Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [207]
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light
Where there is sadness, joy.
The Unpublished Letters of Marina Tsvetayeva is how it all began. As a student in the Faculty of Journalism I sat in the kitchen of Anna’s flat. She was a schoolgirl then, and while my fellow students were taking notes, she and I dissected the gossamer of the poetess’s idiosyncratic punctuation. Prof Rosenthal did not cover such matters in his lectures. The banned Tsvetayeva book had been brought from America by her father, who worked at the United Nations.
And then she herself became a student in the Faculty, following in the footsteps of Yelena, her elder sister. I was a four-storey-high Moscow lout who had earned his first money as a child doing odd jobs between excursions with my mum to the Conservatory, and graduated from a School for Working Youth. She had graduated from a specialist school and was living in accordance with the principles of classical literature. A tempestuous romance and immediately a devoted relationship. A trainee summer writing letters to each other. The slightly bitter smell of her sandalwood perfume, a student wedding in a one-roomed Khrushchev-era flat. A flower in my cap and a bottle of Moskovskaya vodka in a string bag with some black bread, such was the manner in which the bridegroom collected his bride. Her diplomat family did not appreciate the humor. Afterwards, socialist poverty and the joy when a new life is created.
My son entered the world and my student friends congratulated me: “Well done! Now you’ll have someone to send out for beer in the morning.” Instead, I remember rushing round the chemists’ shops of Moscow looking for dill water to soothe colic.
Then, a daughter. Hurrah. She was called Vera.
Later, a nationalistically challenged moron of a schoolteacher with a straggly little beard gave my daughter a hard time in drawing lessons because of her surname, which he thought was Jewish. I wanted to treat him to a knuckle sandwich, Anna was sure that was the wrong approach and firmly protected the teacher’s teeth. Her more humane approach triumphed. We explained at length to Vera that the teacher was barking up the wrong tree, but she should not demean herself by putting him right, just grin and bear it.
Anna gained her degree. Of course, her dissertation was on Tsvetayeva, and brilliantly defended. The plume of our student romance dissipated and the outlines of our relationship were fine-tuned, both matrimonial and professional. My first TV assignment in Rustavi. The agony of my first script. That evening Anna read the children a story remembered from her own childhood about a brave little tin soldier, or from mine, about Little Gavroche in Les Misérables. Having put the children to bed, she came to help me out. “… and thus the myth of seven-league boots came partly to be embodied in the idea of the internal combustion engine.” That was Anna writing about motorbike racing. It was terrible, but it was used in the broadcast. Years later we laughed at ourselves in the kitchen on Herzen Street.
By now the flat was ours, and we were joined by Solly Zeus Smile or, more simply, Martyn the Dobermann. He wasn’t at all Dobermannish. In our crazy flat we had a growing dog with a fearsome bark but as affectionate as a kitten. He had some doggy sixth sense for identifying (infrequent) enemies. When he was a year and a half old, Anna saved his life by giving him injections every two hours. My friends offered to take the dog to the children’s hospital where they worked, insert a catheter in a vein, and save us a lot of trouble. Anna was appalled. “We really couldn’t do that. Alexander and I will take it in turns to get up.”
Relations with my mother were difficult. Of course, we had arguments, mainly about how to bring the children up. Dr Spock was Anna’s bible: “Teach them to swim before they can walk,” and all that. The main bone of contention was finding a good nursery. It was impossible to get the children into one. I was a junior editor at a