Beautiful Assassin

3

If you are to understand me, why I did what I did during the war and later, you should have some idea of who I was before, so that you can know in what ways the fighting changed me, made me the sort of person who could kill with such dispassionate ease.
Though I was raised as an only child, my parents did have another baby before I came along, a son named Mikhail. Still in a crib, he went to sleep one night and, as my mother put it, “God decided he was needed in heaven.” In one corner of our home she’d erected a small shrine to him—a pair of his baby shoes, a blanket from his crib, a lock of his hair, a single photograph showing a pretty, dark-haired boy who bore a striking resemblance to me. Though I never knew him, I sometimes resented my brother for leaving behind an unspoken sadness that pervaded my childhood, that hung palpably over our family. I could sense his ghost, the presence missing from the dinner table with the extra plate my mother always set out, could feel it in my mother when she tucked me in at night, her possessiveness, the fear that it would happen again. How my father looked at me with a barely concealed expression of displeasure. And I felt too, as all those who have lost siblings, the oppressive weight of responsibility that sits on those left behind—not to disappoint one’s parents, not to cause them any further pain, to live, not one’s own life, but that of the dead sibling.
My father’s work for the kolkhoz, the government’s farm collectivization program, caused us to move many times when I was growing up. We lived all over the Ukraine, in small villages and large cities. I was always having to get used to a new home, a new town, new schoolmates. I never felt a part of anything, never felt I had a home in any conventional sense of that word. And there were many Ukrainians who hated apparatchiks like my father, whom they felt were responsible for taking away their lands, dividing up their farms among the peasants, for the famine that eventually swept over the land like a plague. That and the fact that my father’s government position permitted us to enjoy a certain status and financial security that most of our fellow Ukrainians did not—all of this only caused our family to be even more isolated and, in many cases, despised. We usually had a car, always a modest but pleasant home, plenty to eat—this at a time when most families were crammed into a single room or small apartment and had to stand in long lines with food vouchers to get a loaf of bread or a few potatoes. And in my native Ukraine, tens of thousands were starving during the Holomodor, when there were dead bodies in the alleys and scattered across the countryside like so many grains of wheat left after the harvest.
My father was a Russian, an educated and urbane man, handsome and remote in a nineteenth-century sort of way, with his high collar and pince-nez, his dark, wavy hair and bushy mustaches. An atheist, he came from a well-to-do family in St. Petersburg before the revolution, though he’d taken an active part in the brave new world after the overthrow of the czar, even fighting with the Reds against the Whites in the civil war. A distant and reserved man whose capability for love, I think, was forever stunted by the death of his son, a man who seemed reluctant to allow himself to get close to another child. And yet, in his own way he tried to be a good father to his one surviving child, and I suppose he loved me in his own fashion. At night I remember him reading Turgenev or Gogol to me, or some Pushkin (it was from him that I developed my love of poetry). He took me to the opera and the symphony. He would listen to Mozart in the evening as he smoked his pipe, though later, after the German invasion, he would smash all of his “Nazi music,” as he put it. He taught me to play chess and to swim in the sea. To throw a javelin and run the hurdles. (Later, it would be he who instructed me on how to shoot a gun.) Sometimes he would relate to me stories from his experiences in the civil war, fighting with the famous Chapayev, the sweet odor of his pipe intoxicating. While the peasant in my mother believed in the need to feed the people, she was naturally suspect of abstractions, both fearful of and bitter toward the government. My father, on the other hand, looked upon the Party as a benevolent if sometimes necessarily stern parent that wouldn’t spare the rod because of its love of its children. He had placed his complete faith in socialism. It was his god, his religion, his heaven on earth.
I could recall at night, my parents sitting at the kitchen table, bickering about the government. My mother calling Stalin that ublyudok—mongrel dog—though she would always, as did most citizens even in the privacy of their own homes, instinctively lower her voice when saying something the least critical about the government, fearful that neighbors would overhear and inform on her. She detested Stalin and his cronies, feared and hated the chekisty, the dreaded secret police that came and took people away in the middle of the night. And she blamed the Holomodor directly on him, on his paranoid fear of and hatred for Ukrainian independence. On the other hand, my father took the position that the famine was merely an ugly rumor spread by traitors and reactionaries, or, if some few had actually starved, blaming it on drought or those selfish kulaks. For my father, the blame for any and all of communism’s ills was never laid at the doorstep of Stalin himself, who was, in my father’s eyes, the country’s savior, pure of heart and beyond reproach, nor on the Communist system itself. And he had tried to indoctrinate his daughter with the same dialectical fervor. As I grew older, though, and saw for myself the glaring inequalities and hypocrisies, the failings and atrocities of our system, and later the grotesque circus that was Stalin’s show trials, I couldn’t help but question the government and its leaders, the twisted means to arrive at their perfect ends. But I never questioned my love of country or of my countrymen, which was also something I learned from my father. He instilled in me an undying love of my homeland, a love for which I would gladly give my life.
