The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

And so, they take papa away. I want to walk with him, at least another several steps together. But they don’t let me. It is dawning, and I see how papa, his shoulders hunched, walks down the path. He looks back, then hastens. How hard it is for him. The door slams, the engine turns over. . . . He’s gone . . . The NKVD, did in fact, have little time. That night some five thousand members of the Kiev intelligentsia, engineers, doctors, agronomists shared my father’s fate.

I walked back to the empty house; tried to comfort and quiet my mother; mechanically put the strewn items in their proper places. If only morning would come. I’d call Shura. He is my “valerian drops,” my tranquilizer, as I jokingly referred to him. A true and devoted friend, he would think of something, give sound advice. But Shura was powerless. Nor did my visits to the waiting rooms of the NKVD amount to anything. When I came on the eighth, the assigned day, I was told what hundreds of others were told: “It is wartime. No information about particular individuals can be given out.” I came again and again only to receive the same response. I fought my way to the district attorney and to the military prosecutor. The first said laconically: “He’s not on our lists.” The second looked through his papers, called his secretary, made a phone call and finally said: “There is no such case.” Then he glanced at my white knuckles and said in a softer voice that the NKVD had simply removed my father as an “unreliable.”

Oh yes, he was unreliable—my father. After all, thirty years ago he had studied in Germany and did not hide the fact. He spoke German well, never went unshaven, and despite warnings from the party secretary at work, wore a gold wedding band. The nature of his crime was clear.

The administrators at the draft board were astounded by father’s arrest. They tried to convince me that it was a misunderstanding which would soon be corrected, but refused to pay for the days my father had worked. At the publisher’s where he was owed more than two thousand rubles for his latest book, they also refused to pay. It was useless to argue. All institutions were feverishly preparing for evacuation. Hardly any employees came to work. The offices were empty, the desks gutted. Stoves were crackling everywhere. Mountains of papers, documents, account books, engineers’ calculations were

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Chapter Twenty-Three

being burned. Kiev was covered by black snow: droplets of soot and flakes of charred paper spun in the air and spread over the ground.

I stopped by the university; the scene was the same there. In a heap of documents on the floor I accidentally found my own file. Luckily, I had already received documentation of having passed my Master of Arts exams. The classrooms and offices stood starkly open. Here and there newly cobbled-to-gether crates gave off an aroma of pine. The dean’s office, always crowded and noisy, was totally empty. Not quite, a stove was blazing in the corner and the young, fashion-plate associate dean was carefully feeding it neat file-folders from his desk.

“Oh, Tat’iana Pavlovna,” he said. “There’s nothing new I can tell you. We weren’t assigned any railroad cars, unfortunately. All the students, graduate students, and some of the faculty are evacuating on foot to Poltava, and then we’ll see . . .”

He pressed my hand firmly, and I left through the echoing, empty corridors and stairwells. What was I to do? Neither mother nor I could go on foot. We both had weak hearts, and I was just recovering from surgery. We both were born and had lived all our lives in Kiev, and we had no one outside the city. And most importantly, there was father. Maybe he was here somewhere, nearby. How could we leave him? For there was nothing to fear from the enemy anymore; the greatest wound had been inflicted by our own people.

It was unbearable at home, especially at night. One neighbor, a major, was somewhere at the front. Another neighbor was stranded somewhere on an official trip. Mother asked Andrei to move into one of our empty rooms. Troops were occupying the university dormitories anyway, and it felt safer with a man in the house. Everybody was queuing up around the clock, lugging home candy, cooking oil, pearl barley. We had no money and could not stock up on anything. I tried selling a thing or two, but goods were worthless now, with hardly any takers. As always, Shura came to our aid, forcing some money on us until “better times.”