The Stalin Epigram (23 page)

Bukharin could only nod. Comrade Stalin pulled a folded paper from the inside pocket of his tunic and slid it across the desk. Bukharin reached to retrieve it and, unfolding the paper, started
reading as the
khozyain
, smiling in grim satisfaction, spit out phrases from memory.
Kremlin mountaineer . . . murderer and
peasant-slayer . . . fingers fat as grubs . . . words
final as lead weights . . . cockroach whiskers.

I had heard from Yagoda that Mandelstam had been arrested for an outrageous poem, but up to that moment I had no idea what was in it. The contents must have come as a bombshell to Bukharin, too.
The color literally drained from his features, leaving him as pale as a peeled pear. When he looked up, he seemed to be in a state of shock. “I had no idea . . . nobody told me . . . I
assumed he would be beating about the bush. They suggested it was no more outrageous than what Mandelstam usually wrote.” Bukharin collected himself. “Still, Koba, this poem only proves
Pasternak’s point. No sane person could have written these lines. They stand as proof of his madness.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yes, why are these lines proof of madness?”

From my place at the back of the room, I could almost see the wheels turning in Bukharin’s head. He understood it wasn’t only Mandelstam’s life that was in jeopardy, but
Bukharin’s. “The lines are proof of madness because they are inaccurate, Koba. He doesn’t make a rational argument that one can take issue with. He has resorted to slander of the
worst kind. This is evidence of irrationality, and the irrationality must be seen as a symptom of madness.”

“You made a big mistake interfering in this affair,” the
khozyain
said coldly. “I won’t forget it.”

Bukharin, it must be conceded, had balls. “There were times when you thanked me for interfering,” he snapped. “I still have the revolver you gave me with the inscription
To
the Leader of the Proletarian Revolution N. Bukharin from J. Stalin
.”

My boss replied angrily. “If you want to talk about your past merits, no one can take them away from you. But Trotsky had them, too. Speaking between ourselves, few had as many merits
before the Revolution as Trotsky.” The
khozyain
aimed his index finger at Bukharin. “I will take it amiss if you repeat what I said.” He waved the back of his good hand to
indicate the interview was over. I reached for the knob and pulled open the door. Bukharin rose to his feet. “You’re not the revolutionist I knew when we joined Lenin in the struggle to
change the world, Koba,” he said. “You used to be grateful for the support of your Bolshevik comrades.”

“Gratitude is a dog’s disease,” Stalin shot back.

Bukharin regarded Stalin for a moment as if he intended to have the last word. Then, shaking his head in disgust, he hurried past me.

When Bukharin was gone, the
khozyain
gestured for the door to be shut. “It’s not every day you see someone sign his own death warrant,” he noted. “About
Mandelstam: The shitty thing is that Pasternak is probably right. History is a bitch, and the bitch is on the side of the fucking poets.” He looked up. “Get hold of Yagoda, Vlasik. Tell
him not to put Mandelstam on the overnight list again. We’ll pin a minus twelve on him—keep him away from the twelve major cities for a few years. That’ll give him time to work
through his madness. When he comes to his senses, we’ll kill him for his sanity.”

At which point the
khozyain
—I’ll say what happened and leave you to figure out what it means—the
khozyain
dragged the cigarette from his lips and ground it out on
the back of his hand. It’s something the boss must have picked up during his years in Siberia. Real criminals doing time for murder did this to show the political prisoners how tough they
were. Looking at the burn mark, my boss nodded, as if the gesture brought back memories. Then he uttered something that confused me when he said it and makes even less sense to me now. What he said
was: “Nobody’s innocent, Vlasik. Not Mandelstam, not Pasternak, not that harlot Akhmatova, not Bukharin, not even you. Nobody.”

