Two Chekists in uniform—one a full colonel!—were waiting for me on the quay when my train pulled into Moscow. “Shotman, Fikrit?” the colonel asked, looking up at me because I towered over him.
“One and the same,” I said.
Here’s what took place next. The colonel whipped a paw up to his visor and snapped off as smart a salute as you’re going to see in Soviet Russia. It actually flashed through my thick skull that he was saluting someone behind me, but there was nobody behind me close enough to get saluted. Not wanting to appear bad-mannered, I saluted back.
“We have a car waiting,” the colonel announced, treating me, like the officers in the first-class railway coach, with high regard.
So he wouldn’t think I was bowled over by all this attention, I shrugged indifferently and trailed after him through the flood of passengers out the station’s enormous entrance hall. Sure enough, an Uzbek corporal was standing to attention next to the open door of a shiny blue American Packard. I squeezed into the back, my knees cramped up to my chin. When I rolled down the window to get some air—Moscow winters are summers compared to Siberian winters—I saw the glass was as thick as my little finger. I supposed this was how Americans made cars, though I couldn’t think what advantage thick glass would have over thin. To my surprise, four militiamen on motorcycles leapfrogged ahead of the Packard, blocking cross traffic at intersections so we could run red lights. I got a laugh watching people peering into the car to catch sight of the important apparatchik who could make traffic stop for him. After some minutes I spotted the Kremlin wall ahead at the foot of the street named after the late Maksim Gorky, it sticks in my head he had something to do with books, I remembered Magda reading aloud his death notice in the Kolma weekly newsletter maybe two years back, which is how come I knew he was late. When we reached the wall, with glorious Red Square off on the left, the Packard went to the right, then turned left across a small bridge and drove through a Kremlin gate I happened to know was not open to the public.
All the time I kept asking myself where I was being taken, and why.
Inside the Kremlin compound, the car pulled up in front of a low brick building. The Uzbek sprang from his seat to open the back door of the automobile. Sunlight was shining off the onion dome of a church and I had to shield my eyes with a hand to see. The colonel must have thought I was saluting him because he saluted me again. Darting ahead of me, the Uzbek pulled open the front door of the building. Comrade Stalin’s chief bodyguard, the one who frisked me the time I shook Stalin’s hand in 1932, I remembered him because he was almost as big as me—his name escapes me, with any luck it’ll come back before you finish recording my answers to your questions—was waiting in the vestibule. Only this time he didn’t frisk me. He jerked his head for me to follow him down a flight of stairs. We came to a glass door with writing on it and he jerked his head again for me to go inside. Which I did. In a thousand years you’ll never guess where I was. I was in a tailor shop, yes, a genuine tailor shop with four men slumped over Singer sewing machines, I know the brand because we had the same ones at the circus to repair costumes, their feet furiously working the pedals. Hanging off hangers along one wall were more suits than you could count, piles of folded shirts and shoes filled cubbyholes along another wall. An Israelite tailor, a stooped man with curly hair, began measuring me with the cloth tape measure draped over his neck. Mumbling to himself, the Israelite pulled a dark blue suit off a hanger. “We will have to let out the sleeves and the trousers,” he told the bodyguard.
“How long will it take?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Do it in ten.”
The tailor gave the trousers to one of his sewers and the jacket to another and they dropped what they were doing and went to work. While they were lengthening the sleeves and trousers, I was ordered to strip to my underwear. I was given a white shirt with a collar attached and genuine leather lace-up shoes that came to a point in front and pinched my toes. When the sewers finished sewing, they ironed the new cuffs and sleeves with an iron that looked to be attached by a cord to an electricity outlet. What will they invent next? I tried on the suit and buttoned the double-breast jacket and took a look at myself in the full-length mirror. If Magda could see me she would have thought she was high on chaifir. The Israelite offered me a choice of neckties but, not knowing how to tie one, I waved him off and buttoned the shirt up to my neck, Azerbaidzhani style. My old clothes—the canvas trousers and the flannel shirt that had belonged to Magda’s suicided camp husband, the felt boots with the worn-down cork soles—were thrown into a carton on the floor. When I asked if I could have them back, the bodyguard laughed. The Israelites at the sewing machines began laughing, too. Not wanting to be left out of the joke, I laughed along with them.