My mother was as different from him as night is from day. A Ukrainian, she came from a poor family of farmers, and she never shook her fear of poverty. A simple woman, with broad hips and a sturdy peasant body, she was always saving kopeks in a tin can she kept in her bureau for a rainy day, using milk long after it had gone bad, watering down the soups she made, patching and repatching clothes. Like many Ukrainians, she was shaped by necessity, fashioned by the memory of actual hunger, something I myself had never experienced. And yet she strove hard to make whatever house we stayed in feel like home. We’d hardly get settled in when she would be busy cleaning and scrubbing, making curtains for the windows and putting out our few possessions, including setting up the small memorial in the corner to my brother. I remember her making nachynka and golubtsy, her hands smelling of onions and cornmeal. I loved her hands, blunt, the nails broken, hands fashioned for work, but they were, nonetheless, gentle and loving; I remember them combing my hair or wiping the tears from my eyes when I’d scraped a knee. She tried to establish routines, to forcibly nurture a family life even in the most barren of places. For Christmas, she would place the kolach bread on the table with candles and dishes of salt and honey, and she’d dip the bread in each and repeat the prayer about Christ’s coming—Khristos rozhdayetsya. This despite the government’s view on celebrating such a bourgeois holiday. She was a good mother, whose loss of a child, unlike that of my father, only made her love me all the more fiercely, all the more protectively.
As I mentioned, my father, the former soldier, got me interested in shooting. He said that in this new world women too would need to take up arms to defend the revolution. But I think it was as much that he’d secretly wanted to fashion me into the son he’d lost; and I suppose I took to it for the very same reasons, to give him back that son, or perhaps, become one. When we lived in Odessa, he would take me to an abandoned quarry not far from the Black Sea where he taught me to shoot a heavy old Cossack rifle he’d used in the war. He would set up cans and have me shoot them from progressively longer distances. When I would miss, he would shake his head in disappointment, and I would feel the sting of having failed him and work all the more diligently. Then he would wrap his arms around me, about the only physical contact I’d ever had from him, and adjust my elbow and my head. “You must make your rifle an extension of your will, Tanyusha.” That’s what he called me, Tanyusha, his attempt at tenderness. I practiced hard, hoping to please him, to be what he wanted me to be. Later he had me join the Osoviakhim, the paramilitary shooting club that all Soviet youth were encouraged to participate in. I soon realized that I had a natural aptitude for shooting a gun. I wasn’t afraid of the kick of the rifle or the noise. Instead, I found in it a wonderful symmetry, a synthesis of mind and eye and target, of a will made manifest.
When I was fourteen we finally settled for good in Kiev. It was both strange and comforting to have a place I could finally think of as home. In school I was but an average student, bright but undisciplined, lazy except in those subjects that struck my fancy. I could excel when it came to something like literature or athletics, but in class, I would often daydream, staring out the window onto the playing fields, thinking of how I would perform at an upcoming track meet or scribbling in the margins of my notebook some lines of poetry. From an early age I had become an inveterate scribbler of verse. I fashioned myself something of a modern-day Pushkin. One time in my mathematics class, I was working on a poem instead of doing the assignment. The teacher, a shrill-voiced, stolid woman named Comrade Borovechenko, crept up behind me and caught me in the act.
“What is this, Comrade Levchenko?” she said, snatching the paper I was writing on out of my hands. “Aha. It seems we have a poetess in our midst,” she said sarcastically. Then, to my utter mortification, she proceeded to read the poem aloud to the entire class. It was on a favorite topic of mine at the time—love. The class tittered and taunted me.
At school I kept to myself, an introverted girl who hadn’t many friends. I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, except on the athletic fields. A good athlete and one who enjoyed a challenge, I loved competing, enjoyed outdoor pursuits. I took great satisfaction in pushing myself, the feel of my body in motion. I ran track, competing in the hurdles and the javelin. I also loved to ski and hike, to swim in the Black Sea when we went on holiday. Growing up, I’d never had a boyfriend. I suppose all the moving around hadn’t helped, but mostly I wasn’t particularly interested in boys, at least not the ones that I found myself surrounded by at school. They were immature or coarse, strutting vainly around like roosters. The good-looking ones were usually brainless and conceited, the bookish ones too dull or homely or passive to strike my fancy. Or at least, so I told myself—the lies every insecure young girl learns to tell herself. For they weren’t particularly interested in me either. Until I was thirteen, I was this awkward, ungainly creature, with skinny legs and big feet, a flat chest, a mouth too broad. And with my dark hair and serious dark eyes, which tended to look directly upon the world with a kind of challenge, some even took to calling me “Tsygan”—Gypsy. Others called me Jew, though I wasn’t. (My father, for all of his many flaws, harbored no anti-Semitic views; when he heard this, he told me, “Go ahead and tell them you are a Jew. That I’m a Jew. That we’re all Jews in this country.”)
Despite being so physical, I also loved to read history and books on travel, anything I could find about the rest of the world, which seemed a fascinating and forbidden mystery to me. I loved to read about Paris and London and New York, the Andes and the Great Wall of China. I also enjoyed reading novels and poetry. The classics like Pushkin and Lermontov and Turgenev, as well as more modern writers like Tsvetaeva and Yesenin. I read whatever I could get my hands on, which, given the state’s censorship, was often quite limited. As I said, I’d always written poetry, something to take up the long hours of a lonely young girl whose parents moved from town to town. I wrote in a journal, though I was too shy to show it to anyone, not even my parents. While most of my teachers thought me lazy or simply not particularly clever, a few saw beneath the sometimes prickly, disinterested surface I presented to the world.
