Moscow Nights

by Nigel Cliff

  I have a feeling that I’ve come home. Of course you know I have always loved Russian music, but when I first got to know your country it was as if I got a second Russian soul. I fell in love with Moscow and the Russians at first sight. But it was especially often at home in the USA that I remembered the Russian woman who I met on my last visit, and who as you just saw I was so happy to see now. When I first met her back then she showed me a photograph of her son who died in the war. He was like my twin—he was really terribly like me, it was amazing. He was also my brother by profession; he was a pianist too. She asked me, “Can I call you my son?”

  Then he was off, swept away by adoring fans. The Teatr journalist listened to the excited chatter and had a sudden insight: the more the Soviet people reviled America’s leaders for jeopardizing peace, he thought, the more they yearned to give their respect and love to this American who they believed had a pure soul and heart.

  Hurok had booked Van into the National, which looked out on Red Square and was the least bad hotel in town. The room filled with friends old and new, and Van eagerly welcomed them all. When the Teatr journalist turned up, Van carried on where he had left off two hours before:

  He was probably a good musician, that pianist who was killed, about whom I feel like a brother. There is an amazing amount of musical talent in Russia. Once I was so captivated by the playing of Sviatoslav Richter that I kissed the hand of this wonderful musician, and the fact that the lovers of music received me here with such warmth and care fills me with joy and a feeling of responsibility. If you ask me what I would like to see here first of all, I reply: A grand piano. I need to practice properly before the concerts, as this tour is a great responsibility for me. I need to pass examination by the audience once again.

  Khrushchev stayed true to his word and arranged a dacha where Van could rehearse. Leaving the city, the government car headed through the prettiest part of the Moscow region, passing forests of white birch and firs and little dachas and churches. After a couple of hours, it turned off the main road and down a country lane. Here, through a pair of hand-forged metal gates with a lyre motif, was something that could only be Russian: a forest full of composers. Van had been allotted a simple green wooden dacha in the leafy, meandering compound known as the House of Creativity at Ruza. Next door was Shostakovich’s dacha, where Prokofiev had also lived. In Van’s, an enclosed veranda with a folding bed led to a few small rooms, one with wood baffling and a Weinbach baby grand. The bathroom facilities were rudimentary, and the sole fireplace was made from roughly stacked bricks, but the silence was startling and the air was soft with the perfume of grasses and flowers. The Teatr journalist found his way here, too, and remembered a line from “Moscow Nights”: “Not a rustle is heard in the garden.” Local lore held that the song was composed in this very house, and as the music wafted from Van’s piano it seemed it had been written for this very night.

  With the last notes still lingering, Van struck the opening chords of his concert program. Composers out for a stroll slowed their footsteps and listened. A ten-year-old pianist who had already played his exam pieces to the tall, friendly visitor hovered outside. The piano gathered strength, but suddenly it stopped and Van burst out of the cottage. “Isn’t this paradise?” he cried, flinging his arms wide open and stretching his tired fingers. An unseen cuckoo called from the trees. “How many times will I come back here?” he called back, and silently he counted its long series of notes, wanting to believe in the prophetic bird.

  In the daytime, he ambled down the paths with his friends, Henrietta of course, and Lev Vlassenko and Sergei Dorensky, who came down to see him. The group sat smoking in the canteen, a simple one-story barracks that was light and airy inside, with starched cloths covering the round tables, each piled with a dish of apple piroshky or fluffy rolls or a large jam tart. A low antique sideboard from a merchant’s house bore two samovars and stacks of glasses in metal holders. Between meals, they played table tennis and went down to the wild shores of the Ruza River, a tributary of the Moskva, where they rowed in a little boat. Van, casual in a T-shirt and zippered blouson, knelt down to talk to a little girl and helped a boy wearing a baggy coat, heavy boots, and a beret with his fishing rod. Photographers swarmed after him, and he obligingly posed lying in the grass. Peace and quiet were never long his Russian companions.

