Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  By the fall of 1930 Farida was pregnant again: Her studying days were over before they had even begun. Hamet, however, was determined to continue. After working for eighteen months in a regional insurance office to earn enough money to support the family, he enrolled at the highest Communist kolkhoz school in the city of Ufa, about sixty kilometers away, for a three-year course in agriculture, eventually taking charge of his group. As Hamet’s work often took him to other villages in the area, Farida was left to bring up their children alone. He was away one dreadful day when the new baby, Lilia, developed meningitis, and she lost her hearing because Farida was unable to get her to a doctor in time. “It was March or April and the roads were mud. How could she have walked ten kilometers from Asanova to Kushnarenkova with two small girls?” remarks Lilia’s daughter, Alfia. “It was Hamet’s fault,” she told me. “She never forgave him for it.” As if acknowledging his culpability, Hamet was always especially tender toward Lilia, his favorite daughter, whom he would never punish. He was a good man who loved his wife and children, but his family was never his priority. Driven to succeed, he was becoming increasingly involved in local politics, and from 1935 to 1937 he worked as a political instructor for a party department in the Nurimanovsky region.

  Over the next two years the Terror intensified. Along with the mass repressions and murders and arrests of leading writers and scholars, Stalin and the NKVD struck at the best cadres of the Red Army, destroying tens of thousands of loyal commanders and commissars. These enormous losses were Hamet’s gain. Profiting from the decimation of the military high command, he was among a second wave of recruits with the most basic military training to be appointed as politruks, a type of thought police employed by battalions to instill ideological orthodoxy in the men. A staunch Communist, competent worker, and extremely popular leader, Hamet was ideal for the job. He could even draw on his religious upbringing. “We were like priests,” a former politruk explains. “The goals were the same. You had to communicate and inspire, take care of people’s spirits.” Hamet began by working in an artillery unit, and within a year was promoted to senior politruk and sent to the Soviet-Manchurian border. Badly affected by the purges, the Special Army of the Far East was now increasing its numbers to deal with the recent deterioration of relations between Russia and Japan.

  The greatest number of the new gulags were in the Russian Far East. It was there that “enemies of the nation” were sent, herded by the hundreds into the infamous Stolypin penal wagons bound for Vladivostok. Following the very track along which Rudolf was born were the shaven-headed women of car number 7, stricken with dysentery, scurvy, and malnutrition and rationed to a mug of water a day, whom Eugenia Ginzburg describes so powerfully in Journey into the Whirlwind. Their destination was a prison camp, to which they were marched by brutal guards in ranks of five, whereas Farida and the Ufa women and children ended their journey at Razdolnoye, a small town near the Chinese border, where they were met by a jubilant group of soldiers—the husbands and fathers who were waiting on the platform to welcome them.

  Not far from the station up a main highway was a military settlement where the Nureyevs were billeted, sharing with several other families a long, single-story building, which for some reason was known as “Under the Roofs of Paris,” after the film (and eponymous song) Sous les Toits de Paris. The children loved Razdolnoye, which had a park where they could sleep out in hammocks on hot nights, an open-air cinema, and special activities organized for them by the army. Several families had portable phonographs (“Pettiphones,” they were called), and in summer with all the windows opened wide, in every corner of the camp the latest popular tunes were played—probably the first music the infant Rudik heard. It was a comfortable, cocooned existence, with only an occasional hint of the horrors taking place around them. “Another musician or singer would be arrested and then we’d have to stop playing his records.” That summer in Vladivostok, where Farida once took the girls as a treat to shop for dolls, the poet Osip Mandelstam lay in a transit camp half demented and dying of starvation.

  The hostilities between Russia and Japan were just beginning. In July, Hamet left his family for two months to join his battalion in defending a hill above Lake Khasan. This successful rout of the Japanese was directed by Marshal Vasily Blyukher, commander in chief of the Far Eastern Front, who immediately afterward was mystifyingly arrested and shot on Stalin’s orders. These were dangerously unpredictable times. Although Hamet remained with his artillery regiment for another year, he spent much of his time working on ways to get a transfer. “He wanted the family to go to Moscow. He wanted that for Lilia.”

