Oswald's Tale (4 page)

But she didn’t have much freedom. Everyone’s eyes were always on her, and she remembers that once when they were in bed, she even cried because she did not feel alone with him.

One night, they brought out an album of photographs, and Valya had to think how different it was from her family, where they’d never had anything like that, so poor. So she was embarrassed when they sat around their big table and his mother asked, “Now, tell me your stories, tell me about yourself.” Fortunately, Ilya’s mother then said, “You know, Ilyusha’s first wife was brought up by a stepmother.” Valya got upset, so she touched her husband’s foot under the table, and he touched back, which she understood to mean, “Don’t tell her,” and she didn’t. But later on her mother-in-law asked, “Why do you always talk about your father? Why do you never tell me anything about your mother?” So she confessed. She, too, was brought up by a stepmother.

In this Prusakov family in Arkhangelsk were Ilya’s sister Klavdia and her two children, Marina and Petya, conceived from separate fathers. There was also another sister, Musya, and still another, Lyuba, who lived with them, but the center of this household was Marina, Klavdia’s daughter, who was five years old and very pretty and very bright. She had large beautiful blue eyes, and her grandmother more than admired her. You could say that Tatiana was completely in love with her. Marina was not exactly spoiled, but she was
izbalovanaya,
which is a little nicer than spoiled, for it means somebody who may have been loved too much. There was certainly a tendency to deal with Marina more leniently than a strict parent might accept. But she was a child you could like, and in school Marina got very high marks, and all her family was for Marina.

There was no father around, however, only a stepfather, named Alexander Medvedev, and at first he treated Marina very well, even after his first child with Klavdia, Petya, was born.

As for Marina’s natural father, Valya was never sure what happened to him. He had disappeared in 1941, before Marina was born. Ilya never explained. He just said that Marina’s missing father was a nice man, and Klavdia’s sister Musya said she met him one time, and he was attractive, very attractive eyes, an engineer, whose name was Nikolaev. Nikolaev and Ilya had worked together building a small new city where before there had only been water and marsh, but now it exists, Severodvinsk, about fifty kilometers north of Arkhangelsk.

As for Nikolaev, Valya thinks maybe they didn’t tell her any more about him because the Prusakov family did not want to disgrace themselves. Perhaps Nikolaev had been married to another woman and just made a baby with Klavdia and left. On the other hand, this all happened in Stalin’s time. So Nikolaev could have been deported. Valya remembers how when she was a child Stalin once said: “We have started to live better and we have more fun.” There had been a man in the crowd who heard this slogan and he added, “Yes, so much fun that you could cry.” He was taken to prison for that. It was a terrible time. So, people had the habit of not talking. In any event, Ilya always said that Nikolaev was a good man.

Of course, Valya did not know much about such things. She lived at home and took care of things for her mother-in-law. Neither then nor later did she go to Ilya’s office. He had a job in MVD—Ministry of Internal Affairs—and he would always be in MVD; he never left. Nor did she know exactly what kind of work he did, whether he was an office manager or a production manager. She knew there were people who worked in factories and camps who’d been sentenced for things they did. Ilya never worked directly with such people; he was more like someone who controlled production. He dealt with people who were managing factories. He didn’t have the highest position, but he did have responsibilities in his job, and she would say he was happy with that. Certainly he never discussed anything negative with her.

Despite all those years in Arkhangelsk with Ilya’s family, it was still a good life, because at least Valya and her husband had a separate room. They could make no noise, but still, one could live like that even if she couldn’t look forward to summer, because Ilya didn’t like to hunt for mushrooms. Mosquitoes were terrible in Arkhangelsk in summer, so you couldn’t say you were going out with your husband to search for mushrooms and get to be alone out there in fields full of grass.

