The Stalin Epigram (32 page)

I told him that one had to remain among the living as long as one humanly could. I like to think I managed to say it with conviction even if I didn’t feel any. “If I could save my
son, if I could save my husband,” I added, “Jesus, what I wouldn’t do. I would fuck Stalin.”

“I, too, would fuck Stalin if I could,” he said. And then he actually smiled. Yes, yes, Osip produced a cheerless smile. And he said, “Of course I’m using the verb in a
different sense than you.” And we fell into each other’s arms, shuddering in an ecstasy of laughter.

I can’t recall if it was that day or the next that Osip, crossing the railway tracks, stooped to retrieve a scrap of paper. I started to tease him—“Have you been reduced to
picking up paper, then?”—when I realized that it was folded into a tiny packet. Osip peeled it open and showed it to me. The paper contained a short letter, written in a tiny hand on a
page torn from a school exercise book, along with a name and address in Petersburg. “The cattle cars that pass in the night are filled with prisoners being taken off to Central Asia,”
he said. “Listen to this,” and fitting his spectacles over his ears, he began to read:

Osip carefully folded the paper. I took it from him and moistened the side without writing with the tears accumulating in the corner of an eye. I remember thinking: perhaps I would get word of
the fate of my husband or son when some kind soul comes across a letter dropped along the railway ties. I slipped the folded page inside the wrist of my glove to take back with me to Petersburg,
where I intended to post it. “Perhaps the musician has stumbled across the formula to put an end to your Kremlin mountaineer,” I said. “Perhaps we should all commit the crimes
we’re
going
to be accused of.”

“That would be as good a way as any of killing yourself,” Osip said.

Looking back on my week in Voronezh, it strikes me as instructive how, even in Osip’s situation, banished as he was to one of the minus-twelve cities for writing a seditious poem, one went
through the motions of living a normal life in a civilized society. The hour each morning after breakfast was devoted to reconstituting Mandelstam’s oeuvre. Large portions of it had been
confiscated by the Chekists searching the flat after his arrest. With his eyes tightly shut and his head angled back, Osip would help his wife reconstruct the poems from memory (now and then I was
able to fill in a missing fragment) as Nadezhda copied them off in a tiny hand onto cigarette paper, one poem to a paper, before secreting them with exiled writers in Voronezh. When his
concentration waned, Osip would call a halt for the day. Gleefully stuffing pages of a local newspaper between his shirt and his sweater for insulation against the bitter cold, he insisted on my
accompanying him on his daily expeditions into the center of Voronezh. (Nadezhda used the time to meet with local newspaper editors who paid her a pittance for advising them on the merits of
literary works submitted for publication.) Osip had picked up work writing radio scripts for the Voronezh station—I remember the one he particularly liked was entitled
Gulliver for
Children
. He also had earned three hundred rubles from a theater for writing the program notes for Gluck’s
Orpheus and Eurydice
. On our trips into town, he kept an eye peeled for
cigarettes. Unlike the old days in Moscow when he would buy or mooch them by the pack, he now considered it a triumph to unearth a single cigarette, which, swearing me to secrecy, he smoked behind
Nadezhda’s back. He would stop by the radio station and the theater on the off chance they might have something else for him to do; he claimed to be ready to sweep the streets that, in
Voronezh, were never swept by anything except the blisteringly icy winds from the steppes. But the main excuse for the walks was it gave us an opportunity to catch up. Oblivious to the wintry
temperature, we talked and talked until our lips were stiff from the cold, and the words emerged with muted
b
’s and
m
’s and
p
’s and
v
’s. Osip
joked that we were inventing a new language, one that prisoners spoke without moving their lips so that Cheka lip-readers, watching through binoculars, wouldn’t know they were talking to each
other.

I couldn’t help but observe, as we trudged down and up hills, that Osip seemed to recognize very few of the people we passed. Occasionally a man dressed in a winter coat would doff his hat
in my friend’s direction, and Osip, a distant look in his eyes, would absently nod back. But when I inquired about the identity of the passersby—I was curious whether they were
political prisoners or simply souls living in Voronezh of their own free will—he invariably said he didn’t know. “I am not familiar with the personal stories of the people I nod
to,” he said.

“But you must have made some friends here,” I ventured.

“Aside from Nadenka, I have only one friend. It’s the prostitute who lives immediately next door to us on Lineinaya Street,” he explained. “When I became aware that
nobody greeted her in the street—none of the men would be caught dead tipping his hat to a prostitute—I began to regularly tip mine and she would smile back gratefully. And then one day
she invited us to tea and comfiture, and as we hadn’t set eyes on comfiture in two years we immediately accepted.”

I should say straightaway that I was intrigued by Osip’s friendship with a prostitute. (Was it because I had heard that the Bolsheviks referred to me as
the harlot
?) Over the years
I had met almost all of Osip’s paramours, including the one he ran off with
after
he met Nadezhda at that bohemian cabaret in Kiev, but I’d never known him, no matter how lustful
he felt, to go off with a lady of ill repute, as the gentlemen of ill repute called them. “And did she offer you her services?” I asked with a smirk.

Osip, having stopped to catch his breath, snickered. “No, she never offered. If she had I could not have accepted. I queue on the long line on a side street not far from the railway
station where they rent erections, but they always run out of stock by the time I reach the window. Don’t look so startled, my dear Anna. I still have my muse.”

