The Mayakovsky Tapes

by Robert Littell

  “And you, Vladimir, do you love me?”

  “Dumb question,” he replied. “Anyone can see that I am madly in love with you.”

  “In that case, put your hand where your heart would be if you had a heart and swear eternal fidelity,” I instructed him.

  He only laughed. “Fidelity, whether punctual or eternal, has absolutely nothing to do with love.”

  Oh, I recall shrugging my shoulders in punctual frustration. “You are a self-obsessed man, Vladimir Vladimirovich, too accustomed to having your way with women.”

  “You are a difficult woman to court, Tatiana Yakovleva,” he retorted.

  “I am a difficult woman to seduce,” I corrected him.

  Blinded by the sun, he sat quietly for a bit. Just when I thought the conversation had run its course he startled me by asking: “What is it about intercourse that terrifies you?” Irritated by my failure to immediately respond, he blurted out, “Your silence is earsplitting. Answer, for Christ’s sake, so I can understand my question.”

  The sun on my face, believe it or not, gave me a measure of consolation—I felt I was not alone in standing up to this tempest of a poet. “I worry that intimacy will result in the squandering of what little mystery I hold for a man and, with mystery gone, I fear to be discarded.”

  The Poet turned on me savagely. “You are lying to yourself, Tanik. You dread intimacy and fashion reasons to explain away this dread, as if virginity was an intellectual exercise.”

  “Surely dread is an overstrong word, Vladimir, don’t you think?” Undeterred by my quibble, he forged ahead. “It is suddenly very clear to me. How the hell could I have missed it? You dread intimacy because you live in fear of reciprocity. You will have to give as well as take. There are a thousand ways to make love—I would expect you to explore them all, with me as your guide. Is that why you hesitate?”

  Lilya: Speaking as an aficionada of reciprocity, I can say he may have been on to something—the ritual of reciprocity is a precondition of any good relationship. But did you understand what his thousand ways to make love described, Tatiana?

  Tatiana: I understood him to mean … No … No … To answer honestly, I didn’t completely understand.

  Lilya: He would have expected you to make love with other men while he made love to other women. He would have expected you love women as well as men. He would have wanted to watch, and if not watch, at least listen. He would have expected you to swallow more than your pride—

  Elly: For God’s sake, Lilya!

  Tatiana: It’s all right, Elly. Believe it or not, I welcome her bluntness. Coming from you, Lilya, it is refreshing, even if the intention behind your bluntness is to fluster me. Consider me flustered.… If what you’re saying is I was ill-suited to be muse to the Poet, you may be right. Maybe we were all ill-suited, each in a different way.… I am as ready as the next woman to swallow my pride for the man I love. But not more than my pride. To my credit, I told him as much, there in the Tuileries Garden, with our eyes tight shut and our faces feverish from the sun’s hotness.

  “You win,” I remember him murmuring in exasperation. “I have avoided marriage up to now but I will break my rule and marry you.”

  “If that’s a proposition of marriage, I should remind you that you already proposed to me. And on bended knee. It was the evening of the day we met. I laughingly told you I would think about it. I’m no longer laughing, dear Vladimir, but I am still thinking about it.”

  “You don’t say yes!” he complained bitterly.

  “Take a measure of encouragement from the fact that I don’t say no,” I retorted. I seem to remember nailing him to the cross with: “Listen, Vladimir, marrying a rain cloud in trousers is not something to be undertaken lightly.”

