The Stalin Epigram (33 page)

With a sly smile, Osip said, “You don’t hold out the hope of old age?”

“Old age,” I recall answering, “is beyond the realm of possibility.”

“I think the same,” he admitted.

I went on as if nothing had been said. “If you want to survive into middle age, if you want Nadezhda to survive, you must keep a low profile, you must take refuge somewhere far from Moscow
where nobody knows you, you must cultivate anonymity.”

“Anonymity!” Osip exploded. “How can you of all people tell me that, Anna Andreyevna? What do you suggest the poet Mandelstam do—join the ranks of the thousands through
the centuries who have published poems signed
Anonymous
?” I could see Osip had lost the thread of the question that had provoked the conversation, but that didn’t stop him from
ranting. “Yes, yes, you’ve come up with an idea that recommends itself to me. We shall go to the Bolshevik town committee first thing tomorrow, Nadenka, we shall petition them to
formally change our family name to
Anonymous
. Osip Emilievich and Nadezhda Yakovlevna Anonymous. That’s the ticket. And we’ll move into a hermit’s hut in the mountains and
keep a cow, and use its shit to pave a path to our door when the Bolsheviks come calling to congratulate me on the publication of my Ode to Stalin in
Pravda
under the name
Anonymous
.”

“Calm yourself,” Nadezhda said. “If you are dead set on returning to Moscow, then that’s what we shall do.”

Osip filled his lungs with air. Gradually his breathing became steadier. And he came up with a line I immediately recognized from one of the poems in his Voronezh cycle he had sent me in the
post.
“Maybe this is the beginning of madness.”

“If it is the beginning of madness,” I said, “you can stop feigning sanity.”

Did he identify the remark about feigning sanity as having come from his lips during that memorable conversation with Pasternak a lifetime ago? If so, it didn’t show in his eyes. He looked
at me queerly, almost as if he could see through me. “A bizarre thing happened to me when I was on my way to meet your train,” he said. “I stopped to catch my breath in Petrovsky
Square next to that statue of Peter the Great holding aloft an anchor. And for a terrifying moment I forgot who I was and what I was doing there, sitting on the rim of a fountain filled not with
water but with garbage, looking up at the statue I call Peter the Anchor. What saved me was a line from one of my Voronezh poems that popped into my head.
What is the name of this street?
Mandelstam’s Street . . .
And my name came back to me, and with it the memory that I was going to meet my dearest friend in the world after Nadenka.”

I repeated the line.
“What is the name of this street? Mandelstam’s Street . . .”

It was Nadezhda who accompanied me to the station that afternoon. Osip’s heart palpitation had returned; he had taken several of the sulfur pills but they failed to give him relief and he
was feeling too weak to do more than see me to the door. We embraced, neither of us persuaded we would ever meet again. I started down the steps only to hear Osip issuing instructions to me in a
voice thick with anxiety. He ordered me to go straight to the Central Committee when my train reached Moscow and tell them he was wasting away in Voronezh from hunger and depression, that he had a
letter from Polyclinic No. 1 saying he suffered from cardiologopathy, arterial sclerosis and schizoid psychopathy. “How on earth do you expect me to get in to see the Central
Committee?” I cried. “I have no pass. They won’t let me in the door.”

Osip refused to take no for an answer. “Say you have come from the poet Mandelstam and doors will open,” he replied, his eyelid twitching. “They will fall over each other to
listen to you.”

At the station, Nadezhda and I watched the long train covered with dust creep up to the quay. Children jumped aboard to hold seats for the older travelers bogged down with baggage. Nadezhda
pressed pickled beets wrapped in newspaper into my hands and then tossed her shoulders in a fit of despair. “I have taken to praying,” she informed me. “I pray to God every night
when I climb into the narrow cot alongside my husband.” I must have asked her what she prayed for because she said, “I say,
Dear God, who, judging from what I see around me,
certainly does not exist, while my beloved Osya still has a muse, please arrange things so that the sun fails to rise tomorrow morning. Amen.
”

“Amen,” I said.

