Mervyn decided to take a short holiday with Vadim. They flew to Gagry, the resort on the Black Sea coast where Boris Bibikov had been arrested twenty-five years before. It was a welcome escape from the stuffiness of Moscow’s brief but scorching summer, and the distress of Georges and Irina’s seemingly incurable illnesses and forced separation. Down south the air was warm and fragrant, unaffected by the drabness and depression of Soviet life, and the locals were hospitable and garrulous rather than cocooned against a hostile world by shells of rudeness.
Mervyn relaxed. The whole KGB business would blow over, he hoped, and Alexei had apparently let the matter drop. He’d been careful never to mention anything to Vadim – still believing, in all apparent sincerity, that Vadim had nothing to do with his attempted recruitment. They lay around on the beaches of Gagry, Mervyn’s pale skin burned red by the southern sun, or strolled the promenades. Mervyn asked a friendly, round-faced girl student to come back to his room, and she did so without demur.
But a few days into the holiday Mervyn was summoned to the telephone. It was Alexei, who announced that he was in Gagry. He arranged a rendezvous by the champagne kiosk near the round pond of a nearby park at dusk. Their meeting, among the patterned shadows and the croaking frogs, was short but dramatic. Alexei was elegant and unhurried as ever, and greeted Mervyn courteously. Was Mervyn free that evening? Good. Another rendezvous had been arranged for nine o’clock, in a room at the hotel. Alexei turned and crunched away down the gravel path with his steady step.
Mervyn was not expecting the meeting to be a pleasant one, and it was not. Alexei introduced Mervyn to his ‘boss’, Alexander Fyodorovich Sokolov. He was an older, heavily built man who wore a bad Soviet suit and cheap sandals. Sokolov was clearly an old-school NKVD bruiser, whose demeanour exuded contempt for his younger, foppish colleague and the spoiled young foreigner who stood before him.
Alexei launched the proceedings with great solemnity. He spoke of Mervyn’s ‘career’ and his ‘intentions’, about how the Soviet Union was ‘the only free and fair society in the world’ . Sokolov, quoting from Mervyn’s KGB file, grimly noted that his father had been so poor that he never drank wine. Surely it was time for Mervyn to strike a blow against the system which had so oppressed his parent? Evidently, thought Mervyn, the gallons of beer and cases of whisky downed by his old man had not been recorded by the KGB.
After two hours, the threats came. ‘We know,’ said Alexei gravely, ‘that you have been guilty of immoral acts.’
‘If the Komsomol were to find out,’ growled Sokolov, ‘there would be a big scandal in the newspapers, and you would be shamefully expelled from the university and the country.’ Now that, Mervyn knew, was nonsense. In fact, there had been all too few ‘immoral acts’ – a single visit to a brothel in Moscow with Vadim, Nina from Bukhara, the girl at Vadim’s uncle’s dacha, a girl who lived in a curious, circular building near the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the student in Gagry. It was a pretty modest total, certainly compared to Valery Shein or even Vadim himself.
‘The time has come to say finally, yes or no.’ Alexei and Alexander Fyodorovich looked at Mervyn expectantly.
‘Then the answer must be no,’ said my father. ‘Nothing will persuade me to work against my country.’
That night, sitting on his bed and turning over the possible consequences of his defiance, Mervyn realized that there could be no more stalling. He wasn’t afraid of their threat to cause a scandal, but the KGB could get at his friends. There were sinister stories circulating about trumped-up charges, accidents, arrests for hooliganism, cancellation of residence permits. He decided to pack his bags, take the first plane back to Moscow and leave the Soviet Union, probably for ever.
Yet it wasn’t that simple. Days after Mervyn returned to Moscow, Alexei made a conciliatory phone call. A decision had been taken at the highest levels, Alexei assured my father, that no further action would be taken. Alexei even insisted that they have another little dinner. He had a piece of news for Mervyn.
‘That woman you mentioned, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya,’ Alexei said casually as they tucked into what would be their last cosy meal together. ‘She’s just been arrested. On contraband charges. She was involved in smuggling foreign currency, and other matters. She was morally corrupt.’
Alexei continued to eat as Mervyn stared at his plate, his appetite gone.
‘I told you that they were a bad family,’ Alexei went on. ‘If I were you I’d keep fifteen kilometres away from them.’
Mervyn watched as Alexei sipped more wine. Alexei’s face was blank, expressionless. Two weeks after her mother’s arrest, Irina herself was taken from her hospital bed and driven to the Lubyanka for questioning. Shortly afterwards Irina, the ballet lover and aesthete, followed her mother into the unimaginably brutal world of the labour camps. Mervyn heard nothing more of them. This was not a game, it finally dawned on Mervyn. This was not a game at all. He made hurried arrangements to return to Oxford.
10. Love
Adventures can be wonderful things.
Especially when they’re over.
The Moscow my father knew was a solidly rooted place, its certainties and rules as fixed as the prices in state shops and the squat Stalinist cityscape. Most Soviets of his generation spent their entire lives in the same apartment, worked in the same jobs, bought vodka for an unvarying 2 rubles 87 kopecks and waited ten years to buy a car. Time was measured from vacation to vacation, theatre season to theatre season, from the publication of one volume of a collection of Dickens novels to the next.
Forty years later, when I arrived in Moscow, the city was making up for lost time. The place was obsessed with its own thrusting modernity; it seemed to change overnight, every night. One day you’d see young men with Caesar haircuts and DKNY sweaters where previously red blazers and crew cuts had been in. Internet cafés-cum-trendy clothes shops opened in the place of old grocery stores. Gleaming new chrome and marble shopping malls sprang up with alarming speed, complete with see-through escalators and dollar-dispensing cash machines. After a while I got so used to the pace of change that it seemed normal – a restored church here, a new corporate headquarters there, like mushrooms after the rain. London seemed quaintly static in comparison. The rest of Russia may have been quietly disintegrating, but Moscow waxed fat on the spoils of the plundered empire.
Whenever I wasn’t trawling the lower depths of Moscow’s underbelly for lurid features articles, I dedicated much of my energy to going to parties. My father had found his fun in noisy Gypsy restaurants. A generation later, and sudden money and freedom had transformed the Moscow party scene into something rich and strange. At Club 13, housed in a decrepit palace just behind the Lubyanka, dwarves in miniature Santa Claus costumes would whip you with cat-o’-nine-tails as you walked up the stairs. In Titanic, the favoured haunt of wealthy criminals, the black Mercedes were parked a dozen deep outside and gangs of girls would wait at porthole-shaped tables to be chatted up by fat-necked beaux. At Chance, naked men swam in giant glass-fronted fish tanks, and at the Fire Bird casino I once spent an evening drinking in the unlikely company of Chuck Norris, the ageing action film star, and his guest Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist politician.