Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (19 page)

Van’s three scuffed suitcases were packed, one stuffed with jars of vitamin capsules and boxes of Knox gelatin, accompanied by detailed instructions from the Olympian doctor whose wages were riding on Van’s success. His bills he left unpaid. Only one thing remained: a visa. He kept pestering Mr. Reiner, who explained that doing business with the Soviets required patience.
“Look,” he finally offered when Van dropped by yet again, “I know the president of the Intourist Bureau; I’ll call him in Moscow and see if he can help.” The Intourist president turned out to be a member of the competition’s Organizing Committee, and the visa came through on March 22, Van’s last day in town. Cosmos Travel had already sent Shostakovich a letter announcing that its client “Mr Harry La Van Cliburn Jr” would soon arrive “to take part in the Violin Contest,” and despite Mr. Reiner’s deep Russian connections, Van resolved to send his own cable with the details of his Czech Airlines flight, for the Prague-to-Moscow leg of his trip, number OK502. That, too, got a little scrambled along the way:

ARRIVING OKAY 502 MARCH TWENTYFIFTH VANCLIBURN

That night he had one last engagement: a concert at the Leventritts’ Park Avenue apartment for thirty of Rosina’s favorite students and Rosalie’s wealthy friends. After turkey and champagne for the guests, he began at eight o’clock, playing straight through his repertoire for the competition. From the Steinway came the familiar style, perfected. Every piece had been polished until the details shone and the whole gleamed, yet his playing was freer, more poetic than before. All those present realized they were witnessing something truly exceptional, and when he finished at midnight they were more drained than he.
“Mrs. Leventritt made a graceful little farewell speech,” noted Mark Schubart, “whereupon Van, with no encouragement from an absolutely bushed audience, played encores for a solid hour. I’ve never been so exhausted in my life.”

Van had been strong-armed into entering the Moscow trial, and he had told everyone he was going only so he could see St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin, the sights that had enraptured him as a child. If that had ever been true, it no longer was. A few days earlier he had flown home.
“I could tell that he meant business,” Harvey later recalled. “Then one night he told me, ‘I’m going to win. The Russians will like my style.’” Even closer to his departure he went round to the Chapins’ and announced very simply,
“I’m going to win.” Just in time he had rediscovered his faith in himself: that essential performer’s belief that no one else can play the way you play; that others might have a sounder technique, a bigger repertoire, vaster experience, but they cannot sing a phrase the way you can or find such a delicate shade of sound; that confidence in the depth of your soul that you are capable of performing a tiny bit better than anyone else.

The next day, Van headed to Idlewild Airport, where the Lockheed Starliner with its distinctive triplet tail was idling on the runway. As he prayed the flight would be safe—in those days, there were at least a couple of crashes a year at the New York airport alone—the plane took off via Boston for Paris. When he reached
Paris’s Orly Airport, he mailed home a letter he had written during the fifteen-hour flight and sent a final cable to Shostakovich:

ARRIVING MOSCOW TUESDAY MARCH 25
^TH
FLIGHT 502 AEROFLOT 845 EVENING REGARDS VAN CLIBURN

THE DAY
after twenty-three-year-old Van Cliburn left America with no one to wave him off, twenty-three-year-old Elvis Presley was processed into the U.S. Army with a frenzied media pack in attendance.
“The Army can do anything it wants with me,” Elvis patriotically declared. Washington was equally keen to show that the King of Rock and Roll was being treated like any other draftee, and he was sent to Fort Hood, Texas, for basic training before serving the remainder of his two-year stint at the Third Armored Division base in Friedberg, West Germany. His fans were distraught, and teachers’ groups and parents were ecstatic, but the real news was that there was no end in sight to the draft of America’s young men to combat the Communist threat. Nearly thirteen years after the end of World War II, American and Soviet tanks still stood barrel to barrel across the lines that divided Berlin, Germany, and Europe.

As contestants arrived in Moscow for the Tchaikovsky Competition, tensions between the world’s two thermonuclear-armed superpowers had never been higher. With the weapons race shifting into space, voices on both sides chillingly called for preemptive strikes before it was too late. Risky maneuvers constantly threatened to escalate into full-blown conflict: in the latest incident, that Christmas Eve Soviet fighters had shot down a U.S. Air Force B-57 over the Black Sea, with the loss of all its crew. At any moment, fear and mistrust threatened to unfix the stays of civilization, of human feeling and sanity itself, to the point where a handful of men could envisage destroying the world rather than allow opponents whom they had never met to win. Not for a moment did anyone suppose that classical music would make a particle of difference.

SECOND MOVEMENT

Volante

•
7
•

To Russia, with Love

IN THE
evening the landscape coming into Moscow looked flat, like Texas.

That was his first thought. The grassy plains and the cutout farms and the trees, the virgin forests overflowing the horizon, reminded him of home—which was not what a young American was supposed to think on first approaching the headquarters of world communism in the bleakest years of the Cold War.

The Aeroflot Tu-104 thundered away from the setting sun and began its final descent. The Soviet plane was the world’s only working passenger jet, a product of the same futuristic technology that had stunned America five months before, when
Sputnik
whizzed far over their roofs. But to the tall Texan staring from the aircraft window, Russia represented something entirely different. The music he had been practicing for months played in his head: the glorious Romantic music from a bygone age of painted czarinas, glittering balls, and pealing church bells. He had loved it since he could remember, and to his exquisitely painful excitement he was here to play it in its birthplace.

Dusk had fallen when the jetliner taxied to a stop near the low terminal building. The passengers extinguished their pipes and cigarettes, which stewardesses had passed round to help with air pressure. A stony-faced militia boy came on board and worked his way down the rows.

