Stalin's Children (20 page)
Authors: Owen Matthews
It's not the ice, it's what's underneath that's frightening.
Alexei Suntsov to Mervyn, 1961
Producing tedious reports on Soviet higher education at the embassy was quickly losing its appeal. The new world Vadim had opened was the Russia Mervyn had come to experience, the exciting, romantic land he had dreamed of as he diligently taught himself Russian after school and ploughed painfully through
War and Peace.
Russia, its warmth and expansiveness, its unpredictability and excitement, was penetrating his blood. And with it came a recklessness, and with the recklessness a kind of liberation.
An Oxford friend wrote to ask Mervyn a small favour. The friend was editing a collection of the poetry of Boris Pasternak, author of
Doctor Zhivago,
and wanted some of the author's early work, available only in the Lenin Library in Moscow. He asked Mervyn to copy the poems and send them to Oxford. There was one small problem. A few months before, in October 1958, Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of
Zhivago.
Under pressure from the Writers' Union, who along with the Party considered the book a pernicious celebration of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Pasternak had been forced to turn down the prize. Indeed, only Pasternak's international fame had kept him out of the Gulag. Getting the writer's unpublished material out of the Soviet Union was going to be dangerous, probably illegal, and certainly career-threatening. Mervyn immediately agreed.
My father spent the next two weeks snapping away with a small camera at the manuscripts in the professors' reading room of the Lenin Library, where they were available to anyone with a reader's ticket, as the other scholars hissed him to silence and the library attendant complained archly. He slipped two packages of the photographic prints into the embassy's diplomatic bags on consecutive weeks to avoid their being confiscated by Soviet customs.
A week later, a summons from the head of Chancery was solemnly passed down the embassy hierarchy to Mervyn. There was no doubt that a stiff dressing-down was in the offing. Hilary King was urbane and condescending as he received my father in his magnificent office on the ground floor of the embassy. But King had found out about Mervyn's unofficial packages from the Foreign Office in London, where the contents of diplomatic bags were scrutinized. The embassy was very vulnerable to complaints from the Soviet side, intoned King in tones of biting politeness. There would be terrible trouble if they found out about Mervyn's secreted photographs of the works of a banned author.
I can imagine the look on my father's face as he left the Chancery, fuming. I have seen it often, a suppressed aggression which comes out in flashes of fury, usually after simmering for a few hours or minutes under a façade of icy cordiality. Mervyn had prudently apologized to King. But the anger was there, inside, pent up, at the Foreign Office's pandering to the Soviets' petty administrative demands. He was being scolded for an action which to anyone outside the pygmy world of the diplomatic bureaucracy would have appeared eminently right, and that rankled, deeply. Mervyn walked away, seething, down the thickly carpeted corridor to his own tiny office in the stable block at the back of the building.
Shortly afterwards, in one of the infinitely subtle ways the embassy found to express disfavour, they moved a lowly radio operator into Mervyn's apartment and gave Robert Longmire his own apartment. Then they cut off Mervyn's servant allowance.
It was time to jump. An advertisement in an airmail copy of
The Times
seemed to be the lifeline, announcing a graduate exchange programme between the Soviet Union and Britain, the first ever. It was the opportunity Mervyn had been waiting for to swap cold smiles in Chancery for smelly student dorm corridors and freedom - perhaps - from the ever-present goons. But there was a problem. Mervyn was an accredited diplomat - albeit the very last name on the 1958 Moscow Diplomatic List - and it was unlikely that the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs would believe his sudden change of status to that of a humble academic. Mervyn's first step was to take himself off the restricted list for sensitive documents and get rid of his security clearance. The embassy seemed only too happy to relieve him of both. The paperwork for Mervyn to apply for the graduate exchange was approved by the embassy and duly sent off to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And, duly, after proper consideration, refused.
Over kebabs and vodka in an Azerbaijani restaurant, Mervyn drowned his sorrows with Vadim. The Russian nodded his head in mute sympathy as he poured vodka, firmly and deliberately, into their glasses while Mervyn recalled his tale of the intransigence of the Ministry.
'Don't jump to conclusions, Mervyn,' Vadim assured his mend. 'I'll find out if my uncle can help.'
