Stalin's Children (27 page)

'We liked your phrase, "using an aura of friendship for purposes of recruitment", in your report,' McCaul told my father. 'So we put it in one of our things.' He did not elaborate as to what piece of MI5 literature Mervyn had unwittingly contributed to. A few days later McCaul sent Mervyn two photographs to see if he could identify them. One was of a Russian research student who'd been up at St Anthony's two years previously, and had nothing to do with Mervyn's case. The other picture was of a man Mervyn had never seen. He remembered Alexei's sarcastic comments on how ineffective MIS was, and found himself in full agreement.

M15 did, to Mervyn's surprise, finally come up with the goods on 2 March 1966, when a man met him at Charing Cross Station to show him a photograph of an elegant figure with a broad, handsome face and a distinctive streak of grey hair over his temple. It was Alexei. The M15 man told Mervyn his surname was Suntsov, the first time Mervyn had ever heard it. In Moscow he had never dared ask Alexei his surname.

In Moscow, for Mila, Mervyn was everywhere, appearing like the ghostly overcoat in Gogol's haunting short story. At the theatre she saw some 'long-necked, long-fingered countrymen of yours, and I became so sad, so bitter, that I decided not to stay for the performance,' she wrote. 'My Boy! Where am I to find the strength to wait for so long?'

Mila's life was slowly being suffused and taken over by the virtual presence of Mervyn. She covered one wall of her little room with photographs of her fiancé, and in the evenings she would walk alone down Gogolevsky Boulevard to Kropotkinskaya Metro and look at the people streaming out, watching for Mervyn to appear. 'If only I could meet you now at the Metro; we would walk home together, breathe the summer night air. The Arbat backstreets would seem beautiful, the people kind, the evening soft. But now it seems that everyone looks at me judgmentally. The trees seem old and yellow with you they were young and alive. I look enviously at women who have a man's hand on their shoulder.'

On the large boards by the Metro where the day's newspapers were pasted up, she would stop and read stories about mods and rockers fighting on Hastings beach. Then she'd go back home and write, leaving the apartment again late at night to post her letter in the postbox on the corner of Starokonushenny Pereulok and the Arbat so that it would go with the first post. The little rituals which were to rule her life for the rest of her time in Russia were forming into a comforting pattern, a routine which could assuage, at least a little, the powerlessness of her situation.

'In the morning, as soon as I wake up I write a letter, my beloved boy . . . I imagine you sleeping, getting up, bathing . . . No more letters . . . the waiting is the worst. Even if the postman brought three a day it would not be enough, and now we have a gap . . . No news, it is as though my life has stopped.'

Mervyn spent the rest of the summer working with Alexander Kerensky, the bright lawyer who had risen to head the Provisional Government of the Russian Empire in the precipitous months between July and October 1917, when he was overthrown by the Bolsheviks' coup. Kerensky was now very elderly, a spidery little man with a shock of grey hair and thick glasses. Mervyn helped him with his research, which was devoted to trying to unravel the events in which he himself had played a leading part. Mervyn told Kerensky his story. The old man was sympathetic, but for him Russia was a distant and hostile country which he had fled half a century before and would never see again. They talked about the Revolution and the ruthless men it had brought to power.

'Rasputin? Oh, yes, he was very strong, very strong!' Kerensky would mutter. 'Lenin! I should have had him arrested when I could.' Mervyn nodded in sincere agreement.

My father began writing to sympathetic MPs and dignitaries who might be able to help his fight. Professor Leonard Schapiro of the London School of Economics gave him a list of names and addresses, and Mervyn began a tireless correspondence which eventually grew to fill an entire three-drawer filing cabinet. He wrote to Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, who was in the Soviets' good books for his anti-nuclear campaigns; Selwyn Lloyd, the former Conservative Foreign Secretary who had 'got on well' with his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko; Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Riga-born philosopher of All Souls College; George Woodcock, Secretary of the Trades Union Congress and a well-known fellow-traveller. All replied with polite expressions of concern, but offered little real help.

By now most of Mervyn's time was spent writing letters, making phone calls and visits. His academic work was falling by the wayside. Mervyn paid a visit to the Soviet ambassador's private secretary, Alexander Soldatov, but to his disappointment the meeting yielded nothing beyond polite platitudes. My father, with perverse persistence, kept filing Soviet visa applications; with equal persistence, the Soviets kept turning them down.

