The Stalin Epigram (19 page)

What was going through my head at the moment of execution? The cliché has it that your life flashes before your eyes. Not with me, it didn’t. I made an effort to summon an image of
my wife, but I couldn’t remember what she looked like. Try as I might I was unable to call up an erotic image. I struggled to remember a line, any line, from one of my poems, and failing
that, words. Nothing came to mind. I strained to come up with a single line from the
Divine Comedy
but drew a blank. I couldn’t even recall who had wiped the stains of hell off Dante.
My brain was devoid of thought; thought had been shoved aside by fear, as if the cells in the lobes of my brain had scattered in their panic to get out of the path of the foreign object about to
come crashing into their hive.

I am incapable of telling you what happened after my mock execution. (Only now do I see that he didn’t intend to kill me, only break me.) There are gaps in the story that no amount of
concentration can fill. It will have been sometime after my return to the cell—whether an hour or a day I cannot say—that I tried to cut my wrist with a shard of chinaware. Fikrit
stopped me as I was sawing at the vein. He tore a strip of cloth from the tail of my shirt and bandaged the wound, which although not deep was very painful. Curiously, the pain became a source of
euphoria. I can remember my mother once telling me—when I was stung by nettles while climbing out of a lake near Warsaw—that nothing makes you more aware you are alive than pain.
Cowering in a corner of a cell in the Lubyanka, with Sergo’s brains staining my shirt, was not what my mother had in mind when she spoke of the advantages of pain; still the terrible truth is
that I was elated to be alive.

I must have been in this euphoric state for days on end because if I was again taken for interrogation or execution, I have no recollection of it. It is strange what does surface in a brain
under stress. I remember looking a long, long time at my shoes, mystified by the absence of laces. I remember studying the shards of chinaware on the cell floor, trying to figure out what the
object had been before it was broken. I remember wondering, when Fikrit shyly handed a small book to me, what an illiterate weight lifter was doing with a copy of Pushkin. When I came to my senses,
or what was left of them, I found myself astride the stool with the sawed-off front legs in Christophorovich’s office. I had no idea of how much time had gone by since my execution. Comrade
interrogator had been questioning me but, complaining of stomach cramps, he had gone off to the toilet and left me alone with Stalin, so extraordinarily lifelike in the photograph on the wall
behind the table I half expected to hear his voice. I sat there for I don’t know how long, lost in the enormous room with the pleated curtains on the windows and the alarm clock and the
remains of a supper on the table, staring at Stalin. I have long subscribed to the notion that, for better or for worse, a man’s character is written on his face. Like most Russian
intellectuals, I have been mesmerized by Stalin, wondering what he was like behind the mask. I imagined having conversations with him in the course of which his confidences would shed light on what
had transformed him into a practicing paranoid (my diagnosis, based on no medical evidence, only instinct) who assumed everyone was guilty of something. Pasternak and I used to circle endlessly
around the subject (I have been known to invent biographical details of Soso Dzhugashvili’s life that left Boris in stitches). Had Stalin been marked by a violent childhood in Gori, or his
bank-robbing exploits to raise money for the Bolsheviks, or his several exiles in the frozen tundra under the Arctic Circle, or some particularly brutal experience during the Civil War, or the
death (rumored to be suicide) of his young wife eighteen months earlier? Peering intently into the face of Stalin, I found no ready answers. You couldn’t read much into formal portraits or
photographs of Stalin because they were always retouched to erase the smallpox scars, to add ruddiness to his cheeks and kindheartedness to the shadow of a smirk playing on his lips. I looked
around to be sure the room was empty, then made my way past the table to take a closer look at Stalin’s face. I confess, without shame, that I found myself being drawn to him with the kind of
mesmeric attraction I up to then had experienced only with members of the weaker sex. His reproving eyes gnawed at me from the wall. And then, weird as this must sound to you, I found myself being
sucked into the photograph, sucked
through
it. My ears were ringing with unformed words. Lines from a poem I had not yet written began to knock like a fist on a window:

