Stalin's Children (16 page)

'Pour I.yudmila, en souvenir du soleil de Moscou,'
Philippe wrote. It is still on a shelf in my mother's bedroom.

Mila graduated from Moscow State University with a Gold Medal, one of the ablest students of her year. On leaving, Lyudmila took the risky option of turning down a universityassigned position and instead looked for a job on her own. She rented a room from a middle-aged couple near Lermontovskaya Metro, where she slept on a camp bed. Her landlord was an aviation engineer, and Lyudmila tutored their son in return for board and lodging. The engineer didn't have any official work, except for odd jobs among his neighbours, and Lyudmila suspected he was in disgrace of some sort and lying low. The family ekedouta living in the cracks of the Soviet system, where a man without ajob was a non-person with no money, no access to school for his children, to work canteens or holidays. The family lived on carrot and bone soup; Lyudmila would bring sausages when she found them and had time to wait in line.

Yekaterina Ivanovna Markitan, the wife of an old Party colleague of Boris Bibikov from the Kharkov Tractor Factory days, came from South Russia on a shopping trip and stayed at Lenina's. She told Luydmila that an old friend was now director of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, dedicated to the study and preservation of the legacy of Communism's founders. Her name was Yevgeniya Stepanova, and when Mila contacted her she immediately offered Mila a job as a junior researcher. Lyudmila had no great personal enthusiasm for Marxism or Leninism, but the job was in Moscow, and it was intellectual, so she jumped at it. Her work was to help in the giant task of collating and copy-editing the collected works of Karl Marx and his friend and sponsor, Friedrich Engels. She found the voluminous outpourings of the two men tedious. But the Institute had an outstanding library, her job gave her ample opportunity to practise her French, and she found her colleagues intelligent and lively. Foreign Communists and senior academic practitioners of the almost theological science of Communist doctrine would visit often, with Lyudmila being called upon to translate and accompany them. And then there was the excellently stocked staff canteen, on the ground floor of the small neoclassical palace which housed the Institute, which had formerly belonged to the Princess Dolgoruky and served as the headquarters of the Nobles' Assembly before being put to a more egalitarian use.

In 1995 I stumbled on the old Institute of Marxism and Leninism by chance. With the demise of the Institute and indeed of Marxism and Leninism in general, the old palace had come down in the world. A group of descendants of Russia's nobility had somehow managed to reclaim the building, but had no funds to restore it. So it sat mouldering in its overgrown garden, lonely and irrelevant.

The newly re-formed Nobles' Assembly threw a fundraising ball in a disused gym which occupied one wing. I went in my father's old dinner suit, which he had worn when he met Nikita Khrushchev as a young diplomat in 1959. The vestiges of Russia's noble houses, those who had not emigrated and yet managed to escape the Revolution, the Civil War and the Purges, were out in force, inexpertly dancing as a Russian army band played mazurkas and Viennese waltzes. But the organizers were groping for a past no one remembered, and striving to revive traditions which lived on only in their imaginations. Prince Golitsyn, in grey plastic shoes, chatted to Count Lopukhin, in a worn polyester suit, as their heavily made-up wives fluttered plastic Souvenir of Venice fans.

The palace had once been magnificent, but decades of aggressive Soviet philistinism had reduced it to a soulless warren of cheap chipboard partitions and corridors lined with curling linoleum. The high, heavy windows overlooking the courtyard had long ago been painted shut. Everything which could be stolen had been, including the door handles and light switches.

I tried to imagine my mother, young and full of enthusiasm, limping down these corridors for her first job interview with the Institute's director. Or my mother, defiant and voluble, facing the viciousness of her colleagues at the Party meeting convened to censure her for her romance with a foreigner. But she wasn't there; I couldn't feel any ghosts in the place as it reverberated to the oompah music of the dance band.

By the spring of 1960 Lyudmila had been made a full staff member of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, yet the creaking wheels of the housing bureaucracy turned slowly. She was eligible for her own apartment or, as an unmarried woman, more likely a room in a communal apartment. In March her colleague Klava Konnova, her two children and ageing father, were finally allocated an apartment of their own, and they moved out of a tiny, seven-metre-square room in a
kommunalka
on Starokonushenny Pereulok, near the Old Arbat. Lyudmila put her name down for it, and moved in. It was tiny, but it was a home. She was twenty-six years old, and for the first time in her life she had a space entirely to call her own.

