Europe Central (19 page)

Shostakovich’s inner world was a bunker in which he lived under constant attack. I have a blueprint of it right here. The fact that at any moment one of their eighty-eights or one of our special detachments was going to break through couldn’t help but influence the character of his surroundings.

Konstantinovskaya’s world was a walled garden with a dead fountain within. Once the fountain had jetted into the air, and the trees had borne flowers and fruit—only once. After 1935, what grew there but rubble and mummies? Well, but the reason why I admire her is that unlike Akhmatova, she made no career out of feeling sorry for herself. Good girl! That Order of the Red Star she got, why shouldn’t I inform you that I had something to do with it?

But Akhmatova’s world was the semipublic one of Tsarkoe Selo. In the early years of my assignment, trailing her meant promenading along the long, pale-pillared coast of the Catherine Palace. It used to keep me in shape. As a rule, those scum force us to sit in a chair all day listening in on them, so I can’t say I hated Akhmatova. In fact, one time I told her that I was considering reading Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman.” I asked for advice. Was it really worth my while? I wanted to know. And in that same uninflected voice in which she recited her poetry on demand, she assured me that it would be a waste of my time. I’ll always be grateful to her for that, because I’m a busy man.

Sometimes she took me to the Garden of the Toilers on Uritzky Square, where I could inhale a little sunshine. I’m considered excellent at what I do; she never saw me even when she turned on me that smooth cool face like an enamel icon. For a time the Engineering Academy of the Red Army on Ulitsa Rakova, which she persisted in calling Italyanskaya, was also a favorite destination of hers. I didn’t mind that; I know a lot of engineers.

Where do you think she was when the February Revolution broke out? At one of Meyerhold’s dress rehearsals! It’s true that we did see her gliding from barricade to barricade, but not to participate in our struggle, only to do what poets do: play with fire. And what was she doing when we seized power in the October Revolution? Standing on the Liteiny Bridge. Where might she have been in 1936 when the white-clad Stakhanovite workers came marching toward us on Red Square, with the gigantic white image of Comrade Stalin stretching out his arm toward them from atop his column while R. L. Karmen filmed everything? Where do you think? She was in a certain tree-alley by the Vittolovsky Canal.

That’s why it hurts me when ignorant people claim that we “isolated her.” In 1918, when she divorced Gumilyev and entered into that so-called “marriage” with V. Shileiko (I’ve seen the block warden’s book, and I can assure you that their union was never properly registered), the happy couple withdrew into the icy labyrinth of the Sheremetev Palace, which always reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the Snow Queen: walls of ice, frozen puzzle-pieces, silence, deadness, and a woman with an ice-cold kiss! (Don’t tell me I’m not poetic.) Meanwhile, I took note of a black ring worn around a departing lover’s neck, a poem about weeping, a poem about white crosses. But that’s not the point. What caused us concern is that after we’d arrested those snakes who dared to vote against Soviet power at the Constituent Assembly, we found Akhmatova rallying enemies of the people with a poem entitled “Your Spirit Is Clouded with Arrogance.”

4

When she was still young and beautiful enough to write that the past’s power can fail, she mourned unkissed lips. When our Revolution proved that the past can in fact be broken, what then? Unkissed lips returned to hang eternally over her in the yellow fog over Leningrad. I’ve seen her linger by a pale archway ornamented with bearded heads; she spent an hour there; my toes were getting cold, I can tell you. She gazed at each effigy as if it were someone she’d loved. Well, with her anything was possible. Unkissed lips! When we were supposed to be building socialism! Each mouth was a noose—oh, she hanged herself a thousand times! But from the beginning she celebrated her mourning in colored icons of words. She
needed
to doom herself within those opened lips. I’ve uncovered a term for that behavior: sexual asphyxia! Just as the reflections of railings get broken up by ripples, then begin to heal themselves, never finishing, so her pain of love and life pulsated in and out of exaltation.

A kiss, then mourning for a kiss—to know both, one must experience love’s end. One summer night in 1935 while Shostakovich lay in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms, whose arms did Akhmatova rest in? No one’s. She lay down in the wet grass, gazing at the Chinese Pavilion’s crown. I was there; I saw how her cold lips trembled. Shostakovich found salvation within the curtain of Elena’s hair. Akhmatova haunted herself with swans and dead water.

