The Stalin Epigram (12 page)

The more she protested, the more I supported him. I was, after all, the wife, she was only the occasional mistress. “Get hold of yourself, Zinaida. Osya has paid you the ultimate
compliment of making you one of his first readers. Only the chosen few will know of the existence of this epigram. Whatever happens, you can be certain neither he nor I will ever reveal you heard
it.”

Mandelstam sank to his knees before the two of us. “Zinaida, you must not breathe a word about this to anyone. If they find out, it could cost me my life.”

She nodded miserably.

“Nadenka will memorize the epigram, as she memorizes all my poems. But I have decided that you should, too. If something happens to us, the poem absolutely must survive.”

Zinaida tugged the quilt more tightly around her naked body, as if it could somehow shield her from an inconvenient request.

“Repeat the lines after me, both of you,” Mandelstam said firmly.
“We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches . . .”

“We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches . . .”

“All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer . . .”

“All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer . . .”

Having memorized Mandelstam’s verse for years, I had an instinct for the rhyme and rhythm and layers of multiple meaning buried in a text, for where the slight pause for breath fell. It
didn’t take me long to commit the sixteen lines to memory. Zinaida was having a harder time of it. It quickly became apparent that she had no ear for the inner music of a Mandelstam poem. She
would get four lines right and then mix up the punctuation, or even the order of the words, when she came back to them. Tears of frustration filled her eyes. “I detest being put on the
spot—I can’t memorize this the way you do. I must see it written down so I can picture the words. That’s how I learn my lines for the theater. Even as a child I had to write
things down in order to remember them.”

My husband and I exchanged looks. “What do you think?” he said.

I shrugged. “As long as we can be sure the paper is destroyed once she has committed it to memory.”

Zinaida looked relieved. “I swear I’ll burn it,” she said. “Next time I come by I shall recite it without an error.”

Mandelstam fetched pen and paper. Crouching at the suitcase, using it as a desk, he wrote out the epigram. Zinaida went into the bedroom to get her clothing and emerged dressed a few minutes
later. Mandelstam read over what he’d written to make sure it was exactly as he wanted, then handed the paper to Zinaida. She folded it in half and then in half again and tucked it inside her
brassiere.

“I am grateful you’re willing to do this,” Mandelstam said.

“I am grateful to be part of your citadel,” Zinaida replied nervously. “I am thrilled to have your trust.”

“Perhaps you should be on your way before the conversation becomes too syrupy,” I suggested. I remember adding: “Don’t forget to burn the poem.”

I recall Zinaida’s confident “You can count on me.”

After she left I dressed and busied myself straightening up the bedroom. Through the open door I could see Mandelstam sitting on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, occasionally clapping his hands
together to kill a moth that had wandered within lethal range of him. “Do you think I did the right thing?” he called out to me.

“Are you talking about the epigram or Zinaida?”

“Both.”

I joined him in the living room and sank onto the arm of the sofa. He rested a hand on my ankle and we both smiled at the same memory—the first time we’d been intimate, the night we
met at the Junk Shop in Kiev, he began his leisurely exploration of my body with my ankle. It was a joke of long standing between us that he was Russia’s first and foremost ankle fetishist.
“Concerning the epigram,” I said, “you have been torturing yourself for months. You needed to get it out of your system. You only must be careful whom you let in on the secret. As
for entrusting it to Zinaida, she is a harmless creature who will evolve badly once her body goes. For now, she is enthralled to be the paramour of the poet Mandelstam—”

Mandelstam brightened. “There is a poet of that name.”

His grip tightened on my ankle and he looked intently at me, expecting confirmation. “There is,” I agreed with conviction. “He is not yet dead.”