  During Van’s week in Ruza, Boris Pasternak died, humiliated and enfeebled by his persecutions. Sviatoslav Richter kept vigil beside the open coffin, playing the works of Pasternak’s piano teacher Scriabin on a battered upright; his own teacher, Heinrich Neuhaus, had made him memorize the music after Pasternak eloped with Neuhaus’s wife Zinaida. Handwritten notices of the writer’s funeral spread through the Metro, and thousands braved KGB surveillance to attend alongside squads of foreign journalists. In the crowd, a young voice recited Pasternak’s banned poem “Hamlet” in grievous tones. More voices denounced his treatment by the authorities and his fellow writers, and party officials rushed to close and bury the coffin. “We excommunicated Tolstoy, we disowned Dostoevsky, and now we disown Pasternak,” a last protestor bitterly lamented. “Everything that brings us glory we try to banish to the West.” Within weeks, Pasternak’s mistress was arrested with her daughter for collecting foreign royalties from Dr. Zhivago. She wrote to Khrushchev begging to be released and reminding him how she had cooperated with the security agency, and three years later she was quietly freed.

  DESPITE VAN’S welcome and Pasternak’s send-off, there was no mistaking the nationalistic mood among most Russians. Roberta Peters and Isaac Stern had also arrived to fulfill their concert dates, and Peters felt the tension crackling. They had been warned not to speak in the hotel, in case it was bugged, so they went for a walk in Gorky Park, only to run into a public display of the U-2 wreckage. The spoils included the camera and a selection of its photographs, together with Powers’s maps, false IDs, bills in a range of currencies, the poisonous silver dollar, and (despite the CIA’s carefully checking the planes for clues to their origin, even scrutinizing the pilots’ underwear) Powers’s personal credit card. A party of young Soviets, sixteen or seventeen years old, approached the musicians and spoke in English. They explained that their families had moved to Moscow from Massachusetts, and they were desperate to get to the United States, but friends and relatives who had applied for help at the American embassy had been arrested on their way out, slung in jail, and never heard from again. Unnerved, Peters and Stern went to the embassy themselves to check that it was safe to stay. When they performed, the Russian love of music poured out in cheers and applause, but afterward the concertgoers swarmed backstage, always asking the same question: “Does America really want war?” There was never a suggestion that the Soviet Union might begin hostilities—always the fear of being invaded again.

  Van, meanwhile, was busy renewing more friendships. Naum Shtarkman was still serving time, but Eddik Miansarov was there, as was his ex-wife, Tamara, now on her way to becoming a major Soviet pop star. Van brought her a bottle of French perfume and her son a plush toy kitten. Other foreigners from the competition were in town, too. Thorunn Johannsdottir, the Icelandic pianist who had given Van her caviar, had come to the conservatory for postgraduate study and found the Soviet students incredibly kind—until it became common knowledge that she and the out-of-favor Vladimir Ashkenazy were an item, after which they looked right through her. Liu Shikun was back, too. The businessman’s son had recently joined the Chinese Communist Party, a timely step when Mao’s regime had nationalized the arts, and he had composed a piano concerto for youth, accompanied by traditional Chinese instruments, that met with official approval. In return, the government had sent him to Moscow for further study, giving him respite from a country deeply scarred by the loss of tens of millions of lives during the Great Leap Forward. Van hugged and chatted with them all, over meals in restaurants where he ordered caviar sandwiches, licked the eggs off the top, and left the bread, a luxury version of his Carnegie Hall stud
ent pot roast.

  CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who was also in the Soviet capital, was crossing Red Square when he saw a mob milling around. He went to investigate and found Van hemmed in by women proffering flowers, silver vases, and cuff links and clutching at his clothes. “Aw, look at that,” Van said with a sigh, kissing them. “It’s so beautiful—thank you.” An all-women fan club, called the Van Club, had grown around a nucleus of admirers who’d met one another while standing in line all night for tickets to his competition bouts. Its unofficial leader was Irina Garmash, a simple-seeming young woman who wrote Van heartbreakingly beautiful letters every two weeks. The devotees socialized regularly, swapping news about their idol, and now they followed him down the streets and stood outside his hotel, waiting for a friendly wave from his window. When he left the hotel to play his first concert on June 3, they were ready with huge bouquets of flowers.

  Outside the conservatory thousands once again filled the courtyard and the surrounding streets. Squads of militiamen were struggling to keep order. Students wearing red armbands directed ticket holders inside. The few spares sold for more than ten times their face value. From the loudspeakers a voice barked at the crowd to move along, but no one paid any heed.