By then she’d begun to learn that even greater than the power of the absent lover is
our
power, Soviet power! We were going to plait her braids more tightly for her . . .

I’ve seen her at Gumilyev’s shoulder, gazing away at right angles to him; he wears a rose above his heart, oak-leaves on chest and sleeve; a sword of moonlight fails to cut deeply the black water behind them; statues spy on them from behind the trees. I have every reason to conclude that at that moment he was dreaming about his own Elena, to whom he gave the name “Blue Star.”

In those years it was still believed at my office that her sensibility resembled some rainbow-colored clock whose hands were church-towers creaking round and round Petersburg for the very last time, before we stopped that clock. Nobody could have imagined “Requiem”; we associated her with “At the Seashore.”

5

Then, thanks in part to her unhappy marriage, and also to her native disposition, she began to more than express her suffering; in typical Russian fashion she treasured it! Her Muse no longer reassured her:
Your happiness will be guarded by the statues in the Summer Garden.
That was all the same to Akhmatova. Since her suffering was strong, if she could only allow it to define her, why couldn’t she be indomitable? As early as 1915, N. Nedobrovo noted
her calmness in confessing pain and weakness.
¹⁹
By then, Marina Tsvetaeva was already writing love-poems to her. In 1916 a lover whom I have identified as B. Anrep caused her a highly specific agony which shone within her like a white stone in a well. (When it came to grieving, she was far superior to Shostakovich, who jittered and went to pieces.) Then Shileiko caused her sorrow in the Sheremetev Palace, and more sadness in the Marble Palace; that was how she passed her time. Petersburg became Petrograd, then Leningrad; it starved and rotted all around her. The shiny dark lips of A. Lourie, the affected gestures of O. Glebova-Sudeikina, the droopy eyelids of that so-called “poet” Kuzmin, that entire pallid rabble of aesthetes at the Stray Dog Cabaret, one by one we made them all irrelevant.

Do you think our Anna learned any lesson from this? Not at all. She “immortalized” all those individuals in “Poem Without a Hero.”

6

The introduction to this work bears the dateline of 25 August 1941 from “besieged Leningrad,” which really pisses me off. She never fired a shot in our defense. So she was in Leningrad when the Fascists attacked. So was I. I was always against the medal we gave her. But that’s not the point. Ever since ’48 I’ve become convinced that there’s one person in the poem, a darkhaired woman, whom Akhmatova is shielding with her doubletalk; in other words, this darkhaired woman is still out there; we haven’t caught her yet. Late at night when I can’t sleep, I read the poem over; I know it almost by heart, which is ironic, because quite a number of the “politicals” I’ve sent to the Gulag also quote from it; in my own private museum I have a nearly complete copy, written from memory on pages of birchbark. I don’t mind admitting that it’s got a few nice turns of phrase.

7

On 11 December 1920 our patience ended, so we exposed Akhmatova’s suppurating apoliticism for the people to see. That experience became another pearl for her oyster-shell! Bitterness and musings on bitterness became inseparable in her poetry, like the concentric ovals of arched bridges and their reflections upon the Winter Canal. Not long afterward, I saw her praying and weeping at Blok’s funeral procession; those tears became new beads on her necklace of sorrows. In our Soviet Russia of today, when art is supposed to be positive and life-affirming, there is simply no place for this kind of person.

When we liquidated Gumilyev in ‘21, for anti-Soviet conspiracy, another crimson jewel splashed into the well. I was there; I made sure that everything went professionally. At the last moment, he stood as stiff and pale as one of those statues outside the Catherine Palace. I allow that he didn’t grovel like the others.

I was there in 1930 when she discovered his grave—two holes for sixty people, because why should these scum deserve tombs of their own? There she was, praying and sobbing again! Had it been up to me, I would have shot her right there. But who listens to me? And so naturally she went home and wrote more anti-Soviet poems.

Long before that, in her odious “When in Suicidal Anguish,” she’d already compared Leningrad to a drunken whore. Well, she ought to know. That’s why I’d just as soon give her eight grams, although she’s so birdlike that seven would suffice.

