Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (21 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 letter was never sent, because Lev did not know how to get it to Terletsky at Inta. He was not even sure if he was there.
My darling Sveta, it’s already time to wish you a Happy New Year. I thought this year I should wish the simplest things for you, and you should try to wish them for yourself … Wishes from people who are close to you don’t have to be especially lucky, and, as for happiness, it is incredibly vague, and perhaps it doesn’t quite fit into our reality … I want you to smile more often, to sing more or hum something to yourself, and for your eyes to squint a little, as they do when you find something funny, or for them to open wide with your eyebrows slightly raised when you see something that makes you happy. I want all of these facial expressions of yours to linger on your face more often … And so, Svetin, my darling, my lovely – to continue with these simple things – please don’t overlook the upkeep of your plaits, and, in case you chop them off, make sure you look after your dishevelled locks, that is number one. Second, try not to let your Sundays pass without getting away for a while from domestic or official chores, to ski, skate or boat or just to go somewhere …
Darling Sveta, be well – in the end there is no other way to tell you what I wish; here there should be some kind of superlative to intensify the verb but not the adjective.
Sveta had a great deal of work and a lot to worry about at the start of 1949. She was up to her eyes in administrative duties at the institute, struggling to deal with building work and renovations in preparation for her laboratory’s move to the fourth floor. At the same time she was organizing new research on the compression of rubber, joining the battle for more funds from the ministry and writing up projections for the Five Year Plan. Sveta did not like the work. ‘There is no joy in it,’ she wrote. Under growing stress, she
was afraid of getting into trouble for making a mistake or ‘allowing something to be done which is not allowed’.
It was at the height of the Cold War, and Soviet scientists were under growing pressure from the state. Physicists were criticized and removed from their posts for ‘bowing to the West’ or for holding to the ‘idealist’ philosophy of quantum mechanics, which once again was attacked, as it had been in the 1930s, as incompatible with dialectical materialism, the ‘scientific’ basis of Marxism-Leninism. Some were purged for being ‘cosmopolitans’ (i.e., Jews), an ‘anti-patriotic group’ accused of undermining Soviet art and science in the ideological struggle against the West. At least two of Sveta’s colleagues at the institute (Vitaly Epshtein and Lazar’ Vinnitsky) were forced to find work outside Moscow because of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign, which took off from January 1949, and there were dismissals of many other Soviet Jewish scientists in the world of research institutes in which she moved.
Lev was concerned at the toll all this was having on Sveta’s health and mood. Sveta was taking cod-liver oil and Barbiphen – ‘to calm my nerves,’ as she explained to Lev, ‘and so that I don’t go off the deep end and snarl at everyone’. The barbiturates seemed to have a positive effect. ‘These pills are helping me,’ she wrote to Lev.
Firstly I’m holding up somehow, I’m laughing and not crying (maybe I’m laughing so as not to cry), and secondly, although my appetite has not come back, I’ve stopped losing weight (when I was weighed at the factory I was 56 kg) and everyone agrees that my appearance is starting to improve.
Though Sveta did not pride herself on being attractive, others thought she was. At a party at Nina Semashko’s she found herself engaged in a late-night conversation with a small group of friends, including:
Pavel, an acquaintance (not a very close one) with whom I suddenly found a common language for the first time in 13 years. I have to
admit that I would never have allowed myself if I’d been completely sober – the conversation was about humanity, happiness, work and other lofty matters. I got home at 3 a.m. And this same Pavel (not exactly in a state of sobriety himself) reproached me on the way home for having in the past played it both ways – for knowing I have you but telling him all kinds of things. I swear, I can’t remember ever having said more than two words to him. I always thought that he was devoted to Ninka and indifferent to me. If I did ever say anything to him, it was probably just something to avoid the necessity or the possibility of having a serious conversation.
