The Mayakovsky Tapes

  Lilya: That will surely be when he bombarded you across the table with scraps of cardboard.

  Nora: Yes, yes, I wish I had saved these cablegrams he threw at me. They might have made interesting reading for future Mayakovsky scholars.

  Tatiana: You were arguing, that much seems evident.

  Elly: Surely you remember the gist?

  Nora: The Poet wasn’t one to accept no for an answer. When you contradicted him, he would say—as he did the night we first met—“No matter. We shall proceed as if I am right.” The spat at Meyerhold’s went on through the main course of borsht and sausages.

  Elly: The episode is legendary—people in Moscow intellectual circles still talk of it now, twenty-three years after the fact. Did you respond to his cardboard messages?

  Nora: I did, of course. As he took visceral pleasure in provoking me, I couldn’t resist teasing him back. By the time cakes and tea were set out on the table, the floor under my feet and his was littered with scraps of cardboard. I recall Meyerhold collecting the spitballs in a bowl and making everyone laugh with his vow to sell the scraps to American literature professors in the market for Mayakovsky memorabilia. I played along thinking it was a parlor game the Poet had invented but Mayakovsky, dipping his thumb into a vodka glass and moistening his lips with it—

  Lilya: Uh-oh, that gesture again. On my watch it was a storm warning.

  Nora: I wish to Christ I’d heeded his storm warning—I might have skirted the storm instead of sitting there like a fucking idiot, trapped in its eye. He never cracked a smile as he wrote out his cablegrams on those snippets of cardboard and, squeezing them into spitballs in the palm of his enormous fist, closing one eye the better to aim, sent them flying across the table in my direction. He was still seething when we left, which will have been well after midnight because Meyerhold’s two servants departed when they heard the Kremlin chimes striking midnight. At Meyerhold’s, the Poet had drowned his anger in vodka and in the nervous laughter of the guests egging him on. Back at the Love Boat, he expected to drown his anger in sex. He wanted, as usual, to fuck and he wasn’t in a mood to be denied. But when he’d stripped himself, and me, naked, he couldn’t keep an erection. Oh, you can believe I did everything a woman does in a situation like that, but to no avail. Which made him, if anything, even angrier because by then he wasn’t only furious at me for refusing to abandon my acting career and become his lover and muse, he was furious at himself for not getting what he desperately wanted, which was a serviceable muse into whose cunt he could plunge a serviceable erection. You must excuse my crudeness, Tanik, but it describes a reality. Part of him was still expecting to woo you away from your fiancé, away from Paris, part of him was trying to make do with the bird in hand: me. We slept fitfully on the daybed under the window, with him snoring and tossing and turning this way or that. Every so often he somehow managed to slip his limp prick into my hand in the hope of it becoming hard. Alas. At one point during what seemed like an endless night he stumbled out of bed. In the street light sieving through the dirty panes of the window I could make him out, leaning over the desk scribbling in his Day Book. I could hear the nib of that Waterman pen you gave him, Tanik, scratching across the paper. “What are you writing?” I called. “Go to sleep.” “Say what you’re writing at this ungodly hour, for fuck sake,” I persisted. “A spoof of something Pasternak translated—I call it The Mousetrap.” “Will you read it out to lull me back to sleep?” I thought I heard him answer: “Reading it out will keep you awake.” I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. I do now. When he slipped back into bed he was laughing under his breath, as if he was quite pleased with himself, as if he knew something that I would come to know.

  Elly: In your defense, Nora, I don’t see what you could have done differently.…

  Nora: You’re kind to say that, Elly. Nor do I, nor do I. I got up at first light and was dressed by the time the Poet, draping the quilt over his bare shoulders, padded to the toilet. “Make tea,” he ordered over his shoulder. “And don’t think of leaving before we settle the future.” Jesus Christ, as if the future hadn’t already been settled. I could hear him peeing straight into the water, which meant he was angry as hell because he usually peed on the side of the bowl so as not to make a racket. It took me a while …

  Tatiana: Do try to continue, Nora.

