Saturnine by nature, Yuri began to feel hemmed in by captivity after three weeks of lying low. A message came to us via one of many defector networks that Rostropovich was offering him the use of his house at Aldeburgh, a small fishing town on the east coast where his great friend the composer Benjamin Britten had founded an annual music festival. My mother drove there with Yuri and his wife, accompanied by an unmarked police car. I followed a few days later. When Maman and her top-secret cargo reached the house, they were unnerved by the police requiring them to pose for photographs so they could be identified in the event of kidnapping. Temporary panic buttons were installed in case they needed to raise the alarm. Things were starting to feel a little surreal.
The stakes were very high not only for Yuri but for his production designer David (Dodik) Borovsky, who happened to be Vitya’s cousin. After the play opened, Dodik decided to return to the Soviet Union, knowing that once there he would face punishment for allowing his high-profile comrade to slip his leash. We knew it meant he would probably not be able to work and would lose his position at the Taganka, but might it mean more? How severe would his interrogation be? And the recriminations? Could he be sent to a gulag or banished to Siberia? None of us knew, but we feared the worst. Dodik did not waver. He had a wife and children at home, spoke no European languages and had no desire to remain in Europe.
With the heaviest of hearts, Vitya, my mother and I took Dodik to Victoria Station, pushing trolleys of electrical goods that he was taking home as gifts. We tried to remain cheerful and optimistic, hugging and kissing till the very last moment, but once the train pulled out our masks fell. On the very same platform where I had sobbed my heart out farewelling my friends leaving for Moscow seven years earlier, I now clung to Vitya, both of us undone.
We did not hear from Dodik for years and feared the worst.
There was furious rivalry, mistrust and paranoia among defectors and dissidents as to how genuine their status was: some believed others made up their credentials and claims to political oppression and censorship, and denounced them as opportunists. They competed to see who was the most authentically Russian and who was the most significant loss to their nation’s pride.
Film director Andrei Tarkovsky thought Yuri’s religious gesture of wearing a cross was pure showmanship and posturing. Introverted and shy, Andrei came to our home many times, always intense, oblique and elliptical in his pronouncements. When he decided to defect, he left a young son behind, causing great misery and personal sacrifice. Only once he developed terminal cancer did the hardline Soviet authorities relent, allowing his son to visit for a final goodbye.
Andrei loved nature and being outside, so my mother took him to Richmond Park, where he shot a whole lot of photographs of her with his wife Larissa, only to discover when they got home that he had forgotten to put any film in the camera. On set, someone else always took care of that kind of thing.
Unlike Yuri, who was a master at playing the political game and relished every move, Andrei had no interest in politics, brinksmanship and strategy, despite being a keen chess player. He just wanted to be left alone to make his films, and found the Western film media’s adulation tedious and puzzling. Scholars pored over his every utterance as if he were some priestly poet of higher truth, but in person, away from public scrutiny, he was modest and simple in his needs. My father had never seen any of his films and had only the dimmest awareness of who he was. Andrei was impressed by my father’s grasp of history, his socialist convictions and musical literacy.
Throughout this entire period my father never complained that the situation was putting his family at risk or at any inconvenience. Nor did he ever ask any of our long-term guests when they might be leaving, even when Yuri had to all intents and purposes commandeered our house as the nerve centre for his risky and constantly changing plans. He teased and taunted the Kremlin, issuing terms and conditions under which he might be prepared to go home.
Despite the tension and melodrama, there were moments of humour. At dinner, Yuri regaled us with brilliant impersonations of the many leaders he had weathered; his bushy eyebrows, bulging eyes and broad girth made his irreverent impressions of bloated Soviet leaders like Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov particularly convincing. He and my father forged a mutual respect for each other, despite having no shared language, which culminated in a perverse compliment when Yuri joked with me one day: ‘You know, I met Stalin, but I think your father is more terrifying.’
If I ask myself now what was going through my father’s mind in those years, I suspect that his motives for putting up with all this were mixed. The snob in him was probably flattered to have such distinguished and eminent houseguests, even if he was only dimly aware of who they were. He was probably also relieved to see my mother so animated.
The Russian invasion diverted my mother’s attention from the loneliness of the empty-nest syndrome, which had probably caused her to take Vitya in as a surrogate child upon whom she could lavish endless care. He was as needy and demanding as a baby bird, and my father was probably grateful to him. His antics included eating with his mouth open, displaying a poor example of Soviet dentistry in a prominent row of uneven gold teeth, holding his cutlery like spears. As a child, Vitya had survived the terrible famine of the siege of Leningrad by licking the potato starch in wallpaper glue—and perhaps far worse. So when he ate, he lowered his head to the plate, shovelling fuel into the furnace of his body like a Stakhanovite worker. He was prone to singing vast quantities of opera by heart (including soprano roles), and performed a daily circuit of Soviet Army calisthenics in the garden every morning; by then my bootcamp gymnastic circuit had been pulled down in our backyard, otherwise he would have made ample use of the rings and trapeze.
‘Baby, punch me in the stomach, ppp-leeze, punch me,’ he would urge after these exertions. When I obliged, my fist met abs like concrete, which bruised my knuckles.
