Tatiana: Dear God, it was you all along—you were behind his failure to obtain an exit visa!
Lilya: I suppose there is no harm in revealing the truth. It’s all spilt milk. Mayakovsky and I had no secrets from each other. We knew he had come to think of you, my precious Tatiana, not as a passing fancy but rather the latest in a long line of muses. To speak frankly, the logic of this escaped me. Being a muse is a full-time vocation requiring talent as well as patience and endurance, and presupposing a capacity to inspire the artist to concentrate on something other than death. To this end, muses are supposed to incarnate the fantasy of Eros. They must possess two virtues: corporeal beauty and spiritual mystery. I grant you your corporeal beauty. Spiritual mystery, on the other hand, does not appear to be your strong suit. Who can doubt that a woman who has had many lovers is more mysterious than a virgin? Regrettably, the Poet saw things otherwise. Perhaps the very novelty of virginity, as he had had precious little experience with Eros thus incapacitated, struck him as mysterious. In any case, biding his time in Moscow while waiting for another exit visa, he read out several of his telegrams addressed to you before he sent them. His fate has brought us together, the idea of life without you is intolerable was Osip’s suggestion. His adjust your heart to my hope was my modest contribution. We had great fun editing the rough drafts of his love telegrams.
Tatiana: Once again you are indulging your favorite indoor sport: provocation. I don’t believe a word you say, Lilya. You have set out to punish me for having been loved by Mayakovsky.
Lilya: Believe or doubt as you please. Look, what we were afraid of was not so much that he would marry you and bring you back to Moscow. No, no, what Osip and I dreaded was that you would agree to marry him but refuse to return to Moscow, thereby obliging him to exile himself to Paris. You do see? You were a menace to our ménage à trois, for we were indeed a ménage à trois. We lived under the same roof, we took our meals together when one or the other of us wasn’t off with a paramour. We worked together on his poster and film projects. Osip published his poetry that I inspired. We even pooled our incomes—
Nora: Mayakovsky told me about this pooling of incomes. He was your meal ticket, the only one earning any real money—with his books, with his films, with his pamphlets, with his poetry. You and your precious Osip lived off the money that Mayakovsky contributed to the pool. You are the one who needs to confront reality, Lilya. You and Osip clung to the Poet like barnacles on the hull of a ship. You didn’t want to jeopardize the bohemian lifestyle to which you had become accustomed. You didn’t want the breadwinner to go back to Paris a third time for fear he would stay there and your pool of income would dry up.
Lilya: That’s revolting, even for you. How can you say such a thing? How can you think such a thing? Both Osya and I, each in our own way, loved Mayakovsky dearly. Life without him was unthinkable.
Nora: You forget I was his last but far from least. He told me his innermost secrets. He kept nothing back. When he was obliged to return to the visa office at the ministry day after day and that lackey who kept an eye glued to the wall clock over the portrait of Lenin put him off with one lame excuse or another, he immediately suspected you and Osip were behind it. He knew you had a friend in the CheKa, your occasional paramour, the notorious Comrade Agranov with the pince-nez glued to his broken nose. He was sitting on an orange crate near the window the single time I came to your flat to hear Pasternak read his newest poems. (Nobody who was present is likely to forget that soiree, which ended with Pasternak reading Tsvetaeva’s incomprehensible verse and the two poets wrestling on the floorboards like drunken gymnasium students.) Mayakovsky described the CheKist as having close-cropped gray hair and closer cropped intellectual pretensions—he’d apparently turned up, uninvited and without so much as a bottle of vodka under his arm, several times at your literary soirees. Vlad wasn’t duped. He supposed that Osip and you had put in a word with this CheKist, warning the authorities that Mayakovsky was insanely in love with a Russian émigré and might defect to the West if he were allowed to return again to Paris, in which case Soviet Russia would lose its preeminent poet. In terms of propaganda, Mayakovsky’s defecting to the West to marry a spoilt White Russian princess like our Tanik here would have been a serious blow to the Soviet image. Imagine the headlines in the capitalist press trumpeting this defection. Paradise Lost: Workers’ Paradise Not a Paradise After All!
Elly: My bringing Yelena Vladimirovna to Nice—Mayakovsky’s child was not quite three at the time—was innocent enough. It was never my intention to use my daughter—our daughter—to lure the Poet back to America. I swear to God, I had no ulterior motive. I never imagined him settling down to domestic life, cutting the fingernails of a small girl only too delighted for an excuse to curl up in his lap. No, my only thought was for Yelena—I believed it was important for her to set eyes on her father so that she knew she had one.
Nora: I’m not sure the Poet could have survived America if you had lured him back.
Lilya: I’m not sure America could have survived the Poet!
