The Stalin Epigram

by Robert Littell

  For the record, let me say that I’d been jailed before, briefly, in the Crimea during the Civil War, detained by Wrangel’s White Guards rounding up citizens without travel permits or enough cash to bribe their way out of prison, then freed when the Reds stormed the city and hanged their prisoners from trees on the hill above it. Curiously, I’d even set foot inside the burnt-almond Lubyanka once. It had come about this way. My brother Evgeny had been incarcerated in the Lubyanka Prison in 1922. Desperate to free him, I’d arranged through a mutual friend to see Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, a rising star in the Bolshevik firmament whom Lenin had anointed as the darling of the Party. His Bolshevik credentials notwithstanding, Bukharin was a cultivated man, inclined to help artists when he could. Meeting Bukharin in his apartment in the Second House of Soviets, in earlier times called the Metropol Hotel, I’d exposed the absolute innocence of my brother and pleaded with him to intercede. Setting aside the broom he’d been using to swat enormous water bugs, Bukharin had immediately put through a call to the notorious chief of the Cheka, the Pole Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and arranged an appointment for me. I have a vivid memory of the iron commissar, as Dzerzhinsky was called (behind his back, it goes without saying)—he had a face that looked as if it had been caught in a vise and a stylish goatee that he kept scratching at when he interviewed me in his cavernous office on one of the Lubyanka’s upper floors. (When I described the meeting to Bukharin, I elicited a laugh from him by suggesting that Dzerzhinsky’s beard may have been infested with lice.) Keen to do Bukharin a favor, the iron commissar had offered to liberate my brother if I would stand surety for him. Stand surety for him! Holy God, someone landing from Mars might have mistaken Russia for a civilized country. Within hours Evgeny was taken from his cell and freed, and I was back browsing the bookstalls on Kuznetsky Bridge, a few steps from the Lubyanka, gazing at the heavy granite high-rise that had originally served as the home office of an insurance company, trying to picture what was going on behind the pleats of the large Italian-style curtains that screened the prison windows.

  It was small comfort to think that now I would find out.

  Moments after entering Lubyanka, I found myself in a morgue-like room with white tiles on the floor and the walls. “Name, forename, patronymic?” the warden, a bony man with a shaven head and foul breath, shouted at me.

  “Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich,” I shouted back, as if I were responding to a drill sergeant.

  “Why are you shouting?”

  “I’m shouting because you’re shouting.”

  “I am not shouting,” the drill sergeant shouted. “I am talking in my normal voice.”

  He checked my name against the arrest warrant, then moistening the nib of a pen on his charged tongue, carefully copied it out in longhand on what looked like a bank ledger.

  “Is Mandelstam your real name?”

  I nodded. Without looking up, he shouted, “I did not catch the answer to my question. Is Mandelstam your real name or an alias?”

  “Real name.”

  “Respond in grammatical sentences, not fragments.”

  “Fragments are what I shore up against my ruin,” I shouted.

  “Say again.”

  “Mandelstam is my real name.”

  “Occupation?”

  “I am a poet.”

  “Poet is not a proletarian occupation recognized by Soviet statutes.”

  I had an inspiration. “I am an engineer of men’s souls.”

  He didn’t seem to recognize the phrase that had been attributed to Stalin in the newspapers. “What services do you render to the state?” he shouted. “Who pays you for services rendered?”

  “I compose poetry, but it’s been years since I’ve been remunerated for this service rendered.”

  “Remunerated?”

  “Compensated. Paid.”

  He scratched the words Intellectual and Parasite on the register.

  “Date of birth?”

  “I was born in the night of January the second and third in the unreliable year of eighteen-ninety something, and the centuries surround me with fire,” I replied, quoting from a poem I intended to write if I survived.

  The warden raised his eyes and effortlessly delivered a stinging slap across my face. “You don’t take your arrest seriously,” he warned.

  “I do, I do,” I remember insisting through my tears. “I don’t expect you to understand, but I am actually relieved to be arrested. It gives me one less thing to worry about.”

  “Date of birth?” the warden shouted in precisely the same disinterested tone.

  “The third of January 1891,” I whispered.

  “Speak up,” he shouted.

  “The third of January 1891.”

  “Place of residence?”

  “Herzen House on Nashchokin Street.”

  The warden looked up again. “Number?”

  “I don’t remember the number.” I winced in anticipation of another stinging slap.

  “Name, relationship of nearest relative to be notified in the likely event of death?”

  “Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, wife.”

  “Remove your suspenders and shoelaces. Empty your pockets.” He snatched my volume of Pushkin and, holding it by the spine, shook it, then dropped it back on the table. “Strip to the skin.”

  When I was standing naked before him, he added the word Israelite to the ledger and rang a small bell. A middle-aged woman wearing thick eyeglasses and a white medical smock entered, stage left. While the warden examined every stitch of my clothing, looking no doubt for items on the list posted inside the door—razor blades, nail scissors, pencils, letters or other written material, photographs, medicine of any kind—the medical orderly, if that’s what she was, fitted on surgical gloves and methodically searched through the hair on my head. Then she pushed aside my organ and threaded her fingers through my pubic hair, after which, deftly deploying a tongue depressor, she visited the principal orifices of my body in the wrong order.

