Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (40 page)

In his Kremlin office, Khrushchev flew into a rage at Ike’s broken faith, but he recovered enough to wait and see whether the president would make amends at the summit. At a final press conference, the premier pledged to work to improve relations.

The first meeting of the principals was scheduled for the morning of May 16, a Monday. As he prepared to fly to Paris, Khrushchev, too, was in a corner. He had been trying to exorcise the ghost of war
from the Soviet machine to free up funds for his domestic programs. Yet now his antiaircraft rockets had forced him to concede that the Americans knew his missile-rattling was a feint. Undoubtedly the hard-liners would agitate for a return to the old ways, and the generals would demand that their shorn budgets be restored. During the flight, he reviewed the facts and felt humiliated. Here he was, flying to meet the Americans as if nothing had happened. Why would they negotiate in good faith if they cared so little about sabotaging the talks? He had been duped by American perfidy, the Soviet Union’s dignity insulted once too often. Worried that the other leaders might try to ambush and outgun him, he made a decision. On Monday morning he arrived at the Elysée Palace with just one objective.

In the conference room with Ike were France’s president, General de Gaulle, and Britain’s prime minister, Harold Macmillan. Khrushchev took the floor and loudly declared that he would not discuss any of the issues on the agenda until the president of the United States did three things: apologize to the Soviet Union and condemn the deliberate provocation, guarantee that no more flights would violate Soviet airspace, and punish the individuals responsible for those to date. If any more spy planes dropped in on the Soviet Union, Khrushchev added, he reserved the right to carry out missile strikes on U.S. bases. Meanwhile, the president was no longer welcome to visit the Soviet Union the next month.

Eisenhower was equally furious at Khrushchev for delivering a drubbing in front of their fellow leaders. He could scarcely repudiate his own actions or, at the Soviet leader’s bidding, punish subordinates carrying out his orders. Nor could he give Khrushchev a veto over U.S. intelligence gathering. He undertook again to suspend the flights.

The Soviet leader stalked out. The next day, he went home. He and Eisenhower would never meet again.

Thanks to what Ike called “that
stupid U-2 business,” a rare chance to make the world safer had been squandered. The Soviet press filled with
anti-American propaganda calling for vigilance and readiness to
repel the imperialist aggressor. Mao was invited to Moscow. The armed forces received standing orders to repel all intrusions into the airspace of the Soviet Union and its allies. Jets were scrambled with alarming frequency on both sides. On July 1 the Soviets shot down a U.S. Air Force
B-47 over the Barents Sea, and four crew members drowned.

The world held its breath. The Cold War had dramatically heated up again.

“
WELL
,
I’M
not going,” Van said when the Paris summit spectacularly misfired, though as usual he volunteered no political opinion of the crisis. Then the State Department called. The cultural mandarins had lined up a selection of performers to coincide with Ike’s state visit. “Well, we canceled everybody,” the official said, “but Mr. Khrushchev told us he wants you to continue.” Van readily agreed, but to avoid any new misunderstandings, he flew to Washington and, the day before he was due to depart, made a round of
courtesy calls, including one on Ambassador William S. B. Lacy, the State Department’s director of East-West exchange agreements.

Van arrived in Moscow on May 26. Two years had passed since he flew tearfully away, and the political environment was so hostile that
another American pianist concertizing in Moscow that year was mock-machine-gunned in the streets and greeted with shouts of “U-2” from the audience. Yet the moment Van emerged from the airplane, he was surrounded by hundreds of
yelling teenagers and older women tossing red and white flowers. Henrietta Belayeva was waiting, still madly in love. A girl handed him a huge bouquet of lilies of the valley, and a white-haired babushka wrapped him in a motherly hug. He was amazed and touched, and when a
journalist from
Teatr
magazine got hold of him, Van panted out elated thoughts:

I have a feeling that I’ve come home. Of course you know I have always loved Russian music, but when I first got to know your country it was as if I got a second Russian soul. I fell in love with Moscow and the Russians at first sight. But it was
especially often at home in the USA that I remembered the Russian woman who I met on my last visit, and who as you just saw I was so happy to see now. When I first met her back then she showed me a photograph of her son who died in the war. He was like my twin—he was really terribly like me, it was amazing. He was also my brother by profession; he was a pianist too. She asked me, “Can I call you my son?”

Then he was off, swept away by adoring fans. The
Teatr
journalist listened to the excited chatter and had a sudden insight: the more the Soviet people reviled America’s leaders for jeopardizing peace, he thought, the more they yearned to give their respect and love to this American who they believed had a pure soul and heart.

Hurok had booked Van into the National, which looked out on Red Square and was the least bad hotel in town. The room filled with friends old and new, and Van eagerly welcomed them all. When the
Teatr
journalist turned up, Van carried on where he had left off two hours before:

He was probably a good musician, that pianist who was killed, about whom I feel like a brother. There is an amazing amount of musical talent in Russia. Once I was so captivated by the playing of Sviatoslav Richter that I kissed the hand of this wonderful musician, and the fact that the lovers of music received me here with such warmth and care fills me with joy and a feeling of responsibility. If you ask me what I would like to see here first of all, I reply: A grand piano. I need to practice properly before the concerts, as this tour is a great responsibility for me. I need to pass examination by the audience once again.

