The Stalin Epigram (34 page)

“I have no conviction,” I cried.

The woman behind me said in my ear, “Whatever it is you’re after, dear lady, you stand a better chance of getting it if you calm yourself.”

I pulled the official document from my purse and flattened it on the desk so the official could read it. Again, he didn’t move his head, only his eyes. “It says here you are a
convicted person,” he said.

“I have no conviction. I voluntarily followed my husband into exile.”

I might have been talking to an automaton. “It states here,” he said impatiently,
“Osip Mandelstam, convicted person.”

“Osip Mandelstam is a man. I am a woman.”

I managed to snatch back my precious document an instant before he slammed his fist on the desk. “Osip Mandelstam is your husband, isn’t he? Under Soviet law, arrested persons and
their families are deprived of residence rights in Moscow. Haven’t you heard of Article 58? What your husband was guilty of, you are guilty of. I can charge you with anti-Soviet
activities.”

I am sorry to report that I fled the Petrovka station in terror.

After the failure of my pathetic attempt to get back our old flat, we lived like birds on a branch. We eventually settled into one room of a communal apartment in Kalinin, which was near enough
to Moscow to come in by train several times a month. Word spread that Mandelstam had returned alive from exile and friends flocked to see him when they learned, through word of mouth, that he was
in town. Hoping to save us from a second arrest, my husband gave impassioned readings of his more recent Ode to Stalin to anyone who would listen. We had no shortage of writers and poets offering
us loans “to tide us over” (“tide us over
what
?” Mandelstam would ask in agitation when we were alone); among them was the self-described
master of the genre of
silence
Isaac Babel, who, during one of our several visits to the rooms he rented on the second floor of a private villa, glumly told us, “Silence won’t save me. Mark my
words—they will come for me soon.”

Quite a few close friends were willing to give us shelter in Moscow, though for their sake we never spent more than a few days in any one flat lest our hosts be denounced to the police.
Akhmatova dropped what she was doing and came to Moscow the instant she discovered we were back. Mandelstam and she flung themselves into each other’s arms. Did I feel odd man out? No,
I’m not offended by the question. They had never been lovers, though in a manner of speaking they were more intimate than lovers, by which I mean they were intimate in ways that lovemaking
only scratches the surface of. There were occasions, I won’t deny it, when this intimacy fetched up a lump to my throat that I identified as jealousy. They awakened the lost youth in one
another. Employing a private language that by its very nature excluded others from the conversation, they could make each other laugh until one of them got a nosebleed. His hands behind his head,
his fingers laced together at the back of his neck, Mandelstam strode the room declaiming poems from the Voronezh cycle. Anna Andreyevna, in turn, recited the poem she had written after her visit
to Voronezh the previous year, something about fear and a muse taking turns watching over a disgraced poet. (As far as I know this poem has never been published.) We went to Petersburg once, which
turned out, from my point of view, to be a mistake—strolling streets familiar to him from his student days set my husband to trembling with emotion. We stayed overnight at Akhmatova’s
apartment, drinking toasts to poets and particular poems late into the night.

At one point we could hear the telephone ringing in the corridor. A neighbor stuck his head in the door. “It’s for you, Anna Andreyevna.”

She went to take the call, only to return a moment later looking quite pale. “Who was it?” I asked.

“There was no one on the other end of the line.”

We all exchanged looks. Mandelstam and I left in the morning. Anna Andreyevna accompanied us to the station. I shall never forget my husband’s last words to her: “I am ready for
death.”

On another occasion we spent an afternoon with Pasternak at his dacha in Peredelkino, half an hour out from Moscow; originally the Kolychev estate, the village had became a fashionable retreat
for fashionable writers in the late 1920s. (We never did figure out how, in the summer of ’36, Boris, who was in and out of favor over the years, managed to get a foot in that door.) It was
not lost on any of us that his new (to us, at least) wife remained in the kitchen during our visit to avoid my husband. Boris Leonidovich and Mandelstam pulled up stools next to the ornate tile
stove for warmth, I remained on a sofa with a coverlet over my feet. Pasternak, who said he was in the very early stages of sketching the outline of a novel “about us all,” produced
books he was reading on the subject of the French Revolution. I remember the discussion became animated and I gestured to Boris Leonidovich to calm things down for fear Mandelstam’s pulse
would start to race.

