The Stalin Epigram Page 14

  I told Nadenka how he had read the original version of the epigram; how I’d written out the revised version without the offending stanza that Pasternak had asked me to remove; how it had all come down to my identifying the people who had heard the epigram, something that I had up to now refused to do.

  “But surely they know who heard the epigram,” Nadenka said. “They will have planted microphones in your walls,” Zinaida whispered. “They will have recorded everything we said.” A terrible thought came to her. “They will have recorded everything we did.”

  Nadenka turned on her. “If they had planted microphones in the walls, they would have arrested the three of us months ago. They would have swooped down on Herzen House and arrested Mandelstam the morning he read out the epigram to us to nip the thing in the bud. There are no microphones, which means we only need to concoct a story they can swallow.” She reached for my head and, pulling it closer to hers, said fiercely, “Listen to me, Osya. You must give them names. We must be seen to be naïve intellectuals who blundered and are ready to make amends. It is our only chance.”

  “How can I implicate Akhmatova? How can I implicate Pasternak and the others?”

  “You say you recited the epigram without warning them what the subject was. You say they all reacted, like Pasternak, with horror. You embroider—each and every person who heard the epigram was appalled at the idea of maligning the great Stalin. Each and every person tried to talk you into destroying it. That sort of thing.” Nadenka touched her forehead to mine. “You can do it, Osya. You must do it, for your own sake, for our sakes. You must give them whatever they want.” “Nadezhda is right,” Zinaida pleaded. “Please, please, cooperate with the authorities so we can get on with our lives.”

  And so I named names. I was a nervous wreck—it’s not every day you walk through walls—and began talking so rapidly Christophorovich had trouble keeping up with my confession. He summoned a stenographer and made me start over again. He wanted names, I gave him names. “Nadezhda Yakovlevna, best friend, comrade-in-arms, wife, like Mayakovsky an ardent supporter of cracking eggs in order to make omelets, was the first of eleven. How did she react? She came as close as she ever had to throwing me out of the flat. Sheer slander, she cried, insulting to the intelligence of anyone who might hear it because the entire world knows Stalin as the first among equals, someone who leads by collegiality. Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova, theater actress, poetry lover, friend, was the second. She was sickened to learn I could sink so low as to spread libel about someone as brilliant and at the same time as modest as Stalin. Pasternak threatened to end our long and close friendship if I didn’t destroy this scandalous epigram. As for Akhmatova, I thought she would throw up on our living room floor when she heard it. She insisted it wasn’t a poem at all but a polemic, a political argument that was wide of the mark inasmuch as Stalin had no connection with Ossetia and was universally respected, even by his political opponents, for his sincerity and idealism. Ditto for Sergei Petrovich, whose family name escapes me. Ditto for the six others who had the misfortune to wander onto the middle ground Nadezhda and I had created, only to find themselves the captive audience of a demented poet. All of them, starting with Nadezhda, argued that I shouldn’t be wasting my talents, assuming I had any, doing the villainous bidding of wreckers and counterrevolutionaries, that instead I ought to be composing an ode to the glory of Stalin, to his courage during the Revolution and the Civil War, to his accomplishments as a builder of Socialism in one country, to his inspired leadership that is bringing industrialization and collectivization to backward Russia. I see now that they were right and I was wrong.”

  When I had run out of breath, Christophorovich asked the stenographer to read back my confession. He copied off parts of it on a sheet of paper, then underlined one sentence before reading it aloud. “. . . Doing the villainous bidding of wreckers and counterrevolutionaries. Those were your words.”

  I wasn’t sure where he was going with this and nodded tentatively.

  “Which brings us to the core of the crime, Mandelstam. Who put you up to composing the epigram in the first place? Who ordered you to read it to as many people as possible in the hope that its poison would reverberate”—he plucked another page from the dossier and read from it—“reverberate across the land like ripples from a pebble thrown into stagnant water.”

