Stalin's Children (29 page)

One acquaintance of mine made millions through a cosy relationship he had going with the Russian Orthodox Church. The Kremlin was allowing the Church to import alcohol and cigarettes duty free, the profits supposedly going to the reconstruction of churches. Another friend made his cash doing audits for a major American consultancy company. The arrangement was simple enough. However doomed or decrepit the factory, he'd recommend that they lay off half their workforce, draw up a creative version of their accounts to sell to gullible Western investors and split the profits of the resulting share flotation with the management.

Russia certainly had a definite appeal for anyone with a dark streak of gross irresponsibility and self-destructiveness. And if you had it, there was nothing to stop you indulging it. It was a weird, Godless world, where values went into permanent suspended animation and you were terrifyingly free to explore the nastiest recesses of your own black heart.

But despite the good times Moscow got its revenge on its new masters, insidiously screwing with foreign psyches. You'd see young men who had arrived as cheery, corn-fed boys assuming within a year that hardened, taciturn look one usually associates with circus people. Selfish young hedonists quickly turned into selfish psychotic monsters - too much sexual success, money, vodka, drugs and cynicism in too short a time.

Patti, however, somehow always managed to keep her hippy cheerfulness, despite it all. I have an enduring image of Patti from that time. It was early in the morning, a summer dawn, and I woke to find Patti in my room, rooting in my desk, stark naked, looking for leftover amphetamines. She had an early flight to catch, scooting off on another business trip to Siberia to buy up factories. I stumbled to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw Nosferatu looking back at me. Patti, now pepped up by her chemical wake-up call, cheerily clacked down the hall in her Prada sandals, dragging her Ralph Lauren bags, and called goodbye.

'Patti, darling, when are you going to buy me a factory?' I called from the bathroom.

'Soon, honey, very soon, when we're all verry verry richl Byeee!'

As autumn 1965 approached Mervyn prepared to leave his rooms at St Antony's for ever. He had accepted a teaching post at Nottingham University; by his own assessment, a place 'towards the bottom of the second division' of universities. Fourteen months of effort and he had got nowhere with Mila, and the loneliness was eating into him. In his last weeks at Oxford, he would drive out to Wytham Woods and wander alone through the trees.

'I am very sad this evening, so I am writing to you, it helps,' Mervyn wrote. 'I was struck in your letters by what you said about your lonely walks. Do you really talk to me, call out to me? I thought all evening that I could hear your voice, low and sweet and sing-song, even though I could not answer. I think of you often and you are with me always . . . I thought how good it would be if you were here, we would sit in the garden in the sun or be doing something together. My sorrow is almost unbearable, but it goes after a time and I can pull myself together and work.'

With the end of his Oxford career came desperation. Conventional tactics were clearly not working, so Mervyn began thinking of something more unorthodox. In a final gracious gesture, St Antony's offered to pay for Mervyn to go to a conference in Vienna, even though he had done no research and had no paper to present. The only condition was that Mervyn was to get up to 'no funny business', as Theodore Zeldin, one of the fellows of St Antony's, warned him.

The conference was a lavish affair, with banquets and endless speeches. Mervyn slipped away and ate alone at a Russian restaurant called the Feuervogel, owned by a huge sweaty Russian who also waited at the tables and poured vodka even if it hadn't been ordered. A Bulgarian guitarist sang melancholy songs and bickered with the owner.

Mervyn was indeed planning some 'funny business', which involved slipping into Czechoslovakia unnoticed on the day the conference ended, to send a confidential letter which he hoped would transform his fortunes. Though at that time no visa was required and the train ride to Prague was only three hours, Mervyn spent a sleepless night before his departure, fearing that he might be snatched like Gerald Brooke. But the journey was without incident; the border guards scowled at his passport but stamped it.

Mervyn arrived in Prague on 6 September 1965 and checked into the run-down Hotel Slovan. He found Prague livelier than Moscow, and even discovered a dingy nightclub where he had a solitary glass of wine. That night he sat down to write a long, frank letter to Alexei. Mervyn spelled out the propaganda advantages of letting Mila out, and offered a 'substantial' sum of money if this were to happen. He cited cases of Poles and East Germans buying their way out, unofficially but legally. He would be helping Russia, and though he was not rich he could find benefactors. The money could go to 'charitable causes' in the Soviet Union. 'We are about the same age, Alexei, and we can talk seriously and honestly. Please help!' Mervyn pleaded.

