Came the Dawn Read online

  If Marya was the better skier, I was the better linguist. My Russian didn’t go very deep, but what I knew I knew well, and Marya assured me that I could pass for a Russian anywhere. I even looked like one, she said. That, I suppose, is because of the high cheek-bones I have inherited from a Scandinavian great grandmother. But actually I’m much taller than the average Russian, and a lot slimmer.

  At first we had always talked in Russian, but now Marya was eager to learn English and I encouraged her. She had a quick mind and a retentive memory and she made good progress. She was disappointed that she couldn’t quite lose her Russian accent but I was glad, for it was one of her great charms.

  We had our worries. Marya was aware of a change in her relationship with some members of the ballet company whom she had counted among her friends. There was no ostracizm, but from time to time there was a coolness which was almost equally distressing to anyone of Marya’s affectionate and generous disposition. The ballet, like every Soviet organization, had its political side, and the girls perhaps unconsciously took their cue from the Party members whenever Anglo-Soviet relations ran into difficulties. Marya, though very much a Soviet citizen in the eyes of the law, was regarded by her fellow-Russians as virtually a foreigner. It seemed a little hard that she should sometimes be treated as though she were personally responsible for not having opened a Second Front, but these moments passed, and on the rare occasions when Britain was conceded to have earned Soviet praise she even basked in reflected glory. Poor Marya was a little bewildered by the swift and subtle changes. Happily, her career did not seem to be suffering as I had feared it might.

  Our life together couldn’t be very domestic. We had taken a small suite at the hotel, which in the daytime was cluttered up with papers, secretaries and messengers, as I had to use it as an office. Most of our meals were taken in the restaurant, but sometimes in the evening, when Marya wasn’t dancing, she would go all housewifely and solemnly cook a meal on the single electric-ring. She insisted that the meals she cooked were Russian specialities, but they always seemed to taste and smell the same, whatever ingredients she used. As a cook, she was undoubtedly a most promising ballerina.

  Marya found that her friends were more reluctant to visit her now that she was married to a foreigner. I had been afraid that this would happen, but she was too busy to be lonely, and she liked most of the correspondents who lived in the hotel and who were always dropping in. Her favourite was a good friend of mine, Steve Quillan, who had recently come to Moscow to broadcast for an American network. Steve was as different as could be from the strident and assertive American of caricature. He was an outwardly placid man, with a quizzical expression and a droll sense of humour. To look at, he was tall and loosely-built, with broad shoulders slightly bowed and hands perpetually thrust into his trousers pockets. Though I never heard him discourteous to anyone in Russia except a censor, and that only under the greatest provocation, he disapproved strongly of the Soviet set-up, and his great delight was to make cracks about the Russians over the air which the censors had failed to detect in the tangle of colloquial American. I first got to know him when I acted as a stand-in for a broadcaster who’d gone out of town on a trip. The studio was about a mile from the hotel, and Steve and I used to plod up there together through the snow at two o’ clock in the morning to deliver our broadcasts. I was only an amateur, but Steve was an artist at the microphone. He had a fine low voice, which was no doubt one of the reasons why he had gone into the broadcasting side of foreign reporting. He’d give one or two ‘H’rrrmps’, which seemed to lower his voice about an octave, and then he’d start talking in a deep bass that fairly stroked you into agreement.

  Marya and I found Steve a source of endless entertainment. When he had nothing in particular to do he would weave his way up to our room, greet me with a ‘Hello, you Fascist beast!’, cast an appreciative eye over Marya, and drape himself across our settee with a contented sigh, as though he’d found sanctuary from a madhouse. Sometimes he’d bring up with him the script of a broadcast he’d just given, seeking our praise. He was still fresh enough in Moscow to be keen on the job, and he made a great effort to keep his vast American audience interested. Our raw material was very scrappy. Since we rarely met Russians except on trips, we had to base our reports on the snippets of information contained in the Soviet newspapers, and build on them. But what a builder Steve was! He might be physically confined to Moscow, but his imagination was away campaigning with the Red Army and he was an adept at turning a hint into a two-minute flight of radio fancy. While the official Soviet reporters were still observing the Dnieper from a distant height, Steve would be watering his horses in the river, describing the flora and fauna on the banks and giving an emotional account of the feelings of the residents along its shores who were about to be liberated. The Red Army moved fast, but Steve always moved faster. He was quite shameless about these embellishments. Sometimes he would glance mischievously up from his script, trying to catch my eye, when he came to one of the more colourful passages. The censor was completely cynical about these stories, provided they could be considered good propaganda, and he rarely cut anything solely on the ground that it was imaginary. But Steve had a lot of copy slashed on political grounds, like most of us.

  Apart from Steve, Marya and I became friendly with a man named Jack Denny, and his wife who was also a Russian girl. It was a natural friendship because we had common interests and apprehensions. Denny had come out to Russia in March 1943 to demonstrate some new British tanks, which the Russians characteristically denounced as death-traps while demanding that supplies should be increased. At that time he was a sergeant in the Royal Armoured Corps. He was a first-rate technician, but however hard he tried he could never look or behave much like a soldier. Moscow suited him because discipline was relaxed there and he was practically an autonomous unit. At first he had worn a straggling black moustache in the belief that it gave him a military appearance, but actually it made him look like a rather mournful grocer. He took it off at the approach of winter because he thought it might freeze on him, and I must say he looked a lot better without it.