One was Madame Rudneva, my literature teacher. Middle-aged, with a head of wild reddish hair sprinkled with gray, she had large brown eyes, sharp features, an inviting smile. Not so much pretty as striking. She smoked Gauloises and dressed differently from the frumpy way the other teachers did, in bright flowing dresses and exotic jewelry and a beret. She spoke half a dozen languages fluently, including English. It was rumored she had family money she had somehow managed to retain even after the revolution. It was also rumored that she was part Jewish, which made her suspect in the eyes of many and formed a bond for us. (“We’re a couple of Gypsies, we two,” she used to joke with me.) While the other teachers insisted they be called “Comrade,” she preferred “Madame,” in the European tradition. In class she would sometimes make satirical comments about an article in Pravda or Izvestiya, or some new policy of the government’s she thought idiotic. She believed that women were the equal of men, that the revolution had preached that, and yet in practice, the role of women in the country was limited to teaching or working in a factory or on a collective farm driving a tractor, or worse, relegated to being merely someone’s wife. Though we were supposed to read only the Russian masters and those tedious contemporary works by “approved” writers, which meant plodding stories about factory workers overjoyed about reaching their quotas, often she’d bring in something by Shakespeare or Keats and read it to us in class, translating as she went. Occasionally she even slipped in some banned book by a contemporary Soviet. At the front of our classroom was the mandatory picture of Stalin that every classroom had. His cold, snake black eyes seemed to stare down upon us students like the fearsome gaze of some slightly annoyed god. Right beside his picture, though, Madame Rudneva had put up that of Shakespeare, at least until the headmaster removed it.
I was just emerging from that awkward period of youth, when a girl magnifies her every flaw into some tragedy. Madame Rudneva, though, must have seen some spark in me, one I didn’t even know existed myself. She found some excuse to have me stay after school once. At first I thought I was in trouble, as I sometimes was with other teachers. But instead we just chatted, about poetry, about life, about my life.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Tat’yana?” she asked me. It was the first time anyone had ever asked me such a question. The other teachers, my parents, I guess even I, all assumed I would be like any other girl, no better or worse. Work in a factory, get married, make meals, produce healthy children, in short, silently accept what life had selected for me.
I shrugged. “I like to read,” I told her.
“Reading is an avocation. It’s not a vocation,” she said to me. “What do you want to do with your life.”
I paused, then blurted out, “I would like to write poetry.”
“Poetry?” she said. I feared she’d said this with irony, but I couldn’t detect the slightest trace of sarcasm, as other teachers would have responded to such a bold statement. My own mother, for instance, viewed my poetry writing as just a silly childhood hobby, like playing with dolls. Something that I would eventually grow out of.
I nodded to Madame Rudneva.
“May I see some of it sometime, Tat’yana?”
“I don’t know,” I replied shyly.
After school the next day the woman handed me a tattered copy of a poet I had never heard of.
“You have not read Akhmatova?” asked Madame Rudneva.
“No.”
“She’s our greatest living poet. Though her works have been banned by Old Whiskers,” she said, tossing her head toward Stalin’s portrait.
“Why do you call him that?” I asked.
“It’s what they call him in the camps.” She paused, then whispered cautiously, “I spent some years in one of his camps.”
“My God!” I cried, startled. “What did you do, Madame Rudneva?”
She let out with a sardonic sigh. “I wrote a letter in support of my fifteen-year-old cousin who had been arrested for making a joke about the Party. For this, I received five years’ hard labor.” She glanced again at the picture of Stalin, then said, “‘Old Whiskers’ is too nice a name for that filthy swine.” Madame Rudneva stared at me suspiciously, as if she only then realized she’d spoken out of turn and now didn’t know if she could trust me. In those days, one had to be cautious of what one said. Fear and treachery were everywhere. The walls themselves seemed to have ears.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. Looking over my own shoulder, I whispered, “My mother calls him a mongrel dog.”
We shared a conspiratorial smile at this, knowing then it was safe to talk openly.
“Listen,” said Madame Rudneva as she opened the slender volume and began to read:
“He told me, ‘We’re the best of friends!’
And gently touched my gown’s laces.
Oh, how differs from embraces
The easy touching of these hands.
“Lovely, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Here,” she said, handing me the book. “Just don’t let anybody see you carrying it about.”
I promised that I would be careful.
After that she would bring me other volumes to read, sometimes a frayed edition of a banned poet or a book smuggled into the country by an exiled writer living in Europe. I didn’t let anyone see them. Especially not my father who, though he appreciated poetry, liked only the older poets, not the subversive modern ones who wrote “decadent bourgeois drivel,” as he put it. Madame Rudneva encouraged me to show her some of my own poems, and while I had previously shared them with no one, I found myself letting her read them.
“These are very good, Tat’yana,” she told me.
“Just some scribblings,” I replied defensively.
“Nonsense. They need polish, of course. Nothing of beauty comes except with hard work. But they are good. They show real promise.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes, indeed. You have the seeds of poetry in your soul, Tat’yana.” Then she leaned close, as if the portrait of Old Whiskers might overhear her. “Yet I fear they will never bear fruit in this soulless country of ours.”
Never before had anyone spoken to me like this, so frankly about our country and its failings, or about my passion for writing. Until then, my poetry had appeared to me as little more than a youthful romantic notion I felt compelled to keep to myself, an oddity I would, as my mother maintained, grow out of. As I came to trust Madame Rudneva, I found myself opening up to her, staying after school to talk about all sorts of things—poetry and philosophy, politics and history. The revolution. The Party. The rights of women. Even about love. Unlike most of my other teachers, Madame Rudneva was not closed-minded, not provincial or dogmatic in her thinking, and unlike the rest of my teachers, she was not afraid to express herself, despite the very real danger such things might bring to one who was so outspoken. She had traveled widely, to Europe, studying in England, at Cambridge. She’d even been to the United States, back in the twenties, before such travel was forbidden. She read Donne and Blake and Keats to me in English. She would spend afternoons teaching me to recite the words in English and then translating them for me. Once, she brought me a volume she’d purchased years before when she was in England, by the American poet Emily Dickinson.
“‘There is no frigate like a book,’” she would read from Dickinson, and have me recite it after her. “‘To take us lands away.’”
