A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (41 page)

In Berlin, Moura immediately threw herself back into her work, writing a torrent of letters to Gorky about the parlous state of his literary magazine
Beseda
and its publisher. The whole project was close to bankruptcy due to the refusal of Soviet Russia to allow the magazine to be sold there.
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By the end of August she was in Estonia with the children.

Her relationship with Gorky was turning around. Just a year ago, she had been troubled by not being with him, by the insufficiency of his letters to her; now
he
was berating
her
for not writing often enough. She told him that her health was poor, that she needed to settle the children, and assured him that whenever she was away from him, she left a part of herself behind.
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Gorky knew nothing of her meeting with Lockhart, but his legendary jealousy was stirring anyway.

Gorky’s life had entered a new phase that year, as had that of every Russian. On 21 January 1924, while Gorky was still awaiting his visa to enter Italy, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had died. The death forced him to re-evaluate his relationship with Lenin the man and Lenin the ideologue. He sent a wreath with the simple inscription ‘Farewell Friend’. And yet, only a few days earlier, he had written to his friend and fellow writer Romain Rolland, lamenting that he was unable to return to his homeland and that his arguments with Lenin had ‘awakened a spiritual hatred for each other’.
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Gorky tried to express his complicated feelings for the dead leader: ‘I loved him. Loved him with anger.’
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Moura worked with Gorky to produce his reminiscences of his friend, which would be published around the world in many translations. The death of Lenin, he wrote, had ‘painfully struck at the hearts of those who knew him’:

And if the storm cloud of hatred toward him, the storm cloud of lies and slander around his name grows thicker, it would make no difference: there are no forces which could darken the torch raised by Lenin in the sweltering pitch darkness of a panic-stricken world.
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In publishing this statement, Gorky irritated the Soviet government and scandalised Russian émigrés everywhere. How could he have written such words about the man who had forced so many of them to flee for their lives, instigated butchery, locked up their people? The government continued to send Gorky money, but he was beginning to feel the pinch, and due to the animosity of his fellow Russians he felt more of an outcast than ever. He was earning a healthy $10,000 a year in royalties, and although he spent little on himself, he had a lot of dependants, and never refused anyone’s entreaties.
¹²

Gorky’s former wife Yekaterina was sent by Dzerzhinsky to Sorrento to try to persuade young Max to return to work for the Cheka back in Moscow. Gorky guessed that they were using Max as bait to try to lure him back. ‘They think I will come after him,’ he wrote to Yekaterina. ‘But I won’t go, not on your life!’
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Gorky remained at Il Sorito, and the commune continued its existence.

Moura spent most of 1925 apart from Gorky. She spent time in Paris taking care of his literary affairs, and then carried on to Berlin where she met up with Maria Andreyeva. In July she holidayed with her children in Nice, where her sister Assia and her husband, Prince Basil Kotschoubey, had a small apartment.
¹⁴

She had left Gorky behind in a depressed mood after a serious discussion about their relationship. There was friction between them, and a crisis was developing. He could sense that things had changed somehow and was trying desperately to win her round. It had taken four years – perhaps because of the circumstances of their day-to-day existence in a crowded commune – but Gorky was experiencing the same helpless addiction to Moura that Lockhart had felt and that Wells had already begun to sense after their first week together.

Gorky told her that she was the first woman with whom he had been truly sincere, and complained that by way of reward she gave him strife and argument; he was starting to feel that things could not be put right.
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She assured him that although their relationship had gone past its ‘youthful’ stage, her feelings about him had not altered.
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But he wasn’t to be placated; he was convinced that she wanted to leave him, and told her that life without her would be unbearable.
¹⁷

Their relationship was coming under stresses from every quarter. He was being attacked in the Russian émigré press for his politics.
Beseda
was still barred from Russia. And Moura was almost constantly away from him, on business in Berlin, staying with the children at Kallijärv, or travelling in Europe. The Sorrento apartment had been searched by the Italian police, and in September Moura had been arrested and briefly held by them.
¹⁸
Gorky’s health was declining, he was acutely conscious of his age and physical deterioration, and he was increasingly unhappy about Moura’s disregard for him and the belief that she was in love with a younger man – a mysterious entity referred to directly only once in their correspondence as ‘R’ – apparently living in Sorrento.
¹⁹

He berated her for the insincerity of her letters – sometimes she would write frankly, but at other times she seemed to be reaching for an effect, a dramatic pose. This was her way, and it always had been. When she wrote directly from her feelings, her letters were rushed, the handwriting erratic; but sometimes she would compose carefully, expressing thoughts and sentiments that were dramatically appropriate to the scene playing out in her life as she saw it. In Moura’s mind, and in her perception of Gorky’s writing, ‘Artistic truth is more convincing than the empiric brand, the truth of a dry fact.’
²⁰
But for Gorky, artistic truth was for art. In real life he wanted empiric fact; he wanted and demanded sincerity.

