It was the last nail in the coffin of Mervyn’s Oxford career. His research had ground to a halt and his book had been withdrawn, he’d been on the front page of the Daily Mail, and now this. Deakin summoned Mervyn to his house for an admonitory glass of sherry. ‘Rude and totally unacceptable,’ said Deakin in clipped tones. ‘And he was a guest of the college, too. We cannot possibly put up with that sort of thing. Have you heard anything more about the job going at Glasgow? Perhaps it would be better for you to go up north and get away from things.’
Oxford, my father’s most cherished dream after Lyudmila herself, was over. Harry Willets confirmed that Mervyn’s research fellowship was being terminated over a pint in the Lamb and Flag on St Giles’ Street. Being thrown out of Oxford was a fall from grace which was to scar Mervyn more profoundly than anything else in his life; it was a blow which was to poison his every subsequent achievement.
12. On Different Planets
I have gone mad with love.
MOSCOW, I found, seemed to attract people who were ferociously smart, but often hungry and damaged, fleeing failure or trying to prove something to the world. Like a traumatic love affair, it could change people for ever. And like a love affair, or a drug, it would be exhilarating at first, but then as it wore on it reclaimed the buzz it had given, with interest. ‘What, you thought all that was for free?’ my Moscow Times colleague Jonas Bernstein would cackle whenever I showed up for work complaining of a hangover or nursing strange bruises. I suppose the answer was yes, we all did.
Moscow reached the apogee of its self-congratulatory hubris in late summer of 1997. The city’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, decided that Moscow’s 850th anniversary should be turned into a celebration of the capital’s wealth and success, decreeing a massive public celebration. On the day, Luzhkov rode in triumph past the old Central Telegraph in a motorized Grecian wine bowl as five million revellers packed the centre of Moscow. Luciano Pavarotti sang on Red Square and Jean Michel Jarre performed a son-et-lumière on the Lenin Hills, projecting his lasers on the soaring bulk of Moscow State University. I have a memory of staggering among a pile of debris behind a row of vodka kiosks near Park Kultury looking for a place to pee, and discovering a couple copulating among the discarded beer bottles and crisp packets. It was a night of misrule; as Jarre’s lasers blossomed over the city, crowds of youths rode on the roofs of packed trolleybuses and let off firecrackers in the crowd.
Yet at the same time Moscow had a filthy underbelly which people like Mayor Luzhkov wished didn’t exist. I spent two days at Kursky Station, below the platforms in a warren of dingy cubby holes inhabited by homeless people who had fallen as far as it was possible to fall. As the evening rush hour died down, the station’s secret dwellers would cautiously emerge from their underground world below the underpasses and reclaim the station as their own. Clambering down on to the railway tracks, I found families of tramps who lived in nests of cardboard and litter beneath the platforms. I shared beers with a gang of teenage pickpockets who handed half their takings to the police as protection money. A thirteen-year-old prostitute with a face that was plastered with white make-up and dirty hair held up with a shiny plastic clip tried to chat me up. I bought her a can of gin and tonic, and she explained that she had run away from a remote village where her alcoholic parents had beat her. ‘But now I’m here in the big city,’ she said, brightening, surveying her concrete world of litter and neon. ‘I’ve always dreamed of living here.’
I found other runaways hiding in a maze of underground heating ducts on the outskirts of the city. These kids scratched a living by picking pockets, fetching and carrying for the local market traders, all to fuel their habit of sniffing a cheap brand of glue called Moment. They were scruffy and emaciated but irrepressibly friendly and cocky, even though under constant threat from marauding homosexuals who tried to rape them, the police who periodically rounded them up, and American missionaries who brought them food and made them pray to Jesus. They were cunning and cynical as rats, but they lived like a family, helping the youngest ones who were just eight or nine, feeding and instructing them in the hard ways of their little world. They invited me into their den with great pride and asked me shyly to buy them hot dogs, the greatest treat they could imagine.
In August of that year, I moved into a new apartment on Petrovka Street. My landlady on Starokonushenny Pereulok, caught up in the frenzy of the economic boom, tried to hike my rent by 50 per cent with two days’ notice. I promised to pay, then did a late-night runner.
My new flatmate was a delightful Canadian flower-child turned stockbroker called Patti. Patti, like the thousands of expatriates who crowded into Moscow at that time, was riding high on the back of a giant boom which had followed Boris Yeltsin’s re-election the year before. Good times were rolling, for those who positioned themselves to take advantage of the sale of the century.
Moscow’s rich young foreigners were the conquistadors of capitalism, living in vast apartments once occupied by Stalin’s ministers, throwing epic parties in what had been the Politburo’s most luxurious dachas, scooting off for weekends in Ibiza, taking their pick of the conquered land’s womenfolk and generally reaping the fruits of a hundred billion dollars’ worth of Cold War NATO military spending which allowed them to be there. By day they would trade stocks, buy companies and peddle FMCGs – Fast Moving Consumer Goods – to the Russian masses, making fortunes selling Tampax, Marlboros and deodorant. By night they cruised around Moscow in polished black SUVs, guzzling cocaine and accumulating an entourage of astonishingly beautiful girlfriends.
One acquaintance of mine made millions through a cosy relationship he had going with the Russian Orthodox Church. The Kremlin was allowing the Church to import alcohol and cigarettes duty free, the profits supposedly going to the reconstruction of churches. Another friend made his cash doing audits for a major American consultancy company. The arrangement was simple enough. However doomed or decrepit the factory, he’d recommend that they lay off half their workforce, draw up a creative version of their accounts to sell to gullible Western investors and split the profits of the resulting share flotation with the management.
Russia certainly had a definite appeal for anyone with a dark streak of gross irresponsibility and self-destructiveness. And if you had it, there was nothing to stop you indulging it. It was a weird, Godless world, where values went into permanent suspended animation and you were terrifyingly free to explore the nastiest recesses of your own black heart.
But despite the good times Moscow got its revenge on its new masters, insidiously screwing with foreign psyches. You’d see young men who had arrived as cheery, corn-fed boys assuming within a year that hardened, taciturn look one usually associates with circus people. Selfish young hedonists quickly turned into selfish psychotic monsters – too much sexual success, money, vodka, drugs and cynicism in too short a time.
Patti, however, somehow always managed to keep her hippy cheerfulness, despite it all. I have an enduring image of Patti from that time. It was early in the morning, a summer dawn, and I woke to find Patti in my room, rooting in my desk, stark naked, looking for leftover amphetamines. She had an early flight to catch, scooting off on another business trip to Siberia to buy up factories. I stumbled to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw Nosferatu looking back at me. Patti, now pepped up by her chemical wake-up call, cheerily clacked down the hall in her Prada sandals, dragging her Ralph Lauren bags, and called goodbye.