The Stalin Epigram Page 6

  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?”

  Borisik announced, “I shall plead madness, in both senses of the word.”

  Osip said, “What’s the difference how he pleads—he is clearly guilty as charged. There’s nothing left to do but come up with an appropriately inappropriate sentence.”

  “As we are under no obligation to have the punishment fit the crime,” I said, enjoying the game, “I propose the only rational sentence.” And to Osip’s immense pleasure, I quoted a line from a gem of a poem he once dedicated to me: “I’ll find an old beheading axe in the woods.”

  “A beheading axe!” Osip exclaimed. “Now we’re getting into the Bolshevik spirit of things.”

  “And where th’offense is, let the great axe fall,” Boris proclaimed in English, quoting, as he told us, a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

  We burst into laughter—my heart aches now as I recall the scene, for it was destined to be the last time the three of us would laugh together. In a manner of speaking, laughter vanished from our lives on that sun-drenched Thursday in April, anno Domini 1934.

  A trolley came churning along the street, sparks flecking from the electric cable overhead, and with a shriek of metal on metal skidded to a stop in front of us. I waved to the motorman to signal we weren’t getting on. Neither, apparently, was the woman pushing the child in the stroller. The motorman called grumpily through the open door, “Thems that aren’t waiting for trolleys, comrades, oughtn’t be sitting at trolley stops.” Jerking closed his doors, he headed off down the street.

  Borisik groaned. “What is it about us and the new order that we can’t even get trolley etiquette right?”

  “It’s the story of my life,” I said. “Do you really think there is a regulation restricting these benches to trolley passengers?”

  “Why not?” Osip said irritably. “There are regulations for everything else, including the writing of poetry.”

  Borisik said, “According to the article in Pravda, Stalin himself spelled out the new regulations during a meeting with writers at Gorky’s villa.”

  “Socialist realism,” I said, “makes me want to throw up.”

  “It will not have escaped you that none of us was invited to this meeting between Stalin and the so-called engineers of the human soul,” Borisik said. “What do you make of this?”

  And then Osip uttered something that astonished us. “Stalin was paying us a great compliment. With his peasant’s instinct for what is genuine and what is ersatz, he doesn’t put us in the same pigeonhole as his writer-engineers.”

  I wasn’t sure whether Osip was speaking tongue-in-cheek. “Do you really think he is capable of distinguishing between art that is genuine and art that isn’t?”

  “The Kremlin mountaineer, as I have decided to call him, surely understands the difference between the poet or the dramatist or the composer who is willing to deliver the obligatory monody to the everlasting glory of Stalin and those who, because of moral or esthetic scruples, are unwilling. If I had to make an educated guess, I would bet Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, to use his Georgian name, is endowed with enough peasant common sense to realize that the artist who coughs up a monody on command delivers something devoid of artistic value; that the monodies he can’t get are the ones he must have if his legend is to outlive his body.”

  We began walking again. I saw that the woman pushing the child in a stroller was a few paces behind us. “We have company,” I said under my breath.

  Borisik glanced back and grinned at the woman and she smiled back. “You’re becoming paranoid,” he told me. “She’s taking the sun like us.”

  “Let’s return to Hamlet,” I suggested. “Borisik, explain, please, what you see in the play that brings you back to it, year after year.”

  Osip didn’t understand Borisik’s fascination with it either. “Tolstoy hit the nail on the head,” he said impatiently. “Hamlet is little more than a vulgar tale of pagan vengeance. The plot is relatively straightforward—a Danish prince seeks more and more proof that his uncle murdered his father because he can’t bring himself to act, can’t bring himself to take revenge even when he has the proof. It’s a story about someone who is unable to deal with his own cowardice and so takes refuge from it in madness.”

  “No, no, I don’t read it that way at all,” Borisik burst out. “Hamlet is not mad; he feigns madness to justify his failure to act against his essential nature.”

  And then something happened that, given how things turned out, now seems to me to be best conveyed by saying that I thought the earth had stopped dead in its tracks for the beat of a heart.

  I will need a moment to collect my thoughts.

  What I have recalled up to now is more or less the gist. But when the earth stopped dead, so too did time; things proceeded at the speed of a mountain eroding, so I am able to reconstruct the moment with absolute accuracy. Osip halted so abruptly the woman pushing the stroller had to swerve to avoid him. Borisik and I looked inquisitively at him, then at each other, then at Osip again. He appeared to be shrugging off a great burden. His breathing became as calm as the drafts of air you would expect to find in the eye
of a hurricane. “So that’s how it is,” he said, more to himself than to us. And forgetting his decaying teeth, he smiled a genuine smile.

