‘The postal workers are demanding 7½ per cent, the government is offering 4½ per cent, and until this argument is settled we must suffer,’ Mervyn replied. ‘I think the government is quite wrong on this question, but I do not advertise this viewpoint. The last few nights I have slept badly, and dream of you often. I often think of those wonderful dinners which you made me. I try not to overeat here. I bought myself a new pair of slippers, Hungarian ones, and have begun playing squash. Don’t be sad, dear Milochka, everything will go well for us in the end. I hug you. M.’
It was only a matter of time before Mila’s scandalous love affair with a foreigner who had been expelled from the Soviet Union collided with her position at the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. Behind her back, she knew, there was a lot of gossip. Some of her colleagues clearly sympathized; many others looked at her askance as they passed. Mila did her best to be alone, so as not to embarrass anyone. She tried to bury herself in work, only to find that she had ‘grown stupid from the pain, it is bothering me so much’.
The blow fell after a specially convened meeting of the Institute’s leading Party members, as dour a bunch of zealots as Mila had ever encountered. ‘This week has been a nightmare, constant nerves, tears,’ Mila reported. ‘At work there’s a huge furore. A few days ago there was a Party meeting. They demanded a report about “My Case”. They wanted blood. They shouted, “Why didn’t we know earlier? Why didn’t you tell us everything?” (This is all in the style of the Party Secretary.) “We need to find out more through the Organs [of State Security]. And what does she say for herself? She denies it. You see! If the government made a decision, that means it’s a correct one. She must be punished! She put personal interests before society’s! He will surely use her for anti-Soviet propaganda and then abandons her.”’
A few of Mila’s colleagues, bravely, tried to defend her, urging leniency and saying that falling in love didn’t make her an enemy of the people. But mostly, ‘the clever ones stayed silent, the bastards shouted with all their might’. This hypocrites’ court was the worst sort of pressure, a perfect weapon for the conformity obsessed Soviet society. And not only Soviet society: defying authority is one thing, but few human beings can withstand a chorus of disapproval from those whom they know and trust.
Mila didn’t give them the victory of seeing her break down in tears. But the experience shook her deeply. For all her spirit, she was a Soviet woman, daughter of a Communist, a child brought up by the state. Never, before now, had she been confronted with the prospect of outright dissent. And she was all too aware that the taint of rebellion might follow her through her whole life.
‘I think that even if I do leave, they will immediately telephone my new work or someone will inform on me, in the old fashioned way, and they’ll fire me immediately in turn,’ wrote Mila. ‘Nevertheless, I must leave. The atmosphere is vile, a lot of gossip, little talks “of an instructional nature”, which are enough to give me a heart attack.’
Despite Mila’s public disgrace, the Institute’s director was sympathetic. He arranged a transfer to the Central Library of the Academy of Sciences at the same status and wage, where Mila was to translate scholarly articles from French academic journals. To Mila’s huge relief, her new colleagues turned out to be young and independent-minded. The library was in fact a ‘den of dissidents… it was like throwing a fish into water,’ Mila remembered. The room where she worked was decorated with large, surreal, pencil caricatures of various wanfaced historical figures which the director had allowed some wag to draw directly on to the walls. She and her fellow workers amused themselves by snapping a series of comic photos – one shows Mila and her friend Eric Zhuk posing as the Worker and the Communal Farm Woman, a classic 1937 statue of Soviet youth. He holds a hammer, she holds a sickle, and they stand back to back in a mock-heroic pose. Another shows the young librarians parodying Rodin’s sculpture of the Burghers of Calais, standing in a row with their heads tragicomically bowed. The liberal atmosphere of the library allowed Mila to have heated arguments with the senior researchers over whether Soviet power would fall in their lifetimes. Mila argued that it would; Professor Faigin, an expert on Peter the Great, argued that it would survive for centuries. ‘The Russian pig lay on one side for three hundred years,’ the sprightly old professor joked. ‘Now she’s rolled over on to the other and will lie there for another three hundred.’
On 19 October 1964 Mila went with two new girlfriends to greet the returning cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov. They had gone into space when Nikita Khrushchev was still in power; by the time they came back to earth he had been quietly removed in a politburo coup, to be replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. For the wider Soviet public, the transition passed with barely a ripple, but Brezhnev’s harder line was to bode ill for my parents’ case. Mila and her friends waved frantically as the cosmonauts cruised down Gorky Street in an open car in a fine drizzle. Then they went to a crowded café and talked till the evening.
But despite her new job and the support of her friends, the pain of separation would not let her go. ‘I hope so much that our love will not die, I so want to be with you, that it seems that if I were offered a choice I would rather die than never be with you again. Honestly!’ Mila wrote, alone in her room one autumn evening. ‘I miss you. I suffer terribly. I can’t see or listen to anyone or anything. I want to cry out to the whole world from love, from despair, from such a cruel and unfair fate!’
As I read my parents’ letters, sitting by the fire of the dacha where I lived with the woman who is now my wife, I felt a strange thing. As Xenia sat on the sofa and read the difficult, cursive script, and I took notes, sitting on the floor, I could not shake the terrible feeling that both my parents were dead and lost to me. Their voices were so distant, the details of their intimate lives and suffering so moving, that it seemed to me that I was rooting through lives already lived and gone. The letters were powerful as much for what they didn’t say as what they did, and I found myself unable to break the spell, even when I called my mother and heard her familiar voice on the telephone. We spoke of reassuring banalities, and I could not bring myself to say what I was feeling – that I was overwhelmed by admiration and love. And sorrow, for the knowledge that though my parents would eventually be reunited, their unspoken belief that they could erase their traumatic childhoods through prodigious self-sacrifice and struggle in the name of love would ultimately fail.
‘I so want to tell you my feelings, about my unending, deep, warm and eternally sad love for you,’ my mother wrote. ‘My letters seem dry because it’s impossible to say in words what is happening – something wonderful and terrible at the same time. It’s light and beautiful but burningly painful.’
Winter dosed in on Moscow, and, later and with less vehemence, on Oxford. Mervyn continued to write to whomever he thought might be of some help. But it was becoming clear that there would not be a swift resolution. He and Mila continued to speak by telephone for ten minutes once a fortnight, at ruinous cost. They agreed to alternate the calls – Mila would pay 1 ruble 40 per minute after filling in a complex system of forms and bank slips to book the call at the Central Telegraph on Gorky Street. Each call cost 15 rubles 70, a considerable chunk of her salary of eighty rubles per month. Yet to Mila it was worth every kopeck She prepared herself for her twice monthly telephone ‘date’ with Mervyn at the Central Telegraph as meticulously as if he’d really be there, instead of being a distant voice on the crackling line. She made sure not to wear shoes that Mervyn didn’t like. She would ask her cousin Nadia to do her hair in a beehive, and she’d put on her new raincoat and take her new handbag. It is this vision of my mother that comes back to me most powerfully when I think about the letters: a small, limping figure in her handmade best outfit and carefully coiffed hair, walking alone to the trolleybus stop on Gogol Boulevard, proud that she is on her way to a date with a beautiful man of her very own.