  If they had offered me a choice, I would have preferred the humiliation of Once long ago, there was such a poet.

  “Why are you trembling?” the warden shouted.

  “I am chilled to the bone,” I shouted back.

  “You were sweating when you arrived.”

  “I have a built-in thermostat that takes into account my level of fear. Sometimes I sweat, sometimes I tremble.”

  With a snap of his fingers, the warden signaled for me to dress. The items in my pockets were placed in a cardboard box and I was instructed to sign the page in the ledger listing what had been confiscated. One internal identity card in the name of Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich. One Moscow residence permit made out to the same name. One cotton handkerchief, frayed at the edges. One half-empty box of Komsomolskaya brand safety matches. One pack of Herzegovina Flors. One Odessa dental floss dispenser. One passkey (to the front door of Herzen House), one latchkey (to our ground-floor flat). One vial of prescription sulfur pills for heart palpitation, another of valerian drops to calm nerves and induce sleep. Forty rubles in banknotes, twenty kopeks in loose change. I was issued an army blanket and a small towel and a bar of laundry soap, along with a chinaware soup bowl so out of place in a prison it could only have been part of the elegant table service used by the insurance company for banquets at the turn of the century. Clutching my trousers and my volume of Pushkin in one hand, shuffling along in laceless shoes, I followed a turnkey through the labyrinthine corridors to the cell block at the heart of the Lubyanka. Every twenty or so meters steel doors clanged open before us, the racket of the gate alerting everyone within earshot that another soul was entering this Soviet purgatorio.

  Disoriented in the twisting corridors, I penetrated the heart-murmuring terrain of D. Alighieri half expecting, at each turn, to come across Virgil washing the stains of hell off my beloved Dante, to hear his glorious infantlike babbling.

  E consolando, usava l’idioma

  Che prima i padri e le madri trastulla;
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  . . . Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia

  De’Troiani, di Fiesole, e di Roma.

  I was eventually shoved into a cell illuminated by a blindingly bright electric light suspended from the ceiling. There was a window high in the wall, but it was covered with planks. I shielded my eyes with my volume of Pushkin and made out the two prisoners already in the cell. One was squatting in a corner in what smelled like a puddle of urine and excrement, moaning as he rocked back and forth on his bare feet. The other prisoner, a giant of a man, was sitting on a blanket with his back to the wall. “I think he is dying,” the giant said, indicating the moaning figure with his chin. He angled his head so that his right ear was turned toward me and said, “What are you guilty of, comrade?”

  I set my belongings on the stone floor and, sitting down on the folded blanket facing him, covered my nose and mouth with my forearm. “I am guilty of being a poet,” I said. “I am guilty of not beating about the bush.”

  “Poetry doesn’t strike me as honest work,” the giant said, “in the sense that you don’t produce something people can eat or wear. Me, I’m Shotman, Fikrit Trofimovich. He’s Sergo. His family name and patronymic are known to God, but not to me.”

  “Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich,” I said.

  “Pleased. Fact is, I’m glad to have someone to talk to—Sergo is no longer capable of conversation. I work as a strongman in the circus.”

  “You don’t produce something people eat or wear either.”

  “I entertain the working class. You entertain the intelligentsia. You can’t compare the two. I have a common-law wife, she is the tattooed lady in the same circus as me. Her tattoos are art and history and nature and geography all rolled into one, the first time I saw them I fell into love with her. What about you? Are you married?” When I said I was, he wanted to know if my wife had any tattoos. When I said no, he tossed his head. “No matter—she may have other qualities. How did you meet?”

  Telling him took my mind off my present predicament. “I first set eyes on Nadezhda—that’s her name—in a cabaret in Kiev called the Junk Shop. I’d been watching her for the better part of an hour—she was bantering with her companions, laughing at their jokes, listening intently to their stories, all the while burning with sensuality. I was overwhelmed by the desire to warm myself at her flame. All I could think to do was ask her for a cigarette. She looked up and smiled and gave me one, and we’ve been together ever since. Tell me, Fikrit, how long have you been in the Lubyanka?”

  “Lost track.”

  “Do they ever turn the light off?”

  “Never.”

  “How can you sleep with it shining in your eyes all the time?”

  “Can’t,” he said. “That’s why they leave it on. If you do doze off, the comrade guard who keeps an eye on us through the peephole will hammer on the door until you wake up. My interrogator, an experienced Chekist with the best interests of his prisoners at heart, says being exhausted helps clear the mind of bourgeois delusions of innocence. If you are here, it’s because you are guilty of something. The sooner you identify your crime, the sooner your case will be disposed of.”

  I looked again at the figure squatting in the corner. “If he is really dying, why don’t you summon medical help?”

  The giant thought my suggestion humorous. “Medical help! That’s a good one. They’re the ones making him die.”

  “Why are they making him die?”

  “Because he won’t admit guilt.”

  “And what is he guilty of?”

