The Stalin Epigram (11 page)

Every now and then the Uzbek went over to the shut-tight pleated curtains to smoke a cigarette while comrade interrogator came at me again with his questions. He wanted to know what political
statement I was making with the tattoo of Comrade Stalin on my biceps having a scar across his face. When I explained about the rope burn from when we were putting up the tent in Tiflis, he broke
into laughter.

“You have an explanation for everything, which in my experience is a definite sign of guilt.”

“I am telling you the way it really happened.”

“What about the fifty dollars U.S. you took to let the American weight lifter Hoffman win the gold medal at the European games in 1932? You didn’t think we knew about that, did you?
Wise up, Shotman, we know everything there is to know about you.” Christophorovich didn’t even give me a chance to deny the charge. “The Chekists who were watching you in Vienna
filed a report. You were lucky that time—the picture of Stalin shaking your hand at the Kremlin reception turned up in the newspapers before we got around to arresting you. But it’s a
matter of record that you were already in the employ of the Americans in 1932. When did they first contact you? What kind of secret codes did they use to communicate with you when you returned to
Moscow?” About then he dramatically pulled open another drawer in my steamer trunk and took out the copy of the American magazine
Strength and Health
Bob Hoffman gave me in Vienna,
Austria. His voice dripping with contempt, Christophorovich read in what sounded like American the dedication Bob Hoffman wrote in it. He didn’t need to translate the words—I knew them
by heart.
To Fikrit Shotman, who took silver when he came in ten kilograms behind me in the dead lift, Vienna, December 27, 1932.
It was signed,
From your friend Bob Hoffman, who took
gold.
“Any jackass can see there’s a secret message buried here somewhere. Save yourself grief and tell us what it says, Shotman. Our cipher experts will decode it
anyway.”

The Uzbek stubbed out his cigarette in the box of sand and came back to my side of the room, all the while smacking the sock filled with sand in his palm. Comrade interrogator turned my head so
he could talk into my good ear. “I don’t need to remind you that Trotsky was in New York at the time of the first Revolution that overthrew the Tsar in 1917. He was without doubt in the
pay of the American Organs when he returned to Russia to join the Bolsheviks, and later tried to take over the Party after Lenin’s death. You are clearly an accomplice of Trotsky’s,
like him in the pay of the Americans. If you hope for leniency, confess what we already know, Shotman—you are a key member of the backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik Center.”
And he added so triumphantly I could almost make out the
ta da
in his voice, “That is the significance of the Eiffel Tower sticker on your trunk!”

It may have been long about then I began to consider the possibility there might be a grain of truth to comrade interrogator’s version of events. I wasn’t yet positive of what, but I
knew there was a good chance I must be guilty of something. I mean, even a village idiot knows there’s no smoke without fire.

SIX

Nadezhda Yakovlevna

Monday, the 7th of May 1934

S
PREAD-EAGLED ON OUR MATTRESS
, Mandelstam listened to the siren song of the sea nymph and, to my immense relief, managed to resist being lured to
destruction on the rocks surrounding our citadel.

Since the night of that poetry reading back in January, Zinaida had more or less separated from her agronomist husband. She hadn’t actually moved in with us bag and baggage—she was
careful to make it appear she was still living with her husband so as not to jeopardize her rights to their flat, and eventually her Moscow residence permit. But she had taken to spending two and
sometimes three nights a week with us in Herzen House, more often than not in our bed, the other times on a thin mattress in the tiny kitchen if my husband was exhausted or preoccupied with what I
delicately called
his mountaineer mission
.

