The Stalin Epigram (28 page)

And with good reason. Stalin’s transgression against humanity—forcing peasants who survived the man-induced famine and the execution squads onto agricultural collectives—had
uprooted masses of people and scattered them across what had become a wasteland. My husband and I had seen traces of the calamity returning to Moscow from the Crimea—the trip that left an
indelible mark on Mandelstam and turned him, for better or for worse, into a truth teller. Friends traveling south or east from Moscow reported coming across survivors searching desperately for a
village to settle in or a plot of land to work, all the while trying to evade the squads of Chekists who were combing the countryside. Now, from the deck of our riverboat, we could see the detritus
of collectivization camping at the edge of both banks of the river, clusters of lost souls huddled under tarpaulins stretched from branches over their heads, cartons and straw trunks piled around
them, naked children playing in the shallow water while their parents cooked scraps of horsemeat, hacked from dead carcasses, on charcoal fires. And my befuddled best friend and husband, his brain
awash with hallucinations of having visited me in a Lubyanka cell, of having encountered Stalin in the Kremlin, turned to me and, pointing a quivering finger at the shore, cried out, “See,
Nadenka—the shortage
is
being divided amongst the peasants!”

To the eternal shame of Russia, he was right. What can one say about this episode after all these years? If, as Mandelstam insisted, Stalin knew what his Chekists were doing, he was surely
condemned for eternity to the circle of hell where, as Dante tells us, the fires are so searing one could use molten glass to cool one’s body. If, as Pasternak suspected, Stalin didn’t
know, he was guilty of not knowing what he should have known and will wind up in the same inferno.

At midafternoon Cherdyn loomed around a bend in the Kolva, sprawling over several hills, each surrounded by forest, the whole dominated by the bell tower of an enormous cathedral that had surely
been converted by the Bolsheviks into a warehouse. Mandelstam stood on the bow, his palm on the rump of the naked sprit, watching as the steamer turned in the current and drifted down on the cement
wharf piled high with bales and crates waiting to be transported back to civilization. Catching the heaving lines thrown by crewmen, stevedores dragged the heavy hawsers through the water and up
onto bollards. When the ship was fast to the wharf and the gangway secured at midship, the three guards, carrying our possessions, escorted us to an open carriage drawn by a skeletal mare and
followed along on foot behind as we slowly made our way through an enormous gate into the citadel at the center of the city. The commandant, an old cavalryman from the look of his high boots and
flamboyant mustache, was hastily fastening the tarnished gold buttons of his tunic as we were led into his office. He sharpened the ends of his mustache with his fingers. “You will be the
Mandelstams,” he said. “The telegram from Moscow failed to mention a first name or patronymic. Which one of you is the prisoner?”

“It’s me, the prisoner,” my husband said. “I am the poet Mandelstam.”

“And I am Nadezhda Yakovlevna, the wife of the poet Mandelstam,” I said, my pride at being connected to Mandelstam overcoming my resentment (which I tended to suppress) at his having
gotten us into this predicament.

“Very unusual,” the commandant, who never bothered introducing himself, observed.

“What is very unusual?” I inquired.

“The notation
Isolate and preserve
next to the name Mandelstam on the telegram,” he replied. “It is the first time I have come across such instructions.” He looked
directly at Mandelstam. “Whom do you know in the Kremlin?”

My husband’s lips fashioned themselves into what on another occasion could reasonably have been described as a smile. “Stalin,” he replied.

The commandant exchanged quick looks with his young deputy sitting behind a desk across the room. “This is not something you should joke about,” he warned.

“What makes you think I am joking?”

Apparently deciding it would be more prudent to drop the matter, the commandant announced that we were to be housed in the local district hospital until our final place of exile was decided
upon. This was the first inkling we had that Cherdyn was to be a way station for us. The same carriage transported us up a winding road paved with split logs to a brick structure that had been
converted, so we learned, from a sausage factory into a hospital. Our three guards bid us farewell at the gate. The one called Osip actually stood to attention and saluted after turning us over to
the hospital authorities. A heavyset woman wearing a soiled white smock led us to a large, empty second-floor ward with two metal army cots set at right angles to one wall. As nobody offered to
assist us with our baggage, I had to make several trips to the lobby and haul everything upstairs myself. With the departure of our three guards, who Mandelstam thought were under orders to execute
him, my husband relaxed ever so slightly. He noticed a portrait of Lenin that had been torn from a magazine thumbtacked to the back of the ward door, and this sparked a memory. “When the Reds
took power,” he said, “the wife of one of the Bolsheviks came to the flats of writers to pin portraits of Lenin cut from magazines to our walls. She hoped it would save the
intelligentsia. How innocent she was.” He shook his head. “How innocent we all were.”