As well as a repertoire of filthy Russian swearwords which he deployed liberally, Vitya stuttered to great effect, using his inability to spit out more than one syllable as an expression of exaggerated disapproval—especially if the word started with NO as in ‘He is a NN-NN-NOBODY,’ or ‘There is NO-NO-NOTHING he can do’. He harboured absurd prejudices, such as believing that ‘only homosexuals wear slip-on shoes’ (a common Soviet opinion). These attitudes and his various neuroses had great novelty and comic value. Vitya willingly became our resident exotic and clown. Invited into grand houses by philanthropists and pillars of the establishment, he was happy to play to the gallery, a Russian dancing bear who entertained his starchy hosts with fiercely accurate mimicry of the opera stars he coached, backstage gossip and his pseudo-peasant table manners.
Over ten years my mother befriended him, virtually adopted him, fell in love with him, fought with him and eventually in utter exasperation, threw him out. He was, in every sense, our family’s Rasputin: charismatic, manipulative, devious, duplicitous, intellectually brilliant, melodramatic, an unapologetic serial seducer (despite being self-consciously unattractive) and chauvinist. He was as unpredictable and volatile as spring weather, frequently taciturn to the point of rudeness at meals for no apparent reason, petulant and sometimes puerile. One day when he was feeling particularly exuberant, he picked my mother up and wedged her in the kitchen sink where she giggled helplessly, stuck.
The two of them collaborated closely on Vitya’s scholarly biography of Fyodor Chaliapin, the great Russian bass; with no formal training, my mother proved herself a first-rate researcher and translator, which gave her a tremendous sense of personal achievement and satisfaction. By the time the 600-page volume was complete, her Russian was so fluent and her accent so flawless that she passed for a native speaker and embarked confidently on reading the complete works of Chekhov and Gogol in the original.
Vitya and I rubbed along more or less well: at first I was grateful that he pulled focus from me, like a substitute sibling, though I was less than impressed when my mother moved
him from the spare room into mine without asking me.
Hardly the most patient or tolerant of men, my father indulged and even spoiled Vitya. When Papa took us on an extravagant family pilgrimage to the Bayreuth Festival, Vitya came too. He bought Vitya Hermès ties and introduced him to the merits of Marks and Spencer menswear, tried to explain British socialism to him, managed his finances, gave him professional advice about how to negotiate fees and contracts, and helped him secure a mortgage.
In return, Vitya introduced my parents to his friends and colleagues—they dined with endless divas and maestros, patrons and impresarios—including them in the exclusive embrace of the musical world he inhabited. On the phone to me, my mother name-dropped her latest encounters—‘Domingo called today’, ‘We had dinner with Abbado’—boasting of her new social cachet and using it as a lure to draw me home more often.
My father was probably grateful to Vitya for diverting my mother’s affection while he was most likely playing away from home himself. In a moment of girlish infatuation, my mother confessed to me that she wanted to leave my father and start a new life with Vitya. Although I wanted her happiness and felt she should have left my father years before, I was sceptical about this plan but said nothing.
There were scenes of high melodrama when my mother turned back at Heathrow from a planned weekend in Paris with my father on hearing that Vitya had become unwell. Often in tears, she confided in me like a bashful teenager. I was embarrassed by her gushing and the awkward role reversal but said I would support any decision she made.
Eventually, she recovered her sanity and the crush passed, averting what would have been a disaster. Fortunately, her feelings for Vitya were not reciprocated. He may have exploited my mother in other ways, but he did not take advantage of her physically. She was not his type; he preferred wispy, fey creatures. Later, my mother became a confidante to several of his hapless and short-lived girlfriends, giving quiet thanks that she was not one of them. By all accounts, he treated his lovers appallingly.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Vitya returned to Saint Petersburg several times but was unwilling to settle there permanently, recognising that the scars to the national psyche would take longer than the rest of his lifetime to heal, and that corruption would remain embedded in the great cultural institutions. By the time he died of painful stomach cancer, the rift between him and my mother was ravine-deep and unreconciled. Although he owed her everything, he left her nothing. Once again, she was disappointed.
And what of the dazzling comrades whom Vitya brought into our lives for that tumultuous period? Like Vitya, Yuri Liubimov also returned to his former country. He was reunited with his friend and colleague Dodik Borovsky, who later returned to visit us after the collapse of communism. Following a period of being blackballed, Dodik resumed a distinguished career in Russian theatre until his early death from illness. Today, his creative workshop in Moscow is the only museum in the entire country devoted to the work of a set designer. We never heard from Yuri again, though he continued to work internationally well into his eighties. Though shy and often aloof in public, Mischa stayed in touch. He and I had dinner together when we found ourselves in the same city. Once, backstage, he introduced me to a renowned choreographer, saying that my mother was the best cook in the world.
When the Russians invaded our lives, tea consumption soared. We really should have installed a samovar. Once they departed, the fridge returned to normal: the herrings and cabbage rolls disappeared, the contents reverted to their original cultural palate. It was as if the Cold War had never taken place.
