Europe Central (20 page)

9

This was the period when L. Chukovskaya, infatuated by those Russian eyes of hers (grave but not sad, steady but not fixed; aware, capable of gentleness and ruthlessness), became Akhmatova’s confidante. In her diary (I’ve read every page), Chukovskaya insists that
she herself, her words, her deeds, her head, shoulders and the movements of her hands were possessed of such perfection, which, in this world, usually only belongs to great works of art.
Tell me she wasn’t in love! Later on, Akhmatova turned against her in Tashkent, for no reason. That’s how it is with people like that.

10

I followed them across a stone bridge over a canal, and a stone church-head trembled in the dark water below—not decapitated yet, only reflected.—Anna Andreyevna, what do you think of Shostakovich’s music?—Well, of course there are brilliant pages, replied Akhmatova.—Chukovskaya took her arm. Then they turned right. For the sake of inconspicuousness, I stayed behind, smoking my cigarette and thinking about Elena Konstantinovskaya. Pyotr Alexeev was already in position. He enjoyed those outings—although he was much more in love with the two beefy, cheery sisters who’d become the tennis champions of our Soviet land. He got ill-tempered when Akhmatova went to Liteiny Prospekt to send another package to Lev; that was a busman’s holiday for him. He informed me that on one occasion, when she came up to the window and spoke her name, a woman in the long line behind her burst into tears. This was unpleasant to us. Whatever our next move against her might be, we had to plan it out. On those afternoons when I stayed behind, I had a very pleasant time arranging Akhmatova’s future. When that palled, I thought some more about Elena Konstantinovskaya. Chukovskaya was going to come back late and alone. I waited at the bridge. Then I went home, counting Leningrad’s broken windows.

In every way, that period marked the height of my career. The Hitlerites hadn’t attacked us yet, so even I of all people still got to embrace an illusion or two about “peace” and “freedom”; meanwhile, we’d finally made an impression on our spoiled darling Anna Andreyevna! In corroboration, N. K. Danchenko, whom we often stationed there, reported to me that Akhmatova appeared malnourished (not that I hadn’t seen that for myself) and that her face resembled
the shining of a yellow dress at a window.

To return to my report, by the time those two relics of bourgeois gentility took off their shabby coats and sat down facing one another at the kitchen table, I was invariably ready for them.

11

Her attempts to deceive us had become desperately pitiful by then. How many times can’t I remember Akhmatova handing a new scrap of illicit poetry to Lidiya Chukovskaya, who read it hurriedly and silently, memorized it, then passed it back to her hostess, who burned it over an ashtray? I was flat on my belly on the floor of the apartment above, watching them through a hole in the chandelier.
²⁰

How early autumn came this year, said Akhmatova, setting fire to another memorized scrap of “Requiem.” I’d already noted it down. Come to think of it, we knew “Requiem” by heart before she’d even finished it; it’s fair to say that we wrote it ourselves.

Sometimes Chukovskaya used to beg her to recite something.

It’s all the same to me, Akhmatova would reply.—It was all the same to me, too. I’m not claiming that she didn’t occasionally achieve certain effects (I’m speaking here as someone who knows art—professionally, of course).

Please don’t trouble yourself if you’re tired, my dear Anna Andreyevna! How are you feeling?

It’s extremely good that I’ll be dead soon, said Akhmatova.

Chukovskaya stared at her, her eyes filling with tears. Oh, it was love, all right! As far as I was concerned, they could both go where we’d sent Gumilyev.

In fact, from any practical point of view, they should have ceased to exist. Only the war saved them. Poor Lidiya—when should I bring her in? Poor Anna Andreyevna with her broken heel and missing teeth! I felt as an
-doctor must when he broods over his collection of Jewish skulls, for these two women were
ghosts,
gliding over the red velvet carpets of olden times. Sometimes they did nothing but stare into each other’s eyes, and then I’d eat my lunch, for there’s an ancient Russian custom of meals at a graveside.

Sometimes she recited from
Rosary,
which I have always considered her weakest collection, thanks to its religious trash. I have a copy right here, and according to the title page it was published in March 1914, when I was still in what it’s best to call
street business.
I’m not averse to informing you that my life wasn’t easy in those days. But who cares about me? In 1914, I hated anybody Orthodox. When we were putting the priests on trial in the twenties, my attitude hardened beyond mere hatred; I argued that possession of
Rosary
should be grounds for a death sentence. But something about the religiosity of those two pathetic women almost disarmed me.

12

When we arrested Gumilyev, we found an old volume by Masaryk in his study. I don’t feel embarrassed about informing you that when I was searching it for marginalia, I learned a few things about my country. On the subject of Dostoyevsky he writes:
It is not Christ but rather the Russian Christ who is his idol.
Right away, I understood that this emblematized Akhmatova’s position also. And, frankly, even committed Stalinists such as myself are proud to be Russians deep down, although we can’t always show it. The world-wide conspiracy of the priests against the people, naturally we have to stamp that out. But if Akhmatova’s Christ is a Russian Christ, why not let her kiss Him goodbye a little longer? If she’s lucky, she’ll die before He does.