It was almost midday when I got around to emptying the glass ashtray filled with cigarette ends into the bin immediately outside the alley door of Herzen House. And who should I come across
there but Boris Pasternak, throwing out kitchen garbage after having spent the morning in another wing of the building with his future ex-wife and their son. Telling him that Mandelstam needed
cheering up, I practically dragged him back to our flat. My husband was tucking his shirt into his trousers when he caught sight of Pasternak at the door behind me. He let out a howl of pleasure.
“You will stay for lunch,” I ordered. “We have bread and a bit of butter and two eggs—I will scare up a third from someone on our floor.”

I found the extra egg at the second door I knocked on. When I returned to our flat I discovered Mandelstam standing in the middle of the living room reciting the last lines of his Stalin epigram
to Pasternak, who was sitting on the floor, his back against a wall, his face buried in his enormous hands. When Mandelstam reached the end, Boris sat there without moving a muscle.

“Well?” Mandelstam said impatiently.

“Well?” I repeated from the doorway.

Boris looked up, first at me, then at my husband. “Who knows about this?” he demanded.

“The three of us,” Mandelstam said. “And one friend.”

“Can you trust the friend?”

I answered from the door. “Yes.”

Springing to his feet, Boris went over to the window and pulled the interior shutters closed. Then he turned around to face us. “You’re committing suicide,” he said, his eyes
grown so hollow you could barely make out the pupils in them. “When you said you were going to let the scream emerge from the back of your throat, I didn’t dream you would do something
this insane.”

“What Russia needs,” Mandelstam observed, “is more insanity and less sanity.”

Boris was so caught up in his own anguish I don’t think he heard him. “How could you write such a poem, you, a Jew!” he blurted out.

“You’re forgetting I converted to Christianity to get into university,” Mandelstam replied angrily.

“Stalin and the people around him have a lot in common with the ecclesiastical tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition,” Pasternak said. “For the
calificadores
, a Jew who
converted remains a Jew in his heart, in his soul.”

It was difficult to get a word in, but I managed. “I’ll recite the poem to you again, Boris—you tell me exactly what in it a Jew shouldn’t say.”

“No, no, I don’t have to hear it a second time to know that Osip has not thought this through. He is either stupid or innocent. I don’t want any part of it.”

Mandelstam sank onto the back of the sofa. “Poetry is nourished by innocence, not stupidity,” he said, clearly devastated by Pasternak’s reaction. “You yourself took the
position that art is risk taking.”

“I said that? Where?”

Mandelstam managed a bitter smile as he threw Pasternak’s words back in his face.
“One cannot talk of art as if it were a drainpipe or a construction job and so boil the question
down to technique. To talk about the technique of writing poetry is to talk about the technique of achieving disaster. One has to remember that one needs to take risks; nothing on earth exists
without risk taking.”

Boris muttered something about having said that in another context. He turned on me furiously. “How can you permit him to do this?”

Before I could put a word in, Mandelstam said, very quietly, “We have never had a relationship that involved my asking her permission or her asking mine.”

Boris was beginning to exasperate me. “You are angry,” I burst out, “because you don’t have the guts to do what Osya is doing. You’re not the poet he is.”

Mandelstam tried to cut me off. “Nadenka, you go too far—”

I remember saying, “I don’t go far enough. He must understand that Mandelstam has to be true to Mandelstam, not to Pasternak.”

Boris looked bewildered. “My dear Osip, I don’t recognize you anymore. You have become someone else.”

“When he becomes someone else,” I informed Boris, taking, I will own up, a certain satisfaction from his evident bewilderment, “I am never far behind.”

Boris raised a hand to his forehead and kneaded the migraine lurking under his brow. “If you are serious about bringing Stalin down,” he told Osip, “join in the long-term
political struggle.”

“My constitution is incapable of political struggle,” my husband retorted. “I am too impatient for strategy. I only have the temperament for tactics. I am drawn to the gesture.
And I believe in the power of poetry to displace mountains, along with the Kremlin mountaineer.”

“At least rework the poem,” Boris said with great emotion, “so that it is veiled, ambiguous, written, say, about a historical figure.”

