The Stalin Epigram (7 page)

“Nikita Khrushchev,” I said excitedly, “that’s it. He was in the room next to me with gallbladder trouble or kidney stones, I don’t remember which. Imagine, an
important Communist like him next to a weight lifter—when he was up and about, he used to come into my room every afternoon to see how I was getting on. Once he even challenged me to
arm-wrestle. Of course I could have beaten him, but I let him pin me. The male nurses had a good laugh watching us.”

“They botched the operation,” Agrippina reminded me disagreeably.

“It wasn’t Comrade Stalin’s fault if the Kremlin doctors didn’t know about knee cartilage. And that Nikita Khrushchev was the one who came up with the idea of me working
as a circus strongman when the doctors broke the news about my weight-lifting days being behind me. Don’t you see it, Agrippina, these local Chekists will cringe when they realize they are
dealing with someone who has shaken the hand of Comrade Stalin and arm-wrestled Nikita Khrushchev. They will mumble excuses and beg our pardon and back out of the room and close the door behind
them so quietly you won’t hear the latch click.”

The things I said must have comforted her because she drifted off into a deep sleep. Her head was on my thigh and as she had been up most of the night before worrying, I didn’t have the
heart to wake her when my stiff knee began to throb. I sat there dealing with the pain for I don’t know how long. It must have been past midnight when I caught the sound of an automobile
pulling to a stop in the street below our apartment house, which was far enough off the ring road to make a car in the dead of night remarkable. At first I thought I must have imagined the thing I
feared. Then I made out men talking in the street, I heard the janitor unlocking the front door, I heard the elevator start up from the lobby. In my head I could picture the tenants on every floor,
almost all of them workers at the circus like us, staring into the darkness, listening to see where it would stop. You could almost hear the sighs of relief when it passed their floor. Agrippina
and I lived on the one-from-last floor and I started hoping and then praying it would stop, please God, before it reached our floor. But it didn’t and so I began hoping and then praying it
would pass our floor and continue on up to the top floor. But it didn’t. And then I heard the heavy elevator door swing open and the footsteps of men walking down the hallway and I started
hoping and then praying they would for God’s sake knock on someone else’s door. But the footsteps kept coming until the men were standing before our door. And then one of them pressed
the buzzer.

The bell set high on the wall inside the apartment rang. Agrippina came awake without knowing what woke her. She sat up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes with the back of her small fists.
“Fikrit, I’ve been thinking about those tsarist loan coupons you use for cigarette paper,” she said. “We ought to get rid of them before the Chekists find them.”

The bell rang again and didn’t stop ringing. Agrippina’s eyes opened wide in panic. I leaned over and whispered in her ear, “It’s true what you said about me loving your
body covered in tattoos. Living with you has been like living with art and history and nature and geography all rolled into one.”

FOUR

Anna Andreyevna

Thursday, the 12th of April 1934

I
TOLD
N
ADEZHDA
I would try and I will. She takes the view that it serves some purpose to have it down on paper. So for
Nadezhda’s sake, for the sake also of our posterity that may one day want to take a closer look at this nightmarish period of Russian history, I’ll see how much of it I can recall.

The day in question, Osip, the ultimate gentleman, had risen before dawn and was waiting for me on the platform when the overnight train pulled in from Petersburg. (I’ll be damned if
I’ll call what Dostoevsky referred to as the
invented city
by its Bolshevik alias, Leningrad.) He clutched a small bouquet of white bindweeds in his hand and thrust it under my nose to
smell. We were, as usual, elated to see each other but by mutual consent restrained our emotions lest they run amok—Osip once seriously explained to me that most men and some women never
cried because they were afraid of not being able to stop. I thought Osip looked reasonably fit, all things considered, and told him so but he waved away the compliment, if that’s what it was,
saying the episodes of shortness of breath, of dizziness, had been occurring more frequently of late. I asked him if he had been to see a doctor; he answered my question with an embarrassed
tight-lipped smile. (Because of his bad teeth, he had taken the habit of smiling with his mouth shut.) I could see he was under a great strain. Nadezhda had spoken to me about the cigarette ends
she regularly found in an ashtray when they came back to their flat. She hadn’t mentioned the uninvited visitors to Osip, hoping the evidence of their presence had escaped his notice. During
a recent telephone conversation he had sounded more depressed than usual. When I asked what was wrong, he had admitted discovering the cigarette ends of strangers in an ashtray; since Nadezhda
hadn’t raised the matter with him he assumed she took the cigarette ends for his. Such was life in our Soviet swamp these days. Little wonder Osip’s eyes were hollow from lost sleep,
his forehead dark with worry. He was gnawing on the inside of his cheek more than I remembered. I decided not to raise the subject of the cigarette ends unless he did. He would talk about what was
making him anxious if he wanted to; if not, not.