8
Mervyn

In the eyes: dream .
. .
And all the rest so curtained within itself
and effaced, as though we could not understand it
and clouded deep out of its own depths.
You swiftly fading daguerreotype,
In
my
more slowly fading hands.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I was always fascinated by my father's study, on the first floor of the narrow Victorian house in Pimlico where I grew up. It smelled of French cigarettes and Darjeeling tea, and it was filled with the sound of Bach cantatas and Handel operas. Now it seems a small room, but in my mind's eye it is always enormous, seen from the height of a seven-year-old hovering by my father's venerable armchair and gazing up at the towering walls of books. The cavalry sword hanging over the mantelpiece and the collection of model steam engines spoke of an unknowable but overpowering masculinity, while the drawers full of telescopes, compasses, family photographs and knick-knacks were a forbidden treasure trove. Even in my mid-teens, as my father and I grew apart, I remained fascinated by his past, which he refused to discuss and the key to which seemed to be inextricably linked to the mystery which was his study.

Once, when I was about sixteen, I found a packet of photographs of my father while illegally rooting though his desk drawers. The images were not of the father I knew, but a surprisingly cool-looking young man in a sharp sixties suit and Malcolm X-style sunglasses. In one photograph he was strolling along a sunlit seaside promenade. Other photos showed him in a heavy overcoat, standing on the ice of a giant lake; browsing among watermelon stalls in a picturesque marketplace in Central Asia; looking relaxed and confident in a seaside restaurant, surrounded by pretty girls. The photos all had when and where they were taken neatly marked on the back in pencil in his careful hand.

I asked my father later that day, perhaps seeking to provoke him with a confession of my brazen invasion of his hallowed desk, what he had been doing in Bukhara and Lake Baikal in 1961. He looked away, smiling thinly - his favourite mannerism - and settled into his chair.

'Oh,' he said noncommittally, as he poured himself tea through a strainer. 'Baikal? The KGB took me there.'

My father was born in July 1932 in a tiny terraced house on Lamb Street in Swansea. He grew up in a world of coal grates and tiny, unheated bedrooms, unused front parlours packed with heavy furniture, strident women and harddrinking men. I visited the street where he grew up a couple of times as a child, always on blowy days when a grey sky spat drizzle and the streets were empty. Swansea, in my mind's eye, is always suffused with a dirty yellow light, somehow poisoned and gravity laden. The sea wind from the great sweep of Swansea Bay brought the smell of salt and oil. The streets were monochrome, as was the human flesh: heavy, sagging complexions the colour of suet.

South Wales seems a washed-up place now, ugly and unsure of itself, filthy and emphysemic after many lifetimes of toil and smoke. But in my father's childhood it was very different. Swansea was one of Britain's busiest coaling ports, and the giant ships which docked there were the arteries of an empire which was still the greatest in the world. My father grew up during the twilight years of a great Victorian port city. Belching steam engines still hauled the colliery cages up and down, and a few handsome old sailing schooners still moored among the great liners and freighters at the docks.

I imagine that I have, at various moments in my life, experienced a few echoes of that vanished world of my father's childhood. Driving on a foggy evening through a miserable mining town in Slovakia in 1993, when I breathed damp night air suffused with the smell of coal smoke and frying onions. Standing among the endless rusty cranes and cargo ships at the port of Leningrad, leaning into a biting sea wind which came off the Gulf of Finland, bringing the tang of rusting steel and the clang of metal on metal. And there was a week in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the southern Urals, in the company of miners, hard-muscled men with moustaches and grimy faces who drank with grim determination, and said little. Their women looked drained, struggling to keep up appearances with a smear of lipstick and a fading perm. These are the images which populate my picture of South Wales during the Depression. A place, I imagine, where everyone's share of happiness was tiny and precious, to be paid for by a lifetime's drudgery.

