We would meet at Tram, a nouveau riche hangout near Pushkin Square with steel tubular chairs and matt black tables, where, after a light but cripplingly expensive dinner, she would drag me to various parties. One was at a set in the MosFilm studios built for The Three Musketeers, a labyrinth of plywood seventeenth-century balconies, archways and spiral staircases. Girls in feather jackets and hot pants danced on a horse-drawn coach while fit young men in Boss jeans and slicked hair looked on. Another was in the Theatre of the Red Army, an absurd star-shaped Stalinist building surrounded by neoclassical columns. Instead of a Victory Day balalaika extravaganza, the place had been transformed into a Day-Glo rave bacchanal populated by long-legged girls with steel bras and shaven-headed men in green fur coats. I have a vision of Yana, in a pair of wraparound shades she’d borrowed from someone, dancing maniacally on the edge of the revolving stage. She pumped her fist in the air as she cruised past me at a stately three miles an hour, screaming ‘Davai, Davai!’ – an untranslatable expression of exuberance – as she went.
For all Moscow’s sleaziness, I loved the energy of this bonfire of vanities. I believed that I had stumbled on some- thing dark, vibrant and absolutely compelling. The money, the sin, the beautiful people – it was doomed, apocalyptic, transiently beautiful as a Javanese fire sculpture. The incandescent energy of the pretty, deluded party kids who frequented these places could have lit up this blighted country for a century if channelled into anything other than selfdestruction and oblivion.
Yana and I saw each other regularly for about six months. Her fabulous presence transformed me, I thought, into someone better and bolder. I felt constant disbelief that this extraordinary creature was by my side. This cannot be true, I told myself. I was not even jealous as she kissed and flirted her way around parties. I waited in line with the rest for the searchlight of her charm to fall upon me, and it was enough. Every time she ignored all the rich boys and came back home with me seemed a small miracle.
There were a few rare moments when she shed the heavy burden of her persona and became meek and vulnerable, a younger and less complex version of herself. This is the Yana which endures for me now – not the fabulous Yana of Bogdan’s, but the make-up-less Yana in a Russian Navy pea coat I gave her and silk combat pants stomping through Moscow in big boots, mercifully incognito.
Then, as I had always expected, she seemed to lose interest, and I didn’t press it. I rationalized it by telling myself that I was better off confining my sexual energies to earth dwellers, rather than heavenly creatures like Yana.
But after Yana and I stopped seeing each other I brooded; lumpen, sagging, armchair depression. She’d make a perfect first wife, I would joke to my best mend and fellow Moscow Times reporter Matt Taibbi, I found my old apartment too redolent of my pre-Yana life, too grounded in adolescence. So I borrowed a mend’s place for a few days while he was away, and spent days sitting on his deformed old sofa, smoking cigarettes. I felt I needed to mark the moment with some act of masochism, so I asked Matt to bring his electric hair clippers round. By the apartment’s tenth-floor picture window looking on to the Kremlin, he shaved my head clean of its schoolboy locks, which fell thickly on the spread newspapers strewn around the chair.
The pain of my decision to let Yana go without a fight – to choose Later rather than Now – ran deeper than I knew. I had been unable to twist free from the straitjacket of common sense when Yana and her world of extravagant folly called, and that knowledge burned hot on my cheeks like shame. It seemed to age me – all the more so because I also knew that with time the wound would heal almost without trace, and I would go on as before. I was bitter because my teenage bohemianism had been so brutally exposed as a brittle sham, and I was humiliated because I felt acutely that the real reason that I had lost Yana was that I was not man enough to keep her. The realization was brutal, and I fled from it by returning to the more sordid habits of my old life with a vengeance, trying to obliterate the pain with sex and negate the humiliation with bragging. It worked, for a while.
After half a year or so, the intensity of my feelings for her faded into a faint pang every time I saw her photo in Ptyuch or some other trendy magazine devoted to the antics of the city’s club kids. I was a new friend who was destined never to become an old friend – too little time, so many people and parties. But I liked to think that among a thousand discarded people, impressions, parties, somewhere in that fabulous kaleidoscope of her butterfly brain, my image was lodged.