We came back into Moscow by trolley car, careful not to say too much, surrounded as we were by people we didn’t know. Borisik, as I called Pasternak, was waiting for us in the small square
in front of Herzen House. He had been to see his soon-to-be ex-wife, Yevgenia, who lived with their young son in the ritzier wing of the writers’ house, to work out the details of their
divorce. We found him, with those cadaverous eyes of his set in a tormented face that broke into a grin when you least expected it, sitting on a bench, his suit jacket and vest unbuttoned, his tie
loosened around his neck, his gaunt face turned toward the sun, his lids so tightly shut he had squeezed tears out from under his lashes and onto his cheeks. When I came between him and the light,
he instantly felt my shadow. His eyes flicked open in alarm. Seeing who it was, he leaped from the bench to catch me in a bear hug of an embrace.

Pasternak and Mandelstam were two of my closest friends in the world—spending precious time together provided each of us with a breath of fresh air in this stale, stifling country of ours.
Every meeting took on an intensity that came from the real possibility it would be our last; that one or all of us might not survive to meet yet again. Their being wonderfully talented poets only
cemented the bond between us inasmuch as it gave us a common language, a way of communicating with coded messages tucked out of sight between and under the words. I admired them both enormously.
They were unsure enough about themselves to keep them from being boring. (It is this uncertainty, isn’t it, that attracts women?) They didn’t take their poetic gift for granted,
knowing, as we all know, that because you are able to compose a poem one day does not mean you will compose another in your lifetime. What else? They shared an abiding responsibility to be truth
tellers in this wasteland of lies.

They brought out the best in each other and in me, no mean feat when you consider the times we lived in, and the place. When the three of us were able to come together, we vanished into a
sanctuary of camaraderie and connivance that was not, I’ll be the first to admit, without overtones of sensuality. (I had slept with one of them years before and would have slept with the
other if he had ever asked me. I won’t say which was which; let that be my little secret.)

We started to stroll, and I walked between the two of them, looking happily from one to the other, the three of us not in the least concerned with the getting there, contented only with the
going. In the distance we could make out enormous cranes swinging giant wrecking balls—Osip, who excavated metaphors in the most unlikely places, thought it was a sign of the times that they
were in the shape of teardrops—against the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which the Bolsheviks had condemned to demolition. Geysers of chalk and cement particles spewed into the sky with
each angry thump of the teardrops. I think I was wearing the rubber mackintosh with the hood for fear it would rain, along with my shiny black ankle-length boots. Yes, yes, I must have been because
I distinctly remember Osip teasing me for dressing like a deep-sea diver. (It’s amazing the details that come back to you once you start down this road.) Borisik was still under the spell of
Shostakovich’s new opera,
Lady Macbeth of the Mzensk District
, which he’d seen at the Stanislavsky-Nemirovich the night before. He took a visceral pleasure in reading aloud the
inane review he’d torn from a page of
Pravda
. I can still hear his melodious voice in my ear. “ ‘An ugly flood of confusing sound, a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking and
clashes.’ Ah, and this,” he said, slapping the scrap of newsprint with the back of his hand. “ ‘
Un-Soviet
.’ Now what the hell does un-Soviet mean? I can vaguely
see what they’re driving at with this Socialist realism gibberish, but how can
music
, for God’s sake, be realist in form and Socialist in content?” Shaking his head in
disgust, he added, “We live under a dictatorship of mediocrities, not a dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Osip, for his part, described a visit he’d had from Ehrenburg, the Russian émigré novelist who had been living in Europe since the early twenties. “In tones that left
little room for dispute, Ilya Grigorievich let me know how much he admired the progressive politics of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, I could not let that pass without comment.”