Mervyn was immensely cheered. Vadim, with his mysterious friends in high places with their ZiLs and dachas, would surely be able to persuade the Ministry to change its collective mind. Vadim mentioned nothing of what would be expected from Mervyn in return. They toasted Mervyn's future as a Soviet student, and friend of the Soviet people.
'So, you're going to Moscow State University.' The ambassador, Sir Patrick Reilly, was friendly, despite the hitches in Mervyn's short embassy career, as his soon-to-be ex-employee came to say goodbye. 'Most unusual. I wonder why the Ministry allowed you to do it?'
There was a long silence. This was not the time or the place for Mervyn to reveal the story of Vadim and his uncle, their evenings on the town with his new friends, the Ministry's inexplicable last-minute change of heart. He said nothing. Receiving no answer, the ambassador held out his hand. 'Well. Good luck.'
To use up the remaining few days of holiday time he had outstanding from the embassy, Mervyn took a trip to Soviet Central Asia. A woman in the Chancery, whose job was to burn sensitive documents in an iron pot, advised him that Bukhara was worth a detour from Samarkand and Tashkent. Mervyn talked over his plans excitedly with Vadim, who was unimpressed with his English friend's enthusiasm for historical sites. Mervyn set off eastwards in a series of small but sturdy Aeroflot planes. Bukhara was to be his last stop.
The desert city turned out to be cold and uninviting, a stretch of mud-walled houses huddled along the airport road giving way to some new but already dilapidated-looking Soviet concrete blocks closer to the centre. The taxi driver, a Bukharan Jew, chatted all the way about the brand new Intourist hotel and, when they arrived, complained about the heaviness of Mervyn's suitcase and hiked the already exorbitant fare. The hotel was indeed new, but as he pushed through the doors Mervyn found that inside it was colder than out on the street. The receptionist had moved her desk closer to the door in order to keep warm.
Mervyn asked if the heating would be switched on soon. 'This is a new hotel,' said the receptionist, offended by the foreigner's prissiness. 'And the lifts don't work. You'll have to take the stairs.' She gave him a room on the top floor.
Dragging his suitcase up the stairs Mervyn noticed a pair of familiar legs descending. Vadim, it seemed, was in Bukhara on official business, quite by coincidence. Even better, Vadim happened to be free that day to take Mervyn round the sights of Bukhara, with an official car, and in the evening it turned out that a Russian friend of Vadim'shad laid on a little welcoming party in his house on the outskirts. Vadim announced proudly that there would be some girls there.
After a day touring the sites, far too perfunctorily for Mervyn's liking, they made their way down some unpaved streets to the town's outskirts. Vadim's friend's house was in an old Russian quarter of traditional log houses quite different from the native brick-built Uzbek courtyards. Volodya, their host, greeted them warmly and plied them with vodka. They ate turkey, the largest Mervyn had ever seen in Russia, and danced to old American records. One of the three girls at the little party, Nina, turned out to be staying in the same hotel as Mervyn and Vadim. They walked home together in the moonlight, and said their goodnights in the foyer.
'You'll come to my room later?' Mervyn whispered as Vadim turned to go up the stairs. Nina squeezed his hand.
Mervyn tipsily wove his way down the corridor towards his room. The light was on, and someone was inside. Whoever it was had heard him coming upstairs and opened the door. Backlit from the room, Mervyn didn't see the man's face, but demanded to know what he was doing. 'Fixing the electricity,' the man said calmly. 'But we're done now.'
After the men had left, Mervyn sat down heavily on the bed. Even here in the middle of Central Asia, the KGB was tailing him. Mervyn noticed that on the table were two empty glasses. Secret policemen, apparently, liked to have a quick drink on the job.
He undressed quickly, shivering, and got into bed. There was a soft knock on the door. Thinking it was Vadim, Mervyn got up and opened it. It was Nina. She pushed him inside the room, frisky. He bundled her back out. A rape scandal was the last thing Mervyn needed; he pictured Nina's plump embrace turning into a wrestling hold, and help waiting just outside the door as she screamed for rescue. He climbed into his frigid bed alone.
Moscow State University was the largest of Stalin's grandiose highrises which punctuated the Moscow skyline like a ring of watchful vultures. It was also, at thirty-six storeys, the tallest building in Europe at that time. On the sweeping terrace in front of the building were gigantic statues of well-muscled male and female students looking up confidently from their hefty stone books and engineering instruments into the bright future. It was a long way from the haphazard sandstone quads of Oxford.
