The Stalin Epigram

by Robert Littell

  Except the lives of those unlucky enough to hear it.

  Darling Osip really didn’t leave me much choice, so I don’t feel as if I betrayed a trust or anything like that. Besides which, any idiot can see the poor man is trying to commit suicide. By alerting the Organs, I was only doing what deep down he wanted me to do.

  Was I uncomfortable lengthening my life at the expense of shortening Mandelstam’s?

  Svoloch—bastard! You’ve been talking to Nadezhda! If anybody’s to blame for shortening Mandelstam’s life, it’s his bitch. They’re a folie à deux. One eggs the other on. For God’s sake, what other lies did she tell you about me?

  EIGHT

  Anna Andreyevna

  Sunday, the 13th of May 1934

  I COULD TELL SOMETHING was terribly wrong the instant I lifted the telephone handset to my ear. Borisik, his speech saturated with static because of the magnetic storm disrupting the line linking Petersburg to the rest of Russia, announced, “You must absolutely drop whatever you’re doing and come to Moscow.” He said it in a way that left precious little room for argument. Somehow my dear friend Pasternak managed to sound both alarmed and deathly calm at the same time; it was his deathly calm that sent the chill down my vertebral column. I tried to tell him this was not a good moment for me to leave Petersburg. My twenty-two-year-old son, Lev, with whom I had a thorny relationship, was in town and for once we were talking about what had gone wrong between us rather than quarreling about how I could have described motherhood as a bright torture; my third husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin, had secured a voucher for a two-week holiday at one of his university’s hostels on Lake Ladoga and was dying for a break from the city; and an editor I knew had agreed to publish my critical essay on Pushkin on condition I cut it by half, no easy chore since I had already cut the original version by half. Borisik brushed aside my excuses and I was beginning to get annoyed when I heard him say: “You don’t understand, Anna. Our mutual friend, who shall remain nameless lest the Organs are monitoring this conversation, has decided to kill himself.”

  “Kill himself?” I heard myself repeating dully.

  “You remember the conversation we had, the three of us, when we were watching the teardrops hurl themselves against the Cathedral of Christ the Savior? Well, he has gone ahead with his project. I tried to convince him it was insane but, supported by that mulish wife of his, he claimed what Russia needed was less sanity and more insanity. I take the view that you are the only one who can have an influence on him in this matter. You must immediately come to Moscow and stop him before—” The noise on the line blotted Borisik out for a moment. Then I heard the words “spilt milk.”

  Which is how I came to disappoint son and husband and editor. My husband tried to persuade me to phone the Mandelstams so Osip could meet my train, but fearing he would only talk me out of coming, I thought it better not to. As it was too late for the night train and far too early for the morning train, I spent hours tossing sleeplessly on the bed (after a terrible row with Nikolai, who argued that Osip was a consenting adult; that if he really was determined to commit suicide, I had a moral obligation to respect his decision). Under the best of circumstances, I am an agitated traveler. Unlike Borisik, who loves to leap onto the last wagon as it starts to pull out of the quay, I prefer to arrive at the station with time to kill. Knowing my disposition, my husband persuaded a neighbor on our embankment who had the use of a city administration vehicle to drive us to the Moskovsky Railway Station well before dawn. In the waiting room, filled with travelers curled up on benches, Nikolai spotted a public telephone and again suggested I call the Mandelstams. Was it because I was exhausted and not thinking clearly that I didn’t argue? I dialed the intercity operator and gave her the number of the communal telephone in the first-floor hallway of Herzen House. After a long wait I could hear the handset ringing on the other end. When nobody answered, the operator was ready to hang up, but I explained that it was a communal phone and begged her to keep ringing. When someone finally picked up the receiver, I asked to speak to Mandelstam. Do you have any idea of the hour? a man demanded petulantly. Before I could say a word, he informed me that there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House. I started to insist that he was making a terrible mistake, there was certainly a Mandelstam living in Herzen House, but the line went dead in my ear. “What did he mean, there is no Mandelstam living in Herzen House?” I asked my husband, a knob of panic rising to the back of my throat.

  “You make a serious error trying to read between the lines,” Nikolai said, but I could see from the look in his eyes that he, too, was turning over the words as if they were stones, looking for worms of calamity beneath them.

  I had taken my Pushkin article with me on the train, thinking I could distract myself by reworking it, but I wound up catnapping on my hard second-class seat, my scarf bunched into a makeshift pillow so that my ear, pressed against the windowpane, would not become bruised by the jolting of the train. And I dreamed dreams so frightful I had to force myself awake to escape the anguish they imparted to my soul.

  No Mandelstam living in Herzen House! Had the people who left cigarette ends in Nadezhda’s ashtray taken over the telephone? Were they, in the manner of Chekists, announcing the death of the poet Mandelstam?