  Both Borisik and I were mystified. “What?” I asked.

  “But that puts everything into perspective!” Osip declared. “Hamlet feigns madness to justify his failure to act. I feign sanity to justify my failure to act, since no sane person can be expected to do what I must do.”

  Osip couldn’t have missed the look of confusion in my eyes. “What must you do?” I demanded.

  Borisik, who had a sixth sense for matters of the spirit, said very quietly, “He has been putting off confronting his Kremlin mountaineer. What he feels he must do compels him to act against his essential nature, inasmuch as poets don’t dirty their hands in politics.”

  And then, as if a dam had given way, a torrent of words spilled from Osip’s lips. “In the beginning, God forgive us, many of us shared Mayakovsky’s optimistic view of the Revolution—the Bolsheviks seemed to have a moral dimension, a hunger to improve the lot of the masses. But we didn’t reckon on the Kremlin mountaineer climbing over the bodies of his colleagues and reaching the top of the pyramid ahead of them. Stalin makes Caligula, Cesare Borgia, Ivan the Terrible look like humanitarians.”

  I saw Borisik shaking his head in anxious disagreement. “There is no evidence that Stalin knows what’s going on,” he said. “It could be Yagoda who is behind the forced collectivization and the famine and the mass arrests. The Cheka has always acted as a state within a state.”

  “This is not the first time we’ve had this argument,” Osip insisted, clearly exasperated. “What will it take to convince you I’m right, Boris, a photograph of Stalin on the front page of Pravda with a smoking revolver in his fist? Something is rotten in these Soviet Socialist Republics! He knows, for God’s sake. He’s behind every arrest, every execution, every deportation to Siberia. Nothing happens without his approval in this unweeded garden—your phrase, Boris, taken from the lips of the Hamlet who feigns madness. Absolutely nothing!”

  If I shut my eyes and catch my breath, I can still make out Borisik delivering the lines in English: “ ’Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.”

  In his eagerness to explain himself, Osip was almost tripping over words now. “Red Terror didn’t start yesterday, it began when that poor creature Fanny Kaplan tried to kill Lenin in 1923—that night the order, countersigned by Stalin, went out to execute White prisoners by the thousands. He’s been at it ever since, killing hope, pushing us deeper and deeper into a new ice age. He has to be stopped before he runs riot and drowns a hundred and fifty million people in teardrops.” Wincing in agitation, Osip came up with some lines I recognized from one of his older poems. “. . . Your spine has been shattered, my splendid derelict, my age . . . My dear Anna, my dear Boris, I confide in you because you of all people will comprehend me. I know how to go about destroying him! It needs only a spark. We have heard physicists speculate about the explosive power locked inside an atom. I am deeply committed to the proposition that an explosive power resides in the nucleus of a poem, too. I am able to release this power, I can trigger the explosion if I can bring myself to abandon sanity, if I become mad enough, in both senses of the word, to let the scream of outrage stuck in the back of my throat emerge.” Osip looked hard at me. “Screaming has a lot in common with crying, Anna—once you start you risk not being able to stop.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “You propose to destroy Stalin with a poem!” I said incredulously.

  “A poem bursting with truth telling that will reverberate across the land like ripples from a pebble thrown into stagnant water. Something as straightforward as The king has no clothes. The peasants will greet his fall with prayers of thanksgiving. The Party will declare a national holiday. The Komsomol will sing it as they march off to fulfill their quotas. At congresses in the Bolshoi, from every balcony and box, workers will shout it out. Young people who have grown old before their time with fear will dance in the streets for joy. It will be the end of Stalin.”

  “He will kill you,” Borisik said flatly.

  “Executions fill me with fear,” Osip admitted, “especially my own.”

  Borisik came up with another phrase from Hamlet, something along the lines of Safety lies in fear. Osip shook his head in irritation. “In an unweeded garden, there is no safety,” he said. “No matter—the object is to save Russia, not me.”

  I was beginning to feel alarmed. Turning on Borisik, I grabbed a lapel of his jacket. “Don’t stand there like an idiot, for heaven’s sake. Talk sense to him.”

  I have the image engraved in my brain of these two dear men staring into each other’s eyes for an eternity, though it was surely only a fleeting moment. Then Borisik, the consummate ladies’ man who wasn’t particularly physical with his male friends, did something I’d never seen him do before: moving with exquisite awkwardness, he wrapped his gangling arms around Osip and pulled him into what can only be described as a lover’s embrace.

