Stalin's Children (35 page)

In all, we counted over eighty bodies, and this was only the edge of the village. In all, the Russians claimed to have killed eight hundred of rebel commander Ruslan Gelayev's men in and around Komsomolskoye. I had little stomach to go further. I was also nervous of mines and booby-traps. I walked over to a breeze-block house which had been partially burned down. The corrugated concrete roof had collapsed and shattered among a jumble of iron beds and plastic picnic chairs. Among the shards of the roof I noticed a blanket, which seemed to be wrapped around a body. I picked up a piece of roofing - a foot-long fragment of tile - and began clearing the debris. I gingerly moved the blanket to reveal a man's face, and as I did so the tile touched his cheek. The flesh was hard and unyielding, absolutely nothing like touching a human at all.

The dead man was an African, his skin deep black but with European features, perhaps a Somali. He seemed to have been one of the foreign fighters who had come to Chechnya to join the jihad, and finally made his rendezvous with his Maker in this bleak corner of the Caucasus. He looked like a decent young man: someone you would ask directions from if you were lost in a strange city, or trust with your camera to take a photograph of you.

Later - and I was to think of him often - I imagined him standing with his cheap luggage and polyester suit in an airport on his way to the holy war, nervous but excited. And I thought of a family somewhere going about its daily business, squabbling sisters and nagging mother, not knowing that their son was lying here in the wreckage of a Chechen house where he'd died fighting someone else's war.

I had had enough of Komsomolskoye. We hurried back to our car, a battered Russian military jeep driven by a young Chechen called Beslan, who prided himself on his driving skills. We had four hours before the only Moscow flight of the day left from Nazran Airport in Ingushetia. Beslan promised to get us there in good time. He gunned the engine as we swung out on to the main road, and we careered westwards towards the border. Robert and I were jammed in the back seat with our Chechen guide, Musa, an official in the pro-Moscow government who talked us through checkpoints by waving his government ID. Two Russian policemen, whom we had hired for $50 a day as bodyguards, shared the front passenger seat. Halfway to the border, we saw a Russian Mi-24 helicopter gunship hovering menacingly over a copse, from which smoke was rising. The chopper turned slowly in the air to face us.

The next thing I remember was that the view of damp fields in the windscreen was replaced by a wall of earth. I recall bracing my arms as hard as I could against the front seats, and there was a moment of great physical stress and then relief as I felt my body yield to the overpowering laws of physics and fly forward through the windscreen. Fortunately for me the glass had been shattered seconds before by the head of one of our police escorts.

The moments that followed were filled with infinite peace. I lay on my back on the gravel of the road, spread-eagled, looking up at the douds drifting across the big Chechen sky. I was conscious of being alive in a way I have never been before or since, and though I realized that I was probably badly injured, the signals were somewhere far away, like a ringing phone which could be quietly ignored. Slowly, I flexed my fingers along the surface of the tarmac, rolling tiny stones and bits of grit back and forth. Somewhere, I could hear voices, and I breathed deeply through my nose to check for the smell of gasoline, or cordite, or burning. I smelled only the smell of clay, and the flowering grasses by the roadside.

My mind frequently wanders back to this moment, ascribing to it different meanings as the mood takes me. The only thought that I can attribute with complete honesty to that time and that place is this: I felt a deep contentment that I had someone in Moscow who was waiting for me, and an overwhelming urge to return to Xenia and to Moscow, and never leave again.

A bearded face loomed above me, and began to speak. Something like a reflex took hold of me; I began answering, quite calmly, and issuing orders. My shoulder was dislocated, and, I suspected, some ribs cracked. I told the Chechen villager to put his foot on my collarbone, pick up my useless right arm, and pull. Shock must have blocked the pain, because I continued giving instructions until the joint popped back into place. I saw Robert kneeling by my side, and he gently unwound the scarf from my neck and made a makeshift sling. As I sat up I saw that Beslan's beloved jeep had crashed into a four-foot-deep shell hole blasted in the road. Beslan himself, I noted with some satisfaction, had smashed his head on his own steering wheel, and was dabbing away blood. The two policemen were more badly injured, lying by the roadside, concussed.