Slowly I began to pick up a little English, and with it a curiosity about America.
“What was it like?” I asked her once.
“In New York, the buildings are so tall the tops reach the clouds. And automobiles everywhere. Going this way and that. Zoom, zoom,” the woman said, waving her hands rapidly about, as if shooing away flies. “And there is more food lying in the gutters than is on the tables of the wealthy here.”
“No,” I replied in astonishment.
“It’s true.”
“What sort of clothing do the women wear?”
“They dress in very bad taste. Flappers, they are called. They dance like this.” At which point Madame Rudneva got up from behind her desk and demonstrated how the American women danced, kicking her legs up and moving her body wildly around the front of the classroom. “Come,” she said, inviting me to dance. I shook my head, never having danced before. But she insisted. “I shall show you.”
Madame Rudneva held my hand and spun me about in dizzying circles. After a while we both stopped and began laughing uncontrollably.
“Are they all as decadent as they say?” I asked.
“They are spoiled from such soft living,” she replied. “But the Americans are not so very different from us.”
“But they are capitalists.”
At this time I still believed in some of the things my father had taught me, and he said the Americans were the epitome of capitalist greed and corruption, a society doomed to the “garbage heap of history.”
“You mustn’t believe everything those fools tell you, Tat’yana. The Party tries to fill everyone’s head with lies and deceptions. Because the truth would make everyone angry. And when some brave few try to tell the truth, the government uses fear to shut them up.”
“My father says the Party exists only to carry out the will of the people.”
“Huh.” She laughed. “I once believed heart and soul in the revolution. I was young when we overthrew the czar, just a little older than you. I thought we could change the world. But those in charge wanted to change things only for their own betterment.”
“Did you like America?” I asked.
“In some ways very much. There you are free to do many things we could not even imagine here. You can read whatever you want and write what’s in your heart. People aren’t afraid to say what they think. And American women aren’t pigeonholed into this or that category. They can be anything. Do anything.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You would like it there, I think.”
“If you liked it so much in America, did you ever think of…” I asked, my voice trailing warily off, as we’d been trained when speaking of forbidden topics.
“Defecting?” replied Madame Rudneva. “I did actually. I gave it serious consideration. But this is my home. It’s my country as much as it is those fools’ who run things. Besides, there was the small matter of a man back here.” She smiled at this, her thoughts drifting off for a moment. “I was young and in love. He lived here and I thought I would die if we were not together.”
“May I ask what happened?”
“Like you he was a writer. A journalist. He wrote the truth, and when they told him to stop and he refused, they came and took him away. I never heard from him again. It broke my heart. I have had many lovers, but he was the only man I ever truly loved.”
She let her gaze fall to the floor. I didn’t know what to say. Here was a teacher sharing her intimate personal life with me, as if I were a friend, an equal.
“I’m sorry,” I offered finally.
“I consider myself fortunate to have been in love with someone of such courage,” she explained. “Have you ever been in love, Tat’yana?”
“Me?” I said, shaking my head.
“A pretty girl like you must have many admirers.”
“Hardly,” I replied. “I don’t think boys are much interested in me, Madame Rudneva. They call me Gypsy because of my dark hair.”
“You have lovely hair.”
I shrugged.
“They are imbeciles!” she said, laughing. “But that will soon change. You are a beautiful young woman, Tat’yana. Someday you will have lots of men interested in you. And you will meet a handsome young man and you will fall in love just as I did.”
“I doubt that.”
“Believe me, you will. Do you know what Tsvetaeva wrote about love?” Of course, at the time I had never even heard of such a poet. “‘Ah! is the heart that bursts with rapture.’”
Secretly, I hoped someday my own heart would burst with such rapture. You see, despite my competitive nature, my seeming disdain for boys and for matters of the heart, I hoped that I would someday fall in love, that I would meet a man who would stir the sort of passion in me that only my poetry or my shooting did now. I pictured someone tall with broad shoulders and an easy smile, a man who would not begrudge my wanting to write poetry, to think independently, who would accept me as I was and not want to make me into some coarse and dull babushka. As I began to devour Akhmatova as one would an exotic and heady fruit whose sweet nectar made the throat clutch with passion, I would see in her poems my own imagined lover. Someone whose touch was gentle and tender, who wasn’t afraid to love fully and completely, even dangerously. Of course, life never works out as one imagines. Sometimes I think our dreams are there only to make us taste the bitter regret of how far short we fall from them.
After I graduated secondary school, I took a job for a while at an arsenal factory. I worked a lathe, making artillery shells, as unpoetic an occupation as there is. I recall coming home one evening, and over dinner my father casually telling me that my former teacher Madame Rudneva had been arrested. “Arrested!” I cried. Despite knowing the danger she’d always put herself in by her candor, I was shocked. I begged my father to use his influence, to try to find out where she’d been sent, to see what he could do on her behalf. But he told me that that was impossible, that he wouldn’t put himself or his family in je0pardy for such a person. That night I remember crying myself to sleep.


When I grew bored with factory work, I decided to go to the university, where I studied Russian history and literature. I also shot competitively in the Osoviakhim, even winning many medals for my shooting, including being the best marksman in the entire Ukraine. In my spare time I read whatever I could get my hands on. A group of us shared books smuggled in from the West, rough, handwritten translations of T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman and D. H. Lawrence, as well as banned volumes of our own countrymen, Pilnyak and Pasternak, and the great soul herself, Akhmatova. I also continued to write my own poetry. I showed it among my friends and even managed to publish some poems in small underground newspapers and in anonymous samizdat literary journals circulated in manuscript and read by a handful of like-minded people. Though, of course, you had to be extremely careful about what you wrote and with whom you associated. The editor of The Workers’ Voice, which published one of my poems, had his apartment broken into by the secret police. His mimeograph machine and typewriter were smashed to pieces. Like Madame Rudneva’s lover, though, he stubbornly refused to take the hint and continued to publish articles and poems against the government until finally he was arrested.