As night settled over Cherdyn, Mandelstam started to hear voices again. I knew this was the case from the wild look in his eyes. He became convinced he had heard Akhmatova reciting a line from
one of her poems—
They take my shadow for questioning
—and concluded from this that she had been arrested and shot. We were summoned to supper in the canteen on the main floor, but
Mandelstam flatly refused to eat anything until he had searched the ravines around the hospital for Akhmatova’s corpse. I followed him along the dirt paths that ran through the woods around
the hospital until the two of us were stumbling from exhaustion. Only then was I able, pushing and tugging, to get him back up to the second-floor ward and onto his cot. By the time I made it down
to the canteen, the only food available was leftovers, but, as they correctly say, beggars cannot be choosers, so I scraped some gristly meat and cold potatoes onto a clean plate and brought it up
to my husband, who picked at the scraps with a remarkable absence of enthusiasm.

I have reached the part of the story that causes my heart to splinter. It’s as if . . . as if reliving this episode has something in common with dying.

Mandelstam was sitting up on his cot, fully dressed, his spinal cord against the wall, listening with his eyes, muttering about how the woodcutters were going to execute him when the moon was
high enough for them to find their way through the forest. I was determined not to close my eyes until he fell asleep but, overcome with fatigue, I must have drifted off. I dreamed terrible dreams
of alligators plucking children out of the shallow water along the riverbank while their parents fanned the flames of charcoal fires and turned makeshift spits with dead humans on them. The
nightmare jolted me awake. The cot next to me was empty. The glass door leading to a narrow balcony was open. I caught sight of the poet Mandelstam in the light of the moon. He was sitting astride
the balustrade, one leg dangling over the side two floors above the ground, working up the courage to jump. From the glass door I whispered his name in order not to startle him. He turned his head
and gaped at me, his eye sockets dark with terror. I lunged for him and caught hold of the back of his jacket, but he squirmed out of the sleeves and dropped into the darkness. I stood there in the
icy night, clutching the jacket in my hands for the time it takes the image on the retina to reach the brain. Then I screamed a scream so piercing it frightened birds into the night sky.

I don’t recall how I made it down the wide flight of steps to the ground floor, only of standing in the garden at the foot of the hospital wall as figures carrying kerosene lamps rushed
from the entrance. People in white smocks were pulling Mandelstam, moaning in pain, from the hedge into which he had fallen. They set him on a stretcher and had to pry me off his body in order to
carry him back into the hospital. I staggered along behind. We wound up in the operating block lighted by candles because the generator was switched off at night to save fuel. A woman doctor,
wearing a bathrobe and clearly disgruntled at having been woken up, directed the nurses to strip Mandelstam naked. Her eyeglasses slipping along her nose, she examined his right shoulder and arm,
which were twisted out of shape and blue with bruises. “He is fortunate,” the doctor said, probing my husband with the tips of her fingers. “He has dislocated his shoulder
socket.” And with that she took hold of Mandelstam’s wrist and gave it a sharp tug, setting the bone back into the socket. My husband’s shriek of pain was cut short when he
fainted.

By the time he regained consciousness, his shoulder and torso had been bandaged and he was back in his cot, his arm in a sling, a blanket pulled up to his chin. “What happened?” he
asked when the effect of the sedative wore off.

“You fell, my darling Osya. Luckily, you landed in hedges, which broke your fall. The ground underneath had been recently turned to make a flower bed. You dislocated your shoulder. The
doctor said it will be some weeks before you regain full use of your right arm.”

