Two sisters recall their friend Pasternak

KATYA, a historian, is 78 and her sister Masha, a medical doctor, is three years younger. They live with their dog and cats in a shack of a dacha 40 kilometres north of Moscow, where water has to be drawn from a well and life, on a pension of £20 per month, is difficult enough when the pension money is paid and grim when, as has been the case since September, it is not.

I made my way through the birch trees to the house of Masha and Katya Krasheninnikova with a supply of kasha for the making of buckwheat porridge, some bread and oil. With the winter approaching, neighbours were helping out with other supplies and the old ladies, once bosom friends of the Nobel prize-winner Boris Pasternak, were getting together a reasonable supply of food for the bleak months ahead.

The sisters suffered under the Soviet system and they suffer too under its successor. Of noble origin, fading oval-framed photographs of their ancestors, the old barons and baronesses, line the walls of their tiny living room; a small number of monogrammed silver forks and spoons remain to grace their linoleum-topped table.

Their manners are gracious. Katya does most if not all of the talking, Masha who is steadier on her feet moves around, brings tea and bread and jam from the kitchen and checks that the dog and the "chief cat", a tabby called "Funtik", are being properly fed.

The talk is of literature. Of Boris Leonidovich (Pasternak) and his life and death in Peredelkino on the other side of town of Marina Ivanovna (Tsvetayeva) and her tragic suicide after being evacuated from Moscow in 1942 as the Germans approached.

Trips to the countryside, conversations with Pasternak and his friends, the atmosphere of the terror, are recounted in a matter-of-fact way, interpolated with remarks about life in the new Russia that has emerged since the Soviet Union was dissolved five years back.

"We were very religious, so we had a great deal of trouble. What very few people realise is that there were those who had become priests and nuns in secret in those days. They went to work like everyone else but practised their religion with the utmost secrecy. We became nuns ourselves, we had the gift of faith and wanted to give it to others. One of them was Boris Leonidovich."

Stories are told and retold. A meeting of writers had been held to denounce the Bolshevik Kamenev, whom Stalin was preparing to destroy in 1937. All those in favour of denunciation had been asked to raise their hands. Although Pasternak had not raised his hand, he was reported to have done so in Jzvestiya. This enraged him and he determined to go to the newspaper's office and demand a retraction.

Knowing that such a course of action would inevitably lead to his imprisonment, his wife Zinaida and the then chairman of the writers union, Alexander Fadeyev who was to accompany Pasternak to Moscow, locked him in a closet for three days to ensure his future safety.

People were careful in those days, they looked after each other. Later when Pasternak's final illness was diagnosed he had given his last confession to Katya to be relayed to a priest. Although Jewish by birth, he had become attracted to Christianity at a very early age and, according to Katya, willed that a priest stay overnight after his death to pray over his body in the custom of the Russian Orthodox Church. This wish was not fulfilled as Zinaida and Nina Tabidze, the wife of a Georgian poet, had refused to allow it.

They knew that if the priest had come and been seen, they were in danger of losing the fine dacha supplied by the state in Peredelkino.

The sisters had set out, too, to meet the great poet Marina Tsvetayeva because she was depressed by life in general and more particularly at the arrest of her husband and daughter and the imminent conscription of her son. They arrived at her apartment to be told that Marina Ivanovna had been evacuated the previous night. Some weeks later, detached forcibly from her family and her Moscow surroundings, she took her own life.

These stories of sad and difficult times were told with that sense of enjoyment in which old people remember their youth, however difficult or tragic it might have been. Katya's feelings for the present day are more blunt, less softened by the passage of time.

Masha broke her silence. "Our pensions are small. We might just about survive on them ourselves but we have all our animals to feed too."

"In any event we haven't been paid our pensions since September. We had the oblast (regional) elections coming up then and suddenly, out of the blue our pension money arrived. We haven't seen any since. Our neighbours help us to get by, they bring food to us and they take us water from the well. That's something we physically can't do anymore."

Katya adds: "Some babushki (grandmothers) here are good kind people, who were trading at the kiosks and given food instead of wages they share with us. So somehow we survive, there is always something happening but it is very hard of course.

"But we don't pay any attention to it; when this criminal situation is over it will be fine. We have simply criminals in the government. But I have decided not to judge them. I will leave the judgment to God on high."