The Stalin Epigram (21 page)

“I am certainly not bored.”

“When the party broke up, I threw an army greatcoat over my shoulders and took Galina off in one of the Packards to my dacha outside of Moscow at Zubalovo. We spent a few unpleasant hours
together—she was worried that Nadezhda, in a fit of jealousy, would have her arrested. I had to reassure her that I was the only one who could authorize the arrest of someone in the
superstructure. Still, the damage was done. It’s hard to fuck a woman who is not wet with desire, so we wound up playing billiards. In the early hours of the morning, Vlasik drove me home
through the deserted streets of Moscow while I dozed in the backseat. I came awake as we passed through the Troitsky Gates into the Kremlin compound. I remember a light snow was falling. It had
already erased the footprints of the guests who had quit the banquet hours before. Someone had left a hall light on for me, but no one was stirring in our apartment in the Poteshny Palace. My anger
had accumulated, it’s true. The daily drumbeat of bad news from the Ukraine made everyone edgy. Yagoda had passed along word that Zinoviev and Kamenev and even Bukharin were spreading it
about that Stalin had fucked up—they were accusing me of having launched the drive for collectivization thinking the peasants would greet us with open arms, of not having a plan to deal with
the chaos in the event they didn’t. Nadezhda’s public rudeness that night had been the last straw. I stormed into her bedroom and found her, still wearing the black dress, asleep in the
narrow bed she retreated to when she had the female problems that had plagued her since the abortion in the mid-twenties. Leaning over the bed, I shook her awake.
Have you come to apologize for
going off with that slut?
she demanded.
It’s you who should apologize for walking out on the supper, for embarrassing me in front of my colleagues,
I lashed out at her. If you do
it again, ubyu—
I’ll kill you
. No sooner had the words crossed my lips than I regretted them. Nadezhda was as fragile as chinaware, easily roused to hysteria and bouts of
depression. It was then that she produced the small French Label that Pavel had given her along with the black dress. She was strangely calm as she removed all but one of the bullets from the
pistol’s cylinder and spun it with her long elegant fingers as if she intended to play Russian roulette.
Don’t push me too far,
I warned. She made the mistake of taunting me.
Were you hard with Galina tonight? Were you hard with the hairdresser or that girl in the typists’ pool last week? I can see from your expression you weren’t. Of course they will
tell everyone, you’ll be the laughingstock of Moscow. For someone who prides himself on Bolshevik hardness, you are often limp. Here,
she said, holding out the pistol, butt first,
prove to the world you are as hard as your alter ego, Ivan the Terrible, who in a fit of rage killed his own son
. And I did prove it. In the heat of the moment I held the pistol to her
heart, Mandelstam. I held it to her heart and I pulled the trigger.”

“And?” I asked, barely daring to breathe. “Did the firing pin fall on a bullet?”

“
And
is for me to know and you to imagine,” Stalin said. “The servants discovered her body, stiff with rigor mortis, in the morning. There were bruises on her face,
though I have no recollection of hitting her. The pistol and the five bullets she’d taken from the cylinder were on the pillow next to her head. Vlasik came up with a doctor who was willing
to sign a death certificate listing the cause of death as peritonitis, which was the official version published in
Pravda
. But everyone in the Kremlin was convinced she had committed
suicide.” Stalin’s eyes suddenly glistened with what I took to be inconsolability. “She broke my life,” he said so softly I had to strain to make out his words. Had I heard
him correctly?
She broke my life!