CHAPTER 15
My father’s daughter
Never one for spontaneity, my father was a planner. He made no distinction between professional travel clients and his wife and daughter. Holiday itineraries were typed and issued to concerned parties as a fait accompli. I don’t remember him ever consulting my mother about destinations. Alone in his study, in a vapour of cigarette smoke, bent over the fine print of his reference library, he scrutinised maps, timetables and guide books, whether he was designing a tour for five hundred students, two hundred senior executives, fifty dermatologists or his family.
He was an acknowledged pioneer and leader in the tourism industry, admired for his uncompromising standards in recruiting staff, finely tuned budgets and elegantly choreographed itineraries. His secret weapon, apart from the surgical precision with which he planned every minute of a trip, leaving nothing to chance, was the calibre and charm of the couriers he trained to escort his groups. Often suave and good-looking, these exclusively male Oxbridge graduates were under strict instructions to ‘keep their hands off the merchandise’, as my father put it, referring to the impressionable American women who made up the bulk of his earliest groups. Couriers stuck to the script of a Bible-like manual my father wrote once every two years, providing them with heavily editorialised historical background and cultural context for their trips. Over four decades, he mentored people who went on to become competitors, applying his exacting standards of excellence to their own version of his concept of tailored travel.
I inherited my father’s restlessness and, unlike my mother who was a fearful passenger, loved planes. As a child, if I was very, very good, the stewardess would invite me to pass the basket of boiled sweets around to passengers. I might be allowed into the cockpit to meet the pilot and given an enamelled wings badge as I disembarked.
When it came to inspecting hotels, which all of our holidays involved, by the time I was ten, I was an eager patron of room service, confident at ordering my favourite club sandwich and a bowl of French fries, waiting with anticipation for that discreet knock at the door and the magical entrance of the trolley with its concealed heated cabinet. Like a trophy hunter, I was always looking for souvenirs to add to my stockpile of miniature soaps and shampoos, rivalled only by my impressive collection of miniature airline salt and pepper shakers. By puberty I had been on so many so-called site inspections that I knew at a glance what rating a room or suite deserved.
Accommodation was booked well in advance, and always at the upper end of the scale. If not the newest, splurgiest, most luxurious hotel, then the one with the finest historical pedigree—for my parents there was no greater accolade a place could earn than to boast that Mozart, Napoleon, Churchill or de Gaulle had slept there. Preferably all of the above. Travel time was scheduled to the minute (long before GPS existed). Nothing was left to chance.
My father did it all by the book. One book, to be precise: the Michelin Guide. The green edition for historical and cultural sightseeing; the red for accommodation and eating. He never trusted anyone else. When his sources became outdated, he remained steadfast. We never played it by ear, or adapted to circumstances, or made do with a pit stop or had picnics. Weeks before departure, my father booked ahead, reserving tables, calibrating the trip to the gastronomic equivalent of an orchestral crescendo. First, the mild overture of a pleasant one-star bistro, then the swelling expectations of a more formal two-star relais, and finally, the symphonic climax of a three-star temple of gastronomy. By the time I was fifteen I had eaten in half a dozen of the finest restaurants in the world and tasted turbot, truffles and palm hearts. When it came to sauces, I knew my romesco from my gribiche.
I learned to be a planner by osmosis. Logistics became a fascinating kind of puzzle, a satisfying game of strategy. Could you design a neat sequence in which you could connect a flight to a train without too much delay or criss-crossing a city? Get from A to B the most efficient or scenic way possible? Avoid traffic bottlenecks by a cunning detour? Find your way to inaccessible places?
To celebrate my father’s sixtieth birthday, I wanted to demonstrate that I had learned everything he had taught me. But how? By plotting and deploying all his signature tactics, I devised an elaborate plan to turn up in London on the day as a surprise. But that was not enough: I wanted to bring him something special that would involve a challenge and degree of difficulty that proved mastery of his
own skills.
I roped my mother in as co-conspirator, but being a bad liar, she was nervous about giving the game away. I would not, she told my father, be able to celebrate in person on the date, but would fly back for Christmas instead. She resisted his suggestions they go out for lunch, saying she would prefer to make him one of his favourite meals at home. Thus tempted, he offered no resistance.
What could I bring him that he cherished? Chocolate was too banal and he already made regular trips to Paris to stock up on cheese and charcuterie. Suddenly I had it: wild strawberries. I’d seen him almost swoon while sniffing punnets of them in markets across southern France, rhapsodising on the delicacy of their scent. Despite his natural greed, he resisted his usual tendency to gulp them down, savouring each miniature bliss bomb with uncharacteristic restraint while rolling his eyes heavenward. They were his ambrosia.
But in October, when his birthday fell, they were also out of season. So I would go for the next best thing: wild strawberry ice cream from his favourite Parisian glacier, Berthillon. He had introduced me to its legendary repertoire years before and, despite the fact that I did not like chilled food or drinks, I had to admit that the intensity of the flavours had a magical effect. Although cold usually lessens the impact of flavour, somehow by freezing their syrups and fruit purées, Berthillon enhanced the original taste. Its green apple sorbet was a miracle of tartness that made you shiver with pleasure. Yes, I would arrive in London with glace au parfum fraise des bois.
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