Unlike Mila, Mervyn seemed still to harbour illusions about the fundamental decency of the KGB, or at least of Alexei personally. What he did not include was an offer to cooperate - but by this stage such an offer probably wouldn't have been accepted in any case. He sent the letter by registered post in the morning from the Central Post Office just off Wenceslas Square. He never received an answer.

Perhaps my parents found something in their separation which resonated with an emotional barrenness they each carried with them from childhood. But there came a point, quite early in their epistolary relationship, when they began to put so much of their lives into their letters that the recording of the experience overtook the experience itself, the material became too huge, the process of turning it into history began to rob them of their present.

In Moscow, Mila was settled into the private rituals of her long-distance love affair. As she left for work she would kiss Mervyn's photo. On her way home she shopped for records for Mervyn, so he and his friends could listen to Russian music together. She consulted her doctor about Mervyn's minor ailments. In almost every letter she refers to Mervyn's diet, her obsession with food a hangover from her childhood.

'Do you listen to your Mila? Please Mervyn, don't eat too much pepper, vinegar and other spices. Do you drink your milk? I drink half a litre every night. Eat properly, as I taught you, eat fresh things.' When Mervyn tried to object that he was partial to a curry from time to time, Mila would have none of it. 'I respect your tastes, but I fear some of them hurt your health - I mean what I mentioned to you in Moscow, your passion for Eastern, Caucasian and Indian food. It's too spicy for you, you are a person from a maritime climate. This is food for people with strong stomachs, but you are a delicate northern flower, you need to eat delicately.'

Mila asked for clothes, which Mervyn would buy in London [jokingly grumbling in his letters at the expense) and send to Moscow through Dinnerman's, the only authorized parcel handler to the Soviet Union. Mila would buy books and send them to Mervyn in London in brown paper parcels tied with rough string. Soon there were hundreds on his shelves.

Mila's virtual relationship with Mervyn was spiralling into a full-fledged obsession; she was plunging deep into an imagined world of her own creation. 'It is as though I live entirely in a complex mechanism called Mervyn, I see all his bolts and wheels all around me,' she wrote. 'You are the point, the aim of my life . . . Soon I will begin practising a new religion, Mervusism, and I will make everyone believe in my God of joy and warmth.'

In many ways, it seemed to her that the life represented by the stream of letters was more real than her interactions with the live people around her. 'I have no present, only a past and a future if I can believe in it,' she wrote. 'Everything around me is dead, I wander through the ruins, onwards towards some goal, towards you.' She lived for Mervyn's letters; 'everything else, I invent just to fill in the time.'

Mila describes sitting in the courtyard at Starokonushenny Pereulok in the warm drizzle, laughing out loud as she reads Mervyn's latest letters while a hatchet-faced old babushka peers out from a cellar window. 'It was as though wings had sprouted from my back,' she wrote. 'All your soul, in the form of paper and ink, poured into me like a clear stream and filled my body and soul with strength. This is the best medicine I could have. Your letters are getting better and better, soon I will cry not from sorrow but from joy.'

At the weekend she went to the dacha. Olga read Chekhov while Mila knitted; a late summer hailstorm rattled on the house's iron roof. When the storm cleared, Mila went for a long walk through cornfields, calling out Mervyn's name. The burden of grief was taking its toll on her. 'Mervyn, sorrow is sucking the life out of her . . . surely she's suffered enough in her life. I am truly worried for her,' Lenina wrote. 'Probably because she never felt or saw the love of parents she suffers twice as much now. Our house is in mourning, literally . . . She has stopped smiling, laughing, she has tears in her eyes all the time. I ask you to write more often, she lives for you.'

Mila's periods had stopped from worry, but her doctor told her not to be concerned. 'In wartime women didn't have them for years,' she told Mila. Nevertheless she prescribed daily injections 'for your nerves', as well as a course of 'magnetic therapy' - evidently some kind of pseudo-scientific quackery of the kind beloved by the hypochondriac Soviets.

