Nora: Pasternak’s not stupid enough to do that. The Party would never permit him to publish it here. And he’d be in deep shit if he published it abroad.
Lilya: To get back to the subject at hand—the evening when Pasternak read Tsvetaeva—I see now that you were, as you say, present, Nora. You’ll surely recall it was after Meyerhold’s rant that Mayakovsky, his eyes bloodshot with rage, his face blood-splotched with exasperation, blurted out, “At least I keep the faith.”
Zinaida, looking irresistible with her dress slipping off one shoulder and a breast slipping out of the dress, rose to stand beside her husband. She flung a bare arm over his neck and said, in that purr of a voice for which she was notorious, “You criticize the Bolsheviks in private, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Why do you fear to criticize them in public?”
I remember calling out, “He doesn’t criticize them in public for the same reason you tugged at your husband’s sleeve a moment ago.”
I had lived with Mayakovsky long enough to know when his volcanic temper was about to erupt. Biting his words as they escaped his lips, he said, near as I can recall, “I am certainly not afraid to raise legitimate criticisms in public—I do it all the time when I confront our cultural tsars. But I don’t want to become like my former friend Pasternak, spitting where you eat—”
Pasternak bristled. “You insult me,” he cried.
“I insult your intelligence,” Mayakovsky retorted. “I insult your integrity, you shit.”
Pasternak hesitated, the muscles on his face knotted, his eyes squinted, searching, so I thought, for an insult that would offend the Poet in equal measure. And he came up with: “Tsvetaeva had a terror of words mangled by use. You, Mayakovsky, are in the business of mangling words. You were a poet once but you stepped on the throat of your song when you betrayed your gift, putting it at the service of a revolution gone wrong.”
All of us witnessing the battle royal held our breath. Mayakovsky could barely activate his vocal cords to respond, but respond he did. “You are a fucking bastard!” he rasped, and lowering his head he rammed it straight into Pasternak’s chest. In an instant the two of them were brawling on the floorboards. Several of the women sitting cross-legged scuttled out of their way, their skirts flying. My Osip and Meyerhold and Balanchine were trying to break up the fight when the two wrestlers, breathing hard, for neither was in great physical condition, sat up and eyed each other shamefacedly. Mayakovsky retrieved his shoe that had come off in the scuffle. Pasternak laughed awkwardly at the hole in the Poet’s stocking. The men standing around began to laugh, too. For myself, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as the two poets, sitting there on the floor and looking like complete idiots, reached out and embraced. But it was plain to see that something beside the Poet’s stocking had been torn, never to be mended.
That something was the kinship of poets.
Nora: (walking over to the hotel window) What’s that wailing sound outside?
Lilya: They must be testing the new air-raid siren that was installed on a roof down the block.
Tatiana: It sounds almost human, like an inconsolable woman grieving her heart out.
Elly: (joining Nora at the window) Look. People are rushing into the street! Some of them seem to be weeping. Oh my God, has war with America started?
Lilya: (joining them at the window, throwing it open, shouting) What’s going on down there? (to Elly) What does he say?
Elly: He says to turn on the radio?
Lilya: (turning on the radio) They’re playing “The Internationale”—someone important must have died. Wait, here comes an announcement. Litzky, keep recording.
Radio: (solemnly) The Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Council of Ministers, and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR announce—
Lilya: (whispering) That’s the voice of Yuri Levitan—during the Great War he broadcast news of Soviet victories.
Radio:—with deep grief that yesterday, March 5, 1953, at 9:50 p.m., the heart of Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin, Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, collaborator of Lenin, stopped beating.
Elly: (raising her voice to be heard over the dirge filling the radio) Did I hear right? He’s announcing that Stalin has given up the ghost! Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.
Nora: Oh Jesus, his death, if it’s true, will cause an earthquake here. Nothing will be the same.
Elly: I wonder what Mayakovsky would have thought of the death of Stalin.
Lilya: Knowing him, he would have remarked how, on occasions like this, people are quick to weep, but the tears will be tears for events, what Virgil’s Greeks called lacrimae rerum. Oh, I can almost hear Mayakovsky’s voice in my ear. When the tear ducts run dry, he would have said, anyone with the slightest sense of history will celebrate the death of a despot and mourn a glorious idea gone awry.
