My thickheadedness was beginning to irritate my husband. “Not in prison. And he didn’t come to me, I went to him. I saw him in the Kremlin, of course. In the flesh. He offered me a cigarette. We talked. He told me many things about himself, including”—he pressed his lips against my ear again—“including that he shot his wife after an argument. Oh, it wasn’t entirely his fault—she produced the pistol, she pushed it into his hand, she dared him to prove that he was as hard as Ivan the Terrible. So he thrust the muzzle to her heart and pulled the trigger. Everyone in the Kremlin is convinced she committed suicide. Only I know the truth.”
I couldn’t think how to respond. Was it possible that Stalin had brought my husband to the Kremlin and confided in him? If he had confided in him—if he had admitted shooting his wife—why would he now send Mandelstam into exile where he could repeat the story to anybody who would listen? No, no, the only explanation that made a shred of sense was that Mandelstam, on the doorsill of a nervous breakdown, had imagined seeing me and Zinaida in a prison cell, and imagined the conversation with Stalin. “Listen carefully, my darling,” I said, breathing my message into his ear. “You must not tell a living soul about having encountered Stalin in the Kremlin. I have no doubt it happened as you said. But if you spread the story about how his wife died, he will have you brought back to the Lubyanka in chains. Do you understand what I’m saying, Osya?”
He kneaded his beautiful forehead with his knuckles. “Yes.”
“Are you sure you understand?” I repeated.
He nodded slowly.
“Good. Never mention it again. To yourself. To Akhmatova. To Pasternak. To your brother. Even to me.”
“I shall never mention it again,” he said in a small voice.
“We must put the past behind us and concentrate on the future.”
“Is the future behind us or ahead of us?”
For an instant I thought Mandelstam had come to his senses and was making a typically mordant, not to mention poetic, observation. Then I sank back on my heels and saw his eyes gaping wide, hungering for the answer to the question he had posed.
“The future,” I replied, “is ahead of us.”
Mandelstam accepted this clarification with another slow nod of his head.
The maître d’hôtel returned to the room, bringing with him forms in triplicate for me to sign. I scratched my name at the bottom of each page without bothering to read it. What more could I lose that hadn’t already been taken from me? Using the side of his table as a straight edge, Christophorovich tore off a scrap of paper and wrote the name of a train station, the track number and the time of departure on it. “Mandelstam will be sent into exile in the town of Cherdyn in the northern Urals,” he said. “You have seven hours to collect what belongings you can carry and join your husband in the railway carriage.” As I started toward the door—I had no time to lose if I was to prepare for the journey—Mandelstam bounded to his feet. “A swallow,” he howled, pointing to the pleated curtains covering the window with the hand that wasn’t holding up his trousers.
“What is it you see, Osya?”
“I see the future crashing into a mountainside!”
I turned on the interrogator and began ranting. “A poet has been driven insane,” I cried. “This is a major offense against the government you represent. A poet is being sent into exile in a state of madness.”
Christophorovich remain unfazed in the face of Mandelstam’s madness and my tirade. “You will use the time remaining before the departure of the train to better advantage if you calm yourself and start to prepare for the trip,” he told me coldly.
I am afraid the images in my mind’s eye blur at this point of the narrative. I seem to remember that Mandelstam was weeping as I tore myself away from the room. I have no memory of how I got back to Herzen House, none at all. I don’t recall phoning Akhmatova, but I must have because within minutes several of the younger poets who lived in the small rooms on the second floor turned up to help me pack. I remember feeling as if I were running a high fever. In this delirious condition I crammed my husband’s clothing (some of it reeking of camphor) into the suitcase that had served as a coffee table, I packed my own clothes in a cardboard suitcase that someone gave me, I threw saucepans and porcelain bowls and kitchen utensils and linen into a canvas mail sack, I filled a small carton with books from Mandelstam’s shelves. Pasternak turned up with a thick wad of rubles attached by a rubber band—he said half was from him, half from Akhmatova. Looking more mournful than usual, he kissed me on the forehead and fled from the flat. Bulgakov’s wife, Elena Sergeyevna, couldn’t contain her tears when she knocked on the door. She literally emptied her purse on the kitchen table and forced me to accept every last ruble in it. The wives of two editors who had been unable to publish Mandelstam’s poems also came by, one with two knitted winter scarves, the other with cash. (“Consider it a loan,” she insisted when I tried to push the rubles back into her hand.) Two of the young poets who had spent evenings around our kitchen table listening to Mandelstam read aloud from Stone, his first book of poetry, flagged down a government automobile and offered the chauffeur a large gratuity to take me to the train station. They insisted on accompanying me to carry the suitcases and the canvas sack and the carton filled with books. Clutching to my breast a tattered handbag filled with more cash than we’d possessed in years, the two young poets trailing along the quay behind me with our pathetic belongings, I caught sight of my husband in a compartment. He appeared as pale and one-dimensional as the reflection you see in the smudged window of a storefront.