No, I don’t remember very much of the trip back to Petersburg. It had a beginning and a terminus but no middle. In a trancelike state, I changed trains and scrambled for seats and fell
asleep clutching my satchel to my chest so that nothing would be stolen from it. Somewhere along the way I scratched four lines on the back of an envelope, which I have to this day. I don’t
need to find the envelope to tell you the lines. They are committed to memory, they are etched on my brain.

EIGHTEEN

Nadezhda Yakovlevna

Monday, the 2nd of May 1938

A
S FAR AS THE
state was concerned, our minus-twelve banishment to Voronezh came to an end not quite one year ago—at three-fifteen in the afternoon
on the sixteenth of May 1937, to be precise—when a pinched-faced Chekist with a waxed mustache (a client, as it turned out, of the charming prostitute who lived next door to us) signed and
stamped an official document declaring that Mandelstam had served his sentence and we were free to live anywhere in Soviet Russia our hearts desired. There was an unstated catch: we needed to have
a residence permit, and the only city in Soviet Russia we had a residence permit for was Voronezh.

Which meant for the poet Mandelstam, for his wedded wife, exile was expected to last a lifetime.

Still, we were determined to move on. (Where, how, only God knew.) The first order of business was to get rid of the excess baggage we had accumulated since our arrival in Voronezh: buckets, a
chamber pot, a frying pan, a flatiron, a small one-burner kerosene stove, a kerosene lamp, a lumpy mattress and an assortment of very mended blankets and quilts, a carton filled with chipped plates
and saucepans. Some of the booty we bequeathed to our seamstress landlady, some we gave to a couple of fresh-off-the-train exiles Mandelstam found wandering in Lineinaya Street desperately looking
for a room to rent. (Our landlady had decided we would be her last borders as she wanted to free up the room for her son.) We packed our clothing into a valise and two satchels and a paper sack
with a rope handle and, paying the seamstress’s son to assist us, made our way to the train station. With or without residence permits, we were drawn to Moscow like the proverbial moth to
flame. Mandelstam, who slept fitfully and was despondent most of his waking hours, perked up the moment the train, heading north and west, pulled away from Voronezh. The closer we got to Moscow,
the more animated he became. He wasn’t composing verse these days, but it was almost as if his muse was breathing down his neck.

I can tell you that Moscow, which we reached after a grueling two-and-a-half-day trek, had changed since we’d lived there three years earlier. The long train crept through suburbs that
hadn’t existed before—wide dusty boulevards lined with brick apartment houses in various stages of construction. The city itself looked as if it had had a face-lift. Tsarist-era
buildings had been steam-scrubbed and you could catch glimpses of massive structures rising inside scaffolding, with imposing stone and steel and glass façades that, to my layman’s
eye, appeared inspired by what our newspapers called the decadent American ornamental style. The social climate had changed, too, though I would be hard put to say it had changed for the better.
For months recent arrivals in Voronezh had been commenting on the existence in Moscow of a class of citizens they described as nouveau rich (to which Mandelstam, in one of his infrequent bursts of
wit, had responded:
Better nouveau than never
). Young people acted as if they had money to burn. Cadres were getting promoted rapidly (as those ahead of them in the pecking order were
arrested). The latest chic was to actually open a bank account. (When I had money, like Akhmatova I kept it pinned inside my undergarments.) Apartments, dachas, used furniture, secondhand
gramophones and records, even luxury items such as electric iceboxes were said to be easier to come by, no doubt because so many people were vanishing into prisons or exile, abandoning their
possessions behind them.

The moment Mandelstam set foot back in Moscow I could see that, despite the danger of not having a residence permit, we had done the right thing to return. It may sound as if I am inventing this
but I could have sworn the color of his skin changed from asphalt to—well, skin color. An unmistakable gleam materialized in his eyes, almost as if the sights and noises of a metropolis had
jogged a memory, had reminded him of life
before
death. He even walked at a pace that would have left a snail behind. Seeing a smile on my husband’s lips for the first time in months
brought a smile to my lips for the first time in months.

