The Stalin Epigram (26 page)

It occurred to me that I should call Akhmatova, my worldly wise friend who knew if you delivered packages to prisons you could discover where your husband was being held. I fell on Lev, Anna
Andreyevna’s son by her first husband, Gumilyov, who promised me he would have his mother ring me back the instant she returned from the gastronome. I sat there for I don’t know how
long before the telephone rang under my fingers. I snatched it from the cradle. It was, thank heaven, Akhmatova. I quickly read the summons to her over the phone. As usual, she considered the
matter carefully before delivering her opinion. “I think we can rule out that they have summoned you to tell you he is dead,” she said finally. “From what I hear, you only learn
of the death of a prisoner when a package or a letter is returned with the word
Deceased
stamped on it. Very occasionally some kind soul writes in the cause of death, though the death of a
prisoner, even the ones shot in the basements of the Lubyanka, is almost always attributed to heart failure. On rare occasions the authorities send a formal notice listing the date on which the
prisoner is said to have died.”

“If he
is
dead, what do they do with the body?”

“I have heard the prisoners who aren’t cremated are buried in a common grave on the Butovo Shooting Range outside of Moscow, next to the dachas they built for Chekists. But be
reassured, Nadezhda, it is extremely unlikely they would summon you to announce Mandelstam’s death. I can’t rule out you will be arrested. I understand they are arresting so many people
these days they don’t have enough Chekists to bring them in. The less important political prisoners are
summoned
to save Chekist manpower for the more important prisoners. On the other
hand, it might be something entirely different—one can not abandon hope entirely that Pasternak or Bukharin somehow got word to Stalin and Osip is being given a prison sentence. The thing to
watch for, if this is the case, is the notation
without the right of correspondence
after the prison term.
Without the right of correspondence
is the equivalent of a death
sentence—it means they are cutting the prisoner off from civilization because they don’t expect him to return. There is still another possibility—that Osip will be sent into
exile, what they call the famous
minus twelve.
In which case they would need you to bring foodstuff for the journey, and clothing for the winter”—Anna corrected
herself—“or winters, plural, ahead.”

“I never thought I would pray to God for Mandelstam to be sent into exile,” I said.

“It would be the least terrible resolution,” she agreed. “I will add my voice to yours on the off chance there is an Almighty and he is listening.”

“Will they permit me to accompany him into exile?”

“If it is exile, probably. More and more wives are going into exile with their husbands these days. It frees up flats, it gets nuisances like us out of eyeshot. What time are you supposed
to turn up at Lubyanka?”

“Two.”

“Dearest Nadezhda, I shall camp by the telephone,” Akhmatova informed me. “If you don’t call back by five, I shall inform Pasternak and the both of us will start
bombarding the Writers’ Union with telegrams demanding to know what happened to you.”

Which is how I found myself standing before a nondescript door on Furkassovsky Street, looking for a bell to ring or a knocker to strike against the wood. Mandelstam would surely have burst into
laughter if he could have seen me trying to figure out how to get
into
the Lubyanka. In the end I wound up rapping the joints of my fingers against the door. A young Chekist in the blue
uniform of a frontier guard opened it the width of a fist so that I could see only one of his eyes peering at me.

“Well?”

I slipped my summons through the crack to him. He closed the door in my face. I stood there debating whether to knock again or wait. Women passing on the sidewalk, each carrying an
avoska
filled with oranges, glanced at me. I wondered if they were aware that this was a back door to the dreaded Lubyanka Prison. After a moment the door opened, this time wide enough for me to pass
through. I heard it being slammed shut and locked with a bolt behind me. I had all to do to keep from sinking to my knees.

