Luckily for Mervyn’s sanity, a saviour soon appeared in the diminutive form of Vadim Popov. Popov was a junior official from the Ministry of Education, who became my father’s first real Russian mend. They met when Mervyn visited the ministry to begin his official duties, which consisted of compiling a paper on the Soviet university system. Vadim was slightly older than Mervyn, strong and squat with a square Slavic face. He was a drinker, and fancied himself as a ladies’ man, and at times could be bluff and even abrasive. But Mervyn found himself warming quickly to his new comrade’s rough charm.
Vadim appointed himself Mervyn’s guide to what my father fondly imagined was the ‘real’ Russia – a Russia of smoky restaurants, animated conversations and body-odorous embraces. Over months, and in gradual degrees, Vadim drew Mervyn out of his shyness, and led him into a glamorous world of flirtatious women and sentimental, vodka-induced confidences.
Though Mervyn reported his first, official meeting with Vadim to discuss Soviet higher education policy, he did not, as embassy regulations required, report the many drunken dinners which followed. He didn’t dare. If some fool in Chancery found out they would probably have banned Mervyn from seeing his one Russian chum, his sole window on to a Moscow his embassy colleagues never saw.
By day, Mervyn toiled in the high-ceilinged, bourgeois splendour of the embassy, housed in the former Kharitonenko mansion, a hideous miniature stately home situated directly across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. By night he would spend hours chatting with his flatmate over cups of Ovaltine, or giving his KGB goons a good night-time exercise as he wandered up and down Tsvetnoi Boulevard and Petrovka Street. On the blessed evenings that Vadim invited him out, he would sneak away from Sad-Sam to a forbidden but fascinating night of bad food, terrible music and real, true-to-life Russians on raucous Gypsy restaurant-barges on the Moscow River. He was as happy as he’d ever been.
Winter in Moscow comes down like a hammer, crushing out light and colour, beating the life out of the city. It closes overhead like a pair of musty wings, enveloping Moscow in a cocoon, cutting it off from the world. The city begins to look like a black-and-white dreamscape, disorientating and subtly disquieting. On the streets streams of huddled figures hurry through pools of dirty yellow light before disappearing into doorways or the Metro. Everything becomes monochrome, the people in black leather and black fur, the city swathed in black shadows. In the underpasses or in shops, the only places one sees people in bright light, faces are pale and strained and everything is pervaded with the wet-dog smell of damp wool. The skies are dirty grey, low and oppressive.
Every winter I spent in Moscow I had a sense that the world was closing in on itself, shrinking into a state of siege behind double-glazed windows, taking shelter in the fug of state- provided steam heating, and that we were powerless in the face of this overwhelming force of nature, fragile, unable to do anything but accept our lot.
As the first frosts of December 1958 began to bite, Mervyn’s dinners with Vadim were becoming more regular. They would arrange the date and time of meetings before they parted; both, for unspoken but obvious reasons, preferred not to call each other on the telephone.
One evening, Mervyn set out for Manezh Square by trolleybus, expecting to go to Aragvi, one of their favourite Georgian restaurants, or perhaps the National Hotel. But to his surprise, and slight alarm, he saw Vadim standing near the trolleybus stop next to a purring official ZiL limousine. Vadim greeted him warmly, and explained offhandedly that the car belonged to his uncle, who’d loaned it for the night to take them to his dacha, where dinner was waiting. Vadim held the door open expectantly. Mervyn wavered, turning over the possible consequences of breaking the rules imposed by the Soviet government banning foreigners from making unauthorized trips beyond the city limits. Then he climbed into the ZiL and drove with Vadim to the dacha, far beyond the city’s edge and deep into the wintry countryside, and into a new stage of his life, strange and dangerous.
The dinner was excellent. Mervyn and Vadim ate caviar, herrings, vodka, smoked sturgeon and steaming boiled potatoes served by an elderly cook. They sat by the dacha’s log fire discussing women, and drunkenly attempted to play billiards. The cutlery was of heavy Victorian silver, the fireside armchairs were overstuffed and of pre-revolutionary vintage. A friend of Vadim’s was there, a fat and jovial gynaecologist who cracked jokes about his research work, which consisted of inflating the wombs of female rabbits. Vadim reminisced about his latest conquests. Politics were not mentioned. Mervyn relaxed, fuzzy with the vodka, for which he always had a weak head. When he praised the house, with its vast dark oil paintings and sweeping staircase, Vadim muttered casually that his uncle was quite the bolshaya shishka, literally, the ‘big pine cone’, slang for big boss.
At one in the morning the cook came up to tell them that their ZiL was waiting. They drove to Moscow in silence, sated, drunk and happy. Back on familiar territory as the huge car eased around the turn on to the Garden Ring at Mayakovsky Square, a rational thought struggled through the vodka haze. Mervyn ordered the driver to stop a couple of hundred yards short of Sad-Sam. He got out in a flurry of thanks and goodbyes, and walked the rest of the distance home. A young British diplomat arriving outside a foreigners’ compound in a Soviet official limousine in the small hours of the morning might have been misunderstood if any of his cocoa-sipping colleagues had happened to notice. This would be my father’s little secret, a secret life with the Russian friends he had discovered which no one at the embassy could take away from him.
My first Moscow apartment was a dingy little place just round the corner from Sad-Sam; from my windows I could see the same intersection, clad in a pall of grey exhaust. In the evenings I would walk down Tsvetnoi Boulevard, alone. No goons followed me.
My place of work in Moscow was on Ulitsa Pravdy, literally the Street of Truth. Every morning I would hail a passing car, briefly haggle with the driver over the two-dollar fare and be driven to work. Some days polished black government Audis with tinted windows would stop for me, sometimes ambulances and, on one occasion, an army truck full of soldiers. In any case, whatever the vehicle, I trundled or bounced past Sadovaya-Samotechnaya, turning north up Leningradsky Prospekt. The old Pravda building, where the Moscow Times leased half a floor, was a grimy constructivist hulk crouching among backstreets lined with sagging warehouses. I would be at work within fifteen minutes and would run up the stairs to the cavernous newsroom.
The paper was run by bright young expatriates, mostly Americans. It was owned by a diminutive Dutch former Maoist who also published the Russian editions of Cosmopolitan and Playboy. Most of my new colleagues were welleducated Russian majors, all bright, friendly and enthusiastic. My own brief at the paper was a simple one. While my more serious-minded colleagues toiled over Kremlin intrigues and the state of the economy, I was cut loose with an open brief to hunt and gather quirky feature stories in the human jungles of the city. It was, for someone of twenty-four, with exactly two years of rather diffident journalistic experience under his belt, a small, but remarkable, professional miracle. Quite unexpectedly, I found that I had the whole screaming, teeming, outrageous, lurid underside of Moscow more or less to myself.