The Stalin Epigram Page 15

  I came to him—to his core—

  Entering the Kremlin without a pass,

  In pain, and with a guilty head,

  Tearing the sackcloth canvas space.

  I hardly dared open my eyes. When I did I found myself adrift in a murkiness that muted all sound and only gradually dissipated, like thick morning fog, at which point I discovered I was halfway along a narrow corridor. Portraits of the generals who defeated Napoleon were hanging on both sides, each illuminated by a small lamp attached to the top of the gilt frame. I touched one wall with the tips of my fingers. It felt cold and damp. I could sense the soft pile of the thick carpet under my feet. I grasped there were two possibilities: either I was not imagining this, or I was imagining that I was not imagining it. At the far end of the corridor two men in tight-fitting European suits were sitting on either side of a low table playing chess with miniscule pieces made out of clay. The older of the two, with fine gray hair falling to his collarbones, struck me as vaguely familiar. “Mandelstam?” he called out, waving me forward. I must have looked mystified because the other man, younger than the first and prematurely bald, repeated the question. “You are Mandelstam?” I nodded. “I don’t have a Kremlin pass,” I said, hoping to avoid trouble by admitting my blunder straightaway. “What makes you think you’re in the Kremlin?” the younger man demanded. “The portraits of the generals behind me,” I said, “are known to hang in the Kremlin.” Amused by my amateur detective work, he pulled an appointment book from a file cabinet and ran his finger down a list of names. He put a tick next to one of them. “You don’t require a pass,” he said. “Stalin is expecting you. Through the double doors there. Don’t bow or scrape or anything like that. He detests protocol. He’s not a tsar, after all, merely secretary general of the Party.”

  A big man I recognized from newspaper photographs as Stalin’s bodyguard Vlasik pulled open the double doors and, never lifting his eyes from me, stepped aside. “Just walk up to him as you would to any ordinary individual and say your name,” he instructed me. “If he offers his hand, shake it.” I heard the doors close behind me when I had gone through. Josef Stalin was sitting at the far end of the long rectangular room behind an enormous desk piled high with books. One entire wall was lined with ornate Russian stoves. The thick drapes on the window behind him were partially open and I could make out the onion-shaped domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral, illuminated by antiaircraft searchlights, which meant that I was indeed, as I supposed, inside the Kremlin. What light there was in the room came from a low desk lamp and an arched reading lamp hanging over an upholstered chair. The man known in Kremlin circles as the khozyain, wearing a military tunic open at the neck and smoking a cigarette, got to his feet and came around the desk. “Stalin,” he muttered. “Mandelstam,” I replied. “I know who you are,” he said. “Your reputation precedes you.” I heard myself say, “Yours trails after you like a wake,” and immediately regretted my impudence. (Did I actually say these words or is this how I would have liked to conduct myself?) My comment, assuming I made it, irritated the head of the household. “Therein lies the problem,” he said. “Wakes fade away after a time.”

  He glanced down at my shoes. “What happened to your laces?” “I ask myself the same thing,” I said. He raised his eyebrows, obviously perplexed, and after an instant’s hesitation, awkwardly held out his hand. I just as awkwardly took it. He produced a packet of Kazbek Papirosi from a pocket of his tunic and offered me one of the cigarettes with their long cardboard tips. A gunmetal cigarette lighter materialized in his stumpy fingers. I took hold of his wrist and leaned toward him to bring the end of my cigarette to the flame. Stalin couldn’t have missed noticing that my hand was trembling but was discreet enough not to comment on it. The drag on a cigarette, the first since my arrest, went a long way toward calming my frayed nerves. “Let’s talk,” he suggested, gesturing toward the upholstered chair, pulling over the high-backed wicker chair so that we were facing each other, our knees nearly touching. “About what should we talk?” I asked.

  “You can start by explaining how is it that every composer and painter and writer and poet in Russia except you is ready to dedicate a work to Stalin.”

  “With all respect, if you have the dedication of every composer and painter and writer and poet, I don’t see why you need mine.”

  In person, Stalin looked nothing like his photographs. He was a good deal shorter than the figure in his portraits, almost dwarflike even. His left arm, visibly withered, hung stiffly from a hunched shoulder. He had the beginnings of a paunch. His face, filled with smallpox scars and freckles, was ruddy enough, but on closer inspection I got the impression he applied what women refer to as rouge. His teeth were in worse condition than mine, his eyes were yellow, the mustache on his upper lip was thickened and darkened with shoe wax. His scalp was dry and peeling in places. Black hairs protruded from his nostrils.