Things started to move quickly. I produced money to pay off everyone. A car was summoned from the nearest village to take Robert, Musa and myself onwards. I had only two thoughts in my mind - to get on the plane, and never to return to Chechnya. Even when our second car hit a pothole and my injured shoulder was dislocated a second time, the desire to head for home blotted out all pain, indeed everything else in the world unconnected to pushing on to Ingushetia, and safety.

Somehow, we made it. Nazran Airport was crawling with officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the KGB's successor, who fingered our accreditations suspiciously and questioned us as to where we'd been. Robert and I made a suspicious pair. Both of us wore the Russian military coats and black knitted caps which were our feeble disguise against foreigner-hunting kidnappers. We were both filthy, and smelled strongly of smoke and corpses. With a superhuman effort of will, I maintained my calm, insisting that we had never left Ingushetia and never been into the forbidden territory of Chechnya. As we boarded the bus to the plane, more FSB officers rushed up, wanting to look at Robert's undeveloped photos. I cajoled and joked with them and, after an agonizing few minutes, they went away. We walked up the steps of the old Tupolev 134 in dread that they would change their minds and haul us off the plane, and back into the world of Chechnya.

Only later that evening at the American Medical Centre in Moscow, as a doctor from Ohio cut the stinking Russian Army T-shirt off my body with a pair of cold steel scissors, did I burst into tears of pain and relief. Xenia waited for me outside the Casualty Department. Never had I felt so profoundly that I had come home.

War and memory are strange things. You see disturbing things which skitter off the surface of your mind like a pinball bouncing down the board. But once in a while some memory or image or thought suddenly lodges in a hole and penetrates right into your deepest heart. For me that memory was the dead black man in Komsomolskoye, who began to haunt my dreams. My shoulder healed quickly enough, but my mind seemed to have been infected. At Xenia's dacha, we walked along the river, chatting. But when we found an empty meadow where the spring silence was broken only by the creaking of the pines swaying in the wind, I collapsed into a deep, damp snow bank and refused to move. 'Just leave me here for a few minutes,' I whispered, my eyes fixed on the grey-white sky. 'Just leave me alone.'

I became convinced that the unquiet spirit of the dead rebel I had touched had entered me. I relived the moment of physical contact with his cold cheek, and believed that somehow, like an electric charge, the man's spirit had jumped into my living body. I dreamed of the churned fields of Komsomolskoye, and imagined the angry souls of the dead men flapping limply along the ground, like wounded birds.

It was Xenia who pulled me out of it. She drove a reluctant Robert and me to a church near my apartment, where we both lit candles for the dead men. But more importantly, she helped me by making a home, a real family home, the first I had had since leaving London seven years before. I left my bachelor apartment and rented a dacha deep in the Moscow woods near Zvenigorod, not far from Xenia's parents' at Nikolina Gora. We painted the rooms bright colours. I bought Dagestani kilims and old furniture, and we dismantled the old Russian stove in the living room and used the heavy old tiles to build an open fireplace where the stove had stood. Xenia replaced the brass knobs on the grate we had bought with two small clay heads she had sculpted. One was a portrait of me, the other of her, and our little clay images faced each other across the hearth.

Epilogue

Better by far you forget, and smile,
Than that you should remember, and be sad.
Christina Rossetti

Mila and Mervyn arrived at Heathrow in a grey London drizzle. They took the bus to Victoria; a taxi would have been too expensive. As they drove down the Westway London struck Mila, she told me, as being 'very poor, very down-at-heel'. When she saw old women in woollen coats and headscarves she told her new husband that they were 'just the same as our Russian babushkas'.

Mervyn's little one-bedroom flat on Belgrave Road in Pimlico was an ascetic place, with a tatty carpet and barely warmed by large brown electric storage heaters, set low to save money. My mother remembers that Mervyn's single bed was just two foot six inches wide, and covered with thin army surplus blankets. When the newly freed Gerald Brooke called round to ask if there was anything Mila needed, the first thing she thought of was proper woollen blankets. After the overheated apartments of Moscow, Mila found the flat desperately cold. In order to warm up she would go out for brisk walks through the streets of Pimlico. Her abiding memory of that first winter in London was 'the terrible damp chill which penetrated your bones - much worse than the Russian winter'.