Mervyn had little hope that a visa would actually come through. Mila, on the other hand, seemed to have formed a firm belief that her own application for a Soviet exit visa, a rare privilege usually granted only to the most politically trusted, had a chance of being approved. When she learned on 18 August that her exit visa had been refused 'at the highest level', she was distraught.

'The last two months with the help of my friends and family I have lived in hope that my suffering will end but yesterday I discovered that my hopes are in vain,' she wrote, the writing paper stained with tears. 'All night I wandered in the heat, unable to sleep, and today I am still bathed in tears, as though in front of my eyes a piece of my heart has been torn out. I am once again in terrible despair. I beg you, my darling, don't let me down, I am on the verge of death.

'I am sitting at home like a bird in a cage, I slept badly, in a terrible mix of love and pain, but I will have to live, bear it, wait. It seems one more minute of waiting and my heart will tear itself to pieces and blood will pour from my mouth. Together with you I am ready to bear any tortures, but alone it's terribly hard . . . Some people are rejoicing: there is nothing they love more than to see the blood dripping from souls they have torn apart with their claws. They think they have saved me from a fiery Gehenna. They think you are a devil incarnate, and they themselves are saints. Keep knocking at the gates of heaven, listen and you will hear my voice calling to you from behind them. Even though the gatekeeper won't let you through, don't let him sleep.'

A few days later her mood seemed to have lifted. Mila apologized for her desperate letters of the previous week. 'If only you knew how your decisiveness is like oxygen to me. Please, Mervusya, never tell me that you have given up beating your head against the wall. Don't retreat! Storming the walls doesn't always work first time. I can never bear to hear that you have given up hope, faith in your own powers.'

In Moscow the summer was ending. Mila harvested the potatoes and cucumbers which Mervyn had planted. Berrying season had come, and Mila and her nieces spent days in the woods with iron buckets collecting wild strawberries, bilberries and cranberries in the marshy clearings. Sasha picked fruit, and Mila and Lenina boiled up vast pots of jam in the dacha kitchen. Mila kept some jars aside, which she planned to eat with Mervyn just as soon as he came back.

'Please tell me all the details of your life, the little curry house in the centre of town,' wrote Mila to Mervyn, calmer than she'd been in months after her spell in the country. 'All these things are vital to me. In them I see my real live little person, my beloved boy.' At the end of the letter Mila drew some little sketches of a shirt she was sewing. 'Here's a funny poem for you,' she wrote a day later. 'Mervusya - happiness, Mervusya - bottom, Mervusya - joy, For Mila - sweetness . . . Is your room warm, your blanket? Do demons of temptation come to you?'

'The postal workers are demanding 7½ per cent, the government is offering 4½ per cent, and until this argument is settled we must suffer,' Mervyn replied. 'I think the government is quite wrong on this question, but I do not advertise this viewpoint. The last few nights I have slept badly, and dream of you often. I often think of those wonderful dinners which you made me. I try not to overeat here. I bought myself a new pair of slippers, Hungarian ones, and have begun playing squash. Don't be sad, dear Milochka, everything will go well for us in the end. I hug you. M.'

It was only a matter of time before Mila's scandalous love affair with a foreigner who had been expelled from the Soviet Union collided with her position at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. Behind her back, she knew, there was a lot of gossip. Some of her colleagues clearly sympathized; many others looked at her askance as they passed. Mila did her best to be alone, so as not to embarrass anyone. She tried to bury herself in work, only to find that she had 'grown stupid from the pain, it is bothering me so much'.

The blow fell after a specially convened meeting of the Institute's leading Party members, as dour a bunch of zealots as Mila had ever encountered. 'This week has been a nightmare, constant nerves, tears,' Mila reported. 'At work there's a huge furore. A few days ago there was a Party meeting. They demanded a report about "My Case". They wanted blood. They shouted, "Why didn't we know earlier? Why didn't you tell us everything?" (This is all in the style of the Party Secretary.) "We need to find out more through the Organs [of State Security]. And what does she say for herself? She denies it. You see! If the government made a decision, that means it's a correct one. She must be punished! She put personal interests before society's! He will surely use her for anti-Soviet propaganda and then abandons her.'"