Still, it was good to feel a part of something important, a community of kindred spirits who wanted to think and speak and write freely. My father and I grew more and more distant, divided politically as well as emotionally. While I still deeply loved my country, believed in what the revolution had promised and the aspirations of the people, I had grown discouraged, even angry, with the Party, which I came to see as oppressive as any czar. My father and I began to argue, sometimes so heatedly that my mother would have to intervene. He thought I was associating with a decadent crowd, and that if I wasn’t careful I would find myself like Madame Rudneva, which would reflect badly on him and my mother. I didn’t want to hurt them, so I moved out and got a room near the university. I supported myself by working nights in the factory and going to school during the day. I gravitated toward a small circle of bohemian friends. We wore outlandish clothing and smoked and frequented a café down near the river where students and intellectuals and artists gathered. I struck a pose that suited me, fostered a romantic notion of myself as a poet. I liked to believe I’d be the next Akhmatova. That I’d write fearless and daring poems that would touch the heart, that would make people stand up and take notice. Like her, I would write the truth no matter the cost. Like her, I would live a life filled with intensity. I would live dangerously, love passionately. I was young and foolish and thought that one could control one’s destiny.
Then I met a man named Nikolai Grigorovich. Nikolai—Kolya to those few friends he had—would sometimes come by the café and sit in the corner with a book and sip a cup of tea. He was older than I by some dozen years. He wasn’t handsome, at least not in the traditional sense, but there was something about him, a seriousness of purpose, I found appealing. Those brooding, blue-gray eyes of his, a neatly trimmed beard, the complete focus with which he read his book so that he was oblivious to anything else around him. I had heard his name bandied about, an important Party member, they said. I would sometimes sit in the café, a volume of Akhmatova in front of me, and glance over at him.
“What is it you are reading?” he asked me one time out of the blue. I was startled actually that he even noticed me. After I told him, he said, “Oh, a shame what befell her.”
“The shame is on those who persecuted her,” I said.
He smiled, stroking his beard. “Your father works for the kolkhoz?”
I nodded.
He sat and introduced himself, in that formal way that he had. To my surprise we spent a pleasant evening conversing. Unlike so many of the dolts who were Party members, Kolya turned out to be bright, open-minded, well-read. We discussed history and philosophy, politics and poetry. I recall he even quoted some lines from Pushkin, which impressed me no end.
I loved you silently, without hope, fully,
In diffidence, in jealousy, in pain;
I loved you so tenderly and truly,
As let you else be loved by any man.
He told me he was an engineer, one whose specialty was building bridges. Such a vocation, I would come to learn, suited him perfectly. He liked connecting objects, bringing disparate sides together. He talked about the revolution, the new world order that would in time emerge from it. When he spoke, his voice wasn’t that of the zealot or an ideologue, one of those who could kill in the name of the revolution. No, his voice was soft and calm, filled with gentleness, though at its core it had the strength of conviction, the passion of one who believed in helping his fellow man.
“What of the lives it has ruined to achieve this new order?” I said.
He nodded patiently. “Yes, many mistakes have been made,” he agreed. “And many terrible things have been done in its name. But in the future, we will all be equal and no one will have power over another.” Then, smiling, he added, “And poets will be our sacred priests.”
“That I would very much like to see!” I replied with a laugh.
He was different from most men I’d known, and certainly most Party members. Quiet and self-effacing, not needing to prove something to himself or to others. He was generous and unselfish, almost without ego. He hardly ever began a sentence with I. A good listener, he would nod thoughtfully, even if he disagreed with you, his brows knitting themselves in concentration as I spoke. On days I didn’t work, we would talk well into the night at the café or after going to the symphony or an art exhibit. We played chess, and while I thought I was good, he would drub me soundly each time, and then patiently try to show me my errors. Sometimes we would sit quietly reading, not uttering a word. Other times I would read to him, Pushkin or Akhmatova, sometimes even my own poetry. He took an interest in my poetry, read my work with the same seriousness that he perused his engineering textbooks. We took long walks through the city, with Kolya occasionally stopping near a bridge to admire its construction. He would bring a pad and sketch the bridge, its configuration, its trusses and support. Sometimes he would sketch landscapes or children playing in the park. He was a very skilled artist. Occasionally he would even draw me. Once when he showed me a sketch of myself, my breath was literally taken away.
“What’s the matter, Tat’yana?” he asked. “Don’t you like it?”
It wasn’t that. Actually, the sketch was quite remarkable, showing just how talented he was. But it was as if he had reached into my very soul and pulled out a kind of wistful yearning, something I hadn’t even been aware resided there.
“No, I think it’s wonderful, Kolya,” I said. “I just didn’t recognize myself.”
“You’re lovely, Tanyusha,” he said. It was the first time he had called me that, or said that I was lovely.
Looking back, I think he would misinterpret what that longing in my eyes bespoke. And for me, it hinted of something decidedly missing, something absent in my life or in my heart.
Still, for a while things between us continued along in this comfortable vein, a closeness and easy familiarity developing as with longtime acquaintances. In time I came to think of him as my dearest friend, someone whom I could trust, share my innermost thoughts with. That Akhmatova poem about friendship that Madame Rudneva had read to me made me think of our relationship: Oh, how differs from embraces, The easy touching of these hands. It was easy being with Kolya, the first time I’d felt such a feeling with anyone. In some ways, he seemed to me like the brother who had died.
