The Stalin Epigram (38 page)

Comrade Stalin leaned forward in his chair. “Until?”

“Until spotted typhus struck Second River. The first cases were reported in the middle of December. It spread fast. Anyone with fever was locked in the quarantine barrack. Nobody went in
or out. Every morning the infected prisoners emptied slop buckets out the window. Pretty soon word spread that everyone in the barrack was dead. Osip Emilievich begged me not let them take him to
the quarantine barrack. He was shivering so hard I hauled him up to my upper bunk because it was warmer, and covered him with his blanket and mine. When the medical orderlies with masks over their
mouths came through in the morning to take off prisoners with fever, I managed to hide Osip Emilievich from them by lying on the bunk alongside him. And then one morning, when it was my turn to
fetch the ration of kasha, the other prisoners found him shivering and sweating under his blankets. When I got back they told me he had a fever, they threatened to report the both of us if I
didn’t take him off straightaway to the quarantine barrack. I bundled him up in the blankets and carried him instead to the camp infirmary. The doctor at the infirmary, an Article 58er like
us, stripped Osip Emilievich and washed his body, which was by then only skin and bones, with a sponge and warm water. The doctor combed the lice out of his hair and beard and short hairs and put
him to sleep in an army cot with a real straw mattress. I spent as much time with him as I could in the next days. His mind drifted a lot. One time he made me promise to send a telegram to the
Writers’ Union informing them he was under the weather and wouldn’t be able to read at their auditorium that night. Another time he ranted about having been injected with rabies. Late
one afternoon late in December I must have nodded off next to his bed. When I woke up I saw him staring at me with the wide eyes of a child and I thought to myself, he has made his way back to the
safety of childhood before he dies. “Can you hear me, Osip Emilievich?” I whispered. His answer was so soft I had to lean my ear that worked over his mouth to catch it. He said
something about how the pinprick of the last star was vanishing without pain. I repeated his words to myself until I had memorized them, though the meaning was a mystery to me. (With or without
pain, I don’t see how a faraway star can give you a pinprick.) Then he reached under the rough blanket and began to play with his sex and I thought to myself, he has made his way past
childhood to the safety of babyhood before he dies. I am not ashamed to say I turned my head away so he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. After a while I got hold of myself and turned back.
Mandelstam was still staring at me with his child’s innocent eyes, except they were frozen open and he wasn’t breathing. I went into the hallway and gestured to the doctor at the end of
it and he understood and came running and pulled out a pocket mirror and held it to Mandelstam’s mouth and when there was no cloud of life on it he looked over at me and shook his head. And
he said,
Death is not sad when what came before was not life
. He printed out Osip Emilievich’s name and the date—twenty-seventh of December 1938—on a valise tag and
attached it with wire to the poet’s big toe. I wrapped his body in a scrap of canvas set aside for that purpose and carried it to the trench behind the last barrack that was already filled
with corpses from the typhus outbreak. A bulldozer was parked nearby, waiting to cover the trench with earth when there was no more room in it. I jumped into the trench and lifted Osip Emilievich
down after me and set him on the frozen ground and, opening the folds of the canvas, I put two small flat stones, the kind you skim off water, on his eyes, which is what you do when you bury a
notable in Azerbaidzhan. And I thought, Jesus, somebody ought to say a prayer or something, what with him being dead, so I said,
God of the Jewish, don’t assign too much weight to the
charges against the poet Mandelstam, it’s not his fault he wasn’t socially useful
. When Arkhangelski saw me that night, he wanted to know if the poet was well enough to come up and
read to the criminals. I said no, he wasn’t well enough to read, the fact was he would never read again, he was dead.”

When I finished describing Mandelstam’s death, I could hear Comrade Stalin breathing through his nostrils. He was still holding the cigarette but not smoking it. He pulled another telegram
from the pile on his desk and said, “The camp commandant listed the cause of death as typhus.”

I must have shrugged because Comrade Stalin burst out, “It was typhus, wasn’t it?”

“I am not a medical person, Excellency. Who can say why a person dies? In Osip Emilievich’s case, he could have died from hunger, since he was afraid to eat his ration. He could have
died from not sleeping, since he spent the nights tossing and shivering in his bunk. At Second River prisoners sometimes upped and died when they lost hope, Mandelstam himself said that a few days
before he passed on.”