  Nora: Yes, I must get this off my chest, if only to better understand it. So: It took me a while, using splinters from a wooden crate, to get the fire started and longer to get the fucking water boiling on the wood-burning stove. Waiting for the water to boil, I couldn’t resist opening his Day Book to the most recent entry and reading the work in progress, which turned out to be a treatment for a film based on Pasternak’s translation of a scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Mayakovsky called his film The Mousetrap: A Comedy with Suicide. It ended, logically enough, on those two unambiguous words they throw onto the silver screen moments before the houselights come up: The end. I didn’t really know what to make of the Poet’s screenplay—the truth is I wasn’t sure what had ended. Knowing Mayakovsky, surely something more than just the film. But what? Hamlet’s uncertainty about the guilt of his uncle, the king? The (less than divine) comedy we identified as revolution? Mayakovsky’s hope against hope that even a washed-up poet had a role to play in a fucking worker’s paradise? Or, more simply, my efforts to breathe life into the dead prick? Don’t ask me why but I had the uncomfortable feeling it wasn’t a spoof, as he’d claimed, but a grand metaphor for the life and times of … Holy fuck, in what sense can it be considered a comedy if the curtain comes down on a suicide? I would have asked the son of a bitch to explain, except—

  Tatiana:—except?

  Nora: When the Poet finally emerged from the toilet … curiously … curiously, I noticed that he had shaved. Yes, he was clean shaven. He was wearing that black suit of his with one of those fucking radishes in the buttonhole—personally I no longer eat plants that grow into the ground, they make me sick to my stomach, come to think of it the idea of spending eternity under the ground also makes me sick to my stomach. What else? He had put on a clean white shirt and a clean cardboard collar, along with a yellow cravat. I tried to make light of it, jesting that he looked as if he had dressed for a funeral. And he said …

  Elly: Yes, yes, he said?

  Nora: He said he had. Dressed for a funeral. And I caught my breath, fearing to ask whose. It will have been about then that I caught sight of the cannon of a revolver that Lilya once described, partly obscured behind his back, dangling from a forefinger hooked through the trigger guard. I’m afraid I quite simply snapped. I remember shouting “Who the fuck are you proposing to shoot, you cocksucker? Me? Or yourself? Get it into your thick skull that you will not scare me into living with you.” By then the tea was infused. I could hear the pot hissing behind me, it sounded uncannily human, a bit of onomatopoeia that suggested a cornered woman’s bile, which, rising to the back of the throat, impeded speech. Which is what happened to me. Suddenly speechless, I turned away from him. And as if I had nothing more important to do in life than make morning tea for the Poet—I am an actress, after all—I calmly poured out a steaming cup and set it on his writing desk. I could feel his eyes on the nape of my neck as I gathered up my coat and my handbag and started toward the door. I heard a muffled cry, “Where are you off to?” “Rehearsal with Meyerhold,” I managed to murmur. By way of reply, I thought I heard him repeat the terrible line he had read out to the vicious students the previous evening:

  punctuate my sentence with a bullet

  Elly: My poor Nora!