With my new shoes squeaking under my weight and the collar of the starched shirt scratching at my neck, I followed the bodyguard down a long underground passage lighted every few meters by overhead bulbs. (I knew electricity didn’t grow on trees. I wondered if they turned the bulbs off at night to save money.) At the end of the passageway we climbed a spiral staircase to a locked door three flights up. The bodyguard—ah, his name just now came to me. It’s Vlasik. Agrippina used to say brains were not my strong suit, but I’m not doing too bad, am I?—this Vlasik took out a ring of keys and fitted one of them in the lock, and the door, which turned out to be made of iron, clicked open. I followed him up another flight of stairs and down a hallway into a room with polished benches along the walls. Behind a desk with three telephones on it sat a hairless man with acne. On the wall behind him was an inspirational picture of Comrade Lenin, his right hand cutting the air, speaking to a crowd of workers from a wooden platform.
Comrade Stalin’s bodyguard said, “He’s here.”
The hairless man at the desk picked up one of the telephones and said, “He’s here.” He looked up. “Take him straight in.”
I caught my breath as I walked through the door—it was the very same room where Comrade Stalin shook my hand when I won silver in Vienna, Austria. A short man wearing a military tunic was standing at one of the windows, looking out at the Kremlin church with the sun shining off the dome. Vlasik coughed into his fist. The person at the window turned slowly to face me. It was Comrade Stalin in the flesh, smaller and older and tireder than I remembered from when I met him six years before. He hitched up his trousers and, making his way around the desk, stuck out a soft hand. “Stalin,” he said.
I shook his hand, being careful not to squeeze it. “Shotman, Fikrit,” I managed to say, though I was short of breath from breathing the same air as the person I admired most in the world.
Comrade Stalin took a cigarette with a long cardboard tip from a silver case and offered it to me. “I used to smoke hand-rolled makhorka,” I said, “but I gave it up, Excellency.”
“I wish I didn’t smoke,” he said, holding the flame from a small lighter to the end of the cigarette. He expelled a lungful of smoke. “I intend to give up cigarettes the day America goes Communist.”
He went around the desk and sat down on an ordinary chair and pointed to another chair on my side of the desk. I must have looked at it uncertainly because Vlasik growled at me, “Sit, for God’s sake.” I did.
Comrade Stalin said, “I remember you very well, Shotman—people your size are not easily forgotten. You were the champion weight lifter with the bad knee. When the Kremlin doctors screwed up the operation, Khrushchev had the bright idea of turning you into a circus strongman. How has life treated you since?”
I was thrilled that Comrade Stalin, with the weight of the Soviet state on his shoulders, not to mention the world Communist movement, remembered someone as not important as Fikrit Shotman. Naturally I told him the truth. “I was accused of being wrecker for having a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on my steamer trunk, for having tsarist state loan coupons in its drawers. I served four years mining gold on the Kolma River.”
“I know about Siberia,” Comrade Stali
n said. “To speak plainly, that’s why you’re here.” He picked through a pile of what looked like telegrams. “The commandant at Second River reports that you came across the poet Mandelstam while you were waiting for transportation west after finishing your sentence.”
“Am I in trouble because of Mandelstam?” I blurted out.
“Only answer Comrade Stalin’s questions honestly and all will go well for you,” Vlasik said from the wall.
“You are not in trouble,” Comrade Stalin assured me. “Take your time. Tell me what you know of this Mandelstam.”