  “Article 58—anti-Soviet propaganda and counterrevolutionary activity. He is guilty of wrecking, he told me so himself when he was still able to talk. He raised the subject of collectivization in front of Stalin at a public meeting.” Fikrit must have seen I was trembling. “Not to worry yourself sick, Osip Emilievich. They won’t beat you if you admit the truth straight off.”

  “If he admits he is guilty of wrecking, will they stop beating him?”

  Fikrit became indignant. “This is the Soviet Union. Socialist justice and the rule of law always triumph. Once Sergo admits guilt they will stop the beatings and shoot him.”

  “Without a trial?”

  “There may be a secret trial, though the law doesn’t require that he be present or have access to the evidence against him, so the comrade interrogator told me. As you can see, Sergo is in no shape for a public trial.”

  “Have you admitted your guilt?”

  “At first I didn’t, not because I was trying to fool them into thinking I was innocent, nothing like that. I didn’t admit it because I didn’t know what I was guilty of.”

  “Did they beat you?”

  “They did. The beatings, along with not being able to sleep, helped me to see the light. I have confessed to being a member of a backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. When the day comes to overthrow the Bolsheviks, the members of this conspiracy will recognize each other because we all have distinctive Eiffel Tower stickers on our valises or trunks. The Eiffel Tower, in case you are not familiar with it, is located in Paris, France. To make my personal situation worse, I kept tsarist loan coupons against the day when, thanks to Trotsky, capitalism is restored and I can cash them in.”

  “If you’ve admitted your guilt, how come you’re still in prison?”

  “Because I was lucky enough to be selected for public trial. They have promised that my common-law wife will be there to see me. I can tell by the suit you’re wearing you are a member of the intelligentsia—a poet is the same as an intellectual, right?—so you probably do not recognize me. I am, excuse me for being the one to say it, famous in Russia for winning the silver medal at the All-European games in Vienna, Austria in 1932. A picture of me shaking hands with Comrade Stalin at the Kremlin was printed on the front page of Pravda. Comrade interrogator has promised my picture will be on the front page of Pravda again when I give details of the Trotskyist conspiracy at my trial. Right now I am memorizing these details.”

  Poor Sergo—if he was really dying, he was doing it by centimeters. His moaning never let up. Even now when I think back to that cell I hear Sergo whimpering, I gag at the memory of the stench rising from his tortured body. As for Fikrit, you could tell he was a goodhearted soul, but once he’d recounted his childhood in Azerbaidzhan and his exploit in Vienna and his botched knee operation and his life as a circus strongman, we more or less ran out of conversation. When he wasn’t summoned for interrogation, he spent endless hours sitting with his back to the stone wall, his large head buried in his large hands, repeating aloud the confession he would deliver at his trial. I caught fragments (that would lead to his ruin!)—how he’d been recruited in Vienna in 1932 and been given a down payment in United States dollars, how he’d communicated with his handler using a secret code buried in the dedication inside the cover of an American fitness magazine, how carried away by his hatred for the new order he had disfigured Stalin’s face tattooed on his upper arm. There was more, a great deal more, but it has long since slipped my mind.

  I made a stab at keeping track of the passage of time, but this turned out to be a challenge requiring clearheadedness, and thus beyond my capacity. One day blended seamlessly into the next. I believe, though I can’t swear to it, that I was taken off for interrogation after I’d spent something like four days and four nights in the cell, never sleeping more than a few minutes at a time before the comrade guard, as Fikrit called him, woke me, along with everyone else in the cell block, by slamming a sledgehammer against the metal door. What I am certain of is that they came for me after the evening meal, which consisted of watery soup splashed into our chinaware bowls. A beefy guard turned up at the door of the cell and pointed what looked like a cattle prod at me. Fikrit must have sensed where I was off to because he offered some last minute words of advice. “I have heard it said that poets are somehow connected with culture. Which means your interrogator will be comrade Christophorovich—he specializes in culture criminals like yoursel
f. Find out what you’re guilty of and then confess it, Osip Emilievich, and things will go more smooth for you.”

  I realize now how difficult it is to reconstruct the fourteen days I spent in the Lubyanka, given the fact that I was frightened out of my skin even when I managed to doze. Which is to say, my brain was functioning sluggishly; it was as if a shadow of a doubt had lodged in my skull with the result that I wasn’t certain in what order things happened, or whether they happened at all. My state of mind is probably best conveyed by comparing it to the loss of depth perception, something I actually experienced in the months after my arrest; you perceive things with a hazy lucidity, but you aren’t sure if they are in front of your nose or several meters away; you wind up not being sure if they are there at all or fragments of your imagination.

  To this day I am haunted by spectral memories that have the graininess of bad dreams: of an open freight elevator rising with excruciating lethargy to a high floor; of brightly illuminated corridors with worn runners that, like the chinaware, looked as if they dated back to the turn of the century when the building served as the headquarters for an insurance company; of a polished brass number twenty-three on a polished wooden door; of an enormous room with bright spotlights that caused your eyes to smart the moment you crossed the threshold; of the clatter of a typewriter coming from behind a slightly open door; of the distant chiming of the hour from the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower; of a blurred figure of a man dressed in some manner of uniform and a leather butcher’s apron gesturing for the guard to leave.