The Stalin Epigram Read online

  Sergei Petrovich fell silent when Osip had finished. Then, noisily sucking a lungful of air through his flaring nostrils, he announced, ex cathedra, “It is a truly great poem, my dears. There is no doubt about it. I am swollen with pride to have been one of your first readers, Osip Emilievich. On my deathbed I shall boast of it.”

  Nadezhda glanced at me triumphantly. Osip was so moved he was at a loss for words. Patting the visitor on the shoulder, he kept nodding his thanks.

  Sergei Petrovich wanted to know when the poem had been first conceived, whether it had been revised, who outside the eight at Herzen House had heard it, how each of the first readers had reacted. To Osip’s credit, he answered evasively. Eventually he got into a discussion with his visitor about the poets who had defied the tsars before the Bolshevik Revolution. He reached for the teapot where Nadezhda hid the poems she copied off, riffled through them until he found the one with lines from the poet Blok written on the back of a draft of a Mandelstam poem and read them out: Nothing will change. There’s no way out. Carried away by Sergei Petrovich’s compliments, Osip went so far as to compare himself to Lermontov, who had openly accused the tsar of complicity in Pushkin’s death and railed against the venomous wretches huddling about the throne in a greedy throng.

  Sergei Petrovich’s head bobbed in truckling agreement. “Lermontov’s venomous wretches is the spiritual father of your rabble of thin-necked leaders, your fawning half-men.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Osip said, “but I will concede there is something to what you say.”

  When I was able to get a word in, I asked Osip if he happened to recall Pushkin’s last words.

  He was in an edgy humor. “I’m sure you’ll remind me.”

  I did remind him. “Lying on the daybed, dying from the bullet wound he’d suffered in the duel with that treacherous Frenchman d’Anthès, he said: Try to be forgotten. Go live in the country. Which is what you and Nadezhda ought to be doing instead of drawing attention to yourselves with political poems.”

  I was beginning to wonder how long the conversation would drag on. Having slept hardly at all the previous night, I was bone tired and aching to stretch out on the sofa in the next room. As much as Nadezhda was enjoying Sergei Petrovich’s visit, I could see she was suppressing yawns. Over our heads the Swiss clock with the heavy weight hanging on the end of a chain ticked away as slowly and as loudly as ever. I suggested we move into the living room, thinking the visitor would take the hint and depart. I noticed Sergei Petrovich pulling a large watch from the fob pocket in his vest as he followed me down the hallway. “It is late,” he said as Nadezhda and I collapsed onto the sofa and the two men brought over chairs. But he made no move to leave.

  Fumbling in a pocket, Osip came up with a crumpled pack of cheap Bulgarian cigarettes. When he saw there were only two left in it, he leaped to his feet in distress. “I hate to cut short such an agreeable evening,” he said, “but I absolutely must find cigarettes.”

  As if by slight of hand, Sergei Petrovich produced an unopened pack, Herzegovina Flors at that, and tossed it to Osip. “It’s yours,” he said so grandly you would have thought he was offering caviar and vodka.

  “I wasn’t aware you smoked,” Osip said, examining the pack as he sank back onto his seat.

  “I don’t,” Sergei Petrovich said. “Someone gave it to me for translating a letter—I offer the cigarettes to thank you for the use of your toilet.”

  “It is getting late,” Nadezhda said. “Perhaps we should think of calling it a night.”

  “Am I keeping you up?” the visitor inquired. It was not my place to say he was, but I remember snorting aloud at his shamelessness. Sergei Petrovich nervously checked the time on his pocket watch. “I shall be on my way as soon as I learn how Mandelstam and Akhmatova met,” he announced, looking directly at me. “I want to be able to say I heard the story from the horse’s mouth.”

  That was more than I could tolerate—I’d reached the limits of my patience with this inebriated lyric poet who thought my mouth resembled that of a horse. “We met after you were born but before you started drinking,” I remarked.

  Sergei Petrovich rolled with the punch. “I am not offended,” he told Osip who, too much of a gentleman to evict a guest, started to describe our first meeting, in 1911. Nadezhda, who had heard the story a hundred times, went off to the bedroom and came back with the quilt I always used when I slept over. And still Sergei Petrovich made no move to leave.

