The Stalin Epigram (2 page)

“It is the one he composed for you, my dear.
Shamefaced glances
.”

Mandelstam set down the glass of water. “
Mistress of shamefaced glances
,” he began, the stubby fingers of one hand splayed above his balding scalp, his pupils burning into the
eyes of the woman next to me.

I leaned toward Zinaida. “Tonight you must conduct yourself decently,” I instructed her. “You must stop teasing him.”

“But it’s you I tease,” she whispered back, flaying playfully at my knuckles with the end of one of the long braids that plunged down her chest. “You excite me as much as
he does.”

“In Ottoman Turkey,” I told Zinaida, my lips grazing her ear, “adulterous wives were sewn into sacks with their lovers and cast into the sea.”

Never lifting her gaze from Mandelstam, her reddening, tiny, piteous lips barely moving, she murmured, “Oh, I shouldn’t mind drowning like that.”

“Hard threshold,” Zinaida repeated.

“Hard indeed,” I said with a snicker of suggestiveness.

The eleven souls apart from us who had braved a January snowstorm to attend the reading broke into fervent applause. Two or three of the younger members of the audience stomped the wooden
floorboards with the soles of their galoshes. The
Literary Gazette
’s chief editor, a brave fellow who had published Mandelstam when Mandelstam was publishable, had been bitterly
disappointed by the turnout, which he attributed to the subzero weather. Despite my husband’s low profile in recent years, there were still many poetry lovers who considered him to be an
iconic figure, so the editor had reassured us. We liked to think this was true, but we were no longer as sure of it as we had been in the late twenties when a Mandelstam reading could fill a small
concert hall.

Mandelstam, suddenly breathing with difficulty (he suffered from occasional palpitation of the heart), swayed drunkenly, then stepped to the side and, steadying himself with a hand on the
lectern, bowed from the waist.

“Has he been drinking?” Zinaida asked me above the clamor.

“He drank half a bottle of Georgian wine before the reading to calm his nerves,” I told her. “But he is not intoxicated, if that’s what you mean. I have never seen
Mandelstam intoxicated on alcohol, only on words.”

Standing at the back of the room, the woman editorial director of a state publishing house, who was known as the Pigeon (it was widely believed she kept our Chekists informed of who said what at
gatherings such as this one), called out, “Questions, answers.”

I waved a warning finger at my husband, hoping to get him to end the evening then and there; I feared the Pigeon would try to provoke him into saying something that could land him in hot water
with our minders. When his instinct for survival (mine as well as his) had dominated his fine sense of right and wrong, he used to beat about the bush. No longer. In the months since we’d
returned from the Crimea, where we’d seen hoards of rake-thin and bone-weary peasants, victims of Stalin’s collectivization rampage, begging for crusts of bread at train stations along
the way, Mandelstam had become dangerously outspoken. In recent weeks he had taken to quoting lines from an old 1931 poem of his whenever one of his acquaintances passed through our kitchen:
How
I’d love to speak my mind, To play the fool, to spit out truth
. I lived in dread he would do precisely that—I was terrified he would repeat in public things he’d confided to
intimate friends in private: about the individual he called the Kremlin mountaineer, about the utter failure of the Bolshevik Revolution to improve the lot of common people, about the
transformation of Russia into a police state far worse than existed under the miserable tsars, about how the Communist apparatchiki who kept an eye on artists had deprived poets of the right to
write boring poems.

With a courteous wave of his hand, Mandelstam gave the woman leave to pose a question.

“Tell us, Osip Emilievich, where in your experience does poetry come from?”

“If I could be sure, I’d write more verse than I do.” Mandelstam savored the laughter his comment elicited. “To respond to your question,” he went on when it had
subsided, “Pasternak claims the artist doesn’t think up images, rather he gathers them from the street.”

“Are you telling us that the poet is something like a garbage collector?” the Pigeon asked.