Then one evening we were walking along the river. It was winter, the snow crunching under our boots. The Dnieper was frozen over and people were skating on it, carrying torches. It looked like something out of Brueghel, a still life in winter. We’d stopped along the way to admire the spectacle. Kolya was especially quiet, I’d noticed, seemed nervous about something. I asked him if anything was the matter, but he shook his head. After a while I couldn’t help but notice that he was gazing at me in an odd fashion, as if I were a math problem he was puzzling over.
Finally, I grabbed his collar playfully and stared into his face. “For God’s sakes, Kolya, what’s the matter?” I cried, unable to keep from giggling.
Yet he continued silently to look at me with that odd expression. Then he leaned toward me and gave me an awkward, fumbling kiss on the mouth.
“Kolya!” I exclaimed. “What has gotten into you?”
Perhaps I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. In life, most of the time you see what you want to and are blind to the rest. We go about stumbling in the dark, until someone wiser than we turns on the lights.
“I love you, Tanyusha,” he blurted out.
No man had ever said those words to me before, and I’d always thought that when they were finally uttered my heart would leap up with joy, that I would feel such wondrous bliss. But I did not. Instead, I felt my face flush, my stomach twist itself into knots. I didn’t know how to respond. I cared for him, very much in fact, though now I realized not in the same way he did for me. I felt suddenly uncomfortable and was about to say something regarding my deep friendship for him, but he put a finger to my lips and told me I didn’t have to say anything.
This, of course, changed things between us. Soon after this, he asked me to marry him. Trying to do the kind instead of the honest thing, which meant I would eventually be doing something very cruel to both of us, I didn’t outright refuse. Rather, I told him I was too young, that at twenty I wasn’t ready to get married, that we should, for now at least, continue just as friends. I thought by putting him off, he would understand that I didn’t see the two of us in that way. He told me that he just wanted me to think about it, that he was patient and could wait. Kolya was extremely patient, but also persistent. He viewed me, I think, in the same way he did his engineering problems, as an obstacle to be overcome, a distance to be closed, that with a bit more bolstering here, a little more buttressing there, he could join us, put us soundly together so that our souls could cross over to the other. I don’t say this to suggest that he was cold or unfeeling. Only that he saw problems and tried to fix them. He would ask me to marry him again, several times in fact. He told me he would take care of me, that I wouldn’t have to work, that I could simply concentrate on my studies, on my poetry. Each time I told him as gently, as kindly, as I could that I wasn’t ready to get married.
My father thought Nikolai Grigorovich had a very bright future in the Party, and my mother had become very fond of Kolya. Always the pragmatist, she said he would make a favorable match and that it was both foolish and wrong of me to keep him dangling on a string, that I should either tell him yes or no.
“I am quite fond of him, Mama,” I explained. “But…”
“But what?”
“I’m not sure I love him. Not as a wife should love a husband.”
“Ach, love,” my mother scoffed, waving a blunt finger of scorn in my face. “You sound like a silly girl, Tanyusha.” To my mother, a good match was something only a foolish woman turned down. And Kolya was, to her mind, a decidedly good match. He was educated, had a wonderful career ahead of him. “Look at all the rivers this country has. At how many bridges we are going to need. How can you refuse a man who will be such a success someday?”
“But is that enough? That he will be successful.”
“You and Kolya are friends, no?”
“We are.”
“Friendship is a start. Many couples do not even have that.” She looked toward the kitchen, where my father sat reading.
“What of love, Mama?”
“You can learn to love,” she said to me. “And if not, you can’t eat love. It will never put a roof over your head or food in your belly. Besides, Nikolai’s a good man, one who will make someone a good husband. And he won’t wait around forever while you’re dillydallying.” Then, her tone softening, she took my face in her callused hands and said, “Tanyusha, don’t think so much, or your life will be very hard.”
I couldn’t disagree with what she’d said about Kolya—he was a good man and would make someone a good husband. And the other thing was that he adored me, loved me unconditionally, as I had always dreamed one day of being loved by a man.
I felt an unstated pressure from my father to agree to the marriage, since Kolya was an important Party figure. And my mother was right, I couldn’t just keep Kolya hanging on. That wasn’t fair. If I’d been more honest with myself and with Kolya, I would have said no. Harder at first perhaps, but less painful in the long run. But I didn’t want to hurt him. I told myself, I was very fond of him, liked his company, his friendship. Maybe my mother was right, that I was being na?ve, hoping for too much. What was more, a part of me, a selfish part I must admit, was attracted to the notion of someone taking care of me, allowing me to write my poetry and not having to worry about getting by in life. So, when I couldn’t find a good enough reason to tell him no, I took the coward’s way out and surrendered finally—and it felt very much like a surrender. My mother hugged me, my father nodded at the rightness of my choice and went back to reading his newspaper.