I hardly dared open my eyes. When I did I found myself adrift in a murkiness that muted all sound and only gradually dissipated, like thick morning fog, at which point I discovered I was halfway
along a narrow corridor. Portraits of the generals who defeated Napoleon were hanging on both sides, each illuminated by a small lamp attached to the top of the gilt frame. I touched one wall with
the tips of my fingers. It felt cold and damp. I could sense the soft pile of the thick carpet under my feet. I grasped there were two possibilities: either I was not imagining this, or I was
imagining that I was not imagining it. At the far end of the corridor two men in tight-fitting European suits were sitting on either side of a low table playing chess with miniscule pieces made out
of clay. The older of the two, with fine gray hair falling to his collarbones, struck me as vaguely familiar. “Mandelstam?” he called out, waving me forward. I must have looked
mystified because the other man, younger than the first and prematurely bald, repeated the question. “You are Mandelstam?” I nodded. “I don’t have a Kremlin pass,” I
said, hoping to avoid trouble by admitting my blunder straightaway. “What makes you think you’re in the Kremlin?” the younger man demanded. “The portraits of the generals
behind me,” I said, “are known to hang in the Kremlin.” Amused by my amateur detective work, he pulled an appointment book from a file cabinet and ran his finger down a list of
names. He put a tick next to one of them. “You don’t require a pass,” he said. “Stalin is expecting you. Through the double doors there. Don’t bow or scrape or
anything like that. He detests protocol. He’s not a tsar, after all, merely secretary general of the Party.”

A big man I recognized from newspaper photographs as Stalin’s bodyguard Vlasik pulled open the double doors and, never lifting his eyes from me, stepped aside. “Just walk up to him
as you would to any ordinary individual and say your name,” he instructed me. “If he offers his hand, shake it.” I heard the doors close behind me when I had gone through. Josef
Stalin was sitting at the far end of the long rectangular room behind an enormous desk piled high with books. One entire wall was lined with ornate Russian stoves. The thick drapes on the window
behind him were partially open and I could make out the onion-shaped domes of Saint Basil’s Cathedral, illuminated by antiaircraft searchlights, which meant that I was indeed, as I supposed,
inside the Kremlin. What light there was in the room came from a low desk lamp and an arched reading lamp hanging over an upholstered chair. The man known in Kremlin circles as the
khozyain
,
wearing a military tunic open at the neck and smoking a cigarette, got to his feet and came around the desk. “Stalin,” he muttered. “Mandelstam,” I replied. “I know
who you are,” he said. “Your reputation precedes you.” I heard myself say, “Yours trails after you like a wake,” and immediately regretted my impudence. (Did I
actually say these words or is this how I would have liked to conduct myself?) My comment, assuming I made it, irritated the head of the household. “Therein lies the problem,” he said.
“Wakes fade away after a time.”

He glanced down at my shoes. “What happened to your laces?” “I ask myself the same thing,” I said. He raised his eyebrows, obviously perplexed, and after an
instant’s hesitation, awkwardly held out his hand. I just as awkwardly took it. He produced a packet of
Kazbek Papirosi
from a pocket of his tunic and offered me one of the cigarettes
with their long cardboard tips. A gunmetal cigarette lighter materialized in his stumpy fingers. I took hold of his wrist and leaned toward him to bring the end of my cigarette to the flame. Stalin
couldn’t have missed noticing that my hand was trembling but was discreet enough not to comment on it. The drag on a cigarette, the first since my arrest, went a long way toward calming my
frayed nerves. “Let’s talk,” he suggested, gesturing toward the upholstered chair, pulling over the high-backed wicker chair so that we were facing each other, our knees nearly
touching. “About what should we talk?” I asked.

“You can start by explaining how is it that every composer and painter and writer and poet in Russia except you is ready to dedicate a work to Stalin.”

“With all respect, if you have the dedication of every composer and painter and writer and poet, I don’t see why you need mine.”

In person, Stalin looked nothing like his photographs. He was a good deal shorter than the figure in his portraits, almost dwarflike even. His left arm, visibly withered, hung stiffly from a
hunched shoulder. He had the beginnings of a paunch. His face, filled with smallpox scars and freckles, was ruddy enough, but on closer inspection I got the impression he applied what women refer
to as rouge. His teeth were in worse condition than mine, his eyes were yellow, the mustache on his upper lip was thickened and darkened with shoe wax. His scalp was dry and peeling in places.
Black hairs protruded from his nostrils.