  In the Great Hall the aisles and stairs were packed solid. Tommy Thompson was present, as was an array of Soviet officialdom, including the magisterial “Madame” Furtseva, a former weaver who was now the minister of culture. By the time Van came out, his fans had spread a thick layer of flowers over the stage apron and piano bench. Roberta Peters looked on in awe. Four years older than Van, she was already famous when he started at Juilliard and had starred in the Hurok biopic Tonight We Sing while he was still a student, but she had never seen anything like this. Van bowed over and over to ringing cheers and shouts of “Vanya” and “Vanyusha,” removed some flowers, and sat down to play Prokofiev’s Third and Brahms’s Second Piano Concertos, with Kondrashin conducting. At the end, the audience clapped in thunderous unison, and dewy-eyed girls surged down the aisles. In Van’s dressing room Prokofiev’s widow embraced him, saying in Russian, “Wonderful, wonderful.” During the encores, including “Moscow Nights,” women at the front propped their elbows on the stage and stared up in a reverie. Van bent down to shake their hands and talk to each of them, and when he finally made to leave, they climbed up and dragged him back to sign autographs. As the house lights went off, he was still there, standing amid a frenzy of flowers in front of Soviet and American flags, saying in broken Russian, “I will never forget your wonderful welcome.”

  “Strained relations between the Soviet Union and the United States over the U-2 spy plane incident did not discourage hundreds of cheering Muscovites from pelting the 25-year-old Texan with flowers and nearly mobbing him with affection as he emerged from the conservatory,” the New York Times reported. At a post-concert dinner, “Soviet cultural officials were extremely courteous and carefully avoided political subjects.” On the embassy lawn sat an abandoned jet-powered speedboat with a silver plaque on its dashboard inscribed, TO NIKITA S. KHRUSHCHEV FROM DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER. As a satire on the stalled summit and state visit, it was priceless, but a monument was scarcely needed when Khrushchev was busy grandstanding at press conferences and heaping invective on Ike and America. The Soviet leader was still livid about the U-2 imbroglio. On top of everything else, a great deal of money had been spent preparing for the president’s now-canceled visit: as well as the golf course, a shoreside mansion had been built on Siberia’s unspoiled Lake Baikal, complete with costly new roads and communications.

  In America, where newspapers were still giving saturation coverage to the squall of Soviet denunciations, reaction to Van’s ecstatic welcome was far from universally positive. A reader wrote to the Chicago Tribune to suggest that the pianist “could do his own country a great service by canceling his tour and leaving Russia because of the attacks on this country and its President by Mr. Khrushchev. This step might cause Mr. Cliburn some inconvenience, but in the long run he would have the satisfaction of making a widespread protest against such an unsavory character as the Russian leader.” Those who thought that with diplomacy in crisis it was more important than ever for artists to step into the breach, or who were reassured that the Soviets still loved at least one American, stayed silent.

  To his Soviet fans, Van transcended politics as a kind of ideal American-Russian hybrid, an exotic but beloved adopted son, and nothing short of outright war would have kept them away. Two days later the Great Hall was equally jammed for his second concert. “In the summer heat,” UPI reported, “two spectators fainted during the first number of Mr. Cliburn’s program and had to be carried into the lobby. Many youngsters, as adoring of Mr. Cliburn as some American youth are of Elvis Presley, rushed down the aisles at the end of the Chopin program to thrust armfuls of lilacs and tulips at the tall, smiling pianist. Other music lovers pelted Mr. Cliburn with sprigs of lilies of the valley as he stood bowing and clasping his hands to his chest in gratitude for the reception.” Swept up in music and love, Van was overwhelmed and utterly alive, and he saw no reason to trim his sails to the political winds. He had grown especially fond of Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan since their divan chat in Washington, and now he met Mikoyan’s son Stepan, a test pilot, and Stepan’s wife, Ella, a classical music aficionado, who sat at the symphony with her head in the score. After each of his ensuing concerts, he slipped through the back door of the conservatory and crouched in the rear of Ste-pan’s Buick, a 1956 eight-cylinder monster, concealed under a mound of flowers. They then sped to the House on the Embankment, a grim monolith with five hundred apartments and twenty-five entrances, which housed many members of the upper echelon. In the courtyard, Van emerged from the blooms and hastened to the Mikoyans’ fourth-floor apartment, where Ella had a library of three thousand records, scrupulously cataloged and stored in a huge glass-fronted cabinet. Close friends came for dinner, and afterward they sang “Moscow Nights” and other sentimental songs round the piano till the small hours, while Ella mended Van’s frayed concert clothes. In this private world he was in his element, roaring with infectious laughter, telling preposterous stories about opera divas, and doing wicked impressions. His keenest fans quickly cottoned on to the ruse and threw flowers at the car as it left after subsequent performances, and at four in the morning Aschen Mikoyan, Ella and Stepan’s eleven-year-old daughter, looked down from her bedroom window and saw some of them sitting on a bench in the courtyard, gazing up.

