The Stalin Epigram (27 page)

“The future,” I replied, “is ahead of us.”

Mandelstam accepted this clarification with another slow nod of his head.

The maître d’hôtel returned to the room, bringing with him forms in triplicate for me to sign. I scratched my name at the bottom of each page without bothering to read it. What
more could I lose that hadn’t already been taken from me? Using the side of his table as a straight edge, Christophorovich tore off a scrap of paper and wrote the name of a train station, the
track number and the time of departure on it. “Mandelstam will be sent into exile in the town of Cherdyn in the northern Urals,” he said. “You have seven hours to collect what
belongings you can carry and join your husband in the railway carriage.” As I started toward the door—I had no time to lose if I was to prepare for the journey—Mandelstam bounded
to his feet. “A swallow,” he howled, pointing to the pleated curtains covering the window with the hand that wasn’t holding up his trousers.

“What is it you see, Osya?”

“I see the future crashing into a mountainside!”

I turned on the interrogator and began ranting. “A poet has been driven insane,” I cried. “This is a major offense against the government you represent. A poet is being sent
into exile in a state of madness.”

Christophorovich remain unfazed in the face of Mandelstam’s madness and my tirade. “You will use the time remaining before the departure of the train to better advantage if you calm
yourself and start to prepare for the trip,” he told me coldly.

I am afraid the images in my mind’s eye blur at this point of the narrative. I seem to remember that Mandelstam was weeping as I tore myself away from the room. I have no memory of how I
got back to Herzen House, none at all. I don’t recall phoning Akhmatova, but I must have because within minutes several of the younger poets who lived in the small rooms on the second floor
turned up to help me pack. I remember feeling as if I were running a high fever. In this delirious condition I crammed my husband’s clothing (some of it reeking of camphor) into the suitcase
that had served as a coffee table, I packed my own clothes in a cardboard suitcase that someone gave me, I threw saucepans and porcelain bowls and kitchen utensils and linen into a canvas mail
sack, I filled a small carton with books from Mandelstam’s shelves. Pasternak turned up with a thick wad of rubles attached by a rubber band—he said half was from him, half from
Akhmatova. Looking more mournful than usual, he kissed me on the forehead and fled from the flat. Bulgakov’s wife, Elena Sergeyevna, couldn’t contain her tears when she knocked on the
door. She literally emptied her purse on the kitchen table and forced me to accept every last ruble in it. The wives of two editors who had been unable to publish Mandelstam’s poems also came
by, one with two knitted winter scarves, the other with cash. (“Consider it a loan,” she insisted when I tried to push the rubles back into her hand.) Two of the young poets who had
spent evenings around our kitchen table listening to Mandelstam read aloud from
Stone,
his first book of poetry, flagged down a government automobile and offered the chauffeur a large
gratuity to take me to the train station. They insisted on accompanying me to carry the suitcases and the canvas sack and the carton filled with books. Clutching to my breast a tattered handbag
filled with more cash than we’d possessed in years, the two young poets trailing along the quay behind me with our pathetic belongings, I caught sight of my husband in a compartment. He
appeared as pale and one-dimensional as the reflection you see in the smudged window of a storefront.

Fleeting images of the trip into exile at Cherdyn—it took three nights and two days for the train and the riverboat to cover the roughly fifteen hundred kilometers—run through my
mind’s eye like one of those motion pictures where the frames jump on the projector’s sprockets. (Akhmatova, quoting an English poet whose name escapes me, often spoke of fragments
shored up against one’s ruin; what I am about to recount are fragments
of
my ruin.) Except for the three armed soldiers, one of whom was always posted outside the door to keep other
passengers away, Mandelstam and I had the compartment and its six berths to ourselves. The senior guard, also named Osip, was a country boy with a broad, open face who hummed roundelays when he
wasn’t grinning at me. He filled my teapot with boiling water from the carriage samovar whenever I asked him, and so I was able to keep my husband supplied with tea, though I’d
forgotten to scrounge for sugar at Herzen House and he pulled a face at every sip. Mandelstam spent hours on end with his forehead pressed against the pane, fogging the window with his breath,
staring through his reflection at the taiga and the villages hurtling past, listening intently to the almost human voice of the rails under the wheels of the train. “Can’t you hear
it?” he demanded, and he deciphered the words for me:
Age before beauty? Talent before mediocrity? Urban intellectual before rural hick?
On another occasion I came awake to find him
talking to himself. I remember him saying the same thing again and again, something like, “They want to get me away from Moscow before they shoot me—they want me to vanish without a
trace.”