Tatiana: I do admit to feeling safer knowing Stalin is no longer among the living. (looking at Litzky’s Peirce wire recorder) Should I be saying that out loud?
Lilya: Litzky, do me the favor of erasing what we all just said. And then turn your damn contraption off. Stalin may be dead but he’s not yet buried. Nor is the Party.
Litzky: (in English) I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, ladies. And if anybody asks, I don’t speak Russian.
Nora: We might benefit from a break. I must absolutely make some phone calls.
FIFTH SESSION
Who appointed you poet?
Tatiana: (inaudible)
Elly: (inaudible)
Tatiana: It’s surely a ruse to … (inaudible)
Lilya: What are you two whispering about?
Elly: It’s not possible, I tell you.
Nora: Elly’s right. I called a friend at the university. She said all classes have been canceled until further notice. They wouldn’t cancel classes unless it were true. She said the students have been directed to send a Komsomol delegation to view the body, which is lying in state in the Hall of Columns.
Elly: (to Tatiana) At a time like this rumors are bound to fly.
Tatiana: How many times do I have to tell you, it’s not a rumor! I heard it from the babushka who sits in front of the toilet on our floor. She heard it from her daughter who is a maid in Stalin’s Kremlin apartment. The Kremlin guards have the housekeepers scrubbing the floors, the sinks, the toilets—they’re expecting the vozhd back from the near dacha tonight for some sort of meeting. The Kremlin guards don’t think he died even though the radio announced his death. How can you not see it! It’s an elaborate ruse. The CheKa is spreading the story that he’s dead to see who will mourn and who will celebrate. God help those who celebrate.
Lilya: For God’s sake, calm yourself, Tatiana. I talked to Osip on the phone. He spoke with a doctor friend who is a trauma specialist here in Moscow. Two CheKists came around early yesterday to ask this doctor what Cheyne-Stokes was. He told them it was spasmodic breathing in adults suffering from a brain tumor, cerebral hemorrhaging, or severe arteriosclerosis. The CheKists appeared to panic—they wanted to know if someone with Cheyne-Stokes symptoms could possibly recover. The specialist told them it was unlikely. Surely you see: The CheKists were in a panic because they were asking about Stalin!
Nora: Stalin must be dead, all right. But the awful truth is I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, sure, I’m relieved. I personally know two Jewish actors who were arrested in this new Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign of his. Their crime: being Jewish, and Jewish is the same as Zionist, and Zionist is the same as anti-Soviet. On the other hand, my mother and father, my grandfather, my two brothers, one of whom is in prison somewhere, my three uncles, one of whom was taken prisoner by the Germans and survived Bergen-Belsen only to be arrested when he set foot back in Russia after the war for having surrendered, Jesus fuck, all of them believed this suffering had a reason—this socialism in one country that we were constructing, brick by painful brick, was going to show the whole fucking world that a better way existed. An
d now the prick is dead and all of us who believed the vozhd knew what he was doing, that he was right and we were wrong, that there really were enemies of the people throwing broken glass into the flour to sabotage the heroic socialist experiment, all of us squandered the best years of our lives believing. Fuck. We were in hot water with him alive. Now the bastard’s safely across the Styx and we’re drifting up shit’s creek in Marx’s leaky canoe with a rusty teaspoon for a paddle.
Tatiana: (whispering) In Paris we never believed a word Stalin uttered. Not one. But all those confessions … Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Radek.… If they weren’t enemies of the people, if they hadn’t tried to assassinate Stalin, if they weren’t spies for Germany or England or Japan, why did they confess? (noticing Elly’s mordant smile) Oh my God. Oh my God! How did I not know this?
