“It’s me, the prisoner,” my husband said. “I am the poet Mandelstam.”
“And I am Nadezhda Yakovlevna, the wife of the poet Mandelstam,” I said, my pride at being connected to Mandelstam overcoming my resentment (which I tended to suppress) at his having gotten us into this predicament.
“Very unusual,” the commandant, who never bothered introducing himself, observed.
“What is very unusual?” I inquired.
“The notation Isolate and preserve next to the name Mandelstam on the telegram,” he replied. “It is the first time I have come across such instructions.” He looked directly at Mandelstam. “Whom do you know in the Kremlin?”
My husband’s lips fashioned themselves into what on another occasion could reasonably have been described as a smile. “Stalin,” he replied.
The commandant exchanged quick looks with his young deputy sitting behind a desk across the room. “This is not something you should joke about,” he warned.
“What makes you think I am joking?”
Apparently deciding it would be more prudent to drop the matter, the commandant announced that we were to be housed in the local district hospital until our final place of exile was decided upon. This was the first inkling we had that Cherdyn was to be a way station for us. The same carriage transported us up a winding road paved with split logs to a brick structure that had been converted, so we learned, from a sausage factory into a hospital. Our three guards bid us farewell at the gate. The one called Osip actually stood to attention and saluted after turning us over to the hospital authorities. A heavyset woman wearing a soiled white smock led us to a large, empty second-floor ward with two metal army cots set at right angles to one wall. As nobody offered to assist us with our baggage, I had to make several trips to the lobby and haul everything upstairs myself. With the departure of our three guards, who Mandelstam thought were under orders to execute him, my husband relaxed ever so slightly. He noticed a portrait of Lenin that had been torn from a magazine thumbtacked to the back of the ward door, and this sparked a memory. “When the Reds took power,” he said, “the wife of one of the Bolsheviks came to the flats of writers to pin portraits of Lenin cut from magazines to our walls. She hoped it would save the intelligentsia. How innocent she was.” He shook his head. “How innocent we all were.”
As night settled over Cherdyn, Mandelstam started to hear voices again. I knew this was the case from the wild look in his eyes. He became convinced he had heard Akhmatova reciting a line from one of her poems—They take my shadow for questioning—and concluded from this that she had been arrested and shot. We were summoned to supper in the canteen on the main floor, but Mandelstam flatly refused to eat anything until he had searched the ravines around the hospital for Akhmatova’s corpse. I followed him along the dirt paths that ran through the woods around the hospital until the two of us were stumbling from exhaustion. Only then was I able, pushing and tugging, to get him back up to the second-floor ward and onto his cot. By the time I made it down to the canteen, the only food available was leftovers, but, as they correctly say, beggars cannot be choosers, so I scraped some gristly meat and cold potatoes onto a clean plate and brought it up to my husband, who picked at the scraps with a remarkable absence of enthusiasm.
I have reached the part of the story that causes my heart to splinter. It’s as if . . . as if reliving this episode has something in common with dying.
Mandelstam was sitting up on his cot, fully dressed, his spinal cord against the wall, listening with his eyes, muttering about how the woodcutters were going to execute him when the moon was high enough for them to find their way through the forest. I was determined not to close my eyes until he fell asleep but, overcome with fatigue, I must have drifted off. I dreamed terrible dreams of alligators plucking children out of the shallow water along the riverbank while their parents fanned the flames of charcoal fires and turned makeshift spits with dead humans on them. The nightmare jolted me awake. The cot next to me was empty. The glass door leading to a narrow balcony was open. I caught sight of the poet Mandelstam in the light of the moon. He was sitting astride the balustrade, one leg dangling over the side two floors above the ground, working up the courage to jump. From the glass door I whispered his name in order not to startle him. He turned his head and gaped at me, his eye sockets dark with terror. I lunged for him and caught hold of the back of his jacket, but he squirmed out of the sleeves and dropped into the darkness. I stood there in the icy night, clutching the jacket in my hands for the time it takes the image on the retina to reach the brain. Then I screamed a scream so piercing it frightened birds into the night sky.
I don’t recall how I made it down the wide flight of steps to the ground floor, only of standing in the garden at the foot of the hospital wall as figures carrying kerosene lamps rushed from the entrance. People in white smocks were pulling Mandelstam, moaning in pain, from the hedge into which he had fallen. They set him on a stretcher and had to pry me off his body in order to carry him back into the hospital. I staggered along behind. We wound up in the operating block lighted by candles because the generator was switched off at night to save fuel. A woman doctor, wearing a bathrobe and clearly disgruntled at having been woken up, directed the nurses to strip Mandelstam naked. Her eyeglasses slipping along her nose, she examined his right shoulder and arm, which were twisted out of shape and blue with bruises. “He is fortunate,” the doctor said, probing my husband with the tips of her fingers. “He has dislocated his shoulder socket.” And with that she took hold of Mandelstam’s wrist and gave it a sharp tug, setting the bone back into the socket. My husband’s shriek of pain was cut short when he fainted.
By the time he regained consciousness, his shoulder and torso had been bandaged and he was back in his cot, his arm in a sling, a blanket pulled up to his chin. “What happened?” he asked when the effect of the sedative wore off.