Osip the guard must have overheard him because, still grinning, he turned to me and said, “Tell him to calm down, Missus. We don’t shoot people for making up rhymes, only for spying
and sabotage. We’re not like the bourgeois countries. There you could be strung up for writing stuff they don’t like.”

The frames jump to other images. At some point during that first night the train pulled onto a siding and we had to transfer to an open carriage (the guards slung their rifles across their backs
and carried our belongings) on a narrow-gauge line. Mandelstam and I sat on the wooden benches facing each other, the guards sat across the aisle and kept other passengers at a distance with waves
of their hands. What people made of the two gloomy city folks, their suitcases and belongings piled on the overhead rack, I cannot say. Seeing that we were escorted by armed soldiers, everyone
avoided eye contact—everyone except for one person, a thin, elegantly dressed older woman who looked as if she had stepped off the pages of a Turgenev novel. Oh God, it all comes back to me.
I haven’t thought of her in years. She boarded the carriage at a remote station, dressed as my mother, rest her soul, used to dress for weddings, in a high-collared cream-colored garment and
a small straw hat and crocheted gloves. She held a folded lace parasol under one arm and a covered straw hamper in one hand. She looked at me, then at the soldiers, then back at me and, having
grasped that we were prisoners being escorted into exile, she favored me with the saddest smile you are likely to see in a lifetime. She started down the aisle toward us, oblivious to the solders
waving her off, oblivious to Osip the guard rising to his feet with one hand fingering the butt of an enormous revolver. Opening the lid of her hamper, she rummaged under a foulard and produced two
cucumbers. She offered one to my husband, the other to me. My husband, shaken out of his stupor by this bold act of solidarity, rose and kissed her hand in the French manner, his bloodless lips
grazing the back of her glove. And with a courteous inclination of her head, this guardian angel of deported prisoners, this relic from a dying Russia, turned and made her way to a seat beside a
family of peasants at the far end of the carriage, from where she never lifted her gaze from me.

I must have dozed when I was no longer physically able to keep my eyes open. As the train was pulling out of another remote station, I shook myself awake to find the woman’s seat at the
end of the car vacant. To this day I bitterly regret not knowing her name, though given what she had done for us it would have put her in jeopardy to ask. Mandelstam, for his part, never stopped
staring at his reflection in the window. He was sure he would be executed at any moment and didn’t want to be caught unawares. The season of white nights had begun and one could glimpse
copses of birches and aspens on the foothills. I drifted off again but was woken before dawn by the lack of motion of the train. We’d pulled onto another siding in a freight yard to let pass
red cattle wagons transporting prisoners to forced-labor camps in Siberia. Women had pushed scraps of nylon undergarments between the planks of the wooden siding so people spotting the wagons would
understand the nature of their cargo. In my imagination I see these scraps flying like regimental banners in the chilly penumbra between white night and first light.

Late on second day, with the Ural range rising like a smudge on the horizon, the train crawled through a suburb of brightly painted one-storey frame houses and narrow dirt streets into a rundown
terminal with giant likenesses of Lenin and Stalin pasted onto billboards and
Solikamsk
printed over the swinging doors leading to the station’s waiting room. A news bulletin echoed
from loudspeakers rigged to posts on the platform:
The spies, traitors and turncoats have been swept from the face of the earth.
Our three trusty guards transported us and our possessions to
an open truck parked around the side next to the public toilets. Mandelstam and I were ordered onto bales of straw in the back and, with a belch of exhaust, the truck headed due north along the
city’s single boulevard. Within minutes, the frame houses gave way to dense woods and daylight was replaced by impenetrable shadows. Soon after, we pulled up in a clearing and the truck
filled with forestry workers hitching rides to the river. One of them in particular terrified Mandelstam—a big bearded man in a dark red shirt carrying a double-bladed axe on one shoulder.
Fearing for his life, my husband began to tremble. “They’re going to behead me, as in Peter’s time,” he gasped. I hugged him to me and attempted to calm him, but he eyed the
bearded giant with dread. “Expect the worst,” he told me. “Do everything possible to keep your dignity. When they come for me, I must absolutely run for it—it is important
to escape or die in the attempt.”

