The Stalin Epigram (14 page)

Osip added with a sour laugh, “Even a pickle.”

While Nadezhda went to let him in, Osip told me about their friend and neighbor Sergei Petrovich, who was living in the toiletless half of his former wife’s apartment on the second floor;
as the two weren’t on speaking terms, he had to knock on different doors during the day to use the facilities. “He’s a decent enough lyric poet, half Georgian on his
mother’s side—he was dismissed as the literary editor of a regional newspaper some while ago for publishing a Mandelstam poem, so I feel a debt toward him. Since being fired he has been
unable to find work. He makes ends meet translating an infinitely long Georgian epic poem. Because it’s Georgian, everyone presumes the project is close to Stalin’s heart and so Sergei
collects a monthly stipend no matter how many or how few pages he manages to turn in.”

Nadezhda returned to the kitchen, the lyric poet—with alcohol on his breath—trailing shakily after her. He plucked my hand from the table and kissed it in the French manner, barely
grazing the skin with his course lips.
“Ochen rad,”
he said. “To meet the celebrated Akhmatova in person is a consummation of sorts, more gratifying than sex, which, in any
case, I have not experienced in years.” He pulled over a wooden apple crate and, setting it on end, joined us around the table. Sergei Petrovich was as tall as I but thin as a plank, which
made him appear taller. His long dirty white beard was matted with traces of the food he’d been able to sponge. He wore a vest over a soiled white shirt, shapeless trousers and felt slippers
with the backs cut out because they were too small for his large feet. Armless spectacles were attached to his head by a shoelace. Nadezhda pushed the page of newspaper folded into a pouch and
filled with kasha across the table to him. Sergei Petrovich managed to bow from the waist while still sitting.“Thank you, my dears,” he said, “but what I really hunger after
tonight is food for thought.” He leaned forward and peered at Osip strangely. “Everybody at Herzen House is talking about it, you know.”

I smelled a rat. “Talking about what?” I asked.

Swaying on his makeshift stool, Sergei Petrovich eyed Osip. “The poem about Stalin, of course.”

“Who’s everybody?” I demanded. I turned on Osip in exasperation. “Did you circulate the epigram in writing?”

Nadezhda answered for him. “It has never been written out. We’re not fools.”

“How many did you read the poem to, Osip?” I asked.

Nadezhda said, “In Herzen House, two or three, not counting me.”

Osip tossed one shoulder defiantly. “My dear Anna, it’s a matter of creating ripples.”

“How many?” I insisted.

“Five or six. Certainly not more than six.”

Sergei Petrovich said, “Seven. If the poet does me the honor, I shall be number eight.”

And so my poor innocent naïve Osip pushed himself to his feet and recited it for the tosspot shit. All of it. Every word. He omitted nothing, not the
Kremlin mountaineer
nor the
fingers fat as grubs
nor the
cockroach whiskers
nor the
fawning half-men
nor the son of a bitch of an Ossete for whom
every killing
was
a treat.
My God, in light
of what happened afterward, only remembering the moment makes me sick to my stomach.

Sergei Petrovich fell silent when Osip had finished. Then, noisily sucking a lungful of air through his flaring nostrils, he announced, ex cathedra, “It is a truly great poem, my dears.
There is no doubt about it. I am swollen with pride to have been one of your first readers, Osip Emilievich. On my deathbed I shall boast of it.”

Nadezhda glanced at me triumphantly. Osip was so moved he was at a loss for words. Patting the visitor on the shoulder, he kept nodding his thanks.

Sergei Petrovich wanted to know when the poem had been first conceived, whether it had been revised, who outside the eight at Herzen House had heard it, how each of the first readers had
reacted. To Osip’s credit, he answered evasively. Eventually he got into a discussion with his visitor about the poets who had defied the tsars before the Bolshevik Revolution. He reached for
the teapot where Nadezhda hid the poems she copied off, riffled through them until he found the one with lines from the poet Blok written on the back of a draft of a Mandelstam poem and read them
out:
Nothing will change. There’s no way out.
Carried away by Sergei Petrovich’s compliments, Osip went so far as to compare himself to Lermontov, who had openly accused the tsar
of complicity in Pushkin’s death and railed against the
venomous wretches huddling about the throne in a greedy throng
.