  My mouth must have fallen open. Christophorovich snickered with pleasure at my surprise. “I presume you recognize your own words. As you will have guessed by now, the young woman pushing the child in a stroller behind you that day in Moscow was equipped with a directional microphone and recording everything you said.” Comrade interrogator read the heading on the page. “Transcript of conversation between Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Thursday, the twelfth of April 1934. Moscow street. The Party will declare a national holiday. The Komsomol will sing it—it being your slanderous epigram—as they march off to fulfill their quotas. At congresses in the Bolshoi, from every balcony and box, workers will shout it out. It will be the end of Stalin. Clearly, only someone in the Bolshevik superstructure would be in a position to suggest to you how the Party, how the Komsomol, how delegates to a congress in the Bolshoi Theater would react to the demise of Stalin. Was it Kamenev or Zinoviev, both of whom were expelled from the Party as Trotskyists in 1927? Was it that slime Rykov, who has been plotting against Stalin since the death of Lenin? Perhaps it was the darling of the party, the great Bukharin, expelled from the Politburo because he sided with Stalin’s enemies who criticized revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary, collectivization. There is, after all, a long history of Bukharin acting as your guardian angel, first to free your brother from prison, then arranging flats and ration cards and a monthly pension for services to Russian literature, even organizing contracts for future volumes that were paid for but never published. The list of Bukharin’s favors to you are as long as your arm: he pulled strings to get you travel permits to the Crimea, he used his influence to have several of your prose pieces published, he even offered you and your wife exit visas from Russia in the mid-twenties, which, to your credit, you turned down. Pity. Perhaps you wouldn’t be where you are today if you had gone into exile. Was it Bukharin who proposed you return all these favors by circulating a poem slandering Stalin? Or was it the archtraitor Trotsky himself? Actually, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced ripples on stagnant water sounds exactly like a formulation that would appeal to the twisted mind of the Jew Trotsky. We know for a fact that he has set industrial wreckers to throwing cut glass into sacks of farina. He has ordered mechanics to add water to aviation fuel. He has invited kulaks to slaughter their livestock rather than deliver the animals to collective farms. He is not above psychological wrecking—encouraging a gullible poet to spread poison about Stalin like ripples on stagnant water.”

  “No one put me up to it,” I insisted. “The idea for truth telling originated with me.”

  “Surely you don’t expect us to believe that. You’re an intellectual. You don’t have the profile of a counterrevolutionary.” Christophorovich glanced at another report in his dossier. “You do remember what that girl said in the canteen for trolley car workers last January? Once, long ago, there was such a poet. Perhaps it was in the wake of this insult that someone whispered in your ear: As a poet, you have dropped below the literary horizon. If you circulate a slanderous poem about Stalin, your star will rise—you will be recognized as one of Russia’s great poets. Who whispered in your ear? Who organized the conspiracy? The only thing that can save you is a confession.”

  “I didn’t compose the poem to get attention. I am not part of a conspiracy. I am a poet, not a plotter. I wouldn’t know how to function in a conspiracy.”

  “You have been manipulated, Mandelstam, surely you can see that now. You must identify the person or persons who originated this counterrevolutionary scheme. Your confession, your naming names, is not worth the paper it’s written on until you identify the instigators.” He circled
around behind me and began talking to the nape of my neck. “Look at the trouble they caused you. You and your wife and your mistress. Pasternak, Akhmatova, all the others. The traitors who put you up to this don’t give a shit about your fate. Why do you protect scum of the earth? You owe them nothing. Save yourself. Save Nadezhda and the others from a fate worse than death: slow strangulation by hanging from short ropes, simulated drowning in laundry basins, suffocation in sealed cells, standing naked for days on end in subzero temperatures, the breaking of bones in the body one a day—your cell mate Sergo’s fate. Give me the name of the ringleader.”

  Gathering what must have been the last shred of outrage in my trembling body, I said, “You claim to be builders, but in the end you are only torturers.”

  Comrade interrogator was mightily offended. “My poor Mandelstam, we are not torturers. Chekist tradition holds that to be deemed torture, a procedure must shock the conscience.”

  I thought I’d found the flaw in his logic. “How can a procedure shock the conscience if you have no conscience?”

  “You make a grave miscalculation, Mandelstam. We Bolsheviks live by conscience. We are committed to the principle that ends justify means. As the end in question is the construction of Communism, our conscience instructs us that all means, any means, are justified.”

  I understood what Christophorovich was after—he wanted me to admit, like Fikrit back in my cell, that I was a member of a Trotskyist anti-Bolshevik Center. He wanted to parade the poet Mandelstam at a public trial. Obviously, my confession would have more impact than that of an uneducated silver medalist at the 1932 Vienna games. But it is one thing to name the names of the those who actually heard my sad little epigram, and quite another to invent a conspiracy that could then be used at the show trials rumored to be in the works—of Zinoviev and Kamenev, of Bukharin despite the esteem in which most Bolsheviks held him, of Trotsky himself if Stalin could lure him back, like Gorky, from exile. And so I stuck to my story, which was after all the truth—not that this counted for much in purgatorio. Christophorovich was nothing if not tenacious. He brought to mind the doggedness of a lover who refuses to take no for an answer; who is disappointed by a yes because it cuts short the pleasure to be had from breaking your will. He had the endurance of a marathon runner. He kept at me for hours on end, promising me the state would be lenient with me and mine if I testified against the designated instigators, threatening me with execution if I failed to give him what he wanted—what (I’m supposing here) he needed in order for his career to flourish.

