Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (20 page)

Henrietta Belayeva helped Van send a cable home—
ARRIVED SAFELY EVERYTHING WONDERFUL
—and settled him in. Upstairs, the spacious landings were guarded by a professionally surly
dezhurnaya
, the duty woman who kept hold of room keys when guests were out and kept an eye on them when they were in. Those who came back after she had nodded off could expect a mouthful of abuse. Long hallways with dark wainscoting and doors led to rooms with high ceilings and elaborate moldings. Van’s suite had a bedroom, bathroom, and living room with a telephone, television, and shortwave radio. After Henrietta left, he was too jet-lagged and wound up to sleep, and there was a sheaf of
competition papers to contemplate. Three large sheets were ready to be filled in with the pieces he would offer in each round. One small booklet with a blue cameo of Tchaikovsky on the cover contained photographs and biographies of all the entrants, and another turned out to be a handy guide for contestants. Following photographs of the conservatory and the hotels—the venerable Metropol, overlooking the Bolshoi Theatre, also housed some competitors—a note advertised that Shostakovich and his deputy chairman, Professor A. B. Goldenweiser, would receive visitors with questions for an hour daily, beginning at 1:00 p.m. There were jury lists, full timetables, and details of the hotel mealtimes, which were generous—dinner from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., supper from 7:00 p.m. to midnight—to accommodate different performance schedules. Everything seemed to have been thought of. “Should you desire to visit a theatrical performance, concert, museum exhibition or cinema,” the booklet concluded, “please apply to your interpreter in good time.” Finally, Van pulled a
nylon stocking over his head, stretched it tight as a bathing cap to train down his springy curls, and drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, Henrietta came to take him to the conservatory. She was so sweet and charming that he would have found it hard to
believe she had to file regular
reports on him for the KGB, like every government employee dealing with foreigners. Nor did he suspect for a second that his driver, Yuri, was a trainee diplomat specializing in English who, as was the custom in those times, most likely worked for the KGB. He might have been even more alarmed to know that the Peking was notorious as the
KGB’s official Moscow hotel. Visiting or newly employed secret agents were regularly quartered there, and an entire wing was reserved for them. The place was crawling with trained eyes, and
secret monitoring rooms were said to be hidden throughout, including in the top of the tower and spire. Then again, urban myth also held that the much taller spire of the
Hotel Ukraine contained a nuclear launching device. Some of the foreign contestants whispered knowingly about
concealed microphones, but it was all part of the game.

It was another bone-chilling day; at the weekend the temperature had plummeted to a low of minus twenty-three Celsius. Along the route small domes and golden spires gleamed dully through snowy branches. An ancient house with turreted chimneys looked as if it had wandered in from a fairy tale. Across the street from the house, three wings of an imposing neoclassical pile enclosed a large courtyard, and seated in front on a granite pillar, caught in a flight of inspiration, was Tchaikovsky. The Moscow State Conservatory named for P. I. Tchaikovsky had been gussied up for the great occasion with long banners and a large cameo of the composer above the main entrance.

“Henya!” a voice called across the snowy courtyard; Henrietta often accompanied visiting musicians and was a familiar face at the conservatory. The voice belonged to a young assistant professor named Sergei Dorensky.

“Seryozha, come and meet my friend,” she said. Dorensky was struck by how tall and shy the young man was and, when he came over, by his beautiful manners. Dorensky asked how he could help, and Van replied that he needed to play the piano. The young teacher led them through a door in the building’s left wing and up some stairs to the control room, where he asked an official for the best available
studio. More stairs led to a hallway lined with pairs of large white double doors. This was the piano empire, and Dorensky ushered them into a room, explaining that it would be Van’s for the duration. It had two full-length windows, two grand pianos, and a motley collection of furniture. Van sat down at one of the pianos and gently touched the keys as if he were a child again, overwhelmed by thoughts of the geniuses who had played and taught in this very place.

AT LUNCHTIME
Henrietta came up behind and touched him, and he jumped. She pulled him away and took him to the cafeteria, where there were a few familiar faces.
Daniel Pollack, whom Van hadn’t seen since Rosina’s class, had come by train from Vienna, where he was studying on a Fulbright scholarship. He was in a foul mood. Since December he had been practicing ten hours a day, and it was only when he and his young wife, Noemi, arrived in Moscow and were dining with some fellow contestants that he discovered he had prepared the wrong pieces. His Austrian professor, who had read him the required repertoire, had apparently gotten in a muddle, and Pollack had come to Moscow armed with too many modern Soviet pieces and no Tchaikovsky concerto at all. After a sleepless night, he attended Shostakovich’s daily surgery, where he explained the situation and offered to withdraw. The composer was terrified of provoking an international incident and called an emergency meeting of the Organizing Committee, which suspected Pollack was making some kind of political statement and shunted the matter to the jury, which had yet to pronounce.

Also unofficially representing Juilliard in the piano competition was the studious
Jerome Lowenthal, who was studying on a Fulbright in Paris. The three had not been friends, and amid the tensions of the competition they exchanged little more than pleasantries. There was a third American pianist whom Van knew: twenty-six-year-old
Norman Shetler, originally of Dubuque, Iowa, had briefly been part of the same set of young New York pianists that included Jimmy Mathis and John Browning. The son of a self-taught all-round musician and
band organizer, Shetler had enrolled in Juilliard, but before he could attend, he was drafted into the army, where he served mostly as a typist. He was also currently a student in Vienna and had become infatuated with Europe; a trip on the wild side paid for by the Soviet government had seemed just the ticket. Besides, ever since he heard a record by Sviatoslav Richter, he had dreamed of studying with him, and he had brought along a gift in the hope of pinning down the elusive virtuoso.