“So Mandelstam is really dead,” Comrade Stalin said. “You’re positive he was the one you buried?”

I nodded yes.

Comrade Stalin ground out his cigarette in an ashtray even though it wasn’t smoked down to the end. (In Kolma, at Second Rivers, prisoners would kill for a half-smoked cigarette.) Climbing
to his feet, he turned to stare out the window. I could make out the lights coming on in the GUM office arcades across Red Square. When Comrade Stalin spoke again, I could see he was furious.
“If the asshole had given me the poem when I wanted it, none of this would have happened. Well, fuck him. He killed himself with his stubborn-headedness. I had nothing to do with it.”
And then the tsar of Soviet Russia did something that scared the bejesus out of me—he began to knock his fist against the glass pane of the window, lightly at first, then harder and harder
and I was sure the glass would break until I figured out it must be as thick as the glass in the Packard. And he shouted out in a voice I didn’t recognize, “The prick! What will I do
now?”

Vlasik started across the room but Comrade Stalin, his forehead against the windowpane, waved him off. I felt the bodyguard’s grip on my arm, the one with the almost completely faded face
of Stalin tattooed on it. I followed Vlasik through the waiting room and down the hallway. Turning on me, he warned, “Don’t tell a living soul what you saw in there.”

“Comrade Stalin is a great hero to me,” I said. “I didn’t see nothing out of the ordinary.”

Vlasik kicked open the door to a toilet. There was a carton on the floor with the canvas trousers and the flannel shirt that’d belonged to Magda’s suicided husband and my felt boots
with the worn-down cork soles. “The suit and the shirt and the shoes the tailor gave you were on loan,” he said.

I wasn’t sorry to have my own clothes back. Something told me that Agrippina, who I was planning to look up, wouldn’t think the tailor-made suit with the double-breast jacket suited
me.

TWENTY-ONE

Anna Andreyevna

Friday, the 4th of June 1965

N
O
,
NO
, I
DON
’
T
think I can do this again, even as a favor to Nadezhda.
Not now, not ever. Nowadays when I summon memories of Osip Mandelstam, a certain amount of sheer pain comes up with them and, frankly, I’ve had enough pain to last a lifetime—my first
husband’s execution, my third husband’s arrest and death in the gulag, my son’s rotting in prison for years a hostage to my “good” behavior. When the American poet
Frost, old, red-faced, gray-haired, visited me in 1962 (the authorities insisted we meet in one of the plusher dachas in Komarovo rather than my modest cottage; I suppose they didn’t want him
to see into what dirt they’d trampled me), I told him I’d had it all—poverty, prison lines, fear, poems remembered only by heart, burned poems. And humiliation and grief; endless
humiliation, endless grief. Frost was a kindhearted gentleman, he meant no harm, but when I realized he expected me to talk about Osip, the words spilled through my lips before the lobe of my brain
that deals with language could formulate a sentence. What I heard myself say was: “You don’t know anything about this. You wouldn’t be able to understand if I told you.”

Russia, the running riot we know and loathe and love and fear, is reserved for Russians. It’s really not very complicated: my body is here in England to accept this honorary doctorate from
Oxford, but my head, my heart, my soul, my gut are back in Russia. Even if by some miracle we get our bodies out, we Russians can’t leave Russia. And goodhearted people like Frost can’t
get in simply because their passport bears a Soviet visa stamp. You have to have lived through the thirties to understand, and even then you don’t understand.

If you think about it, you’ll see I’ve told you everything I know about dear, dear Osip and what was surely one of the most dreadful chapters in Russia’s thousand-year
history.