I recall saying, “At least if they kill us we won’t have to commit suicide.”

This elicited a nervous giggle from Mandelstam. “How can I live with a professional suicide like you next to me?” he demanded.

What I didn’t say, what I thought, was: If you decide to die, I won’t need to kill myself, my life will simply stop.

I remember his taking several deep breaths, which calmed him, but he never took his eyes off the bearded lumberjack and his double-bladed axe.

The sun had gone down by the time the truck reached the rickety pier on the Kolva River. Even the white night was lost in the shadows of the forest that descended almost to the water’s
edge. Voices of women singing on the far bank echoed through the woods. The foresters disappeared into a barracklike building on a low bluff over the river. The three guards piled our belongings on
the pier and sat down with their backs against the pilings, smoking cigarettes and talking in undertones. I knocked on the window of the small store next to the barrack and managed to purchase
several tins of sardines, along with a loaf of bread and, to my husband’s delight, two packets of cheap Turkish cigarettes. We settled onto the grassy slope next to the pier, listening to the
delicate sounds a river produces at night—the murmur of eddying water, the splash of fish, the croak of frogs. In other circumstances it would have been an agreeable interlude. Mandelstam
passed the first Turkish cigarette under his nostrils, savoring the odor, then wedged it between his lips and struck a match. His hand was shaking too much to maneuver the flame to the tip of the
cigarette, so I lit a second match and he held my wrist and brought the cigarette to the fire. He exhaled and sank back on the grass. “I held Stalin’s wrist when he lit my
cigarette,” he said absently. God only knows how I forced a smile onto my face. And in the darkness, I could see him staring at me as if I were a stranger.

Shortly after midnight, the river steamer, an ancient vessel with a naked lady for bowsprit and a lopsided pilothouse leaning into the wind high above the main deck, tied up alongside the feeble
electric lights at the end of the pier. I found the purser in his office off the midship passageway and, dipping into the wealth of cash in my purse, purchased tickets that entitled us to a cabin
all to ourselves, even a toilet with a small tin tub. Mandelstam could not believe our good fortune when the steward unlocked the door with a skeleton key and stepped back to let us pass, almost as
if we were vacationers on a cruise to Cherdyn. Our three soldiers installed our belongings under the two beds in the cabin and went in search of the bunk rooms reserved for steerage passengers. The
smell of cooked cabbage emanated from the galley at the end of the passageway (Mandelstam pronounced himself dismayed at my familiarity with nautical terminology) and, for the price of several
cigarettes, we were able to have our meals brought to the cabin. Before long the shriek of the ship’s whistle filled the night. The deck began vibrating under our feet as the steamer drifted
away from the pier and started upriver toward our destination.

I can say without exaggeration that we both got our first good sleep in days, so much so that I was quite frightened in the morning to see how still Mandelstam lay in his bunk. I watched him
closely to reassure myself that he was still breathing before slipping under his blanket to awaken him with the warmth of my body. He clung to me as a drowning man clings to a life preserver and I
thought—I wasn’t certain, mind you, it was only an impression—that I felt the dampness of tears on my neck. And then—I record this detail, along with the pain it caused me
at the time; despite the pain it causes me now—I heard him say, “With any luck, I may still have a muse.”

With or without your leave, I shall skip ahead several hours.

Mandelstam, bathed, shaven (by me while he sat in the tub, his knobby knees jutting from the water; I didn’t yet feel comfortable letting him have a straight-edged razor in his hand),
attired in clothing that smelled of camphor, one of the new knitted scarves wound around his neck, was taking the air on the narrow main deck, strolling from where I was sitting in a lounger to the
forecastle and back again, his copy of Pushkin open in his hand but his attention riveted on the shoreline.