Pavel was not the only man to show an interest in Sveta. At the end of the war there had been an episode that she had told Lev about in 1948. She had only mentioned it in the context of an argument she had had with her friend Irina Krauze about a mutual friend who was having an affair with a married man. Sveta had disapproved of their friend’s behaviour on the grounds that it involved a lie, and this had reminded her of a young man who
was planning to get married when I suddenly appeared on the scene and a week before the wedding we had a talk. He told me that he had never met anyone better than me and that his fiancée couldn’t stand up to any kind of comparison with me, and he was suffering terribly. I replied that I was waiting for you (this was in 1945) and asked why he was in such a hurry to get married if she wasn’t the best person for him. He should wait until he met someone else. He said that it was useless to wait. Whoever you select, there will always be somebody better whom you’ll meet one day, and, in order to be moral, once you’ve made your choice you have to close your eyes and never look at anyone else ever again. And, since he had already promised he would marry her, everything was decided. I said it was disrespectful to her. I just can’t accept such blind morality. I don’t need the kind of morality that drags you by the tail and uses force. Perhaps that’s just my youth and foolishness?
Maybe it was also that she was lucky – in knowing that she had the man she really loved, even if she could not have him yet.
Lev agreed. He did not need to compare Sveta with anybody, because it was her he loved.
As for the ‘best’ and closing your eyes for the future – of course it’s false and impossible to live like that. Objectively, there must be others who are better, the world is bigger than ‘her’, but that’s not what it is about. Which is that for ‘me’, that is ‘him’, well, it’s easier for me if I philosophize in the first person so I’ll use ‘I’ and ‘you’. The point is that you are the best for me – not because you are objectively so but because
for me
you are the best and
I don’t need anybody else
, not even the Queen of Sheba, because I love
you
, for all your particular qualities – even your shortcomings are dear to me – while your merits are a source of joy. At the start [of a relationship], of course, feeling comes from pleasing qualities, but then they play a secondary role … Disappointment often plays a part, or external circumstances – losing that force of attraction and so on. But when a person has known someone very well for a long time, not just for a month or a year, but over many years, this danger boils down to nothing. That’s how it seems to me, in any case. The colour of our blushes or the number of grey hairs become insignificant. Common sense won’t help with this at all, especially not mine. I love you, and that is all. And for how long? Well, it seems like it will be for ever, that’s how it seems now. It seemed less certain before, when we were apart, but now I believe, I believe, I believe. What else can I say?
Lev thought that a person who could even think in terms of finding ‘someone better’ had lost the ‘capacity for emotion’. When he wrote of ‘common sense’ he had in mind the ‘hollow-hearted reasoning’ that could make such calculations, and referred to ‘Prelude to a Poem on the Five Year Plan’, the last poem of Vladimir Mayakovsky, in which there was a line about ‘shameful common sense’:
She loves me? She loves me not?
I crack my knuckles, knead my hands, and fling
My broken fingers to the winds.
So wreath of daisies you chance upon in spring
And use to tell your fortune
Are torn and flung away.
Let me discover grey in beard and hair,
Let the silver of advancing years ring out in peals
I hope and trust that I shall never
Come to shameful common sense or reason.
Sveta longed for Lev. ‘For some reason, I’ve been seeing you in my dreams all week,’ she wrote to him on 5 March. ‘It didn’t make me all that happy, because, although I could see you, I wasn’t able to touch you (Alik says this about God, whose existence he finds conceivable, apparently), and you were moving away from me the whole time.’ Lev too had dreams about her. He could hear her voice but not see her. He could see a letter she had sent but could not touch or open it. He saw her not only in his dreams ‘but also in reality, relentlessly, and it’s really getting bad’.
Lev was seeing Sveta all the time. When he was on his shift he was often thinking about her and having conversations with her in his head. He was irritated by the attempts of his shift coworkers to talk to him. ‘Nikolai [Lileev] has had to switch to the night shift,’ Lev wrote to Sveta, ‘and I’m feeling liberated from the need to account for my thoughts (“What are you thinking, Lev?” What a stupid question!).’