  Nora: I got as far as the staircase—the explosion—I heard the explosion which, though I know nothing of firearms, I immediately associated with the cannon I’d seen in his hand. I wasn’t frightened really. I recalled the many tales of intellectuals tempting fate with Russian roulette. The dark suit, the clean shirt and collar, the cravat were all part of the ritual, so it was said. I remember walking leisurely back into
the Love Boat expecting to find the Poet playacting a corpse sprawled on the floor. And he was on the floor, face up, spread-eagled with one leg bent back awkwardly under his body, only he wasn’t playacting. A honey-thick dark red fluid oozed from a coal black hole in the drift white shirt where his heart would have been if he had had a heart. His eyes and his mouth were gaping open in stupefaction. The rest, I’m afraid, is recollected through a gauze of incoherence. I remember flinging open the window and screaming “Come quickly—Mayakovsky has shot himself!” I remember leaning over the Poet and administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and when that didn’t work tearing open his fly front and administering mouth-to-penis resuscitation. I must have been more than a little mad, I see now, to think I could resurrect the dead prick. I remember strong hands dragging me away from his body. I remember the Love Boat swarming with people—firemen in silver helmets, militiamen in brown uniforms, civilians wearing felt hats and belted raincoats even though it wasn’t raining. In my mind’s ear I can still hear the hollow popping of flashbulbs. I remember Mayakovsky’s little sister Olga Vladimirovna throwing up her hands and crying, in a voice that must have penetrated into every cranny of the building, “Volodya! Volodya! Oh dear God, he doesn’t answer!” I remember hearing the thunderous ticking of the Poet’s alarm clock on the stool. I even recall the time: It was 10:17. I remember thinking someone ought to smash the clock to fix the time of death—somebody had shattered the clock the afternoon Pushkin died, the hour hand, as every schoolchild knows, on 2, the minute hand on 45. I remember a women in a white laboratory smock holding a mirror to the Poet’s lips and then, as he was incapable of doing it himself, closing his eyes and his mouth for him. Ah, and Boris Pasternak. I have an indelible memory of him crouching in a corner, sobbing a torrent of tears into the Poet’s dark green woolen scarf. I remember him trying to comfort me after the militiamen carried off Mayakovsky’s body. “Poets won’t survive the thirties,” he whispered huskily, his lips pressed so close to my ear I could feel the moisture of his tears on my cheek. “He will have sensed that, which explains his self-slaughter. He didn’t leave the dirty work to others.”

  Lilya: Pasternak was prescient. Osip Mandelshtam didn’t survive the thirties—he perished in a Siberian camp after his second arrest in the late thirties. The brilliant Isaac Babel, esteemed for his Red Cavalry stories, was taken down to one of the Lubyanka vaults and shot in 1940.

  Elly: The unfathomable Tsvetaeva—whose soul, according to Pasternak, was verb—fell victim to the vicious years. Her husband, Sergei Efron, may or may not have been obliged to spy on Russian exiles for the CheKa when the couple lived in Paris. In any case he was lured back to Russia only to disappear. Tsvetaeva’s daughter went back to Russia to look for her father; she, too, disappeared. Tsvetaeva made the tragic mistake of returning from exile in 1939 to trace her husband and daughter—she wound up hanging herself after she discovered that Sergei had been executed and their daughter had been sentenced to prison. (reacting to Tatiana’s expression of disbelief) How do you not know this?

  Nora: (touching her cheek with her fingertips) I am not ashamed to admit I can still feel Pasternak’s tears on my skin—they have never evaporated. I remember dipping my fingers into the stain of blood on the floorboard of the Love Boat and thinking: Perhaps—yes, perhaps the kinship of poets had not been torn after all. And then there was the lined page ripped from the Poet’s Day Book with his last testament written out in blue ink, evidence that he’d been using Tanik’s Waterman. I suppose, like Yesenin, he would have used blood if there had been no ink at hand.

  As they say,

  “the incident is closed.”

  The Love Boat was shipwrecked

  on the dreariness of day-to-day routine.

  Now life and I are quits,

  nothing is to be gained by itemizing

  mutual hurts

  and insults.

  There appeared to be a post scriptum.

  Comrade Government, my family consists of Lilya Brik, mama, my sisters, and Veronica Vitoldovna Polonskaya dit Nora. I commend them to your care. If you can ensure them a decent life, I thank you.

  You know what he can do with his pompous Comrade Government, ensure them a decent life. The son of a bitch can shove it up his delicate poetic asshole is what he can do.

  Elly: Get ahold of yourself, Nora. He is in no position to have anything shoved up his asshole.

  Litzky: (in English) In the grave, worms could be working their way up his asshole. Unless of course he was cremated.

  Elly: (in English, to Litzky) He was, actually. Cremated.

  Lilya: Kindly inform Rasputin that the death of the Poet is not a smiling matter.

