The Poets' Wives (24 page)

1956

She is falling head over heels into old age, her body shrinking into itself, and with it comes a new danger, except it’s not the brittleness of her bones or the weariness of the flesh that torment her now but the slow weakening of memory. So between the lines she silently recites stray all the scattered images of her life, each half glimpsed before it slips back again into the deeply grooved rhythm of the words. Endless journeys on trains, an uncertain future unfolding in countless framed windows of ravenous forests seemingly gorging on the body of the land; windswept steppes and nameless villages looking back at her with faces scarred from the years of forced collectivisation and starvation. The journeys by boat and huddled in the back of carts. And the litany of all the backwater towns in which she has sought refuge and sustenance keeps insisting that she also speaks their names and when she tries to stifle them they assert their right to be included because they too are part of everything.

Mostly small towns with nothing to offer beyond a temporary refuge and the brief hope of living below the surface, of never casting a shadow, and then at the first sign of attention, or suspicious questions, abandoning the little that has been built and moving on. During the war, when she found herself fleeing the new terror of Hitler, Akhmatova managed to get her evacuated to Tashkent. Other times she has hidden in places she couldn’t with any certainty locate on a map. Terrible to have lived such a nomadic life, never sure whether at any moment they would come for her. All through the different terrors, the temporary respites as its leaders were themselves eventually consumed, only to be replaced by worse, all the times that quotas had to be met, the sweeps driven by some new paranoia. Sleeping in dormitories, back rooms, corridors, spaces that were not much more than cupboards, and never having the capacity or the need to own anything other than the basic necessities for existence.

Sometimes too she thinks of her childhood with the semblance of a smile, about all its comforts, the elegant, cultured home, the prim little English governesses straight out of
Jane Eyre
to whom she is grateful for her knowledge of English. It’s often been as a teacher of languages that she has found temporary employment. Perhaps there was a greater safety in a language not her own. And she tries not to think of Anatoli Lebedev because it is an embarrassment now to remember what she almost felt and what she would have had to give up. There’s no longer a consciousness of what might have been gained so much as what would have been lost and it frightens her to think that she nearly put it at risk.

She tries to insist on the purity of her memory, tries to tongue-lash it into faithful servitude with insults and curses and to banish all those names and images that aren’t part of what has to be remembered. But almost imperceptibly her memory is weakening – perhaps losing a single word here or there, or the sequence of a line. To try and help she attempts to recall the very moment she wrote the poems for the first time when the words still hung on his lips, tries to hear his voice ringing true. Sometimes it comes but at others it crumbles away like a cliff being slowly eroded by the sea. And that frightens her, even more than the sound of a stopping car or the lift halting on her floor in the middle of the night.

She does not live her life, as he did not, held in the tight fist of fear, but it’s always a penumbral presence whose shadowy reality can never be fully escaped. What would it be like to live a life unencumbered by that deadening weight? She can’t even begin to imagine it. She lights a cigarette and sits in the room’s one chair. She knows it a foolish thought but wonders if the smoke might clear her mind, the way it would some nest of bees under the eaves. So far, she tells herself, time has been on her side. The great father is finally gone, his patricide committed behind the closed doors of the Twentieth Congress and all his crimes supposedly denounced. But how much of what is whispered on the streets is truth and how much rumour? Time has aided her to this moment but now it twists and slithers things into new shapes and so she trusts nothing any longer except her anger and the strength that gives her.

She has slipped through the tightening clutch of her country’s history – she remembers how in the poem about Stalin he referred to his thick worm-like fingers – and despite everything somehow she has survived. There are those who will call it a miracle but she doesn’t believe in such things. She sits in a tiny room in a communal apartment surrounded by the little that she owns and smokes her cigarette. She glances around the room, austere as a monk’s cell. There are few books – it is still what Akhmatova likes to call the pre-Gutenberg era and what books that come into her possession are read and passed to others. Ideas and a smattering of new literature have still survived, if only in samizdat – precious scraps and manuscripts passed from trusted hand to hand. And she thinks she has the most precious of them all inside her if only someone will come for it. Surely someone will come soon, relieve her of this responsibility that she has carried for so long and before time succeeds in blunting the sharpness of her memory.

The smoke doesn’t clear any of the confusions she harbours. These are still dangerous times. Returnees come back every day, most barely recognisable as the men and women who entered the camps. They try to sift back silently into their lives and mostly never talk about what they have seen, in part because they fear that the telling will be held against them and lay themselves open to some new charge, but also because they cannot bring the terror and suffering back through words in case it finally destroys what’s left of them. And there are always those who whisper that there was no smoke without fire, that they’re not necessarily innocent of the crimes with which they were charged. But already she has heard of some people and some writers being rehabilitated so whatever her apprehensions she believes this is the road she must take.

When the day comes for her to go to the Writers’ Union she makes a special effort with her appearance, putting on what passes for her best clothes. It’s spring but she thinks herself too wise to allow herself to think of that as a portend, nor is there any great sense of change about to blossom – life feels as if it continues as it always has, although some of the hardships of the war years have ebbed away. But she takes some consolation at least from the birch trees beginning to swell towards leaf and the knowledge that she has survived what the worst of another winter could offer. It is a journey that she has made many times, often with him, but on this new day she is resolved not to go like a little mouse, not cap in hand for the doling out of meagre charity but with her head held high and looking them in the eye.