“You fell, my darling Osya. Luckily, you landed in hedges, which broke your fall. The ground underneath had been recently turned to make a flower bed. You dislocated your shoulder. The doctor said it will be some weeks before you regain full use of your right arm.”
After Mandelstam’s attempt at suicide, I have no memory of time, only of light: sunlight, white night, candlelight, moonlight, even starlight. Days folded themselves into one another. The nurses, moved by our plight, turned out to be very caring. They changed my husband’s bandages and sponged his limbs and emptied the bedpan and brought up meals from the canteen so I wouldn’t be obliged to leave him alone in the ward. Perhaps a week went by. I honestly can’t say. What I do remember is that on a sun-drenched morning two male nurses turned up in the ward carrying a sturdy chair on which they proposed to carry Mandelstam downstairs. I never understood why but he broke into a cold sweat and began shaking his head emphatically, and nothing I said could convince him to submit to their ministrations. He ended up descending the staircase leaning his weight on me and wincing in pain with each step. Once downstairs, Mandelstam was lifted, along with our possessions, into the back of a hand-drawn cart, which two strapping peasant boys contrived to drag down the road paved with split logs to the citadel. The commandant, wearing coveralls this time, received us in his office. “I guess you do have a friend in the Kremlin,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I have received a telegram with instructions you are to be permitted to select your place of exile. It can be anywhere except one of the twelve biggest cities.”
Who was our friend in the Kremlin? Had Pasternak prevailed upon Bukharin to intervene after all? Had the head of the Writers’ Union, Maksim Gorky, picked up rumblings of discontent from the poets and passed them on to Yagoda? Had Stalin himself—surely the one behind the order to isolate and preserve—decided that Mandelstam would be unlikely to survive a winter immediately under the Arctic Circle?
Offered a choice, Mandelstam didn’t hesitate. “Voronezh,” he announced as if he had anticipated the question.
“Why Voronezh?” the command
ant asked.
The choice surprised me, too. “Why Voronezh, Osya?”
Mandelstam thought about this. “I knew a biologist at Tashkent University who was born in Voronezh, a frontier town in the time of Peter the Great populated with escaped convicts. He told me good things about it. As the city is on the Don and south of Moscow, the weather will be milder than here. I remember the biologist saying his father worked as a prison doctor there.” And then, miracle of miracles, the old Mandelstam, that high-strung, headstrong, life-glad homo poeticus who was able to find a grain of humor in the darkest situation, reincarnated himself in the commandant’s office of the citadel at Cherdyn. He looked at me, a hint of a smile playing in his eyes, and he said, “We cannot rule out the possibility that we may need the services of a prison doctor, can we, Nadenka?”
“Welcome back,” I said.
SIXTEEN
Fikrit Shotman
Saturday, the 23rd of June 1934
I LOVE TRAINS. I have as far back as I can remember remembering. To my mind, there’s no music more easy on the ear than the whistle of a train in the night. When I was sixteen and already big for my age, I dreamed of working as a coal stoker in a steam locomotive. I admired the uniforms worn by stationmasters and conductors, with their visored caps they looked to me like generals in the glorious Red Army. When I became a professional weight lifter, later when I was a circus strongman, I spent a good part of my life on the road, but the trip that began on the twenty-third day of June in the year 1934 was the first time I ever voyaged in a cattle car. If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, you’re dead wrong because traveling in a cattle car turned out to be as close to first class as I ever been when there was a first class in the days before the Revolution. I’ll explain. There’s no denying we were crowded, ninety-three warm bodies all told, including seven children going to Siberia with their parents and nineteen old people, one of which was paralyzed from the waist downward and needed to be carried in and out of the cattle car when we stopped in the middle of nowhere so we could wash in streams. This kind of situation was ripe for calamity, except we were lucky to have with us one prisoner that everyone called the professor, a short guy with round eyeglasses thick as windowpanes and a pointed goatee that reminded me of Agrippina’s tattoo of the traitor Trotsky that she passed off as Engels. Not that it mattered, but the professor must have been an Israelite because he had the same name as that Jew on the Politburo, Kaganovich, for all I know the professor and the locomotive commissar (Kaganovich’s nickname when he ran the railroads) may have been near or distant cousins. The professor organized us into what he called the cattle car collective and it was thanks to him that, unlike in the other cattle cars on the same train where they buried dead bodies in shallow graves at every siding, we made the nineteen-day trip from the little-used station in Moscow to the transit camp in Magadanskaya without losing a single life. My size gave me natural authority, so the professor put me in charge of the communal toilet, which was a hole contrived in the floorboards at one corner of the car and surrounded with women’s shawls fastened to make a screen. I used a wooden bucket filled with piss and a sheaf of straw to clean the hole after it was fouled by prisoners with the runs, leading the professor himself to compliment me in front of every member of the collective on the sanitary condition of the toilet.
