And so it happened that Marina Gustavovna was next to her father as they travelled by sled from Yeniseysk to Tomsk, a journey of days through the snow-filled taiga (forest). The young woman’s mother was terrified that father and daughter would freeze themselves to death, or at least catch a chronic illness, but somehow they both got through in one piece. Marina Gustavovna speaks of those few days on the way to Tomsk with unmistakable warmth. ‘The wolves were howling, the little bells on the sleighs were ringing – it was absolutely wonderful,’ she says. She was just a teenager then, the same age as I was when I came to Australia. Still essentially a girl. To this day Marina Gustavovna counts herself incredibly lucky to have been next to her father in that moment and as I begin to realise the depth of her loyalty to her family, a word comes into my head and stays there for the whole of our conversation – nobility. It occurs to me that Marina Gustavovna’s family, from her father to her great-grandchildren, has not given this world a single plebeian soul. If we are to grasp anything of Marina Gustavovna’s character, her pride in being next to her exiled father needs to be measured against the way in which the very notion of familial loyalty was under sustained and brutal attack in a world where survival demanded continual betrayal of yourself and those around you, where the fabric of so many families was soaked in blood and finally worn out by secrecy, lies and betrayals.
In 1937, the year of the Great Purge, Gustav Gustavovich was rearrested in Tomsk and this time given ten years without the right of correspondence, the ominous sentence that meant either camps (if you were lucky) or a secret execution. Thirty-seven was the worst year of Stalin’s twenty-nine-year-old reign. About this reign, Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, ‘Just as there is no minute when people are not dying or being born, so there was no minute when people were not being arrested.’ Those arrested were not limited to a particular social class or ethnicity: ‘Any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss.’ Thirty-seven was the crescendo. Between 1937 and 1938 more than one and a half million people were arrested in the largest wave of mass repressions to engulf the Soviet Union. More than seven hundred thousand of them, including Gustav Gustavovich, were shot. For decades Marina Gustavovna and her family were told nothing about her father’s fate. In 1956 his widow received a fake death certificate in which Shpet was shown to have died in Tomsk in 1940 from pneumonia. But it wasn’t until 1989 that the opening of the State archives yielded the details of Gustav Shpet’s death: ‘Executed, 16 November 1937.’
To Billie, Marina Gustavovna is just an old woman – kind of interesting, warm and humorous, but a relic nonetheless. She jumps when Marina Gustavovna says in good English, ‘I do not speak English.’ Old people in Russia speaking English; for a moment, Billie is genuinely surprised. But then Marina Gustavovna confides that the key to foreign languages is to master just a phrase (I do not speak English; je n’ai pas beaucoup de français; ich bedaure, mein Deutsch ist sehr schlecht) and then everyone you encounter is likely to treat you with tolerance. So I cannot make the spell last for Billie. I want to whisper, ‘This is not an ordinary woman, can’t you see!’ For a moment, in Marina Gustavovna’s kitchen, the generational gap between my daughter and me feels like a dark, infinite abyss. No matter what I say in my pathos-filled, twentieth-century-history voice, Billie cannot see who is in front of her. In this apartment at the very heart of Moscow, metres away from the Mossovet and Satira Theatres and the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Billie sits down at the old piano. She plays what she usually plays – Tori Amos and Coldplay. How alien they sound inside these walls. Not in Adorno’s ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’ kind of way, no. And not in a vulgar popular-culture way. It is just that here these songs, which evoke places and times that make no sense in the world of this apartment, sound thin, flat and inconsequential in the extreme, like a mobile ringtone underneath a cathedral dome. Momentarily I feel ashamed. Ashamed for both of us.
As Marina Gustavovna tells me the story of her father, I think of the words of Nadezhda Mandelstam: ‘Anybody who breathes the air of terror is doomed, even if nominally he manages to save his life.’ Marina Gustavovna does not look doomed to me at all, even though once her lungs must have been full of that air. I ask her what happened after her father’s arrest: Did people cross the road to avoid meeting his family? Did the phone stop ringing? Did they feel, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, ‘in the hustle of a big city… as if they were in a desert’. I wait for Marina Gustavovna to start telling me the stories of silence and betrayal I have come to expect, but instead Marina Gustavovna looks surprised by my questions. No, she says, she does not remember being abandoned by those really close to them, nor does she remember her family walking away from other families with repressed members. (The Shpets’s plight was hardly unique.) ‘If someone were arrested,’ Marina Gustavovna says, ‘we would come to their place the next day. Of course, we wouldn’t talk politics, but we would come.’ What are these words worth? Actually, they are worth just about everything. Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, would outlive Gustav Gustavovich by a year and a month, wrote in the second book of her memoirs Hope Abandoned:
It is possible to tell thousands of stories about the fear sparked by the arrest of someone we knew, but I remember a nine-year-old girl who, upon hearing about the arrest of one of her parents’ friends, approached the bookshelf in a businesslike manner, picked out several books belonging to the one arrested and tore out several sheets with his name. Those sheets were immediately thrown into the fire. This girl had seen how her parents would destroy all traces of such acquaintance [with those taken away] – letters, diary pages with the addresses and phone numbers.
Mandelstam could not keep the efficient, all-seeing nine-year-old girl out of her mind, believing later, as rumours suggested, that she grew up to become an informer. This girl, after all, was the rule, rather than an exception. When a member of a family was arrested, it was as if the whole family was infected by the Black Death. Any contact with the third party, however fleeting, could be fatal. In order to protect their own families, most people stayed away from those infected, ripping pages from their diaries and throwing them hurriedly into a fire. The best were tortured until the end of their days by the terrible choice between betraying their friends and protecting their immediate family. This is how the system worked at its peak: by sucking everyone into its circle of all-encompassing paranoia, fear, distrust and betrayal. Almost everyone.
Valeriya Mikhaylovna Gerlin is a friend of Marina Gustavovna and her family. She met and married her husband of forty-two years, the late Yuri Aleksandrovich Aikhenvald, in 1950, in the Kazakhstan city of Karaganda, which Solzhenitsyn called ‘one of the jewels’ of the Gulag nation. Like Siberia, Kazakhstan served as one of the primary sites of camps and exile; it was for this reason both the newlyweds had been sent there. Karaganda was the location of Karlag, one of the country’s biggest labour camps, which held around a million prisoners and exiles over the years and which, by the beginning of the 1950s, occupied an area as big as France. Yuri Aleksandrovich’s grandfather, a well-known literary critic and philosopher, was on that very philosophers’ ship that Gustav Gustavovich Shpet managed to escape. Yuri Aleksandrovich’s father, an economist, was shot in 1941 as an Enemy of the People. Yuri Aleksandrovich himself, a poet, translator and literary critic, was only twenty-three when he was arrested for the second time in 1951. Following this arrest, he spent several years in a psychiatric institution, having faked his own mental illness (even writing bogus literary works that called for and celebrated the total destruction of humankind), convinced that his plea of insanity was the only way to survive. After the death of Stalin, Aikhenvald was rehabilitated and, alongside Valeriya Mikhaylovna, became a high school teacher of Russian language and literature in Moscow, both of them regarded by many of their students and contemporaries as teachers ‘from God’. Both were forced from their teaching positions in 1968 for signing a petition.