Fleeting images of the trip into exile at Cherdyn—it took three nights and two days for the train and the riverboat to cover the roughly fifteen hundred kilometers—run through my mind’s eye like one of those motion pictures where the frames jump on the projector’s sprockets. (Akhmatova, quoting an English poet whose name escapes me, often spoke of fragments shored up against one’s ruin; what I am about to recount are fragments of my ruin.) Except for the three armed soldiers, one of whom was always posted outside the door to keep other passengers away, Mandelstam and I had the compartment and its six berths to ourselves. The senior guard, also named Osip, was a country boy with a broad, open face who hummed roundelays when he wasn’t grinning at me. He filled my teapot with boiling water from the carriage samovar whenever I asked him, and so I was able to keep my husband supplied with tea, though I’d forgotten to scrounge for sugar at Herzen House and he pulled a face at every sip. Mandelstam spent hours on end with his forehead pressed against the pane, fogging the window with his breath, staring through his reflection at the taiga and the villages hurtling past, listening intently to the almost human voice of the rails under the wheels of the train. “Can’t you hear it?” he demanded, and he deciphered the words for me: Age before beauty? Talent before mediocrity? Urban intellectual before rural hick? On another occasion I came awake to find him talking to himself. I remember him saying the same thing again and again, something like, “They want to get me away from Moscow before they shoot me—they want me to vanish without a trace.”
Osip the guard must have overheard him because, still grinning, he turned to me and said, “Tell him to calm down, Missus. We don’t shoot people for making up rhymes, only for spying and sabotage. We’re not like the bourgeois countries. There you could be strung up for writing stuff they don’t like.”
The frames jump to other images. At some point during that first night the train pulled onto a siding and we had to transfer to an open carriage (the guards slung their rifles across their backs and carried our belongings) on a narrow-gauge line. Mandelstam and I sat on the wooden benches facing each other, the guards sat across the aisle and kept other passengers at a distance with waves of their hands. What people made of the two gloomy city folks, their suitcases and belongings piled on the overhead rack, I cannot say. Seeing that we were escorted by armed soldiers, everyone avoided eye contact—everyone except for one person, a thin, elegantly dressed ol
der woman who looked as if she had stepped off the pages of a Turgenev novel. Oh God, it all comes back to me. I haven’t thought of her in years. She boarded the carriage at a remote station, dressed as my mother, rest her soul, used to dress for weddings, in a high-collared cream-colored garment and a small straw hat and crocheted gloves. She held a folded lace parasol under one arm and a covered straw hamper in one hand. She looked at me, then at the soldiers, then back at me and, having grasped that we were prisoners being escorted into exile, she favored me with the saddest smile you are likely to see in a lifetime. She started down the aisle toward us, oblivious to the solders waving her off, oblivious to Osip the guard rising to his feet with one hand fingering the butt of an enormous revolver. Opening the lid of her hamper, she rummaged under a foulard and produced two cucumbers. She offered one to my husband, the other to me. My husband, shaken out of his stupor by this bold act of solidarity, rose and kissed her hand in the French manner, his bloodless lips grazing the back of her glove. And with a courteous inclination of her head, this guardian angel of deported prisoners, this relic from a dying Russia, turned and made her way to a seat beside a family of peasants at the far end of the carriage, from where she never lifted her gaze from me.
