The Stalin Epigram (31 page)

I guess that more or less covers everything. Except your last question. What was the difference between Agrippina and Magda? First off, it’s hard to compare two ladies when they’re
not in the same room. The presence of the one that’s present adds weight to her qualities. The absence of the one that’s absent calls to mind her faults. What I can say is that Magda
was a lady of few words, but those words said everything that needed to be said. She was, as the peasant’s put it, the mistress of the world she lived in. And the center of her world was her
bed. She took pleasure in giving pleasure. I won’t say more because I don’t want to embarrass you by obliging you to listen to things that are none of your business.

SEVENTEEN

Anna Andreyevna

Tuesday, the 4th of February 1936

T
HE TRIP OUT WAS
an abomination—forty-nine interminable hours, thirty-six of them in stuffy railway carriages filled with cigarette smoke and
Communist bourgeois (apparatchiki going to Voronezh to audit state warehouses or run state farms or, in one case, lecture on Stalin’s colossal contribution to what the state calls scientific
Marxism), thirteen hours killing time in decrepit stations waiting for a train to pass going in the right direction. The worst part was the small talk: the recitation by one’s carriage
companions of their bodily tribulations, ranging from boils on their backsides to rotting teeth to gynecological problems that shall remain, by me at least, unidentified. There was one couple in
the last rows of wooden benches being escorted by three soldiers who had fitted bayonets to their rifles before stacking them on the overhead rack as if they were ski poles. The man, unshaven but
decently dressed in a tie and three-piece suit of foreign manufacture and reading a book, had the look of an intellectual—a professor who had probably been overheard repeating an anti-Soviet
joke by the student in his class designated to spy for the Cheka. (I say this because I know of one case where the professor’s downfall happened exactly like that.) Passing the couple on the
way to the toilet in the vestibule, I established eye contact with the woman, handsome enough but careworn, her hair turned sooty white even though she had obviously not yet reached middle age. My
own husband and son had been arrested four months earlier; a glimpse of the misery in the woman’s eyes was enough to make me think I was seeing my reflection in a mirror. I stopped to utter a
word of encouragement but the soldiers shooed me away, saying prisoners being escorted into exile were excluded from conversing with free citizens of the Soviet Socialist Republics. The woman,
refusing to be cowed, informed the soldier that her husband was the convicted prisoner; that she was a free woman voluntarily accompanying him into exile and she could talk to anyone she pleased.
The eldest of the three soldiers, with frayed sergeant stripes peeling off the sleeve of his shapeless tunic, raised his eyebrows in a kind of world-weariness and gave her a sharp slap across the
mouth with the back of his hand. He wore a ring on one finger and it scored her cheek, drawing a trickle of blood. The husband looked up from his book and I could see tears seeping from his eyes
because he was unable to protect his wife.

The young woman with white hair struggled for breath. “Can you describe this?” she asked softly, looking intently at me.

“I can,” I murmured and made a silent vow I one day would. I stood there glaring at the sergeant, but I didn’t dare protest lest he use his asinine authority to banish me from
the train at the next station. Which would leave Osip Emilievich, waiting impatiently for me on the quay of Voronezh, an increment closer to suicide than he would have been if I’d turned up.
Nadezhda’s letter begging me to come out had been unambiguous. Despite her Herculean efforts, dear Osip was slipping down the treacherous slope into melancholy and madness. And so I swallowed
my pride, along with my words of disgust for the regime, and said nothing. And hated myself a bit more than I had before this incident.

The train crawled into the Voronezh station moments before noon. I lugged my two satchels—the smaller one with a change of clothing and toilet articles, the larger of the two filled with
books and sundry presents for the Mandelstams—down the quay, peering into faces searching for one that seemed familiar. And then I heard a voice
behind
me call out,
Anna
Andreyevna!
I turned back to gape at an utter stranger.

It was, of course, the poet Mandelstam.

My failure to recognize him had clearly frightened him. “Dear Anna, have I changed all that much?” he demanded.

“Osip?”