Elly: Curiously, I heard him declare as much the night we met. You’ll enjoy the story of Mayakovsky in New York: The comrade-journalists from the Marxist magazine New Masses had invited Mayakovsky to read at the Central Opera House on East Sixty-seventh Street, which turned out to be jam-packed with young Communists who greeted the visiting Russian poet with a thunderous rendition of “The Internationale.” When they finished singing they gave him a standing ovation and began stamping their feet rhythmically. Mayakovsky tried to calm things down, crying (if you believe the description of the event in the New Masses) “Comrades, comrades, please, please, if this turns into a political event they will revoke my visa.” After the reading, after another standing ovation, the New Masses people dragged Mayakovsky off to a bash in his honor on the upper West Side of Manhattan Island, where he was besieged by New York’s leftist literati, all of them spellbound by this exotic extraterrestrial, this poet-revolutionist come from a world a world away. The Americans present were hanging on his every translated word, the young women were pressing their breasts into his arms. Mayakovsky, his innate arrogance overwhelming his superficial modesty, blurted out something along the lines of “America will change me or I will change America. For sure one of us will not be the same after my visit.” Everyone cheered when his words were translated. “Change America! Change America!” they chanted. Flushed with exuberance, the Poet grabbed the nearest girl around the waist and lifted her bodily until her head was scraping the ceiling. (Luckily for her she was wearing knickers.) The literati ate it up.
I was the only person in the apartment not fawning over the visiting Russian. I’d been invited by one of the New Masses editors for whom I’d done some translation work—he’d been trying, without success I might add, to seduce me, which is why he kept offering me pages to translate and then inviting me up to his Greenwich Village flat when his wife, an opera singer, was away on tour to soi-disant go over the text. As I needed the work—to make ends meet, as the money I earned modeling barely paid the rent—I kept stringing him along. On the night in question I was off in a corner, sitting on the padded arm of an armchair, my ankles crossed and dangling, reading the back cover of a recently published novel entitled Great Gatsby. (I’m sorry to say the author’s name escapes me.) The Poet must have remarked me not remarking him because he suddenly materialized in front of the armchair holding two porcelain teacups that turned out to be filled with moonshine whiskey. He offered one to me. Without a word, without a smile, we clanked cups. He drank his off in gulps as if it were vodka neat. I sipped at mine. I remember him looking quite irritated at having to introduce himself. “Mayakovsky, Vlad—”
I cut him off. “Of course I know who you are,” I will have snapped. “And you know I know. Why playact? For God’s sake, everyone here knows who you are. You’re the reason they all braved the Seventh Avenue subway and flocked to this stagnant West Side backwater tonight. One needs a jolly
good reason to journey to the upper West Side and you’re it. You are the toast of the town, as they say in American English.”
I couldn’t help but notice the grin seeping onto his lips as he realized I was speaking Russian like a Russian. “Toast of the town?” he repeated in perfectly dreadful English.
I explained the expression and he clanked his glass against mine again to show he understood. Then he did something odd: He dipped his thumb into what was left of his whiskey and absently caressed his lips with the moistened finger, all the while studying me over the rim of the teacup.
Nora: The business of his dipping a thumb into wine or vodka or whatever and humidifying his lips was a tic. I noticed it on more than one occasion. He did it, so it seemed to me, when he was anxious, when he wasn’t sure how to hold up his end of a conversation; when he wasn’t confident holding up his end of a conversation would result in a successful seduction, which was his life’s blood. He required daily transfusions!
Lilya: I agree with Nora. The business with the thumb surely was a tic. But I read it as a gesture that conveyed sensuality. Osip had a more mundane explanation: He thought the Poet’s lips tended to chap in the winter months, and his chapped lips required frequent moisturizing.
Tatiana: Personally, I never saw him do that, even in winter, but then I don’t recall the Poet ever being anxious about holding up his end of the conversation in my presence.
Nora: You are implying you were able to tame the animal in the Poet and we weren’t, of course.
Tatiana: How did you put it earlier? If the shoe fits …
Lilya: Ladies, for heaven’s sake—
Elly: I had the feeling, watching him stroke his lips with the ball of his thumb, that he was waiting for me to appear befittingly flattered to be the focus of his attention. I waited for him to stop waiting. The silence unnerved him. He laughed awkwardly to break it. “I am delighted to be in the presence of a Russian lady—But you haven’t introduced yourself!”
“Elly. Elly Jones.”
“Am I wrong in thinking Jones is not your typical Russian name?”
“Jones is your typical English name,” I explained. “My maiden name is Elisabeta Petrovna Zibert. I married a knight in armor, an English gentleman aid worker in Russia named George Jones. Being married to an Englishman qualified me for a British passport, the British passport qualified me for an exit visa, which is how I was able to escape from Soviet Russia and save my life.”
I remember being on the receiving end of a disconcertingly intense gaze. “As you are brooding by yourself in a corner,” I heard him say, “I take it your knight in armor didn’t accompany you here tonight.”
