Usually the first thing I do when I get to my parents’ home in London, after making the obligatory pot of tea, is look in the fridge. It delivers me an instant update, a state-of-the-nation report, like an electrically powered oracle. Tell me, oh great Westinghouse double-door fridge–freezer with ice-maker, how are things round here? Will I get through this visit without tantrums and tears? I should, of course, just pay attention to its constant, thermostat-controlled existentialist message: CHILL.
I’m not sure what prompts me to open the door, beyond relentless insatiable gluttony. It is a completely unconscious reflex action. But it’s not a behaviour unique to me. Often, in Hollywood movies, you see people get up in the middle of the night and open the fridge. There, in the darkness of the kitchen, light pours out like a beam of wisdom while they lean in to find a bottle of milk. Sometimes they don’t even bother to retrieve anything: just contemplating the contents seems to help the players in any overheated domestic drama cool down a little.
What I am looking for is reassurance and love. Because of all the places to find love, it is more likely to have survived in this frosty universe than in the rest of my parents’ stuffy hothouse, where rows eventually occur because I am opening too many windows and complaining that I can’t breathe or sleep and my face is swollen and puffy from near suffocation.
My parents store love in the fridge, where it will not perish as rapidly: in jars, bottles, packets and opaque Tupperware containers. The ingredients refrigerating there are the most unconditional expression of affection possible between my mother and father. And between them and me. So when I look in the fridge, they are proud that it is full to overflowing, as if it were proof not only of boundless prosperity—particularly for two survivors of World War II who know about hunger, shortages and rationing—it is also incontestable proof of their capacity to share this plenty with me.
But while my mother is always happy for me to look in the fridge, to admire its contents as if I were looking into a cabinet of curiosities, sometimes she doesn’t want me to touch. She is saving some things to eat on certain occasions, and does not want me to pre-empt those plans with my random foragings. She gets apprehensive if I start rummaging or help myself, as if she would prefer it if the fridge came with a PIN number to which only she had access.
On an ordinary day, this is what I might find in the fridge if I went on an archaeological dig to the very back of the shelves:
A tin of goose fat from Fauchon in Paris
A tin of foie gras
A jar of rillettes de porc
Eighteen—yes, really—different kinds of mustard and chutney
Imported Scandinavian herrings in dill and mustard sauce
Several cheeses: a bitey aged cheddar in its red wax coat, a
Coulommiers on a bed of straw in a wooden round box, demi-sel cream cheese in little silver foil squares, fromage blanc, Cantal,
Leyden, Emmental
A pair of weisswurst
A saucisson à l’ail
A vacuum-sealed cotechino sausage
A jar of sauerkraut
A bunch of long small radishes, brought back from a French market
A corn-fed chicken with giblets in the body cavity.
This small sample of ingredients represents the United Nations kind of food we ate at home for the eighteen or so years that I was fed on a more or less daily basis by my mother. Between them, my parents speak English, French, German, Russian, a little Italian and some Spanish. But my mother’s library of more than 2000 cookbooks includes many in languages she does not speak but can cook in. When she developed a crush on meatballs and wanted to make authentic frikadeller, she simply bought a Scandinavian cookbook on the subject and translated the recipes.
Each night my mother served up a three-course meal cooked from scratch. For many years it was a matter of pride that her repertoire was so varied that she did not repeat herself unless by popular request. The food was gobbled down by her appreciative audience in a matter of minutes; while my mother ate at a dignified French pace, my father, having learned to eat at speed in the English public-school system, passed on the urgency to me in the form of contests to see who could finish first and secure a second helping, his greedy shovelling mouthfuls punctuated with carnal grunts of appreciation. Then, when the plates were clean, dishes were discussed and critiqued with the same seriousness as a concert or play.
So imagine the chaos, the confusion, and the sense of threat when one day in 1980 I came home from university, opened the fridge and was faced with an entirely unfamiliar set of ingredients: stacked glass dishes of herrings, fermented red cabbage, beetroot soup. Things smelled yeasty, sweet but sour: slightly farty.