For a few months in 1965, Mila seems to have become preoccupied with the fear that her good-looking fiancé might be stolen from her. It even pervaded her sleep. Mila dreamt that she was at the Bolshoi with Valery and caught sight of Mervyn down in the stalls with another woman. She called and shouted, and was seized by an uncontrollable desire to throw herself over the balcony down to him.

The pain of separation had shaken loose all Mila's deepest fears - of abandonment, most profoundly, but also lesser insecurities about her appearance. Mila felt acutely that she was no beauty. 'This is the most painful question for me, and I never speak of it to anyone - but I am terribly sorry that I will not please your friends and acquaintances in this respect,' Mila wrote. 'I am so afraid of that, I worry about it. Though I do have one comfort - all my life I have had lots of friends, including pretty ones, and they all loved me and were attracted to me. I know that you like beautiful women, like any man. I love beauty too. I hope very much that you will see beyond this and see what others do not see. We will look at beautiful women together. I am not so insecure that I cannot acknowledge the beauty of other women if they are not bitches or fools. All my life I had very few photos taken of me - you know why, but if something comes out I'll send it to you. I feel shy when you show my photographs to people.'

At work, Mila would show Mervyn's letters around. She had a man, which in turn made her fully a woman. 'I want someone to love me - I want people to know that I am not such an unfortunate.' But the pain, and perhaps an obscure sense of shame and guilt at having lost her lover, kept her behind late at work so that she would not have to see other girls being met by their husbands and boyfriends.

In late September 1965, Mervyn saw a hopeful story in the
Sun.
Secret talks on swapping Brooke for the Krogers had got further than Mervyn had suspected. Wolfgang Vogel, a mysterious East German lawyer, represented the Soviet side. Vogel had a good track record - he had brokered the 1962 spy swap of the American U2 pilot Gary Powers for the veteran Soviet spy 'Rudolph Abel'. Abel, whose real name was William Fischer, had, ironically enough, been the Krogers' controller when they worked in the US in the 1940s, running messages for Moscow's atomic spies in the Manhattan Project. Vogel was also rumoured to have arranged the 'purchase' of East Germans by their relatives in the West.

'The British government has bitterly rejected all suggestions of a swap, now or in the future,' said the
Sun
on 22 September 1965. 'They consider Gerald Brooke, jailed in Moscow for subversion, is being held to ransom. But this reaction has not apparently deterred Herr Vogel . . . On Monday night his green and cream Opel was waved through Checkpoint Charlie without the usual close scrutiny of papers for a meeting with Mr Christopher Lush at the British HQ in West Berlin.'

Four days later Mervyn was on a train trundling eastwards through Germany. The heating in the carriage had been switched off, and he passed the guard towers and barbed wire around West Berlin at dawn, shivering cold. He stayed, as usual, in the cheapest hotel he could find, the Pension Aleron in Lietzenburgerstrasse. Mervyn telephoned Jiirgen Stange, Vogel's West German lawyer contact, and made an appointment for the next day. He spent the rest of the day in East Berlin sightseeing. Wartime ruins were everywhere, and the place was tense and drab. Later in the afternoon he visited the Zoo and watched the monkeys staring at him gloomily from their cages.

Mervyn explained his case in detail to Stange, who promised to arrange a meeting with Vogel the next night. Their rendezvous was the Baronen Bar, a small and expensive place frequented by businessmen where Vogel often stopped for a drink before returning east from his regular trips. As Mervyn waited he noticed that the tall barman wore extravagant cufflinks, intended, Mervyn supposed, to inveigle the customers into giving him larger tips.

Vogel was round-faced, bespectacled and friendly. Mervyn's German was poor, and Vogel had no English; Stange had explained that his knowledge of foreign languages was confined to Latin and Greek. But Vogel was upbeat, and made a lot of optimistic noises about improving relations. He suggested that maybe Mila and perhaps one other person could be exchanged for one of the Krogers, something that Mervyn thought highly unlikely. But he was heartened by the German lawyer's enthusiastic tone.

As Vogel stood to leave, Mervyn sprang to his feet and offered to carry a small suitcase Vogel had brought with him into the bar. The case was impossibly heavy, and Mervyn could barely lift it. He staggered after Vogel and heaved the suitcase into his Opel, and waved as he drove off in an easterly direction. Mervyn never found out what was in the case, and never dared ask.