I must have dozed when I was no longer physically able to keep my eyes open. As the train was pulling out of another remote station, I shook myself awake to find the woman’s seat at the end of the car vacant. To this day I bitterly regret not knowing her name, though given what she had done for us it would have put her in jeopardy to ask. Mandelstam, for his part, never stopped staring at his reflection in the window. He was sure he would be executed at any moment and didn’t want to be caught unawares. The season of white nights had begun and one could glimpse copses of birches and aspens on the foothills. I drifted off again but was woken before dawn by the lack of motion of the train. We’d pulled onto another siding in a freight yard to let pass red cattle wagons transporting prisoners to forced-labor camps in Siberia. Women had pushed scraps of nylon undergarments between the planks of the wooden siding so people spotting the wagons would understand the nature of their cargo. In my imagination I see these scraps flying like regimental banners in the chilly penumbra between white night and first light.
Late on second day, with the Ural range rising like a smudge on the horizon, the train crawled through a suburb of brightly painted one-storey frame houses and narrow dirt streets into a rundown terminal with giant likenesses of Lenin and Stalin pasted onto billboards and Solikamsk printed over the swinging doors leading to the station’s waiting room. A news bulletin echoed from loudspeakers rigged to posts on the platform: The spies, traitors and turncoats have been swept from the face of the earth. Our three trusty guards transported us and our possessions to an open truck parked around the side next to the public toilets. Mandelstam and I were ordered onto bales of straw in the back and, with a belch of exhaust, the truck headed due north along the city’s single boulevard. Within minutes, the frame houses gave way to dense woods and daylight was replaced by impenetrable shadows. Soon after, we pulled up in a clearing and the truck filled with forestry workers hitching rides to the river. One of them in particular terrified Mandelstam—a big bearded man in a dark red shirt carrying a double-bladed axe on one shoulder. Fearing for his life, my husband began to tremble. “They’re going to behead me, as in Peter’s time,” he gasped. I hugged him to me and attempted to calm him, but he eyed the bearded giant with dread. “Expect the worst,” he told me. “Do everything possible to keep your dignity. When they come for me, I must absolutely run for it—it is important to escape or die in the attempt.”
I recall saying, “At least if they kill us we won’t have to commit suicide.”
This elicited a nervous giggle from Mandelstam. “How can I live with a professional suicide like you next to me?” he demanded.
What I didn’t say, what I thought, was: If you decide to die, I won’t need to kill myself, my life will simply stop.
I remember his taking several deep breaths, which calmed him, but he never took his eyes off the bearded lumberjack and his double-bladed axe.
The sun had gone down by the time the truck reached the rickety pier on the Kolva River. Even the white night was lost in the shadows of the forest that descended almost to the water’s edge. Voices of women singing on the far bank echoed through the woods. The foresters disappeared into a barracklike building on a low bluff over the river. The three guards piled our belongings on the pier and sat down with their backs against the pilings, smoking cigarettes and talking in undertones. I knocked on the window of the small store next to the barrack and managed to purchase several tins of sardines, along with a loaf of bread and, to my husband’s delight, two packets of cheap Turkish cigarettes. We settled onto the grassy slope next to the pier, listening to the delicate sounds a river produces at night—the murmur of eddying water, the splash of fish, the croak of frogs. In other circumstances it would have been an agreeable interlude. Mandelstam passed the first Turkish cigarette under his nostrils, savoring the odor, then wedged it between his lips and struck a match. His hand was shaking too much to maneuver the flame to the tip of the cigarette, so I lit a second match and he held my wrist and brought the cigarette to the fire. He exhaled and sank back on the grass. “I held Stalin’s wrist when he lit my cigarette,” he said absently. God only knows how I forced a smile onto my face. And in the darkness, I could see him staring at me as if I were a stranger.
Shortly after midnight, the river steamer, an ancient vessel with a naked lady for bowsprit and a lopsided pilothouse leaning into the wind high above the main deck, tied up alongside the feeble electric lights at the end of the pier. I found the purser in his office off the midship passageway and, dipping into the wealth of cash in my purse, purchased tickets that entitled us to a cabin all to ourselves, even a toilet with a small tin tub. Mandelstam could not believe our good fortune when the steward unlocked the door with a skeleton key and stepped back to let us pass, almost as if we were vacationers on a cruise to Cherdyn. Our three soldiers installed our belongings under the two beds in the cabin and went in search of the bunk rooms reserved for steerage passengers. The smell of cooked cabbage emanated from the galley at the end of the passageway (Mandelstam pronounced himself dismayed at my familiarity with nautical terminology) and, for the price of several cigarettes, we were able to have our meals brought to the cabin. Before long the shriek of the ship’s whistle filled the night. The deck began vibrating under our feet as the steamer drifted away from the pier and started upriver toward our destination.
I can say without exaggeration that we both got our first good sleep in days, so much so that I was quite frightened in the morning to see how still Mandelstam lay in his bunk. I watched him closely to reassure myself that he was still breathing before slipping under his blanket to awaken him with the warmth of my body. He clung to me as a drowning man clings to a life preserver and I thought—I wasn’t certain, mind you, it was only an impression—that I felt the dampness of tears on my neck. And then—I record this detail, along with the pain it caused me at the time; despite the pain it causes me now—I heard him say, “With any luck, I may still have a muse.”
With or without your leave, I shall skip ahead several hours.
Mandelstam, bathed, shaven (by me while he sat in the tub, his knobby knees jutting from the water; I didn’t yet feel comfortable letting him have a straight-edged razor in his hand), attired in clothing that smelled of camphor, one of the new knitted scarves wound around his neck, was taking the air on the narrow main deck, strolling from where I was sitting in a lounger to the forecastle and back again, his copy of Pushkin open in his hand but his attention riveted on the shoreline.
And with good reason. Stalin’s transgression against humanity—forcing peasants who survived the man-induced famine and the execution squads onto agricultural collectives—had uprooted masses of people and scattered them across what had become a wasteland. My husband and I had seen
traces of the calamity returning to Moscow from the Crimea—the trip that left an indelible mark on Mandelstam and turned him, for better or for worse, into a truth teller. Friends traveling south or east from Moscow reported coming across survivors searching desperately for a village to settle in or a plot of land to work, all the while trying to evade the squads of Chekists who were combing the countryside. Now, from the deck of our riverboat, we could see the detritus of collectivization camping at the edge of both banks of the river, clusters of lost souls huddled under tarpaulins stretched from branches over their heads, cartons and straw trunks piled around them, naked children playing in the shallow water while their parents cooked scraps of horsemeat, hacked from dead carcasses, on charcoal fires. And my befuddled best friend and husband, his brain awash with hallucinations of having visited me in a Lubyanka cell, of having encountered Stalin in the Kremlin, turned to me and, pointing a quivering finger at the shore, cried out, “See, Nadenka—the shortage is being divided amongst the peasants!”
To the eternal shame of Russia, he was right. What can one say about this episode after all these years? If, as Mandelstam insisted, Stalin knew what his Chekists were doing, he was surely condemned for eternity to the circle of hell where, as Dante tells us, the fires are so searing one could use molten glass to cool one’s body. If, as Pasternak suspected, Stalin didn’t know, he was guilty of not knowing what he should have known and will wind up in the same inferno.
At midafternoon Cherdyn loomed around a bend in the Kolva, sprawling over several hills, each surrounded by forest, the whole dominated by the bell tower of an enormous cathedral that had surely been converted by the Bolsheviks into a warehouse. Mandelstam stood on the bow, his palm on the rump of the naked sprit, watching as the steamer turned in the current and drifted down on the cement wharf piled high with bales and crates waiting to be transported back to civilization. Catching the heaving lines thrown by crewmen, stevedores dragged the heavy hawsers through the water and up onto bollards. When the ship was fast to the wharf and the gangway secured at midship, the three guards, carrying our possessions, escorted us to an open carriage drawn by a skeletal mare and followed along on foot behind as we slowly made our way through an enormous gate into the citadel at the center of the city. The commandant, an old cavalryman from the look of his high boots and flamboyant mustache, was hastily fastening the tarnished gold buttons of his tunic as we were led into his office. He sharpened the ends of his mustache with his fingers. “You will be the Mandelstams,” he said. “The telegram from Moscow failed to mention a first name or patronymic. Which one of you is the prisoner?”
The Stalin Epigram Page 21