Osip was reluctant to arrange for me to meet the prostitute, fearing she would take it badly if he brought around a friend to stare at her as if she were a fish in a bowl. He relented only when
I persisted. Which is how we wound up taking tea, as the English say, in the parlor of the prostitute, whose name was Varvara Samolova. She turned out to be something of a character. Varvara had
arrived in Voronezh as the common-law wife of a political prisoner. When he failed to survive the first winter, she took up prostitution to earn money to raise her son, who was fifteen or sixteen.
Her hobby was collecting postage stamps from all over the world depicting works of art—paintings, statues, architectural wonders. Osip claimed that some of her clients paid her in postage
stamps instead of rubles, but I found this hard to believe. I thought it quite out of the ordinary that she functioned openly as a prostitute until I discovered, from Osip, that several members of
the local Party committee, including one who was a Chekist, regularly made use of her services.

What did Varvara look like? I took her to be in her late twenties or early thirties, fine-boned like a snowbird, with a beautiful complexion and long reddish hair that trailed in fluffy tufts
over her breasts. She wore a frock that (as it turned out) she herself had created by sewing together two aprons. The dress was cut low on the bosom and worn over a lace undergarment that left
little to the imagination. Planted squarely on her head, even indoors, was a fashionable hat, the kind you might come across in a Parisian magazine. It crossed my mind that she may have received
her clients with her clothing removed and her hat on, but I didn’t feel it suitable to raise the question with her. She was clearly delighted to discover Osip on her doorstep and immediately
fetched the comfiture from its hiding place on a shelf. She took me for a newly arrived minus-twelver and as Osip failed to correct her, she didn’t hesitate to talk freely in my presence.
Before one knew it she was setting out her son’s textbooks on the glass-covered table to show us the pages where thick paper had been glued over the faces of Trotsky or Zinoviev or
Kamenev.

“But how did they know to do this?” I inquired.

“The children are instructed at school which leaders have fallen from grace. The schoolmaster regularly receives letters from the editors of the
Great Encyclopedia
with lists of
articles or illustrations to be pasted over or cut out. All this is easy enough when you live, as we do, in the countryside because we have our wood stoves. My sister lives in Moscow—she
spends half her waking hours cutting articles and illustrations into strips and flushing them down the toilet.”

Osip wondered aloud if all references to him had been expunged from books about poetry published in the twenties and early thirties. “Are you famous?” the prostitute asked and when
he didn’t answer, she turned to me and repeated the question. “You must absolutely tell me: Is he famous?”

“In certain circles, he is famous. In other circles, he is infamous.”

Varvara dismissed my comment with a disparaging wave of her hand. “You don’t fool me. You are playing with words, which is something I never do. Here you can lose your head if you
play with words. And what is he famous for, then?”

“For scrambling across the faults between words,” I declared.

Varvara rocked her head from side to side in wonderment. “One could vanish in the faults between words.”

Osip held out his hand. “Let me guide you across the faults,” he said.

Smiling demurely, Varvara took his hand.

With the prostitute, I saw a side of Osip that I thought had gone the way of his erections. He was teasing, even seductive, with her. (Perhaps rehearsing a role that, by his own account, he
could no longer hope to play allowed him to fantasize). With Varvara he let his hair down, as the saying goes, chatting of lighter-hearted things as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Nadezhda was another story. In my presence, they talked only of serious matters seriously: the pros and cons of suicide; whether to squander their limited supply of rubles on a bottle of Georgian
wine in my honor; whether Nadezhda’s
murtsovka
was tastier cooked with
kvass
or rusty tap water; if with
kvass
, where on earth some could be found; who in Voronezh might
be prevailed upon to give one or the other of them work.

It was left to me to raise the delicate subject they were studiously avoiding. I remember doing it over bowls of semolina an hour or two before my departure. I cleared my throat to get their
attention. “What will you do when your sentence is up next year?” I asked.

My question was greeted with stony silence. “If it grows any quieter in the room,” I quipped, “one may be able to hear the earth’s axis.”

A faint smile appeared on Nadezhda’s lips as she quoted the line from Osip’s Voronezh cycle.
“. . . Beyond sleep and death, the earth’s axis . . .”

“Well?” I insisted.

Osip rushed to the door to watch a passing train. When he had shuffled back to his chair, he stared out the window and said, very firmly, “When my sentence is up, I shall make my way back
to Moscow and resume my life.”

Nadezhda turned on her husband. “Resume reading your poems to eleven people who brave the weather to turn up at the
Literary Gazette
office? Resume mooching cigarettes from silly
girls who think the poet Mandelstam must be dead? Resume fabricating an original manuscript of the 1913 edition of
Stone
to sell to the Literary Fund Library? Resume the insomnia that comes
from listening for the late-night knock on the door?”

Osip controlled his temper. “My new Ode to Stalin will protect the both of us from arrest.”

Nadezhda appealed to me. “I had a dream of disappearing so far into the countryside the state would forget we existed, of living in an isolated wooden house with ornamented shutters, of
seeing on a distant hill the onion domes of a small village church that was being used to store hay, of growing potatoes and cabbages and cucumbers and beets and turnips on the tiny parcel of land
behind the house, of keeping hens and a cow, of exchanging eggs and milk for loaves of bread and tins of roe.”

I remember Nadezhda looking away, her shoulders aquiver with anguish. I glanced over at my dear friend Osip. “The night you were arrested, back in 1934, I reminded you of Pushkin’s
last words,” I said. “They haven’t slipped your mind, surely.
Try to be forgotten. Go live in the country.
”

“Pushkin breathed his last breath in a city,” Osip noted irritably. “It is my intention to follow his example.”

“You’d be crazy to return to Moscow,” I said. “After three years of exile, there’s almost no chance of your getting a residence permit, so you would have to live
illegally. The cities are acrawl with minor officials and writers and editors who think they can survive by denouncing someone; anyone. Whether you are there legally or illegally, some ambitious
lackey in the Cheka will want to make a name for himself by arresting the poet Mandelstam a second time. If you want to survive into middle age—”