Lev was busy with repairs at the power station at the start of 1949. The previous autumn he had designed a steam-heater for the engine but when it was delivered after the New Year it turned out they had made it the wrong size, so it had to be sent for repairs to the main workshops. On 18 January, he had his first day off in more than half a year. ‘There will be more free days,’ he wrote to Sveta, ‘although the good they bring me is not much.’
After the departure of Terletsky, Lev found little comfort in his friends. He was becoming more self-sufficient and did not want to became close to anyone. ‘I like being on my own at work,’ he wrote to Sveta on 19 January. ‘People come to talk with me of course, but that doesn’t bother me as long as I’m not made to feel awkward out of a sense that I need to repay their friendship or kindness by opening myself up to them, which I absolutely cannot do with Nikolai [Lileev] or anybody else who thinks he is my friend.’ Lev was alienated by the banter of the barracks, where without Terletsky he felt more isolated than before. ‘Today was an idiotic day,’ he wrote on 20 January. ‘In the barracks there are so many stupid, wild things done, so many jokes and pranks, that I can’t help but get annoyed and wonder how it’s possible for someone like A. A. [Semenov],
35
with a normal mind, to go along with them, especially when these practical jokes are at the expense of someone present at the time.’ He felt unable to join in when the other prisoners fooled around. He was irritated by their drinking and singing, even by their noisy games of dominoes in the barracks after work. While Lev would be lying on his bunk, trying to read
Anna Karenina
, his fellow prisoners would be creating havoc around him. Sometimes, however, he too enjoyed the party. ‘The people in our barracks are having fun today,’ he wrote to Sveta on 25 January. ‘There’s no particular reason. The floors and windows are all shaking with their dancing and the sounds of their guitars, and surprisingly the best musician turned out to be Aleksandrovich. I take my hat off to him!’
Three weeks later, there was a quieter party, for Strelkov’s fiftieth birthday. Lev came with Lileev to drink tea with him in the laboratory. ‘It was a sad day,’ Lev wrote to Sveta, ‘and I could not bring myself to wish him happy birthday. He understood, of course, why we had come but said nothing.’ Strelkov continued to be ill, with scurvy and increasingly acute attacks caused by gallstones. Nothing could be done by the doctors in the infirmary, who lacked the
expertise to carry out the difficult operation he required. Lev felt sorry for Strelkov, as he explained to Sveta:
Nobody has done as much as him for the production of the wood-combine, and not only has he received no thanks but the people who have benefited from his work are trying to keep quiet about it so as not to reveal that their own work is being done for them by others. The local bosses don’t lift a finger to help him beyond his individual ration, which he should get anyway because he’s ill.
There were even sadder celebrations on 17 April, the twenty-fifth birthday of Strelkov’s daughter, Valya, who lived in Moscow with her husband and her son, whom Strelkov had never seen, and Strelkov’s wife.
Only 25! And if G. Y. [Strelkov] lives to see her she’ll be 37! – under 40! But will there ever be such a meeting? It’s really hard for him and sometimes when I’m leaving him his misfortune and pitiful situation are enough to make me weep … It is getting to the point where I want to bang my head against a wall and grind my teeth from impotence and indignation at everything that has been done to him. He’s a wonderful person even though we often argue (quite civilly, of course).
Spring came late to Pechora in 1949. There was snow in May, and the first warm days did not arrive until mid-June. The long cold winter put an extra strain on everyone. With the river still frozen, timber could not be brought in to the wood-combine. There were frequent power cuts because the power station relied on burning wood. In the saw-mill and workshops machines could not be powered and lay idle; workers had to resort to hand-tools, and the wood-combine fell far behind its quota so that the Gulag authorities reduced food deliveries. Throughout that winter there were chronic shortages of warm clothes, boots and gloves for the prisoners. Many became ill as they were forced to work for longer hours in freezing
temperatures to make up for the shortfall in output. In the 2nd Colony, where Lev was a prisoner, one in ten prisoners was estimated to be sick during the first quarter of 1949, but only 1 per cent were allowed to be ill officially on any day.

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