Pasternak took the view that it was possible to survive a reign of terror, but my husband only shook his head in obstinate disagreement. “If you breathe the air of terror,” he said,
“you become infected. Everyone becomes a victim—those whose heads are lopped off, the executioners who lop off heads, the masses in the streets who watch, even those who have the
decency to look away.”

At the train station later, Pasternak—with the dexterity of a cutpurse—slipped money into Mandelstam’s pocket when they embraced. We discovered it when I went to hang up my
husband’s yellow leather coat back in Kalinin.

And so the weeks, the months slipped past with Mandelstam staring out of rain-stained windows in Kalinin or Moscow or Petersburg, repeating the names of people who had vanished into a gulag. If
I close my eyes I can reproduce his voice in my ear: “The enigmatic Khardjiev with his oversized head, Hippolyte with his wild scheme to seduce the angel of death, Zhenya with his nails
bitten to the quick, Vadik with his poems so convoluted even he couldn’t understand them, Pasha with his crazy theory about how Russia would be saved when opiate became the religion of the
people.”

I should say here the disappearance that gave us the most pain, not to speak of the most anguish, was that of our friend and protector Nikolai Bukharin. We had, it goes without saying, followed
his fate closely. His name as editor in chief had been removed from the masthead of
Izvestiya
in the winter of ’37 and we’d learned of his arrest soon after over the loudspeakers
in the main streets of Voronezh. (Mandelstam was particularly incensed to hear people cheering.) For months on end there was no news of Bukharin. Then came his very public trial for high treason
and plotting to assassinate Stalin. (Ironically, Genrikh Yagoda, the onetime head of the Cheka who had personally signed the charges against Mandelstam when he was arrested in 1934, was a
codefendant: “We won’t waste tears over him” was all my husband said when he heard about this.) The trial began early in March of this year in the October Hall of the House of
Trade Unions where, we happened to know, Nikolai Ivanovich had proposed marriage to the young woman who later became his third wife. His confession, published in
Pravda
, was the principal
subject of conversation in intellectual circles (Hitler’s
Anschluss
of Austria was a close second) where Bukharin, despite his Bolshevik credentials, was considered to be a cultivated
individual and a humanist. There were those who repeated the old saw
Where there is smoke, expect to come across fire
, which was another way of saying that, given the circumstances,
“the filthy little Bukharin” (as he was described in newspaper articles) would have been stupid not to have plotted against Stalin; there were others, we among them, who supposed that
he had confessed to save his wife and young son.

Esteemed Nikolai Ivanovich was taken to the vaulted basement of the Lubyanka and shot in the back of the head, if one believed the execution notice that turned up in the newspaper on the morning
of 15 March. Which, curiously, was a few days after we bumped into V. Stavsky, the secretary general of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Let me explain. We had all but abandoned hope that we would
ever get permission to live in Moscow; abandoned hope of being able to survive the new wave of terror spreading across Russia. The last straw we clutched at was the possibility that in the absence
of Bukharin, Stavsky would argue Mandelstam’s case to Stalin; would give him the text, which we knew to be circulating, of the Ode to Stalin (“
Stalin’s eyes are parting
mountains
. . .”). But our desperate and repeated attempts to get an appointment with Stavsky failed miserably. We camped for hours on the hard benches in his waiting room. Secretaries
would rush about. Eventually someone would take pity on us. The secretary general was out of town, a woman would inform us. He was attending a conference of writers in the Crimea. He was visiting
collective farms in various Soviet Socialist Republics. And so on. And then one day, implausible as this may sound, we stumbled across Stavsky emerging from the office building as we were going in.
Or more accurately, he stumbled across us. We hadn’t seen him in years and I doubt either of us would have recognized him if he hadn’t shouted, “Hey, ho, Mandelstam, I’ve
been hunting everywhere for you.”

Stavsky, looking very suntanned, wearing a coffee-colored linen three-piece suit and dark glasses, hurried over to us and shook my husband’s hand cordially. “I’ve been trying
to get in touch with you,” he exclaimed, “but nobody seems to know where you hang your hat these days.”

All Mandelstam, bless his heart, could think to say was: “I hang my hat in its usual place, which is on my head.”

Stavsky dropped my husband’s hand. “Are you all right?”

“No.”

