The Stalin Epigram (13 page)

Darling Osip really didn’t leave me much choice, so I don’t feel as if I betrayed a trust or anything like that. Besides which, any idiot can see the poor man is trying to commit
suicide. By alerting the Organs, I was only doing what deep down he wanted me to do.

Was I uncomfortable lengthening my life at the expense of shortening Mandelstam’s?

Svoloch
—bastard! You’ve been talking to Nadezhda! If anybody’s to blame for shortening Mandelstam’s life, it’s his bitch. They’re a
folie à
deux
. One eggs the other on. For God’s sake, what other lies did she tell you about me?

EIGHT

Anna Andreyevna

Sunday, the 13th of May 1934

I
COULD TELL SOMETHING
was terribly wrong the instant I lifted the telephone handset to my ear. Borisik, his speech saturated with static because of the
magnetic storm disrupting the line linking Petersburg to the rest of Russia, announced, “You must absolutely drop whatever you’re doing and come to Moscow.” He said it in a way
that left precious little room for argument. Somehow my dear friend Pasternak managed to sound both alarmed and deathly calm at the same time; it was his deathly calm that sent the chill down my
vertebral column. I tried to tell him this was not a good moment for me to leave Petersburg. My twenty-two-year-old son, Lev, with whom I had a thorny relationship, was in town and for once we were
talking about what had gone wrong between us rather than quarreling about how I could have described motherhood as a
bright torture
; my third husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin, had
secured a voucher for a two-week holiday at one of his university’s hostels on Lake Ladoga and was dying for a break from the city; and an editor I knew had agreed to publish my critical
essay on Pushkin on condition I cut it by half, no easy chore since I had already cut the original version by half. Borisik brushed aside my excuses and I was beginning to get annoyed when I heard
him say: “You don’t understand, Anna. Our mutual friend, who shall remain nameless lest the Organs are monitoring this conversation, has decided to kill himself.”

“Kill himself?” I heard myself repeating dully.

“You remember the conversation we had, the three of us, when we were watching the teardrops hurl themselves against the Cathedral of Christ the Savior? Well, he has gone ahead with his
project. I tried to convince him it was insane but, supported by that mulish wife of his, he claimed what Russia needed was less sanity and more insanity. I take the view that you are the only one
who can have an influence on him in this matter. You must immediately come to Moscow and stop him before—” The noise on the line blotted Borisik out for a moment. Then I heard the words
“spilt milk.”

Which is how I came to disappoint son and husband and editor. My husband tried to persuade me to phone the Mandelstams so Osip could meet my train, but fearing he would only talk me out of
coming, I thought it better not to. As it was too late for the night train and far too early for the morning train, I spent hours tossing sleeplessly on the bed (after a terrible row with Nikolai,
who argued that Osip was a consenting adult; that if he really was determined to commit suicide, I had a moral obligation to respect his decision). Under the best of circumstances, I am an agitated
traveler. Unlike Borisik, who loves to leap onto the last wagon as it starts to pull out of the quay, I prefer to arrive at the station with time to kill. Knowing my disposition, my husband
persuaded a neighbor on our embankment who had the use of a city administration vehicle to drive us to the Moskovsky Railway Station well before dawn. In the waiting room, filled with travelers
curled up on benches, Nikolai spotted a public telephone and again suggested I call the Mandelstams. Was it because I was exhausted and not thinking clearly that I didn’t argue? I dialed the
intercity operator and gave her the number of the communal telephone in the first-floor hallway of Herzen House. After a long wait I could hear the handset ringing on the other end. When nobody
answered, the operator was ready to hang up, but I explained that it was a communal phone and begged her to keep ringing. When someone finally picked up the receiver, I asked to speak to
Mandelstam.
Do you have any idea of the hour?
a man demanded petulantly. Before I could say a word, he informed me that there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House. I started to insist
that he was making a terrible mistake, there was certainly a Mandelstam living in Herzen House, but the line went dead in my ear. “What did he mean, there is no Mandelstam
living
in
Herzen House?” I asked my husband, a knob of panic rising to the back of my throat.

