Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (48 page)

MEDIUM
: You seem disturbed.

VAN
: I am.

MEDIUM
: Do not hold a negative thought. [She says she has received a message that the spirits of all the great musicians are standing around him, holding positive thoughts and helping him.] The mind rules the body.

VAN
: Could I have a shot tonight?

MEDIUM
: Could you do it yourself?

VAN
: Yes, I feel I need it every day.

MEDIUM
: Twice daily will keep you above normal.

VAN
: Should I have some beer tonight?

MEDIUM
: Yes, it will relax you.

VAN
: Will they like my conducting?

MEDIUM
: Yes. I had a vision.

VAN
: I hope you will project to my mind so I will not make any slip.

MEDIUM
: The forces will be with you.

VAN
: The Embassy is short of tuna fish.

MEDIUM
: Send tuna fish to the Embassy. It will make a good impression.

VAN
: Daddy fell. Should I call a doctor?

MEDIUM
: No. It is painful but he will be all right.

HE WENT
home discouraged, but from a distance the Soviet Union still figured large in his life. In the summer of 1966, Kirill Kondrashin joined him at Philadelphia’s Robin Hood Dell concert venue and at the Hollywood Bowl, to resume their performances of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. In September, LBJ threw a
reception at the White House for the five American prizewinners in that year’s Tchaikovsky Competition, and Van was master of ceremonies. Harvey and Rildia Bee were there among a lineup of musical royalty, including Rosalie Leventritt and pianist-entertainer Victor Borge, the author of a famous
crack about Van: “Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 and was a rather obscure musician until 1958 when he was discovered by a Texan.” That same month, the second Cliburn Competition took place in Fort Worth. Twenty-year-old Radu Lupu, who was Romanian but had trained at the Moscow Conservatory, won first prize in a reduced field that was more than half American. To Van’s dismay, the Kremlin had banned Soviet competitors from taking part, in protest at the huge American troop increases in Vietnam.

That at least was the public explanation. In truth, both superpowers were losing the automatic support of their youth that had been taken for granted in the conformist 1950s. The Shook-Up Generation of New York and the Beat Generation of San Francisco had their bored, cynical counterparts in the Soviet Union, reared on pure Marxism-Leninism but the despair of the party.
“
LOST GENERATION
”
BAFFLES SOVIET
;
NIHILISTIC YOUTHS SHUN IDEOLOGY
, headlined the
New York Times.
The
stilyagi
were long gone, and remembered almost nostalgically; the newly disaffected youth were more materialistic and drawn to anything Western, “from a new hair-do to a belief in democratic freedoms.” Girls wore nylons and spike heels or black cotton stockings and ballet pumps. Guys called each other “zhentlmen,” said things such as “tip-top” and “okay,” and sported Ivy League haircuts, fringe beards, tan slacks, and narrow italianate ties with horizontal stripes. Jeans, known as “kowbois” or “Texas trousers,” were rare but could be counted on to infuriate party propagandists. Both sexes read
The Catcher in the Rye
and danced to Western music played by Russian jazz bands or taped from the Voice of America. “Can you show us how to do the twist?” they asked foreign visitors, between trying to discover the truth about the West. By no means were all troublemakers: many were the educated sons and daughters of high officials, kids who spent their evenings hanging out at top hotels, including the National, where the hot bands played. “Komsomol bully squads rout them out of the restaurants and cafes and send them home,” the
Times
reported. “Photographs of them are plastered on billboards under headings: ‘Parasites, Get Out!’ They are shipped to the virgin lands or the construction sites of Siberia.” Yet nothing won them back to the cause. A few leaders quietly wondered how belief in a system that purported to be perfect could have been so easily lost to mass apathy. Most were content to revoke Khrushchev’s limited freedoms, lock up dissidents in mental institutions to be cured of their infectious desire for free speech, and support Brezhnev when, in 1968, he ordered tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

The bloody echo of 1956 further deepened the disillusion of the
Western left with Soviet-style socialism. Still, there was always Mao’s China to make the Kremlin look like a model of enlightened governance.

IN
1961,
Liu Shikun had returned from Moscow to take up a post as piano teacher at the Beijing Conservatory. That same year he had married a daughter of Ye Jianying, a prominent marshal of the People’s Liberation Army. The top leadership attended the wedding, and Mao invited Liu to play at his home:
“They told me Western music was not very nice,” Mao said afterward, “but what you played was very nice. We cannot totally reject Western music and arts.” Liu’s future seemed assured when, in 1964, he was sent to live with a farmer in a Shanxi province cave dwelling with no running water and bricks piled on a stove for a bed: not as a punishment but as part of the Four Cleanups campaign, which assigned intellectuals to learn from peasants and purge themselves of reactionary thoughts.