In 1933, when we arrested her son Lev for the very first time, just to tease him, another jewel of suffering glowed within her poetic well; exegesis reveals it to be a second red jewel. The red dot feared by Shostakovich—it haunted all his nightmares—was death, of course. What was it for her? Stars and water, poison drinks, salt and churches, these very specific entities made up her world, in which everything not only meant what it meant, but existed independently. For Shostakovich, the red dot equaled nothing more than death. For Akhmatova, no matter what else it was, it also became a ruby.

Presumably it is this concretion of treasures to which L. K. Chukovskaya is referring when she writes Akhmatova’s fate became
something even greater than her own person.

All the same, we’d finally begun to make progress with her. The way we educate these people is first to shoot someone they love, so that they realize that this can and will happen to them; next, we
take away
someone they love more than themselves. When we did this to Shostakovich, the results were excellent. In Akhmatova’s case we were also quite effective:
Where Stalin is, is freedom,
and you know the rest.

No doubt she suffered other shocks, because our Revolution ripped out almost everything, even the brass plates on the doors of what used to be called Saint Petersburg. I almost laughed at her surprise when she saw Krylov’s half-sandbagged statue in the Summer Garden!

In that same year, we banned her so-called “work”—a measure which I’m happy to say remained in force until 1940. Her white face and black braids, like the snow and willows at Tsarskoe Selo, lived on as if they’d been forgotten; in fact no one forgot her, especially not us. She once wrote that death eases thirst—with lye. We said to ourselves: Let her get thirstier first! Kisses and prayers, unanswered knocks, more kisses, boredom, abandonment and death, what did we care about any of that? However, I’m not ashamed to tell you that I enjoyed watching her kissing.

8

By now that tight black silk dress of hers had holes in it, and she’d long since sold the oval cameo in her belt; who among us Russians hasn’t been desperate for bread?

Our objective for her: No more summer poems. Give us the greenish skies of Leningrad in autumn. Then we’ll know she’s where we want her.

In 1937 we fulfilled the Stalin Route, the nonstop flight across the Pole to America, in an ANT-25 with a red star on each wing! You’d think that this event would be worth commemorating. I made a point of attending the ceremony. Elena Konstantinovskaya and Roman Karmen, freshly wed and newly returned from Spain, were also at the aerodrome. Elena failed to recognize me, I’m relieved to say. I’ve watched Karmen’s newsreel half a dozen times. It’s quite good, really. But do you think Akhmatova cared to participate in our victory? Instead, she polished another jewel in that poisoned necklace called “Requiem.”

In 1938 we arrested her son again and condemned him to death by shooting, but we were still just playing; we were curious to see if that would bring her around. I was one of the ones who recommended that his sentence be commuted to five years, and that’s what he got, not that he deserved it; he tried to defy us even after we’d beaten him for eight months.

At this point her persona had assumed certain qualities most convenient to us: resignation, poverty, martyrdom, and the pretense of meekness (not that you can ever trust those bourgeoisie, even when we keep our heels on their necks). Then there were the religious trappings, which I’m personally not averse to in the case of such people; it’s to our advantage when a dying class stupefies itself with
the opiate of the masses.
We’d stripped her of her yellow dress; now she was no better than all the shivering men in jackets, the bowed women in shawls, waiting in the sun of searchlights beneath fatality’s moon-breath for their turn at the window: Will the clerk take my package or not? If not, the person I meant it for has gone to stay with Lev Gumilyev. L. Zhukova, whose relatives we’d already
sent away,
encountered her one winter’s day in the queue at Liteiny Prospekt, number 4, and described her in a letter as
an aloof mannequin.
That was how we liked her! Unfortunately, her presence still electrified any crowd. To me, this proves that we hadn’t been sufficiently strict with her. An aloof mannequin she might have been, as still as water under ice; but our task was to freeze her solid. In this we never succeeded: after all, Akhmatova was the poet of “Requiem,” which even our yes-man Shostakovich admired and which I’m sorry to say I’ve heard on the lips of students, prisoners, prostitutes, peasants and kerchiefed factory women. Needless to say, it gets no mention in the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
All I can say is that world events have confirmed the correctness of that policy.