In the winter evenings, on his way back to the university from the Lenin Library, Mervyn would stop by Valery Golovitser’s place to chat and pick up some new records, duck into an archway to try and shake off his KGB goons, and appear at Mila’s front door. He would install himself on her divan and read while she fried sturgeon, Mervyn’s favourite fish, in the kitchen. After dinner they would go for long walks along the boulevards and the backstreets, and sit up into the night talking. He loved her homemade jam, served on prerevolutionary Gardner plates she’d bought in an antique shop and which she took with her to London. Later, Mila’s room with its divan bed, little table and wardrobe became a lovers’ everywhere for them, while the neighbours in the next room held rowdy parties and played the accordion.
Their romance was a homecoming for them both – two lonely, bookish, loveless people finding in each other what they had lacked all their dislocated lives. Mila was twenty-nine and raised on the romantic fantasies of Soviet films and literature. Most of her friends and her sister had married in their teens. Mila, though she’d had affairs and was popular with men despite her twisted hip, had never found someone who lived up to her exacting standards.
But now, suddenly, as though by an act of God, came the long-backed foreigner, the dreamy, shy Russophile with his long fingers and careful vowels, so earnest and innocent (despite those tumbles into sin in the company of Vadim and Shein), so lost, so in love with Russia but with no home there. She would become the embodiment of all he loved in Russia, its passion and fire.
Mervyn was the exact shape of the gap in Mila’s life. He made sense of her existence, he was what she had been missing to make her complete, to patch over the horror of her childhood and the loneliness of her adulthood. She became the intelligent mother he never had. He became the son, the child to nurture as she was never nurtured, as if by healing him she could heal herself, make everything all right for both of them. After a lifetime of deprivation, Mervyn was Mila’s redemption.
‘Life can’t be so cruel and unfair if it gave me you,’ Mila wrote to him, later, when they were living on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. ‘For some reason I have moved into you, and nothing will chase me out of such a warm habitation. There’s so little warmth and love in the world that you can’t afford to lose even a crumb of it that you’ve found.’
Mervyn was truly Mila’s first love, and it had all the moral purity and absolute, dreamlike clarity of adolescence. Mila had all too few human reference points for her emotional life, but many literary ones. The language of love, for her, was melodramatic, naïve and slightly childish, but underpinned with a welling passion which was all her own. It was not an erotic passion, but a passion fuelled by a terrible fear of abandonment, of losing this one chance to redeem her unhappy life and cancel out all its suffering with one bold stroke.
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.