  “Believe me, I would talk you out of it if I could,” Borisik said in tones usually reserved for funeral orations.

  Osip seemed to be in a state of exaltation. His face was flushed, his fingers trembled. “The two of you, along with Nadenka, shall be my first readers,” he promised.

  Borisik slipped his arms through Osip’s and mine and the three of us set off walking again. I became aware of a spring to Osip’s step, almost as if the going had given way to the getting there. Nobody said a word for some time. I remember it was Borisik who broke the silence. “If it were possible, I would set the clock back.”

  “Where would you go back to?” I asked.

  “I would return to when Osip feigned sanity to justify his failure to act.”

  “I would set the clock back still further,” Osip declared passionately. “I would go back to Russian literature before the Bolsheviks twisted its arm and tore it from its socket.”

  I had the sinking feeling he was going to spill more milk. I begged Osip—dear God, when I think of it now my blood runs cold—I begged him to carefully weigh the consequences of his actions. “The last thing Russia needs,” I told him, “is the death of another poet.”

  FIVE

  Fikrit Shotman

  Tuesday, the 1st of May 1934

  THROUGH THE PLANKS NAILED over the slit of a window high in the wall of my cell, I could hear horns and whistles and kettledrums and trombones in the streets around the Lubyanka. I could picture the mass of workers, some waving banners representing their factory or collective, others carrying small children on their shoulders, flowing in great rivers toward Red Square to file past Lenin’s Tomb in celebration of the seventeenth May Day since the glorious Bolshevik Revolution put Russia on the road to Communism. Monitors along the route would keep an eye peeled for those who had drunk too much vodka and could barely walk, and cart them off to dry out in open trucks filled with straw parked in side streets. The workers from my circus collective—as attendance is obligatory, Agrippina would be among them if she wasn’t in prison like me—would march in the crowd, the hammer-and-sickle ensign serving as a balancing pole for one of the lady funambulists tightrope-walking on a cable stretched and held taut overhead by the tent men. Oh, how I wished I could join the parade—I would wave wildly at Comrade Stalin looking down from Lenin’s Tomb in the hope that he would recognize me, would point me out to his Politburo comrades, would clasp his hands together in a sign of approval and wave his clasped hands for all the world to see he had not forgotten the weight lifter who brought the silver medal home to Moscow from the 1932 All-Europe championship games in Vienna, Austria.

  “Turn down the racket,” my cell mate said through lips caked stiff with dried blood, as if the noise from the street was coming from a loudspeaker. He had been in the cell, crouching like a wild animal in a corner, his trousers and shirt shredded beyond mending, his bare feet (minus some toenails) planted in a puddle of his
own urine, when I arrived something like four weeks before. He was badly beaten and thrown back into the cell in even worse condition after each interrogation. One shoulder was dislocated, all but one of his front teeth was knocked out, his left wrist hung limp, judging from the grimaces when he coughed up blood he must have several cracked ribs, where his nose had been there was a swell of bloody tissue that oozed puss. I didn’t for an instant doubt this prisoner was a dangerous criminal who deserved severe punishment. I resented having to share a cell with such a scoundrel and protested to my interrogator the first time I was taken for questioning. He slid a pencil and a sheet of paper across the table and instructed me to write down my complaint. I didn’t want to let on I couldn’t read or write so I pushed the paper back and mumbled something about not wanting to waste his time on a matter so trivial.

  What did it feel like to be arrested? I wasn’t frightened, if that’s what you’re driving at. Why should I have been frightened? I didn’t break any laws, I wasn’t a wrecker or an assassin or a spy for the Great Britain secret service. I was a member of the Party in good standing. I owed two months’ dues earlier in the year (the circus was touring in Central Asia at the time) but I settled the debt as soon as we got back to Moscow, including the ten percent penalty for late payment. Don’t take my word for it—I have a receipt to prove it if you don’t believe me. I admit I was mortified at being arrested in front of all my neighbors (listening behind their doors, watching from their windows). Everyone in the circus would know the strongman had been taken off by the militia, and as people generally believe there is no smoke without fire, everyone would agree I must be guilty of something. I could picture the embarrassment on their faces when I returned to the circus waving a typewriter letter signed and stamped by the procurer testifying to the world that the arrest of Shotman, Fikrit, had been a regrettable bureaucratic error. Out of shame they would avoid my eye when they shook my hand. Certain Chekists would surely be reprimanded. Who could say, there might even be a telegram from Comrade Stalin himself apologizing for any inconvenience the Organs caused me or mine.