EPILOGUE

Robert Littell

Sunday, the 23rd of December 1979

I
PHONED
M
ADAM
M
ANDELSTAM
as soon as I reached Moscow. Some years before, having led a nomadic existence
for decades, she’d been granted a residence permit and installed herself in the capital. She invited my companion and me to come by for tea. With the biggest box of chocolates I could find in
the hotel’s hard currency store under my arm, I flagged down a taxi. It took us to a bleak apartment house in a distant suburb filled with six-storey brick buildings that looked as if they
had come into existence ramshackled and gone downhill from there. When the door to the ground floor flat opened, we found ourselves standing before a short, worn, emaciated woman, ancient when she
should have been merely old. Young poets were taking turns caring for the widow of the poet Mandelstam. One was preparing tea and cakes in the tiny kitchen when we arrived. Madam Mandelstam lay
propped up on a settee most of the time we were there, occasionally selecting, after some deliberation, a bonbon from the box of chocolates open on her lap. “I was never skilled at predicting
how something would taste from its shape,” she said absently. The narrow apartment was terribly overheated. She was wearing a white sleeveless shift. Her elbows were bare and jutting, the
skin on her arms hanging in soft pleats off her bones. The conversation was in English, which she spoke fluently—she had used it to make ends meet with translation work in the years when the
poet Mandelstam was not being published and earning no income. When I began recording the conversation she said, “It’s been an eternity since you came around with the infernal taping
machine of yours that filled a small suitcase. The time you interviewed Mandelstam, I seem to remember you had to change reels every half hour—after you left he complained that watching the
spools go round made him dizzy. Now you turn up with a device not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes.”

“In the future they’ll get even smaller,” I said.

Smiling faintly, Madam Mandelstam looked away. “When I was permitted to see him in the Lubyanka, Mandelstam asked me if the future was behind or ahead of us.”

“What did you answer?”

“Damn it, Robert, I can’t be expected to remember something I said in 1934. That’s why you record these conversations. You tell me what I said.”

“A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then,” I remarked. “I’ll have to look it up in my notes.”

She laughed under her breath. “My great friend Akhmatova pretended that what flows under bridges is spilt milk. She was surely right. When she died, not long after returning from Oxford, I
thought it entirely possible she might have drowned in spilt milk.” Responding to a question, Madam Mandelstam began to talk about her husband: “He was a silly young man, very gay even
when things started to become difficult for him as a poet in the twenties. He was endlessly
zhizneradostny
, which can be translated as
joyous
or, better still,
life-glad
. In
the thirties, when we were especially miserable—we experienced hunger, homelessness, fear, filth, abject poverty—Mandelstam would ask me:
Where is it written you should be
happy?
” Staring off into space, Madam Mandelstam seemed to pick up the thread of a conversation with her husband that had been interrupted forty-one years before. “I was never
disillusioned, my darling, because I never had the luxury of illusions.”

We sipped our tea. My tape machine recorded minutes of silence. After a while I asked Madam Mandelstam if she thought her husband had actually come face-to-face with Stalin.

“Mandelstam wasn’t the only Russian intellectual of his day to be fascinated by Stalin. He wondered what enigmas lay hidden behind those eyes, he was curious about what had
transformed the Caucasian peasant Dzhugashvili into the Kremlin peasant-slayer Stalin, which is to say, into a practicing paranoid.”

“But you haven’t answered my question.”

She thought about this for a moment before coming up with a response that satisfied her. “Mandelstam certainly encountered Stalin,” she said carefully. “You must decide for
yourself whether the meetings took place in the Kremlin or a dacha, or in the poet’s head.”

Responding to another question, she said she had no idea why she hadn’t been arrested along with her husband. At both of his arrests they could have taken her off as easily as they took
him. “After the second arrest I followed Pushkin’s advice.
Try to be forgotten
. I worked at so many jobs, and in so many places, I’ve lost track. I was a teacher, a
translator, I once cleaned government buildings. I never lived in any one city for very long. I heard there were arrest warrants issued for me but I kept moving and managed to stay one jump ahead
of the Chekists. I had to if Mandelstam’s oeuvre—a portion of which existed and still exists only in my head—was to survive.”

“In the end, obliging you to memorize his poems saved your life.”

“You are mistaken if you think he
obliged
me, Robert. I committed his poems to memory because I wanted them on the tip of my tongue. Only later did it occur to either of us that
memorizing his oeuvre would give me an incentive to survive if something were to happen to him.” Madam Mandelstam closed her eyes for a moment. “Well, against all the odds I did
survive. And here I am back in Moscow, if you can call this Moscow”—she waved tiredly at the window looking out onto another apartment building in her remote suburb. “I’m an
old lady now. They have lost interest in me.”