“I am through beating about the bush, Boris. A poem needs to be written that spells out the evil of Stalin so that any dense-brained idiot can understand it.” Thinking it would put
an end to the argument, Mandelstam coughed up one of his favorite mantras.
“If not now, when? If not me, who?”

Shaking his head in despair, Boris turned to leave. At the door he hesitated. “The very least you can do—if not for your own sake, then for the friends who will hear the
epigram—is rewrite the second stanza. The business about murderer and peasant-slayer—it is perilously direct. I ask you, Osip, to do this.”

My husband looked at me, thinking I would challenge Pasternak. I took a deep breath and held my tongue. Whether a truth teller was still truth telling if he gutted the truth was something only
Osya could decide.

I could see Mandelstam chewing on the inside of his cheek as he considered the matter. Tossing his head in frustration, he said, “The original version had two other lines that I got rid of
because they weren’t straightforward enough. If it will make you feel easier, I’ll eliminate the
murderer and peasant-slayer
and restore the first version.” And he closed
his eyes and recited the lines he would substitute:

Boris said, “If you really want to make me feel easier, scrap the entire epigram.”

Only thinking about what my beloved husband did then makes my heart beat more rapidly. His fingers trembling, he elevated his chin and repeated the words he’d thrown into the faces of
Ugor-Zhitkin and his lady friends at the canteen for trolley car workers. “I am the poet Mandelstam.”

I am afraid I couldn’t resist driving home the spike. “As for me, I am the wife of the poet Mandelstam, and proud to be.”

Boris shrugged angrily as he turned toward the door.

“What about those eggs?” I said.

“At a time like this, how can you think of food!” he growled in annoyance. “With or without those
peasant-slayer
lines, this matter will end badly. They have treated you
miserably in the last years, Osip. If you insist on this epigram, at least you will know
why
they are treating you miserably. I esteem you as a poet. I love you as a brother. I wish you long
life, Osip Emilievich.”

I remember being struck by how devastated Mandelstam looked—he had been counting on Pasternak’s unstinting support. In my brain, I can still hear his voice calling after the
departing poet, “Long life to you, too, Boris Leonidovich.”

SEVEN

Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova

Monday, the 7th of May 1934

H
OW COULD THE SON
of a bitch have done this to me! The way I see it, it’s one thing if you’re fed up with life before death and want to kill
yourself. Stop jabbering about it and do it, I say, but you simply don’t have the right to take others down with you. This Stalin poem of Mandelstam’s is unadulterated madness.
He’s off his trolley, round the bend, certifiably loony. But it’s
his
madness, not mine. I’m not even sure it’s a good poem, for Christ’s sake. But that’s
not going to stop him from reading it to all those has-been writers hanging around Herzen House. My God, what in the world can he be thinking, reading such a poem to innocent people? He has no
moral right to make others accomplices to what is, after all,
his
crime. We live in an epoch when someone who has knowledge of treason and doesn’t denounce the wrecker
becomes
a
wrecker, subject to the same punishment as the perpetrator. It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going to happen: of the five or ten or twenty who will hear the poem, one or several
of them—or
all
of them except for poor Nadezhda, who is blinded by love—are going to reason like me. Mandelstam has a hell of a nerve putting us in the position where we could be
treated as traitors for
listening
to his shitty little poem. Which means one or several or all of those who hear the poem will protect themselves the only way possible: they will race to the
nearest militia post and denounce the author of the poem before someone else does and the Cheka comes sniffing around asking you to explain, please, how come you heard this treacherous poem and
didn’t denounce the enemy of the people who composed it. And what would I do? Bat my eyelashes and ask,
What poem are you talking about, comrade militiaman?
By then they’ll know
the contents of the poem down to the last comma and the name and address and internal passport number of all those who heard it. And the ones who failed to alert the Organs will be up shit’s
creek, as the saying goes; off to Siberia or, heaven forbid, worse. And for what? I mean, it’s not as if this little poem of Mandelstam’s is going to change anything.

Except the lives of those unlucky enough to hear it.