  Like the poet Mandelstam in his most recent incarnation, Stalin didn’t beat about the bush. “Let’s be clear, Mandelstam—I am not afraid of dying. I looked death in the face dozens of times as a young revolutionist, as the commissar charged with defending Tsaritsyn during the Civil War. No, what I fear, what I loathe, is the fading of my wake after the passage of my ship. I send off valises filled with rubles to that Ukrainian rejuvenation quack Bogomolets to finance his experiments—he is said to believe that drinking water from glaciers accounts for Georgians living into ripe old age—but I don’t put much stock in the professor’s magic potions. With or without water from glaciers, the curtain will one day come down on my life. And then what? All those objects named after Stalin—the tanks, the tractors, the warships, the factories—all of them will sooner or later disappear, to be replaced by new tanks and new tractors and new warships and new factories named after a new secretary general. The limousine I ride in is a ZIS. The initials, as you no doubt know, stand for Zavod Imeni Stalina—the Factory Named After Stalin. When the last ZIS finishes up in a museum for antique automobiles, people will have forgotten what the initials stood for. The streets in the cities named after Stalin, even the cities like Stalingrad, will eventually revert to their original names. So where, I put the question to the poet Mandelstam, where can I expect to find a flicker of life after death? The answer is: If there is such a thing as immortality, it resides in the poetry of a genius.”

  Stalin jabbed a nicotine-stained finger into my knee. “You are a stubborn prick, Mandelstam. Your pal Pasternak came up with a poem, albeit quite run-of-the-mill. So go forward without flinching, as long as you’re alive . . . Shostakovich delivered a whole symphony he described as a creative reply to Stalin’s accurate criticism, though it gives me a splitting headache when I am forced to sit through a performance. (Now that I think of it, maybe that’s what the asshole intended. I should have Shostakovich arrested for wrecking my sleep!) Thousands of lesser poets and writers celebrate Stalin in a hundred different languages. Nobody in Russia publishes a book, a pamphlet, a thesis on philosophy or philology or astronomy or linguistics without acknowledging his debt to Stalin. Do you know Khachaturian’s Stalin Song?” He started to hum the first bars in the sweet-pitched voice of the choir boy he once was. “Well, you get the idea.” The khozyain pulled another cigarette from his pack and lit it on the embers of the one in his mouth, then filled his lungs with smoke. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking this conversation is easy for me, Mandelstam. I am not used to asking for something. It is more usual that the very few things I require are offered. It would seem that Stalin can have anything his heart desires in all of Russia with the exception of your poem. I ask you, man-to-man, face-to-face: Is such a situation normal?”

  I was, I can see now as I look back on my encounter with Stalin, so flabbergasted by the turn the conversation had taken that I couldn’t find words to reply. Taking my silence for stubbornness, Stalin became exasperated. “It is unusual to come across someone who does not fear the secretary general who runs the Party and, through it, the state
. In other circumstances I could admire such a man. Let’s be sure you know what’s at stake here, Mandelstam.” Scraping back his chair, he stood up and came around behind me and began talking to the nape of my neck. “Do you have an idea of how much the state weighs?”

  “The weight of the state?”

  “Yes, with all its factories and dams and trains and aircraft and trucks and ships and tanks.”

  “Nobody can calculate the weight of the state. It is in the realm of astronomical figures.”

  “And do you think one man can resist the pressure of this astronomical weight? I will have your poem, Mandelstam. If for some reason I can’t have your poem, you will be crushed under the weight of the state.”

  His bluntness left me short of breath. “I am not a threat to Soviet power,” was all I could think to say.

  He circled around the upholstered chair and stood over me, sucking on his cigarette, studying me with his angry yellow eyes. “You are most certainly a threat to Soviet power. Someone who refuses to bend to Stalin’s will may bend to the will of his enemies. There is no middle ground between worshipping the ground Stalin walks on and desecrating it.”

  Stalin hauled his wicker chair back behind his desk and sank into it, lost for a long moment in reflection. “So what’s your answer, Mandelstam?” he said. “I haven’t got all night. Will you do your part to secure the secretary general’s immortality?”

  “I would if I could.”

  His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What does that mean?”

  “Even if I were to compose such an ode, it would be useless to you. I would be going through the motions. I don’t really know you well enough to compose something so true it cuts to the bone, which is what a poem must do if it is to have life after the poet’s death. For me you are a larger-than-life icon, a legend, a myth, not a flesh-and-blood human being. There is no way I can counterfeit it.”

  “Stalin is made of flesh and blood like you.” He straightened in his chair. “What is your age?”

  “Forty-three.”

  “You look older. I happen to be thirteen years your senior, but the difference in age notwithstanding, we have a lot in common. Both our fathers were in the leather business—yours sold leather in Warsaw, mine was a shoemaker in Georgia. It is not to be excluded that my father made shoes using leather supplied by your father. Stranger things have been known to happen. In addition we share a common interest in poesy. I myself have written romantic verse—several of my poems were published in a Georgian newspaper under the pen name Soselo before I became a full-time revolutionist. That’s not all. It is certainly no accident we both married women whose name, Nadezhda, signifies hope in Russian—we may hope for different things, but we share an inclination toward hope. And, curiously, you and I have the same forename. During one of my stretches in exile, the locals in Solvychegodsk in the Arkhangelsk Oblast took to calling me Osip, which is a popular Russian form of Josef up north. I even signed Oddball Osip on love letters I wrote to a schoolgirl there named Pelageya. Being a revolutionist, robbing banks to finance the sacred proletarian enterprise, was not without advantages—you could get into any girl’s pants.”

