Truly, when the war ends, our Soviet Union will become stronger and more cohesive, all the wounds will heal, everything that has been destroyed will be reborn, life will gush forth like a spring, women and girls will find themselves new husbands and lovers—but who will heal the wounds of thousands of mothers? Who will answer for their suffering and irreparable grief? Yes, who besides the mothers themselves can understand their suffering? For it’s impossible to tell it. You are right a hundred times over. Every letter I get from my mother, in which she tries not to show her terrible anguish because she doesn’t want me to worry, enters the tiniest particles of my life and awakens such a storm of indignation and sorrow that I can’t tell where the indignation ends and the sorrow begins. But, reading your letter, I am convinced that all mothers feel the same, or at least very similar, anguish about their sons. The only thing that remains is to hope that all the sons feel the same love and gratitude toward their mothers that Genrikh and I feel.
But I am an optimist, Mrs. Ossetsky, and I know that you are, too, more so than many, and for that reason we will hope that very soon we will all be together in Moscow, and we will raise a toast in honor of the victorious finish of the war and all the good that lies ahead.
I send you my warmest, warmest greetings,
Egor Gavrilin GENRIKH TO MARUSYA Postcard
FEBRUARY 15, 1942
Mama! Sasha Figner has not heard anything from his parents in more than one and a half months. He asks you to call phone number D2-24-47, or inquire at his parents’ address: 6 Novinsky Boulevard, apartment 13, to find out whether everything is all right.
Some marriages are made in heaven, but the war made Amalia and Genrikh’s. They were never friends during high school. Genrikh looked at Amalia from afar, but she was surrounded by an impenetrable wall of friends, both boys and girls, and at the time when Genrikh left school, Tisha Golovanov, who was in love with her, was always by her side. Amalia and Tisha married right after they finished tenth grade and graduated, and the whole class celebrated the first wedding among their classmates. Genrikh didn’t attend the wedding—by that time he was already living the life of an adult, working and studying, and he rarely saw his former classmates.
He and Amalia didn’t meet again until December 1941, in Sverdlovsk, at the bazaar. Both of them had been evacuated—Genrikh with students of the Institute from which he was supposed to graduate that year, and Amalia from the design bureau where she worked. They both worked for Uralmash, which at that time was launching self-propelled guns. Genrikh worked in the project design department, and Amalia in Design Bureau 9, on the other side of town.
They delighted in each other’s company—as fellow Muscovites, neighbors, former classmates, with a great many common memories and common friends. During the first months of the war, four boys from their class perished. The first “killed in battle” notice was about Amalia’s husband, Tisha Golovanov, at the end of July 1941. Amalia took her bereavement very hard. The last stage of their relationship had been difficult: Tisha had begun to drink heavily, Amalia was ashamed about his drunkenness, they quarreled for an entire year, and Amalia’s mother, Zinaida, having suffered enough from the drunken behavior of men, lit a match to the fire so Amalia would kick Tisha out. He went to live with his mother; but now, after his death, Amalia couldn’t forgive herself for the falling out. Why couldn’t she simply have put up with it? It was especially painful to her that she and her husband hadn’t even managed to say goodbye, she had never written to him, and she hadn’t received a single letter from him. Amalia, as his wife, was given the news first, and had to go inform Tisha’s mother, who wailed and keened and then chased Amalia out of the house.
Amalia suffered not only the loss of her husband, but the loss of herself. She was used to living in peace with herself. The world smiled at her, and she liked herself well enough—what she didn’t like, she just didn’t look at. Instinctively, she preferred to avoid complications, not to multiply them. After Tisha’s death, she couldn’t return to her old habits of mind and her peaceable accommodation with the world. She was haunted by a feeling of guilt toward him, and tormented by what she thought was her own sinfulness, overcome by despair and loneliness, without a shadow of hope. Her own life seemed doomed and worthless to her.
She was happy to be evacuated—Moscow had become unbearable—but Sverdlovsk turned out to be worse.
Work was hard. It began at eight in the morning, and ended at various times, but never before eight in the evening. She left work every day with a swollen face and blue-tinged fingers, shivering with cold. In the room where the drafting boards were set up, where she worked, the temperature never rose above fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
The food supply in the city was meager. Food rations had not yet been introduced, and people lined up at the stores from early morning to buy a portion. A single person with a job had no time to stand in line. If it hadn’t been for the cafeteria at her workplace, she would have starved. On the last weekend before the New Year’s celebration, Amalia made her way to the market to buy some food—potatoes and rutabagas. Right in the middle of the vegetable stands, Genrikh appeared. She didn’t recognize him at first. Genrikh recognized her right away, by her blue eyes and her white fur hat—which she had worn since high school—with two earflaps and a pompom on the top.
They grabbed each other’s hands and embraced warmly. Genrikh picked up her bag and carried it for her—two kilograms of potatoes and a kilogram of rutabagas. Amalia also wanted to buy milk, but she didn’t have enough money; it had already become very expensive. Genrikh had a bottle of vodka to barter. They exchanged it for two loaves of bread. He gave one of them to Amalia. People were already hungry, but that was only the beginning of the deprivations they would experience in the coming year.
They celebrated the New Year in Genrikh’s dormitory, with his fellow students. Amalia was acknowledged to be the prettiest girl there. The contestants were few: Dilyara, a typist from the dean’s office, sweet, with slightly bulging eyes caused by Graves’ disease; and Sonya, the librarian, with an elongated nose, narrow face, and slightly protruding ears. From that evening on, Amalia became Genrikh’s girlfriend.
Genrikh met Amalia after work to accompany her to her dormitory, and then returned to his own, an hour’s walk through the dark, deserted city.
They got married in the spring of 1942. Now they lived not in dormitories but in a room in the family barracks. It was partitioned by a curtain; the second half of the room was occupied by a couple that had also been evacuated—engineers from Minsk, reticent and unfriendly. It was easier, and warmer for the two of them, to live together in the luxury of half a room. Still, they were hungry.
At the same time, Marusya was rushing around Moscow, which was becoming empty of residents, trying to find a decent job. She had been dogged by disappointment for a long time now: after the high hopes and expectations of her youth, the star that had lured her had begun to set. She had not become an actress, or a pedagogue; and she had not been able to break into journalism, either. The apex of her career was an occasional publication in the newspaper The Factory Whistle. It was comforting to know that wonderful writers appeared in the publication—Ilf and Petrov, Yuri Olesha, Paustovsky … and Marusya. There was also Pioneers’ Pravda, where Marusya managed to publish her articles devoted to children’s arts, gesturing subtly toward the Froebel principles of pedagogy. Her favorite journal, Soviet Toys and Games, to which she had been recommended by Nadezhda Krupskaya herself, had already closed down before the war. How interesting it had been to work there! They created new Soviet games and toys with new ideological content … But it was in the past, it was all in the past.