Lilya: Listen, it never crossed my mind that Stalin would know how to die—like everybody else, I simply assumed he would live forever. Given a choice, I suppose, deep down, in reaches of myself I scarcely dare venture, I would have preferred he live forever. Changing apartments or lovers or brand of cigarettes can make me edgy—changing one tyrant for another is sure to bring on Alzheimer’s, if only because you won’t want to remember what happened. God, what will become of us? What will become of Russia? We need a tsar, we need a father figure like Stalin, we need a helmsman or the country will run aground. Who or what can keep the Soviet Socialist Republics—especially the Muslims in Central Asia—from deserting the state? Who or what can keep the Soviet Union from disintegrating into chaos?
Nora: Uncomfortable as it is for me to find myself seeing eye to eye with Lilya, I hear what she’s saying. There’s another line from Pasternak’s masterful translation of Hamlet that comes to mind: something about the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns—
Lilya: Of course! That’s it in a nutshell. The undiscovered country puzzles the will,
… And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Elly: I can’t believe I’m hearing right. The both of you appear to prefer the notorious viciousness of a Stalin to the uncertainty of what might come after? Not me. There’s no way what comes after—there’s no way who comes after—could be worse.
Lilya: Well, I hope you’re right, Elly, but damn it, I dread waking up one morning in Prince Hamlet’s undiscovered country.
Elly: Maybe we ought to move onto safer ground: Mayakovsky. There’s not much time left. Let’s get back to the Poet, which after all is the reason we’re gathered here. Tatiana, you said you wanted to ask me a question—
Tatiana: I forget now what it was.
Elly: Something about small talk.
Tatiana: Oh yes, I remember now. Small talk. If we can backtrack for a moment, I admit to being intrigued by the vow you exchanged with the Poet on the famous bridge of his in Brooklyn, the one where you promised never to make small talk. Surely he offered up some juicy secrets to match your contribution, Elly.
Lilya: Knowing him, he will have. Delivering juicy secrets was his way of priming the pump to get juicy secrets.
Elly: As a matter of fact he did. He’d come home—which is to say he turned up at my flat on Twelfth Street in Manhattan—from a jazz jamboree at the San Remo, a popular speakeasy in a part of the island called Greenwich Village.
Nora: Excuse me but I don’t know this word speakeasy. Is there an equivalent in Russian?
Elly: Thankfully, no. Which is why I used the American word. Speakeasy was particular to the United States of North America during Prohibition, when all alcohol—with the exception of what they called near beer—was illegal. It was illegal to brew, illegal to sell, illegal to drink. For a dozen years, Americans went crazy. The speakeasy was a not-so-secret bar or club that served contraband alcohol behind locked doors and saved the country from insanity.
Lilya: I think we can say, without exaggeration, that that’s one area where our Bolsheviks, thanks be to God, never copied the American capitalists. Can you imagine Russia without vodka!
Elly: To get back to my story: I would have liked to accompany Mayakovsky to the speakeasy but Vogue’s imperious editor, the notorious Miss Edna Chase, had scheduled a night shoot on one of the fishing schooners tied up at the Fulton Fish Market, two blocks south of Mayakovsky’s beloved Brooklyn Bridge. Long about one in the morning I remember the Poet lurching through the front door of my floor-through, staggering over to the bed and, without bothering to remove his shoes, flopping face up onto it. “Vlad, you’ve been drinking again,” I must have cried because he replied in a slurred whisper, “Not a drop of moonshine passed my lips. But I did get to smoke a pipe of opium in the toilet with the Negro guitarist.” I was trying to unlace his shoes when he sat up suddenly, as if he’d been startled out of a fantasy. The opium must have loosened his tongue because I have this memory of him blurting out something along the lines of: “If I have a fault, it’s that I have no faults. My curse is that everything I do, I do well.” I tried to calm him but he raised his voice to drown out mine and continued talking, as if the words had been bottled up and needed to escape. “I am a gifted poet and a zealous revolutionist and a skillful lover. The three vocations have a lot in common—they feed off each other, the energy generated by one fuels the others. Why the hell are you smirking? Pasternak himself said I was a poet’s poet. The Commissar of Culture personally thanked me for rallying the masses to the Bolshevik Revolution. The women with whom I have copulated would surely agree that I was the best lay of their lives. Don’t take my word for it. Ask them.” And he started to reel off a list of lovers who could testify to his carnal competence, starting with you, Lilya. Long about lover number eighteen or twenty, his very bloodshot eyes simply closed and he sank back onto the bed, sound asleep.
