The Stalin Epigram (16 page)

If they had offered me a choice, I would have preferred the humiliation of
Once long ago, there was such a poet
.

“Why are you trembling?” the warden shouted.

“I am chilled to the bone,” I shouted back.

“You were sweating when you arrived.”

“I have a built-in thermostat that takes into account my level of fear. Sometimes I sweat, sometimes I tremble.”

With a snap of his fingers, the warden signaled for me to dress. The items in my pockets were placed in a cardboard box and I was instructed to sign the page in the ledger listing what had been
confiscated. One internal identity card in the name of Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich. One Moscow residence permit made out to the same name. One cotton handkerchief, frayed at the edges. One
half-empty box of Komsomolskaya brand safety matches. One pack of Herzegovina Flors. One Odessa dental floss dispenser. One passkey (to the front door of Herzen House), one latchkey (to our
ground-floor flat). One vial of prescription sulfur pills for heart palpitation, another of valerian drops to calm nerves and induce sleep. Forty rubles in banknotes, twenty kopeks in loose change.
I was issued an army blanket and a small towel and a bar of laundry soap, along with a chinaware soup bowl so out of place in a prison it could only have been part of the elegant table service used
by the insurance company for banquets at the turn of the century. Clutching my trousers and my volume of Pushkin in one hand, shuffling along in laceless shoes, I followed a turnkey through the
labyrinthine corridors to the cell block at the heart of the Lubyanka. Every twenty or so meters steel doors clanged open before us, the racket of the gate alerting everyone within earshot that
another soul was entering this Soviet
purgatorio
.

Disoriented in the twisting corridors, I penetrated the heart-murmuring terrain of D. Alighieri half expecting, at each turn, to come across Virgil washing the stains of hell off my beloved
Dante, to hear his glorious infantlike babbling.

I was eventually shoved into a cell illuminated by a blindingly bright electric light suspended from the ceiling. There was a window high in the wall, but it was covered with planks. I shielded
my eyes with my volume of Pushkin and made out the two prisoners already in the cell. One was squatting in a corner in what smelled like a puddle of urine and excrement, moaning as he rocked back
and forth on his bare feet. The other prisoner, a giant of a man, was sitting on a blanket with his back to the wall. “I think he is dying,” the giant said, indicating the moaning
figure with his chin. He angled his head so that his right ear was turned toward me and said, “What are you guilty of, comrade?”

I set my belongings on the stone floor and, sitting down on the folded blanket facing him, covered my nose and mouth with my forearm. “I am guilty of being a poet,” I said. “I
am guilty of not beating about the bush.”

“Poetry doesn’t strike me as honest work,” the giant said, “in the sense that you don’t produce something people can eat or wear. Me, I’m Shotman, Fikrit
Trofimovich. He’s Sergo. His family name and patronymic are known to God, but not to me.”

“Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich,” I said.

“Pleased. Fact is, I’m glad to have someone to talk to—Sergo is no longer capable of conversation. I work as a strongman in the circus.”

“You don’t produce something people eat or wear either.”

“I entertain the working class. You entertain the intelligentsia. You can’t compare the two. I have a common-law wife, she is the tattooed lady in the same circus as me. Her tattoos
are art and history and nature and geography all rolled into one, the first time I saw them I fell into love with her. What about you? Are you married?” When I said I was, he wanted to know
if my wife had any tattoos. When I said no, he tossed his head. “No matter—she may have other qualities. How did you meet?”

Telling him took my mind off my present predicament. “I first set eyes on Nadezhda—that’s her name—in a cabaret in Kiev called the Junk Shop. I’d been watching her
for the better part of an hour—she was bantering with her companions, laughing at their jokes, listening intently to their stories, all the while burning with sensuality. I was overwhelmed by
the desire to warm myself at her flame. All I could think to do was ask her for a cigarette. She looked up and smiled and gave me one, and we’ve been together ever since. Tell me, Fikrit, how
long have you been in the Lubyanka?”

“Lost track.”