We were married in the beautiful Andreyevskaya Church in Kiev, on a sunny autumn afternoon. Though neither Kolya nor I were particularly religious, we decided to have a traditional Ukrainian ceremony. I wore the dress my mother had worn for her wedding, and since we didn’t have much money, Kolya and I exchanged simple gold bands and then our hands were joined by the customary rushnik, an embroidered cloth signifying our union. As I looked at Kolya, his face aglow with happiness, I told myself I’d made the right decision. That happiness could be achieved in making others happy. For our honeymoon, we went, ironically, to Sevastopol, the same city that would, in a few short years, lie in ruins. We strolled on Primorsky Bul’var. We walked hand in hand along the Grafskaya Quay. We went to the symphony. We talked and enjoyed each other’s company. At night, we made love pleasantly, in the dark, with restraint and with a certain formality, with Kolya’s head buried into the pillow next to mine, almost as if he were embarrassed by his own passion. That first time, I told myself it was not unpleasant, and besides, as my mother had reminded me before the wedding, it was my duty to my husband. Afterward, I turned and fell asleep in Kolya’s embrace. In some ways I found marriage to be a comfort—the companionship, the conversations in the evening, his loving attentions, how he would prepare me a cup of tea, give me a back rub after a long evening of study, do anything he could to make me happy. Above all was the fact that Kolya would let me have my own space within the marriage, my time to write and read and be alone. He was not one of those possessive husbands who had to have my complete attention, thank God. However, from the very first, I realized that while I cared about Kolya, deeply in fact, my feelings for him were those for a cherished friend and would never grow into love. At least not the sort I felt should exist between a man and a woman.
After we returned from our honeymoon, we settled into our life, one filled with the slow but inexorable blunting of dreams but which most of us insist on calling an acceptance of reality—our life became our millstone. We moved into a small apartment not far from the Dnieper River. During the day he’d be off working, sometimes having to travel to distant construction sites where he’d be away for weeks on end. In some ways, I actually looked forward to his absence. I would attend classes or do research at the library or write in the tiny room off the kitchen. When he was home we would share a bottle of Massandra wine and chat about our days. Afterward we might go for a walk along the river or to our usual café or stay in and read to each other. He lavished on me small gifts, presents and things that few in the Soviet Union could afford. Below us lived Kovalevsky, who was studying cello at the conservatory. Sometimes, a few of his fellow music students would get together in his apartment, and they would invite Kolya and me down. We would talk and drink vodka and listen as they played. Later, back in our apartment, we would make love to the lilting sounds of Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev floating upward through the floorboards—sad, wistful music that filled me with unmet longing. Even then, when I was physically closest to Kolya, I would find my thoughts drifting off, seeking to be elsewhere.
“I love you, Tanyusha,” Kolya would whisper to me before we fell asleep each night.
He was so earnest and sweet when he said this to me, so tender and caring, that my heart welled up in my chest, not because of what I felt for him as much as because of my nagging guilt. I would smile and stroke his face and tell him that I loved him too. And I tried hard to believe this, and in some fashion I succeeded in convincing myself I did love him. Though I suppose some part of me always knew it was a conditional love, not as he loved me, with all of his heart and soul, but only narrowly, as a dear friend. Yet as the weeks turned into months, and the months to years, I slowly came to resent his touch, and when we made love, I would close my eyes and go off to my own private place. Occasionally, I would be unfaithful to him. No, I don’t mean that I took on lovers. But in my mind. I would pretend I was with someone else—a student I’d seen at the library, one of my instructors, a young man I saw in a café, even the lover in some poem by Akhmatova. Sometimes, when I couldn’t endure his touch, I would tell him I was tired and turn away. “Is anything wrong, Tanyusha?” he would ask, never in anger, only with genuine tenderness for me. To which I would reply that I was merely fatigued from my studies. The truth was, I wasn’t a good wife. No, I was never unfaithful, except for those transgressions in my mind. But I wasn’t truthful with him, wasn’t fair with him or, for that matter, with myself. I felt as if I were in a beautiful gilded cage, but a cage is still a cage nonetheless. I wish he would have gotten angry with me, wish he’d have yelled and screamed, even struck me, said he’d had enough. It would have made things much easier for me, for both of us. Or I wish I’d simply had the courage to tell him the truth. But it was equally true that he was my dearest friend, such a kind and gentle soul, and as such I had vowed never to hurt him. He seemed content enough with our unspoken “arrangement,” with that small part of me that he had access to. He was a man, as I have said, of great patience and of modest needs, and his work took much of his time. Perhaps he was just waiting for me to come around, as my mother said I would.
And I? What was I waiting for? I was not unhappy with our arrangement, or at least I told myself this over and over, knowing that one can convince oneself of almost anything. Besides, when I compared my lot with that of my fellow Ukrainians, so many of whom were suffering terribly, who were starving by the tens of thousands or being shipped off to gulags, what right did I, with my bourgeois romanticism, have to complain in such a world? No, I’d made my bed, so to speak, and now had to lie in it.
Yet just when you think you have life figured out and can see it all the way to the grave, something happens to surprise and amaze you. In my case, it was two things. The first was Mariya, who came like a glorious ray of morning sunlight after a night of bad dreams. Kolya and I had talked vaguely of having a family, someday, “down the road.” He wanted children more than I, but I knew it was something expected of me. After all, every good Soviet wife was called upon to produce children, healthy workers for the state. But there was my poetry, my studies to think about. And secretly, I wasn’t sure if I wanted children, not yet, perhaps not ever. I had seen what the loss of a child did to my parents. Besides, I guess I looked upon children as a kind of period to the end of my sentence, a final gesture that would forever lock me in the life I was trapped in. But how wrong I was! As soon as Masha, as we came to call her, entered my body and my soul, she became my entire existence, my joy, my passion, my poetry. I loved her with the unconditional love I hadn’t been able to find with Kolya. As I’ve said, I could almost tell the moment she entered my body. That warmish summer day, I was lying on the bed, the breeze lifting the curtains, and suddenly that tiny presence attached itself deep inside me, swelling me with life. From that moment on, my moy krolik—my little rabbit—completely captivated me, stole my heart and ran off with it. Both of ours. I remember Kolya had been away for a few weeks working on a bridge project near Zaporozh’ye. When he came home that night, I excitedly threw my arms around him and told him the good news. “We’re going to have a baby, Kolya,” I cried. He looked stunned. I wasn’t sure if it was more due to the news itself or to the way in which I’d reacted to it.