  Sol Hurok arrived and installed himself in Lenin’s old suite at the National. He invited Van, Roberta Peters, and Isaac Stern for dinner, and they reminisced about the past while digging into cans of caviar. Van spoke glowingly of Rildia Bee and everything she had done for him. The flamboyant Hurok basked in his wealth and status, but at heart he was a closet socialist who had come to the United States with a handful of rubles and got his start arranging concerts for labor organizations. He never stopped scheming to bring great artists to the greatest number of people, an obsession for which he had an uncanny instinct. Van, though a lifelong Republican voter, was utterly in sympathy with him. He had come to love the impulsive impresario, with his thick Yiddish accent and his lurking humor, which always threatened but never quite managed to burst into a smile.

  DURING A break between Moscow performances, Van, Kondrashin, and Henrietta set off on a tour of Riga, Minsk, Kiev, Sochi, Leningrad, Yerevan, Baku, and Tbilisi. In Leningrad’s Philharmonic Hall two thousand fans swarmed down the aisles to present Van with souvenirs, including a pigeon that “bounced out of his arms and flew to the ceiling.” A thousand followed him to his hotel, cheered when he stepped onto the balcony to appeal for “Russian-American friendship,” and continued cheering long after midnight. In Tbilisi he was asked to don the Georgian national costume and sit at the piano while his photograph was taken. He gamely agreed and gave permission for the pictures to be published, which in Russia was interpreted as a political statement, much as his innocent wor
ds in Leningrad had been at home.

  On July 4 he was back in Moscow playing for the Independence Day celebrations at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. Khrushchev was in Austria, but Mikoyan attended and sang lustily along as Van played Russian songs. Afterward the Cliburn party moved south, and on the thirteenth it reached Sochi, on the Black Sea. At Adler airport, crowds pressed flowers and babies at Van in the warm sunshine, plump Sochi ladies with lovely smiles revealed gold teeth, and men wore plaid shirts and battered hats. He smiled back, hot in his dark suit, button-down shirt, and thin tie, his face nicked from shaving, while Kondrashin grinned in an airy white shirt and filmed the scene on his fancy cine camera. In another unprecedented mark of favor, Khrushchev had lent Van his state villa, an imposing mansion fronted by a two-story white portico set amid lush gardens with a swimming pool and badminton court. Van kicked around it for a week before returning to Moscow for his final concert on July 19. Twenty thousand fans filled the Lenin Sports Palace, which Khrushchev used for political rallies, to hear Van play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 with Kondrashin and the USSR State Symphony. “More than 1,000 teen-age Russian girls stampeded down the aisles,” UPI reported. “They crowded around the stage and threw bouquets at the lank, grinning pianist. Usherettes flanked the stage at the end of the concert to defend Mr. Cliburn from the showers of flowers, gifts and notes that were directed his way by the fans. At times during the concert, the teen-agers sighed in unison or wept. When it finished, the entire audience kept Mr. Cliburn coming back for curtain calls for at least half an hour.” By the end, Van and most of the audience were weeping; so, no doubt, were many watching the broadcast on television.

  His tour over, Van returned to the Black Sea for his long-delayed vacation. With its subtropical climate, the coast was the main resort for the whole Soviet Union, and it was especially famous for its medicinal spas. Every major institution had its own establishment where workers, gifted a voucher by their trade union, could get meals, treatments, and massages free or at cost. In the usual hierarchical Soviet way, the Council of Ministers’ spa was rated the highest in several categories. Cottages were dotted round a large park, and Van moved into one that had been equipped with a piano. Henrietta stayed with him, and Ella Mikoyan installed herself in the main building. The three swam, walked, took trips to a mountain lake, and lazed in the sun. One day, Van went to the Mikoyans’ nearby compound for a late lunch party. With mock solemnity Anastas Mikoyan warned Van not to divulge the address of Khrushchev’s dacha, as it was part of the nuclear weapons research facility; Van replied that it made no difference to him as he could barely work a camera, let alone understand complex technology when he saw it. Young Aschen, who by now had developed a fierce crush on him, was sick in bed and missed the festivities, but at her mother’s prompting, Van stopped in to cheer her up.