“When I reached Second River, around the middle of October, it was crawling with prisoners. There were no free bunks left in the barracks so I camped out under tent canvas rigged between two barracks. I’m not complaining, only giving you information, Excellency. The next morning I noticed naked men sitting on the ground in front of the latrines searching their clothes and each other’s scalps for lice, and crushing them between their fingers when they found them. I recognized one of the prisoners. It was Mandelstam.”
“How could you recognize him? Had you met him before?”
“I shared a cell with him in 1934 when I was being interrogated in the Lubyanka.”
“Ha! So that’s the connection.” Comrade Stalin sucked on his cigarette, slapping away the smoke with a palm so he could keep an eye on me. “What was Mandelstam like when you met him in the Lubyanka?”
“To tell the truth, Excellency, he was a bit loony at times. He thought he could walk through walls. He boasted about meeting you in the Kremlin, he described going down a hallway filled with paintings of Russian generals. He was very mysterious, he said it would be dangerous for me to know what you talked about. At the end he would have cut his wrist with a piece of broken china bowl if I hadn’t stopped him.”
I could make out Comrade Stalin scowling. Then he said something I still don’t comprehend. “I never met Mandelstam in the Kremlin. I never met him outside the Kremlin for that matter.”
“I never bought his story about meeting you,” I said quickly. Which wasn’t the honest-to-God truth. Osip Emilievich described the meeting with Comrade Stalin in so much detail, it never entered my head he was making it up.
“Tell me about Mandelstam in Second River.”
The fact of the matter was that if I closed the lids over my eyes, I could see the poet, which is what everyone in the camp called him, as clearly as if he was standing in front of me. I could almost reach out and touch him. “He was thin like a scarecrow, Excellency. Thin and breakable, like the sheets of ice sliding off the roof of the barrack when the sun came out. He refused to collect the bowls of kasha with fat poured over the buckwheat groats handed out twice a day—he was frightened the guards were going to poison him. I scrounged crusts of bread and potato peelings and bone marrow from garbage bins behind the mess barrack and he ate those, though he didn’t have many teeth in his mouth and needed to gum the food. When a convoy of prisoners left for the gulags on Kamchatka, I found an empty top bunk in Hut Number 11, Mandelstam’s barrack, and pretty much became his protector, carrying him piggyback to the latrine and back, carrying him to the infirmary when he complained of stomach cramps or pains in his chest or double vision. In November, Siberian winter blew in from the steppes. When we went to shower, which was once every two weeks, our clothing froze in the damp air of the bathhouse—our trousers leaned up against the wall as if somebody was in them. And Mandelstam would clap his hands and do a jig to fight off the numbness in his feet. His yellow leather coat was in shreds and he took to shivering all the time. I wrapped one of his spare shirts around his neck like a scarf but it didn’t help. One day a prisoner named Arkhangelski—he was a real criminal, not an Article 58er like us—asked Mandelstam to read to the criminals that lived in the attic space under the barrack roof. The invitation raised Osip Emilievich’s spirits. He combed his hair with his fingers and ironed the rags on his body with his palms. I helped him up the ladder to the loft, which was heated by a wood stove and lit by a paraffin lamp. The yellow light turned his yellow skin yellower. I lifted Mandelstam, who was getting thinner and weaker with each passing day, onto a high stool and he began reading from the small book he carried in his pocket wherever he went so it wouldn’t get stolen. Every once in a while he would stare out at the criminals and finish the poem without bothering to look down at the page. He recited other poems written by someone with a name like Voronezh, I think. The criminals listened with great attention. Sometimes Arkhangelski or another would ask him to recite the same poem again or say what a certain line or certain word meant. Listening to him along with the criminals, I can’t say I understood all that much of what he read, though you could see what Osip Emilievich must have been like when he was young and strong and not sick with fear. Between poems Arkhangelski or one of the others gave him slices from a loaf of bread or pickled mushrooms from a can, even lumps of sugar from a jar filled with lumps of sugar. Mandelstam wasn’t afraid of the criminals—he didn’t think they were out to poison him—so he accepted. He wound up reading to the criminals two or three times a week until . . .”