A few of Mila's colleagues, bravely, tried to defend her, urging leniency and saying that falling in love didn't make her an enemy of the people. But mostly, 'the clever ones stayed silent, the bastards shouted with all their might'. This hypocrites' court was the worst sort of pressure, a perfect weapon for the conformity obsessed Soviet society. And not only Soviet society: defying authority is one thing, but few human beings can withstand a chorus of disapproval from those whom they know and trust.

Mila didn't give them the victory of seeing her break down in tears. But the experience shook her deeply. For all her spirit, she was a Soviet woman, daughter of a Communist, a child brought up by the state. Never, before now, had she been confronted with the prospect of outright dissent. And she was all too aware that the taint of rebellion might follow her through her whole life.

'I think that even if I do leave, they will immediately telephone my new work or someone will inform on me, in the old fashioned way, and they'll fire me immediately in turn,' wrote Mila. 'Nevertheless, I must leave. The atmosphere is vile, a lot of gossip, little talks "of an instructional nature", which are enough to give me a heart attack.'

Despite Mila's public disgrace, the Institute's director was sympathetic. He arranged a transfer to the Central Library of the Academy of Sciences at the same status and wage, where Mila was to translate scholarly articles from French academic journals. To Mila's huge relief, her new colleagues turned out to be young and independent-minded. The library was in fact a 'den of dissidents . . . it was like throwing a fish into water,' Mila remembered. The room where she worked was decorated with large, surreal, pencil caricatures of various wanfaced historical figures which the director had allowed some wag to draw directly on to the walls. She and her fellow workers amused themselves by snapping a series of comic photos - one shows Mila and her friend Eric Zhuk posing as the Worker and the Communal Farm Woman, a classic 1937 statue of Soviet youth. He holds a hammer, she holds a sickle, and they stand back to back in a mock-heroic pose. Another shows the young librarians parodying Rodin's sculpture of the Burghers of Calais, standing in a row with their heads tragicomically bowed. The liberal atmosphere of the library allowed Mila to have heated arguments with the senior researchers over whether Soviet power would fall in their lifetimes. Mila argued that it would; Professor Faigin, an expert on Peter the Great, argued that it would survive for centuries. 'The Russian pig lay on one side for three hundred years,' the sprightly old professor joked. 'Now she's rolled over on to the other and will lie there for another three hundred.'

On 19 October 1964 Mila went with two new girlfriends to greet the returning cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov. They had gone into space when Nikita Khrushchev was still in power; by the time they came back to earth he had been quietly removed in a politburo coup, to be replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. For the wider Soviet public, the transition passed with barely a ripple, but Brezhnev's harder line was to bode ill for my parents' case. Mila and her friends waved frantically as the cosmonauts cruised down Gorky Street in an open car in a fine drizzle. Then they went to a crowded café and talked till the evening.

But despite her new job and the support of her friends, the pain of separation would not let her go. 'I hope so much that our love will not die, I so want to be with you, that it seems that if I were offered a choice I would rather die than never be with you again. Honestly!' Mila wrote, alone in her room one autumn evening. 'I miss you. I suffer terribly. I can't see or listen to anyone or anything. I want to cry out to the whole world from love, from despair, from such a cruel and unfair fate!'

As I read my parents' letters, sitting by the fire of the dacha where I lived with the woman who is now my wife, I felt a strange thing. As Xenia sat on the sofa and read the difficult, cursive script, and I took notes, sitting on the floor, I could not shake the terrible feeling that both my parents were dead and lost to me. Their voices were so distant, the details of their intimate lives and suffering so moving, that it seemed to me that I was rooting through lives already lived and gone. The letters were powerful as much for what they didn't say as what they did, and I found myself unable to break the spell, even when I called my mother and heard her familiar voice on the telephone. We spoke of reassuring banalities, and I could not bring myself to say what I was feeling - that I was overwhelmed by admiration and love. And sorrow, for the knowledge that though my parents would eventually be reunited, their unspoken belief that they could erase their traumatic childhoods through prodigious self-sacrifice and struggle in the name of love would ultimately fail.