Our daughter turned out to be blond like him, to have his thin, soft hair and blue-gray eyes. We put her cradle in what had been my study. After I nursed her, she would fall asleep in my arms, her rose-petal mouth pressed against my breast.
“Isn’t she just the most perfect thing, Kolya?” I would say.
“She looks just like you,” he would reply.
Kolya made a wonderful father. He was kind and loving, patient and gentle, and watching him with her, I felt this newfound tenderness toward him, found myself drawn closer to him, the way parents, even those not in love, will sometimes be brought closer because of their mutual love for a child. I would watch with bemused adoration as he swept her up and placed her on his shoulders, and carried her squealing with laughter about the apartment. She formed that missing link between us, a link that held us fast together.
When Masha would grasp my hair with her chubby pink fingers, I felt my heart so swollen with love, I thought it would burst into a thousand tiny pieces. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would get up from bed and go into her room and lean down, close enough to make sure I could hear her breathing, that fear no doubt inspired by the example of my mother’s loss of her firstborn. I loved the smell of her, of her hair and skin, the sweet hoppy fragrance of her breath after she’d taken suck. The way her eyes would dart beneath her closed lids, as if watching butterflies in her sleep. I would whisper into her ear “My sweet love” and “My little rabbit.” When I was at school, I would take her to my mother’s. Later, when she could walk, she’d scurry up the path from my parents’ front door and throw her arms around my neck, crying, “Mama,” as if she’d not seen me for ages. It was the most precious of feelings. My chest would ache with love, a love I could never have imagined before. I came to realize that what I had lost by marrying, I had more than gained with the gift of my daughter. I was happy at long last, prepared—no, eager—to spend the rest of my days like this.
But then the second change came into my life.


22 June 1941


It fell like a fiery comet from the sky, scorching everything in its path, obliterating everything. It was the day that monster from Berlin invaded my country. We were walking in the park, the three of us. A warm, bright summer day, the sun gleaming off the buildings, the smell of roses in the air. That’s when a boy came running by, yelling that Germany had invaded. We couldn’t believe it. Just two years earlier, Molotov had signed a nonaggression treaty between our two countries. War had been averted, we all thought. When we got back to our apartment, we heard the foreign minister on the radio saying that we’d been attacked by Germany and that a state of war existed between our countries. Later we heard the pleas of Bishop Sergey, one of the few clergy who hadn’t been arrested or executed by Stalin, asking for all to help fight the invaders. We were shocked and dismayed, though in hindsight it should not have surprised anyone. Not just because of what Germany had been doing—the military buildup along our borders, the Nazi rhetoric that had openly called for Lebensraum, the need for the land of the Untermensch for their superior race—but also because of our own country’s complicity. The treaty with Hitler, permitting us to chop up Poland and the Baltic states as if they were pieces of meat, was a deal we’d cut with the devil himself. Then there were Stalin’s own purges, which had liquidated most of the military’s top brass, replacing them with sycophants and incompetents. But now all that didn’t matter. Our country was under attack. We were all Soviets, all patriots united against our common foe.
Kolya and I talked things over. He said he wanted to enlist straightaway, that the Motherland needed every available body to fight the fascists. That day he went down to the recruiting office and signed up, and the next day, Masha and I accompanied him to the station where he was to board a train heading north, to Leningrad he’d been told. The station was utter chaos. Thousands of new recruits and their loved ones had gathered there, hugging and crying, exchanging packages and saying their good-byes. Over the loudspeaker an announcement was made that the Germans had crossed the Dvina River and were pushing toward Leningrad.
“We must stop these fascist bastards,” Kolya said to me. I found it surprising because he hardly ever cursed, and never in front of Masha.
I took his face in my hands and said, “You listen to me, Nikolai. You be careful. Don’t be a hero.”
“You will move in with your parents?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I love you, Tanyusha,” he said.
“And I love you too,” I replied.
I hugged him tightly to me, not wanting to let him go. I felt closer to him at that moment than I ever had. A tenderness, the sort, I suppose, one would feel for a brother going off to war. He kissed Masha, then, taking my face in his long, slender hands, he said to me, “Don’t let anything happen to my girls.”
His girls? I thought. The expression would come to haunt me. He was entrusting our safety and our love to me. I would come to feel as if I had betrayed him. Was I his girl? And hadn’t I let something happen to Masha? He boarded the train with the other soldiers and waved as it pulled out of the station.
“Wave good-bye to your father,” I told Masha.
“Where’s tato going?” she asked.
“To fight the Germans,” I replied.
“Why?”
How do you explain to a child the reason why adults kill one another? How would I ever have been able to tell her of all the men I aligned in my sights and sent to their deaths?
“Because he loves us.”
“Will he come back?”
“Of course,” I said.
As we walked home I told myself over and over that Kolya was a good man and that I would remain loyal to him, that I would love no other and that I would be waiting for him when he came home. But I saw through this flimsy pretense. In my heart I held the blackest of secrets, a maggot devouring my soul. Some part of me hoped that he wouldn’t come back. Yes, it’s true. I thought that if he died in the war, I could grieve for him publicly, honor him by wearing widow’s weeds for a year. But then I would be free from my cage, free to live my own life as I chose, and not that which others had chosen for me or to which I had with cowardice surrendered. Only later would I understand the harsh wisdom of being cautious of what you wish for.