Yana was too beautiful, too surreally perfect to live, so I was strangely unsurprised when a mutual acquaintance called late one night, in the autumn of 1996, and told me that she had been found raped and murdered at a remote Metro stop somewhere in Moscow’s grey suburban hinterland. No one -least of all the police – had any idea of who would want to kill her.
Even before her death I couldn’t think of her as anything but a child of her time, vibrating to the deep, doomed rhythms of a specific moment. I could never place her anywhere else but Moscow, or imagine her old, or bored, or cynical, or fat, or married. So that’s why it seemed right, somehow, that Russia swallowed her in the end.
She had been so perversely bright and optimistic while everything about her lied and died. But reality finally reached up to pluck her out of her cloud, like Icarus, and pulled her down, down deep into its dark underbelly. She died broken, raped and terrified near a remote Metro station, strangled by someone – a stranger, a lover? Who knows? If she’d been a character in my novel I would have killed her off, too.
Mervyn returned to the Soviet Union at the end of the summer of 1963, three years after he had left. Through St Antony’s, he had managed to arrange another graduate exchange with Moscow State University. The fact that the authorities had allowed him back was proof enough, he surmised with relief, that bygones were bygones with the KGB. Back in Moscow, Mervyn quickly picked up his old friendships – with the exception, that is, of Alexei and Vadim.
Mervyn had had enough of the high life he’d pursued in his earlier incarnations. He was thirty-one years old, and ready to settle down. Valery Golovitser told Mervyn that he knew a delightful girl who’d be just right for him. Golovitser, it seems, was a more astute student of his fellow men than his friend and cousin Valery Shein, who tried to persuade Mervyn to go out with the brassy, fashionable and pretty girls of his fast circle.
No, the girl Valery had in mind for Mervyn was as intellectual and romantic as he was himself, but brave and spirited with it. Mervyn was interested, but thought the idea of a blind date crass. He asked if he could see Valery’s friend Lyudmila before they were formally introduced.
Valery suggested that Mervyn wait for them outside the portico of the Bolshoi after the end of a performance; that way he could catch a glimpse of his prospective new girlfriend. It was an arrangement that only someone from an absolutely innocent age could have contemplated, more like something out of a Moliere play than the start of a realworld romance. Nevertheless, Mervyn duly waited in the driving sleet of an October evening, and indeed caught a glimpse of a diminutive young woman with a slight limp, chatting animatedly with Valery as they emerged from the theatre.
A small tea party was arranged in Golovitser’s little room. Mervyn was introduced as an Estonian, to ease the exoticism and awkwardness that the presence of a bona fide Englishman would have caused. Mila remembers what she noticed most of all was the shy ‘Estonian’s’ beautiful long back. Mervyn noticed Mila’s kind grey-blue eyes. In an occasional diary Mervyn kept, written in clumsy Welsh to render it incomprehensible to the KGB in case he lost the notebook, he noted on 28 October 1963 that he’d met a girl ‘of very strong character, but utterly charming, intelligent’. They arranged to see each other again. They went on long walks together and chatted for hours. Before long, my father had become a regular visitor to my mother’s tiny room on Starokonushenny Pereulok.
My mother and I went to see the old place, once, thirty-odd years after she left it, during one of my mother�
�s annual visits to Moscow. The house stood back from the street, through two archways filled with uncollected rubbish. It was in an ugly, turn-of-the-century building, squat and institutional, with thick walls and barred windows on the ground floor. The hallway smelled of sodden cardboard and mould, and the ground-floor doorway to the communal apartment was covered in flaking layers of brown institutional paint. It still had its old row of doorbells, one for every room of the kommunalka. I pressed the button, the same one my father pressed for the first time in 1963, hesitantly, bearing carnations, and again, for the last time, in 1969 when he came to take her away with him to England. A young woman opened the door, listened as we explained that my mother had once lived there, and let us in with a shy smile. She and her husband and the old woman with whom they shared the kommunalka were moving out soon, she said. The building was due to be gutted and sold off by the Moscow City Government for conversion into luxury flats.