“Garbage represents the dregs of capitalist societies,” Mandelstam observed, smiling blandly at the stool pigeon over the heads of his listeners. “Our Soviet Socialist
Republics don’t produce garbage, which explains the absence of garbage collectors.”

This, too, drew a laugh; a functionary in the Moscow City Cooperative had recently been arrested on charges of sabotaging the capital’s sanitation department by failing to hire a
sufficient number of garbage collectors.

“No garbage, no garbage collectors,” Zinaida agreed under her breath. She uttered it in a way that dispatched a pang of jealousy through my soul; for the instant it takes an eyelid
to rinse the eye, she actually
sounded
like Mandelstam.

“What about Akhmatova?” an intense young poet demanded from the row behind me.

“As for Akhmatova,” Mandelstam said, “it is inaccurate to say she writes poetry. In point of fact,
she writes it down
—she opens a notebook and copies out lines
that, during what she calls prelyrical anxiety, have already formed in her head. I have known her to substitute dots for a line that has not yet come to her, filling in the missing words
later.” Closing his eyes, angling his head, exposing his throat, Mandelstam recited a verse of Akhmatova’s that, like much of her recent poetry, remained unpublished:

“Enough of Pasternak and Akhmatova,” Zinaida cried. “Where does
Mandelstam
poetry come from, Osip Emilievich?”

Mandelstam favored her with a conspiratorial half-smile, as if they had covered this very ground during one of their so-called literary evenings together. “A poem begins with a barely
audible voice ringing in the ear well before words are formed,” he replied. “This signals that the search for lost words has been initiated. My lips move soundlessly, so I’m told,
until eventually they begin to mouth disjointed words or phrases. Gradually this inner voice becomes more distinct, resolving itself into units of meaning, at which point the poem begins to knock
like a fist on a window. For me, the writing of poetry has two phases: when the first words make themselves known, and when the last of the foreign words lodged like splinters in the body of the
poem are driven out by the right words.”

“God, he makes it sound easy,” Zinaida was saying as we waited in the lobby downstairs for Mandelstam to finish signing slim volumes of his early poetry or scraps cut from newspapers
with more recent poems printed on them (a rarity since our minders decided that Mandelstam wasn’t contributing to the construction of socialism). “I could listen for the inner music
from now until the Arctic melts,” Zinaida continued with what I took to be a practiced theatrical sigh, “and still never come up with a poem.”

“What Mandelstam has,” I informed the young actress whom we were both lusting after, “is a gift from the Gods. Either you have it or you don’t. If you have it, the music
and the words are delivered to you on a silver tray.”

“Is it true, Nadezhda, what they say about your knowing every poem he has ever written?”

“I am of course extremely familiar with his several volumes of published poetry. But our literary minders pretty much stopped publishing Mandelstam’s verse, with the occasional
exception, six years ago. In the late twenties, he went through what he calls his
deaf-mute
phase, when he abandoned the writing of poetry entirely. Every poem he has composed since I have
had to memorize—I repeat them to myself day in and day out. This way if anything happens to him, the poems could survive.”

“And if, God forbid, something were to happen to you?”

The little persifleur had touched a nerve. I wondered if Mandelstam had spoken of the matter with her. Knowing him, probably. Confiding intimate secrets was an unerring way of gaining a
woman’s confidence; of persuading her you were not violent in order to seduce her into what, in the end, is an essentially violent act. “You have put your finger on a sore point between
my husband and me,” I admitted. (I was not above sharing intimate secrets to tempt someone of either sex into my bed.) “Mandelstam has few illusions about his own survival, or that of
his oeuvre. Since Stalin decreed that nothing contradicting the Party line could be published, Mandelstam considers his fate has been sealed. Let’s face it: an unpublished poet makes as much
noise as a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it. Stalin’s position—which boils down to
Either you are for us or you are against us, my darlings
—leaves no
middle ground for the likes of Mandelstam. So you see, my dear Zinaida, my husband had something in addition to his literary legacy in mind when he encouraged me to commit his poems to memory. As
we have chosen not to have children, he has convinced himself that my being the last repository of his oeuvre would give me an incentive to survive.”