  I’m aware that Nadenka takes the view that recounting this episode is therapeutic, in the sense that it sheds light on everything that happened afterward. Personally, I am not persuaded it serves any useful purpose. What’s to be gained by reliving the execution? To this day, I am amazed they didn’t shoot me straight off the night they brought me to the Lubyanka. I half expected to be put to death every time they took me from my cell—I had heard rumors of prisoners being executed in the vaulted cellars that once served as storage rooms for the insurance company, and only managed to breathe again when the freight elevator started up instead of down. Until the night . . . the nightmarish night . . . the heartaching night when it started down.

  Now I’ll do my execution.

  The next evening, at the hour they usually came to get me for interrogation, three brutes I had never set eyes on turned up at the door of my cell. Two of them carried an ordinary wooden chair into the cell and strapped Sergo onto it with canvas belts. The third brought the heel of his boot down on my chinaware bowl, shattering it into pieces. “You won’t be needing this anymore,” is how he explained the gesture. He reached for my upper arm and, hauling me roughly to my feet, twisted both my arms behind my back and bound them tightly together at the wrists. Fikrit, bless his soul, climbed to his feet as if he intended to intervene. The guard lazily rested a hand on the butt of the pistol in his web holster and stared down the giant until he slowly backed up against the wall. I think I managed to say, “Thank you, Fikrit,” though it is entirely possible my lips moved but no words emerged. With the toe of my shoe, I edged my volume of Pushkin across the floor toward my cell mate. “I cannot read,” Fikrit said. “Learn,” I said. “Start with Pushkin. If you can one day make out his words, you won’t need to read anything else in your lifetime.” The two guards carried Sergo from the cell on the chair. Prodded along by the third guard, I followed. At the door I turned back to see, through my tears, the giant weight lifter bowing farewell to me from the waist, his knuckles scraping the floor in the style of peasants from the mountains of Azerbaidzhan.

  Our little group made its way down the corridor, through several steel doors to the open freight elevator. When the five of us were inside the guard pulled the throttle back—no, no, keep recording, I just need to catch my breath—and the elevator and my stomach and my heart and my head began descending deeper into hell.

  Christophorovich was waiting in the vaulted cellar when the elevator reached the basement. He was wearing the leather apron over his uniform and holding a large-bored naval revolver. The guards carried Sergo from the elevator and set him down in the middle of a patch of earth covered with sawdust. They forced me to kneel beside the chair. I could see comrade interrogator chewing on his lower lip as he removed the five enormous bullets from the revolver, then thumbed one of them back in and spun the cylinder as if he intended to play Russian roulette. The three guards backed off. Christophorovich said, “Who wants to go first? Age before beauty? Talent before mediocrity? Urban intellectual before rural hick? What will it be?” I heard Sergo spitting words from between his pus-swollen lips. “Fuck . . . Stalin” is what I think he said. Christophorovich called over to the guards, “It would seem we have someone who is impatient to meet his maker, comrades. Never let it be said I don’t attend to the last wishes of the condemned.” Stepping behind the chair, he held the revolver at arm’s length and thrust the bore into the nape of Sergo’s neck and he—he pulled—he pulled the trigger. The hammer struck an empty chamber. Sergo produced an anguished groan, almost as if he regretted still being alive. “Your turn, Mandelstam,” Christophorovich announced. “You have been condemned and sentenced to the Highest Measure of Punishment.” “But there was no trial,” I cried out. “The trial was held without you.” He pressed the revolver into the back of my neck and pulled the trigger—on another empty chamber. My knees gave way and my forehead pitched forward onto the sawdust. Christophorovich took a grip on my collar and hauled me upright, then turned back to Sergo and, aiming at his neck, again pulled the trigger. A deafening roar reverberated through the vaulted cellars as the chair and the body strapped to it spilled sideways. The sound came back from so many directions I thought other prisoners were being shot in other parts of the basement. Clots of blood, of brain spattered on my shirt. “Are you a believer, Mandelstam?” the interrogator demanded as he thumbed another bullet into the revolver and gave a spin to the cylinder. I must have said yes because he asked, “In what?” “In poetry.” “Poetry won’t save you now,” he said and he pressed the revolver into the nape of my neck. I could feel warm urine soaking through my trousers as he—oh, Jesus—as he pulled the thing, the trigger. I heard what must have been the dry thud of the hammer hitting the firing pin and vomited on the sawdust under my knees. It took an eternity for me to realize that if I could vomit, I must be alive. Christophorovich and the guards started laughing, piano at first, then louder until they were roaring with laughter and the laughter, like the shot that had put an end to Sergo’s suffering, echoed through the vaulted cellars. “You were luckier than Sergo,” Christophorovich managed to say. “Take him back to his cell. We’ll try again another night.”