  In Razdolnoye there was a kindergarten where Lilia was able to participate in games and communicate with the children in a sign language of sorts, but there was no school in the region that would accept children with disabilities; the only specialized institution for the deaf was in Moscow. Farida later told Rudolf that it had been her dream to educate her children in the capital—“She wanted us to go to better schools and eventually to university”—and she was ecstatic when Hamet’s request was granted. “My mother wished that we had a Russian education. She even forbade my father to speak Tatar with us. That way it happened that, although paternally and maternally being Tatars, we spoke exclusively Russian.”

  In August 1939 the family, this time accompanied by their father, set off once again on the long rail journey through the Urals and on to Moscow. Hamet began work immediately as a politruk in the artillery school on Horoshevskoye Street, opposite which they had settled into a small second-floor room. Over the next two years—the most stable period of Rudolf’s early childhood—the baby would be lulled to sleep by the sound of trains rattling along the track beyond the back fence. As Hamet’s work was so close to home, the soldiers became part of the family, playing with the children and sometimes smuggling the sisters under their coats into the local cinema. But such well-being was short-lived. In June 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, Hamet was sent to the Western Front, and the military families were ordered to evacuate the city immediately. His division went on to help mount one of the most spectacularly successful counterattacks in history: the defense of Moscow, for which, despite his lack of military experience, Hamet was decorated for bravery.

  Although told to leave Moscow with only essentials, by turning a metal washtub into a makeshift trunk Farida even managed to fit in their samovar. She and the children were billeted in the village of Shuchye, at the foot of the Ural Mountains, where they were given the most basic accommodation, sharing a room in a primitive isba with an old Russian couple who still clung to their Orthodox beliefs. Rudolf’s first memories were of being gently shaken awake at dawn by the man or his wife, and led to kneel in front of an icon of the Virgin, kept constantly lit by an oil lamp: “The peasants there gave me potatoes when I prayed with them, sweet, frozen potatoes. My poor mother suffered when she saw me.… Brought up as a Muslim she had to watch her son praying to an icon in order to get something to eat.”

  These were the years Rudolf called his “potato period,” a time defined by hunger, cold, and loneliness. The winter of 1941 was one of the coldest on record, with snow piled up in dirty mountains on either side of the village lane, a “narrow, frightening path” on which he played with no companions, games, or toys. Almost everything had been left behind in Moscow, and except for a set of colored pencils and paper animals Farida had bought to comfort him after he burned himself on their primus stove, Rudolf had no possessions he could call his own—a deprivation he never forgot.

  In 1942 Hamet, now serving as commissar of a mine battalion, arranged for the family to move into his brother Nurislam’s apartment in Ufa. This small industrial town, the capital of Bashkiria, was just beginning to expand as factories (producing mostly arms and military equipment) were being moved there from Moscow and Leningrad as a safety precaution during the war. Today the city sprawls from the old center along six-lane Stalinist boulevards as far as what used to be the town of
Chernikovsk and incorporating Glumilino, the village in between. When the Nureyev family arrived it was rare to see a car in Ufa, and only the main roads were paved with asphalt; Sverdlova Street, where they lived first, was a muddy half-cobbled lane with single- or two-story isbas backing onto a yard, characteristic of the old quarters of many Russian towns.