THIRTEEN

Boris Pasternak

Thursday, the 23rd of May 1934

F
EW THINGS DISHEARTENED ME
more than a row with Akhmatova, probably because she turned out to be right more often than not, which is something I would
grasp only after she’d hung down the phone. To add to my general sense of aggravation, I shared my father’s old apartment with six other families whose children produced such a racket
in the communal hallway you could barely make out what your interlocutor was saying. So picture it: There I was, standing in the telephone niche in the corridor, barefooted after having rushed from
the communal toilet to answer a call, my suspenders plunging to my shins, the telephone pressed to my ear, children scampering back and forth kicking a ball made of old rags tied with string, and
me shouting into the mouthpiece begging Anna to repeat what she had just said. But of course she had raced on to make another point that may or may not have had anything to do with her previous
point. Mandelstam’s arrest had put us all on edge and Anna was reproaching herself, and me, and every last member of the Union of Writers, for not fulfilling our duty as poets, in sharp
contrast to Osip Emilievich, who was rotting in prison for withstanding pressure that the rest of us bowed to.
Define what you mean by the duty of a poet
? I hollered.
Truth telling,
she shouted back.
You can’t do an awful lot of truth telling from the grave,
I retorted, but she probably never heard me.

Akhmatova was engaged in truth telling, of course. What I had valued above all in the Revolution, back when I’d valued the Revolution, was its moral side—I’d actually
entertained the idea that life would take a turn for the better, that art would be free to cut to the bone, that artists could agree to disagree and still honor one another. (I remember Mayakovsky
once flinging a long arm over my shoulder after a bitter argument and saying,
We really are different, Boris—you love lightning in the sky, I love it in an electric iron
.) Nowadays it
was no longer possible to harbor the delusion that tomorrow would be better than today, or that today was an improvement over yesterday. And this insight changed my life as an artist. For as far
back as I can remember I had devoted myself to poetry, which is to say to the art closest to sign language, code writing and other signaling systems. Now I was drifting toward the view that life
had grown too complicated for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience; that what we had lived through was best captured in prose. I dreamt of writing a novel that would seal my
oeuvre, like a lid on a box. I dreamt of writing a novel that would conquer my incoherence as a poet and show how the Russian Revolution had swept away everything established, everything settled,
everything to do with home and order. But I’m wandering from the subject: Akhmatova beside herself with anxiety over the fate of our dear friend Mandelstam, Pasternak trying to defend himself
against attacks that were never launched, both of us overwhelmed with guilt because Osip was inside the Lubyanka and we were outside.

Some hours passed. I lay stretched out on the daybed in the half of my father’s old painting studio that had been partitioned off and allotted to me, lighting up my fifth cigarette of the
day, still hoping to limit myself to six before midnight, when one of my neighbors called out that I had another phone call. I assumed it was Akhmatova ringing back to apologize for things that
neither of us could remember her saying. The children, thanks to God, were playing up at the other end of the corridor when I picked up the telephone.

“Pasternak?”

“Speaking.”

“Alexander Poskrebyshev on the line. Do you have paper and pencil?”

“One second.” I tugged open the drawer and found the message pad and a pencil. For some reason I pulled up my suspenders, snapping them on to my shoulders. “Ready,” I
said into the telephone.

“I am going to give you a private Kremlin telephone number. Dial it in three minutes.” He read out the number and had me read it back to be sure I’d noted it correctly. Without
another word, he hung up.

My heart was racing. Why would Stalin’s
chef de cabinet
be calling me? And who would I find at the other end of the line when I dialed the Kremlin number? I hauled my pocket watch
from my trousers and stared at the second hand, convinced that it had slowed to a snail’s crawl; that at its present speed a day would last forty-eight hours, which would make limiting
one’s self to six cigarettes more difficult. When I thought three minutes had gone by, I dialed the number. I was so tense I got it wrong the first time and had to dial again. Someone
answered immediately.

“Do you recognize my voice, Pasternak?”

“No.”

The man on the other end of the line laughed quietly. “Stalin here. I want to talk to you about Mandelstam. I want you to know that I didn’t authorize his arrest.”

The children were kicking the ball back down the corridor and yelling as they ran after it. “I can’t hear very well—there are kids playing in the corridor. Can you say that
again?”

Stalin raised his voice. “I didn’t authorize Mandelstam’s arrest. When I learned about it, I found it disgraceful. I am calling to let you know that Mandelstam’s case is
being reviewed at the highest level. I have a feeling everything will turn out all right for him.”

