Memoir of a Gulag Actress

Chapter 10

~Chapter10~ The end of 1947 was marked by a slight weakening of the regime. Despite the particulars of some of the gifted prisoners’ sentences, TEC had less trouble drawing them into the collective, and the directors had more luck petitioning on behalf of professional actors who were arriving on transports. Along with other actors and musicians, TEC hired a splendid artist, Margarita Vent-Pichugina, who took on a dual role as costumier and stage technician. Her mother, a German, had married a Russian engineer and departed Germany in order to live with him in Russia. In 1926 Margarita went to study in Germany, where she married and eventually had four children. Twenty years later, in 1946, when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt signed an agreement to bring all the Russians back home, Margarita returned to her motherland, only to get a ten-year sentence under Article 58-1. Margo was a remarkable woman. She always wore a thick cable sweater, around which she looped a thin leather belt. The knot of her hair was tucked up with netting on the back of her head. A mysterious smile never left her lips. She didn’t speak much, and when she did, she never wasted words. Margo was like a sphinx. Many fell in love with her. Her magic hands easily turned a piece of tin, broken glass or gauze into a kokoshnik, a purse, a crown, or any other kind of embellishment. She would dye fabric, sew dresses and decorate hems with elaborate patterns, and an article of magnificent clothing would be born out of nowhere, igniting the imagination of the female prisoners and arousing the envy of even the free workers. Margo’s fantasies carried her away from the routine of camp life into the self-governing, untouchable world of creation, where a human being felt free and independent. Once, marching down the road to one of the camps where we had to give a concert, we passed by a free woman walking with her children. Margo and Tamara Petkevich 339 I followed her with our eyes for a long time. Margo’s four children were in another country. In a sense, my son also lived “abroad.” Perhaps it was at that moment that we became friends. The gem of the troupe was the Armenian singer Inna Kurulyants, who had a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice. I don’t know how she wound up in Romania, but she got her ten years for a “liaison with a Romanian officer.” When Inna started to sing, I would drop everything and run to listen to her, no matter where I was or what I was doing. She was the one whom the audience most often applauded for an encore. A variegated flower of the wild, Inna wouldn’t think twice before putting her fingers to her mouth and letting out with a shrill brigand-like whistle. Yet when she’d appear on stage in a long black-and-white dress sewn by Margo, she was a serene and charming young woman. In a voice of sharp honey, she would sing the words to a Spanish tune: Waves are splashing against rocky shores, Far away—the light of the moon. Muffled strokes of the silvery tide Speed up the blood in the veins. When their terms were over, Senya Erukhimovich and Dmitry Karayanidi were released, but because of the notorious Regulation 39, both remained to work in the North—Senya as the director of TEC, and Dima as a pianist and conductor. Senya’s elderly mother and younger sister, Fira, came to visit him from Leningrad. After ten years of separation, they didn’t want to part again; they came to live nearby, in Knyazh-Pogost. His mother brought Senya some of his clothes from their time in Harbin. He changed his quilted jacket for a durable winter coat with a beaver collar and put on his beaver pelt hat, which stirred the camp authorities’ interest. Freedom especially suited Senya , who had always been an affable and smiling fellow but now seemed to be filled with an even greater joy, naively supposing that from now on life would bring nothing but pleasure and happiness. To get an official approval for concert programs, which required a great deal of persistence and diplomacy, Senya would personally go to the Political Department. “What’s this nonsense?” the head of the Political Department would ask, poking his finger into the program. “What rubbish this song is, ‘Wanders the Lonely...