“You make a serious error trying to read between the lines,” Nikolai said, but I could see from the look in his eyes that he, too, was turning over the words as if they were stones,
looking for worms of calamity beneath them.

I had taken my Pushkin article with me on the train, thinking I could distract myself by reworking it, but I wound up catnapping on my hard second-class seat, my scarf bunched into a makeshift
pillow so that my ear, pressed against the windowpane, would not become bruised by the jolting of the train. And I dreamed dreams so frightful I had to force myself awake to escape the anguish they
imparted to my soul.

No Mandelstam
living
in Herzen House! Had the people who left cigarette ends in Nadezhda’s ashtray taken over the telephone? Were they, in the manner of Chekists, announcing the
death of the poet Mandelstam?

The sun was sinking below the rooftops of wooden
izbas
as the train crept through the Moscow suburbs, past the first factories and cooperatives with hammer-and-sickle devices over the
arched entrances, through neighborhoods with unpaved streets lined with newly fabricated lodgments that had come into this world with a birth defect: ugliness. It was dark out by the time we pulled
into the grand Leningradskiya Railway Station on Komsomolskaya Ploshchad. I lowered the compartment window and leaned out to see if I could spot a familiar face—Borisik would have calculated
which train I was on and passed word to Osip, so I told myself, so I hoped. But there were too many passengers milling on the platform, which was dimly lighted in any case. Clutching my carpetbag,
I made my way through the crowd to the head of the platform; I am quite tall enough to see over the heads of people, but I climbed onto a block of cement anyhow to get a better view. I instructed
my heart not to sink if Osip didn’t turn up. He could have had an appointment with an editor who was willing to publish one of his poems that beat about the bush. He could be out scouring
neighborhood canteens for cheap cigarettes.

When I failed to spot him, my disobedient heart sank all the same. Borisik might not have been able to get word to him for the same reason I’d been unable to get word to
him—
because there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House!

How I managed to find my way to the right trolley line with my soul gripped by a presentiment of tragedy, my sight blurred by unshed tears, I will never know. Perhaps it was pure instinct that
led me to the trolley, that helped me to purchase a ticket from the woman conductor at the back, that told me where to get off and which way to walk. Something like forty minutes later, with my
heart pounding in my rib cage, I found myself standing before the door of the Mandelstam flat in Herzen House. I remember raising my knuckles to knock and then, short of breath, backing away,
terrified that no one would answer.

What if there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House?

And then I stopped breathing altogether and knocked and strained to catch the sound of footsteps. I thought I heard a woman’s voice call
Coming
from somewhere inside. A second later
Nadezhda was on the other side of the unopened door demanding, “Who’s there?”

Somehow I managed to activate my vocal cords. “It’s me,” I rasped. “It’s Anna.”

The door was flung open and a stunned smile materialized on Nadezhda’s angelic face. As it dawned on me that she wouldn’t be smiling if there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen
House, I collapsed into her arms.

“Osip, look who has turned up at our doorstep,” Nadezhda cried as she led me into their small kitchen. And there was my dear, dear Osip, in shirttails and suspenders, sipping tea at
the table.

At the sight of him I sank onto a chair and wept in relief.

When I had calmed down enough to carry my end of a conversation, I explained about Borisik’s summoning me to Moscow. Osip chided me for not calling so he could meet the train, at which
point I described the voice on the communal telephone claiming there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House. Osip and Nadezhda exchanged looks. Osip smiled grimly. Nadezhda linked her arm through
her husband’s and kissed him on the shoulder. “I suppose I should have told you,” she said. “For some months now, there have been strangers visiting our flat when we were
away. From time to time I find their cigarette ends in our ashtray.”

I remember exclaiming, “But he knows about them, Nadezhda—he’s been keeping it to himself so as not to upset
you
.”

Nadezhda stared at Osip. “You know about the cigarette ends?”

He was incredulous. “Don’t tell me you have known about them, too!”

And the two of them, looking for all the world like mischievous children discovering they shared a secret, laughed until the laughter turned to tears.