Like the poet Mandelstam in his most recent incarnation, Stalin didn’t beat about the bush. “Let’s be clear, Mandelstam—I am not afraid of dying. I looked death in the
face dozens of times as a young revolutionist, as the commissar charged with defending Tsaritsyn during the Civil War. No, what I fear, what I
loathe
, is the fading of my wake after the
passage of my ship. I send off valises filled with rubles to that Ukrainian rejuvenation quack Bogomolets to finance his experiments—he is said to believe that drinking water from glaciers
accounts for Georgians living into ripe old age—but I don’t put much stock in the professor’s magic potions. With or without water from glaciers, the curtain will one day come
down on my life. And then what? All those objects named after Stalin—the tanks, the tractors, the warships, the factories—all of them will sooner or later disappear, to be replaced by
new tanks and new tractors and new warships and new factories named after a new secretary general. The limousine I ride in is a ZIS. The initials, as you no doubt know, stand for Zavod Imeni
Stalina—the Factory Named After Stalin. When the last ZIS finishes up in a museum for antique automobiles, people will have forgotten what the initials stood for. The streets in the cities
named after Stalin, even the cities like Stalingrad, will eventually revert to their original names. So where, I put the question to the poet Mandelstam, where can I expect to find a flicker of
life after death? The answer is: If there is such a thing as immortality, it resides in the poetry of a genius.”

Stalin jabbed a nicotine-stained finger into my knee. “You are a stubborn prick, Mandelstam. Your pal Pasternak came up with a poem, albeit quite run-of-the-mill.
So go forward without
flinching, as long as you’re alive . . .
Shostakovich delivered a whole symphony he described as a creative reply to Stalin’s accurate criticism, though it gives me a splitting
headache when I am forced to sit through a performance. (Now that I think of it, maybe that’s what the asshole intended. I should have Shostakovich arrested for wrecking my sleep!) Thousands
of lesser poets and writers celebrate Stalin in a hundred different languages. Nobody in Russia publishes a book, a pamphlet, a thesis on philosophy or philology or astronomy or linguistics without
acknowledging his debt to Stalin. Do you know Khachaturian’s
Stalin Song
?” He started to hum the first bars in the sweet-pitched voice of the choir boy he once was. “Well,
you get the idea.” The
khozyain
pulled another cigarette from his pack and lit it on the embers of the one in his mouth, then filled his lungs with smoke. “Don’t make the
mistake of thinking this conversation is easy for me, Mandelstam. I am not used to
asking
for something. It is more usual that the very few things I require are
offered
. It would seem
that Stalin can have anything his heart desires in all of Russia with the exception of your poem. I ask you, man-to-man, face-to-face: Is such a situation normal?”

I was, I can see now as I look back on my encounter with Stalin, so flabbergasted by the turn the conversation had taken that I couldn’t find words to reply. Taking my silence for
stubbornness, Stalin became exasperated. “It is unusual to come across someone who does not fear the secretary general who runs the Party and, through it, the state. In other circumstances I
could admire such a man. Let’s be sure you know what’s at stake here, Mandelstam.” Scraping back his chair, he stood up and came around behind me and began talking to the nape of
my neck. “Do you have an idea of how much the state weighs?”

“The weight of the state?”

“Yes, with all its factories and dams and trains and aircraft and trucks and ships and tanks.”

“Nobody can calculate the weight of the state. It is in the realm of astronomical figures.”

“And do you think one man can resist the pressure of this astronomical weight? I will have your poem, Mandelstam. If for some reason I can’t have your poem, you will be crushed under
the weight of the state.”

His bluntness left me short of breath. “I am not a threat to Soviet power,” was all I could think to say.

He circled around the upholstered chair and stood over me, sucking on his cigarette, studying me with his angry yellow eyes. “You are most certainly a threat to Soviet power. Someone who
refuses to bend to Stalin’s will may bend to the will of his enemies. There is no middle ground between worshipping the ground Stalin walks on and desecrating it.”