Stalin's Children (24 page)

For Mervyn it was a little different. His good looks meant that Russian women liked him, flirted with him, went to bed with him. But he never had Shein's fervour or hunger for women. Women made him shy, and he couldn't summon the cavalier charm of his Russian friends, their swagger, or their ladykilling confidence. Now, here was Mila, the woman with a crippled body but a beautiful soul, devoted, unthreatening, intellectually independent, an ally and friend first and a woman second, yet with an apparently endless supply of love to pour out to him. 'I want to make a good, healthy life for you, a home, good food,' wrote Mila later, of her vision of their future. 'It will give me such pleasure to help you with your work. I am sure that we can make a real family, bound together by love and friendship, mutual understanding, helping each other. Everything we have we have done with our own work, by our own wits. Together, we can achieve anything.'

Most important of all, perhaps, was that Mila understood Mervyn's painful past as no one had ever been able to before. 'I see your desire to get yourself out of poverty, out of anonymity into the big world,' she wrote. 'I see how you, alone and without patrons and without a clear path to follow, are pushing on with life and scaling its heights; I understand your tastes, your interests, your weaknesses.'

There was a moment, on a slushy February evening, when Mervyn and Mila left the apartment on Starokonushenny Pereulok together and walked down to Gogolevsky Boulevard. Mervyn had to turn right to go to Kropotkinskaya Metro, Mila to the left to go and visit some friends. They embraced, and as he walked away in the twilight Mervyn suddenly realized, as he wrote in his memoirs, that he was 'profoundly in love with that lopsided figure, and I could see no future for myself without her'.

He had no idea - how could he - of quite how hard they would have to fight for that love in the years to come, or how profoundly it would transform his life. His love for Mila, like his love for Russia, began as a romantic infatuation. What had gone before were adventures, free of consequences and exciting. What was to come would expel him from himself and summon all his reserves of determination.

Mila invited Mervyn to her sister Lenina's apartment on Frunzenskaya Embankment, a sure sign of the growing seriousness of their relationship. Even after all his years in Russia, Lenina's was the first family home Mervyn had ever visited. None of his friends, not even Vadim, had invited him back to anything other than a bachelor room in the university or a
kommunalka
like Valery Golovitser's.

It was a characteristically brave move for Mila to ask him, and for Lenina to accept the idea of a foreigner coming to visit. Mervyn's sporadic KGB tails were a fact of life for both of them, and they cheerfully ignored it - but his visit could prove dangerous for Lenina's one-legged husband Sasha, who was by now head of the finance department of the Ministry of Justice. Still, Mervyn came, and was fed
shchi
soup and meatballs and cake and tea, and treated as a member of the family. He was invited back. Despite my father's dangerous foreignness and the odd formality of his manner, Lenina, Sasha and their two teenage daughters quickly grew fond of him.

Summer came, and Mila invited Mervyn to the Vasins' dacha at Vnukovo, an hour's drive from the centre of Moscow but already firmly in the Russian hinterland of infinite skies, endless fields, earth privies and water brought in buckets from a well. In the sunshine, Mervyn helped Sasha dig the garden and plant potatoes and cucumbers. In the afternoons they would feed twigs and birch bark into the samovar and drink smoky tea and eat blackcurrant jam as the light faded. Mila and Mervyn would go for long walks in the birch woods, he in a short-sleeved shirt, she in a long cotton print baby-doll dress, pinched at the waist, copied from a picture in a magazine.

I visited the dacha myself, when I was eight, on a trip to Moscow with my mother and baby sister. I was deeply excited at living in the little wooden house, with its creaking floorboards, filled with the smell of earth and pickles and with dust swirling in beams of summer sunshine. The northern summer days seemed to stretch for ever, the sky cloudless and vast. But however hot the day was, the wheat fields were always damp and filled with frogs and snails. There was a small pond full of miniature perch, one of which I once caught in a jam jar and brought home. My little fish died overnight, and I was so guiltstricken that I buried it ceremoniously in the garden, digging the thick earth with my fingers.

The garden ran riot, despite the efforts of my uncle Sasha to tend it. Lenina used to say scornfully that he'd planted three sacks of potatoes and harvested two. This may have had something to do with the fact that we boys - oddly enough I remember no awkward period of shy integration with the other village boys, we were immediately a gang - would surreptitiously dig them up in the afternoons while the grown-ups were having their naps, replace the potato plant carefully in the ground and repair with our haul to the woods, where we'd bake the potatoes in the ash of our camp fire.