“Follow,” the guard ordered.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, but he had already hurried off and I had to run to catch up with him. We passed through another door into a courtyard, then up steps and through
yet another door into an elegant entranceway filled with mirrors set into the walls and a tiled floor so polished one could see the hem of one’s skirt in it. A wide staircase with a mahogany
banister curled up from the entranceway. The guard led me past the staircase to a large mirrored elevator. He handed my summons to the elevator operator, an elderly gentleman wearing white gloves
and a blue tunic with gold braid and brass buttons. I got in and through force of habit glanced at myself in the mirror—my complexion alone was enough to frighten off the devil who, we all
assumed, lurked in the shadows inside the Lubyanka. I tucked stray hairs back under the beret that my parents had purchased for me in Paris when I was sixteen. It occurred to me that it would have
been more prudent to wear a Russian cap than one with a French label sewn inside. The elevator rose under my feet. I counted the floors as they went by. One. Two. We glided to a stop at the third
floor. The operator reached for the brass grill and with an effort dragged it back, then pushed open the heavy hall door and held it for me as if I were a guest at the Ritz. “Room
twenty-three,” he said, nodding in the direction of a door at the far end of the corridor. I started down the brightly lighted hallway, walking on a worn runner past an open freight elevator
with padded walls, past fine wooden doors with brass numbers on them until I came to the one with twenty-three on it. And then, as if I were paying a civilized visit to a publisher who wanted to
engage my services as a translator, I reached out and knocked.

What I am recounting does not originate in the lobe of the brain where memory resides. It comes directly from the mind’s eye. I relive it as I describe it, or more precisely, I live it as
if for the first time. When, on occasion, I recall these awful events, they have the odor of earth at a freshly dug grave.

Here is what my heart saw when the man I came to know as Interrogator Christophorovich pulled open the door and with a nod invited me into the room. I saw Josef Stalin peering at me from a huge
photograph on the wall. I saw Christophorovich grinning inanely at me like a maître d’hôtel. I saw a man who resembled—no more than
resembled
—the poet
Mandelstam standing next to an absurd stool whose front legs were shorter than its hind legs, clinging with both hands to the waistband of his disheveled trousers to keep them from falling to his
ankles.

I stumbled across the room and crushed his body, trembling from head to foot with soundless sobs, into my trembling arms.

I should add here that the stench of urine emanated from his clothing.

“As you can see, Madam Mandelstam, your husband is alive and well,” the interrogator said. Settling onto a chair behind a large table, he pushed aside a half-eaten dinner and
motioned for Mandelstam to sit. My husband clung to my hand as he sank onto the stool. “Are they letting you go?” he asked in a voice that I didn’t recognize as coming from anyone
I knew.

“What do you mean,
letting me go
?”

“Have you forgotten? I visited you in your cell, Nadenka. You and Zinaida.” He beckoned for me crouch next to him so that his mouth was near my ear. “When they arrested her,
they arrested the epigram that I wrote out for her.”

“My name,” the maître d’hôtel announced from behind the table, “is Christophorovich. I have the honor of being your husband’s interrogator. He is
slightly disoriented, as you can see, due most certainly to the shock of seeing you.” He turned to Mandelstam. “Your wife, along with your wife’s friend the actress Zinaida
Zaitseva-Antonova, were never taken into protective custody.”

“You are lying, of course,” Mandelstam said in a voice that sounded more like the one I remembered. “I saw them both in prison.”

“He is telling the truth, Osya. You must have dreamed it. I have been in our flat in Herzen House these past two weeks.”

Christophorovich cleared his throat. “You have been summoned,” he informed me, “to hear Mandelstam’s sentence for having violated Article 58, which covers the offenses of
anti-Soviet propaganda and counterrevolutionary activities. Your husband’s poem is a counterrevolutionary document without precedent.” The interrogator extracted a sheet of paper from
the bulging folder on the table. “Comrade Stalin has reviewed the case personally and instructed the Organs to isolate and preserve the prisoner. He is sentenced to three years of
minus-twelve exile.”

“What does that mean, minus-twelve?” Mandelstam asked.

“It means you are not permitted to reside in any of the Soviet Union’s twelve major urban centers,” Christophorovich said.

My husband’s grip on my hand tightened and he began to shake uncontrollably. “I am not to be shot?”

“You won’t be shot,” I told him. “You will live to compose beautiful poems by the dozen.”

“I am not to be shot?” he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard my response.