More about the professor. He was an Old Bolshevik, having fought, as he proudly informed us, in the battle for the Winter Palace at the time of the Revolution. Being a diehard Marxist, he gathered prisoners in the cattle car around him at night and delivered lectures on the dictatorship of the proletariat or dielectrical materialism or exploitation by the capitalist class. After the lectures, the professor opened the floor to questions. The night of his first lecture, I raised a finger and he nodded in my direction. “What are you being sent up for?” I asked.
“Violation of Article 58,” he replied, looking me straight in the eye. “I was accused of belonging to an anti-Soviet Trotkyist wrecking group that was planning to assassinate Stalin and other members of the Politburo.”
Many in the cattle car, me included, greeted this with a buzz of anger. It had not occurred to us that this small man with bushy hair over his ears and bald crown could be a dangerous criminal. “Were you guilty?” a woman called from the back of the car.
“Of course he was guilty,” I said, “otherwise he wouldn’t be on his way to Siberia.”
“I was guilty,” the professor said, “but not of what they accused me of. I signed a petition circulated by Communist students at my university supporting Bukharin’s criticism of forced collectivization of agriculture. Like Bukharin, we were not against collectivization itself—the idea of peasants being treated as agricultural workers and drawing salaries the same as factory workers seemed to us to be a logical extension of Marxist doctrine. But we favored a more gradual approach—we would have lured the peasants onto collectives with good housing and a fifty-four-hour workweek and a guaranteed wage even if the harvest was poor. The other peasants, seeing how much better life turned out to be on the collective, would have drifted in that direction of their own free will instead of destroying their livestock and their crops in protest.”
The old man who was paralyzed spoke up. “How is it that despite being falsely convicted, you still call yourself a Marxist?”
“With pride, with hope in the future of Russia and all mankind, I call myself a Marxist and a Leninist,” the professor declared. “Progress is not a straight line. It zigs and it zags as it attempts to avoid the Western materialistic mind-set that is indifferent to suffering and find a distinctive Russian path to modernity. Each zig, each zag results in unnecessary distress, even the death of true believers. Let me put it another way. Until the Bolsheviks came on the scene, man was the object of history—he was kicked around like a football by tyrannical leaders of religious institutions and capitalist empires. With the coming of Communism, man discredited the religious institutions and the capitalist tyrants and became the subject of history. In this cattle car, on this train steaming toward the most remote corner of Siberia, I see myself as a soldier on the front line of the world proletarian revolution. What’s the difference if I lay the foundations for Communism in European Russia or on some Siberian taiga? Comrades, I shall supply the answer to my own question. There is no difference.”
Several of the women prisoners started applauding softly. Then the men joined in and the applause grew louder. And me, too, I began clapping my hands together, setting a rhythm to the applause that matched the moan of the wheels on the rails. And soon everybody was applauding and stomping on the floorboards to the rhythm I set, and I knew that I would look back on the trip in the cattle car as one of the high points of my life, right up there with my silver medal in Vienna, Austria and my handshake with Comrade Stalin.
Washing my feet and my one pair of spare socks in an icy stream the next afternoon, I overheard a lady mention what the professor was a professor of. It turned out to be something called linguistics. The lady said he was famous for figuring out the difference between languages and dialects—languages were spoken by people with armies, dialects by people without. The professor was no slouch in geography, neither, because no sooner had our train started out than he marked the route from Moscow to Magadanskaya in chalk on the wood siding of the cattle car, ticking off the cities as he caught glimpses of them through the crack between the boards—Nizhni-Novgorod, Kazan, Yekaterinburg (where, good riddance to bad rubbish, the Bolsheviks executed the last tsar), Omsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutskaya.
That first night out he had all the food and water and water receptacles in the cattle car collected and appointed a committee to distribute rations, to each according to his need, which is to say the children and the old people got to get more water than the able-bodied prisoners like myself. He appointed another committee, made up of peasant women, whose job it was to search for cedar nuts and edible roots whenever the train pulled up on a siding and we were allowed off
to fill the receptacles from a rivulet or brook. From time to time, usually after we passed through a city late at night, the guards slid back the heavy door and threw in a paper sack filled with loaves of bread. In the other cars you could hear the prisoners cursing and battling among themselves as they fought over the bread. In our car the ration committee took charge of the sack and doled out the bread so that it pretty much lasted until the next city and the next sack.
Some of the prisoners wrote letters on their own, but for the illiterate there was the professor’s letter writing committee, made up of three ex-schoolteachers. To begin with they made the rounds of the cattle car, collecting blank pages from the books the prisoners had brought with them. Writing on the pages in the style of the prison camps, which is to say in a tiny handwriting that filled every square centimeter of the paper, they copied off letters for the prisoners who couldn’t write their own. The name and address of the receiver of the letter was printed out on one side, then the paper was folded and refolded so that only the receiver’s name and address was visible, at which point it was mailed through the toilet hole when we passed a town or village at night. The professor told us there was a tradition that went back to the tsar’s penal colonies whereby peasants coming across letters on the railroad tracks would copy the address onto an envelope and, as stamps were dirt cheap, post it. That way relatives and friends back in Moscow would get news of the prisoners being transported to Siberia. I myself didn’t take advantage of this letter-writing system because I didn’t want people to think I couldn’t read or write.