It was not much of an apartment. There was a wide corridor lined with curling linoleum, gaping layers of wallpaper, and separate locks on each door. At the end of the passage was a squalid kitchen, its ceiling peeling from the weight of years of grease, disconnected gas pipes from defunct cookers sticking out of the wall.
My mother’s room, little more than a storeroom, really, was now a nursery for a sleeping two-year-old. My mother looked round unsentimentally, peering up and down as if looking for something that remained of her. Finding nothing, she turned and we left. She seemed unmoved, and we went shopping.
At the time, I was living on Starokonushenny Pereulok myself. The house was an early thirties constructivist building, and the long, narrow rooms of the apartment had walls and windows at strange angles. It was 300 yards from my mother’s old apartment near the corner of the Arbat. In the evenings I would wander the deserted backstreets, up to Ryleev Street, where Valery Golovitser used to live and where my parents first met. I’d walk down Gogolevsky Boulevard, where they had walked, arm in arm, to the Kropotkinskaya Metro, and up Sivtsev Vrazhek Street, where my mother used to walk to Gastronom Number One for her shopping. They were streets freighted with memory for my parents, but not yet for me. I had not yet read their letters, nor taken much of an interest in their early lives; I did not, then, feel any connection between their Moscow and mine. ‘Mervyn, do you imagine how I walk through the puddles of night-time Moscow to our home on the Arbat?’ my mother wrote to my father, late in 1964. He did. Now I do, too.
In her little lightless room with its single narrow window, Mila made something that she’d never had before – a home. Then, when Mervyn appeared in her life, she made a family.
‘In the autumn of 1963 I saw you for the first time,’ Mila wrote a year later. ‘I felt some kind of inner impulse, some kind of momentary, searing certitude that you were precisely the one person with whom I would finally, really fall in love. It was as though a piece of my heart detached itself and began living independently within you. I was not mistaken. In a very short time I understood you and came as close to you as if I had been your shadow since your first steps in this world. All the barriers collapsed – political, geographic, national, sexual. The whole world was divided for me into two halves – one, us (you and me), and the other – the rest.’
The minutiae of the nine months my parents spent together in Moscow survive because over six years of forced separation their conversations were all relived, in great detail, in their later letters. Almost every minute and day of their few months together was revisited and turned over, lovingly, like a keepsake. Every little tiff and conversation and lovemaking and walk was played out in Mila’s mind, replayed and discussed, words, sentences remembered and analyzed, produced like living proof that it was not all just a dream, that for a while they really had a home, had each other. ‘Literally every detail of our lives together goes through my mind,’ Mila wrote. ‘I live for the memory of those times.’
In the winter evenings, on his way back to the university from the Lenin Library, Mervyn would stop by Valery Golovitser’s place to chat and pick up some new records, duck into an archway to try and shake off his KGB goons, and appear at Mila’s front door. He would install himself on her divan and read while she fried sturgeon, Mervyn’s favourite fish, in the kitchen. After dinner they would go for long walks along the boulevards and the backstreets, and sit up into the night talking. He loved her homemade jam, served on prerevolutionary Gardner plates she’d bought in an antique shop and which she took with her to London. Later, Mila’s room with its divan bed, little table and wardrobe became a lovers’ everywhere for them, while the neighbours in the next room held rowdy parties and played the accordion.
Their romance was a homecoming for them both – two lonely, bookish, loveless people finding in each other what they had lacked all their dislocated lives. Mila was twenty-nine and raised on the romantic fantasies of Soviet films and literature. Most of her friends and her sister had married in their teens. Mila, though she’d had affairs and was popular with men despite her twisted hip, had never found someone who lived up to her exacting standards.
But now, suddenly, as though by an act of God, came the long-backed foreigner, the dreamy, shy Russophile with his long fingers and careful vowels, so earnest and innocent (despite those tumbles into sin in the company of Vadim and Shein), so lost, so in love with Russia but with no home there. She would become the embodiment of all he loved in Russia, its passion and fire.