My parents went for walks in St James's Park, and visited the House of Lords for tea with Lord Brockway, one of the dignitaries whom Mervyn had persuaded to help his campaign. A friend of Mervyn's took Mila to Harrods, but she was unimpressed. Western plenty didn't amaze her as it did some Soviet visitors. 'We had all this in Russia - before the Revolution,' she joked as she was reverently led into the Food Halls. Mervyn drove her to Swansea, stopping off at Oxford on the way, and introduced Mila to his mother. For all her entreaties to Mervyn to give up his struggle over the years, Lillian embraced Mila warmly.

My mother immediately set to work making my father's flat as cosy as possible, setting out the old china she'd brought from Russia and putting her books on the shelves. She made a great effort to become the perfect wife of her imagination, preparing dinners from her well-thumbed copy of
1000 Tasty Recipes,
the Soviet housewives' culinary Bible. She tried to make friends with the neighbours, but most of them snubbed her and wouldn't even greet her in the hallway - whether out of British coldness or because Mila was a citizen of an enemy empire, she never worked out. Often in her first six months, the shock of dislocation would overwhelm her and she would burst into tears. She wept from the cold as she typed translations to earn a bit of money, her tears falling among the typewriter keys. Mervyn was at a loss as to how to comfort her. He chose to let her cry herself out.

'I can't say I was completely unhappy,' my mother recalled. 'But I think I had spent too much of my life in Moscow for leaving not to be a terrible trauma.'

She missed her friends, and the passion and excitement of the dissident lifestyle - swapping samizdat books, waiting for the next issue of the
Novy Mir
journal (which had even dared to publish Solzhenitsyn's
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
in 1962), being part of a devoted group of like-minded people who had become like a family to her. And though she had never been rich, even the small luxuries of Soviet life had always been affordable. But in London, Mervyn's salary barely covered his own needs, let alone Mila's. She remembers standing weeping outside a Tube station after she'd spent all her money on little presents for her Moscow friends at a haberdasher's on Warren Street and didn't have enough left over for the fare. In a fit of generosity, my father took her to Woolworth's and bought her a green wool dress for a pound. It was the only item of clothing she bought all ofher first year.

For the first time in her life, Mila felt depressed, unable to summon the unconquerable will which had fuelled her fights ever since her childhood illness. She wrote to her sister in Moscow of her terrible homesickness. My mother didn't say openly that she wanted to return, but Lenina feared that was only because her headstrong sister couldn't bear to admit to herself that all her years of struggle had been a mistake. Lenina showed the letter to Sasha, who sat down at the kitchen table to compose a reply. 'Dearest Mila, there is no way back for you,' he wrote. 'You have chosen your fate and you must live with it. Love Mervyn; have children.'

After so much expectation, so much idealization, so much sacrifice and burning, high ideals, could the reality have been anything but a disappointment? What marriage, what life in the fairyland of the West could ever live up to the expectations of six years of longing? I believe that to my parents, the fight had become an end in itself sooner than either of them realized. When victory came neither of them knew how to continue the story. For years Mervyn and Mila had been superhuman creatures to each other, bounding over mountains and valleys, beating on the doors of heaven, confronting the juggernaut of history. But when they finally came together as real, living people, they found themselves having to invent something neither of them had ever known - a happy family. After a life as actors in a great drama they found the hardest thing was simply to become human again.

In the spring of 1970, as she was returning from Brighton on the train after a session teaching Russian, Lyudmila had one of her attacks of melancholy and burst into tears. Unlike in Russia, no fellow passenger came to comfort her or to ask what the matter was. But she looked up out of the window at the green English fields. 'What a fool I am,' my mother remembers thinking. 'I have been crying for six months. This Russian blackness must stop.' Slowly, Mila began to make a life for herself in London. My father was always shy of company and never had many close friends, but my gregarious mother soon made English friends who loved her warmth and wit, and with whom she could go to the theatre and ballet. They never became the close-knit, comradely surrogate family of my mother's youthful circle, but being among cultured people helped ease the pain of losing her old Moscow life.