Mervyn's immediate family were poor but respectable, clinging desperately to the bottom rung of petit-bourgeois life, keeping up appearances. Some time around 1904, my great-grandfather Alfred took his family to the photographer's for a formal portrait which exactly reflected the family's strained circumstances. In the daguerreotype, Alfred is every inch the Edwardian paterfamilias, in his stern black suit and gold watch chain; his son William and daughter Ethel are prim, he in an outsize jam-jar collar, she in a high-necked black dress and black stockings. But his wife, Lillian, looks pale and unhealthy, and the heavy chairs and potted aspidistra which frame the stiff group are photographer's props, grander than anything they had at home. The giant photograph, expensively hand-tinted and framed, presided over Mervyn's modest young life in the tiny house he shared with his mother and grandmother in the Hafod area of Swansea, like a reminder of the family's inexorable fall from respectability.

My father's father, William Alfred Matthews, organized the loading of coal into the holds of ships so that it didn't shift as the ship rolled. It was called 'trimming' the ships, and was, in its modest way, a skilled job. It was filthy work, but at least not quite at the bottom of the working-class social ladder. That place was reserved for the navvies who actually shovelled the coal, stripped to the waist and knee deep in the coal dust.

William Matthews seems to have been a man of no ambition at all. His major interest in life was drinking his wages away at the Working Men's Club with his old comrades from the trenches. He had been wounded five times in the Great War. But like many of his generation he had nothing to show for it but a strong head for drink, a collection of medals and the respect of his fellows in the Comrades' Sick Club, a kind of cooperative health-insurance society, from whom in 1932 he received a cheap mantel clock which still ticks in my father's study, in recognition of his services as Secretary. German mustard gas on the Somme had also fatally weakened his lungs, which he further abused by chain smoking Players' Navy Cut.

My grandfather was a handsome man. He always wore sharp three-piece suits with his father's heavy gold watch chain, adorned with a sovereign in a gaudy gold holder. When he died in 1964, one of the few things he left his son were his pocket diaries, in which he'd marked off the days when he'd met his fancy women in Swansea parks.

He neglected his son Mervyn and couldn't bear to live with his wife Lillian. He took little interest in his son's schooling and never read a book in his life. Mervyn was always deeply repelled by his father's philistinism; one reason, perhaps, that he himself became so bookish and studious. From time to time William would assert his paternal authority arbitrarily over a son he certainly sensed was cleverer than himself, refusing to lend Mervyn his precious tools or scoffing at his lack of physical toughness.

The humiliations inflicted by his father echoed through Mervyn's whole life. In the letters he was to write to his Russian fiancée, Mervyn comes back time and again to his father's cruelty and selfishness. Their shared experience of neglect in childhood became a powerful bond between Mervyn and Mila.

'Your joyless, nasty, humiliated childhood, the constant lack of warmth and affection, kindness, respect, all your humiliations, illnesses, tears, I understand them all, to the point of pain,' wrote Mila to Mervyn in 1965. 'How I hated your father because he refused to give you his wood plane when you wanted to make yourself something out of wood. What horrible cruelty, what a lack of respect for a person - I suffered the same a thousand times! I so wanted to return those for ever lost minutes and buy you a whole workshop, to give you everything you wanted, to make your life rich and happy.'

Mervyn grew up a rather lonely boy, I think. He liked to spend hours wandering alone through the shunting yards of the great docks and the machine houses of the collieries which ringed the grimy city, admiring the steam engines. On Sundays he would walk to the tops of the vast colliery slag heaps and look down on the ships in the channel, and the Irish Sea beyond, and he would dream, in the manner ascribed to young boys who end up following unusual destinies, of travelling to distant lands.

He spent much of his childhood with his mother Lillian and his crippled grandmother. The family's life was punctuated by screaming rows between his parents, which either ended in one of his father's regular walk-outs, or by his mother taking little Mervyn and running away to stay with her mother. Mervyn's mother was an emotional woman, prone to hysterics. Her son was the focus of her hopes, and she lived entirely for him - and Mervyn was to devote much energy to getting as far away from his mother's intense, controlling love as possible. In later years, Mervyn frequently complained to Mila that his mother, addicted to hyperbole, would accuse him of 'killing your old mother with your thoughtlessness'.