Priscilla McMillan - Marina and Lee

The mistress of the apartment was the baby’s grandmother, Tatyana Yakovlevna Prusakova, a member of the former landowning class and a straitlaced woman of the old school who was steeped in the religious values of the Russian provinces. The child herself never learned exactly the circumstances in which she happened to be conceived. Perhaps it was an age-old story of seduction. But perhaps, as the child herself hopes, it was one of the innumerable sad stories of Russian life in the 1930s and early 1940s—purges, the Finnish war, the conflict with Germany, a time when men frequently vanished into the night as victims of political disfavor. [1] Marina was conceived in December 1940 when the worst of the purges was over and before the war with Germany began. This had made it harder for her to guess the reasons for her father’s disappearance. The best estimate appears to be that he was a late victim of the Great Purges of the 1930s. Whatever the circumstances of Klavdia’s pregnancy may have been, Tatyana Yakovlevna found it in her heart to forgive her favorite daughter. She took the baby and consented to bring it up. But first, she insisted on a christening. Religious observances of any kind were frowned on, if not actually forbidden, by Stalin himself. But Tatyana Yakovlevna, as usual, had her way. At the age of two months the child was christened in the living room of her apartment by a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. She was immersed in warm water in the family’s most treasured ornament, a bowl of green porcelain and mother-of-pearl. The child was named Marina.

Tatyana Yakovlevna was apparently glad to have a child to take care of. The war had scattered her large family to the four winds. Her husband Vasily Prusakov, a lanky, mustachioed man, had worked for a British shipping company before 1917. So valued were his services that his employers had offered to move the whole family to London to escape the Revolution. But Tatyana had flatly refused to leave Russia, and Vasily was now the captain of a Soviet commercial vessel plying the northern seas and was seldom home. One of their seven children, the youngest son Nikolai, had gone straight to the army from school and had been killed on the Leningrad front soon after the war broke out. For years Tatyana refused to admit that he was dead and expected him to return at any moment.

Klavdia went back to her job in Molotovsk, and Marina was left in her grandmother’s care. The only other member of the household was Klavdia’s sister Lyuba, a flirtatious young woman who worked for a restaurant trust. Tatyana Yakovlevna disapproved of Lyuba, whom she considered too easily deceived by men. With a shake of her head, she sometimes called her “my wayward daughter” or “my bad girl.” Free to devote her formidable energies to bringing up her granddaughter, Tatyana Yakovlevna was determined that Marina would be a good girl.

In spite of the war, it was a peaceful, even privileged home. Marina, her grandmother, and her Aunt Lyuba shared a three-room apartment with a kitchen and a bath. Marina remembers it, even during Archangel’s endless Artic winter, as a place filled with warmth and sunshine, with rubber plants, geraniums, flowering tearoses, and mimosa. There was a row of copper pots in the kitchen and a heavy brass samovar, polished to shine like gold.

Then there was Tatyana Yakovlevna herself, an altogether commanding presence. Tall and dark-haired still, clad in a long dress with flowers embroidered on the front, she moved unhurriedly through the day’s tasks, propelled by some invisible list of chores in her head. Every morning, no matter how cold it was outside, she threw open the windows to air out the apartment. Each day she scrubbed the floors, did the washing, and polished the copper, brass, and silver. She pressed clothes the old-fashioned way, with hot coals inside a heavy iron. She made clothing and bed linen on an old Singer sewing machine purchased before the 1917 Revolution when the company had a factory in Leningrad.

If Tatyana Yakovlevna was scrupulous keeping the apartment clean, she was no less scrupulous about her grandchild. Every night she heated water on the stove, bathed her, and then tucked her into the bed the two of them shared in the living room. Marina said her prayers, and the last sight she saw as she dropped off to sleep was her grandmother sitting by the samovar, stirring jam into her evening tea.

In spite of unyielding ways that made her a figure of awe to nearly everyone, Tatyana Yakovlevna bent a little when it came to Marina, whom she called “little daughter” or “little granddaughter.” Marina was said to be her favorite. Marina, for her part, admired her grandmother’s pale skin and her unvarying fragrance of kindling and soap and perfume. She loved nestling next to her in bed at night. “Grandma,” she would say, “you smell so sweet. May I kiss you?” Her grandmother never turned her away.

Their apartment building, a sprawling L-shaped structure of whitewashed stucco close to the heart of Archangel, had a courtyard to play in. Marina was also allowed to play in a little park across the street where there was a merry-go-round and a zoo with seals cavorting in a fountain, rabbits, foxes, a wolf, and a big brown bear. As she grew older, she got to know more of Archangel. She became aware of cobblestone streets and of sidewalks paved, after the fashion of the cities of the Russian north, with wood. She became familiar with the smell of birches—the birches of the park, the birches of the woods outside the city, and, above all, the birch smell the sidewalks gave off whenever they were wet with rain. On the outskirts of the town there were wooden houses so close to the edge of the sea that they had to be set on stilts. Beyond the town lay frozen Arctic tundra and thick virgin forest where wolves and bears had their lairs.

Archangel was a busy port in wartime, one of the principal cities in Russia where the Allies could land supplies. Unlike almost any other provincial Soviet city at the time, Archangel was filled with sailors and foreigners from every nation. There were Englishmen, Chinese, and Americans, even Negroes, whom few Russians had ever seen. With so many foreigners, with foreign music and foreign cloth and foreign canned goods to buy and sell, Archangel had a muffled wartime lilt and, in its own gray, Soviet way, a little of the feel of an icebound honky-tonk town.

All of this spelled privilege. One of Marina’s early recollections, for example, is of eating American Spam. Another is of the green-and-red-striped peppermint sticks that arrived in a tin box at intervals from her Aunt Taisya, an accountant who traveled back and forth on a Soviet ship between Russia and America. Each time a new box came, Marina thought: “What a lucky country!” To her, America was like a big box of candies. Or a gingerbread house in the forest, filled with good things to eat while Russia had almost nothing.

In spite of the terrible wartime shortages, Marina never went hungry, for her grandmother was an ingenious cook in the old Russian style, skilled at making the most of fresh fish, and mushrooms and berries from the outlying forests. Nor did Marina have to wear the shabby, somber ready-made clothes that were all the stores of Archangel had to offer. Her grandmother sewed her full smock dresses and a dark blue coat with a white fur collar and cap. She also had a half-dozen bright, flowered dresses bought by her Aunt Taisya in America.

Marina’s clothes nearly brought her to grief. One day she was playing alone in the park when a strange woman promised her a mechanical toy if she would come with her. Marina trotted after her, but on the street she became frightened and burst into tears. A passerby noticed her, managed to get her away from the woman, and took her home by the hand. When Tatyana Yakovlevna heard what had happened, she told Marina that she must never listen to the stories strangers told. So difficult were conditions during the war that there were people who roamed the streets kidnapping children for their clothes. They would sell the clothing and leave the children to starve in the woods.