The timid mistress of shamefaced glances, with her burning cheeks and incendiary orgasms (half stifled in deference to the thinness of the walls of our bedroom), had become adept at the protocol
of a ménage à trois. She devoted as much attention to me as she did to my husband, partly to compensate for his paying more attention to her than to me, partly (I flatter myself )
because she found me, as I found her, physically attractive and sexually stimulating. Mandelstam is on record as saying that loving a third person is not without risks, though the risk in this
particular instance was not his falling insanely, or even sanely, in love with Zinaida. I can say that she was the kind of sexual animal who shrinks on you with time. Her constantly on display
intelligence, her fastidiousness, her gushing admiration for the poet were already wearing thin. What remained was her body. And
what
a body! She was one of those females who didn’t
object to being lusted after for their bodies and only their bodies. And even I will concede her adroitness at certain techniques of lovemaking normally associated with harlots. Which is to say, no
major orifice was left unexplored. Not one. Mandelstam, enthralled by the newness of the delectable corpus at his disposition and somewhat awed by what I might call the exotic smorgasbord set out
on the sideboard, tended to forget that I was present as a participant and not a spectator. I suppose the phenomenon of the male focusing on the third person singular, to the exclusion of the
ty
in his life, is the hidden pitfall of all love triangles. I must remember to compare notes on the matter with Akhmatova one of these days.

Where was I? On the morning of the day I propose to recount, Zinaida stirred in my arms, sleepily fondling my breast with one hand, reaching out for Mandelstam with the other. Finding his side
of the bed empty, she sat up abruptly.

“Did you manage to get some sleep?” I asked.

“Afterward I did. After our beautiful white night. My God, that husband of yours is insatiable.” She looked around the tiny bedroom. “Where has he gotten to?”

“He’s been up for hours,” I said. “You can hear him pacing in the next room.”

“Is he composing a poem?”

“So it would seem.”

“For me?”

I had to keep from smiling. “Not for you, darling girl. Though perhaps he will let you interpret it into existence, as he says, when it’s completed.”

Talk about insatiable, she melted back into my arms and started caressing my skin with the tips of her fingers. “It’s true what you said about women’s bodies being far more
attractive than men’s,” she said. Her hand worked its way down over my pelvis. “It’s no accident that all the great sculptors and painters preferred the female nude to the
male. Our skin is silkier, our curves softer, our sensual penetralia trickier to locate but, once located, effortlessly stimulated. Isn’t that so, Nadezhda?”

I cannot exclude that I was unable to articulate a response.

“I especially love our breasts,” she went on. “Sometimes I caress my own to remind myself how beautiful women are.”

“Did you love your agronomist the way you love us?”

“You
are
mocking me, Nadezhda, aren’t you? I married the first man I slept with, and I slept with the first man I came across who had a Moscow residence permit. He was my
ticket out of the Urals to civilization. Can you see me spending the best years of my life in a repertory theater in Perm?”

“Surely your agronomist has redeeming features.”

“Oh he does, he definitely does. He comes equipped with twenty-two square meters in a communal apartment off the Arbat. He has a job with a regular salary and the use of one room in a
communal dacha on the low bank of the Volga for holidays, no matter that brats with runny noses swarm like locusts. Best of all, he is on the road for weeks at a stretch to study which seeds are
best suited to which climates, which is his area of expertise.”

“When the cat’s away, the mouse will play,” I teased her.

She confirmed my supposition with one of her shamefaced glances. “Whenever he returns home, it is too soon. Marriage to my agronomist, who is a hundred years older than I
am—”

“Twelve,” I corrected her.

“Twelve solar years but a hundred psychic years,” she insisted. “Marriage to him transformed our Moscow flat into a cage, with fixed hours of the day for eating and defecating,
and fixed days of the month for copulating. I often thought I’d be better off on my own, but I didn’t want to abandon the flat and, with it, my precious Moscow residence permit, both of
which are the price I must pay for a divorce. If it came to it, I think I could actually bring myself to kill for a residence permit. Tell me honestly, do you think I am wicked?”

“We all of us make compromises to keep our heads above water in this workers’ swamp. By the way, I saw your agronomist when my husband and I came backstage the night you played one
of the sisters in
Three Sisters
. As men go, he isn’t all that bad looking.”