Khrushchev stayed true to his word and arranged a dacha where Van could rehearse. Leaving the city, the government car headed through the prettiest part of the Moscow region, passing forests of white birch and firs and little dachas and churches. After a couple of
hours, it turned off the main road and down a country lane. Here, through a pair of hand-forged metal gates with a lyre motif, was something that could only be Russian: a forest full of composers. Van had been allotted a simple
green wooden dacha in the leafy, meandering compound known as the House of Creativity at Ruza. Next door was Shostakovich’s dacha, where Prokofiev had also lived. In Van’s, an enclosed veranda with a folding bed led to a few small rooms, one with wood baffling and a Weinbach baby grand. The bathroom facilities were rudimentary, and the sole fireplace was made from roughly stacked bricks, but the silence was startling and the air was soft with the perfume of grasses and flowers. The
Teatr
journalist found his way here, too, and remembered a line from “Moscow Nights”: “Not a rustle is heard in the garden.” Local lore held that the song was composed in this very house, and as the music wafted from Van’s piano it seemed it had been written for this very night.

With the last notes still lingering, Van struck the opening chords of his concert program. Composers out for a stroll slowed their footsteps and listened. A ten-year-old pianist who had already played his exam pieces to the tall, friendly visitor hovered outside. The piano gathered strength, but suddenly it stopped and Van burst out of the cottage. “Isn’t this paradise?” he cried, flinging his arms wide open and stretching his tired fingers. An unseen cuckoo called from the trees. “How many times will I come back here?” he called back, and silently he counted its long series of notes, wanting to believe in the prophetic bird.

In the daytime, he ambled down the paths with his friends, Henrietta of course, and Lev Vlassenko and Sergei Dorensky, who came down to see him. The group sat smoking in the canteen, a simple one-story barracks that was light and airy inside, with starched cloths covering the round tables, each piled with a dish of apple
piroshky
or fluffy rolls or a large jam tart. A low antique sideboard from a merchant’s house bore two samovars and stacks of glasses in metal holders. Between meals, they played table tennis and went down to the wild shores of the Ruza River, a tributary of the Moskva, where they
rowed in a little boat. Van, casual in a T-shirt and zippered blouson, knelt down to talk to a little girl and helped a boy wearing a baggy coat, heavy boots, and a beret with his fishing rod. Photographers swarmed after him, and he obligingly posed lying in the grass. Peace and quiet were never long his Russian companions.

During Van’s week in Ruza, Boris Pasternak died, humiliated and enfeebled by his persecutions. Sviatoslav
Richter kept vigil beside the open coffin, playing the works of Pasternak’s piano teacher Scriabin on a battered upright; his own teacher, Heinrich Neuhaus, had made him memorize the music after Pasternak
eloped with Neuhaus’s wife Zinaida. Handwritten notices of the writer’s funeral spread through the Metro, and thousands braved KGB surveillance to attend alongside squads of foreign journalists. In the crowd, a young voice recited Pasternak’s banned poem “Hamlet” in grievous tones. More voices denounced his treatment by the authorities and his fellow writers, and party officials rushed to close and bury the coffin.
“We excommunicated Tolstoy, we disowned Dostoevsky, and now we disown Pasternak,” a last protestor bitterly lamented. “Everything that brings us glory we try to banish to the West.” Within weeks, Pasternak’s mistress was arrested with her daughter for collecting foreign royalties from
Dr. Zhivago.
She wrote to Khrushchev begging to be released and reminding him how she had cooperated with the security agency, and three years later she was
quietly freed.

DESPITE VAN’S
welcome and Pasternak’s send-off, there was no mistaking the nationalistic mood among most Russians. Roberta Peters and Isaac Stern had also arrived to fulfill their concert dates, and Peters felt the tension crackling. They had been warned not to speak in the hotel, in case it was bugged, so they went for a walk in Gorky Park, only to run into a public display of the U-2 wreckage. The
spoils included the camera and a selection of its photographs, together with Powers’s maps, false IDs, bills in a range of currencies, the poisonous silver dollar, and (despite the CIA’s carefully checking the planes for clues to their origin, even scrutinizing the pilots’ underwear) Powers’s
personal credit card. A
party of young Soviets, sixteen or seventeen years old, approached the musicians and spoke in English. They explained that their families had moved to Moscow from Massachusetts, and they were desperate to get to the United States, but friends and relatives who had applied for help at the American embassy had been arrested on their way out, slung in jail, and never heard from again. Unnerved, Peters and Stern went to the embassy themselves to check that it was safe to stay. When they performed, the Russian love of music poured out in cheers and applause, but afterward the concertgoers swarmed backstage, always asking the same question:
“Does America really want war?” There was never a suggestion that the Soviet Union might begin hostilities—always the fear of being invaded again.

Van, meanwhile, was busy renewing more friendships. Naum Shtarkman was still serving time, but Eddik Miansarov was there, as was
his ex-wife, Tamara, now on her way to becoming a major Soviet pop star. Van brought her a bottle of French perfume and her son a plush toy kitten. Other foreigners from the competition were in town, too.
Thorunn Johannsdottir, the Icelandic pianist who had given Van her caviar, had come to the conservatory for postgraduate study and found the Soviet students incredibly kind—until it became common knowledge that she and the out-of-favor Vladimir Ashkenazy were an item, after which they looked right through her.
Liu Shikun was back, too. The businessman’s son had recently joined the Chinese Communist Party, a timely step when Mao’s regime had nationalized the arts, and he had composed a piano concerto for youth, accompanied by traditional Chinese instruments, that met with official approval. In return, the government had sent him to Moscow for further study, giving him respite from a country deeply scarred by the loss of tens of millions of lives during the Great Leap Forward. Van hugged and chatted with them all, over meals in restaurants where he ordered caviar sandwiches, licked the eggs off the top, and left the bread, a luxury version of his Carnegie Hall student pot roast.