“Would it?”

I must have shrugged, which is how I usually evade answering silly questions. Who can say what, besides the hard-to-kick habit of breathing or the ephemeral gratification of sexual congress or
the utter satisfaction of disappointing those in power who wish you dead, would push one to cling to life?

Zinaida studied her reflection in the glass door. “If my husband were to disappear into a camp—they have been arresting agronomists of late to account for the long lines at bread
shops—it would solve all my problems.” She tossed her pretty head to suggest she was making a joke, but I knew enough about her marriage—her husband was twelve years her senior
and had little interest in the theater or in the arts—to understand she was at least half serious. “I would be legally entitled to divorce him and keep the apartment, as well as my
Moscow residence permit.”

Mandelstam turned up before I could educate her—wives of enemies of the people were more often than not being sent into exile with their arrested husbands these days. Catching sight of
him, Zinaida arranged the shabby fox stole around her delicate neck so that the head of the animal, its beady eyes surveying the world with unblinking indifference, was resting on her breast. Never
one to let pass something he considered sexually suggestive, Mandelstam noticed this immediately. “For the first time in my forty-three years of existence I am green with jealousy of a dead
fox,” he confessed, causing Zinaida to avert her eyes in feigned embarrassment. (She was, you will remember, the mistress—and I might add, the master—of shamefaced glances.) I
pulled the ratty collar of my late aunt’s winter coat, made, if you believed my husband, of skunk fur, up around my neck and dragged open the heavy door of the building. A blast of icy air
filled with frozen clots of snow singed our faces. Mandelstam lowered the earflaps on his fur-lined leather cap. “Cigarettes,” he announced, and linking his arms through ours he pulled
us into the wintry Moscow street.

Like many men—perhaps I should say like
most
men—Mandelstam sailed through life with a cargo of manias. He lived in terror of his muse and his erection one day deserting him.
He lived in everlasting fear of fear. He never thought twice about where the next ruble or the next hard currency coupon would come from—he simply assumed that when he needed one or the
other, I would somehow magically produce it, which was more often than not the case. But he worried himself sick that he would run out of cigarettes in the middle of the night when the ringing in
his ear roused him from a troubled sleep and he spent the restless hours before dawn prowling the miniscule rooms of the flat we were lucky enough to have, sucking on cigarette after cigarette as
he waited for the arrival of those disjointed words and phrases. And so, having sponged two cigarettes from members of the audience upstairs and discovering that he himself had only five
Herzegovina Flors left in a crumpled packet, he led us, gripping the white knob of the walking stick he had begun using because of occasional shortness of breath, on a mad quest for cheap
cigarettes. We wound up, our heads bent into an eye-tearing snowstorm, making the rounds of the coffee shops and the canteens in the neighborhood, hoping to beg or borrow or buy a full packet of
cigarettes. It was at the third stop, actually a late-night canteen for trolley car workers hidden in a small alleyway behind the Kremlin terminal, that Mandelstam found what he was looking for (a
shady character who claimed to have a vendor’s license was selling individual Bulgarian cigarettes from a cigar box), along with something he wasn’t looking for: humiliation.

“Osip Emilievich! What brings you out on a night like this? It’s New Year’s Day according to the old style Julian calendar. So happy new year to you, friend.”

The voice came from an unshaven ruffian holding court at two tables dragged together at the back of the canteen. The five young women around him, all wearing padded winter overcoats and sipping
what I supposed to be vodka from tea glasses, turned to gape at us as if we were ghouls wandered in from a cemetery. I could tell from the way Mandelstam saluted the speaker with his half-raised
walking stick that he wasn’t sure of his identity; Mandelstam often had a hard time putting names to faces when people were out of context.