Masaryk also argues that Russian atheism
is not positivist agnosticism, but rather a kind of embittered skepticism which revels in the laceration of the soul.
I do admit his point. Whenever I’ve been working over a priest (lacerating him, let’s say), I come home in a particularly foul mood. So even when Akhmatova and Chukovskaya knelt down to pray, I didn’t feel as disgusted as I would have expected. This speaks for my fairness and neutrality.

Besides, I’m a lover of the arts.

13

All this is a way of leading up to the fact, which fails to embarrass me in the least, but which for obvious reasons I wouldn’t confide to just anyone, that on one freezing December afternoon—dead black by four-o’-clock—when Akhmatova happened to be in a delicately happy mood because on my instructions we’d accepted her parcel that day (it was Pyotr Alexeev’s turn to take that one home, not that Akhmatova’s parcels ever offered us many treats) and Chukovskaya took full advantage of that success to ask her oracle for an elucidation of “At the Seashore”—she seems to have heard about it from M. Shaginyan, whose file I haven’t studied but whose acquaintances seem to place her in suspicious proximity to anti-Soviet circles—a sincere joy overcame me, because that’s my favorite poem; and a quarter-hour later, when Akhmatova, shivering there in her black dressing gown with the silver dragon on the back, agreed to recite the poem, I could hardly believe my luck; then she began:
Bays wounded the low shore
and my heart thrilled.

14

In the summer of 1914, as the Romanovs, blinded by mysticism and bad alliances, led Russia ever closer to war’s edge, Gumilyev was in the second year of his affair with the young T. Adamovicha, who wanted to marry him and to whom he dedicated his next book of poems, which no one has studied more closely than I. Ever since his voyage to Africa, as I know from reading his diary, he’d had nightmares about the future. In one dream, about which I reminded him at his interrogation, he found himself condemned for complicity in a palace revolution in Abyssinia; after his decapitation, he clapped his bloody hands at the goodness and simplicity of it all. In Tanya’s arms, of course, he dreamed other dreams. As for Akhmatova, left alone with their child in Slepnyovo (not that she hadn’t begun her so-called “friendship” with N. Nedobrovo), she lay on the couch and wrote “At the Seashore.” What a parasite!

The notion that there is a “soul” which can express itself through poetry has long since been ringingly disproven; all the same (doubtless on account of my Russian nationality), “At the Seashore” is sufficiently beautiful to bring tears to my eyes. The first line:
Bays wounded the low shore.

15

Once upon a time, when the sails all blew away, Akhmatova, or the young braided girl who might have been her, sat naked on a flat rock-island. She’d interred her yellow dress back on the beach so that it would not get wet and no one would steal it.
And I’d dry my salty hair on that flat rock far from land.
That was what she used to do every day, before she and Russia both changed. She played with the green fish and the white bird. She experienced feelings of one kind and another, not knowing them to be happiness; and as I watched and listened through the ceiling, I wondered whether happiness is invisible until it’s been lost, at which point Fate (since like any decent Communist I reject God) hurls it down into a pit (for instance, the mine-shaft into which we tumbled the Romanovs), where it shines in the darkness like a supernatural jewel. “At the Seashore” is actually this sort of jewel; that our Muse of Weeping, who loved winter, could write such a poem remains inexplicable to me; parts of it deserve widespread publication.

Once upon a time, the braided girl rested on a wave as dark and hot as blood; she let herself be carried far away; then she swam back to her flat rock and dried her salty hair. Not knowing that she was happy, she sang to the white bird; she swam around the rock, and the green fish kept her company. The rock was so far out to sea that by the time she swam home it was always dusk and the lighthouse had begun to wink.

She wanted to become a Tsarina who’d defend her bay with six battleships and six gunships. So she rejected the grey-eyed fisher-boy who brought her roses, and waited for the Tsarevich to come. When he came he was dead, drowned; he’d had green eyes like the green fish. Her paralyzed sister-double wept; the church glowed like an island; the bells rang for the Tsarevich’s soul.

That was only the beginning and the end of it. (The end, by the way, betrays her attitude of religious submission, which I’ve already alluded to. We’ll need to rewrite that.) I’ve left out the middle, so that this report won’t get too long. And now the braided girl, long widowed of her Tsarevich, lived in a torn dressing-gown and had no sugar for her tea. For a moment—such is the dangerous power of poetry—I even felt sorry for her. But it’s important to remember that a personal feeling is merely a personal feeling. I’ve shot any number of enticing women.

I admit that I was overpowered; it was my Russian blood. For her part, Chukovskaya knelt and kissed what Gumilyev, in one of his saddest poems, memorialized as
your cold, slender hands.

16

Then what? Then bare trees in the snow on the Moika Embankment.

And that night when I went home, I don’t mind confessing that my head was filled with all kinds of ridiculous word-rubbish, such as
the moon and six candles,
and
a kiss upon her eyelashes.
What was I to do? Finally I picked up
The Foundations of Leninism
and read two pages at random. That cured me. I still felt melancholy, and it’s possible that I might have been sharp with my wife. But, as Akhmatova bitterly laughs in one of her earliest love lyrics,
I don’t cure anybody of happiness!
‣

CASE WHITE

...
with the mysterious lens in your eye, you will be master of the thoughts of people . . . If you move freely in the world, your blood will flow more easily, all gloomy brooding will cease, and, what is best of all, brightly colored ideas and thoughts will rise in your brain . . .