After Mandelstam’s attempt at suicide, I have no memory of time, only of light: sunlight, white night, candlelight, moonlight, even starlight. Days folded themselves into one another. The
nurses, moved by our plight, turned out to be very caring. They changed my husband’s bandages and sponged his limbs and emptied the bedpan and brought up meals from the canteen so I
wouldn’t be obliged to leave him alone in the ward. Perhaps a week went by. I honestly can’t say. What I do remember is that on a sun-drenched morning two male nurses turned up in the
ward carrying a sturdy chair on which they proposed to carry Mandelstam downstairs. I never understood why but he broke into a cold sweat and began shaking his head emphatically, and nothing I said
could convince him to submit to their ministrations. He ended up descending the staircase leaning his weight on me and wincing in pain with each step. Once downstairs, Mandelstam was lifted, along
with our possessions, into the back of a hand-drawn cart, which two strapping peasant boys contrived to drag down the road paved with split logs to the citadel. The commandant, wearing coveralls
this time, received us in his office. “I guess you do have a friend in the Kremlin,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I have received a telegram with instructions you are
to be permitted to select your place of exile. It can be anywhere except one of the twelve biggest cities.”

Who was our friend in the Kremlin? Had Pasternak prevailed upon Bukharin to intervene after all? Had the head of the Writers’ Union, Maksim Gorky, picked up rumblings of discontent from
the poets and passed them on to Yagoda? Had Stalin himself—surely the one behind the order to
isolate and preserve
—decided that Mandelstam would be unlikely to survive a winter
immediately under the Arctic Circle?

Offered a choice, Mandelstam didn’t hesitate. “Voronezh,” he announced as if he had anticipated the question.

“Why Voronezh?” the commandant asked.

The choice surprised me, too. “Why Voronezh, Osya?”

Mandelstam thought about this. “I knew a biologist at Tashkent University who was born in Voronezh, a frontier town in the time of Peter the Great populated with escaped convicts. He told
me good things about it. As the city is on the Don and south of Moscow, the weather will be milder than here. I remember the biologist saying his father worked as a prison doctor there.” And
then, miracle of miracles, the old Mandelstam, that high-strung, headstrong, life-glad
homo poeticus
who was able to find a grain of humor in the darkest situation, reincarnated himself in
the commandant’s office of the citadel at Cherdyn. He looked at me, a hint of a smile playing in his eyes, and he said, “We cannot rule out the possibility that we may need the services
of a prison doctor, can we, Nadenka?”

“Welcome back,” I said.

SIXTEEN

Fikrit Shotman

Saturday, the 23rd of June 1934

I
LOVE TRAINS
. I have as far back as I can remember remembering. To my mind, there’s no music more easy on the ear than the whistle of a train in
the night. When I was sixteen and already big for my age, I dreamed of working as a coal stoker in a steam locomotive. I admired the uniforms worn by stationmasters and conductors, with their
visored caps they looked to me like generals in the glorious Red Army. When I became a professional weight lifter, later when I was a circus strongman, I spent a good part of my life on the road,
but the trip that began on the twenty-third day of June in the year 1934 was the first time I ever voyaged in a cattle car. If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, you’re
dead wrong because traveling in a cattle car turned out to be as close to first class as I ever been when there was a first class in the days before the Revolution. I’ll explain.
There’s no denying we were crowded, ninety-three warm bodies all told, including seven children going to Siberia with their parents and nineteen old people, one of which was paralyzed from
the waist downward and needed to be carried in and out of the cattle car when we stopped in the middle of nowhere so we could wash in streams. This kind of situation was ripe for calamity, except
we were lucky to have with us one prisoner that everyone called the professor, a short guy with round eyeglasses thick as windowpanes and a pointed goatee that reminded me of Agrippina’s
tattoo of the traitor Trotsky that she passed off as Engels. Not that it mattered, but the professor must have been an Israelite because he had the same name as that Jew on the Politburo,
Kaganovich, for all I know the professor and the locomotive commissar (Kaganovich’s nickname when he ran the railroads) may have been near or distant cousins. The professor organized us into
what he called the cattle car collective and it was thanks to him that, unlike in the other cattle cars on the same train where they buried dead bodies in shallow graves at every siding, we made
the nineteen-day trip from the little-used station in Moscow to the transit camp in Magadanskaya without losing a single life. My size gave me natural authority, so the professor put me in charge
of the communal toilet, which was a hole contrived in the floorboards at one corner of the car and surrounded with women’s shawls fastened to make a screen. I used a wooden bucket filled with
piss and a sheaf of straw to clean the hole after it was fouled by prisoners with the runs, leading the professor himself to compliment me in front of every member of the collective on the sanitary
condition of the toilet.