  Denny was a thickset chap with a large placid countenance. It took a long time to get him talking as a rule, but let him once start on a pet theme and the ponderous flood of his discourse would wear you down. He had come out to Moscow equipped with a wardrobe the like of which had never been seen there before. It was quite embarrassing to walk out with him in winter when he was wearing ‘civvies’, for small children would follow us for miles, fascinated by the deerstalker hat and the coat of many linings that Denny had been convinced he would need in deepest Russia. It was just as well the kids couldn’t see his underwear.

  The circumstances in which Denny met his Russian wife were unique. After many requests, the correspondents had managed to get permission to visit a tank training-school where British tanks were being used, and Denny was invited too. He couldn’t speak a word of Russian at that time, so the authorities thoughtfully provided him with an interpreter, whose name I afterwards discovered was Svetlana. After we had looked over the tank school there was the usual banquet. Denny was sitting just opposite me, and Svetlana was next to him. She was attractive in a heavy Slav way, with flaxen hair and hazel eyes, a splendid Russian bosom and a complexion like a baby’s. At the banquet our host, a Tank General, set a hard-drinking pace, and before long we were all pretty tight. Denny, still unused to vodka, succumbed completely, but Svetlana was quite unperturbed. When he finally slumped in his chair she rolled her beautiful lace sleeves above her elbows, picked him up bodily, and carried him out. A few weeks later they were married.

  Because Denny was a bit heavy in his movements and in his conversation, some of the colony were inclined to write him off as stupid. But he certainly wasn’t that. He was slow, which is a different thing. He would quietly take people to pieces and examine their works, as he took everything to pieces. He couldn’t stand anything shoddy. I have a mental picture of Denn
y dismantling an electric-light switch in our room at the hotel just to see how a Russian switch worked, and I remember now the tone of shocked disbelief in which he said, ‘Blimey, look at this contraption.’

  Denny’s great qualities were lots of common sense and an absolutely unswerving loyalty. He was one of the most naturally upright men I’d ever met. He was the sort of chap who could be relied upon to say ‘I will’ only once in his life and to mean what he said about sticking to his girl for better or worse. Svetlana appreciated that. She was very straightforward and loyal herself—a good Soviet citizen, believing what she was told like everyone else. Actually she had reason to be grateful to the Revolution. Her paternal grandfather had been an illiterate peasant with more children than livestock and no prospect of improving his lot. In the social earthquake after 1917, Svetlana’s mother had found her way to Moscow, and with the help of state scholarships had been educated up to university standard and had emerged with a diploma as a teacher of languages. She had married a minor Party intellectual who had died shortly after Svetlana’s birth. In due course Svetlana had followed in her mother’s footsteps and had herself become a teacher of English at the Moscow Institute. When she met Denny her mother had just died, leaving a big gap in her life which Denny—who so obviously needed looking after—filled admirably. Denny of course was warned about the dangers of such a marriage, but like the rest of us he decided to risk it.

  Marya and Svetlana, in most respects complete opposites, took to each other very quickly and became close friends. Svetlana admired Marya’s accomplishments, and Marya found Svetlana reliable and comforting. We all saw a good deal of each other and visited each other’s homes. Denny and Svetlana were a devoted pair and, domestically speaking, Denny went quite native. They had one tiny room with the bed curtained off, and they had a fourth share in a communal kitchen and an eighth share in the usual offices. The place wasn’t too bad by Russian standards—there were no bugs, and with his special privileges as a foreigner Denny was able to get enough fuel for their little iron stove, as well as adequate rations. When Svetlana had more work to do than he had, he would even go down to the market and do the shopping. In the end, he thought nothing of travelling on the Moscow trams, which was the supreme test of acclimatization for any foreigner.

  Sometimes, when he and Svetlana came to visit us at the hotel and saw again the comparative luxury of our faded Louis Quinze suite, they would grumble a little about their squalid conditions. But mostly they were looking ahead. Denny’s ideal was a neat little villa in Streatham, with a trim grass lawn and a small workshop in the garage, and he got a tremendous kick out of telling Svetlana what fun they would have setting up house in England. Svetlana made it plain that they hoped to raise a large family.

  Then the war and the Russians dragged them apart. Early in 1944, when Denny had been in Russia a little under a year, he was recalled to England. Svetlana at once applied for an exit visa, which was neither refused nor granted. The Russians were still sullenly awaiting the Second Front, and we all tried to pretend that that was the reason for their silence and that when they felt better about their allies they’d grant the visa. There was nothing whatever to be done except be patient. Both Denny and Svetlana took the blow with outward composure, though Denny’s sense of justice was deeply affronted. He had always got on well with the Russians at the technical level, he had taught them a great deal, and he felt he deserved something better from them. But he didn’t moan and he didn’t lose hope. Marya and I went with them to the airport on a bitter February day and afterwards we did our best to comfort Svetlana, though we weren’t feeling any too happy ourselves. In the evening Steve dropped in for a drink and his remarks about the Soviet authorities were corrosive. His indignation increased under the influence of vodka. He was supposed to broadcast that night and he went off at about nine o’clock, muttering, to write his piece. It was never broadcast, however. Apparently Steve took it down to the Press Department himself, got involved in an argument with the censor about the Russian wives, and finally had his copy killed. He told me next morning, with a grin compounded of shame and complacency, that he thought it was because he had written ‘Soviet Neroes’ instead of ‘Soviet heroes’ and had denied that it was a typing error.