Nora: Come clean, Lilya Yuryevna. Was he the best lay of your life?
Lilya: No.
Litzky: (in English) Oh my gosh. She said no!
Nora: What does Rasputin say?
Elly: He is startled to hear Lilya answer a question with a single word. Me, also, I’m startled.
Lilya: The terrible truth … the dreadful truth—
Elly: Uh-oh, here comes the rest of the sentence.
Lilya:—the true truth is I never took pleasure from intercourse with Mayakovsky.
Tatiana: That’s not what you said earlier.
Nora: Holy shit, you told us he would actually go on strike until you had your orgasm. You told us you never faked an orgasm—
Lilya: In a manner of speaking, I was telling the truth. With Mayakovsky, I never faked an orgasm and I never had one, at least not one you’d notice on Mister Richter’s newfangled earthquake scale. The Poet was so focused on his own pleasure—he presumed merely making love with Mayakovsky was a ration of pleasure for his female partners—that I don’t think he noticed. Look, if I overstated how ardent he was, it’s because you were all so Goddamn critical of him. Somebody had to step up and defend the Poet’s reputation.
Nora: Did the asshole know this true truth when he boasted to Elly of his sexual prowess and named your vagina as his star witness?
Lilya: No. He only learned it late in the game, toward the end of the twenties actually. I’m afraid he got my goat one evening when, more crabby than usual, he described the suggestive positions a ballerina in the Bolshoi had been able to fold herself into during a recent tryst. Which is surely what pushed me to let slip that I was seeing an army general. It didn’t help matters that the Poet had only just come across an old book on my shelf that my sister had sent from Paris—
Tatiana: Ought we to know which book?
Lilya: It was an 1887 British reprint of an 1832 American book entitled The Private Companion of Young Married People. In it this American physician argued that sex and procreation could and should be disconnected, which meant that women could copulate freely as long as they syringed their vaginas immediately after intercourse with a sulfate of zinc solution. I actually tried it several
times until Mayakovsky complained that it spoiled cunnilingus for him. The Poet chose that evening to ask me where I’d learned about the sulfate solution, which is how I came to show him the book. Leafing through it, he very casually posed the question: Which did I enjoy more, the seduction or the sex?
Nora: Surely you said the sex.
Lilya: In my defense I was still smarting from his description of the Bolshoi contortionist. I’m afraid I confessed that I enjoyed the seduction far more than the sex. Oh, I did try to convince the Poet not to take it personally—I swore to him he wasn’t the only lover who had never given me physical pleasure from intercourse. I suppose it was about then I began ticking off the list of my lovers who hadn’t given me an orgasm, starting with my Osip, working through six or eight literary personalities, an actor or two, an editor or two, several theater directors, that young Soviet diplomat on home leave, the Danish businessman—
Elly: We get the idea, Lilya Yuryevna.
Nora: You fucked up royally! There are things the male of the species is better off not knowing.
Lilya: With the benefit of hindsight, I am obliged to agree with you. You clearly have a haruspex’s gift for hindsight, Nora.
Nora: I appreciate the compliment.
Lilya: It wasn’t intended as a compliment, only a description.
Litzky: Touché! (to Elly, in English) Sorry, sorry.
Tatiana: Good Lord, Lilya, you must tell us how the Poet took your revelations.
Lilya: I’m afraid he took them to heart. He cursed the book and its American doctor-author. He cursed my sister for giving it to me. He called me several names that I won’t repeat with a young American who understands Russian in the room. We had another of our knock-down quarrels. He smashed an electric reading lamp against the back of a chair, he pounded the wall with his fist, he broke Uzbek crockery that he had brought back from a recent poetry reading expedition. One of the neighbors shouted she would summon the police if it kept up but that didn’t deter the Poet. The row petered out only when he petered out. What we were really fighting over wasn’t my admission about preferring seduction to sex, but my confession that I was serious about my Red Army general who, I made the blunder of telling Mayakovsky, did give me physical pleasure. A great deal of it, in actual fact.