Arkhangelsk, in this period, was not yet a big city and didn’t have many roads. Most were mud, or made of logs, but their Dvina River was deep, and oceangoing ships could come in from the White Sea. Still, it was much too cold. Ilya had some kind of arthritis in his back and needed to live in a warmer climate. In 1951, therefore, they moved to Minsk, first Ilya, then a month later Valya joined him, and at first they had to share a kitchen with a strange family and only had one room, although later, because of his job, they would live better. But again, Valya did not know exactly what kind of work he did, because of his being in this special Ministry controlling production under both Military and Security. In fact, Ilya’s office was now in that same big building where KGB was located; MVD and KGB were both in a large yellow structure, five stories high, with columns in front—a government building, classical, with small doors, Valya remarked, for so large a place.

Ilya was, of course, a member of the Communist Party, but he and Valya never talked much about it, and he never asked her to join. In fact, he never said a word about it. While he was not what you could call devoted, he was responsible, and he was loyal; he paid fees regularly and did what he had to do; on everything he was responsible. If all Communists had been like Ilya, then it would be a different world, because Ilya was very honest. Valya never met anyone more so than him.

Valya had to like Minsk. It had been destroyed twice during the Great Patriotic War—once when the Germans came in and once when the Germans retreated back into Poland three years later. Ninety percent of Minsk had been leveled by all that. All the same, a decision was taken after the war to rebuild not in a different location, which would have been easier, but right over the ruins. That was in 1945. By the time Valya and Ilya moved there in 1951, Minsk’s town center had been rebuilt in a new style. The city didn’t look at all like it used to. Minsk had been a very large township of numberless small wooden houses all leaning against one another. Now it was stately. It had five- and six-story buildings with lots of yellow stone, like in Leningrad, and broad avenues, with good apartment houses that looked as if they’d been built a hundred years ago. Now, in 1951, it was a clean city, free of ruins, and food was everywhere: black caviar, red caviar, many different types of sausages and cheeses. She and Ilya didn’t have a lot of money, but enough, and they lived near the center, which had been very well built by German prisoners before they had gone back to their country. Even Ilya’s mother, who didn’t want to leave Arkhangelsk, because she had a good apartment with three rooms and didn’t pay a lot for it, was impressed when she came to Minsk. After she’d been there for a couple of months, she said, “Oh, here I feel as if I am in heaven,” and at about this time, they were able to move into two rooms, and went on that way for years, with Tatiana, Valya, and Ilya all living in one small apartment, sharing a kitchen with a neighbor who had three children and worked as a prosecutor. They got along with them well, and in fact, their neighbors were upset when they moved, and said, “We’ll never meet such nice people again.” Of course, their toilet was in the yard, and one had to go out there when it was zero and worse, but then Valya felt strong. Since childhood, she had been used to going about without shoes, yet now at night Ilya would wake up too and say, “Wear your shoes.” She was used to going barefoot in snow as a child, so it did not seem necessary to put on shoes to walk thirty meters to a toilet in their apartment-house yard.

In this period, between 1955 and 1960, Valya knew that this production which Ilya oversaw was done with prisoners. Her husband never said anything to her, but sometimes when fellow officers came over for dinner and drinks, she would hear them talking, and she knew there was a plan to be fulfilled: People should work well, and deliver production according to plan. But they never discussed it as husband and wife.

Valya could keep secrets. If you told her not to say something, she wouldn’t. Once Ilya was on a business trip and telephoned her and said that one of his colleagues would come over to their apartment, and she should give him a key to his safe.

Shortly afterward, somebody knocked at her door and a man in civilian clothes entered and asked if he could have that key. She said to herself, “Maybe someone listened to my telephone conversation.” So she asked, “Can you show me your I.D.?” And not until he did would she give him the key.

Later, he told Ilya, “You have such a wife! She demanded my I.D.!” Valya didn’t know what kind of secrets Ilya had in his safe, but if he told her to do something, she did it properly.

Valya’s only trip to Leningrad occurred when Marina was eleven or twelve. Klavdia lived in Leningrad then with her husband, Alexander Medvedev, in one room with three children, and when Valya and Ilya and Tatiana arrived, it was difficult, all eight people in one room, a huge family for so small a space, even worse because Alexander Medvedev also had a mother who did not take to Klavdia, and didn’t like her son to be married to a woman who had a child by another man. This mother of Medvedev was a very intelligent woman, but mean and fat, a witch. So Marina’s situation was now different, and she was no longer at the center of her family.