  And then we discovered why.

  No matter how much this hurts, I must get it right. The pain is in the details. Someone knocked softly on the door of the flat. Nadezhda glanced anxiously at the tiny watch on her wrist. “Who would come calling at this hour?” she asked in a hollow voice.

  Osip buttoned the top button of his shirt again, almost as if he thought it would be held against him if he wasn’t presentable. “O Lord,” he murmured, quoting from one of his poems I first heard in the early thirties, “help me to live through this night.”

  Whoever was at the door rapped more sharply. Osip said to Nadezhda, very calmly, “Will you get that or should I?”

  She rose to her feet. The blood had drained from her lips. She looked at me to see if I could fashion an answer to the question she feared to ask. I was too terrified to try. Sergei Petrovich came up with a small medicinal bottle filled with a clear liquid and took a quick swig from it. He wiped the lips that had grazed the back of my hand on the sleeve of his shirt. Reeking of alcohol but suddenly stone sober, he said, “I swear on the head of my ex-wife I didn’t know they were coming tonight.”

  “Who’s coming tonight?” I asked so weakly nobody heard me. Nadezhda loomed over the guest and hissed, “Utter one word about the epigram, Sergei, and I will circumcise you with a kitchen knife.” She ironed the wrinkles out of her skirt with the palms of her quavering hands and went to open the door.

  When she came back, six men crowded into the room behind her. Five of them wore the belted raincoats associated with the secret police. The sixth, dressed in a black suit with a double-breasted jacket, had the features of a raven; I have heard it said that the guttural croak of the raven can resemble human speech but I had never experienced this until then. (It is beyond me how in the world I remember such trivia. I suppose it’s because the scene is graven in my memory.) The man in the dark suit, evidently the agent in charge, approached Sergei Petrovich and, looking down at him, said, “I have a warrant for your arrest.”

  Considering that the arrest of Mandelstam must have been planned down to the last detail, I couldn’t help but smile uneasily at this manifestation of mistaken identity. One could almost feel sorry for the drunken shit of a collaborator, who had been dispatched to make sure the individual the Cheka sought would be there when they came around to collect him at the witching hour; who, during the arrest, would play the role of the obligatory civilian witness required by Soviet law. This explained Sergei’s endless questions, not to mention the full pack of Herzegovina Flors in his pocket.

  Osip stood up and addressed the officer I identified as the Raven. “You are making a mistake, comrade enforcer of the law. He is the witness. I am the poet.”

  “Osip Mandelstam?”

  “I am the poet Mandelstam, yes.”

  “I am the Colonel Abakumov. I have a warrant for your arrest. You are charged under Article 58, covering anti-Soviet propaganda and counterrevolutionary activities.”

  “I don’t for an instant doubt you are in possession of a warrant. Still, am I permitted to see it?”

  The Raven pulled a paper from the breast pocket of his jacket. Osip skimmed the document. “Genrikh Yagoda himself signed it,” he informed us. “I suppose I must take it as mark of esteem to be arrested on a warrant signed by the head of the Cheka.” He looked at Sergei Petrovich, who was sitting with his chin on his chest, his eyes tightly shut. “Give me your opinion, Sergei. Would it be a stretch of the imagination to consider this signature as evidence that I
am not, after all, a minor poet?”

  The guest made no move to reply. The Raven addressed Osip. “Are you armed?”

  To my astonishment, Osip nodded. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  The Raven seemed taken aback. “What are you armed with? And where do you conceal the weapon?”

  “I am armed with the explosive power locked inside the nucleus of poems. I conceal the poems in question in my brain.”

  The Raven didn’t think this was humorous. “You are treating this matter more lightly than you should. One of my men will accompany you to the bedroom. You are permitted to dress. You are permitted to collect a few personal items in a bag, including a change of undergarments.”

  Osip followed an agent into the bedroom. Nadezhda said, “I want to see the arrest warrant.”

  “That is out of the question. The arrest warrant is stamped state secret. The procedure is to show it to the individual being arrested, not to every person who happens to be present at the arrest.”

  “Where are you taking him?” Nadezhda demanded.

  “That, too, is a state secret.”