Comrade Stalin leaned forward in his chair. “Until?”
“Until spotted typhus struck Second River. The first cases were reported in the middle of December. It spread fast. Anyone with fever was locked in the quarantine barrack. Nobody went in or out. Every morning the infected prisoners emptied slop buckets out the window. Pretty soon word spread that everyone in the barrack was dead. Osip Emilievich begged me not let them take him to the quarantine barrack. He was shivering so hard I hauled him up to my upper bunk because it was warmer, and covered him with his blanket and mine. When the medical orderlies with masks over their mouths came through in the morning to take off prisoners with fever, I managed to hide Osip Emilievich from them by lying on the bunk alongside him. And then one morning, when it was my turn to fetch the ration of kasha, the other prisoners found him shivering and sweating under his blankets. When I got back they told me he had a fever, they threatened to report the both of us if I didn’t take him off straightaway to the quarantine barrack. I bundled him up in the blankets and carried him instead to the camp infirmary. The doctor at the infirmary, an Article 58er like us, stripped Osip Emilievich and washed his body, which was by then only skin and bones, with a sponge and warm water. The doctor combed the lice out of his hair and beard and short hairs and put him to sleep in an army cot with a real straw mattress. I spent as much time with him as I could in the next days. His mind drifted a lot. One time he made me promise to send a telegram to the Writers’ Union informing them he was under the weather and wouldn’t be able to read at their auditorium that night. Another time he ranted about having been injected with rabies. Late one afternoon late in December I must have nodded off next to his bed. When I woke up I saw him staring at me with the wide eyes of a child and I thought to myself, he has made his way back to the safety of childhood before he dies. “Can you hear me, Osip Emilievich?” I whispered. His answer was so soft I had to lean my ear that worked over his mouth to catch it. He said something about how the pinprick of the last star was vanishing without pain. I repeated his words to myself until I had memorized them, though the meaning was a mystery to me. (With or without pain, I don’t see how a faraway star can give you a pinprick.) Then he reached under the rough blanket and began to play with his sex and I thought to myself, he has made his way past childhood to the safety of babyhood before he dies. I am not ashamed to say I turned my head away so he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. After a while I got hold of myself and turned back. Mandelstam was still staring at me with his child’s innocent eyes, except they were frozen open and he wasn’t breathing. I went into the hallway and gestured to the doctor at the end of it and he understood and came running and pulled out a pocket mirror and held it to Mandelstam’s mouth and when there was no cloud of life on it he looked over at me and shook his head. And he said, Death is not sad when what came before was not life. He printed out Osip
Emilievich’s name and the date—twenty-seventh of December 1938—on a valise tag and attached it with wire to the poet’s big toe. I wrapped his body in a scrap of canvas set aside for that purpose and carried it to the trench behind the last barrack that was already filled with corpses from the typhus outbreak. A bulldozer was parked nearby, waiting to cover the trench with earth when there was no more room in it. I jumped into the trench and lifted Osip Emilievich down after me and set him on the frozen ground and, opening the folds of the canvas, I put two small flat stones, the kind you skim off water, on his eyes, which is what you do when you bury a notable in Azerbaidzhan. And I thought, Jesus, somebody ought to say a prayer or something, what with him being dead, so I said, God of the Jewish, don’t assign too much weight to the charges against the poet Mandelstam, it’s not his fault he wasn’t socially useful. When Arkhangelski saw me that night, he wanted to know if the poet was well enough to come up and read to the criminals. I said no, he wasn’t well enough to read, the fact was he would never read again, he was dead.”
When I finished describing Mandelstam’s death, I could hear Comrade Stalin breathing through his nostrils. He was still holding the cigarette but not smoking it. He pulled another telegram from the pile on his desk and said, “The camp commandant listed the cause of death as typhus.”
I must have shrugged because Comrade Stalin burst out, “It was typhus, wasn’t it?”