Marusya did not give up, however. She wrote, and ran around from one editorial office to another, offering them her work, and suddenly her efforts were met with unexpected success. A chance meeting, an offer that it would have been impossible even to contemplate—she was invited to work at the Moscow Theater of Drama as assistant to the artistic director in the Literary Section, and, if the occasion arose, to work with the actors. The other theaters had all been evacuated, but this one, organized by a director named Gorchakov, had elected to stay in Moscow in 1941.
Oh, joy! Marusya again breathed in the air of the theater and the dust of the footlights. They staged a play the public needed—Russian People, by Konstantin Simonov. It didn’t matter that the play was somewhat clumsy, and that daily life was hard, and shortages unavoidable. Marusya had the luxury of creative work, which was dearer to her than that most essential thing, bread. She flew through the darkened streets of Moscow, reborn, and dead tired. She wrote Genrikh occasional cheery letters and worked unflaggingly for the welfare of the country.
Amalia and Genrikh worked quietly behind their curtain, and their silent lovemaking brought forth fruit. What had not happened in five years of married life with Tisha came about now: Amalia was pregnant. She didn’t realize it for the first few months. Her period stopped, but during that hungry year, many young women stopped menstruating. Nature resisted conception. Amalia attributed her symptoms to exhaustion and malnourishment. She visited the doctor for the first time during the sixth month of her pregnancy, when the baby had begun to kick, announcing its existence. Her belly had begun to round out a little, some yellow spots had appeared on her face, and her lips were swollen. But she didn’t need to adjust a single button on her clothing—she herself lost weight, and all her nourishment went to the child. Her gait changed; she rocked as she walked, leaning back a bit like a duck, in her fear of falling.
The summer was unusually cold and rainy that year. It passed by almost unnoticed, and an early winter set in. The biggest trial was not the constant hunger, but the outhouse, which one had to visit every day, whether one wanted to or not. A long trench was dug, with rough boards resting on top like the walls of a temporary shed. Inside, by the wall, was a kind of battered platform covered with frozen urine and steadily increasing piles of excrement. Every trip to the outhouse was like a double balancing act. The natural boundaries of shame collapsed. Gripping her husband’s arms, in the darkness cut by the light of Genrikh’s flashlight, Amalia planted herself above a terrifying hole. Tears flowed down her face as blood squeezed out of the hemorrhoidal knots in her rectum. Genrikh could hardly keep from crying himself, seeing his wife’s suffering. With passion that surpassed that of the three Prozorov sisters by many degrees, the couple echoed Chekhov’s words: “To Moscow! To Moscow!” Because of the war, this was virtually impossible.
At the beginning of 1943, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, well known to Genrikh from his visit to his father, was closed down. Uralmash increased its production of tanks at an expedited pace. Genrikh worked on a design project that facilitated one of the most labor-intensive processes in high-precision metalworking. After finishing his work ahead of schedule, he received a prize. On the basis of this achievement, he asked the chief of his department, Abuzarov, to write him a letter of reference for an appointment with the director of the plant, Muzrukov. The director’s secretary, Dina, toward whom he was kindly disposed, was Abuzarov’s sister … Abuzarov laughed and refused, saying that it was impossible to make an appointment with the Lord God Himself. There had never been a case when the director agreed to receive a paltry engineer. Genrikh refused to back down, however.
“But why is it so urgent for you to see the big boss?” Abuzarov said. “You received a prize; what more do you want? They still won’t give you a room to live in.”
“Ask Dina. As a personal favor. I have to send my wife to Moscow,” Genrikh told him. “She’s been driven to exhaustion, and she’s going to give birth soon.”
Abuzarov scratched his scaly cheek with his scaly hand. “I’ll ask Dina, but it isn’t likely to work. If it does, you owe me one.”
“Three, if you want!” Genrikh said.
The meeting did take place, and the results were very positive. The director assumed that the greenhorn would request a separate room in a dormitory—but the housing issue was very tense. The scrawny-necked youth, who didn’t look a day over eighteen, asked for a permit for his pregnant wife to return to Moscow. This took Muzrukov by surprise—he’s not asking for housing?—and he called Design Bureau 9, where Amalia worked. Though they were even more surprised to receive a call from the big boss, they agreed to let Amalia leave for Moscow under the circumstances.
During the entire conversation, Genrikh stood at attention before the director’s desk, astonished at the ease with which decisions were made about issues that were insoluble for ordinary people.
The entrance permit into Moscow was wangled in a particular way, by a complex procedure. Muzrukov called the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee, Andrianov, and the issue was resolved definitively—a permit to go to Moscow to reside was ordered and duly received.
Three bottles of vodka, purchased on the black market at half the sum Genrikh earned from his prize, were given to Abuzarov. Abuzarov was happy. His father was trying to finish rebuilding a cowshed that had fallen into disrepair. Building materials were hard to come by, and vodka had been used as a currency of exchange for any goods since time immemorial.
The second half of the prize money was sent to Marusya. At first, Amalia was offended that Genrikh had sent the rest of it to his mother, but then she reconsidered and realized that he had not yet quite grown used to being a husband.
In the beginning of 1943, during a raging blizzard, Genrikh took his wife, who was heavily pregnant, to the station. He had to search and search to find the train, which was standing half a mile from the platform, and he propelled Amalia in that direction. He managed to stuff her suitcase into the car of the train, but the bag with scanty provisions for the trip stayed behind. The train started moving away. Thus, Amalia traveled for nearly four days and nights almost without eating. She was ill with flu, racked by pain, and bleeding. Her mother met her at the station with their lame neighbor, Pustygin, whom Zinaida had asked to carry the suitcase.
It was cold and dark at the station in Moscow. A blizzard was raging there, too, but not of such prodigious proportions as the one that had seen Amalia off in the Urals.
A few days later, Marusya, Amalia’s mother-in-law, visited. The first visit was very cordial. Her mother-in-law talked about Genrikh; she was cheerful and witty. Amalia recalled their classmates, whom Marusya remembered, too; she even mentioned Tisha. They counted the dead. They grieved, and they found reasons to be glad as well.
“It would be good if the baby were a girl,” Marusya said before she left.
“Everyone says that it will be a girl. Mama says that girls suck away the mother’s good looks, and I’ve become so unattractive since I got pregnant.”
“It will pass, it will pass,” Marusya said magnanimously.
In the beginning of March, in the Grauerman Maternity Hospital, where she herself had been born, Amalia brought into the world a four-pound-four-ounce girl. They called her Nora, on Marusya’s insistence. Amalia would have preferred “Lenochka,” but it was not Nora’s fate to be a Lenochka. The doctor delivered the baby and tied up the hemorrhoids that had plagued Amalia the entire second half of her pregnancy. They never troubled her again.