At this time, before Klavdia died, Medvedev did treat Marina and her mother properly, but still there were difficulties. Klavdia had an advanced case of rheumatism, and Ilya once told Valya: “You can see how sick she is.” Besides, Alexander’s attitude toward Marina had changed as his own two children with Klavdia grew older. Alexander now punished Marina a lot, and matters did get worse once Klavdia died, just before Marina turned sixteen.

Two years later, Marina wrote to Valya and Ilya in Minsk to tell them that it was very difficult for her to stay any longer with her stepfather, and asked if she could come to live with them.

Such a request was not too welcome for Valya. She was tired of her relatives. She didn’t show it, but for all these years somebody in Ilya’s family had always been living with them. Tatiana even died in their home. In her last ten months, Valya had taken care of her so well that before she went, she said to Valya, “I have survived only because of you, Valya.” Ilya was in effect the father of his family, and that was fine, except that Valya felt he could give time to his wife only when they went to bed.

Still, when Marina arrived at the train station, Valya saw that she had only one suitcase, and pitied her. The girl seemed so happy to be able to move to Minsk. She was shy and, for a while, very obedient. Just a sweet eighteen-year-old. Marina had a natural color to her lips and never used lipstick. She was attractive even if she was afraid to smile—one of her front teeth was a little in front of the other. It would all have been nice if Valya didn’t have to share her life with one more relative again.

Of course, Marina didn’t know much about housework. If Valya asked her to do something, Marina would try it, but she couldn’t cook. She did wash her own clothes, and hardly knew how to do that properly. Then, when Marina got a place in a hospital pharmacy, for which kind of work she’d been trained in Leningrad, she was usually tired when she came back from her job, so she didn’t really have house duties. She was free to go to movies, to parties, to plays. Valya, after all, did not go out to work, so she was responsible for the apartment. Sometimes Marina washed floors, and sometimes she washed dishes, and certainly when she was eating alone, she never left dirty plates for Valya. And she had her job. People were needed in pharmacy work, and Marina liked her occupation. She told Valya and Ilya, “I’ll cure you,” because at that time she had access to medicine.

The only trouble Valya could foresee might yet be with dates, although Marina was usually critical of them. If a boy said something wrong or bought something cheap, that was goodbye! She told Valya that she stopped seeing a man she had dated in Leningrad because he bought her cheap sweets. Of course, being that critical was an unusual matter for someone in her position. Girls like Marina, with no more than a vocational education, were not considered to be as outstanding as girls who went to an Institute or to Universities. So girls like Marina were not usually dated for serious relationships by the best young men in the best schools. But Marina only liked people who were educated.

Valya never saw her go out with an average man. She had lots of boyfriends, students at an Institute or at the University of Minsk, and she went to their parties with her best friend, Larissa, and spent all her earnings for clothes. After all, Ilya and Valya were not going to take a part of her salary for food. Sometimes, if Marina wanted money for theatre or movies, she would make her own clothes.

She was very industrious. She liked to sew, do embroidery, and she cut up Valya’s old fur coats to make hats for herself.

She also read a lot, particularly Theodore Dreiser. Marina loved Dreiser, who was very popular at this time, but then, there were hundreds of books in their apartment, because Ilya had purchased complete sets of works by famous Russian authors, and Valya would read Chekhov and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov. Marina, however, chose Dreiser. Writers like Chekhov she was always having to get through in school.

Taken on the whole, it was all right having Marina there. Valya never minded that she did not contribute to their living, because Marina had been so poor when she arrived that she didn’t even have underwear, and her salary was small. She needed everything—shoes, stockings, clothes from her head to her feet—and Valya pitied her, for Marina had had a very difficult destiny. Marina even told Valya that she loved her. Loved her a lot. Marina said Valya was the first woman to treat her decently and give her all this freedom, and in turn, Valya loved and pitied her.