“Amen,” I said.
No, I don’t remember very much of the trip back to Petersburg. It had a beginning and a terminus but no middle. In a trancelike state, I changed trains and scrambled for seats and fell asleep clutching my satchel to my chest so that nothing would be stolen from it. Somewhere along the way I scratched four lines on the back of an envelope, which I have to this day. I don’t need to find the envelope to tell you the lines. They are committed to memory, they are etched on my brain.
. . . in the room of the banished poet
Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn,
And the night is coming on,
Which has no hope of dawn
EIGHTEEN
Nadezhda Yakovlevna
Monday, the 2nd of May 1938
AS FAR AS THE state was concerned, our minus-twelve banishment to Voronezh came to an end not quite one year ago—at three-fifteen in the afternoon on the sixteenth of May 1937, to be precise—when a pinched-faced Chekist with a waxed mustache (a client, as it turned out, of the charming prostitute who lived next door to us) signed and stamped an official document declaring that Mandelstam had served his sentence and we were free to live anywhere in Soviet Russia our hearts desired. There was an unstated catch: we needed to have a residence permit, and the only city in Soviet Russia we had a residence permit for was Voronezh.
Which meant for the poet Mandelstam, for his wedded wife, exile was expected to last a lifetime.
Still, we were determined to move on. (Where, how, only God knew.) The first order of business was to get rid of the excess baggage we had accumulated since our arrival in Voronezh: buckets, a chamber pot, a frying pan, a flatiron, a small one-burner kerosene stove, a kerosene lamp, a lumpy mattress and an assortment of very mended blankets and quilts, a carton filled with chipped plates and saucepans. Some of the booty we bequeathed to our seamstress landlady, some we gave to a couple of fresh-off-the-train exiles Mandelstam found wandering in Lineinaya Street desperately looking for a room to rent. (Our landlady had decided we would be her last borders as she wanted to free up the room for her son.) We packed our clothing into a valise and two satchels and a paper sack with a rope handle and, paying the seamstress’s son to assist us, made our way to the train station. With or without residence permits, we were drawn to Moscow like the proverbial moth to flame. Mandelstam, who slept fitfully and was despondent most of his waking hours, perked up the moment the train, heading north and west, pulled away from Voronezh. The closer we got to Moscow, the more animated he became. He wasn’t composing verse these days, but it was almost as if his muse was breathing down his neck.
I can tell you that Moscow, which we reached after a grueling two-and-a-half-day trek, had changed since we’d lived there three years earlier. The long train crept through suburbs that hadn’t existed before—wide dusty boulevards lined with brick apartment houses in various stages of construction. The city itself looked as if it had had a face-lift. Tsarist-era buildings had been steam-scrubbed and you could catch glimpses of massive structures rising inside scaffolding, with imposing stone and steel and glass façades that, to my layman’s eye, appeared inspired by what our newspapers called the decadent American ornamental style. The social climate had changed, too, though I would be hard put to say it had changed for the better. For months recent arrivals in Voronezh had been commenting on the existence in Moscow of a class of citizens they described as nouveau rich (to which Mandelstam, in one of his infrequent bursts of wit, had responded: Better nouveau than never). Young people acted as if they had money to burn. Cadres were getting promoted rapidly (as those ahead of them in the pecking order were arrested). The latest chic was to actually open a bank account. (When I had money, like Akhmatova I kept it pinned inside my undergarments.) Apartments, dachas, used furniture, secondhand gramophones and records, even luxury items such as electric iceboxes were said to be easier to come by, no doubt because so many people were vanishing into prisons or exile, abandoning their possessions behind them.
The moment Mandelstam set foot back in Moscow I could see that, despite the danger of not having a residence permit, we had done the right thing to return. It may sound as if I am inventing this but I could have sworn the color of his skin changed from asphalt to—well, skin color. An unmistakable gleam materialized in his eyes, almost as if the sights and noises of a metropolis had jogged a memory, had reminded him of life before death. He even walked at a pace that would have left a snail behind. Seeing a smile on my husband’s lips for the first time in months brought a smile to my lips for the first time in months.
Feeling like Jews who had reached the Promised Land after years of wandering a wilderness, we decided then and there that we absolutely had to find a way to remain in Moscow. The first imperative was to come up with a place to sleep. And so, flagging down one of the ministry pool automobiles whose chauffeurs freelanced as taxi drivers, we headed for Herzen House in the hope of coming across someone willing to put us up for a night or two.
In the event we had to make do with couch cushions on the linoleum floor of the tiny apartment belonging to one of the young poets to whom Mandelstam used to read his poetry. The poet’s wife, a plump and pale editor at a monthly literary magazine, made it clear, as she set out the cushions on sheets of newspaper, that we were welcome to stay for two or three days, by which she meant that we were not welcome to stay longer. (I didn’t hold this against her. They were already running a risk having people without residence permits under their roof.) Mandelstam, overcome with fatigue from the journey, not to mention melancholy at finding himself back in Moscow, stretched out on the cushions and, pulling down the earflaps of his cap to block the clamor of traffic on Nashchokin Street, drifted into a deep sleep. I covered him with his yellow leather coat and lay down, fully clothed, beside him.
I recall waking at sunrise that first morning in Moscow with a fierce headache. My husband was sleeping so soundly I didn’t have the heart to rouse him. Making my way to the toilet, I rinsed my face and the back of my neck with rusty cold water from the tap. That made me feel human again. I decided to go downstairs and knock on the door of our old apartment—when I’d packed in a mad rush to accompany Mandelstam into exile, I’d left books behind and I thought I might be able to recover them now. Which is how I came across the note pinned to the door of our flat: “If anybody asks for Zakonsky, I’m at the dacha until the end of the month.” There was also a telephone number. I didn’t recognize the name Zakonsky, but if he had a dacha and a telephone, it meant he was published, which in itself was an inauspicious sign these days; the only writers published were the ones who toed the Party line. I started to turn away when I remembered the latchkey I’d hidden behind the molding near the communal telephone in case Mandelstam should forget his. To my amazement, it was still there after all these years. Nobody was stirring on the floor as I let myself into our apartment. The sight of the familiar walls, the sound of our old Swiss clock ticking away in the kitchen brought tears to my eyes. The books I had left behind filled the top shelf of our old bookcase—first editions of Derzhavin, Yazykov, Zhukovski, Baratynski, Fet, Polanski, along with Mandelstam’s beloved Italians, Vasari, Boccaccio, Vico. I gathered them up and, sinking onto the bedraggled sofa where Zinaida and I had sat listening to Mandelstam read his Kremlin mountaineer epigram, began to leaf through the title pages. And naïve as this may sound, it suddenly dawned on me: The best way to obtain a residence permit is to possess a residence. The explanation that came into my head seemed simple enough for even an apparatchik to understand: the poet Mandelstam and I had been allotted this flat in Herzen House, he’d been sent into minus-twelve exile, I had accompanied him; now with exile behind us we had returned to Moscow and wanted our residence back. You won’t believe this—I barely believe it as I recount the episode—but my reasoning seemed so commonsensical to my twisted brain that I actually set off to find the district militia office. Imagine the fear I had to suppress simply walking through the front door! To my
surprise, the officer on duty, an older man who, from the look of him, was desperately hoping to retire before they got around to arresting him, heard me out and then shrugged. You must understand that a shrug in Soviet Russia didn’t mean no. It meant maybe; it meant I’m not senior enough to assume the responsibility of giving you a definitive answer. The officer suggested I try the central militia station on Petrovka. I walked all the way, hoping the exertion would calm my nerves and let my voice pass for tired instead of stressed. A long line had formed and I had to queue for hours to reach the ranking militia official in the main hall of the Petrovka station. He was a baby-faced young man—too young for the post he held, which suggested that he had filled the shoes of an arrested official—wearing perfectly round steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He raised his eyes, but not his head, to peer over the rims at me. I started to explain our situation but he cut me off.