“Passport,” he levelly demanded. At the center of his cap band was an enameled red star badge bearing a hammer and sickle.

Van Cliburn handed over his documents and flashed him a smile. The young functionary was caught off guard and smiled back.

Out on the air stairs, the
subzero cold sliced through Van like a flush of shame. Klieg lights reflected mistily off banks of dry snow, casting a pallid glow in the evening sky. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of planes parked around. Van scanned the waiting faces and unexpectedly saw someone he knew:
Harriet Wingreen, a fellow Juilliard pianist, who had been out here accompanying an American violinist. He made for her, arms akimbo, and stooped down to draw her in; at five feet, she was a good sixteen inches shorter than he.

“Is everything all right?” he asked in his soft southern slide, looking searchingly in her eyes. His perpetual smile was thinner than usual, she thought.

“Everything is just fine,” she reassured him, and he brightened up.

It was true up to a point. Harriet’s husband had emigrated from the Soviet Union as a small boy and had stayed in touch with relatives back in Moscow. When she arrived, she had telephoned them, but they were too scared to come to her hotel, and eventually they agreed to meet her in a busy public place. It was all very hush-hush and unsettling, and she was glad to see another American face.

Before she could say more, a young Soviet woman came up. “Is this Van Kleeburn?” she asked. She was small, thin, and drably dressed, with short dark hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses that intruded like exclamation marks on a gentle face.

“What?” Van said, smiling at her askance.

“Mr. Van Kleeburn, welcome to Moscow,” she said, introducing herself as Henrietta Belayeva, Van’s designated interpreter from the Ministry of Culture. She had been told to look for the tallest boy getting off the plane, though not that he was so cute or had such resplendently buoyant hair.

“Ma’am,” Van said with an elaborate politeness that seemed perfectly
sincere, “wherever may be the hotel where I am staying, can you take me first to the Church of St. Basil?”

The Russian looked at him in surprise. “Oh yes, sure,” replied Belayeva. “We can drive you there.”

She stared hard at the young American, trying to make him out. He was so open, and he seemed to float rather than walk—as if he hadn’t quite landed yet. That was it, she thought; he looked
happy.

Outside the terminal, a porter loaded Van’s three battered suitcases into the trunk of a black government car. The driver introduced himself, also in good English, as Yuri Klimov. He was Van’s age, twenty-three, and was his appointed driver for the duration of the competition. He, too, seemed remarkably agreeable.

Everyone piled in, and the automobile pulled away from the curb. A minute later it turned onto a highway that led through gloomy pine forests punctuated by open fields and small hamlets. Soon a dull glow filled the sky ahead, and the road widened into a grand avenue. On either side, rows of Khrushchev’s identical
boxy apartment buildings were going up, five stories high and bolted together from the same prefabricated concrete sections. Farther on, the new construction yielded to much grander Stalinist blocks adorned with decorative arches, balconies, and overhanging roofs. Like the concentric rings of a tree trunk, Moscow’s sprawl marked the succession of its Soviet overlords, each with his own bold blueprint for the future.

The car bounced across a vast open space and toward two immense curved apartment buildings that funneled traffic into the city’s heart. From here, more monolithic blocks lined the avenue, interspersed with old single-story mansions, small parks, and the occasional monastery or church. Minutes later they trundled across a great beltway, an asphalt moat inaptly named the Garden Ring, built in anticipation of a time when Muscovites with enough money would not have to wait years for a car. Around it, silhouetted against the snow-bright sky, rose several of the Seven Sisters, imperial high-rises that Stalin had commissioned after the Second World War to
compete with American skylines. Topped with pinnacles and spires in a riot of Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque, these atheistic cathedrals were as visionary and ungainly as Soviet Russia itself: built by forced labor using pirated American technology, they were heavily overengineered and housed precious little accommodation for their cost and bulk.

The car jolted across the Moscow River, and moments later Van saw the magnificent
square of his childhood dreams. The Kremlin, with its ring of towers and ranks of white-topped firs facing a sea of dark cobbles, was vaster and more stirring than he had imagined. That night, Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral were festooned with lightbulbs, like strings of stars twinkling against the pale, snowy sky. He had never seen snow like it, not even when he played in North Dakota. It was drifting down now, and as he stepped from the car he had the great stage virtually to himself. Before his eyes a half-century of history dissolved, and the czar of all the Russias came riding through the wooden gate in the Savior’s Tower on a white horse. To Van this was not the menacing seat of an adversary bent on world subjugation; it was the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

THE PEKING
Hotel, where Van was billeted, was a minor relative of Stalin’s Seven Sisters. A striking stucco-and-stone confection, it stood at the intersection of the Garden Ring and Triumphal Square, with its new statue of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in disgust at the revolution he had supported. Construction of the hotel had begun as a symbol of Sino-Soviet friendship in 1949, the year of Mao Zedong’s victory, but in true Stalin style, there was not a hint of China about it. Two seven-story wings met at a squat corner tower crowned with a columned belvedere that featured a blue baroque clock and allegorical stone figures and supported a smaller structure from which rose a gold spire surmounted by a gold hammer and sickle on a bed of leaves. Above the entrance, Soviet heroes in life-size stone walked confidently into the future: a shot-putter with an intellectual, a teacher and a wrestler, a farmworker and a
builder wielding a pneumatic drill. The hotel had finally opened in 1956, shortly after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech infuriated Mao, and it now stood as a prominent reminder of the growing rift between the two Communist powers.