“Do they ever turn the light off?”

“Never.”

“How can you sleep with it shining in your eyes all the time?”

“Can’t,” he said. “That’s why they leave it on. If you do doze off, the comrade guard who keeps an eye on us through the peephole will hammer on the door until you
wake up. My interrogator, an experienced Chekist with the best interests of his prisoners at heart, says being exhausted helps clear the mind of bourgeois delusions of innocence. If you are here,
it’s because you are guilty of something. The sooner you identify your crime, the sooner your case will be disposed of.”

I looked again at the figure squatting in the corner. “If he is really dying, why don’t you summon medical help?”

The giant thought my suggestion humorous. “Medical help! That’s a good one. They’re the ones making him die.”

“Why are they making him die?”

“Because he won’t admit guilt.”

“And what is he guilty of?”

“Article 58—anti-Soviet propaganda and counterrevolutionary activity. He is guilty of wrecking, he told me so himself when he was still able to talk. He raised the subject of
collectivization in front of Stalin at a public meeting.” Fikrit must have seen I was trembling. “Not to worry yourself sick, Osip Emilievich. They won’t beat you if you admit the
truth straight off.”

“If he admits he is guilty of wrecking, will they stop beating him?”

Fikrit became indignant. “This is the Soviet Union. Socialist justice and the rule of law always triumph. Once Sergo admits guilt they will stop the beatings and shoot him.”

“Without a trial?”

“There may be a secret trial, though the law doesn’t require that he be present or have access to the evidence against him, so the comrade interrogator told me. As you can see, Sergo
is in no shape for a public trial.”

“Have you admitted your guilt?”

“At first I didn’t, not because I was trying to fool them into thinking I was innocent, nothing like that. I didn’t admit it because I didn’t know what I was guilty
of.”

“Did they beat you?”

“They did. The beatings, along with not being able to sleep, helped me to see the light. I have confessed to being a member of a backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik conspiracy.
When the day comes to overthrow the Bolsheviks, the members of this conspiracy will recognize each other because we all have distinctive Eiffel Tower stickers on our valises or trunks. The Eiffel
Tower, in case you are not familiar with it, is located in Paris, France. To make my personal situation worse, I kept tsarist loan coupons against the day when, thanks to Trotsky, capitalism is
restored and I can cash them in.”

“If you’ve admitted your guilt, how come you’re still in prison?”

“Because I was lucky enough to be selected for public trial. They have promised that my common-law wife will be there to see me. I can tell by the suit you’re wearing you are a
member of the intelligentsia—a poet is the same as an intellectual, right?—so you probably do not recognize me. I am, excuse me for being the one to say it, famous in Russia for winning
the silver medal at the All-European games in Vienna, Austria in 1932. A picture of me shaking hands with Comrade Stalin at the Kremlin was printed on the front page of
Pravda
. Comrade
interrogator has promised my picture will be on the front page of
Pravda
again when I give details of the Trotskyist conspiracy at my trial. Right now I am memorizing these
details.”

Poor Sergo—if he was really dying, he was doing it by centimeters. His moaning never let up. Even now when I think back to that cell I hear Sergo whimpering, I gag at the memory of the
stench rising from his tortured body. As for Fikrit, you could tell he was a goodhearted soul, but once he’d recounted his childhood in Azerbaidzhan and his exploit in Vienna and his botched
knee operation and his life as a circus strongman, we more or less ran out of conversation. When he wasn’t summoned for interrogation, he spent endless hours sitting with his back to the
stone wall, his large head buried in his large hands, repeating aloud the confession he would deliver at his trial. I caught fragments (that would lead to his ruin!)—how he’d been
recruited in Vienna in 1932 and been given a down payment in United States dollars, how he’d communicated with his handler using a secret code buried in the dedication inside the cover of an
American fitness magazine, how carried away by his hatred for the new order he had disfigured Stalin’s face tattooed on his upper arm. There was more, a great deal more, but it has long since
slipped my mind.