  What was going through my head at the moment of execution? The cliché has it that your life flashes before your eyes. Not with me, it didn’t. I made an effort to summon an image of my wife, but I couldn’t remember what she looked like. Try as I might I was unable to call up an erotic image. I s
truggled to remember a line, any line, from one of my poems, and failing that, words. Nothing came to mind. I strained to come up with a single line from the Divine Comedy but drew a blank. I couldn’t even recall who had wiped the stains of hell off Dante. My brain was devoid of thought; thought had been shoved aside by fear, as if the cells in the lobes of my brain had scattered in their panic to get out of the path of the foreign object about to come crashing into their hive.

  I am incapable of telling you what happened after my mock execution. (Only now do I see that he didn’t intend to kill me, only break me.) There are gaps in the story that no amount of concentration can fill. It will have been sometime after my return to the cell—whether an hour or a day I cannot say—that I tried to cut my wrist with a shard of chinaware. Fikrit stopped me as I was sawing at the vein. He tore a strip of cloth from the tail of my shirt and bandaged the wound, which although not deep was very painful. Curiously, the pain became a source of euphoria. I can remember my mother once telling me—when I was stung by nettles while climbing out of a lake near Warsaw—that nothing makes you more aware you are alive than pain. Cowering in a corner of a cell in the Lubyanka, with Sergo’s brains staining my shirt, was not what my mother had in mind when she spoke of the advantages of pain; still the terrible truth is that I was elated to be alive.

  I must have been in this euphoric state for days on end because if I was again taken for interrogation or execution, I have no recollection of it. It is strange what does surface in a brain under stress. I remember looking a long, long time at my shoes, mystified by the absence of laces. I remember studying the shards of chinaware on the cell floor, trying to figure out what the object had been before it was broken. I remember wondering, when Fikrit shyly handed a small book to me, what an illiterate weight lifter was doing with a copy of Pushkin. When I came to my senses, or what was left of them, I found myself astride the stool with the sawed-off front legs in Christophorovich’s office. I had no idea of how much time had gone by since my execution. Comrade interrogator had been questioning me but, complaining of stomach cramps, he had gone off to the toilet and left me alone with Stalin, so extraordinarily lifelike in the photograph on the wall behind the table I half expected to hear his voice. I sat there for I don’t know how long, lost in the enormous room with the pleated curtains on the windows and the alarm clock and the remains of a supper on the table, staring at Stalin. I have long subscribed to the notion that, for better or for worse, a man’s character is written on his face. Like most Russian intellectuals, I have been mesmerized by Stalin, wondering what he was like behind the mask. I imagined having conversations with him in the course of which his confidences would shed light on what had transformed him into a practicing paranoid (my diagnosis, based on no medical evidence, only instinct) who assumed everyone was guilty of something. Pasternak and I used to circle endlessly around the subject (I have been known to invent biographical details of Soso Dzhugashvili’s life that left Boris in stitches). Had Stalin been marked by a violent childhood in Gori, or his bank-robbing exploits to raise money for the Bolsheviks, or his several exiles in the frozen tundra under the Arctic Circle, or some particularly brutal experience during the Civil War, or the death (rumored to be suicide) of his young wife eighteen months earlier? Peering intently into the face of Stalin, I found no ready answers. You couldn’t read much into formal portraits or photographs of Stalin because they were always retouched to erase the smallpox scars, to add ruddiness to his cheeks and kindheartedness to the shadow of a smirk playing on his lips. I looked around to be sure the room was empty, then made my way past the table to take a closer look at Stalin’s face. I confess, without shame, that I found myself being drawn to him with the kind of mesmeric attraction I up to then had experienced only with members of the weaker sex. His reproving eyes gnawed at me from the wall. And then, weird as this must sound to you, I found myself being sucked into the photograph, sucked through it. My ears were ringing with unformed words. Lines from a poem I had not yet written began to knock like a fist on a window: