The Stalin Epigram

  Stavsky, looking very suntanned, wearing a coffee-colored linen three-piece suit and dark glasses, hurried over to us and shook my husband’s hand cordially. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” he exclaimed, “but nobody seems to know where you hang your hat these days.”

  All Mandelstam, bless his heart, could think to say was: “I hang my hat in its usual place, which is on my head.”

  Stavsky dropped my husband’s hand. “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “Ah! Well, I have good news for you, Mandelstam. Your fortunes are about to take a turn for the better. To begin with, we have decided to give you and your wife vouchers for a two-month cure at one of the writers’ sanatoriums outside of Moscow. The stay will do you a world of good—wholesome food, country air, plenty of sleep, long walks in the woods. You will be a new man. Then we will look into your rehabilitation. The question of a permit to live in Moscow, the matter of finding appropriate work for you, will be hashed out at the highest level.”

  Stavsky instructed us to present ourselves at the Literary Fund office to collect the train tickets to Charusti, on the Murom Line, and the vouchers for the rest home in Samatikha, twenty-five kilometers from Charusti. When we reached Charusti, we would find a horse-drawn sleigh waiting to take us the rest of the way.

  Elation rose in Mandelstam like sap in a tree. “Pinch me,” he said when Stavsky saluted us from the backseat of his limousine as it pulled away from the curb. “I must be dreaming that this is happening.”

  “The problem,” I remember saying, “is to figure out what is happening.”

  “But any idiot can see what is happening! My ode has reached Stalin’s ears. Word has filtered back down that the poet Mandelstam must be looked after.” He turned on me angrily. “Why aren’t you capable of dealing with good news?”

  “I am worried.”

  “About what?”

  “That there is no such thing as good news, only bad news disguised as good news. I am worried sick they want to get you away from your friends. I am worried sick you will be arrested again.”

  “What are our alternatives?”

  “We can find an isolated house with ornamented shutters, we can grow potatoes and cabbages and cucumbers and beets and turnips in the garden, we can keep hens and a cow, we can exchange eggs and milk for loaves of bread and tins of roe.”

  Mandelstam’s face flushed in agitation. “You don’t fool me—you want me to publish poetry under the name Anonymous. Nadenka, don’t you see it—they’re going to rehabilitate me. My muse, perhaps even my erection, will take up residence again. Poems will begin to knock like a fist on the window. I shall make love and write poetry and publish under the name of Osip Mandelstam. Editors will beat down my door to get the rights to my collected works.”

  I looked into his eyes. He desperately wanted to believe we had turned a corner. I suppose I must have smiled because he said, “I knew you’d come around.”

  I think I said: “What is there to lose by trying?” I think I thought: “Only what’s left of our lives.”

  Why do you keep pressing me for details? There is only one detail that counts for me now: from the moment we ran into Stavsky, I had the sinking feeling of being on a steep and slippery slope. Yes, the train tickets and the vouchers were waiting for us at the Literary Fund office. Yes, yes, there was a horse-drawn sleigh sitting outside the station at Charusti, which Mandelstam took as a further indication that his fortunes had taken a turn for the better. Luxury of luxuries, an enormous sheepskin rug was folded on the seat. We spread it and tugged it up to our armpits and the driver, an old mujik with knee-high lace-up leather boots and a wolf-skin chapka on his pointed head, raised a whip to the horse and we set out at a trot to cover the twenty-five kilometers to the rest home in Samatikha.

  Winter had persisted into April. As far as the eye could see, the countryside was quilted with blindingly white fresh snow. Fir trees stooped under the weight of the ice on their branches. The sky was pearl blue, with wisps of clouds drifting at high altitudes. Swirls of frozen breath spewed from the horse’s flaring nostrils. Mandelstam improvised a pair of peasant sunshades with his gloved fingers and took everything in, sighing from time to time at the splendor of the scenery. After two or so hours, the mujik pulled into the yard of a collective farm and we were taken to a room where hot wine and biscuits were waiting on a table, as if we were expected. Mandelstam kept glancing at me with a look of triumph on his face. We reached the writers’ sanatorium at dusk. The resident doctor, an old Bolshevik who (he later told us) had taken the job in the rest home in the hope of lowering his profile, met us at the door. He confided that he had received a telegram from Moscow ordering him to treat the Mandelstams as important guests. The doctor looked honest enough—if we were being set up for arrest, I took heart from my gut feeling he didn’t know about it. Mandelstam mentioned that he longed for quiet as well as peace. The doctor said there was a cabin at the edge of the woods that served as a reading room for residents. In no time they had set up two cots in the reading room and given us the key. We spread our clothing and books on one of the shabby sofas and lay down on the beds, fully dressed, our fingers laced under our heads.

  Lord knows why but it was then that Mandelstam was suddenly overcome with doubts. “You could be right,” he said suddenly. “We may have fallen into a trap. If we are arrested here, Pasternak and Akhmatova would not hear about it for months.”

  When my husband’s spirits flagged, I must have felt a compulsion to be positive. How else can one explain that I said, “No, no, didn’t the Literary Fund pay for transportation and the two-month stay here? They wouldn’t have done this if we were still living under a cloud.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes.”

  Mandelstam cheered up. “You are surely right,” he said.

  April went by. Hope put down roots in the thawing soil of Samatikha. We went for long walks along the paths in the woods, slept late into the mornings, napped again in the afternoons with books from the shelves of the reading room open on our laps. I would come awake to find Mandelstam listening to music over earphones attached to a shortwave radio post in our cabin. We took our meals in the communal dining room not far from the main building. Occasionally writers or poets whom we knew, or knew of, came by the table to chat with Mandelstam. The wife of a short story writer, herself a translator, asked him what he was working on.

  “Staying alive,” he shot back.

  “Everyone works on staying alive,” her husband noted with a dry laugh. “She meant, artistically. Are you writing these days?”

  For some reason the two of them brought out the orneriness in my husband. “I never write,” Mandelstam said innocently. “I compose poetry in my head and dictate it to Nadenka. She is the one who writes it down.”

  The writer’s wife was obstinate. “And are you composing in your head here?”

  One of those ghostly wry smiles flitted across my husband’s lips. “Here I concentrate on clearing the cobwebs from my head. When we return to Moscow—when we are given back our flat in Herzen House—I shall begin composing poetry again.”

  And then . . . then one evening . . .

  Thank you, yes, I will start over.

  And then one evening after dinner, peering from the window of the reading room at the edge of the woods, we watched as two identical black automobiles with whitewall tires pulled up to the main house. The figures in the lead automobile remained inside. Two beefy men emerged from the second vehicle, one in civilian clothing, the other in some sort of uniform that I wasn’t able to identify. “Did you see that?” Mandelstam asked in alarm.

  I could make out his eyes in the dying light. They were wide with fright. “They have probably come to inspect the rest home,” I said.

  It was the first of May, nineteen years to the day since our paths had crossed in that seedy bohemian cabaret in Kiev. I say that with certainty because I have a memory of the guests stand
ing around a shortwave radio post in the late afternoon listening to Stalin deliver a rambling speech. When an enormous gingerbread cake with twenty-one candles on it was brought to the head table after supper, people clapped their hands and stamped their feet on the floor; Mandelstam leaned close and told me they were applauding the chef who had baked it, not the twenty-one Bolshevik May Days. After the meal, the guests gathered around a piano to drink brandy and sing Russian folk songs. For hours after we retired to our cabin, we could hear them singing patriotic songs at the top of their lungs. When I managed to fall asleep, I dreamed of icons, which is universally taken to be a bad omen. Death lurks behind icons. I remember sitting up suddenly, gasping for breath. My husband tried to calm me. “We have nothing to be afraid of now,” he said. “The worst is behind us.”

  At dawn I was roused by the birds chirping in the trees around the reading room. I checked, as I always did upon awakening, to be sure Mandelstam was breathing. I heard someone knock. Pulling on a robe, I padded across the room in my bare feet and opened the door, thinking of the reproach I would make to the guest come to borrow a book from the reading room at this ungodly hour. I found myself staring at the doctor, who was hyperventilating as if he had run the length of a soccer field. The two beefy men were behind him. The one in civilian clothing shouldered past the doctor. “We are looking for Osip Mandelstam.”

  Mandelstam materialized behind me. “I am the poet Mandelstam.”

  The two men pushed past me into the reading room. “Osip Emilievich Mandelstam,” the civilian announced, “you are under arrest for violation of Article 58 of the Penal Code.” I seem to remember he showed Mandelstam the arrest warrant, though I’m not absolutely certain of this.

  My husband, who was in his underwear, nodded. He collected his thoughts, then went to the sofa and pulled on his gray trousers and a collarless white shirt, tucking it into the waistband and buttoning the top button against his neck. As the two men watched in silence, Mandelstam fitted on his suspenders and suit jacket and socks and shoes. He looked around to see what he’d forgotten, then climbed into his yellow leather coat despite the relative warmness of the season. He retrieved the paper sack with the rope handle from under the cot and began to drop things into it—his one-volume Pushkin edited by Tomashevski, some shirts that I had ironed the previous day, several changes of underwear and socks, the knitted winter scarf that an editor’s wife had given him after his first arrest, a bar of soap, a comb, a tin of tooth powder, a toothbrush. I pulled my robe tight around my anesthetized body and sat on the bed as if paralyzed. My husband came over to me.

  “Accompany me as far as Charusti.”

  The man wearing the uniform I couldn’t identify said, “That is not permitted.”

  Mandelstam leaned down and kissed me on the lips. “Good-bye, then.”

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  I looked over at the shafts of sunlight stabbing through the panes of the window. When I turned back, my husband was gone. I heard the motors of the cars spurting into life. The door of the reading room yawned open. The doctor stood on the threshold, his palm on his heart. “I have no words,” he said, crushed by what had transpired. And he, too, fled, leaving the door open behind him. I could not identify the muscles in my body that would have allowed me to cross the room and close it. I cannot remember how long I remained sitting on the bed. It could have been hours. I do remember talking to myself. I remember trying to come to terms with my new identity by repeating it over and over. “I am the widow of the poet Mandelstam. I am the widow of the poet Mandelstam. I am the widow of the poet Mandelstam. I am the widow of the poet Mandelstam. I am the widow of the poet Mandelstam.”

  NINETEEN

  Probably Osip Emilievich

  Mid- or late September 1938

  [A copy of the letter reprinted below was generously given to the author (in January 1965, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Isaac Babel, who was tortured into confessing to espionage and shot) by Yekaterina Zh., a woman living in Moscow who herself endured three years in a gulag and preferred to remain unidentified. She and her late husband, a critic who wrote his (unpublished, later confiscated) magnum opus on Russian poetry before the Bolshevik Revolution, were close friends of the Mandelstams and, at some personal risk, put them up overnight on several occasions when Osip and Nadezhda were living like Gypsies in Moscow after their return from Voronezh. The letter arrived in an envelope fabricated out of course brown wrapping paper and postmarked from Ulaan Baatar, with the name and address of Yekaterina Zh. printed in ink in large majuscule letters on it. There was no return address. Undated, unsigned except for the tantalizingly ambiguous (almost coded) Still dancing at the end, the letter itself was painstakingly written out in pencil in a spidery handwriting, completely filling two sides of the title page and two sides of a blank page torn from a copy of Tomashevski’s Pushkin. It begins with the name Yekaterina Zh. and her address in Moscow printed in a hand-drawn box. That’s followed by the word Hope, which in the feminine singular, in Cyrillic, is the name of Mandelstam’s wife, Nadezhda. This, along with the several references to Nadenka, supports the supposition that the letter originated with Osip Mandelstam. If, as it appears, this document really can be attributed to Mandelstam, it was probably written in mid- or late September 1938 while he was en route to a transit camp in Siberia after his second arrest. It is reasonable to assume he mailed it in the traditional way prisoners posted letters, slipping it through the floor planks of a cattle car as the train carrying him east sped past a village or town at night.]

  Hope: My second arrest, I keep track of them on the fingers of my left hand, I still have three arrests to go before I switch to my right, was extraordinary for being ordinary. I could sense the Chekists going through motions they had repeated, like workers on an assembly line, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. They seemed bored to tears as they started back toward Moscow, three of them in the automobile with me, one of them racing ahead in the second vehicle to clear the road with his siren when it became clogged with trucks or cows. The Chekist in charge, the one who showed me the arrest warrant, actually offered me a tin cup with tea from a thermos. I was afraid to accept lest the tea turn out to be poisoned, at which point he shrugged and drank it off himself. He didn’t offer me a second cup. At Charusti we stopped at a military canteen for a lunch of [illegible] and black bread. I sat between the two soldiers almost as if I were a guest and, as I helped myself from the general bowl, I was able to eat. None of the soldiers at the other tables paid the slightest attention to me. When we started out again I dozed most of the time in the back of the car, my head against my satchel, which was wedged between the back of the seat and the window. Approaching Moscow, I was awakened by the radio [barely legible; could be crackling into life]. A voice announced a change of plans. The Chekists were ordered to bring their prisoner to a militia station on the outskirts of the city. When I heard this I started to shake uncontrollably—I thought they were going to take me down to the cellar and shoot me out of hand, which happened to me once before. We pulled up in front of the station. Trembling so badly I could barely walk, I was led inside, where an officer clearly senior to the others—like you, Nadenka, I was never very skillful at identifying rank from the array of gold or silver on shoulder boards or collars—led me through the main hall and out a door into a courtyard. He directed me into the backseat of a shiny American Packard parked at the foot of the steps, its motor running, an Uzbek soldier at the wheel. The officer took his place next to the driver and the Packard set off, thumping at high speed over the cobblestones of an avenue lined with brick apartment buildings so new they didn’t have glass in their windows. (Can windows properly be described as windows if they don’t reflect light?) I felt as if I would suffocate and started to turn down the car window, which is when I discovered that the glass was as thick as my thumb, which is to say it was of the bulletproof variety one reads about in newspapers. From this I surmised the vehicle belonged to someone imp
ortant. For what seemed like minutes, though my sense of the passage of time had abandoned me along with my sense of color and my muse, the Packard sped along Government Highway. We passed a billboard depicting a Chekist wearing steel mittens strangling a snake with the heads of Trotsky and Bukharin. I couldn’t tell if it was an advertisement for a motion picture or propaganda. The Packard turned off Government Highway at a railroad-crossing barrier blocking a single-lane paved road that plunged into a wood. The officer in the front seat flashed a small badge through the windshield. The guards saluted and raised the barrier. We continued on for some minutes, then turned left onto an even narrower road. Around a bend we were waved past a checkpoint manned by soldiers armed with submachine pistols. Some of the soldiers held watchdogs on short leashes. A high double chain-link fence trailed off on either side of the checkpoint as far as I could see, which wasn’t far because we were in the middle of a thick forest of black pines and white birches. Here comes the curious part, Nadenka. Around another bend, completely blocking the road, was an enormous full-length poster of Stalin. It was the size of one of those motion picture billboards but standing on end, and showed Stalin with his feet slightly apart, his chin raised and staring off over the tops of the trees. He was wearing a plain military tunic buttoned to the neck and soft flannel trousers tucked into ankle-length boots. And to my utter befuddlement, the Packard didn’t slow down but drove directly through the giant poster that was hanging across the road. Dear Nadenka, I can almost make out your voice in my ear saying, Calm yourself, my darling—you’re imaging things again. To say the truth, I wasn’t sure if this was really happening or I was fantasizing until I looked back through the narrow slit of a rear window and saw the ripped edges of the poster flapping in the currents created by our passage. (Are you still there, Nadenka? I can’t hear you listening.) Familiar words resounded in my head—Tearing the sackcloth canvas space—as we drove up an oval-shaped gravel driveway past the dog runs of a kennel, past a one-storey barrack with Uzbeks in fatigues sitting outside cleaning weapons on picnic tables. The Packard pulled up in the courtyard of a villa that was too big to be a dacha and too small to be a sanatorium, surrounded on three sides by closed-in glass porches. Uzbeks with submachine pistols at the ready surrounded the car. One of them pulled open the rear door. When I reached for my satchel, the officer in the front seat wagged a finger. You will retrieve it afterward, he said. After what? I asked. After [illegible]. Clutching my yellow leather coat around me, I climbed out of the Packard. A big man who looked vaguely familiar stepped forward and searched me thoroughly. He removed my yellow coat and flung it over the top of the open rear door. If you’re looking for a weapon, I don’t have one, I said. If I had one, I wouldn’t know how to use it. To which he replied, Shut your trap. When he’d finished patting down my trousers and my ankles, he stood up. Don’t you recognize me? he asked. When I didn’t reply, he said, Vlasik. I’m the chief Kremlin bodyguard. Our paths crossed when you were brought in to see the boss several years ago. I asked, Who is the head of household here? He appeared surprised by my question. Why, the khozyain, to use the Georgian expression, is the head of household, though the household in question sprawls from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Arctic icecap to the Pacific Ocean. Motioning for me to follow, this Vlasik person turned on his heel and entered the building. Glancing back to be sure I was still behind, he walked slowly enough for me to keep up with him. We crossed rooms filled with heavy furniture. In one a radio was playing classical music and a woman was passing a carpet sweeper at the same time. Ah, dearest Nadenka, here is a detail that will make you smile: there was no art on the walls, no paintings of generals such as I saw in the Kremlin, only pages torn from picture magazines—pastoral winter scenes, the Kremlin seen from various angles, that hideous tower in Kiev, a full page aerial view in a Parisian publication of that marvelous Eiffel Tower. There were also quite a few photographs of film and theater actresses. (One looked amazingly like our friend Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova. I have sometimes wondered what became of the dear girl. Don’t get the wrong idea, Nadenka, I don’t miss the sex, I miss the intimacy that came from making love to her with you watching. For me, intimacy was always the ultimate orgasm.) Turning down a long corridor we reached a wooden door with what the French call a vasistas over it. I could hear muffled voices behind it. Smiling faintly, Vlasik pulled open the door and stepped aside. I found myself at the entrance to a dining room with eight or ten men in it, some in dark European suits, two in uniforms with rows of medals on their chests and gold on their shoulder boards. I immediately recognized several of those present from photographs I had seen in newspapers. Kaganovich stood at a sideboard, heaping caviar and cream onto a blini in his plate. Molotov, with his distinctive mustache and sallow complexion and watchful eyes, looked up at me, then for some reason shook his head as if to dislodge a fly on the tip of his nose and went back to eating. Nikita Khrushchev, sucking noisily on a drumstick, wiped his chin on a shirtsleeve. Sitting one seat down from the head of the table was the khozyain, Josef Stalin. He added a finger of vodka to the wine already in his glass and sipped it. One of the men whom I didn’t recognize—a short man with the pale greenish skin of an alcoholic and a pince-nez that flashed when it caught the light from the overhead chandelier—spotted me and said something in Georgian. Stalin looked up. Here we speak only Russian, Lavrenti Pavlovich, he said with a scowl. He waved me in with his good arm. Come on, don’t hang back, he cried out. Beria is not going to bite you. He pointed to a vacant seat across the table from him. Help yourself to food, then we’ll talk. I went to the sideboard and put some herring and pickled onions on a plate, filled a glass with mineral water and made my way to the seat that had been indicated.