And he got it. On 23 October she laid out the truth about her feelings. She insisted that she had loved him in Russia, and that it had continued through their time at Saarow. And then, gradually, she realised, ‘I was no longer in love with you. I love you but I was not in love.’ She struggled to describe what it was that had gone, and reached into her feelings about Lockhart – ‘what makes birds sing and makes you see
God
in your head’. She hated herself for feeling no rapture with Gorky, only tenderness. ‘I convinced myself that none of this is important, that this demon can be strangled, but it kept on growing.’ And then, being as open as she knew how, she told him that she longed to ‘sense my life being illuminated again with that wonderful kind of love that gives everything, but demands nothing, love for which alone it is worth living. I had this with Lockhart and I had it with you – but it’s gone’. Without that, she pleaded, ‘what am I good for, how can you need me?’ To her mind, it was ‘insulting to take your rapture of love – and not be in a condition to sing with you as one voice, not feel excitement from your caresses. My dear friend,’ she concluded, ‘God knows if I have left you to suffer – I have paid for this a hundred times over with my own suffering.’
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For a while, the crisis seemed to pass. She had been sincere, and that was all he asked. But by December, the complaints resumed. Moura, deciding that the time had come to be single again, had begun divorce proceedings against Budberg. Believing the situation with Gorky to be settled, and borne down by work and family, Moura had started being ‘cautious’ again in her letters to Gorky, picking her words, and again he interpreted this as an attempt to hide her feelings. He preferred sincere harshness to false pleasantry. ‘I’m no less self-centred than you,’ he assured her. ‘I want you to be inspired with the philanthropy of a surgeon and not be tormented like you have tormented me this whole past year. In the last few months it has been especially onerous and frivolous.’
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She was shaken and hurt by his hostility. In a flurry of increasingly emotional replies, she assured him that she loved him, apologised for the anxiety she had caused him, denied that there was a ‘secret corner of my soul’ that she kept hidden from him. And she dismissed his accusation of frivolity and torture, and reminded him that it was he who had taught her to be cautious. If he wanted ‘the philanthropy of a surgeon’, ‘would it not be better for you to be just as “surgically” open with me?’
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Gorky, who hadn’t slept for five nights, was furious. They must part, he decreed; their relationship must end. He was unable to work without the ‘basic conditions of peace of mind’, and he couldn’t achieve that so long as Moura was there to torment him. He could take no more of her ‘caution’.

I told you many times before that I am too old for you, and I said this in the hope of hearing your truthful ‘yes!’ You did not dare, and do not dare say it, and this has created both for you and me a completely unbearable situation. Your attraction to a man younger than I and therefore more worthy of your love and friendship is completely natural. And it is absolutely useless for you to conceal the voice of instinct with the fig leaves of ‘fine’ words.
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Her attachment to the younger man – the mysterious ‘R’ – might have existed only in Gorky’s imagination; an invention to explain Moura’s disaffection. No clear evidence of a relationship survived, and Moura was never good at hiding her amours. Gorky believed that her travels to Berlin to take care of his business and to Estonia to see her children were pretexts. Separation would be better, he told her: ‘You will not have to split yourself in two, not have to resort to thinking up little lies “out of concern for me”, you will not have to restrain and distort yourself.’ Having made his case, having sustained his pride and dignity, at the close of his letter he broke down: ‘After all, I love you, I am jealous and so on. Sorry, maybe you don’t need to be reminded of this . . . How heavy, how terrible all this is.’

She had pushed him too far. She needed Gorky; needed him personally as a friend and literary mentor, and as a haven in an unfriendly world. After nursing her feelings for a week, in early January 1926 Moura wrote Gorky a portentous letter. In it she referred to the famous farewell poem of Sergei Yesenin, the Russian émigré poet who had committed suicide in Petrograd just two weeks earlier. Young and achingly handsome, Yesenin had been a hugely popular author of romantic verse, a young darling of Russia and a prolific lover of women (he had been briefly married to Isadora Duncan and had lately married a granddaughter of Tolstoy). Suffering from depression, he had killed himself in his hotel room, leaving behind a final poem to a friend. It was said that for the lack of any ink, he had written the poem in his own blood.

Quoting the poem in her letter to Gorky, Moura implied that she might seek a similar farewell from him:
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Goodbye, my friend, goodbye

My love, you are in my heart.

It was destined that we should part

And be reunited one day.

Goodbye, my friend, no handshake, no words.

Don’t be sad, don’t frown.

There’s nothing new in dying now

Though living is no newer.
²⁶

A silence fell. Gorky in his room above the Bay of Naples and Moura in snowbound Kallijärv brooded on their feelings.

What happened next wasn’t recorded. Perhaps a telegram, a telephone call, perhaps merely a simple calming and subsiding of their feelings. A week later, Moura wrote again to Gorky. She had been ill, she said, and apologised for the delay in setting out; she would soon be on her way back to Sorrento.

When Moura returned in early 1926 the relationship continued. Wounds were patched up but not healed. In February Gorky noticed her concealing a letter when he walked into the room.
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By April she was travelling again, attending to his publishing and reviewing his parlous financial affairs. Payments were not coming through from Russia, which was where his largest audience was. He was in such dire need of cash he had considered selling some of his beloved jade figurine collection.

While Moura was away, the cracks appeared again, and they were soon scolding each other for not writing, not being sincere. Moura told Gorky that she thought she had convinced him, during the winter, that she planned to remain as his ‘wife’ and had no desire to leave him. She said that she had ‘decided not to see R any more’.
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