“Needless to say,” Borisik agreed, flashing one of his delicious grins.

“I ripped into him for praising from Paris what writers and artists and poets here had to endure at first hand. I told him how hard it is to compose honest verse in this atmosphere, how I
make the rounds of editorial offices looking in vain for someone with the balls to publish a Mandelstam poem.”

“The problems of those of us who live in cities pale in comparison to what’s happening in the countryside,” Borisik interjected.

“Precisely,” Osip agreed. He let his walking stick clack against the metal grille surrounding a neighborhood Party building. The racket made Borisik and me uneasy—we
weren’t keen to attract attention to ourselves. “I described to him the train ride Nadenka and I took returning from the Crimea,” Osip continued, “the emaciated bodies
stacked like firewood in open wagons queued up before improvised cemeteries, the ribs clearly visible on the horses dragging plows in the fields. I dredged up a line from a poem I wrote a few years
ago that pretty much summarizes my attitude toward Soviet power.
The wolf-hound century leaps at my throat
. I could see Ehrenburg’s eyes searching feverishly for the way out of our
flat,” Osip said gloomily. “He didn’t believe a word I said.”

We spotted an empty bench next to a trolley car stop and sat down on it. A woman pushing a child in a stroller stood in the sun nearby, waiting for the next trolley. As she had her back turned
to us, we took no notice of her.

“I feel as if the world is closing in on me,” Osip said, his brow knitting. Then he added, “I suppose I mustn’t complain. I have the good fortune to live in a country
where poetry is respected—people are killed for reading it, for writing it.”

Osip was inadvertently opening old wounds with this reference to my first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who was shot by the Bolsheviks as a counterrevolutionist one dreadful day in 1921.
There was also the brilliant Yesenin, who evoked peasant life like nobody else of his generation and drowned himself in alcohol before he committed suicide in 1925. And there was the insufferably
clever Mayakovsky, who killed himself in 1930 after becoming disenchanted with the Revolution he had passionately championed. Osip must have seen me close my eyes. “I beg your pardon,
Anna,” he said, touching my elbow. “It was not my intention—”

“Spilt milk,” I remember saying, “always makes me want to weep. But I shall resist, lest I discover that I am unable to stop.”

He favored me with one of his tight-lipped smiles, pleased to see I remembered his observation about crying.

“What are you up to these days, Borisik?” I asked, hoping to move the conversation onto dryer ground.

“My life has become a theatrical performance,” Pasternak moaned. “I am beginning to understand why alcoholics get drunk hoping they will never sober up. I am exhausted, not
from the difficulties of today’s living conditions, but my existence as a whole. I am worn down by the unchangeability of things. I live in faith and grief, faith and fear, faith and
work.”

“What work?” Osip demanded.

“By all means, tell us what work?” I said.

“I’ve been reading into Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
again. I dream of translating it someday.”

Osip said, “You should be writing your own poetry, Boris, not translating the poetry of others. The effect of a Pasternak poem on another poet is liberating—it frees one’s
voice, one’s spirit, one’s imagination. In any case, poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

“One of the many things I like about you, Osip—one of the many things I
love
about you—is that it doesn’t matter who has written a poem, you or another. If
it’s true poetry, you take pride in it. Unlike me, you are free of envy.”

Osip shook his head. “I envy you your being published. I envy you your reviews.”

“My reviews! You are rubbing salt in my wounds. Only last week a literary magazine accused me of standing on the wrong side of the barricades of class warfare, of glorifying the past at
the expense of the present.”

To Osip’s delight, I immediately convened a mock court. “Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, how do you plead?”