With most of the other foreigners, including several pretty French girls whom everyone noticed, there was a language barrier. But the Soviet contestants were eager to befriend the visitors, and did their best to overcome it. They and Van began pointing at objects and teaching one another the words in their respective languages, cigarettes twirling in their hands. Russian proverbs turned out to be very similar to Texan sayings, and Van began to feel surprisingly at home.

Back in his rehearsal studio there was a knock at the door, and a tall, handsome young man entered. He had curly black hair, fleshy lips, and large brown eyes behind semi-rimless glasses.

“Welcome to Moscow!” he said in English, smiling warmly. “My name is Eduard Miansarov, but call me Eddik.” He explained that he was originally from Minsk, in Belarus, but had studied at the conservatory and was also a competitor. They spent two hours playing and singing together until a second Soviet pianist joined them and introduced himself as Naum Shtarkman. A mild, romantic character whose mother worked in the conservatory cloakroom—his Ukrainian Jewish father had died in the war—Shtarkman had made his debut in the Great Hall at twelve and, the previous year, had won first prize in a
competition in Lisbon. At thirty he was older than the upper age limit for the Moscow competition and was already an assistant professor, but the organizers had slipped him in as a backup in case Lev Vlassenko self-destructed. Van and his two new Soviet friends were soon inseparable.

That evening there was a commotion outside as the eighty-one-year-old dowager
queen of Belgium arrived in a mink coat. A famed
patron of the arts who lent her name to the prestigious Brussels piano competition, Elisabeth was known as “the Red Queen” for her penchant for visiting Communist countries. The guest of honor was welcomed by militiamen, students, and women in headscarves as she placed a huge bouquet at the base of Tchaikovsky’s statue.

Back at the Peking Hotel a dining room had been set aside for the use of the contestants. Russian restaurants were not for the impatient, and this one was no different: The waiter carefully inscribed the order on his pad and informed the bookkeeper, who made her own entry and issued a slip to be passed to the kitchen. The kitchen staff then made an entry in their book, after which the food could be prepared. When the dish was ready, its appearance was recorded on a slip that was handed to the waiter, who took it to the bookkeeper, who made a new entry confirming that the ordered food had been prepared and then gave another slip to the waiter, which he took back to the kitchen and exchanged for the dish, which he was then permitted to serve, though not before endorsing his notepad to the effect that the item previously entered was now on its way to be eaten. When it arrived, the food was often surprisingly good, though invariably stone cold. Luckily there was caviar.
Thorunn Johannsdottir, a statuesque young Icelandic contestant, gave Van her portion every day, and he slurped it happily down. She had already heard the other contestants gossiping about him. “My God, you know he’s Texan,” they said. Unlike nearly every other competitor, he had never been to Europe before, which made him even odder.

THE NEXT
day it was snowing again, and a biting north wind had set in. The news on the street was that Nikita Khrushchev had finally consolidated his grip on the machinery of state. Bulganin, the last remaining June plotter, had been ousted as chairman of the Council of Ministers and demoted to his old job of running the state bank. Like Stalin, Khrushchev was now both first secretary of the Communist Party and premier of the Soviet Union, which gave him virtually dictatorial powers. With his hands on both main levers, he appointed
himself commander in chief by creating a Defense Council and installing himself in its chair.

Back at the conservatory, Van ran into the tall, thin figure of Liu Shikun, who took his lessons on the same floor as Van’s studio. They recognized each other from the booklet of competitors and shook hands. Van showed him his room, and they played for each other, Liu starting with Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat Major, op. 53. He had a big sound, played with attack on a large scale, and was brilliantly fast and precise. Van applauded, and hugged him, gesturing that Liu’s technique was much better than his own. Then Van played Liszt’s
Liebestraum
, and Liu applauded, too, thinking that Van was strangely innocent for someone four years older, like a big cute kid.

With some practice behind him Van had a little time to look around. In the conservatory’s main entrance hall, modeled after the Parthenon, with cloakrooms to either side of the columns, there was an exhibition on Tchaikovsky, a showcase of handcrafted Soviet violins, and kiosks selling sheet music, books, and special editions. The violin competition was now coming to an end, and Van slipped in one night to listen. Of the eight finalists, six were Soviets, one was Romanian, and one, Juilliard’s Joyce Flissler, was American. After the last performance, on Saturday March 29, word spread that the winner was Valery Klimov, a regular soloist with the Moscow Philharmonic, who was originally from Kiev; Flissler came in seventh. Klimov’s teacher was the great David Oistrakh, who was chairman of the violin jury, which also included violinist Efrem Zimbalist, who was Russian Jewish by birth but had moved to the United States before the Bolsheviks came to power. A
Soviet composer spread rumors that Zimbalist strongly disagreed with the jury’s decision and had refused to sign the protocol and diplomas. He also claimed that Zimbalist had sent a telegram to the distinguished French pianist Marguerite Long warning her not to come to Moscow to serve on the piano jury. Controversy and scandal ensued.