“This is not a laughing matter,” I said.

They both quieted down. “Of course you are right, Anna,” Nadezhda said. “If we laugh, it’s out of nervousness.”

“Nervous laughter,” Osip quipped, “is known to be excellent for the bowels.”

“Let’s talk about the poem,” I suggested.

“Will you hear it?” Osip asked.

Nadezhda touched my arm. “Do hear it,” she said. “It’s glorious.”

I agreed with a nod. Rising to his feet, Osip tucked the shirttails into his trousers and buttoned the top button of his collarless shirt. Taking a deep breath, tossing back his head, he began
to recite.

I cannot claim to have taken in the epigram the way I usually absorb a Mandelstam poem, which is to say as a whole that, on first hearing, mesmerizes me with its mood and its music. This one
lodged in my consciousness in word splinters—fragments that had no connection with each other or the whole. I admitted as much when Osip pressed me for a comment. “The English poet
Eliot, in his
Waste Land
, claimed to have shored fragments against his ruin,” I said. “But your fragments will bring about your ruin.”

“How can you reduce my epigram to fragments?” Osip retorted, clearly displeased with my reaction.

Nadezhda, as always, rose to his defense. “Exactly what fragments are you talking about?”

I was, truth be told, brokenhearted not to be able to respond more positively. But Osip and I went back a long way—along with my late husband Gumilyov, we’d been poetic comrades
years before Nadezhda came into his life. And the hallmark of our poetic camaraderie was absolute, even brutal, honesty. And so I told him which fragments stuck in my mind. “
Kremlin
mountaineer . . . fingers fat as grubs . . . cockroach whiskers . . . fawning half-men . . .
ah, and the bit about
every killing
being
a treat for the Ossete
. Good Lord, Osip,
people have been known to vanish into prisons for suggesting that Stalin had a drop of Ossetian bandit blood in his veins, as opposed to his being pure Georgian.”

Undoing the top button of his shirt, Osip settled down facing me. “You don’t think it’s a good poem,” he said flatly.

I reached for his hand. “Putting to one side its audacity, I don’t think it’s a good poem, no. To my ear, it doesn’t even appear to be a poem. You weren’t listening
to the music of the words when you composed it. You had something else in mind. It’s a polemic, meant to come across as a political argument. This is not something you will include in your
collected works if and when they are published.”

Osip shook his head. “The insurgent Decembrists had Pushkin’s political poems in their pockets when they rose up against the tsar in Petersburg.”

I remember Nadezhda bursting out, “Whether it’s a good poem or bad poem is beside the point.”

Osip said, “It’s a truth-telling poem, one that doesn’t beat about the bush. It’s a cleansing poem that can wipe the slate clean so Russia can start over
again.”

I felt compelled to point out the obvious. “If it becomes known, it will get you killed.”

“That’s what Boris said,” Nadezhda noted.

“Borisik loves you, Osip, as I love you. It’s one thing to risk your life for a genuine poem, quite another to put your life—as well as your future poetic production—in
jeopardy for a polemic.”

Nadezhda said, “We don’t see things that way.”

I smiled at the
we
. Nadezhda had always been a bit envious of my relationship with Osip. Looking back on the conversation, I think she was using it to establish that she was, after all,
the wife, and I was merely a friend of long standing. The night wore on as we sat at the small four-sided table going around in circles. Nothing I could think to say made the slightest impression
on either of them. Borisik would be deeply troubled when he learned that I had had no success coaxing Osip back across the frontier into sanity.

It must have been close to eleven when we heard someone scratching at the door of the flat. “That will be Sergei Petrovich,” Nadezhda said, springing to her feet, thankful for an
excuse to put an end to the discussion. “He comes around at this hour to use our toilet and to borrow.”

“Borrow what?”

Nadezhda said, “Whatever we happen to have in the way of food. He spends everything he earns on alcohol but gets hungry before going to bed. He’s not fussy, he’ll accept
anything—an egg, a cup of kasha, a slice of bread with or without comfiture. A pickle even.”