“Impossible to be assigned a residence without a residence permit. Residence permit denied because you are a convicted person. Next.”
“I have no conviction,” I cried.
The woman behind me said in my ear, “Whatever it is you’re after, dear lady, you stand a better chance of getting it if you calm yourself.”
I pulled the official document from my purse and flattened it on the desk so the official could read it. Again, he didn’t move his head, only his eyes. “It says here you are a convicted person,” he said.
“I have no conviction. I voluntarily followed my husband into exile.”
I might have been talking to an automaton. “It states here,” he said impatiently, “Osip Mandelstam, convicted person.”
“Osip Mandelstam is a man. I am a woman.”
I managed to snatch back my precious document an instant before he slammed his fist on the desk. “Osip Mandelstam is your husband, isn’t he? Under Soviet law, arrested persons and their families are deprived of residence rights in Moscow. Haven’t you heard of Article 58? What your husband was guilty of, you are guilty of. I can charge you with anti-Soviet activities.”
I am sorry to report that I fled the Petrovka station in terror.
After the failure of my pathetic attempt to get back our old flat, we lived like birds on a branch. We eventually settled into one room of a communal apartment in Kalinin, which was near enough to Moscow to come in by train several times a month. Word spread that Mandelstam had returned alive from exile and friends flocked to see him when they learned, through word of mouth, that he was in town. Hoping to save us from a second arrest, my husband gave impassioned readings of his more recent Ode to Stalin to anyone who would listen. We had no shortage of writers and poets offering us loans “to tide us over” (“tide us over what?” Mandelstam would ask in agitation when we were alone); among them was the self-described master of the genre of silence Isaac Babel, who, during one of our several visits to the rooms he rented on the second floor of a private villa, glumly told us, “Silence won’t save me. Mark my words—they will come for me soon.”
Quite a few close friends were willing to give us shelter in Moscow, though for their sake we never spent more than a few days in any one flat lest our hosts be denounced to the police. Akhmatova dropped what she was doing and came to Moscow the instant she discovered we were back. Mandelstam and she flung themselves into each other’s arms. Did I feel odd man out? No, I’m not offended by the question. They had never been lovers, though in a manner of speaking they were more intimate than lovers, by which I mean they were intimate in ways that lovemaking only scratches the surface of. There were occasions, I won’t deny it, when this intimacy fetched up a lump to my throat that I identified as jealousy. They awakened the lost youth in one another. Employing a private language that by its very nature excluded others from the conversation, they could make each other laugh until one of them got a nosebleed. His hands behind his head, his fingers laced together at the back of his neck, Mandelstam strode the room declaiming poems from the Voronezh cycle. Anna Andreyevna, in turn, recited the poem she had written after her visit to Voronezh the previous year, something about fear and a muse taking turns watching over a disgraced poet. (As far as I know this poem has never been published.) We went to Petersburg once, which turned out, from my point of view, to be a mistake—strolling streets familiar to him from his student days set my husband to trembling with emotion. We stayed overnight at Akhmatova’s apartment, drinking toasts to poets and particular poems late into the night.
At one point we could hear the telephone ringing in the corridor. A neighbor stuck his head in the door. “It’s for you, Anna Andreyevna.”
She went to take the call, only to return a moment later looking quite pale. “Who was it?” I asked.
“There was no one on the other end of the line.”
We all exchanged looks. Mandelstam and I left in the morning. Anna Andreyevna accompanied us to the station. I shall never forget my husband’s last words to her: “I am ready for death.”
On another occasion we spent an afternoon with Pasternak at his dacha in Peredelkino, half an hour out from Moscow; originally the Kolychev estate, the village had became a fashionable retreat for fashionable writers in the late 1920s. (We never did figure out how, in the summer of ’36, Boris, who was in and out of favor over the years, managed to get a foot in that door.) It was not lost on any of us that his new (to us, at least) wife remained in the kitchen during our visit to avoid my husband. Boris Leonidovich and Mandelstam pulled up stools next to the ornate tile stove for warmth, I remained on a sofa with a coverlet over my feet. Pasternak, who said he was in the very early stages of sketching the outline of a novel “about us all,” produced books he was reading on the subject of the French Revolution. I remember the discussion became animated and I gestured to Boris Leonidovich to calm things down for fear Mandelstam’s pulse would start to race.