Feeling like Jews who had reached the Promised Land after years of wandering a wilderness, we decided then and there that we absolutely had to find a way to remain in Moscow. The first
imperative was to come up with a place to sleep. And so, flagging down one of the ministry pool automobiles whose chauffeurs freelanced as taxi drivers, we headed for Herzen House in the hope of
coming across someone willing to put us up for a night or two.

In the event we had to make do with couch cushions on the linoleum floor of the tiny apartment belonging to one of the young poets to whom Mandelstam used to read his poetry. The poet’s
wife, a plump and pale editor at a monthly literary magazine, made it clear, as she set out the cushions on sheets of newspaper, that we were welcome to stay for two or three days, by which she
meant that we were not welcome to stay longer. (I didn’t hold this against her. They were already running a risk having people without residence permits under their roof.) Mandelstam,
overcome with fatigue from the journey, not to mention melancholy at finding himself back in Moscow, stretched out on the cushions and, pulling down the earflaps of his cap to block the clamor of
traffic on Nashchokin Street, drifted into a deep sleep. I covered him with his yellow leather coat and lay down, fully clothed, beside him.

I recall waking at sunrise that first morning in Moscow with a fierce headache. My husband was sleeping so soundly I didn’t have the heart to rouse him. Making my way to the toilet, I
rinsed my face and the back of my neck with rusty cold water from the tap. That made me feel human again. I decided to go downstairs and knock on the door of our old apartment—when I’d
packed in a mad rush to accompany Mandelstam into exile, I’d left books behind and I thought I might be able to recover them now. Which is how I came across the note pinned to the door of our
flat: “If anybody asks for Zakonsky, I’m at the dacha until the end of the month.” There was also a telephone number. I didn’t recognize the name Zakonsky, but if he had a
dacha
and
a telephone, it meant he was published, which in itself was an inauspicious sign these days; the only writers published were the ones who toed the Party line. I started to turn
away when I remembered the latchkey I’d hidden behind the molding near the communal telephone in case Mandelstam should forget his. To my amazement, it was still there after all these years.
Nobody was stirring on the floor as I let myself into our apartment. The sight of the familiar walls, the sound of our old Swiss clock ticking away in the kitchen brought tears to my eyes. The
books I had left behind filled the top shelf of our old bookcase—first editions of Derzhavin, Yazykov, Zhukovski, Baratynski, Fet, Polanski, along with Mandelstam’s beloved Italians,
Vasari, Boccaccio, Vico. I gathered them up and, sinking onto the bedraggled sofa where Zinaida and I had sat listening to Mandelstam read his Kremlin mountaineer epigram, began to leaf through the
title pages. And naïve as this may sound, it suddenly dawned on me:
The best way to obtain a residence permit is to possess a residence
. The explanation that came into my head seemed
simple enough for even an apparatchik to understand: the poet Mandelstam and I had been allotted this flat in Herzen House, he’d been sent into minus-twelve exile, I had accompanied him; now
with exile behind us we had returned to Moscow and wanted our residence back. You won’t believe this—I barely believe it as I recount the episode—but my reasoning seemed so
commonsensical to my twisted brain that I actually set off to find the district militia office. Imagine the fear I had to suppress simply walking through the front door! To my surprise, the officer
on duty, an older man who, from the look of him, was desperately hoping to retire before they got around to arresting him, heard me out and then shrugged. You must understand that a shrug in Soviet
Russia didn’t mean
no
. It meant
maybe;
it meant
I’m not senior enough to assume the responsibility of giving you a definitive answer
. The officer suggested I try
the central militia station on Petrovka. I walked all the way, hoping the exertion would calm my nerves and let my voice pass for tired instead of stressed. A long line had formed and I had to
queue for hours to reach the ranking militia official in the main hall of the Petrovka station. He was a baby-faced young man—too young for the post he held, which suggested that he had
filled the shoes of an arrested official—wearing perfectly round steel-rimmed eyeglasses. He raised his eyes, but not his head, to peer over the rims at me. I started to explain our situation
but he cut me off.

“Impossible to be assigned a residence without a residence permit. Residence permit denied because you are a convicted person. Next.”