Sergei Petrovich’s head bobbed in truckling agreement. “Lermontov’s
venomous wretches
is the spiritual father of your
rabble of thin-necked leaders
, your
fawning half-men
.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Osip said, “but I will concede there is something to what you say.”

When I was able to get a word in, I asked Osip if he happened to recall Pushkin’s last words.

He was in an edgy humor. “I’m sure you’ll remind me.”

I did remind him. “Lying on the daybed, dying from the bullet wound he’d suffered in the duel with that treacherous Frenchman d’Anthès, he said:
Try to be forgotten.
Go live in the country
. Which is what you and Nadezhda ought to be doing instead of drawing attention to yourselves with political poems.”

I was beginning to wonder how long the conversation would drag on. Having slept hardly at all the previous night, I was bone tired and aching to stretch out on the sofa in the next room. As much
as Nadezhda was enjoying Sergei Petrovich’s visit, I could see she was suppressing yawns. Over our heads the Swiss clock with the heavy weight hanging on the end of a chain ticked away as
slowly and as loudly as ever. I suggested we move into the living room, thinking the visitor would take the hint and depart. I noticed Sergei Petrovich pulling a large watch from the fob pocket in
his vest as he followed me down the hallway. “It
is
late,” he said as Nadezhda and I collapsed onto the sofa and the two men brought over chairs. But he made no move to
leave.

Fumbling in a pocket, Osip came up with a crumpled pack of cheap Bulgarian cigarettes. When he saw there were only two left in it, he leaped to his feet in distress. “I hate to cut short
such an agreeable evening,” he said, “but I absolutely must find cigarettes.”

As if by slight of hand, Sergei Petrovich produced an unopened pack, Herzegovina Flors at that, and tossed it to Osip. “It’s yours,” he said so grandly you would have thought
he was offering caviar and vodka.

“I wasn’t aware you smoked,” Osip said, examining the pack as he sank back onto his seat.

“I don’t,” Sergei Petrovich said. “Someone gave it to me for translating a letter—I offer the cigarettes to thank you for the use of your toilet.”

“It
is
getting late,” Nadezhda said. “Perhaps we should think of calling it a night.”

“Am I keeping you up?” the visitor inquired. It was not my place to say he was, but I remember snorting aloud at his shamelessness. Sergei Petrovich nervously checked the time on his
pocket watch. “I shall be on my way as soon as I learn how Mandelstam and Akhmatova met,” he announced, looking directly at me. “I want to be able to say I heard the story from
the horse’s mouth.”

That was more than I could tolerate—I’d reached the limits of my patience with this inebriated lyric poet who thought my mouth resembled that of a horse. “We met after you were
born but before you started drinking,” I remarked.

Sergei Petrovich rolled with the punch. “I am not offended,” he told Osip who, too much of a gentleman to evict a guest, started to describe our first meeting, in 1911. Nadezhda, who
had heard the story a hundred times, went off to the bedroom and came back with the quilt I always used when I slept over. And still Sergei Petrovich made no move to leave.

And then we discovered why.

No matter how much this hurts, I must get it right. The pain is in the details. Someone knocked softly on the door of the flat. Nadezhda glanced anxiously at the tiny watch on her wrist.
“Who would come calling at this hour?” she asked in a hollow voice.

Osip buttoned the top button of his shirt again, almost as if he thought it would be held against him if he wasn’t presentable. “O Lord,” he murmured, quoting from one of his
poems I first heard in the early thirties, “help me to live through this night.”

Whoever was at the door rapped more sharply. Osip said to Nadezhda, very calmly, “Will you get that or should I?”

She rose to her feet. The blood had drained from her lips. She looked at me to see if I could fashion an answer to the question she feared to ask. I was too terrified to try. Sergei Petrovich
came up with a small medicinal bottle filled with a clear liquid and took a quick swig from it. He wiped the lips that had grazed the back of my hand on the sleeve of his shirt. Reeking of alcohol
but suddenly stone sober, he said, “I swear on the head of my ex-wife I didn’t know they were coming tonight.”

“Who’s coming tonight?” I asked so weakly nobody heard me. Nadezhda loomed over the guest and hissed, “Utter one word about the epigram, Sergei, and I will circumcise you
with a kitchen knife.” She ironed the wrinkles out of her skirt with the palms of her quavering hands and went to open the door.

When she came back, six men crowded into the room behind her. Five of them wore the belted raincoats associated with the secret police. The sixth, dressed in a black suit with a double-breasted
jacket, had the features of a raven; I have heard it said that the guttural croak of the raven can resemble human speech but I had never experienced this until then. (It is beyond me how in the
world I remember such trivia. I suppose it’s because the scene is graven in my memory.) The man in the dark suit, evidently the agent in charge, approached Sergei Petrovich and, looking down
at him, said, “I have a warrant for your arrest.”

Considering that the arrest of Mandelstam must have been planned down to the last detail, I couldn’t help but smile uneasily at this manifestation of mistaken identity. One could almost
feel sorry for the drunken shit of a collaborator, who had been dispatched to make sure the individual the Cheka sought would be there when they came around to collect him at the witching hour;
who, during the arrest, would play the role of the obligatory civilian witness required by Soviet law. This explained Sergei’s endless questions, not to mention the full pack of Herzegovina
Flors in his pocket.

Osip stood up and addressed the officer I identified as the Raven. “You are making a mistake, comrade enforcer of the law. He is the witness. I am the poet.”

“Osip Mandelstam?”

“I am the poet Mandelstam, yes.”

“I am the Colonel Abakumov. I have a warrant for your arrest. You are charged under Article 58, covering anti-Soviet propaganda and counterrevolutionary activities.”

“I don’t for an instant doubt you are in possession of a warrant. Still, am I permitted to see it?”

The Raven pulled a paper from the breast pocket of his jacket. Osip skimmed the document. “Genrikh Yagoda himself signed it,” he informed us. “I suppose I must take it as mark
of esteem to be arrested on a warrant signed by the head of the Cheka.” He looked at Sergei Petrovich, who was sitting with his chin on his chest, his eyes tightly shut. “Give me your
opinion, Sergei. Would it be a stretch of the imagination to consider this signature as evidence that I am not, after all, a minor poet?”

The guest made no move to reply. The Raven addressed Osip. “Are you armed?”

To my astonishment, Osip nodded. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

The Raven seemed taken aback. “What are you armed with? And where do you conceal the weapon?”

“I am armed with the explosive power locked inside the nucleus of poems. I conceal the poems in question in my brain.”

The Raven didn’t think this was humorous. “You are treating this matter more lightly than you should. One of my men will accompany you to the bedroom. You are permitted to dress. You
are permitted to collect a few personal items in a bag, including a change of undergarments.”

Osip followed an agent into the bedroom. Nadezhda said, “I want to see the arrest warrant.”

“That is out of the question. The arrest warrant is stamped state secret. The procedure is to show it to the individual being arrested, not to every person who happens to be present at the
arrest.”

“Where are you taking him?” Nadezhda demanded.

“That, too, is a state secret.”

“Who will question him? How will he be questioned?”

“Methods of interrogation are a closely guarded state secret. It would help our enemies if they were to know how they would be interrogated.”

“Surely there are rules that must be followed in any interrogation.”

“There are indeed rules,” the Raven agreed, “but they are a state secret.”

“Mandelstam is a poet, an intellectual,” Nadezhda burst out. “He has not broken the law.”

“If that is the case, he has nothing to fear and will be sent home in short order.”

The agents in raincoats spread out through the apartment and started to rifle through cupboards and drawers and the hall closet, throwing the contents into a heap in the corner of the room.

“Why is Yagoda taking an interest in a poet who is not even published?” I asked.

The Raven shrugged. “The particulars that have resulted in Mandelstam’s arrest are a state secret.”

Making no effort to keep the irony out of my voice, I asked, “Is there anything that’s not a state secret?”

The Raven favored me with a thin smile. “The answer is obviously yes. But what’s not a state secret is a state secret.”

Osip emerged from the bedroom. He had put on his only suit and a detachable collar and carried a small satchel filled, I supposed, with toilet articles and spare underwear. He lingered in front
of the bookshelf to pluck the small copy of Pushkin’s collected works edited by Tomashevski from it. The agent snatched it from his hands and shook it by the spine to be sure nothing was
hidden inside, then returned it. Osip slipped it into the pocket of his suit jacket.