  With the separation of Denny and Svetlana a darker shadow fell across the lives of Marya and myself. We didn’t dare to talk much about our own prospects, but I was seized with new anxiety and even Marya’s gaiety occasionally gave way to tears when we were alone. We had cause to be worried, too, about Svetlana. One night, about a week after Denny’s departure, she was stopped and questioned as she left the hotel by a plain-clothes member of the N. K.V.D.—the Soviet Security Police. Two nights later she was stopped again, and this time she was taken to N. K.V.D. headquarters. She had nothing at all on her conscience and was able to answer all the questions honestly and apparently to the satisfaction of her inquisitors. All the same, it was very disturbing. Svetlana wouldn’t have been the first Russian girl to find herself in Siberia after becoming friendly with a foreigner. I don’t think anyone was surprised when she told us soon afterwards that she had been sacked from the Institute without an explanation. She applied for one or two jobs in other Soviet organizations, but it was apparent that she had been blacklisted for having a British husband and for having asked to go away with him.

  It was Steve who came to the rescue. A correspondent—a British correspondent, he was at pains to tell me—had just bribed his secretary away from him. What made the blow more bitter to Steve was that part of the consideration had been three pairs of American nylons. Anyway, there was a job waiting for Svetlana. The arrangement proved extremely successful, for Svetlana made an admirable secretary, and there was no further trouble with the N. K.V.D. Svetlana soon became her cheerful self again, helped by regular letters from Denny through the diplomatic bag. He had been posted as instructor to a tank school in Wales.

  Marya and I had some wonderful times in the summer of 1944, but the shadow never really lifted. Night after night the great guns boomed out their victory salutes as Russian towns and villages were liberated, but they carried no message of personal hope for us. I knew that my office would expect me to leave Moscow as soon as the war ended, and I knew that from the professional standpoint I ought to leave. I might be able to stall for a time, but the newspaper business expects a measure of discipline and I had always taken a pride in my job.

  Theoretically, of course, I could become a Soviet citizen and try to scrape a living at Marya’s side. I confess I never seriously considered such a step, nor did Marya ever hint that it might be a solution. She had seen one or two of the wretched creatures who had done it.

  In the spring of 1945 we talked the whole position over and made preparatory moves about her visa application. I tried to enlist the support of the Soviet Press Department, pointing out quite justifiably that I had done a reasonably useful job of reporting in Russia and that I expected them to treat me decently in return. I didn’t suppose it would do much good, for these matters are decided at the highest level, but I felt I had to try everything. I wrote to Molotov, who knew me at least by name and by sight and certainly knew of Marya, and I even dropped a carefully-phrased letter—as correspondents occasionally did—into Generalissimo Stalin’s Kremlin letterbox. The British Ambassador refrained from saying ‘I told you so’ when I called on him, and rather wearily promised that he would try to raise the matter personally with Molotov.

  Our spirits rose a little during the victory celebrations, when British and American nationals were mobbed in the streets by enthusiastic crowds and even the official Russians unfroze. But the goodwill bore no material fruit. Day after day I rang the Head of the Press Department—who assured me that he had put in a word with the authorities—but he never knew anything. I got a cable from my office congratulating me on the work I’d done and raising my salary. It was dust and ashes. I would readily have bartered all the money I should ever earn for a seal on a piece of pap
er. Presently I got another cable from the office saying they had assigned me to take charge of the New York bureau—perhaps the finest job a correspondent could have. They hoped I was having no difficulty about my wife’s visa.

  I cabled asking them to approach the Soviet Ambassador in London, though I knew it would be futile. I said I would need a little time to clear up my affairs and they were sympathetic. I called at the visa office but was refused an interview. Marya called, and was told by some underling that the matter was under consideration.

  I knew we were wasting our time. All the doors were closed, and not by chance.

  For the moment, there was nothing more to be done. I write that now, but I wasn’t philosophical then. I was desperately heartsick and worried about what might happen to Marya. But there it was—we’d had two wonderful years and now we were going to pay. I wired the office that I was preparing to leave and stonily packed my bags. If I had to go, the sooner it was done the better—there was no joy for anyone in these last days. Once more Steve rallied round, though his eyes seemed for the moment to have lost their twinkle. He wasn’t wholly to be envied—he would have to do probably two more years in Moscow before his network moved him. He promised to look after Marya for me. Once more we all assured each other that it was only a question of time. I clung to straws of comfort—the thought, for instance, that at least Marya would have her dancing to take her mind off things. But we both felt as though a partial death had come to us.