  Although picturesque from the outside with their lacy, pastel blue wooden shutters, these little log cabins made grim dwellings: dark and cramped. Their second-floor “apartment” was a room nine meters square, but at least they had it to themselves, as Nurislam was away at the front and his family was living elsewhere. Soon, though, Farida was able to find more spacious accommodation around the corner on Zentsova Street, where they also had more light as there were two windows facing the street and two more overlooking the yard. Remembering the kitchen and outside lavatory shared with eight other families, Rudolf was appalled in retrospect by the conditions in which he spent his childhood: “Six people and a dog, all in one room. At night I could never stretch out completely and during the day I pretended for hours to read something, but I couldn’t with everybody watching me.” On the other hand, communal habitation was the life most people knew, and it had its compensations. “These days you don’t know the name of your neighbor, but before we used to live as one family. If somebody needed something they would come and ask; if there was sorrow in one family it was sorrow for all families; if a letter arrived from the war it would be joy for the whole house.”

  Everyone had approximately the same amount of money except for the Nureyevs: “When the family first moved in they had nothing. Just an old wooden bed with a cloth on top and one blanket. Some of the neighbors tried to help and made a mattress for them by stuffing fabric with straw.” Farida was a fanatical housekeeper all the same, so fastidious that despite prizing every morsel of food, she would still cut off the outside of the bread and discard it, aware from her own experience of the unsanitary conditions of bakeries. Later they acquired a table made of planks that became the focal point of their life. For Rudolf, though, there was nothing cozily familial about these days, but only hardship and constant hunger:

  I remember those endless six-month-long winters in Ufa without light and almost no food. I remember, too, Mother trudging off in the snow to bring back a few pounds of potatoes on which we were to live for a Week.… When Mother had gone off on one of her exhausting trips in search of something to eat … my sisters and I would crawl into bed and try to sleep. We had sold everything we possessed and everything we could possibly exchange for food: my father’s civilian clothes, his belts, his braces, his boots.

  It was to Asanova that Farida made regular excursions on foot, a grueling trek of sixty kilometers, but worth every step, as the Fasliyevs were generous with their crops and livestock, and would either share what they had or exchange food for army coupons. Setting off at around five in the morning, she would tow an empty sled behind her, hoping to have a sack full of provisions for the journey home—mostly potatoes but often flour, milk, eggs, and once even a goose. The landscape, especially in winter, was drearily monotonous, its endless horizon broken occasionally by hamlets of brightly painted isbi surrounded by picket fences. When she reached the Podimalovsky Forest, notorious for its bandits, she would wait at the edge for a group of people to arrive, then cross it with them, as it was far too dangerous to pass through alone. At nightfall once, in a wood near the village, Farida noticed what she thought at first were fireflies all around, then realized they were the yellow-blue eyes of animals moving slowly toward her: She was encircled by wolves. Grabbing the blanket she had brought along to stop the potatoes from freezing, Farida set it alight, scaring the creatures away.

  Arriving at last at the track that leads to Asanova, she counted the telegraph poles to see how much longer the journey would take—there were twenty per kilometer—and as she approached the family house would see the eager faces of her nieces and nephews waiting at the window. “Farida-apa is here! Ura!” they would cry, running out to greet her. In summer Rudolf and his sisters often accompanied Farida—the only vacation they ever had. Madim, Hamet’s mother, would prepare the house for their arrival, sluicing the floors so that they were cool and fresh, and ensuring that there was always plenty to eat, even meat for shashliks. The children slept on the big veranda or in the barns scented with sweet drying grass, and spent whole days on the river until they were gypsy-brown, swimming and throwing bread to net little fish they brought back for supper.

  By 1943 Rudik, age five, was old enough to go to kindergarten, which meant that Farida could get a job. She had been ashamed when her son, whom she had carried on her back to school as he had no shoes, had been teased by the other children and called bomsch, the Tatar word for “beggar.” She began working in the local factory that produced ice cream and kefir (a yogurt drink), but was obliged to race back during her lunch break to provide a midday meal for her family, still dressed in her uniform of blue smock, white headscarf, and rubber boots. (The factory floor was awash with water, causing the arthritis from which she suffered for the rest of her life.) The only perk was having access to ice cream wafers, which she and a couple of the other women occasionally managed to smuggle through the bars of the windows to their children. “If their supervisor had caught them they would have got five years in prison,” said Federat Musin, who remembers standing waiting under the window with Rudik.