“Can you explain, dearest Nadezhda, why women like us are attracted to men in the first place? We know next to nothing about what goes on in their silly heads. There are occasions when I
look at their bodies and want to gag. Objectively speaking, the penis, dangling limply like the trunk of an elephant between their hairy legs, is the ugliest body part on a male. And yet . . . and
yet when I catch sight of the swelling in a man’s trousers, my pulse quickens. I long to touch it, to kiss it, to warm my lips with chamomile tea and accept it—ah, Nadezhda, to
welcome
it—into my mouth.” She shuddered in my arms. “Only thinking such thoughts could give me an orgasm.”

“Good thing for you it’s the men, and not the women, who lose a day of their life with each orgasm,” I said jokingly.

“Good thing,” she agreed seriously. “When all is said, we have it so much better than the male of the species, don’t you agree?”

“Speaking of tea, I could do with a cup,” I told her.

“What a rich idea,” she said.

I threw Mandelstam’s old robe over my shoulders and, walking barefoot, headed for the kitchen to boil water on our small paraffin stove. Mandelstam, wearing the secondhand silk robe
I’d gotten him with money I earned for a translation, was so absorbed in the intricacies of composition I don’t think he was aware of my passing. When I returned to the living room
carrying a tray with cups and a pot of tea, I found Zinaida, wrapped in a quilt from the bed, one lovely bare ankle jutting from under it, curled up on the sofa. She was watching in bafflement as
Mandelstam paced the room, four long strides in one direction, then four long strides back, all the while puffing frenetically on a cigarette. I settled down next to her and filled two chipped cups
with tea, and we warmed our hands around them waiting for the boiling water to cool. From time to time a moth flew near Mandelstam’s head—the walls of Herzen House were insulated with
felt, which provided a thermal breeding ground for insects. Mandelstam’s concentration was so absolute he was able to backhand the moth away without being aware of its presence. It occurred
to me he would not take any notice if one of those new air attack sirens being installed around Moscow, now that Hitler was in power in Germany, began yowling. His lips worked, words and then
phrases formed. I could almost hear the poem knocking like a fist on the window.

And then Mandelstam stopped in midstride and looked over at us as if he had only just discovered we were in the room. He spied the moth near his nose and, emerging from a trance, went after it
as if this particular insect was the culprit responsible for the hole he’d recently discovered in his knitted sweater. Clambering over furniture, clapping his hands wildly, the great moth
hunter scrambled around the room until, victorious, he held up his right palm to show us the small spot of blood.

“I think I got it,” he cried.

“The moth?” Zinaida said.

“The poem,” Mandelstam said. “The epigram to Stalin.”

Zinaida, thinking Mandelstam had given in to the many friends who implored him to compose an ode in honor of Stalin, looked relieved. “I know it must have been difficult for you,”
she told him, “but I for one think you were wise to do it.”

I hooked my arm under her elbow. “You don’t understand, darling child. Osya has surely composed a very outspoken poem, one that doesn’t beat about the bush. You and I will be
his first readers.”

She looked puzzled. “But there is only one sort of poem you can compose when the subject is Stalin.”

Mandelstam’s gaze came to rest on the glass ashtray on the windowsill overflowing with cigarette ends, mostly but not all his. (I wondered if he had spotted the ends from a strong
cigarette he himself never smoked when we returned to the flat the previous afternoon.) Shutting his eyes, exposing his pale throat, he raised the palm with the spot of blood on it over his head
and began to recite.

Mandelstam, transfigured, looked hard at me, an unmistakable gleam of triumph in his eyes and it finally dawned on me what he had meant by
Dead but not yet buried.
Looking back at this
defining moment in our lives, I ask myself: How did I really feel? I suppose I was thrilled and proud and devastated all at the same time: thrilled by his audacity, proud to be an accomplice in an
act of pure defiance, devastated that his instinct for survival, his
as well as
mine, was effectively moribund. As for Zinaida, she jerked her ankle back under the quilt and wilted against
my arm.
“Murderer and peasant slayer!”
she groaned. “But you simply cannot do this to me, Osip. What will happen when they learn I was present when you read this out? Oh my
God! There could be a microphone in the wall. They could be recording every word we say right now! Nadezhda, if he isn’t willing to act sanely, you must act sanely for the both of you and
talk him out of this folly.”