I acknowledged as much by not contradicting it. “Not that it’s any business of yours but George and I are more or less living apart,” I said softly.
He exhaled in elation, you would have thought he’d come in first in a hundred-meter dash. “So, beautiful practically divorced Russian lady—”
I cut him off. “White Russian lady, one who detests the Bolsheviks and their reckless revolutionists. To me, they are all gangsters and should be packed off to Siberia before they destroy the country with their scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners stratagems.”
The Mayakovsky I came to know would have taken this as a personal insult. I remember him saying something along the lines of “Now I see why you’ve been ignoring me. I frighten you. Soviet Russia frightens you. The eighty, ninety thousand workers and soldiers and women who took to the streets of Petrograd to oust the Tsar frighten you. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky exhorting the mobs to revolution from wooden platforms erected on street corners frighten you. The emaciated prisoners freed from Siberian labor camps watching my friend Balanchine’s ballets from the royal box in the Maryinsky frighten you. The idea that the blue-collar working-class slobs with dirt under their fingernails actually own the factories and run the government frightens you.”
I had spent too many hours arguing with Bolshevik sympathizers before emigrating to the United States of North America to think you could civilize them. They never give an inch, they can never bring themselves to admit, like Hamlet, that something could be rotten in the state of Denmark, they can never bring themselves to admit that in this fantasy Russia of theirs everyone is equal but some comrades—guess which?—are more equal than others. “As we are not having this conversation in Soviet Russia, you don’t frighten me in the slightest,” I assured him. “In any case you revolutionists are all the same. Your Bolsheviks are committed to the self-serving idea that their ends justify any means.”
The Poet gulped the last of the whiskey in his teacup. “Marxists believe, as an article of faith, in the ethic of ultimate ends,” he muttered defensively. “They would be paralyzed, the day-to-day administration of our vast Russia would come to a grinding halt, if they got bogged down over means.”
“Which is another way of saying that Marxist ends justify Bolshevik means.” I laughed derisively. “You have the saving grace of being open about it but that doesn’t make you less wrongheaded. In your scheme of things colossal dams producing electricity justify gulags filled with slave labor construction workers, urban industrialization justifies confiscating the crops of the peasants in the countryside, the obsession with one hundred percent support for the Party’s line justifies the CheKa knocking on your door if you should happen to disagree with it. Please don’t tell me you swallow all this Bolshevik crap. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs my ass! Who gets to decide on the worker’s ability? Who decides what he needs? Surely some fat-cat Bolshevik apparatchik who exploits the worker more than the capitalist who ran the factory until he was put up against a wall and shot.”
He gave this some thought, all the while squinting into my eyes. “I have come to believe what you call the Bolshevik crap,” he said finally. He shook his very disheveled head (he’d been traveling for weeks and looked it). “I start from the premise that life is a death sentence. I’m not here to anesthetize you with a fiction about life after death, where Moses and Jesus and Mohammed and seventy-two virgins welcome you to a desert oasis with a cool river flowing through it. My subject—my preoccupation, my obsession—is life before death. My comrades and I plan to create an oasis here on earth, and in our lifetime. I am not so much a Bolshevik as a Marxist and a revolutionist, which is to say I support—I encourage, I work for—revolution in Russia that will create this workers’ paradise. Listen, practically divorced White Russian lady, Russia needed revolution to put an end to alienation and save it from extinction. It would have sunk still deeper into tsarist decay without it. The Bolsheviks happen to have been the ones to revolt, so I work alongside them to make sure their revolution stays on track.”
“On track!” I surely exclaimed. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed several guests glancing our way to see who had dared to argue with the guest of honor. “On track my ass,” I said again but in a calmer voice. “Look, I saw this revolution of yours on its track before I managed to get out of the way of Lenin’s locomotive.”
Oh, I remember very well what he said by way of a reply: “I carry Lenin’s locomotive around with me to remind myself, if reminding is needed, that it was the Bolsheviks who dragged Russia kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.” At which point he hauled out a pocket watch with a Soviet locomotive embossed on the back. The CCCP on the front of the locomotive seemed to have been polished to a high sheen.
One of the New Masses people called for Mayakovsky to recite one of his poems. “What does he say?” the Poet whispered.
“He wants you to read out one of your verses.”
“As they don’t understand Russian there is no point,” he said, batting away the request with the back of his free hand. “I have never before spoken with a White Russian,” he said suddenly. “You are a new experience for me.” He smiled tentatively.
I shrugged tentatively. “I have never before spoken with a poet,” I admitted. “You are a new experience for m
e.”
“But I am first and foremost a man, and only afterward a poet,” he insisted. “Surely you have experienced men before.”
Don’t ask me why, I was suddenly baring my soul to this extraordinary creature from outer space. “The men I have slept with, starting with my husband, were invariably loath to take the initiative. Men are so terrified of being rejected they lack the courage to make the first move.”