Stalin's Children (22 page)

Nina from Bukhara called Mervyn at his university dorm. She was in town, she said, on an official trip, and would love to see Mervyn. Right now she was going out to buy a blouse in GUM, the state department store on Red Square, and then she would be free. They made a date for the evening.

As Mervyn put down the phone, he paused. How had Nina found his number? He made a mental note to ask her, but never did.

Mervyn was playing games. He had no inkling of the ruthlessness of the organization he was dealing with. For Mervyn, the KGB was personified in the urbane Alexei and his flattery, and the silent goons who had followed him around Moscow at a respectful distance during his embassy days.

Georges Nivat was under no such illusions. Georges and Irina's idyll quickly soured after Pasternak died of a heart attack at his dacha on 31 May 1960. With Pasternak and his international reputation gone, the Ivinskys lost their famous protector. The KGB had been itching to get them for years; they were notorious for consorting with Westerners and accepting their presents. To cap it all they were the inheritors of the international royalties from Pasternak's poisonous anti- Soviet book. Now, Olga and her foreigner-loving daughter were to be dealt with.

Shortly after Pasternak's death, Mervyn and Georges, along with all the students in their year, were given a routine smallpox vaccination at the university clinic. Mervyn's inoculation passed without incident, but Georges soon developed a mysterious skin infection. The infection got so bad that he was bedridden in hospital on his would-be wedding day. A second wedding date was set, in July, but a guardian nurse was posted by his bedside in the small hours of the morning, frustrating Irina's plan to smuggle Georges out of hospital. Then Irina herself fell ill with the same horrible skin disease.

At first neither Georges nor Irina - nor even her mother, a veteran of the NKVD torture cells - suspected that they had been infected by the KGB in order to prevent the marriage. But it became increasingly obvious that this was the most likely explanation for their mysterious, virulent rashes. Georges was profoundly shocked by the thought; as was his prospective mother-in-law, despite all that she had seen. Georges' student visa was due to expire at the end of July, and despite his desperate pleas the authorities refused to extend it. Irina was too ill to see Georges off when he left for Paris. Mervyn drove a weeping Georges to the airport, along with Irina's mother. The old woman seemed to have shrunk, a husk of her old, vivacious self, as they saw Georges off. Both he and Irina quickly recovered, but they were not to see each other again until half a lifetime later.

Mervyn decided to take a short holiday with Vadim. They flew to Gagry, the resort on the Black Sea coast where Boris Bibikov had been arrested twenty-five years before. It was a welcome escape from the stuffiness of Moscow's brief but scorching summer, and the distress of Georges and Irina's seemingly incurable illnesses and forced separation. Down south the air was warm and fragrant, unaffected by the drabness and depression of Soviet life, and the locals were hospitable and garrulous rather than cocooned against a hostile world by shells of rudeness.

Mervyn relaxed. The whole KGB business would blow over, he hoped, and Alexei had apparently let the matter drop. He'd been careful never to mention anything to Vadim - still believing, in all apparent sincerity, that Vadim had nothing to do with his attempted recruitment. They lay around on the beaches of Gagry, Mervyn's pale skin burned red by the southern sun, or strolled the promenades. Mervyn asked a friendly, round-faced girl student to come back to his room, and she did so without demur.

But a few days into the holiday Mervyn was summoned to the telephone. It was Alexei, who announced that he was in Gagry. He arranged a rendezvous by the champagne kiosk near the round pond of a nearby park at dusk. Their meeting, among the patterned shadows and the croaking frogs, was short but dramatic. Alexei was elegant and unhurried as ever, and greeted Mervyn courteously. Was Mervyn free that evening? Good. Another rendezvous had been arranged for nine o'clock, in a room at the hotel. Alexei turned and crunched away down the gravel path with his steady step.

Mervyn was not expecting the meeting to be a pleasant one, and it was not. Alexei introduced Mervyn to his 'boss', Alexander Fyodorovich Sokolov. He was an older, heavily built man who wore a bad Soviet suit and cheap sandals. Sokolov was clearly an old-school NKVD bruiser, whose demeanour exuded contempt for his younger, foppish colleague and the spoiled young foreigner who stood before him.

Alexei launched the proceedings with great solemnity. He spoke of Mervyn's 'career' and his 'intentions', about how the Soviet Union was 'the only free and fair society in the world' . Sokolov, quoting from Mervyn's KGB file, grimly noted that his father had been so poor that he never drank wine. Surely it was time for Mervyn to strike a blow against the system which had so oppressed his parent? Evidently, thought Mervyn, the gallons of beer and cases of whisky downed by his old man had not been recorded by the KGB.

After two hours, the threats came. 'We know,' said Alexei gravely, 'that you have been guilty of immoral acts.'

'If the Komsomol were to find out,' growled Sokolov, 'there would be a big scandal in the newspapers, and you would be shamefully expelled from the university and the country.' Now that, Mervyn knew, was nonsense. In fact, there had been all too few 'immoral acts' - a single visit to a brothel in Moscow with Vadim, Nina from Bukhara, the girl at Vadim's uncle's dacha, a girl who lived in a curious, circular building near the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the student in Gagry. It was a pretty modest total, certainly compared to Valery Shein or even Vadim himself.

'The time has come to say finally, yes or no.' Alexei and Alexander Fyodorovich looked at Mervyn expectantly.

'Then the answer must be no,' said my father. 'Nothing will persuade me to work against my country.'

That night, sitting on his bed and turning over the possible consequences of his defiance, Mervyn realized that there could be no more stalling. He wasn't afraid of their threat to cause a scandal, but the KGB could get at his friends. There were sinister stories circulating about trumped-up charges, accidents, arrests for hooliganism, cancellation of residence permits. He decided to pack his bags, take the first plane back to Moscow and leave the Soviet Union, probably for ever.

Yet it wasn't that simple. Days after Mervyn returned to Moscow, Alexei made a conciliatory phone call. A decision had been taken at the highest levels, Alexei assured my father, that no further action would be taken. Alexei even insisted that they have another little dinner. He had a piece of news for Mervyn.

'That woman you mentioned, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya,' Alexei said casually as they tucked into what would be their last cosy meal together. 'She's just been arrested. On contraband charges. She was involved in smuggling foreign currency, and other matters. She was morally corrupt.'

Alexei continued to eat as Mervyn stared at his plate, his appetite gone.

'I told you that they were a bad family,' Alexei went on. 'If I were you I'd keep fifteen kilometres away from them.'

Mervyn watched as Alexei sipped more wine. Alexei's face was blank, expressionless. Two weeks after her mother's arrest, Irina herself was taken from her hospital bed and driven to the Lubyanka for questioning. Shortly afterwards Irina, the ballet lover and aesthete, followed her mother into the unimaginably brutal world of the labour camps. Mervyn heard nothing more of them. This was not a game, it finally dawned on Mervyn. This was not a game at all. He made hurried arrangements to return to Oxford.

10
Love

Adventures can be wonderful things.
Mervyn Matthews to Vadim Popov, spring 1964

Especially when they're over.
Vadim Popov

The Moscow my father knew was a solidly rooted place, its certainties and rules as fixed as the prices in state shops and the squat Stalinist cityscape. Most Soviets of his generation spent their entire lives in the same apartment, worked in the same jobs, bought vodka for an unvarying 2 rubles 87 kopecks and waited ten years to buy a car. Time was measured from vacation to vacation, theatre season to theatre season, from the publication of one volume of a collection of Dickens novels to the next.

Forty years later, when I arrived in Moscow, the city was making up for lost time. The place was obsessed with its own thrusting modernity; it seemed to change overnight, every night. One day you'd see young men with Caesar haircuts and DKNY sweaters where previously red blazers and crew cuts had been in. Internet cafés-cum-trendy clothes shops opened in the place of old grocery stores. Gleaming new chrome and marble shopping malls sprang up with alarming speed, complete with see-through escalators and dollar-dispensing cash machines. After a while I got so used to the pace of change that it seemed normal - a restored church here, a new corporate headquarters there, like mushrooms after the rain. London seemed quaintly static in comparison. The rest of Russia may have been quietly disintegrating, but Moscow waxed fat on the spoils of the plundered empire.

Whenever I wasn't trawling the lower depths of Moscow's underbelly for lurid features articles, I dedicated much of my energy to going to parties. My father had found his fun in noisy Gypsy restaurants. A generation later, and sudden money and freedom had transformed the Moscow party scene into something rich and strange. At Club 13, housed in a decrepit palace just behind the Lubyanka, dwarves in miniature Santa Claus costumes would whip you with cat-o'-nine-tails as you walked up the stairs. In Titanic, the favoured haunt of wealthy criminals, the black Mercedes were parked a dozen deep outside and gangs of girls would wait at porthole-shaped tables to be chatted up by fat-necked beaux. At Chance, naked men swam in giant glass-fronted fish tanks, and at the Fire Bird casino I once spent an evening drinking in the unlikely company of Chuck Norris, the ageing action film star, and his guest Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist politician.

Sometimes I would brave a visit to a bar called the Hungry Duck. On 'Ladies' Nights' only women - and a few friends of the owner, invited to tend bar - were allowed into the place between six and nine. The deal was that they would be plied with unlimited free alcohol, and as a result the place was packed with about six hundred sweaty teenage girls, all baying for booze as fast as we could pour it. The smell of Slavic pheromones hung thick, and the sight of a wall of screaming women besieging all sides of the circular bar was terrifying, like defending Rourke's Drift against advancing Zulus. Male strippers would strut down the bar, plucking girls from the audience and stripping them naked over the beer taps. Doug Steele, the Canadian owner, his face turned a Mephistophelean green by the light of the cash register, would lean forward on his brawny arms and survey the mayhem with quiet satisfaction, like Captain Kurtz in his own private Inner Station. By the time they let the men in at nine, drunken, topless girls would be slipping off the beer-covered bar and crashing on to the floor, to be scooped up by security and dumped in a line in the foyer. Soon epic fights would break out; vicious, eye-gouging, smashed bottle affairs with flying beer glasses and broken bones, with the unconscious losers joining the drunks downstairs.

I went to a party thrown by Bogdan Titomir, Russia's most famous rapper, at his apartment-cum-disco, where the windows rattled to the sound of the music blasting on the PA and couples sneaked out to kiss in the back of his Hummer. When I first saw Yana she was backlit by pulsing strobes as she snaked through the smoke, past the blondes draped over Bogdan's electric blue sofas, past the entwined bodies in a half-curtained alcove, towards a table piled with cocaine. She wore a tiny miniskirt covered in printed pairs of luminous Fornasetti eyes, which matched the strange glow of her own under the ultraviolet light which hung over the table. She deftly railed out a line fat as a hangman's rope, and snorted it. Then she threw her blonde hair back and looked me straight in the eye. And winked.

'Polezno i vkusno,'
she said, smiling - 'healthy and tastes good', a slogan from a TV cereal ad - and held out a rolled-up bill.

I found her, later, sitting on Bogdan's doorstep, legs apart, wrists draped over her knees, smoking. I sat down next to her. She shot me a glance, taking a drag from her cigarette with the corner of her mouth. We began to talk.

Yana was a classic child of Moscow's golden youth - rich, smart, privileged and completely lost. Her father was a former Soviet diplomat in Switzerland; her mother was from a long line of St Petersburg intellectuals. Half of Moscow was in love with her, and the more she spurned them the more they loved her. She had a talent for situations, which had served her well for twenty years of an erratic and unpunctual life. The ease with which she moved from one milieu to another, from one place, man, date, to another was staggering. Her flightiness and instability was truly irresistible. She was savagely elemental, temperamental, capricious, often as selfish as a tiny child. Yana always reminded me of someone constantly trying out a series of savage caricatures of herself on the world, adopting slightly new variants of her social persona. And as with many lonely people she had a burning desire to be loved, and to be fabulous, but loved from afar. And that was her paradox; the more fabulous she became, the more impossible it became for her to be loved for herself.

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.