That was how I learned that Vitya Borovsky, my mother’s Russian teacher, had moved in with us for an unspecified period of time that was to stretch to nearly a decade.
My mother had taken it upon herself to rescue him from woeful rented digs after hearing his sob story of how, when he first arrived in Britain, he lived on a park bench. He was now ensconced in a cheerless bedsit where he could not play the cherished record collection he had acquired with his earnings to remind him of his glorious musical heritage. When she took me to meet him after class one day, our first exchange was baffling.
Me: So, Vitya, what did you do before you came to the university?
Him: I was a postal order.
Me: Sorry? (stifling urge to giggle)
Him: (firmly and more slowly) I was a postal order.
(I dare not look to my mother for clarification as I can see from the corner of my eye that she has her hand over her mouth, smothering her urge to laugh, which only makes mine worse.)
Me: A postal order? But that’s a piece of paper.
Him: A postal loader, is that how you say? Yes, a postal loader.
(By now my mother and I are convulsed with laughter. Vitya looks on, delighted to have entertained us with such a humble job description of delivering mail bags.)
Once Vitya was installed, my mother found herself feeding an assortment of Russian dissidents who dropped in on their former compatriot whenever they were let out of their country on brief cultural visits: dancers, film-makers, conductors, theatre directors and designers. The fridge was stocked in a state of hypervigilance, ready for half the Red Army, should it choose to defect, to eat at our place.
After a few vodkas, bowls of my mother’s authentic borschtsch or shchi prompted high-profile dissidents to suddenly announce that they either would not or could not go home. Our house was invaded as swiftly as Czechoslovakia, except without the tanks. All the rules changed. Meals were eaten at irregular hours. The phone rang very late at night. People we hardly knew came to eat and to stay. The only thing that remained the same was that copious amounts of tea were drunk, though Russians like to drink it from a tall glass and suck it through a sugar cube.
At first, I paid little attention to the guests at the kitchen table beyond taking the opportunity to revive my lapsed Russian vocabulary. I was too absorbed in my shaky career and serving the cultural tsars who were my bosses. But gradually, our visitors became more stellar than anyone I was meeting at work. One day I came home to find Mikhail Baryshnikov wrapped in one of my father’s bathrobes watching Dynasty, his tousled hair still damp from a shower.
Speechless in front of someone I’d had a major crush on since the age of sixteen, I stumbled into the kitchen.
‘What’s HE doing here?’ I stammered.
‘He shared a flat with Vitya in Leningrad,’ said my mother casually, savouring the impact of her superstar visitor. He had, she added, arrived bearing a tin of the very best caviar and she was now preparing blini for dinner, as if this were an everyday occurrence.
‘Mischa’, as he was known, was shooting a film called White Nights and on his days off, he would visit our home to relax, sometimes singing plaintive Russian songs or repeating jokes told to him by his best friend, the poet Joseph Brodsky.
On several occasions he brought his co-star Isabella Rossellini with him. Shy, scrubbed free of make-up, quick to blush, and without any of an actor’s customary vanity, she carried a tube of truffle paste in her handbag and squeezed it liberally onto whatever food was put in front of her. She also insisted on doing the washing up.
For my father, to whom ballet was a total bore, Mischa was no one special (he referred to him as ‘that nice boy’) but he almost swooned listening to Isabella talk. Closing his eyes, he could conjure up her mother, Ingrid Bergman, one of his screen goddess pin-ups. Having met Bergman, I could hear how mother and daughter shared the same intonation, accent and cadences to an uncanny degree. In Isabella’s presence, my father wore a foolish, lopsided smile I rarely saw. As for myself, I could hardly look at Mischa, I was so churned up with puppyish devotion.