“Rest assured, you will not be subjected to the highest measure of punishment,” Christophorovich said. He looked directly at me. “Is it your desire to go into exile with your
husband?”

“No,” Mandelstam answered for me.

“Absolutely,” I said, overruling him.

“Which will it be?” Christophorovich demanded.

“I most certainly will accompany my husband into exile.”

“In that case, I will draw up the necessary papers and bring them to you for signature.”

He came around the desk and stood over Mandelstam. “Considering the counterrevolutionary nature of your crime, the sentence represents an incredible act of clemency from the very highest
level. Count your blessings.” With that he left the room, closing the door behind him.

His lips quivering, Mandelstam started to speak. “Be careful what you say,” I whispered. “They are surely listening.” And I glanced at the walls in the classic gesture
indicating microphones could have been functioning in them.

“Did you deny being arrested because he was in the room?”

“No. It’s the truth. I have been home all this while.”

“And Zinaida?”

“After days and days of phoning, I succeeded in getting her on the line. Her voice was strained. I suppose it was because she and her husband are divorcing. She assured me she had
destroyed the copy of the epigram you wrote out for her.”

He shook his head in confusion. “If her voice was strained, it’s because they arrested her copy of the epigram and she was afraid to admit it. Christophorovich showed it to me. There
was no mistaking it—it was the first version before Pasternak got me to change the second stanza. I recognized the handwriting as my own.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Nor do I understand. Believe me, I am not hallucinating. I visited you and Zinaida in prison, for God’s sake.”

“And I tell you, you imagined it. Dear God, what else did you imagine?”

Mandelstam mumbled something in Greek:
Ei kai egnokamen kata sarka Christon.
I recognized the phrase instantly, as we had often tried to decipher these mysterious words of Saint
Paul’s in 2 Corinthians. Paul is said never to have crossed paths with the Christ, yet he claims,
We have known Christ after the flesh.
I didn’t understand what Mandelstam was
getting at by quoting Paul. “Are you trying to tell me you saw Christ in the flesh in prison?” I asked.

He shook his head in annoyance, then looked over at the photograph of Josef Stalin on the wall behind the interrogator’s table. “I saw
him.
”

I still didn’t understand. “Stalin came to see you in prison?”

My thickheadedness was beginning to irritate my husband. “Not
in
prison. And he didn’t come to
me
, I went to
him
. I saw him in the Kremlin, of course. In the flesh. He offered me a cigarette. We talked. He told me many
things about himself, including”—he pressed his lips against my ear again—“including that he shot his wife after an argument. Oh, it wasn’t entirely his
fault—she produced the pistol, she pushed it into his hand, she dared him to prove that he was as hard as Ivan the Terrible. So he thrust the muzzle to her heart and pulled the trigger.
Everyone in the Kremlin is convinced she committed suicide. Only I know the truth.”

I couldn’t think how to respond. Was it possible that Stalin had brought my husband to the Kremlin and confided in him? If he had confided in him—if he had admitted shooting his
wife—why would he now send Mandelstam into exile where he could repeat the story to anybody who would listen? No, no, the only explanation that made a shred of sense was that Mandelstam, on
the doorsill of a nervous breakdown, had imagined seeing me and Zinaida in a prison cell, and imagined the conversation with Stalin. “Listen carefully, my darling,” I said, breathing my
message into his ear. “You must not tell a living soul about having encountered Stalin in the Kremlin. I have no doubt it happened as you said. But if you spread the story about how his wife
died, he will have you brought back to the Lubyanka in chains. Do you understand what I’m saying, Osya?”

He kneaded his beautiful forehead with his knuckles. “Yes.”

“Are you sure you understand?” I repeated.

He nodded slowly.

“Good. Never mention it again. To yourself. To Akhmatova. To Pasternak. To your brother. Even to me.”

“I shall never mention it again,” he said in a small voice.

“We must put the past behind us and concentrate on the future.”

“Is the future behind us or ahead of us?”

For an instant I thought Mandelstam had come to his senses and was making a typically mordant, not to mention poetic, observation. Then I sank back on my heels and saw his eyes gaping wide, hungering for the answer to the question he had posed.