By the time he was recalled two years later, the Cultural Revolution was already under way. Launched by Mao to “save” Communist orthodoxy from bourgeois infiltration and restore his authority after the disastrous Great Leap Forward, it soon consumed the entire nation in an orgy of denunciations and violence. Both Western music and the
“feudalistic music of the old capitalistic China” were favorite targets; in their place, musicians were ordered to play “revolutionary songs which glorify Mao and are inspirational and fill one with courage.” At the Beijing Conservatory, which not long before had
invited Van to tour China, students formed gangs of Red Guards and pounced on its president, Ma Sicong, a venerated composer who had been a judge in the violin section of the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition. Some threw a bucket of glue over his head and covered him with posters—one denounced him as a
“Blood-sucking ghost”—while others beat him with belt buckles and boards full of nails and made him march round banging a stick on a pot. At the Shanghai Conservatory, more Red Guards
denounced Gu Shengying, the other Chinese competitor in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition. Unable to
bear the humiliation, she sent a parcel of chocolate to her father, who was still in jail, then swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and turned on the gas. She was just twenty-nine. In the same city, a whole family of classical musicians gassed themselves, while out of rage or mental derangement, a conductor tore Mao’s
Little Red Book
to pieces and was
shot in the head. Vast though it was, China had no room for such gentle types.

Liu returned from the countryside to find himself already the target of a campaign by a group of Red Guards calling themselves the Mao Zedong Thought Combat Team Revolutionary Committee General Service Station. At their rallies he was declared a
“second-rank ghost and monster” and ordered to wear a paper hat identifying him as “Counterrevolutionary Musician Liu Shikun.” Conservatory students kicked him, spat at him, and made him confess to shaking Khrushchev’s hand and subscribing to Soviet revisionism. Eventually they arrested him and locked him in a storeroom with his colleagues. Each day, the prisoners were woken at six and set to read Mao’s
Selected Works
or newspaper articles before being marched off to clean toilets, break stones, and chop firewood. Sometimes they had to crawl like animals, eat grass, or stand facing a wall for hours. In the evenings, they wrote confessions and sang the “Howling Song,” with its chorus of forced masochism:

If I speak or act without permission,

May you beat me and smash me,

Beat me and smash me.

The Red Guards serenaded Liu with his own ditty:

Liu Shikun you bastard,

Now you can surrender.

If you do not tell the truth,

You may quickly die . . .

One of his students repeatedly beat him with his fists and a belt, fracturing a bone in his right forearm. Ma Sicong, meanwhile, had lost thirty pounds and was too weak to pick up his violin bow. After he had tried to commit suicide several times, a doctor diagnosed him with hepatitis, and he was allowed out to seek treatment. He donned overalls, hid his violin in a bag of tools, and fled. In January he and his family escaped on a small boat to Hong Kong and defected to the United States. More than fifty of his relatives and friends were rounded up; three died, and many were jailed, including the doctor, who received eight years for his solicitude.

Liu did not try to escape, and after a year the Red Guards marched him to the public security bureau, where he was charged with spying for the Soviet Union and sent to prison. There he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured to extract proof that his father-in-law had spoken and acted against the party. By attempting to slow the pace of the Cultural Revolution, General Ye had crossed Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, whose Gang of Four happened to control the Central Special Case Committee in charge of the young pianist’s case. Eventually most of the general’s family and household were arrested, including Liu’s wife and their little boy’s nanny.

Hardly any sunlight penetrated Liu’s cell, and his hair turned white. His daily rations consisted of a moldy cornmeal bun and two bowls of briny water with rotting leaves infested with nourishing worms. In cold weather, puddles turned to ice, and with only a cotton prison uniform and thin blanket for cover, he suffered from frostbite. He had no contact with the outside world and worried that if he died, no one would know what had happened to him. The only news came from the propagandistic
People’s Daily
, a copy of which a guard threw in the cell each morning and collected at night. One day Liu was moved to a new cell and discovered half a copy of the paper on the floor. In his mind, he had already composed a letter to Mao, and now, one by one, he cut out the characters from the newspaper with a twig that had broken off a broom, sticking them together with
morsels of the steamed buns. When the letter was finished, he waited for an opportunity to smuggle it out.

Months and then years went by, but one never came. As he bowed to Mao’s portrait and confessed to his own imaginary crime, he mainly thought about staying alive. Sometimes his mind turned to the piano, and he practiced in his head or mentally composed a concerto. In those moments, he often thought about Van’s playing at the competition, which had affected him so much. He puzzled over what it was that had made it sound improvised. Was it the influence of American jazz and pop music? If so, how could he absorb that himself? But that brought him back to his present surroundings and made him even more desperate to get out.