  “Being a poet was not without advantages, too,” I said, but I could see he was lost in his own life and hadn’t heard me.

  “By God, those were the days. Exhilarating. Dangerous. Sheer fun. In Gori, in Tiflis, I was a local hero. People in the Caucasus respected me for who I was, not”—he waved the back of his hand at the Kremlin compound—“where I lived.” Stalin remembered I was there. “Did you say something?”

  “No.”

  He nodded absently. “Jesus, I haven’t thought about Pelageya in years. I even know her name. Pelageya Onufrieva. I must make a note to have my people find out what became of her.”

  I thought I might stand a better chance of ingratiating myself with Stalin if I could keep him talking about himself. “Siberian exile must have been a bitter experience,” I said.

  Stalin blew air through his lips. “Bitter doesn’t begin to describe it. I was banished seven times, seven times I survived to make my way back to European Russia. I’ll tell you what kept me going in exile: aside from shacking up with girl prisoners so the both of us could keep warm at night, there were the books. Reading is what kept me going. Every time a prisoner died we’d fight to see who’d get his books. I usually won. My seventh exile ended when I raced across the country to Petrograd, after the tsar was overthrown, to direct the Bolsheviks until Lenin negotiated a safe passage through Germany and returned from abroad. Siberian winter is best described as hell frozen over. Try to visualize your piss freezing before it hits the ground. Try to visualize sucking on icicles of frozen vodka to get drunk. Summers, which were as short as a blink of the eye, weren’t much better with their swarms of mosquitoes. Ha! As soon as the permafrost started to thaw, I joined the other prisoners crawling under the women’s shower house—when we spotted water dripping through joints in the floorboards, we would squirm along the ground until we were directly underneath and try to look up through the dripping water to see the naked woman showering above. And if you could keep your eyes open long enough, you could make out the tear—”

  “The tear?”

  “The slash in the crotch. The slit. The cunt, you idiot. You ought to be familiar with cunts, Mandelstam. I have been told you get laid a lot. The Cheka file on your wife says she is an occasional lesbian, that you and your wife are both having an affair with a theater actress, that you sometimes watch them and she sometimes watches the two of you and you sometimes do it à trois in the French manner. I myself have never fucked more than one woman at a time, but it’s not for lack of trying. I made several attempts to talk my Nadezhda into experimenting with free sex in the Bolshevik spirit, but for all her revolutionist credentials—did you know she used to type speeches for Lenin before the Revolution?—she was too puritanical to liberate herself from the bourgeois definition of marriage. These days I fuck my housekeeper Valechka. The only thing she knows is the missionary position, which has a certain irony, since what I preach is the gospel according to Marx.”

  I watched as Stalin poured water into a glass from a pitcher, then measured out drops from a vial. “Tincture of iodine,” he said. “I don’t trust doctors. I treat my several ailments with ten drops twice a day. Works wonders.” And pulling a face in anticipation of the awful taste, he swallowed the contents of the glass. “With luck, all these anecdotes will break down the wall between us. Maybe you’ll begin to see me as flesh and blood after all, which will inspire you to write a serious poem to Stalin, as opposed to a treacherous little polemic.” I could only nod in agreement. Who could rule out the possibility that, knowing these intimate details of his life, I might be able to fabricate an ode to Stalin and avoid being crushed by the state?

  He reached over to angle the desk lamp so that it illuminated a framed photograph on the wall between us. “That’s me at Lenin’s funeral procession. As you can see, as all of Russia knows, I was one of the pallbearers carrying his coffin on our shoulders toward Red Square. There was so much ice, I was terrified I’d lose my footing and the coffin would fall to the ground and open and Lenin’s corpse would spill onto the street. I was devoted to Lenin, it goes without saying, though the old man, as we called him, could be a prick sometimes. To begin with, he wasn’t very courageous—while the rest of us were out in the Petrograd streets making a revolution, he hid in that girls’ school we used as an H.Q. When he did work up the nerve to leave Smolny, he wrapped his face in bandages so nobody would recognize him. I’ll let you in on a state secret, Mandelstam. To speak plainly, Lenin wasn’t very Leninist. Oh, he could theorize about proletarian revolution until the cock crowed but when it came to the day-to-day implementation of the theory, he dithered. Two steps forward, one step back was his idea of progress. Lenin didn’t have the guts to attack the peasant problem head-on—it took a Stalin to do that. History will vindicate me. Collectivization, despite the occasional inconvenienc
e to a handful of peasants, will be the crowning glory of my legacy.”