“The fact of your taking a personal interest in the matter will reassure a great many artists and writers,” I shouted.

The children had passed. I clearly heard Stalin say, “But he is a genius, isn’t he?”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“What is the point?” he demanded.

My brain flooded with possibilities. Perhaps Osip was wrong after all, perhaps I was right. Perhaps Stalin
was
living in a bubble, unaware of what the Chekists were doing in the real
world outside the Kremlin. If only someone could let him know about the famine, the arrests, the executions, the deportations.

“Josef Vissarionovich, I absolutely must talk to you.”

“You are talking to me.”

“I mean face-to-ace. I mean man-to-man.”

He hesitated. “About what do you want to talk?”

I stupidly said the first thing that came into my head. “About life, about death.”

I pressed the receiver to my ear as hard as I could so as not to miss his reply. I thought I could hear Stalin breathing. And then the line went dead. I kept listening to be sure there was no
mistake, all the time bitterly berating myself for not having found the right words; for having passed up the opportunity of a lifetime with my clumsiness. I cut the connection with a finger, then
lifted the phone to my ear and waited for a dial tone. When I heard one I dialed the Kremlin number again. It rang sixteen times before someone answered. “Josef Vissarionovich,” I
shouted, “I beg you to give me a moment to explain—”

“This is Poskrebyshev.”

“Can you put me through to Stalin, please?”

“Impossible. He is no longer in Moscow. Don’t dial this number again. It was activated for one call and will no longer exist after I hang up. Do you understand, Pasternak?”

“I do not understand—” I heard the line go dead again.

FOURTEEN

Fikrit Shotman

Saturday, the 25th of May 1934

E
VER SINCE
V
IENNA
, A
USTRIA
where, as I may have mentioned, I won the silver weight-lifting medal, I’ve been accustomed to flashbulbs exploding in
my face. To tell the truth, I don’t really mind them. It makes me feel important. So while my codefendants at the trial covered their eyes with their arms as we entered the October Hall,
upstairs in the House of Unions, I smiled and waved to let everyone know that although I was pleading guilty, I was innocent in the sense I didn’t know what I was guilty of until
Christophorovich educated me. With its high windows and gold-colored curtains and crystal chandeliers, this was as fancy a room as I ever set foot in, but I decided not to let on that I felt out of
my depth. When I spotted the three judges, decked out in black robes and sitting in high-backed thrones on the raised platform, I raised high my right hand and saluted them in the style of
Azerbaidzhan peasants. Judging from their grins, they weren’t indifferent to my mountain ways. The courtroom was overflowing with spectators—there were more than turned up on any given
day to watch the strongman perform at the circus. I tried to count them but I gave up when I reached a hundred (there were easily three times that), which is as high as I count without help from
Agrippina who, I was thrilled to see, was sitting in the very first row, protected by men in black suits on either side of her. I waved to her and she smiled back one of the forced smiles she
produced when she was really sad. (She had this crazy idea that smiling could suck the sadness out of your heart, the way the juice of an onion could suck a wart out of the flat of your foot.) I
recognized eight or ten faces in the courtroom. The woman who had copied down my confession was there, along with several lady clerks I’d run into when they took me to the Lubyanka clothing
store to fit me out with a suit for the trial. Christophorovich was there, smiling and nodding encouragement. I even spotted the wrestler Islam Issa against a wall near the recessed gallery with
tinted windows in the back where the orchestra used to play for the aristocrats before our Revolution fired the aristocrats. Christophorovich’d confided to me that Comrade Stalin himself
sometimes watched trials from behind the tinted windows. Comrade interrogator knew this because the cleaning lady reported emptying ashtrays filled with his favorite cigarette, Kazbek Papirosi.
Sitting at the end of Agrippina’s row were the foreign journalists. You could tell they were foreign by the lapels on their suits and by the fact that they sat with their legs crossed, which
is something no self-respecting Soviet journalist would do in the formal situation of a trial. Procurator General A. Vishinsky, who (as every schoolchild knew) once shared the hampers of food
supplied by his rich parents with Comrade Stalin when the two were in jail together, stood leaning on the half-circle bar across from me, studying sheets of paper in a file folder.