His visits were social rather than political—he had defected much earlier and remade his life brilliantly in America. But others who came to visit were in a much more precarious situation. Gradually, without us even noticing, our home, once a solemn fortress to which strangers were never admitted, was turned into a safe house for those who needed a discreet sanctuary in which to seek counsel and refuge. Sometimes for a night, sometimes for weeks. Having had very few of my friends stay the night as a child, I was somewhat put out to discover my mother was having wild sleepovers that involved group singsongs, rowdy jokes and cheeky impersonations of world leaders. She blossomed in this company: became more beautiful and more animated, emboldened by her rapidly improving Russian and the new audience’s appreciation for her skills and cuisine. She laughed more than I had ever seen, which made her seem girlish and suddenly younger.
My father raised no objections to the changed rhythms and habits of the house. In the past, whenever I have thought about this time, I have always seen this as my mother’s story: it was she who invited Vitya into our lives, she who came to converse fluently with him and his friends, fed them, translated documents, made calls, drove them to meetings, acted as intermediary and messenger in endless to-ings and fro-ings. Vitya made her vital.
But while language was a barrier to my father, excluding him from much of the soul-searching that went on deep into the night, he provided a kind of still centre in all the emotional chaos of the Slavic soul agonising over questions of leaving behind homeland, and in some cases family, that took place over countless dinners around the kitchen table. My father offered counsel in these endless conversations about strategy, conducted in an atmosphere of conspiratorial intensity.
He may only have ever learned to say ‘pass the salt’ in Russian, but Papa commanded the respect of men who had faced real tyranny. He also did not hesitate to lecture them about their own culture: one night he delivered a sermon-like address to Mischa on the importance of reading Tolstoy, who listened graciously and without interrupting.
When the high-profile theatre director Yuri Liubimov came to London to present his critically acclaimed production of Crime and Punishment, we suddenly and unwittingly found ourselves caught up in a real political maelstrom.
A canny operator who had triumphed over censorship for many decades at his progressive Taganka Theatre company, Yuri decided to defect during his visit, and sought asylum in our home with his wife, the daughter of a Hungarian government minister. He was leaving behind a remarkable career and all the privileges that his status at the helm of a major company brought. It was a major embarrassment to the Soviet Union, which considered him its most high-profile defector since the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.
Yuri gave a defiant interview to The Times in our sitting room, where he was photographed proudly wearing a crucifix around his neck and declaring his religious faith in protest at the Soviet regime’s official policy of atheism.
Then he calmly asked my father if he could borrow his study to make a private phone call, oblivious to the fact that my father did not let anyone use that room, ever. When he came downstairs, he told us with solemnly that he had just spoken with Yuri Andropov, the ageing leader of the Soviet Union, at the Kremlin, telling him that he was resigning his citizenship. After that, it was on for a cat-and-mouse game at the highest level.
Fearing that his rental apartment was bugged by the Soviets, Yuri decamped in secret to a safe house provided by a network of supporters, which caused me significant headaches at work.
As a result of his novels selling well in the Soviet Union, Melvyn had become interested in all things Russian. When Yuri brought his Dostoyevsky adaptation to Britain, Melvyn decided to make a documentary about the production. I was assigned as the researcher on the film because of my Russian language skills. But I was unprepared for the tricky conflict-of-interest loyalties the situation produced.
One morning shortly before his defection had become public, Yuri did not turn up to film an interview with Melvyn. I knew where he was hiding. But sworn to secrecy as to his whereabouts and situation, I could not tell Melvyn why he had been stood up. When I was eventually given permission to do so, my boss was visibly annoyed that I had the inside story.
Mrs Thatcher offered Yuri her personal protection. Whenever Yuri visited my parents, MI5 parked a car outside their home, matched on the other side of the street by a car belonging to the KGB. Meanwhile, to add to the general cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, a young Latvian conductor, Mariss Jansons, then a rising star, turned up at our house one evening with a device he had bought on tour in Germany that was meant to identify bugging devices. Sure enough, our phone, which had been making constant clicking sounds during conversations, was tapped. A few days later, the drama ramped up another notch: after Yuri left his secret address under escort to attend rehearsals of his production, he was threatened by Soviet thugs in a botched kidnapping attempt at the theatre.
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.