  Farida was prepared to take the risk since they were still desperately short of food. “Before the end of the war we really had nothing to eat,” Rudolf remembered. He once fainted from hunger at school, and to earn extra rubles, he collected old newspapers or used bottles, which he washed and sold back to the shop. When Hamet sent the family European chocolate from the front, Farida ground it into cocoa to sell at the market. Life was a bitter struggle, but Farida was determined that the children would have the best she could give them. “In great poverty still you create a sense of luxury. Mother said I was very sensitive as a child. She never wanted me to see unpleasant things. She saw that I reacted badly to something ugly.”

  For a New Year’s Eve treat Farida bought a single ticket for the ballet, hoping to find a way to smuggle her whole family inside. At the entrance to Ufa’s red-brick opera house, all five found themselves pushed through the doors by an impatient, elbowing crowd, and in the confusion were driven right into the auditorium. Even before the overture began, Rudolf was mesmerized; the wonder of the theater’s crystal chandeliers, stuccoed interior, classical murals, and velvet curtains patterned with colored dancing lights transported him at once from the gray world he knew. “And then the gods came dancing.” Song of the Cranes, a three-act work based on a popular national tale about a bird-woman pursued by a hunter, is Bashkiria’s Swan Lake. The star that night was Zaituna Nazretdinova, Ufa’s own prima ballerina, her feminine, folksy movements in spectacular contrast to those of the charismatic leader of the hunters, who ends his solo by draining a bottle and flinging it off the stage. The drama seemed to speak directly to the seven-year-old, who felt utterly possessed and somehow “called.” “I knew. That’s it, that’s my life, that will be my function. I wanted to be everything onstage.”

  By May 1945 the war in Europe was over and Russian soldiers began returning home. Full of excitement, Farida and the children went to meet the first train from the front, scanning the faces of the uniformed men in the crowd, but Hamet was not among them. They went back to the station again and again, feeling more despondent each time, until at last a letter arrived from Hamet saying that he was staying in Germany and would soon be sending for them. He was then working as a deputy commander helping to repatriate Soviet citizens—a welcome respite, however anticlimactic, from the action in which he had been involved. His rifle division had formed part of the Second Belorussian Front, which advanced across the Oder River, marching through Poland to the frontier, and helped to bring about Russia’s victory over Germany. (For his “battle merits” throughout these milit
ary operations, Hamet received two medals.)

  As politruk of a battalion he was expected to be a leader. “You ran in front of the soldiers shouting, ‘For Stalin! The Motherland!’ secretly praying to God as the bombs crashed round you.” Loved by his soldiers, he not only inspired them to fight more bravely but acted as a confidant, listening to their problems and needs. His easy camaraderie shines out in a photograph in which he sits in a field surrounded by smiling comrades, one of whom, no more than a teenager, is playing the accordion. In another picture the boy is accompanying a comically stiff group of waltzing uniformed men, an event that Hamet, a keen amateur photographer, is likely to have captured himself on film as well as choreographed, as he made it part of his job to arrange samodeyatelnost—singing and dancing groups.

  It was in allowing himself to become too close to his men that led to Hamet becoming involved in a party in Poland that got out of hand. Brought up as a Muslim, he was unlikely to have been drunk himself, but was nevertheless held responsible and given a strict reprimand. This, combined with the offense—foreshadowing his son’s future behavior in Paris in 1961—of “communicating with foreigners” (socializing with Polish soldiers), led to his demotion from the rank of major. In August 1946, having worked for a year as a senior instructor in the political department of a “capturing brigade” of the army, Hamet discovered that he was being retired. A character report cited, “He has a general education, but not a special military one, which badly affects his work. In addition, his knowledge of Russian is poor.” Hamet’s sudden discharge following his demotion was a humiliating blow, completely negating the medals he had won. It was a disillusioned and bitter man who returned to Ufa that summer to a family to whom he was virtually a stranger.