13.1 Queen of Evidence

Ariadna learnt about the tragedy that took place in Yelabuga many years later. Samuel Gurevich, or Mulia as called in the family, wished to calm her weak heart by withholding the truth and make her believe that Marina and Georgy were constantly on the move and didn’t have a specific address, it was difficult for them to write. Aunt Lily confessed that she hid the truth about her parents’ ill fate. The golden-haired chick turned white. She was an incredibly strong woman who survived so much personal tragedies, like a rock…didn’t break, didn’t fall.

Ariadna was released towards the end of 1947 and briefly settled in Ryazan where she taught graphics at the Ryazan Regional Art and Pedagogical School from 1^st February, earning her 360 rubles a month. Marina was gone and forgotten but one of their family friends that Ariadna met in Paris in 1935, Boris Pasternak, continued to write and sent her his new poems and chapters from his forthcoming novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ – the epic saga of Russian life for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.

Ariadna was arrested on 22^nd February 1949 and sentenced again, on the basis of her previous conviction, on an eternal settlement in Siberia. She was taken to a jail in Ryazan where she wrote to Elizaveta Efron asking her to collect her things from the apartment in Ryazan and to send her some shirts with long sleeves because she did not have anything suitable for the climate. Ariadna Efron was relocated to a prison in Kuybyshev at the confluence of Samara and Volga rivers before she was transferred to Krasnoyarsk and then on a steamer to Turukhansk where she arrived with 15 rubles in her pocket.

Here, work and housing were not provided and she had to find a way in three days otherwise be sent to a collective farm for general work. Every kind of cultural and educational work was prohibited. Finally, after much grief, she received a job of a cleaner at the school with a salary of 180 rubles and her duties included haymaking, harvesting, sawing and chopping firewood. She started with haymaking on a remote island, not knowing how to work with a scythe, mowed the grass and dragged them on a stretcher. She virtually drowned dragging the boats down the Tunguska River. After returning from mowing, she would whitewash the school walls, paint desks, wash the floors and attend to repairs.

In September, Ariadna was transferred to work in the club due to a lack of staff. They needed an artist, a decorator, even a literate person who could write slogans. Ariadna was assigned at the Worker’s House of Cultures. She was able to work as an art-designer and produced a series of watercolour paintings about life in exile.

In July 1950, she received a later from Mulia and his tone had changed. He wrote, “Don’t write until I write to you.” Then she received an anonymous postcard with his handwriting on it. When the letters stopped, she knew he was in serious trouble. Ariadna read in the newspaper in February 1953 of his execution that took place in July 1952. She would not see him again.

She lived in a hut at the end of the village on the bank of the Yenisei with her partner, Ada Shkodina, that she met in Ryazan who was exiled with her for a previous conviction on suspicion of espionage shortly after marrying an Englishman.

Ariadna took a vacation to Moscow on borrowed money in the fall and took a flight from Turukhansk to Krasnoyarsk since the Yenisei was frozen. She spent one more winter back in Siberia and in the following year, in June, she boarded the elegant steamboat ‘Balkhash’ and set sail from Turukhansk.

In 1955, she was rehabilitated as there was zero proof of criminal activity. Efrons were exonerated after Stalin’s death. She returned to Moscow and reunited with Aunt Anastasia who was released then. Ariadna became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers and lived in one of the buildings on Aeroportovskaya Street though under the eternal absurdity of the Soviet system, Ariadna had to register constantly with Aunt Lily at Merzlyakovskaya Lane and renew a special permit to live in Moscow.

Later in her life, she settled in Tarusa inheriting a small share from the house left by her mother’s family where they spent summers when her mother was young, with a blue porch and a mezzanine…dahlias, phlox and nasturtiums in the garden. Upon doctor’s advice, Ariadna had to seek a quiet solitary life and live on nature to ease her ailing heart besides her tormented physique.

Those were a pair of pale blue eyes, transparent, evidently faded before time from a long contemplation of the northern sky but they bore a game of faces, as in Venetian crystal, and were so huge that they didn’t fit in orbit and looked like they could fall out and crash with a clatter of noises.

Her road was incredible, tragically intertwined, not in a tangle of thread but a bitterness, contradictions, losses, emptiness, unfilled hopes and desires, loneliness, pain, separation and silence. The fate of the ice-blue eyes was dead as the tundra where no ordinary human being could endure. Death could not bury such a spirit, such a soul, such a talent. She would always be there. “I did not live my life,” claimed Ariadna Sergeevna Efron.

Tyler Friesen saw her for the last time standing on the bank of the river posing for a photograph.

Ariadna Sergeevna Efron died at her age of 62 in Tarusa on 26^th July 1975, suffering from a massive heart attack and was buried in the town cemetery – eight years and five months after Tyler Friesen published his book, ‘Merkabah’. She had no children. Her work, compilations of her mother’s prose, were publish posthumously.