  The sun was sinking below the rooftops of wooden izbas as the train crept through the Moscow suburbs, past the first factories and cooperatives with hammer-and-sickle devices over the arched entrances, through neighborhoods with unpaved streets lined with newly fabricated lodgments that had come into this world with a birth defect: ugliness. It was dark out by the time we pulled into the grand Leningradskiya Railway Station on Komsomolskaya Ploshchad. I lowered the compartment window and leaned out to see if I could spot a familiar face—Borisik would have calculated which train I was on and passed word to Osip, so I told myself, so I hoped. But there were too many passengers milling on the platform, which was dimly lighted in any case. Clutching my carpetbag, I made my way through the crowd to the head of the platform; I am quite tall enough to see over the heads of people, but I climbed onto a block of cement anyhow to get a better view. I instructed my heart not to sink if Osip didn’t turn up. He could have had an appointment with an editor who was willing to publish one of his poems that beat about the bush. He could be out scouring neighborhood canteens for cheap cigarettes.

  When I failed to spot him, my disobedient heart sank all the same. Borisik might not have been able to get word to him for the same reason I’d been unable to get word to him—because there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House!

  How I managed to find my way to the right trolley line with my soul gripped by a presentiment of tragedy, my sight blurred by unshed tears, I will never know. Perhaps it was pure instinct that led me to the trolley, that helped me to purchase a ticket from the woman conductor at the back, that told me where to get off and which way to walk. Something like forty minutes later, with my heart pounding in my rib cage, I found myself standing before the door of the Mandelstam flat in Herzen House. I remember raising my knuckles to knock and then, short of breath, backing away, terrified that no one would answer.

  What if there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House?

  And then I stopped breathing altogether and knocked and strained to catch the sound of footsteps. I thought I heard a woman’s voice call Coming from somewhere inside. A second later Nadezhda was on the other side of the unopened door demanding, “Who’s there?”

  Somehow I managed to activate my vocal cords. “It’s me,” I rasped. “It’s Anna.”

  The door was flung open and a stunned smile materialized on Nadezhda’s angelic face. As it dawned on me that she wouldn’t be smiling if there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House, I collapsed into her arms.

  “Osip, look who has turned up at our doorstep,” Nadezhda cried as she led me into their small kitchen. And there was my dear, dear Osip, in shirttails and suspenders, sipping tea at the table.

  At the sight of
him I sank onto a chair and wept in relief.

  When I had calmed down enough to carry my end of a conversation, I explained about Borisik’s summoning me to Moscow. Osip chided me for not calling so he could meet the train, at which point I described the voice on the communal telephone claiming there was no Mandelstam living in Herzen House. Osip and Nadezhda exchanged looks. Osip smiled grimly. Nadezhda linked her arm through her husband’s and kissed him on the shoulder. “I suppose I should have told you,” she said. “For some months now, there have been strangers visiting our flat when we were away. From time to time I find their cigarette ends in our ashtray.”

  I remember exclaiming, “But he knows about them, Nadezhda—he’s been keeping it to himself so as not to upset you.”

  Nadezhda stared at Osip. “You know about the cigarette ends?”

  He was incredulous. “Don’t tell me you have known about them, too!”

  And the two of them, looking for all the world like mischievous children discovering they shared a secret, laughed until the laughter turned to tears.

  “This is not a laughing matter,” I said.

  They both quieted down. “Of course you are right, Anna,” Nadezhda said. “If we laugh, it’s out of nervousness.”

  “Nervous laughter,” Osip quipped, “is known to be excellent for the bowels.”

  “Let’s talk about the poem,” I suggested.

  “Will you hear it?” Osip asked.

  Nadezhda touched my arm. “Do hear it,” she said. “It’s glorious.”

  I agreed with a nod. Rising to his feet, Osip tucked the shirttails into his trousers and buttoned the top button of his collarless shirt. Taking a deep breath, tossing back his head, he began to recite.

  We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

  Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

  But where there’s so much as half a conversation

  The Kremlin mountaineer will get his mention.

  I cannot claim to have taken in the epigram the way I usually absorb a Mandelstam poem, which is to say as a whole that, on first hearing, mesmerizes me with its mood and its music. This one lodged in my consciousness in word splinters—fragments that had no connection with each other or the whole. I admitted as much when Osip pressed me for a comment. “The English poet Eliot, in his Waste Land, claimed to have shored fragments against his ruin,” I said. “But your fragments will bring about your ruin.”

  “How can you reduce my epigram to fragments?” Osip retorted, clearly displeased with my reaction.

  Nadezhda, as always, rose to his defense. “Exactly what fragments are you talking about?”

  I was, truth be told, brokenhearted not to be able to respond more positively. But Osip and I went back a long way—along with my late husband Gumilyov, we’d been poetic comrades years before Nadezhda came into his life. And the hallmark of our poetic camaraderie was absolute, even brutal, honesty. And so I told him which fragments stuck in my mind. “Kremlin mountaineer . . . fingers fat as grubs . . . cockroach whiskers . . . fawning half-men . . . ah, and the bit about every killing being a treat for the Ossete. Good Lord, Osip, people have been known to vanish into prisons for suggesting that Stalin had a drop of Ossetian bandit blood in his veins, as opposed to his being pure Georgian.”