I made a stab at keeping track of the passage of time, but this turned out to be a challenge requiring clearheadedness, and thus beyond my capacity. One day blended seamlessly into the next. I
believe, though I can’t swear to it, that I was taken off for interrogation after I’d spent something like four days and four nights in the cell, never sleeping more than a few minutes
at a time before the comrade guard, as Fikrit called him, woke me, along with everyone else in the cell block, by slamming a sledgehammer against the metal door. What I am certain of is that they
came for me after the evening meal, which consisted of watery soup splashed into our chinaware bowls. A beefy guard turned up at the door of the cell and pointed what looked like a cattle prod at
me. Fikrit must have sensed where I was off to because he offered some last minute words of advice. “I have heard it said that poets are somehow connected with culture. Which means your
interrogator will be comrade Christophorovich—he specializes in culture criminals like yourself. Find out what you’re guilty of and then confess it, Osip Emilievich, and things will go
more smooth for you.”

I realize now how difficult it is to reconstruct the fourteen days I spent in the Lubyanka, given the fact that I was frightened out of my skin even when I managed to doze. Which is to say, my
brain was functioning sluggishly; it was as if a shadow of a doubt had lodged in my skull with the result that I wasn’t certain in what order things happened, or whether they happened at all.
My state of mind is probably best conveyed by comparing it to the loss of depth perception, something I actually experienced in the months after my arrest; you perceive things with a hazy lucidity,
but you aren’t sure if they are in front of your nose or several meters away; you wind up not being sure if they are there at all or fragments of your imagination.

To this day I am haunted by spectral memories that have the graininess of bad dreams: of an open freight elevator rising with excruciating lethargy to a high floor; of brightly illuminated
corridors with worn runners that, like the chinaware, looked as if they dated back to the turn of the century when the building served as the headquarters for an insurance company; of a polished
brass number twenty-three on a polished wooden door; of an enormous room with bright spotlights that caused your eyes to smart the moment you crossed the threshold; of the clatter of a typewriter
coming from behind a slightly open door; of the distant chiming of the hour from the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower; of a blurred figure of a man dressed in some manner of uniform and a leather
butcher’s apron gesturing for the guard to leave.

I heard the man, who was sitting in front of an enormous photograph of Stalin, introduce himself. “Christophorovich.”

I see myself shielding my eyes with my palm, then quickly withdrawing it lest he take it for a salute. “Mandelstam.”

“Sit.”

Squinting to protect my eyes from the light, I dropped onto a wooden stool the front legs of which were shorter than the rear legs, with the result that I had all to do to keep from sliding
off.

The interrogator studied me from behind a mountain of folders. “Any complaints about your detention?”

When I didn’t respond he asked, “How do you feel?”

“Exhausted.” I intended to stop there but, confusing an interrogation with a confessional, I heard myself add, “Exhausted and frightened.”

Let me interrupt my narrative to say that when I have been interviewed, in the years before I was
poeticus non grata
, the words, the phrases attributed to me when a given article appeared
in print were approximative; a journalist has a natural tendency to filter what you say through the prism of his syntax and style, so that what you hear is his voice, not your own. Which makes me
aware that the scenes I am reconstructing for you from memory must suffer from the same defect. The words I attribute to others are surely approximative—with the notable exception of what the
interrogator Christophorovich uttered when I admitted to being frightened. Should I live to be fifty, I will never forget his reply. As I summon it now, I can still hear his intonation: soft and
threatening like distant thunder that augurs a particularly brutal storm. Here, word for word, is what he told me:

“It is useful for a poet to experience fear—it can inspire verse. Rest assured you will experience fear in full measure.”

I was trying to parse this in the hope of finding meanings other than the obvious one when he asked, very quietly, “Have you figured out why you are here?”

I realized, through a film of exhaustion, that I had to tread cautiously. Clinging to the possibility that he didn’t know about the Stalin epigram, I started through the minefield.
“Is it because of something I wrote?”

“Inspired guess,” Christophorovich agreed with a hollow laugh.