There was a tap on the door. The bodyguard Vlasik stuck his head into the room. “I have Yagoda’s overnight list,” he said. Stalin jerked his head, summoning him forward. Vlasik
set several sheets of paper down on the desk. “Both Yagoda and Molotov have signed off on it,” he said, uncapping a fountain pen and offering it to the
khozyain
. Stalin eyed the
fountain pen suspiciously. “Was that made in Soviet Russia?” he asked. “Germany,” Vlasik said, mortified. Stalin’s eyes narrowed in displeasure. Ignoring the fountain
pen, he selected a red pencil from a jar filled with pencils. Then he ran a forefinger down the list, occasionally crossing out a name, muttering something about how
terror to be effective must
be random,
scrawling
Za—Approved,
along with his initial on the top right-hand corner of each page when he’d finished with it. “Who is Akaki Mgeladze?” he asked
at one point. “He’s the Abkhazian you nicknamed
the Wolf
.” “The commissar I sent to straighten things out in Georgia?” “That’s the one.”
Stalin drew a line through his name and moved on. He asked about two other people he couldn’t place. When Vlasik reminded him, Stalin left both their names on the list. “What have we
here?” the
khozyain
exclaimed. “Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich.” He looked over at me. “You will be interested to know that Yagoda has included you for execution. He may
be right. I have read your shitty little epigram. When all is said, you should be shot for writing a lousy poem.” With my heart racing, he pretended to discuss the problem with his bodyguard.
“What shall we do with this Mandelstam? On the one hand, I don’t want to go down in history as the one who cut short the life of a Russian poet. On the other hand, it sets a bad
precedent if I am seen to
dither
—people will mistake me for Lenin. So what will it be?
Execute
or
isolate
and preserve
?” Sucking on his cigarette as he
weighed the alternatives, the
khozyain,
to my everlasting relief, scratched a line through my name and, initialing the last of the pages, handed them back to Vlasik. “Tell Yagoda I
haven’t made up my mind about Mandelstam. He can add his name to tomorrow night’s list. I’ll decide then.” “Will that be all?” the bodyguard asked.
“There’s one more thing,” Stalin said. “Find out what became of a girl I once knew named Pelageya Onufrieva.”

TEN

Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova

Monday, the 20th of May 1934

T
HE LAST THING
I expected was a reward, but the Organs are known to treat collaborators generously, which is understood to be one of their ways of
encouraging collaboration. So I can’t say it came as a surprise when the Chekist buttonholed me in my dressing room after rehearsal one night and announced,
We are eager to show our
gratitude for your loyalty to Stalin and the Revolution. It isn’t every day that someone delivers evidence of treason written out in the traitor’s own hand
. Several propositions
rolled off the Chekist’s tongue. An external passport and authorization to travel to Paris or Rome? Better roles in bigger theaters? A monthlong all-expenses-paid vacation at one of those
plush Black Sea hotels frequented by the
nomenklatura
? I favored the visitor with one of what Mandelstam called my shamefaced glances.
I was only doing my duty as a Soviet citizen,
I
demurred shyly.
I ask for nothing
. The Chekist, an older gentleman whose lips barely moved when he spoke, smiled as if we shared a secret. Several gold teeth in his lower jaw glistened with
saliva.
Surely there is some service the state can offer you to make your life easier,
he insisted. His tone managed to convey that my continuing to refuse could be misconstrued; could be
taken to mean I had second thoughts about having collaborated in the first place. I honestly felt I had no choice but to accept. Which is why I averted my eyes in embarrassment and admitted, in the
husky tone actors use on stage when they want to convey reluctance,
Perhaps there is one small thing
. And I raised the delicate question of my risking the loss of my twenty-two square meters
in the communal apartment off the Arbat and my Moscow residence permit if I divorced my husband. He pulled a small pad from his pocket and made a note to himself.
Proceed with the divorce,
he instructed me.
Leave the matter of the apartment and the residence permit in our hands
. He rose to leave. I saw him to the door and held out my hand.
How can I thank you? I asked.
Curiously, he didn’t shake it. There is no need to thank us, he replied. It is a point of pride with the Organs to take good care of the people who work for us
. His words caught me by
surprise. A retort spilled from my mouth before I knew what I was saying.
I wasn’t aware that I worked for you
. He smiled indulgently, the way one would at a child who has uttered
something vulgar, and said,
We don’t believe in one-night stands
.

ELEVEN

Nadezhda Yakovlevna

Tuesday, the 21st of May 1934

I
T WAS MY DEAR
friend Anna Andreyevna who kept her wits until mine trickled back. When we spoke of my husband’s arrest years later, Akhmatova
claimed I had sobbed until the tear ducts ran dry, at which point I began seething against everything and everybody under the sun: Mandelstam for truth telling in this swamp of lies, the Kremlin
mountaineer for equating the rant of a poet with a counterrevolutionary act, the moths who bred in the felt insulation of our walls, the neighbor Sergei Petrovich who had betrayed the teapot to the
Cheka, myself for not having had the courage to talk my husband into a joint suicide pact when I realized he was determined to propagate his epigram. Yes, yes, I see now that we should have killed
ourselves the instant we heard that late-night knock on the door. It was only after I’d gotten hold of myself that Anna and I began to think constructively. A day after Mandelstam’s
arrest, we packed socks and underwear and soap and cigarettes and two hundred grams of smoked ham into a small carton and made the rounds of Moscow’s prisons to see which one might accept the
package for the prisoner Mandelstam. At Anna’s suggestion we started with Butyrki, where writers and artists were usually taken for questioning. Ahead of us in line were two little girls,
perhaps five and seven, wearing starched dresses and telling everyone within earshot,
Mother has been arrested
. Eventually a soldier turned up from a side door and led the girls away. Behind
us one woman told another,
We must send our children to their grandparents before this happens to them
. After two and a half hours of queuing, Akhmatova and I finally reached the window only
to be turned away by a baby-faced guard who went down his list and announced there was nobody by the name of Mandelstam there. The Lubyanka came next. We waited for almost two hours in a light
rain, the two of us huddled under a broken umbrella, before we reached the window. And lo and behold, the guard on duty checked the name on the damp package against a typewritten list and, without
a word, accepted it.

“At least we know where he is,” I said, relishing this small triumph.

“We also know he is alive, or was when they typed up this list,” Anna said. “I didn’t want to frighten you when we were turned away from Butyrki, but if a prisoner is
dead, that’s another reason they won’t accept the package.”

Looking back now, I remember that we were both quite astonished that
we
hadn’t been arrested as coconspirators, if only because our arrest would have given them more leverage with
Mandelstam. I desperately tried to get in touch with Zinaida to make sure she had destroyed the only copy of the Stalin epigram in my husband’s handwriting, but whoever answered the telephone
in her communal apartment off the Arbat said she was seldom to be found there these days. After I don’t remember how many phone calls I managed to get her agronomist husband on the line. Of
course I couldn’t come right out and ask him if she had destroyed the poem, but I did elicit the information that she was rehearsing a new play and had most certainly not been picked up by
the police.
You catch me at a bad moment,
he said.
We are divorcing and I am in the process of moving out. As for Zinaida, she has always steered clear of anything that smacked of
politics, so the idea that she might be detained by the Cheka is absurd. In point of fact, they are going to accord her a Moscow residence permit. If I were you, the last thing I would do is lose
sleep over her.

I will concede I was terribly relieved to hear that Zinaida had not been arrested; I would not have been able to look myself in the eye if our friendship had landed her in trouble with the
authorities.

While I was trying (without success, as it turned out) to track down Zinaida, Anna got in touch with Boris Pasternak and informed him of my husband’s arrest. He was overwhelmed with
remorse at not having been able to talk Mandelstam into destroying the offending epigram.
I never find the right words when I need them,
he reproached himself. He promised to immediately
contact Nikolai Bukharin to see if he could do anything. He urged me to do the same.
The more of us who talk to him, the more likely it is that he will consent to stick his neck out for
Osip.

“I absolutely must have a word with Nikolai Ivanovich,” I told Bukharin’s secretary, a thin woman named Korotkova whom my husband had described (in his “Fourth
Prose”)
as a squirrel who chews a nut with every visitor.

“You look pale as death,” she said. “Has something happened?”

I could only catch my breath and nod. “Mandelstam has been imprisoned in the Lubyanka,” I said.

Korotkova had a good heart. She took my hand and squeezed it. “Nikolai Ivanovich has a full schedule this morning but I will somehow work you in.”

And she did, between two editors who emerged from his office jotting notes on a pad and a woman waiting to wheel in a trolley with the linotype slugs of
Izvestiya
’s front page
locked into a wooden frame. When he caught sight of me, Nikolai Ivanovich drew me over to the couch. “Pasternak has already been to see me,” he said in a muffled voice. (Did he fear
that microphones had been planted in
his
walls?) “What has that husband of yours done now? Mandelstam hasn’t written something outrageous, has he?”