  Undoing the top button of his shirt, Osip settled down facing me. “You don’t think it’s a good poem,” he said flatly.

  I reached for his hand. “Putting to one side its audacity, I don’t think it’s a good poem, no. To my ear, it doesn’t even appear to be a poem. You weren’t listening to the music of the words when you composed it. You had something else in mind. It’s a polemic, meant to come across as a political argument. This is not something you will include in your collected works if and when they are published.”

  Osip shook his head. “The insurgent Decembrists had Pushkin’s political poems in their pockets when they rose up against the tsar in Petersburg.”

  I remember Nadezhda bursting out, “Whether it’s a good poem or bad poem is beside the point.”

  Osip said, “It’s a truth-telling poem, one that doesn’t beat about the bush. It’s a cleansing poem that can wipe the slate clean so Russia can start over again.”

  I felt compelled to point out the obvious. “If it becomes known, it will get you killed.”

  “That’s what Boris said,” Nadezhda noted.

  “Borisik loves you, Osip, as I love you. It’s one thing to risk your life for a genuine poem, quite another to put your life—as well as your future poetic production—in jeopardy for a polemic.”

  Nadezhda said, “We don’t see things that way.”

  I smiled at the we. Nadezhda had always been a bit envious of my relationship with Osip. Looking back on the conversation, I think she was using it to establish that she was, after all, the wife, and I was merely a friend of long standing. The night wore on as we sat at the small four-sided table going around in circles. Nothing I could think to say made the slightest impression on either of them. Borisik would be deeply troubled when he learned that I had had no success coaxing Osip back across the frontier into sanity.

  It must have been close to eleven when we heard someone scratching at the door of the flat. “That will be Sergei Petrovich,” Nadezhda said, springing to her feet, thankful for an excuse to put an end to the discussion. “He comes around at this hour to use our toilet and to borrow.”

  “Borrow what?”

  Nadezhda said, “Whatever we happen to have in the way of food. He spends everything he earns on alcohol but gets hungry before going to bed. He’s not fussy, he’ll accept anything—an egg, a cup of kasha, a slice of bread with or without comfiture. A pickle even.”

  Osip added with a sour laugh, “Even a pickle.”

  While Nadezhda went to let him in, Osip told me about their friend and neighbor Sergei Petrovich, who was living in the toiletless half of his former wife’s apartment on the second floor; as the two weren’t on speaking terms, he had to knock on different doors during the day to use the facilities. “He’s a decent enough lyric poet, half Georgian on his mother’s side—he was dismissed as the literary editor of a regional newspaper some while ago for publishing a Mandelstam poem, so I feel a debt toward him. Since being fired he has been unable to find work. He makes ends meet translating an infinitely long Georgian epic poem. Because it’s Georgian, everyone presumes the project is close to Stalin’s heart and so Sergei collects a monthly stipend no matter how many or how few pages he manages to turn in.”

  Nadezhda returned to the kitchen, the lyric poet—with alcohol on his breath—trailing shakily after her. He plucked my hand from the table and kissed it in the French manner, barely grazing the skin with his course lips. “Ochen rad,” he said. “To meet the celebrated Akhmatova in person is a consummation of sorts, more gratifying than sex, which, in any case, I have not experienced in years.” He pulled over a wooden apple crate and, setting it on end, joined us around the table. Sergei Petrovich was as tall as I but thin as a plank, which made him appear taller. His long dirty white beard was matted with traces of the food he’d been able to sponge. He wore a vest over a soiled white shirt, shapeless trousers and felt slippers with the backs cut out because they were too small for his large feet. Armless spectacles were attached to his head by a shoelace. Nadezhda pushed the page of newspaper folded into a pouch and filled with kasha across the table to him. Sergei Petrovich managed to bow from the waist while still sitting.“Thank you, my dears,” he said, “but what I really hunger after tonight is food for thought.” He leaned forward and peered at Osip strangely. “Everybody at Herzen House is talking about it, you know.”

  I smelled a rat. “Talking about what?” I asked.

  Swaying on his makeshift stool, Sergei Petrovich eyed Osip. “The poem about Stalin, of course.”

  “Who’s everybody?” I demanded. I turned on Osip in exasperation. “Did you circulate the epigram in writing?”

  Nadezhda answered for him. “It has neve
r been written out. We’re not fools.”

  “How many did you read the poem to, Osip?” I asked.

  Nadezhda said, “In Herzen House, two or three, not counting me.”

  Osip tossed one shoulder defiantly. “My dear Anna, it’s a matter of creating ripples.”

  “How many?” I insisted.

  “Five or six. Certainly not more than six.”

  Sergei Petrovich said, “Seven. If the poet does me the honor, I shall be number eight.”

  And so my poor innocent naïve Osip pushed himself to his feet and recited it for the tosspot shit. All of it. Every word. He omitted nothing, not the Kremlin mountaineer nor the fingers fat as grubs nor the cockroach whiskers nor the fawning half-men nor the son of a bitch of an Ossete for whom every killing was a treat. My God, in light of what happened afterward, only remembering the moment makes me sick to my stomach.