In the late afternoons we would sometimes go into the forest to collect berries and mushrooms. This ancient habit seemed part of the Russian psyche; everyone in the village did it obsessively. After the breezy summer heat in the fields and dusty lanes the forest was dark, still and musty. It was a classic Russian birch forest, endless and disorientating and silent. I was always afraid of clearing away the dead leaves to expose the mushrooms at the foot of the trees after a huge millipede ran on to my hand. The Russian spirit was here, it smelled of Russia. Out of sight of the path it seemed primeval, full of shadows and whispers, unlike any English wood.

The old samovar was there from my father's day, and I would collect dry pine cones to stoke the fire, which never quite seemed to boil the water as it was supposed to. As we drank warm tea and ate homemade jam, I would ask Sasha about the war, and his tank. He was a good-natured man, and answered my questions patiently. An old local woman known as Babka Simka, who helped my aunt about the house, chastised me for my awful ignorance of the history of the Great Patriotic War, but I persisted. Later, my village friends and I would play at Civil War, Reds versus Whites. The greatest honour would be to pull a wooden model of a Vickers machine gun made by one of the village boys' grandfathers on its little trolley. As we trundled it down the rutted main street past my aunt's dacha, Sasha would sometimes shout, 'Peace to the land of the Soviets!' in encouragement as we passed.

Back in Moscow, on the evening of 27 March 1964, Mervyn was having dinner with Mila in her room. He was a methodical man, and had resolved to wait for a while before proposing to her. But as they went into the kitchen to put the dirty dishes into the sink, he suddenly blurted out, 'Let's get registered!'

'Oh Mervusya,' said Mila, using the diminutive of his name she had invented. They embraced in the greasy warmth of the kitchen. But she didn't say yes. Instead, she said Mervyn should think about it, in case he wanted to change his mind. They kissed goodbye in the corridor, and Mervyn walked to the Metro.

The next day Mervyn stopped by, and Mila accepted. Immediately, they went to the mansion on Griboyedov Street which housed the Central Palace of Weddings, the only place foreigners were allowed to marry. In the secular Soviet Union, couples were married not in the name of God but in the name of the State, presided over by busts of Lenin and accompanied by a taped burst of Prokofiev from a machine manned by a scowling old woman. Mervyn and Mila waited in line outside the director's office during the busy lunch hour to put their names down for a wedding date. They were told that the earliest slot was nearly three months away, on 9 June, and they took it. They left with an invitation form certifying their marriage date, and were duly issued with vouchers for champagne which they could redeem in special shops. On the street they parted, my father taking the trolleybus to the Lenin Library and my mother going back to work.

The long Moscow winter was drawing to its end. Mervyn would sit at Mila's tiny table, making notes from his books in a pool of lamplight, while Mila sat on the bed and knitted. She bought Mervyn records and books on her way home from work, where all the girls were curious and envious of her tall, shy fiancé. Most nights he would take the last Metro home to his room in the university, but sometimes he would stay, the two of them squeezed on to the tiny bed like teenagers, and Mervyn would tiptoe out before the neighbours rose. They had both, at last, achieved happiness.

* * *

Their idyll was bitterly short. In May, after a tedious meeting with his supervisor at Moscow State University, Mervyn noticed an unusually heavy KGB team had been assigned to follow him. He had an appointment with a university friend, Igor Vail, that afternoon, but because of the goons Mervyn called and suggested they meet another time because, Mervyn explained in unmistakable euphemism, 'I don't like to come round under certain circumstances.'

Mervyn was nervous because Vail had bought a red sweater from him a few weeks before. Mervyn was due to collect the money, which Igor hadn't been able to pay him straight away. Mervyn had also given Igor an old brown suit to give in to the
kommisionka,
or second-hand shop, which only a Soviet citizen could do. Technically, both actions were illegal, as was all private commerce in the Soviet Union. Igor had taken the suit, saying he could get a better price from an African student at the university. Igor sounded unnaturally tense when Mervyn telephoned, but insisted that he come round anyway.

Vail shared a room in a communal apartment on Kropotkinskaya Street with his mother. He greeted Mervyn overwarmly at the door. His mother was not there, but two middle-aged men in suits sat on the divan. 'My two friends,' blurted Igor, 'are interested in buying that brown suit that you wanted to sell, remember?'

'Yes, we are interested in anything you want to sell,' said one of the men stiffly.

There was a silence. Mervyn turned to leave. This was obviously a hideously amateurish set up, and with rising panic he realized who must have organized it, and why. Igor continued to smile, desperately. The man who had spoken got up from the sofa and produced a red police identity card. Mervyn, he said, was under arrest for the crime of economic speculation.

The detectives drove Igor and Mervyn in silence to the nearest police station, the Sixtieth Militia Precinct on Maly Mogiltsevsky Pereulok, just behind Smolenskaya Square. After a short wait Mervyn was shown in to the office of the duty investigator, a Captain Mirzuyev, who painstakingly composed a long account of the incident, dwelling on Mervyn's crimes as a corrupter of Soviet youth and a capitalist speculator. But the accused refused to sign, and asked the militiaman to show him to a telephone. Mervyn knew perfectly well who was behind the whole incident and could, at least, feel a little superior at the fact that the calibre of his persecutors was higher than that of a mere police captain.

'I need to call the KGB,' he told Mirzuyev, who took him immediately to the front desk phone.

Mervyn called a number Alexei had given to him years before, which he had in his notebook. An unknown woman answered, who seemed unperturbed by the news that Mervyn was calling from a police station. She took his details and told him to wait.

Half an hour later, Alexei walked into the interview room in a sharp suit, dapper as ever. They had not seen each other for nearly three years. He eyed Mervyn disapprovingly and went through the pretence of asking what had happened. Mervyn, deciding it best to play Alexei's game, told him the details of what had happened. 'You realize it's a very serious charge, Mervyn,' Alexei said coldly. 'Very serious.'

There were few formalities. Alexei simply led Mervyn out of the police station and into a waiting car, a ZiL. Alexei has come up in the world, thought Mervyn as they drove up into the Lenin Hills and back to the university. Alexei tried to make small talk, politely asking about Mervyn's mother. Mervyn replied that she was ill, but would be a lot worse if she knew what trouble her son was in. 'Oh yes, Mervyn,' said Alexei. 'You are in trouble.'

They had little else to say to each other as they sat side by side on the ZiL's wide back seat.

* * *

Later, alone at night in his room at the university looking over the lights of the city, Mervyn thought hard about what to do. He assumed that Alexei would soon renew his old offer to work 'for the people of the Soviet Union'. There were six weeks to go before his planned wedding day, and the Soviets could very easily expel him or imprison him for up to two years if he played his cards wrong. He was on borrowed time.

Mervyn told Mila the next day that the KGB had staged a 'provocation' against him. Mila, who could be so unreasonable over trivialities, was calm in crisis. She poured Mervyn a cup of tea. 'Well that's life in Moscow,' she said, and served him some of her jam on a saucer to eat with a spoon. Somehow, Mervyn hoped that he could continue stalling the KGB long enough to marry Lyudmila and carry her away to England for ever.

Unfortunately, the KGB had other plans. There were a series of tense meetings in the Metropole Hotel with his old antagonists, Alexei and his boss, Alexander Fyodorovich Sokolov. Mervyn tried to prevaricate, telling them of his great love and sympathy for the cause of international peace and understanding of peoples. The KGB men were getting impatient and pressed hard for a straight answer. Sokolov, for one, had been brought up in an era when such caprices were customarily dealt with by the simple application of brutality. He cut acidly through Mervyn's floundering - would he work for the KGB or not? He became aggressive, banging the table, infuriated by my father's increasingly desperate evasions. At the end of what was to be their last meeting, it was very clear that the KGB's patience was fast running out, if it had not done so already.

For as long as I have known of it, my father's defiance of the KGB has struck me as a noble and principled act. But on another level I also find it incomprehensible. It has occurred to me, as I write this, that if I had been forced to choose between being separated from the woman I loved and signing a paper saying I would work for the KGB, I would have unhesitatingly signed on the dotted line. Whatever my private feelings for the KGB, I would have considered the cause of my personal happiness supreme above all others. I cannot decide if this is a difference between my and my father's generation, or one of temperament between us personally.