“In the flesh, though the flesh hangs off the bone.”

I was speechless. Osip was wearing a yellow leather jacket that plunged to his knees and a leather cap with the earflaps tied up. He was unshaven, thin as a toothpick, his right shoulder hunched
forward, his right arm hanging stiffly from the shoulder. His teeth were in lamentable condition, his lips blue, his cheeks sunken. Standing there breathing in short gasps, he looked a good twenty
years older than his forty-five years.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “There is no mirror where we live but I have seen my reflection in storefronts. The first few times this happened I saw someone staring
back at me whom I also didn’t recognize.” He thrust a small bouquet of dried forget-me-nots into my hand. “Impossible to find fresh flowers in February. You will have to make do
with these.”

“Dearest Osip,” I cried, and abandoning my satchels on the quay, I flung my arms around his neck. And I remember him saying—dear God in heaven, I can actually hear his voice as
I resurrect his words—“Anna, Anna, I am not dead, only dying.”

Yes.
Only dying
. I am absolutely certain that’s what he said.

Fortunately—I say
fortunately
because it was a struggle for Osip to carry even the lighter of my two satchels—the Mandelstams lived within walking distance of the railway
station. We set off at a snail’s pace. Osip had improvised a cane out of a wooden curtain rod with a knob at the end, but he didn’t appear to have the strength in his right arm to lean
on it. (Nadezhda had written me about his fall from the second floor of a hospital, about his dislocated shoulder, but as she hadn’t mentioned the matter in more than a year I assumed the
injury had healed. How wrong I was.) From time to time Osip stopped to catch his breath. From where we stood I could see the center of Voronezh, flat as a table in a Parisian café.
Revolution Avenue ran like an artery through the town. Side streets and alleyways fell sharply off the avenue and trickled downhill into a frozen stream that Osip identified as the Vorona. Needless
to say, none of the streets off Revolution Avenue were paved, which was perfectly fine in winter when the ground was rock hard but must have been hellish in summer when rain transformed the
pathways into slides of mud. The Mandelstams’ abode (if a warped roof of wooden shingles balanced precariously on four decrepit walls can properly be described as an abode), at number 4
Lineinaya Street, stood at the top of a narrow sloping alley filled with tumbledown weatherboard houses that, to my city eye, looked as if they were slowly sinking into their miniscule gardens.
Railway signals were across from the door of the house where they rented a room from a kindly seamstress. As I soon discovered, trains whooshed past the windows every now and then. With surprising
agility, Osip would bound from his chair and rush to fling open the door and watch the train, as if each passage was a remarkable event in his waking hours. But I’m getting ahead of
myself.

Nadezhda, as you can suppose, was elated when I turned up. She bombarded me with questions, barely leaving room between them for answers. What news did I have of my husband and my son, Lev?
(None. They’d been summoned by the Chekists and hadn’t been heard from since. My telegrams to the Writers’ Union and the Central Committee had gone unanswered.) How long could I
stay? (One week. I was fearful of being away from my communal telephone longer.) What was Pasternak up to these days? (I had torn pages from
Izvestiya
dated January of this year containing
two Pasternak poems in praise of Stalin. I saw Nadezhda and Osip exchange meaningful glances as they passed the poems from one to the other.) Was there any truth to the rumors that Zinoviev and
Kamenev were to go on trial in the summer? (How on earth could one know if a rumor was true? On the other hand, newspaper articles reported they had confessed to plotting against Stalin, which
would indicate a show trial was likely to be in the works.) Was it possible they had arrested so many people, the trains taking prisoners to detention centers, not to mention the centers
themselves, were overloaded and the terror was tapering off? (Certainly not. Compared to the relatively vegetarian year of 1934, when people were more or less arrested for a reason, nowadays
anybody could be arrested and for no reason at all. The Cheka didn’t require accusations, evidence, even a denunciation. It was almost as if the very randomness of the arrests was the point
the state wanted to get across.)