Pasternak took the view that it was possible to survive a reign of terror, but my husband only shook his head in obstinate disagreement. “If you breathe the air of terror,” he said, “you become infected. Everyone becomes a victim—those whose heads are lopped off, the executioners who lop off heads, the masses in the streets who watch, even those who have the decency to look away.”
At the train station later, Pasternak—with the dexterity of a cutpurse—slipped money into Mandelstam’s pocket when they embraced. We discovered it when I went to hang up my husband’s yellow leather coat back in Kalinin.
And so the weeks, the months slipped past with Mandelstam staring out of rain-stained windows in Kalinin or Moscow or Petersburg, repeating the names of people who had vanished into a gulag. If I close my eyes I can reproduce his voice in my ear: “The enigmatic Khardjiev with his oversized head, Hippolyte with his wild scheme to seduce the angel of death, Zhenya with his nails bitten to the quick, Vadik with his poems so convoluted even he couldn’t understand them, Pasha with his crazy theory about how Russia would be saved when opiate became the religion of the people.”
I should say here the disappearance that gave us the most pain, not to speak of the most anguish, was that of our friend and protector Nikolai Bukharin. We had, it goes without saying, followed his fate closely. His name as editor in chief had been removed from the masthead of Izvestiya in the winter of ’37 and we’d learned of his arrest soon after over the loudspeakers in the main streets of Voronezh. (Mandelstam was particularly incensed to hear people cheering.) For months on end there was no news of Bukharin. Then came his very public trial for high treason and plotting to assassinate Stalin. (Ironically, Genrikh Yagoda, the onetime head of the Cheka who had personally signed the charges against Mandelstam when he was arrested in 1934, was a codefendant: “We won’t waste tears over him” was all my husband said when he heard about this.) The trial began early in March of this year in the October Hall of the House of Trade Unions where, we happened to know, Nikolai Ivanovich had proposed marriage to the young woman who later became his third wife. His confession, published in Pravda, was the principal subject of conversation in intellectu
al circles (Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria was a close second) where Bukharin, despite his Bolshevik credentials, was considered to be a cultivated individual and a humanist. There were those who repeated the old saw Where there is smoke, expect to come across fire, which was another way of saying that, given the circumstances, “the filthy little Bukharin” (as he was described in newspaper articles) would have been stupid not to have plotted against Stalin; there were others, we among them, who supposed that he had confessed to save his wife and young son.
Esteemed Nikolai Ivanovich was taken to the vaulted basement of the Lubyanka and shot in the back of the head, if one believed the execution notice that turned up in the newspaper on the morning of 15 March. Which, curiously, was a few days after we bumped into V. Stavsky, the secretary general of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Let me explain. We had all but abandoned hope that we would ever get permission to live in Moscow; abandoned hope of being able to survive the new wave of terror spreading across Russia. The last straw we clutched at was the possibility that in the absence of Bukharin, Stavsky would argue Mandelstam’s case to Stalin; would give him the text, which we knew to be circulating, of the Ode to Stalin (“Stalin’s eyes are parting mountains . . .”). But our desperate and repeated attempts to get an appointment with Stavsky failed miserably. We camped for hours on the hard benches in his waiting room. Secretaries would rush about. Eventually someone would take pity on us. The secretary general was out of town, a woman would inform us. He was attending a conference of writers in the Crimea. He was visiting collective farms in various Soviet Socialist Republics. And so on. And then one day, implausible as this may sound, we stumbled across Stavsky emerging from the office building as we were going in. Or more accurately, he stumbled across us. We hadn’t seen him in years and I doubt either of us would have recognized him if he hadn’t shouted, “Hey, ho, Mandelstam, I’ve been hunting everywhere for you.”