  “Who will question him? How will he be questioned?”

  “Methods of interrogation are a closely guarded state secret. It would help our enemies if they were to know how they would be interrogated.”

  “Surely there are rules that must be followed in any interrogation.”

  “There are indeed rules,” the Raven agreed, “but they are a state secret.”

  “Mandelstam is a poet, an intellectual,” Nadezhda burst out. “He has not broken the law.”

  “If that is the case, he has nothing to fear and will be sent home in short order.”

  The agents in raincoats spread out through the apartment and started to rifle through cupboards and drawers and the hall closet, throwing the contents into a heap in the corner of the room.

  “Why is Yagoda taking an interest in a poet who is not even published?” I asked.

  The Raven shrugged. “The particulars that have resulted in Mandelstam’s arrest are a state secret.”

  Making no effort to keep the irony out of my voice, I asked, “Is there anything that’s not a state secret?”

  The Raven favored me with a thin smile. “The answer is obviously yes. But what’s not a state secret is a state secret.”

  Osip emerged from the bedroom. He had put on his only suit and a detachable collar and carried a small satchel filled, I supposed, with toilet articles and spare underwear. He lingered in front of the bookshelf to pluck the small copy of Pushkin’s collected works edited by Tomashevski from it. The agent snatched it from his hands and shook it by the spine to be sure nothing was hidden inside, then returned it. Osip slipped it into the pocket of his suit jacket.

  Nadezhda tried to embrace her husband but one of the agents stepped between them. His lips trembling, Osip delivered a line from his Tristia cycle. “I have studied the science of good-byes . . .”

  Nadezhda, deathly pale, completed the stanza. “. . . The crying of women and the Muses’ song become one.”

  Only God knows how I remembered lines from the same poem. “Everything’s happened before and will happen again, but still the moment of each meeting is sweet.”

  Blinded by the flood of tears in my eyes, I never saw Osip leave. When the front door closed behind him, Nadezhda and I fell into each other’s arms.

  The collaborator was still sitting there. One of the agents tapped him on the shoulder. “I will take your deposition in the kitchen,” he said, and gestured for Sergei Petrovich to follow him from the room.

  The officer and the other two agents continued ransacking the flat. Going through the shelves book by book, the Raven was quite puzzled by the absence of Marxist classics. “But where do you keep Marx and Lenin and Stalin?” he asked.

  I said, “This is surely the first time you’ve arrested somebody who doesn’t own a copy of Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question.”

  “Not owning a copy of Marxism and the National Question can count against someone during the interrogation,” the Raven retorted. I couldn’t tell whether he was saying this in jest or not. Probably not.

  The search went on until dawn. Through it all Nadezhda and I sat numbly on the sofa watching them. What they were after were handwritten documents—letters, poems, even (as it turned out) shopping lists—and to this end every book in the library was shaken by its spine. At some point we heard the collaborator Sergei Petrovich let himself out of the flat. Nadezhda called after him, “Don’t forget the kasha,” but if he heard her, he made no answer. Soon after the agent came in from the kitchen carrying Nadezhda’s spare teapot. Smiling triumphantly, he lifted off the lid and turned it upside down and the poems Nadezhda had hidden inside, written on scraps of thin paper, fluttered to the floor. Every bit of paper with writing on it was collected in a satchel marked State Property. At one point during the search the youngest of the agents, a pink-cheeked boy with blond hair, came over to offer us rock candy from a small tin in his pocket. Both of us declined. “They’re not poisoned,” he said with a shrug. By the time the first of the Herzen House residents could be heard rushing through the hallway to catch the morning trolley to work, Nadezhda was dozing fitfully, her head on my shoulder, her body shuddering with muffled sobs. Near the end of the search an agent emerged from the bedroom carrying a pile of women’s shoes that had been stuffed with newspaper to keep their shape. Nadezhda came awake and took hold of my elbow. I knew that she had copied many of Osip’s unpublished poems onto the margins of Pravda articles and, crumpling the paper, secreted them in her shoes. Seeing that the shoes were filled with newspaper, the agent tossed them onto the pile of clothing near the window. Nadezhda and I dared not look at each other for fear the expression on our faces would give us away.