And so, in half sentences and pregnant silences and stifled tears, we brought one another up to date on the ruins of our lives. The Mandelstams had sectioned off the room they rented with a cord
strung between two walls and covered with blankets to create a partition screening their narrow bed. They absolutely insisted I sleep in the bed. God only knows where they slept. Perhaps the
seamstress let them use the ottoman I spied in the sewing room when I met their landlady. In any case, mornings were a saraband of people passing in the hallway—the three of us, the
seamstress and her son, even some neighbors who didn’t have running water—to use the only toilet in the house. Soon after my arrival I gave them the books I’d brought (including a
new Italian translation of Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives
) and the clothing (long underwear and leather gloves for Osip, a no-nonsense German brassiere and thick thigh-length woolen
stockings for Nadezhda), along with the sulfur pills for Osip’s heart palpitation and the thousand rubles (half from Borisik, half from me) I had pinned inside my underwear for safekeeping. I
could sense Osip was annoyed to discover there were no cigarettes in what he called his
Father Christmas
stocking, but Nadezhda had written me warning that the doctor at the clinic had urged
him to give up smoking.

Osip had composed any number of poems in what he called the Voronezh cycle, some of which he’d sent to me in letters, others that he took pleasure in reading aloud now that I was in
Voronezh. There were flashes of the old Osip as he thrust himself to his feet and, leaning on the back of a chair, his good hand beating the air, recited bits and pieces from memory.

Nadezhda profited from the first occasion when we were alone to tell me that Osip, who frequently fell into black moods of despair, still entertained the thought of a joint suicide, but when he
seemed set to leap, she hung back; when she was ready, he would say,
Not yet—let’s wait and see
. Apparently the idea of their killing themselves individually was never seriously
considered by either of them. They had lived as a couple, Nadezhda said with what can only be described as pride, if it came to it they would die as a couple. On the positive side, Osip exhibited a
faint sign that his instinct for survival had not completely withered. He’d been laboring for months, so Nadezhda confided, on a proper Ode to Stalin, one that would expunge the insults
he’d flung at the
Kremlin mountaineer
in his epigram to Stalin and, so he hoped, protect them from arrest when his sentence expired. When I accompanied him to Polyclinic No. 1 on
Engels Street to see the laryngologist the following day (Osip’s sinuses were acting up), I raised the subject of the ode and he grudgingly recited chunks of it. I cannot claim to have
committed to memory more than a few fragments of this eminently forgettable poem:

Another appalling line comes to mind:

My God, to what had Osip been reduced!
Stalin’s eyes
parting
mountains!
Here are two more lines, ending with a play on the nom de guerre Stalin, which as every schoolchild
learns, has its origins in
stali, or steel:

I remember Osip stopping in his tracks after he had delivered the last line of the Ode. Lost in self-doubt, he gazed downhill at the half-wrecked Cathedral of Saint Mitrofanius, named after the
holy seventeenth-century bishop of Voronezh, rising like an ice palace from the café table center of town. The streets around the cathedral, locked in ice, were filled with peasants who, fed
up with getting the dregs after the Bolsheviks carted off the harvest to feed the proletarians in the cities, had fled collective farms. One could make out knots of them standing outside stores,
stamping their feet on the ground to keep from freezing while they begged for crusts of bread. Osip had surely seen all of this before, but still he grimaced in empathy. I remember his saying that,
contrary to what people claimed, misery
didn’t
love company—it preferred to be alone. (I surmised he was speaking from personal experience.) And then, in one of the
characteristic ellipsis that left his first readers and his friends struggling to bridge the gap in the conversation, he burst out, “Anna, Anna, when I was younger, poetry came easier and it
was often quite good. Now that I am older, it comes much more slowly, but at times it is better. When I read aloud some of the poems in the Voronezh cycle, I don’t have to pause for breath so
my first readers will know where the lines break or bend or double back. The words speak for themselves. They no longer need the poet. Except for this . . . this Ode to Stalin. These words came up
like bile. I feel as if I am babbling. It is beginning to dawn on me that I am in artistic trouble. What have I done?”