Mervyn was the exact shape of the gap in Mila’s life. He made sense of her existence, he was what she had been missing to make her complete, to patch over the horror of her childhood and the loneliness of her adulthood. She became the intelligent mother he never had. He became the son, the child to nurture as she was never nurtured, as if by healing him she could heal herself, make everything all right for both of them. After a lifetime of deprivation, Mervyn was Mila’s redemption.
‘Life can’t be so cruel and unfair if it gave me you,’ Mila wrote to him, later, when they were living on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. ‘For some reason I have moved into you, and nothing will chase me out of such a warm habitation. There’s so little warmth and love in the world that you can’t afford to lose even a crumb of it that you’ve found.’
Mervyn was truly Mila’s first love, and it had all the moral purity and absolute, dreamlike clarity of adolescence. Mila had all too few human reference points for her emotional life, but many literary ones. The language of love, for her, was melodramatic, naïve and slightly childish, but underpinned with a welling passion which was all her own. It was not an erotic passion, but a passion fuelled by a terrible fear of abandonment, of losing this one chance to redeem her unhappy life and cancel out all its suffering with one bold stroke.
For Mervyn it was a little different. His good looks meant that Russian women liked him, flirted with him, went to bed with him. But he never had Shein’s fervour or hunger for women. Women made him shy, and he couldn’t summon the cavalier charm of his Russian friends, their swagger, or their ladykilling confidence. Now, here was Mila, the woman with a crippled body but a beautiful soul, devoted, unthreatening, intellectually independent, an ally and friend first and a woman second, yet with an apparently endless supply of love to pour out to him. ‘I want to make a good, healthy life for you, a home, good food,’ wrote Mila later, of her vision of their future. ‘It will give me such pleasure to help you with your work. I am sure that we can make a real family, bound together by love and friendship, mutual understanding, helping each other. Everything we have we have done with our own work, by our own wits. Together, we can achieve anything.’
Most important of all, perhaps, was that Mila understood Mervyn’s painful past as no one had ever been able to before. ‘I see your desire to get yourself out of poverty, out of anonymity into the big world,’ she wrote. ‘I see how you, alone and without patrons and without a clear path to follow, are pushing on with life and scaling its heights; I understand your tastes, your interests, your weaknesses.’
There was a moment, on a slushy February evening, when Mervyn and Mila left the apartment on Starokonushenny Pereulok together and walked down to Gogolevsky Boulevard. Mervyn had to turn right to go to Kropotkinskaya Metro, Mila to the left to go and visit some friends. They embraced, and as he walked away in the twilight Mervyn suddenly realized, as he wrote in his memoirs, that he was ‘profoundly in love with that lopsided figure, and I could see no future for myself without her’.
He had no idea – how could he – of quite how hard they would have to fight for that love in the years to come, or how profoundly it would transform his life. His love for Mila, like his love for Russia, began as a romantic infatuation. What had gone before were adventures, free of consequences and exciting. What was to come would expel him from himself and summon all his reserves of determination.
Mila invited Mervyn to her sister Lenina’s apartment on Frunzenskaya Embankment, a sure sign of the growing seriousness of their relationship. Even after all his years in Russia, Lenina’s was the first family home Mervyn had ever visited. None of his friends, not even Vadim, had invited him back to anything other than a bachelor room in the university or a kommunalka like Valery Golovitser’s.
It was a characteristically brave move for Mila to ask him, and for Lenina to accept the idea of a foreigner coming to visit. Mervyn’s sporadic KGB tails were a fact of life for both of them, and they cheerfully ignored it – but his visit could prove dangerous for Lenina’s one-legged husband Sasha, who was by now head of the finance department of the Ministry of Justice. Still, Mervyn came, and was fed shchi soup and meatballs and cake and tea, and treated as a member of the family. He was invited back. Despite my father’s dangerous foreignness and the odd formality of his manner, Lenina, Sasha and their two teenage daughters quickly grew fond of him.
Stalin's Children Page 18