“Ah! Well, I have good news for you, Mandelstam. Your fortunes are about to take a turn for the better. To begin with, we have decided to give you and your wife vouchers for a two-month
cure at one of the writers’ sanatoriums outside of Moscow. The stay will do you a world of good—wholesome food, country air, plenty of sleep, long walks in the woods. You will be a new
man. Then we will look into your rehabilitation. The question of a permit to live in Moscow, the matter of finding appropriate work for you, will be hashed out at the highest level.”

Stavsky instructed us to present ourselves at the Literary Fund office to collect the train tickets to Charusti, on the Murom Line, and the vouchers for the rest home in Samatikha, twenty-five
kilometers from Charusti. When we reached Charusti, we would find a horse-drawn sleigh waiting to take us the rest of the way.

Elation rose in Mandelstam like sap in a tree. “Pinch me,” he said when Stavsky saluted us from the backseat of his limousine as it pulled away from the curb. “I must be
dreaming that this is happening.”

“The problem,” I remember saying, “is to figure out
what
is happening.”

“But any idiot can see what is happening! My ode has reached Stalin’s ears. Word has filtered back down that the poet Mandelstam must be looked after.” He turned on me angrily.
“Why aren’t you capable of dealing with good news?”

“I am worried.”

“About what?”

“That there is no such thing as good news, only bad news disguised as good news. I am worried sick they want to get you away from your friends. I am worried sick you will be arrested
again.”

“What are our alternatives?”

“We can find an isolated house with ornamented shutters, we can grow potatoes and cabbages and cucumbers and beets and turnips in the garden, we can keep hens and a cow, we can exchange
eggs and milk for loaves of bread and tins of roe.”

Mandelstam’s face flushed in agitation. “You don’t fool me—you want me to publish poetry under the name
Anonymous
. Nadenka, don’t you see
it—they’re going to
rehabilitate
me. My muse, perhaps even my erection, will take up residence again. Poems will begin to knock like a fist on the window. I shall make love and
write poetry and publish under the name of Osip Mandelstam. Editors will beat down my door to get the rights to my collected works.”

I looked into his eyes. He desperately wanted to believe we had turned a corner. I suppose I must have smiled because he said, “I knew you’d come around.”

I think I said: “What is there to lose by trying?” I think I thought: “Only what’s left of our lives.”

Why do you keep pressing me for details? There is only one detail that counts for me now: from the moment we ran into Stavsky, I had the sinking feeling of being on a steep and slippery slope.
Yes, the train tickets and the vouchers were waiting for us at the Literary Fund office. Yes, yes, there was a horse-drawn sleigh sitting outside the station at Charusti, which Mandelstam took as a
further indication that his fortunes had taken a turn for the better. Luxury of luxuries, an enormous sheepskin rug was folded on the seat. We spread it and tugged it up to our armpits and the
driver, an old
mujik
with knee-high lace-up leather boots and a wolf-skin
chapka
on his pointed head, raised a whip to the horse and we set out at a trot to cover the twenty-five
kilometers to the rest home in Samatikha.

Winter had persisted into April. As far as the eye could see, the countryside was quilted with blindingly white fresh snow. Fir trees stooped under the weight of the ice on their branches. The
sky was pearl blue, with wisps of clouds drifting at high altitudes. Swirls of frozen breath spewed from the horse’s flaring nostrils. Mandelstam improvised a pair of peasant sunshades with
his gloved fingers and took everything in, sighing from time to time at the splendor of the scenery. After two or so hours, the
mujik
pulled into the yard of a collective farm and we were
taken to a room where hot wine and biscuits were waiting on a table, as if we were expected. Mandelstam kept glancing at me with a look of triumph on his face. We reached the writers’
sanatorium at dusk. The resident doctor, an old Bolshevik who (he later told us) had taken the job in the rest home in the hope of lowering his profile, met us at the door. He confided that he had
received a telegram from Moscow ordering him to treat the Mandelstams as important guests. The doctor looked honest enough—if we were being set up for arrest, I took heart from my gut feeling
he didn’t know about it. Mandelstam mentioned that he longed for quiet as well as peace. The doctor said there was a cabin at the edge of the woods that served as a reading room for
residents. In no time they had set up two cots in the reading room and given us the key. We spread our clothing and books on one of the shabby sofas and lay down on the beds, fully dressed, our
fingers laced under our heads.