Yana was too beautiful, too surreally perfect to live, so I was strangely unsurprised when a mutual acquaintance called late one night, in the autumn of 1996, and told me that she had been found raped and murdered at a remote Metro stop somewhere in Moscow’s grey suburban hinterland. No one -least of all the police – had any idea of who would want to kill her.
Even before her death I couldn’t think of her as anything but a child of her time, vibrating to the deep, doomed rhythms of a specific moment. I could never place her anywhere else but Moscow, or imagine her old, or bored, or cynical, or fat, or married. So that’s why it seemed right, somehow, that Russia swallowed her in the end.
She had been so perversely bright and optimistic while everything about her lied and died. But reality finally reached up to pluck her out of her cloud, like Icarus, and pulled her down, down deep into its dark underbelly. She died broken, raped and terrified near a remote Metro station, strangled by someone – a stranger, a lover? Who knows? If she’d been a character in my novel I would have killed her off, too.
Mervyn returned to the Soviet Union at the end of the summer of 1963, three years after he had left. Through St Antony’s, he had managed to arrange another graduate exchange with Moscow State University. The fact that the authorities had allowed him back was proof enough, he surmised with relief, that bygones were bygones with the KGB. Back in Moscow, Mervyn quickly picked up his old friendships – with the exception, that is, of Alexei and Vadim.
Mervyn had had enough of the high life he’d pursued in his earlier incarnations. He was thirty-one years old, and ready to settle down. Valery Golovitser told Mervyn that he knew a delightful girl who’d be just right for him. Golovitser, it seems, was a more astute student of his fellow men than his friend and cousin Valery Shein, who tried to persuade Mervyn to go out with the brassy, fashionable and pretty girls of his fast circle.
No, the girl Valery had in mind for Mervyn was as intellectual and romantic as he was himself, but brave and spirited with it. Mervyn was interested, but thought the idea of a blind date crass. He asked if he could see Valery’s friend Lyudmila before they were formally introduced.
Valery suggested that Mervyn wait for them outside the portico of the Bolshoi after the end of a performance; that way he could catch a glimpse of his prospective new girlfriend. It was an arrangement that only someone from an absolutely innocent age could have contemplated, more like something out of a Moliere play than the start of a realworld romance. Nevertheless, Mervyn duly waited in the driving sleet of an October evening, and indeed caught a glimpse of a diminutive young woman with a slight limp, chatting animatedly with Valery as they emerged from the theatre.
A small tea party was arranged in Golovitser’s little room. Mervyn was introduced as an Estonian, to ease the exoticism and awkwardness that the presence of a bona fide Englishman would have caused. Mila remembers what she noticed most of all was the shy ‘Estonian’s’ beautiful long back. Mervyn noticed Mila’s kind grey-blue eyes. In an occasional diary Mervyn kept, written in clumsy Welsh to render it incomprehensible to the KGB in case he lost the notebook, he noted on 28 October 1963 that he’d met a girl ‘of very strong character, but utterly charming, intelligent’. They arranged to see each other again. They went on long walks together and chatted for hours. Before long, my father had become a regular visitor to my mother’s tiny room on Starokonushenny Pereulok.
My mother and I went to see the old place, once, thirty-odd years after she left it, during one of my mother’s annual visits to Moscow. The house stood back from the street, through two archways filled with uncollected rubbish. It was in an ugly, turn-of-the-century building, squat and institutional, with thick walls and barred windows on the ground floor. The hallway smelled of sodden cardboard and mould, and the ground-floor doorway to the communal apartment was covered in flaking layers of brown institutional paint. It still had its old row of doorbells, one for every room of the kommunalka. I pressed the button, the same one my father pressed for the first time in 1963, hesitantly, bearing carnations, and again, for the last time, in 1969 when he came to take her away with him to England. A young woman opened the door, listened as we explained that my mother had once lived there, and let us in with a shy smile. She and her husband and the old woman with whom they shared the kommunalka were moving out soon, she said. The building was due to be gutted and sold off by the Moscow City Government for conversion into luxury flats.
It was not much of an apartment. There was a wide corridor lined with curling linoleum, gaping layers of wallpaper, and separate locks on each door. At the end of the passage was a squalid kitchen, its ceiling peeling from the weight of years of grease, disconnected gas pipes from defunct cookers sticking out of the wall.
My mother’s room, little more than a storeroom, really, was now a nursery for a sleeping two-year-old. My mother looked round unsentimentally, peering up and down as if looking for something that remained of her. Finding nothing, she turned and we left. She seemed unmoved, and we went shopping.
At the time, I was living on Starokonushenny Pereulok myself. The house was an early thirties constructivist building, and the long, narrow rooms of the apartment had walls and windows at strange angles. It was 300 yards from my mother’s old apartment near the corner of the Arbat. In the evenings I would wander the deserted backstreets, up to Ryleev Street, where Valery Golovitser used to live and where my parents first met. I’d walk down Gogolevsky Boulevard, where they had walked, arm in arm, to the Kropotkinskaya Metro, and up Sivtsev Vrazhek Street, where my mother used to walk to Gastronom Number One for her shopping. They were streets freighted with memory for my parents, but not yet for me. I had not yet read their letters, nor taken much of an interest in their early lives; I did not, then, feel any connection between their Moscow and mine. ‘Mervyn, do you imagine how I walk through the puddles of night-time Moscow to our home on the Arbat?’ my mother wrote to my father, late in 1964. He did. Now I do, too.
In her little lightless room with its single narrow window, Mila made something that she’d never had before – a home. Then, when Mervyn appeared in her life, she made a family.
‘In the autumn of 1963 I saw you for the first time,’ Mila wrote a year later. ‘I felt some kind of inner impulse, some kind of momentary, searing certitude that you were precisely the one person with whom I would finally, really fall in love. It was as though a piece of my heart detached itself and began living independently within you. I was not mistaken. In a very short time I understood you and came as close to you as if I had been your shadow since your first steps in this world. All the barriers collapsed – political, geographic, national, sexual. The whole world was divided for me into two halves – one, us (you and me), and the other – the rest.’
The minutiae of the nine months my parents spent together in Moscow survive because over six years of forced separation their conversations were all relived, in great detail, in their later letters. Almost every minute and day of their few months together was revisited and turned over, lovingly, like a keepsake. Every little tiff and conversation and lovemaking and walk was played out in Mila’s mind, replayed and discussed, words, sentences remembered and analyzed, produced like living proof that it was not all just a dream, that for a while they really had a home, had each other. ‘Literally every detail of our lives together goes through my mind,’ Mila wrote. ‘I live for the memory of those times.’