The university put Mervyn up in the 'hotel' wing, in fact identical to the rest of the university's five thousand-odd rooms except that, unlike ordinary students and professors, guests were provided with the luxury of a cleaning woman. The room was small, furnished with a sofa-bed, a deal desk and a built-in cupboard. The oversized window, dictated by the monumentalism of the façade, was completely out of proportion to the size of the room.
Nevertheless, Mervyn was delighted to be there. The university was the antithesis of his closeted diplomatic life; it was earthy and profoundly Soviet. Above all, Mervyn was significantly more free than when he was at the embassy. True, KGB radio cars stood outside, ready to put tails on foreigners as they left the building, but the surveillance was mercifully sporadic, and his fellow students, though still wary, were freer in associating with Mervyn than any Russians, apart from Vadim, had been before.
Mervyn had made a point, while at the embassy, of eating whenever he could at
stolovayas
- cheap public canteens - and riding on public transport wherever possible. Now at the university Mervyn ate in the canteen every day, with its papery meatballs, thin soup and watery potato puree. He had no choice but to pile on to trolleybuses, packed with the heavily padded
narod,
or people, and the smell of sweat and pickle-breath. He loved it.
Georges Nivat, a young Frenchman who was one of Mervyn's fellow students and a friend from St Anthony's and the festival, shared his love for immersing himself in Soviet life. Georges lived on a floor of the university which he shared with some Vietnamese graduates. The smell of their cooking, peppery chicken feet and garlicky cabbage soups, wafted down the corridors, much to Georges' distress. 'It is ruining my life!' he would complain with Gallic élan when he came to Mervyn's room for solace, tea and biscuits, gesticulating fatalistically. 'Ruining my Iife!'
Georges' fascination with Russian literature had brought him to Moscow. Soon after he arrived at the university he began frequenting one of Moscow's great literary salons, the apartment of Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya on Potapovsky Pereulok. Ivinskaya had been the typist and collaborator of Boris Pasternak since 1946. She was also the beleaguered poet's mistress, and was the inspiration for Lara, the heroine of
Doctor Zhivago.
She had paid heavily for her association with Pasternak. In 1949, after refusing to denounce her lover as a British spy, Ivinskaya was imprisoned for five years. She was pregnant by Pasternak at the time but lost the child in prison. She returned to Potapovsky Pereulok only after Stalin's death in 1953, and they recommenced their affair. But all her life, Ivinskaya was tortured by Pasternak's refusal to abandon his wife and children. The two families lived in a curious ménage, with the poet lunching and spending the afternoons with Olga before bowing politely to his mistress's guests and leaving to join his wife for dinner.
Irina Ivinskaya was Olga's daughter by a previous marriage to a scientist who committed suicide rather than face arrest in the Purge of 1938. But despite the tragedy which dogged her mother's life, Irina was charming, happy and passionate about books and ballet. Georges fell utterly in love. Within months, he proposed. Pasternak toasted the young couple at a crowded tea party at his dacha in Peredelkino. Mervyn was invited to go and meet the author, but says he was too shy. 'I would have nothing to say to Pasternak,' he told me.
I have often thought about this strange refusal, because it sits so ill with my father's apparent love of risk and danger at that time in his life. Perhaps it was because he only felt at ease with his friends and social equals and couldn't stand formal functions - a dislike which continues to this day. He has always struck me as a very private man, cocooned in a protective world he weaves around himself to keep the outside world at bay. His study in London, the various austere academic apartments he occupied during visiting professorships, these were all fashioned into small masculine nests where he could escape into his piled papers, his pots of tea and his Bach. At social events he usually wears his frayed two-pound charity shop shirts and sagging tweed jackets, and hangs in a corner with a forced smile, waiting until it's time to leave. In a fit of shyness, he even left my wedding dinner early. I said goodbye to him on the steps of the old Splendid Hotel on the island of Buyukada, near Istanbul, as he stood in his antique dinner suit and a beige mackintosh. He thanked me warmly for a good party, as the music of a raucous band of young Gypsy delinquents belted from the dining room. 'I don't really like these big gatherings,' he explained, and turned to walk back alone to our house through the light evening drizzle.