  When it came time for the Chekists to depart, the Raven gathered up the satchel, along with a dozen or so volumes of French or Italian poetry he had decided to confiscate. “If you want to help Mandelstam, mention the arrest to no one,” he advised.

  “Is the fact of his arrest a state secret?” I asked.

  The Raven glared at me. “Step carefully, Akhmatova—you can be pulled in as an accomplice.”

  And with that they were gone.

  I went into the kitchen to make tea. Nadezhda, barely breathing, was sitting motionless on the sofa when I returned with two cups and pressed one into her icy hand. “The bastard took the kasha when he left,” I said, but I don’t think she heard me.

  “If they refuse to say where they took Osip,” Nadezhda asked, “how in the world will I find him?”

  I sat down next to her. “There is an old trick,” I told her. “You will prepare a small parcel filled with soap and socks and the like and address it to Mandelstam, Osip. I will accompany you. Together we’ll go from prison to prison and queue at the window where they accept packages for prisoners. They will check the list of inmates at the prison—if he is not there they will turn you away. The prison that accepts the package is where he’ll be.”

  “How do you know such things, Anna?”

  Looking back, I can see now that I was taking out my rage at Osip’s arrest on her. She was agonizing over the imminent execution of a husband, an unfortunately banal situation in this workers’ paradise of ours. I, on the other hand, stood to lose an irreplaceable poet-brother. “Chalk it up to my having led a less sheltered existence than you,” I said, my tone more vinegary than it should have been under the circumstances.

  “But my life has been anything but sheltered!”

  “Your life may have been unconventional sexually, but sheltered from political reality. You don’t understand—they are arresting people for nothing now! We are shuffled like a pack of cards. Only someone who has no grasp of political reality could have encouraged Osip in this madness.”

  “That’s simply not the case. We imagined prison and accepted the risks.”

  I could barely credit my ears. “You imagined prison!”


  Nadezhda started hyperventilating and I had to massage her solar plexus before she could respire normally. “What do I do after I find out where he is?” she asked in a small voice.

  “We must get people to intervene on his behalf,” I said. “I will alert Borisik. He will surely get in touch with Nikolai Bukharin. You must seek an interview with Bukharin and explain what happened. He has helped you and Osip before. He will help again if he is able to. Whatever you do, don’t mention the Stalin epigram. All you know is that Osip was arrested.”

  “Bukharin has been out of favor since the late twenties—”

  “He’s no longer on the Politburo, but Stalin has thrown him a bone, the editorship of Izvestiya—he is said to value Bukharin’s judgment.”

  I don’t remember how long we sat there in dazed silence, sipping the tea long after it became cold, lost in thought or its absence. The Moscow morning flooded the room with a deathly slate gray light. I do remember that the poet Tsvetaeva came to mind—I’d known the beautiful Marina when she and Osip had been briefly involved before the Bolsheviks came on the scene. At the time of Mandelstam’s arrest she was living in exile in Paris, her poetry circulating in her native land in manuscript. One of her poems that had reached me earlier in the year spoke of the Bolshevik Revolution and the deadly days of October. Sitting in the empty room that had once been filled with life and love and laughter and poetry, I suddenly heard Tsvetaeva’s ominous lines ringing in my ear.

  —Where are the swans?

  —They went away, the swans.

  —The ravens too?

  —They stayed behind, the ravens.

  NINE

  Osip Emilievich

  Thursday, the 17th of May 1934

  I CAN SEE, WITH the benefit of hindsight, that it is a marvelously liberating experience to be arrested—it liberates you from the terror of being arrested. Being liberated from the terror of arrest has a downside—it obliges you to concentrate on lesser terrors: where your next meal or next cigarette will come from, what would happen if your muse or your erection go absent without leave, how those dear to you will survive if the state in its infinite wisdom decides they are more useful as next of kin, what would be the effect on the poet’s literary reputation if it was discovered he was terrified of terror. I was focusing on the lesser terrors when the arresting officer delivered my perspiring body to the inner prison in Lubyanka and got someone to sign a receipt for me. I never set eyes on the receipt, but I supposed it was something (à la L. Carroll) akin to Received, one mad hatter twitching from mercury poisoning or fear of being dispatched to the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.