‘Is this certain?’ she said faintly, and my father grunted.
He’d bought the cello from a colleague of his, at our embassy in Libya.
As I stood and watched, curious at this tense scene, I learned that, on the day before, the colleague of my father’s had defected to the Americans. We all stared at the cello in horror. My father finally covered it up with a bedsheet, as if it were a corpse.
For weeks afterwards, KGB counter-intelligence officers came down from Moscow, unable to comprehend how my father could have bought a cello from someone who would, at some future date, defect. In the eyes of these officers the cello was a clue. It somehow contained the virus of defection. So it was taken to pieces, deliberately broken, and never fixed and put back together. My mother never played a cello again.
For two weeks my mother and I and Genghiz had to stay in our house on the compound, with the windows and blinds shut in the stifling heat, while KGB officers raked over everything and guarded all the entrances, in case the cello made a dash for it, or had the power to make us all defect too. Suspicion and fear ruled the house. My mother went grey, my father’s anger revealed the fear behind it more than usual. But I found it comical that a cello could cause so much panic.
After the incident with my tutor, my parents realised they’d be happier without me unhappy in Damascus and allowed me–as if it were solely for my benefit–to stay in Russia during the summer holidays.
‘It’s better for her education,’ I heard my father say from behind their bedroom door. My mother complied, though I knew she didn’t want me to go. For many years- and despite the fact that I was overjoyed to spend my summers with Nana at Barvikha- I blamed her for giving in to his will. He felt judged by me, perhaps, by my silent looks that questioned his behaviour, and wanted me out of the house. But she was too weak to stand up for me, or for herself. I vowed I would never be weak like her.
After that, all my holidays were spent at Barvikha with Nana and Genghiz and I only saw my mother and father two or three times a year when they came on leave to Moscow or I spent a few unwilling days over Christmas with them in Damascus.
From then on, I devoted myself to my studies, determined to become a workhorse of the state, instead of a ‘weak woman’. I was top or near the top in my class and I learned to speak fluent English. I read everything I could, including the banned foreign books my mother’s family had access to. I wrote poetry and short stories and dreamed of travel to foreign countries and I passed my exams with flying colours. As the Soviet empire began to totter in the middle of the eighties, I was a young trainee in the KGB.
From a thin, gangly, sulky schoolgirl, I grew into a woman. I let my black hair grow long, down to my waist, and it accentuated my height. Slavic cheekbones appeared out of the puppy fat on my face. And my green eyes, Vladimir told me, could be seen from across the street. I became, Vladimir said, a classic Russian beauty and, in response to this flattery of Vladimir’s, I chose not him but my fencing trainer as my first real lover. Occasionally I would be approached at a party to play some Soviet heroine at the Mosfilm studios outside Moscow. Of course, I could never accept these offers.
By the time my parents returned to Moscow on long leave, they’d become estranged from each other. My father stayed in a separate apartment, although careful to maintain the fiction of their marriage. To my father’s disgust, when Gorbachev came to power in the middle of the decade, my mother began to work for the Sakharov human rights organisation.
My parents’ false marriage affected me in unexpected ways. My father began to take me out to official functions in place of my mother. I knew it was because my youth and beauty reflected well on him. And I hated him for it.
By the beginning of the eighties the Soviet Union was nearing the end of its irreversible decline, and then the genial Ronald Reagan raised the stakes still further by placing a new missile system in Western Europe. This decline had been going on for a long time, of course, but nobody really understood it except the SVR- our agents abroad- who could see the outside world most clearly. The truth had become so devalued that it had effectively ceased to exist. Even the Politburo had to be told by the KGB, who learned from the SVR, that things weren’t what they wanted them to be. Like anyone else, the complacent Communist Party bosses in their closed enclave of the Politburo chose to believe their own illusions.
In 1982, mainly for this reason-a a final recognition that decline was irreversible without change, and that the intelligence services were our country’s only hope of survival- the Politburo appointed the KGB boss Yuri Andropov as leader, and our first KGB president. Where before the KGB had been a servant of the Party, this fateful move was the beginning of a reversal of that hierarchy. My father was very pleased.
‘At last we’ve got someone who knows how to run the country,’ he said angrily. ‘A real professional, not some politician.’
Years later when I told Finn of my father’s remark, he said it almost exactly mirrored what was said in Britain when someone with a life outside politics became a minister in the British Government.
‘But at least in England it’s always someone from the business world, not a spy chief,’ Finn said. ‘Spies in England work for Her Majesty’s Government.’
For some reason I’m always amused by this expression.
But the phrase ‘At last we’ve got someone who knows how to run the country’ became a running joke for Finn and me whenever someone in a foreign country came to power. At the diplomatic parties we attended together in Moscow, an official would say, ‘I see that chap Berlusconi has got in in Italy’, and Finn or I, or worse still, both of us together, would say, ‘At last they’ve got someone who knows how to run the country.’ And then both of us would burst out laughing at our private joke. It was a child’s game and we upset a lot of pompous old diplomatic bores that way.
And that was one of the first things I noticed Finn did for me. He lifted me out of my hitherto serious, even repressed, behaviour. He eroded my solemn and determined ambition to be a workhorse of the state with his gleeful, carefree frivolity. I found it–the recklessness of his behaviour-new and exciting.
‘You know, Rabbit,’ he told me, ‘your seriousness exposes the disguise of my frivolity, and my frivolity exposes the disguise of your seriousness.’
And so we played with and reacted to each other’s character opposites–in this and other ways–like two dissonant musical instruments which, combined, made sweet music. We slowly lured each other out of our inner hiding places. We dropped the emotional barbed wire that we’d both used to protect ourselves. And we fell in love with the differences we saw revealed in each other. I looked in the mirror of Finn and he looked in mine, and we began to see who we could be, who we really were.
Finn used to list the things he loved about me, in a sort of league table of characteristics that changed positions according to his whims. But I remember one true and beautiful thing he said, from early in our relationship, which stuck in my mind more than others.
We were in a corner suite at the Marco Polo Hotel, north of Pushkinskaya and our room looked down on to the ice park.
‘I forget how to pretend when I’m with you,’ Finn said to me.
And I felt the same way about being with him. I’d fallen like a stone, but what I said was: ‘You think you’re good at pretending?’
‘Are you?’ he said, smiling.
‘Yes. Better than you by a million miles.’
‘Pretend this, then,’ he said, and he kissed me.
But Finn’s reckless frivolity got him into trouble with others, particularly his masters at the British embassy, on more than one occasion.
‘It is symptomatic of your behaviour,’ was the way Finn’s head of station put it. ‘You don’t seem to take anything seriously any more.’
But he was wrong on both counts. First, Finn hardly ever took anything seriously.
‘There’s hardly anything worth taking seriously,’ he would say.
And, second, when he did take something seriously, he took it more seriously than anyone, his head of station included, could possibly have imagined.
4