  Tatiana: If only I had gone back to Moscow with him when he asked me to, he wouldn’t have tempted fate with a spin of a revolver’s cylinder.…

  Nora: If only I had agreed to become his fucking muse.…

  Elly: If only I’d loaned him ten years of my life instead of five.…

  Lilya: (blotting a single tear on the back of her wrist) If, if, if … an extraterrestrial arriving from Mars would reasonably conclude that life on the planet earth is an endless line of ifs, parading in lockstep, twenty-three abreast, past Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, saluting the master of the Kremlin atop the reviewing stand who, oblivious to the millions he killed, his mustache twitching in irritation, bemoans a single if: his young wife, Nadezhda, who murdered herself in the Kremlin one night in 1932, only God knows why and He isn’t sharing that scrap of top secret information. Oh sweet Jesus, if only I’d come home from that trip to London in time, if only I’d been in Moscow, if only I’d been invited to the supper at Meyerhold’s, things might have turned out differently. Twice before he’d spun the cylinder of his cannon and pulled the trigger. And each time he had somehow managed to be sure there wasn’t a bullet under the firing pin when he held the barrel to his heart—

  Nora: Are you implying he arranged things this time to be sure there was a bullet under the firing pin?

  Lilya: I think it probable, yes. How else can one explain the suicide note? Our CheKist friend told us it was scrawled on the last page of the Poet’s Day Book, which had been ripped from the binding and propped up next to the photograph of Lenin on the Poet’s desk.

  Elly: But newspaper accounts said the note was dated 12 April, Lilya, which was two days before he shot himself.

  Nora: Oh fuck! 12 April was the day he had that revolting interview at the State Publishing House.

  Elly: How do we know he didn’t write it on 12 April the year before? Or even 12 April in the early twenties for that first Russian roulette episode?

  Tatiana: Or the second?

  Lilya: Blue ink! Waterman fountain pen! He didn’t have Tatiana’s Waterman pen in the early twenties. He didn’t have it the year before.

  Tatiana: Someone overhearing this conversation would think you blamed me for the Poet’s death because he wrote the note with the Waterman I gave him. There are Russian fountain pens that write in blue ink, for God’s sake.

  Elly: The writing of a suicide note in any color ink—in case the revolver should fire—doesn’t rule out Russian roulette.

  Tatiana: I, for one, am absolutely convinced it was Russian roulette and not suicide.

  Nora: Holy fuck, Tanik, Russian roulette is suicide! As the Poet’s last but far from least, I can confirm that Mayakovsky was consumed by a rage to punctuate his sentence with a bullet. He no doubt thought of it as the fulfillment of one of those ridiculous Petersburg traditions—the poet who murders himself at the summit of his poetic power is rewarded with instant immortality.

  Tatiana: What a perfectly dreadful concept—immortality through suicide!

  Lilya: Dreadful or not, it’s a leitmotif that runs through Mayakovsky’s poems and plays.

  Elly: Lilya’s correct. I detected that, too, in his oeuvre. One evening, on the street called the Bowery on Manhattan Island, we came across firemen loading the dead body of a drunk into an ambulan
ce. Watching the ambulance pull away, I asked Mayakovsky if he ever thought about dying.

  Tatiana: I asked him the same thing once but he only laughed.

  Elly: Yes, yes, he laughed with me also. But it wasn’t his usual laugh, it didn’t come from the belly, as we say, it came from the back of his throat, as if he was choking on something, as if he was trying to cough it up. I remember asking him what his laughter meant. He said he was laughing at an idiotic question. To keep from answering, he stood the question on its head—he asked me if I thought about dying. I said not yet. I said I was too young to think about dying. I said I planned to start thinking about it when I reached fifty, which was more than twice my age at the time. Later, over drinks in a speakeasy, he surprised me by coming back to the question. Out of the blue, he told me he wasn’t too young to think about dying. He reminded me that he was thirty-two and said he thought about little else. He must have regretted letting me into a part of him I hadn’t visited before because he tried to pass the confidence off as a jest, laughing that same choking laughter again. And throwing back his lovely large head, he startled everyone in the speakeasy by bellowing out two lines from one of his poems: