Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  When he came, he looked grimmer than ever. He didn’t want to drink beer, so we ordered a bottle of blackish-red Romanian wine. He said to me: How well do you remember our national epic?

  The one that’s seven hundred years old, or the one we’re writing now? They’re the same. Do you remember how Siegfried bled anew in his coffin when the murderer passed by? That’s why I ordered the dark wine.

  An ancient German touch! I said to him. But blood is only blood. When Siegfried was killed, his wife wept tears of blood. What did that signify? The poet wrote it in to give us a hint of what’s coming. The intention must have been to unify past and future, but to me it’s a cheap touch, like your drinking wine to make a point. You don’t even like wine.

  I stand guilty! he replied with a laugh. But next time we meet at Bayreuth, I expect you to protest those gloomy leitmotivs in the Ring! Of course, then Verena Wagner won’t smile at you anymore . . .

  5

  When I think back on Operation Magic Fire, I seem to see Verena Wagner in her slim-waisted white dress (it was so white that it was really cotton-white, like a puff of antiaircraft smoke); she was pouring tea for her Uncle Wolf, who was our uncle, too (Meyers Lexikon, 1938: He is no dictator, suppressing the disenfranchised, but Führer of a believing people, who fully trust in him and enclose him in their utter love), her wrist displaying sequence and variation;17 and for some reason I also visualize that perfect antiaircraft light on the wall of swastika standards and on the long glittering rectangles of steel men; that was the Berlin Nazi rally of 1.5.36, half a year before Verena Wagner served Magic Fire’s tea; Franco remained a nothing then; even after Magic Fire had surrounded Spain, and the sleepwalker shut that case folder for good, life was almost the same; the British still believed in peace in our time! So had Siegfried’s wife.

  Magic Fire’s ambiguous, almost keyless chords have fooled many listeners. The tone color is red and orange; everything seems cheerful; as the Amis say, it’s only the hearth fires burning. Condor legionnaires sang round the campfire; Franco handed out medals from a little white-clothed table. Barbarossa beckoned; Verena Wagner wiggled her wrist enchantingly; she poured us a war whose various cases, maneuvers and operations would be as tight as the berets of the clean young men in our Condor Legion. And so the leitmotiv was vindicated. ‣

  AND I’D DRY MY SALTY HAIR

  And I’d dry my salty hair on a flat rock far from land.

  —Anna Akhmatova (1914)

  1

  On 23 August 1942, when Air Fleet Four’s Stukas and Ju-88s were bombing Stalingrad, our Komsomol members rallied to the assistance of citizens who came out between waves of planes to sort corpses and ruins. Whenever anyone recognized a body, the Komsomols instantly embraced him. This made a valid contribution to our defense; I’m not against using children where they’re needed. And the previous September, A. A. Akhmatova had spoken on the radio to extol the bravery of Leningrad’s women, who were already dying by the thousands. In light of her fame (the sole reason her punishment had been delayed), this broadcast must be considered the equivalent of ten Stalin tanks sent directly to the front. At least that’s what Comrade Zhdanov said to me. From my point of view, the correct thing to do would have been to erase her from the picture and then blame the Fascists. (A German shell landed; brown smoke rose up.) But nobody listens to me. I’m certainly willing to agree that a consistent policy is better than no policy, which is why we demanded that Shostakovich complete his Seventh Symphony, the one now known to the world as the “Leningrad.” This task he successfully fulfilled in December. Upon the personal recommendation of Comrade Zhdanov we’d even evacuated the bastard, and his family, too. Akhmatova got the same treatment. As Comrade Zhdanov remarked to me, we could deal with her later.

  She was said to be rather freakish, I mean exotic, in bed, probably on account of her well-known talent for hooking her leg behind her neck. What she did with A. Lourie you wouldn’t believe. Yet she was equally renowned for her coolly retiring politeness. Oh, ice wouldn’t have melted in her mouth! That’s why my job is so important; I expose those people! I’ve seen that drawing of her, the one we should have seized and sold abroad; those libertine Counts they still have in the West would have paid enough to endow an orphanage or a collective farm. Pyotr Alexeev has informed me that it’s her souvenir of a rose-strewn tryst with Modigliani in Paris shortly after her first marriage.

  We’ve obtained photographs of her various affairs. She used to be the biggest joke going at our office, a standing joke, said Pyotr Alexeev, and I won’t tell you what he meant. It’s untrue that she was nearsighted, but like most of these so-called “intellectuals,” she kept her precious head up her ass, or somebody else’s—you can’t imagine all the filthy things I’ve seen her do!—so it proved a simple enough business to keep an eye on her. I for my part enjoy more of a challenge. If I say so myself, I’m very adept at foiling the designs of sneaks. For instance, had he been left to me, Solzhenitsyn never could have smuggled his poisonous Gulag Archipelago to the other side. Once it fell into the hands of The New York Times, that so-called “history” did us incalculable harm. In time we’ll give him what Trotsky got.

  One thing I’ll say for Akhmatova: She cooperated with us, for the sake of her son. (One of her postwar odes runs: Where Stalin is, is freedom, / Earth’s grandeur, and peace! What a good little whore!) From our point of view she really did keep her nose clean—as clean as anyone can who sticks her nose up other people’s . . .—oh, the things I’ve seen!

  Ignorant people say that she founded a secret society of grief. Take it from me; that never happened. I’m in a position to say so. I know what that woman ate for breakfast for the past thirty years!

  I do grant that she had her admirers. The Seventh Northern Elegy is clever enough, for all its unwholesomeness. (To tell you the truth, literature bores me.) The first time I saw her, she was wearing one of her many necklaces, posing in profile, wrapped up in herself, with her eyes slyly half-closed.—Not bad! I said to Pyotr Alexeev.—Amidst the other poets of her time, she stood out as much as E. E. Konstantinovskaya would have if she’d been transported into one of Larionov’s paintings of pinkish-purple-fleshed, meaty-thighed dancers.

  The Trotskyite N. Punin, who admitted to drinking her urine and whom I myself personally arrested—you’ll like this part: We disposed of his predecessor Gumilyev on 25 August 1921, so when we took Punin away,18 in ’49, we waited until 26 August, just to keep her guessing!—liked to argue, and I’ve got his exact words somewhere, that art does not so much derive from life as actually change the perception and appreciation of it, casting itself across existence like a shadow. Unfortunately, he was correct. Derivative as she was, Akhmatova definitely made her mark—like a bitch in heat. It wasn’t just her perverted lovers; it was our Soviet culture that she pissed on.

  2

  Anna Akhmatova, née Gorenko, is best known for two poems, first and foremost the nasty “Requiem,” which attacks the “organs” of state security, and incidentally slanders our prison system. Shostakovich was among that literary effort’s admirers; I wish I had enough space to tell you a few things about that cocksucker. (On the other hand, he did make us laugh from time to time; I don’t mind telling you that my job has its compensations. In 1953 Akhmatova was trying to impress him with some drivel she’d written about his Seventh Symphony, and he thanked her in his usual insincere fashion, then went to the Hotel Sovietskaya and said to his then mistress, G. I. Ustvolskaya, ingenuously assuming the walls don’t have ears: Basically, I can’t bear having poetry written about my music.) Our line on that so-called “work of art” was this: Since she had the good sense not to make a cause out of it, why not let her live out her pathetic little life? We’d already isolated her. Shooting her might have lost us hard currency in the West. Since “Requiem” accuses us, and we already know ourselves, it’s of zero investigative interest.

  That leaves the “Poem Without a Hero,” whose publication I for my part have
always welcomed. Do you remember when Hitler staged that exhibition of degenerate art? Don’t get me wrong; every time I see a German I want to string him up by the balls; nonetheless, I’m man enough to say this straight: Hitler wasn’t incorrect in that instance. Now, “Poem Without a Hero” is as degenerate as anything the Nazis banned. It portrays the so-called “life” of a clique of a parasites and intellectuals in Leningrad before our Revolution. This was the Symbolist epoch, whose atmosphere N. Berdayev aptly characterizedas the putrefied air of a hothouse. My children even studied it in school (I had the teacher arrested). To me the main interest of the poem is this: All the characters are real, in which case have we identified all those bastards and sent them where they belong?

  3

  Once upon a time I found beauty, but beauty left me. I can’t say that I’m the worse for the experience, because it helped me appreciate that pallid, dreamy face, the dark eyes and dark bangs, the shadowy sensuality of Akhmatova. After the war her portrait hung in the Shostakoviches’ apartment in Moscow; I know why. That famous regality of hers, which so many found condescending, was a quality entirely lacking in Elena Konstantinovskaya, who was shy rather than retiring, sad instead of grave. Akhmatova’s calm was impregnable, thanks to the greatness which she knew herself to possess, or be possessed by; Konstantinovskaya’s was a leaden defensive mask. Both women proved extraordinarily selfish in love; but in Akhmatova’s case we can speak of a higher fidelity to the Muse; in Konstantinovskaya’s, of an irremediable disappointment. In 1934 she sent Shostakovich a one-line note in a cipher all her own, with the attached invitation: Whoever translates this gets to keep me. I don’t mind informing you that we opened this communication and did our best to decode it; we failed. (Pyotr Alexeev wanted to get her for that, but I was magnanimous; I said: Hands off!) The point is that there was, self-evidently, a key to Konstantinovskaya’s inner world, and one other person had it. He allowed the key to fall from his hand; he said to himself: What a, a, I mean, what an error I’ve committed! Oh, my God, Lyalka; oh, my God . . .—As for him, he had his own world beneath the piano keys. He was engaged in what it’s now fashionable to call inner emigration. At my office we don’t much care for that term, and I’ll tell you why: Hindemith, von Karajan and Furtwängler make music for the Hitlerites, and then, when it’s all over, they have the effrontery to plead: Word of honor, I wasn’t really here! I couldn’t possibly have collaborated, since I was living in my head the entire time!—You know what I say to that? I say: Give ’em eight grams! And if you don’t know what that means, believe me, you’re better off.

  Now, what about Akhmatova? In a sense, everybody who could read Russian was invited into her inner world. It’s true that many of her most so-called “personal” lyrics remained unpublished in her lifetime, but in our Soviet Union we don’t give a shit about individualism anyhow. The half-belligerent, half-adoring mockeries by that suicide to be, Mayakovsky, expressed true love, of course, based on an intimate knowlege acquired only through words: icons and ivy, private kisses, ambiguous embraces behind the shutters of old Saint Petersburg. Mayakovsky dreamed of her, to be sure; once I watched him stalk her through the pavilions of the Tauride Garden; but all he got from her was a yellow dress in summer, blue snow in winter, you know, that kind of thing, which any other also gets—talk about promiscuity! Pyotr Alexeev, who although he’ll never admit it is still in love with her, insists that every time he rereads “At the Seashore” he inhales the lilac fragrance of Akhmatova’s braids. He, Mayakovsky and dozens more—what’s wrong with our Russian men?

  Shostakovich’s inner world was a bunker in which he lived under constant attack. I have a blueprint of it right here. The fact that at any moment one of their eighty-eights or one of our special detachments was going to break through couldn’t help but influence the character of his surroundings.

  Konstantinovskaya’s world was a walled garden with a dead fountain within. Once the fountain had jetted into the air, and the trees had borne flowers and fruit—only once. After 1935, what grew there but rubble and mummies? Well, but the reason why I admire her is that unlike Akhmatova, she made no career out of feeling sorry for herself. Good girl! That Order of the Red Star she got, why shouldn’t I inform you that I had something to do with it?

  But Akhmatova’s world was the semipublic one of Tsarkoe Selo. In the early years of my assignment, trailing her meant promenading along the long, pale-pillared coast of the Catherine Palace. It used to keep me in shape. As a rule, those scum force us to sit in a chair all day listening in on them, so I can’t say I hated Akhmatova. In fact, one time I told her that I was considering reading Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman.” I asked for advice. Was it really worth my while? I wanted to know. And in that same uninflected voice in which she recited her poetry on demand, she assured me that it would be a waste of my time. I’ll always be grateful to her for that, because I’m a busy man.

  Sometimes she took me to the Garden of the Toilers on Uritzky Square, where I could inhale a little sunshine. I’m considered excellent at what I do; she never saw me even when she turned on me that smooth cool face like an enamel icon. For a time the Engineering Academy of the Red Army on Ulitsa Rakova, which she persisted in calling Italyanskaya, was also a favorite destination of hers. I didn’t mind that; I know a lot of engineers.

  Where do you think she was when the February Revolution broke out? At one of Meyerhold’s dress rehearsals! It’s true that we did see her gliding from barricade to barricade, but not to participate in our struggle, only to do what poets do: play with fire. And what was she doing when we seized power in the October Revolution? Standing on the Liteiny Bridge. Where might she have been in 1936 when the white-clad Stakhanovite workers came marching toward us on Red Square, with the gigantic white image of Comrade Stalin stretching out his arm toward them from atop his column while R. L. Karmen filmed everything? Where do you think? She was in a certain tree-alley by the Vittolovsky Canal.

  That’s why it hurts me when ignorant people claim that we “isolated her.” In 1918, when she divorced Gumilyev and entered into that so-called “marriage” with V. Shileiko (I’ve seen the block warden’s book, and I can assure you that their union was never properly registered), the happy couple withdrew into the icy labyrinth of the Sheremetev Palace, which always reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of the Snow Queen: walls of ice, frozen puzzle-pieces, silence, deadness, and a woman with an ice-cold kiss! (Don’t tell me I’m not poetic.) Meanwhile, I took note of a black ring worn around a departing lover’s neck, a poem about weeping, a poem about white crosses. But that’s not the point. What caused us concern is that after we’d arrested those snakes who dared to vote against Soviet power at the Constituent Assembly, we found Akhmatova rallying enemies of the people with a poem entitled “Your Spirit Is Clouded with Arrogance.”

  4

  When she was still young and beautiful enough to write that the past’s power can fail, she mourned unkissed lips. When our Revolution proved that the past can in fact be broken, what then? Unkissed lips returned to hang eternally over her in the yellow fog over Leningrad. I’ve seen her linger by a pale archway ornamented with bearded heads; she spent an hour there; my toes were getting cold, I can tell you. She gazed at each effigy as if it were someone she’d loved. Well, with her anything was possible. Unkissed lips! When we were supposed to be building socialism! Each mouth was a noose—oh, she hanged herself a thousand times! But from the beginning she celebrated her mourning in colored icons of words. She needed to doom herself within those opened lips. I’ve uncovered a term for that behavior: sexual asphyxia! Just as the reflections of railings get broken up by ripples, then begin to heal themselves, never finishing, so her pain of love and life pulsated in and out of exaltation.

  A kiss, then mourning for a kiss—to know both, one must experience love’s end. One summer night in 1935 while Shostakovich lay in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms, whose arms did Akhmatova rest in? No one’s. She lay down in th
e wet grass, gazing at the Chinese Pavilion’s crown. I was there; I saw how her cold lips trembled. Shostakovich found salvation within the curtain of Elena’s hair. Akhmatova haunted herself with swans and dead water.

  By then she’d begun to learn that even greater than the power of the absent lover is our power, Soviet power! We were going to plait her braids more tightly for her . . .

  I’ve seen her at Gumilyev’s shoulder, gazing away at right angles to him; he wears a rose above his heart, oak-leaves on chest and sleeve; a sword of moonlight fails to cut deeply the black water behind them; statues spy on them from behind the trees. I have every reason to conclude that at that moment he was dreaming about his own Elena, to whom he gave the name “Blue Star.”

  In those years it was still believed at my office that her sensibility resembled some rainbow-colored clock whose hands were church-towers creaking round and round Petersburg for the very last time, before we stopped that clock. Nobody could have imagined “Requiem”; we associated her with “At the Seashore.”

  5

  Then, thanks in part to her unhappy marriage, and also to her native disposition, she began to more than express her suffering; in typical Russian fashion she treasured it! Her Muse no longer reassured her: Your happiness will be guarded by the statues in the Summer Garden. That was all the same to Akhmatova. Since her suffering was strong, if she could only allow it to define her, why couldn’t she be indomitable? As early as 1915, N. Nedobrovo noted her calmness in confessing pain and weakness.19 By then, Marina Tsvetaeva was already writing love-poems to her. In 1916 a lover whom I have identified as B. Anrep caused her a highly specific agony which shone within her like a white stone in a well. (When it came to grieving, she was far superior to Shostakovich, who jittered and went to pieces.) Then Shileiko caused her sorrow in the Sheremetev Palace, and more sadness in the Marble Palace; that was how she passed her time. Petersburg became Petrograd, then Leningrad; it starved and rotted all around her. The shiny dark lips of A. Lourie, the affected gestures of O. Glebova-Sudeikina, the droopy eyelids of that so-called “poet” Kuzmin, that entire pallid rabble of aesthetes at the Stray Dog Cabaret, one by one we made them all irrelevant.