might be released or that they might meet before the end of his sentence. Sveta replied on 15 October:
You’re right that I’m trying to breathe some optimism into you. But isn’t that my main goal at the moment? You’re also right that conditions are more complicated and therefore more difficult and that I have far less to deal with than you do. But the idea that the ultimate goal is hopeless – Levi, I just don’t know how to think like that … Does hope depend on persistence? Yes, I rather think it does. There’s a saying: by doing nothing you get nowhere. I understand that it’s difficult for you to do anything, but maybe hope and desire will develop over time. And if not, we’ll just have to live and wait. I won’t try to convince you that my life is easy and happy, but it’s certainly easier than yours: I have a home, and art, and science, and friends. It was Vera Inber,
13
I think, who wrote, ‘Why everything, when only one is necessary?’ These days I would change everything for one thing; both of us would. All I want is for us to be together. Levi, forgive me if my letters cause you pain and don’t always lift your mood. And if I sometimes write nonsense, there’s nothing to be done – a long time ago it was foretold, by the lines on my palms, my handwriting and various other signs, that my heart rules my head.
As if that were not enough to give Lev hope, three weeks later, in her eighteenth letter, Sveta sent him this:
Levi, I have always believed you – in everything. It was so before, has been all these years, and is still the case now. It’s true, no one can vouch for the future. Yet even now I believe in our future, though I cannot picture it clearly to myself. All that matters is that we can be together. As for everything else, I think I have become wise enough not to let anything trivial or beyond our control spoil the most important thing. I notice you mentioned ‘virtue’ once again. Have you any idea, Levi, how angry I was about your virtue back then, when I was a first-year student? … How many times during these years have I reproached myself for spoiling things between us and – God knows why –tormenting you. And how painful it was for me to think that perhaps I would never get the chance to ask your forgiveness … You know, Levi, not so long ago during a conversation about life in general, about its difficulties and hardships, a girl said that I was the happiest of them all – she meant because the two of us haven’t yet spoilt things for ourselves or for each other (when others spoil it for you it’s not so bad). And I didn’t protest. It’s true, Levi – they don’t have you, which means they cannot be the ‘happiest’. So there you are, it’s confirmed by logic and dialectics. People have tried to prove to me so many times, in word and deed, that a loving couple cannot be happy in a hovel unless it’s insulated and equipped with limitless electricity and gas, and other such comforts, but I haven’t given up yet, Levi. I would only need to see that you are there when I wake up in the morning and then, in the evening, to tell you everything that had happened in the day, to look into your eyes and hold you close to me. A fine ‘only’, isn’t it? For the time being, it would be enough simply to receive your tenth letter. The point of all of this is that I want to tell you just three words – two of them are pronouns and the third is a verb (to be read in all the tenses simultaneously: past, present and future).
Lev was overwhelmed. He thought for several days about how he should reply to Sveta’s declaration of love. At last, on 1 December, he sat down in the machine room of the power station and got out a precious sheet of paper to start his twenty-second letter. But the right words would not come.
I need finally to start this letter somehow. I’ve been sitting here in front of a blank piece of paper for ten minutes now, I’ve dipped the pen several times, but it has dried from lack of use. Sveta, I don’t even know what to call you or what to write, although I’d intended to unburden myself of everything. You are entirely to blame, with your 18th letter, after which I couldn’t sleep and there was nothing coherent in my head – except you.
Lev felt blessed by Sveta’s love. He felt he had been saved. He had nothing to offer her, not even hope that he would return, yet she gave herself to him. Lev felt profound gratitude that she would wait for him, a prisoner, that she loved him in spite of everything. But he was also troubled by a sense of guilt and shame. He did not want to be a burden to Sveta – or to anyone else. That is why he had first written to Aunt Olga rather than to her. And why he had been afraid of ‘knocking on the doors’ of friends and relatives. Sveta understood. As she had told him, ‘humiliation is to blame, as well as pride’.
The two of them would often battle over Lev’s self-abasement. Sveta would lovingly assemble parcels and send them off to him, only to have him protest that he needed nothing, only letters, paper, pens and a few books, and urge her not to waste her money or precious time on him. Sveta would not be deterred:
As for the parcels, don’t try to stop them. For us at the moment it’s the only thing that brings any kind of satisfaction (all the others in our lives may be necessary, but they don’t bring any kind of joy) … Mama has asked me to tell you what was in the parcel that was sent on the 20th … Here’s the list: a white shirt, warm socks, lined trousers, a towel and headscarf, soap, toothpaste, a brush and comb, slippers, thread and buttons, two tins (up to a kilogram) of tinned food and a box of chocolates (with strange packaging, as I told you, but Papa insisted on it because of the rats), paper and a textbook, pencils, pens and ink, glucose and ascorbic acid (vitamin C to the unenlightened) – eat it, for God’s sake.
Lev continued to protest. He felt not only that he was a burden but that he had become as helpless as a child:
Sveta, it’s obvious that God, or maybe someone else, is punishing me for your disobedience. I told you not to bother with parcels at all … I’m responsible for 90 per cent of the things depriving you of time and strength – even you can’t deny that. It causes me a lot more distress than you probably think … There’s absolutely nothing I’ll be able to do in return … At 30 years of age I have ended up, through no will of my own, in the same position as a child whom people spoonfeed,
when to care for them should be my duty
… What could be more agonizing than this? Please excuse the harshness of my words, but I need to be candid.

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