So it is her anger and her disdain for the parasites and lickspittles that weren’t worthy to be given the name of writers which fire her steps and stop her shaking inside as she enters the building that looks unchanged from before the war. But a man steps into the lift she must take just before the doors close. He looks at her, immediately recognises her and then glances away. It is Fadeyev. They are alone in the lift. She is used to being shunned by those who knew her and stares straight ahead. Fadeyev who cried when Osip read some of his poems to him in
1937
and on hearing of his death supposedly said, ‘We have done away with a great poet.’ But she carries other thoughts about him in her head and remembers his reaction when they had told him excitedly about being offered a temporary place in the Writers’ Union rest home in Samatikha – the place that was laid out as a trap for them and from where Osip could be quietly taken. It is obvious to her now that he knew the fate that would await them but was unwilling or powerless to warn them. She remembers his farewell embrace, his Judas kiss in response to Osip’s declaration that they would visit him on their return.

She stands in the lift with this man and the silent space between them seems stretched so tight and thin that it feels like it will break at any moment. The doors close, the lift begins to move. Only then does he shuffle closer and whisper in her ear, ‘It was Andreyev who handled the case.’ His breath smells of alcohol. Nothing more is said and when the doors open at the first floor he hurries out. So this is how it is to be now. What happened was always someone else’s doing. Perhaps they think it true because they need that self-justifying belief to survive, to go on living in the world and sleep soundly in their beds. She thinks of the newsreel films that showed German citizens forced to look at the horrors of the concentration camps and knows it will never happen here. And who can ever know the truth about whose name was on the bottom of the sentence during the terrors and if it hadn’t been this signature it would always have been some willing other. But one thing of which she is sure is that they will have no absolution from her, none of them.

She steps out into the corridor in which she has often been left to sit for hours on end and treated with scorn. She remembers one of the first times she came here with Osip, summoned by the censor who had taken objection to some early poem and the vitriolic treatment he had received and how as they walked away they heard him address a colleague loudly and obviously for their benefit, declaring that Osip was someone ‘who would have to be watched closely’ and whose views were ‘suspect’. She wonders again if it might not have been possible to carve out a different future from that moment but understands that it would have demanded a price that could never have been paid.

The secretary recognises her immediately and although there is no need to identify herself she straightens and says in as clear and steady a voice as she can muster, ‘I am Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Osip Emilievich Mandelstam.’ She watches her scurry to inform Surkov of her presence and wonders how many hours she will have to wait but almost immediately he bounds out of his office and greets her with great politeness.

‘Terrible things have happened,’ he says as his greeting, wringing his hands as if the memory might be expunged. ‘What is your situation? Tell me your situation.’

She tells him about her desire to return to Moscow and the need for a teaching job. She listens to him burble on and in her head it sounds as if he’s talking about the past as a period of bad weather, a harsh winter, some almost natural playing out of the seasons.

‘Do you have the poems?’ he eventually asks and is almost disbelieving when she tells him she has them all.

‘They are preserved,’ is what she says proudly and if she could she would have the words echo through every room and corridor in the building that represented nothing more than a straitjacket for everything she holds dear.

She is almost tempted to believe that things have changed as she listens to him and there are hints of rehabilitation and a Moscow apartment to compensate for the one that was taken from them. What she does eventually get is a small widow’s pension and the securing of a teaching job in Cheboksary almost five hundred miles east of Moscow that had been previously denied to her. In the weeks that follow it slowly becomes obvious that the powers above him have poured cold water on his promises and she knows she will be forced to leave Moscow again. When she speaks to him on the phone or tries face to face she hears him increasingly use the meaningless, tightly circumspect language of the earlier years. The genie is back in the bottle. As a sop she is sent two hundred roubles and she satisfies her pride by using it to buy a copy of Osip’s
Stone
.

It feels like everything has supposedly changed but everything remains the same. She wants to believe that they are sincere when they speak of publishing him again but nothing occurs to make it a reality and she begins to doubt that it will happen in her lifetime. She receives a letter from the Prosecutor telling her that Osip has been cleared of the charges brought against him in
1938
but an application to have him exonerated relating to the poem about Stalin is rejected.

There is one more thing she must do before she has to leave the city, something important that fills her with equal uncertainty but to whose lingering questions she wants answers even though she knows they may tell her more than she is able to bear. Already she has heard stories about Osip’s last months in the camp from returnees, sometimes contradictory, sometimes hopelessly second or third hand, and others although fragmented carrying more semblance of truth. She feels it part of the act of preserving that whatever truth exists should be known and so she gives herself to its pursuit.

Then on a prearranged day she journeys across the city to see a man who wants her to call him only by the name of Lev who has reluctantly, and only after patient weeks of reassurance, agreed to see her. He is a survivor, a returnee, whose name has come to her through a convoluted route. She finds the apartment block in the south of the city; it looks almost identical to the one in which she has taken temporary lodging but the lift is broken and she has to climb the stairs to the fifth floor. So when she knocks on the door she is a little breathless and when he opens it and while she is still introducing herself he is more interested in peering over her shoulder.

‘Were you followed here? Are you running from someone?’

She guesses he is in his late thirties, hollow-eyed and sunken-chested, withered to the bone, and already because she has seen it so often in the past she knows he has tuberculosis. Only a shock of black hair retains the vigour of his youth.

‘The lift is broken,’ she tells him and when she sees more reassurance is needed, ‘no one has followed me.’

Still he stares over her shoulder and then to confirm her words he walks to the stairwell and peers over. Even in that short distance she can hear the wheeze in his lungs, the insistent complaint of his breathing. A woman she assumes to be his wife comes to the door. She could pass for his daughter.