  Lilya: Well, well, rain cloud in trousers is a suitable metaphor, even if it originates with little Miss Innocent here. Volodya was more morose than any of you imagined. He could sulk for days if you so much as frowned at him, his mood could turn pitch-black if you denied him something he took for his due. I remember a roaring fight we had one winter night, it must have been in the very early twenties because Lenin was still alive. In any case it was early in our ménage à trois; yes, yes, all right, early in our ménage à deux if it makes you feel more confortable. One night, beside himself with irritation after a meeting of the Party’s cultural tsars—they’d been debating how to adapt Lenin’s two steps forward, one step back to literature; Volodya had argued, in vain, for a one step forward, no step back stratagem—he returned to our flat in the early hours of the morning, his breath rank with alcohol, and as usual he wanted to drown his anger in eroticism. Oh hell, I may as well come right out with it: He not only wanted to make love but he wanted to do it in a manner he had several times suggested but I had not agreed to. I said no. At which point he exploded, accusing me—me, of all people!—of being a bourgeois prude, shouting that it made no difference into which orifice he inserted his penis, the result would be the same. Osip came to see what was the matter but retreated to the safety of his alcove under the tongue lashing of the Poet. And then, suddenly, as if he had been doused with ice water, Mayakovsky turned cold sober. He went off to shower and came back, it was three in the morning mind you, wearing fresh clothing, dark trousers, a clean white shirt, a brand-new cardboard collar, a cravat even. And he produced, from where I don’t know, an enormous naval infantry revolver, it looked like a cannon to me, and without a word, right in front of my eyes as if every meticulous gesture was intended as punishment for my having denied him what his heart desired, he proceeded to load a single bullet into the cylinder and lock it closed and spin it and then, looking me in the eye with the unblinking stare of a madman, he pressed the barrel of the revolver to his heart and pulled the trigger. I almost died on the spot when I heard the firing pin click onto an empty chamber and it took me an eternity of seconds before I realized the revolver hadn’t detonated, hadn’t sent a bullet through his clean shirt into his heart and snuffed out his life. I was barely able to breathe. I remember shrieking, “Why? For God’s sake, there needs to be a why.” Oh my God, if I close my eyes I can still see him, the cannon of a revolver dangling from his trigger finger, his head pitched to one side in bafflement, his eyes fixed on me in an unblinking stare. He was clearly stunned by the risk he had run, and just as clearly oblivious to my discomfort. “Why not?” were the only words he could bring himself to utter. I seem to remember him walking around in a euphoric daze for days afterward, wondering, when he wound up somewhere, how it was that he couldn’t remember the getting there.

  Tatiana: You’re making it up. She’s making it up, isn’t she?

  Nora: I fear she is not. She is describing the Mayakovsky I knew and loved and loathed. He pulled the same stunt on me when he commended me to the tender loving care of Comrade Government.

  Elly: But his why not doesn’t begin to respond to your why, Lilya. What could bring the poet to murder himself? Surely there is more to it than a meeting of the Party’s cultural tsars or your refusing to indulge one of his many erotic fantasies.

  Lilya: Yes, yes, there had to be more to it. I still go to bed at night repeating my why and straining to catch something more than his absurd why not.

  Nora: And what do you hear besides your own conscience apportioning to you a share of the responsibility?

  Lilya: I shall rise above your insinuation, Nora. The fact is, to describe Mayakovsky as merely moody doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the Poet’s persona. Emotionally speaking, he was forever riding those hills of ice our Catherine the Great erected near Saint Petersburg, what the Americans christened roller coaster and the world still knows as Russian Mountains. His rages could burst like one of the summer squalls that materialize out of nowhere and just as suddenly vanish before the rain disgorged by the cloud reaches the ground. One day the Poet would wake up absolutely euphoric because of a particularly serviceable erection or an original metaphor that he had scribbled into his Day Book during the night and
discovered when he opened his eyes in the morning. At other times he was so despondent he had to be pried out of bed. He could be depressed by the Russian winter, it didn’t matter that it had, as Osip pointed out, defeated Napoléon; it didn’t matter, as I took pleasure in pointing out, that the rats nesting in the mounds of uncollected garbage died of frostbite when the temperature plunged to minus thirty. He could go into a funk because it was colder inside our flat than outside and then become inconsolable because the carpets we’d draped across the windows to stop drafts were blotting out his precious few hours of sunlight. His bad temper would erupt because the tap water was so putrid he had to boil it before drinking; having to scavenge for coal or firewood or broken boxes and, when he found something to burn, sacrificing yet another of his books to light the oven only prolonged the tantrum. He could be depressed by the shortage of Turkish cigarettes, or if he had Turkish cigarettes, by the shortage of matches. His running quarrel with the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment over the official Bolshevik cultural line could reduce him to tears of frustration. But there’s more to the Russian roulette story: Mayakovsky brooded for weeks after the execution of Akhmatova’s first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev—he’d been taken to a forest and shot, along with sixty others, all of them accused of being members of a nonexistent monarchist conspiracy. Christ Almighty, I recollect our heartache when we discovered that Akhmatova had appealed directly to Lenin for clemency but, by the time Lenin agreed to pardon Gumilev, he’d already been shot. Do you remember the bleak poem Akhmatova wrote when she learned of the execution? She recited it from memory the day several of us—the Mandelshtams, Mayakovsky, Osya, and I—went to pay our respects and console her. She’d been separated from her husband for years but she was inconsolable.

  Terror tickles my neck in the night,

  Condemns a moonbeam to the executioner’s axe.

  Catching sound of a thrumming in the wall,

  I imagine a ghost, a thief, a rat.

  Elly: Terror tickles my neck in the night is the story of our several lives.

  Lilya: Looking back, I think what disheartened Mayakovsky—the episode that plunged him into a yawning pit of depression, that certainly contributed to that first episode of Russian roulette—was the Kronstadt massacre. It was a frightful affair: In 1921 the Bolsheviks were just emerging victorious from a brutal Civil War when the sailors from the first and second squadrons of the Baltic Fleet—who, you’ll surely remember, had marched on the Winter Palace in 1917 chanting Mayakovsky’s silly slogan: Eat quail, drink rye, your last day is nigh, bourgeois!—mutinied against the Revolution they had ignited. From Kronstadt, their naval base near Petrograd, they demanded freedom of speech, freedom of the press, they demanded the liberation of political prisoners. Ha! The sailors, obviously not convinced that Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat was the solution to Russia’s problems, elected a new Kronstadt Soviet without a single Communist member. Trotsky—who in 1917 had called the Kronstadt sailors the pride and glory of the Revolution—crushed the mutiny with a ruthless artillery barrage. Survivors who escaped to Finland described the streets of Kronstadt strewn with corpses. There were rumors of mass arrests, of thousands of summary executions. It wasn’t lost on Mayakovsky that Trotsky and his Bolshevik comrades had slaughtered the Kronstadt sailors on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune uprising, an event that had inspired millions of revolutionists. Yes, yes, the more I think about it, the more I’m persuaded Kronstadt planted the first ugly seed of doubt in the wildly imaginative lobe of the Poet’s brain. Kronstadt gave him the first inkling that that lovely little revolution of his had lost its way. Look, in a manner of speaking every generation of socialists had its Kronstadt: Some parted company with the Bolsheviks over Lenin’s ordering Red Terror against his enemies during the Civil War; others over his New Economic Policy with its two steps forward, one step back concession to the capitalists; still others over the rise of the rude Georgian bank robber Iosif Dzhugashvili, alias Iosif Stalin, to the pinnacle of the Soviet pyramid. But Mayakovsky’s Kronstadt was Kronstadt.

  Nora: And what was your Kronstadt, Lilya?

  Lilya: Ahhhh. Uncomfortable question. My Kronstadt was nothing as lofty as Mayakovsky’s. In terms of our ménage à deux, my Kronstadt was Alexander Mikhailovich Krasnoshchokov—

  Nora: The big-wheel lover of yours who was arrested and sent to Siberia!

  Lilya: You seem to know a great deal about my lovers. Well, I have nothing to be ashamed of. Alexander had been a big shot in the Far Eastern Republic. When he returned to Moscow, I think it must have been in the summer of 1922, he was appointed president of the Industrial Bank and Deputy Commissar for Financial Affairs. Our liaison began inauspiciously enough. Osip, who made a point of cultivating contacts in the superstructure, brought Alexander round to our weekly poker game. One thing led to another. What started as an unthreatening one-night stand turned into a vaguely threatening casual affair, the casual affair gradually grew into a very threatening love affair. Not incidentally, Mayakovsky and I were going through a rough patch in our relationship at the time. We both felt we had come to resemble caged birds and could use a breath of fresh air, a period outside the cage and away from each other. Volodya moved into his writing studio and I moved in with Alexander. (Poor Osip was left to fend for himself—though not for long; in a matter of days one of his several paramours, Yevgeniya Zhemchuzhnaya, the wife of the film director Vitaly Zhemchuzhny, turned up from Petrograd and having no roof over her poor head in Moscow, moved in with him.) We’d both had the occasional affair, Volodya and I. At the time he was having a fling with Natalya Bryukhanenko—did any of you ladies by chance know her?—a thin and to my mind mousy young damsel in some sort of distress who worked for the State Publishing House. She had an agreeable sense of humor, I’ll give her that. She’d been married but would explain, in as dry a tone as she could muster, that she had lost her husband, by which she meant that they’d been shopping on different floors of the GUM emporium on Red Square—they were supposed to meet at noon at the information desk on the ground floor inside the main entrance, but he never showed up. She claimed to have waited a full twenty minutes before rushing off for lunch with Mayakovsky. She never saw her husband again, she would say, a thin smile playing on her thin lips. You do see the humor, ladies: When she said she’d lost her husband, she meant she’d lost him as in she couldn’t find him and had quickly given up looking. Funny or not, she must have been good in bed because the Poet seemed vaguely smitten. Still, when he grasped how involved I was with Alexander, he took the liaison badly. He bombarded me with books he decided I should be reading, with bouquets of wild orchids I should be smelling, with bitter-sweet love letters I should be shedding tears over inasmuch as they revealed how inconsolable he was at the thought of permanently losing me, of not having me there to cushion his agony at growing older. Where he used to wear his anger on his sleeve, he now wore his agony. “You are either someone else’s or you are mine,” I remember him ranting in one letter. “You can’t have it both ways!” With hindsight, I confess I would have liked to have it both ways: to have Alexander in my bed during the week and my beloved soul mate Mayakovsky to fall back on weekends.

  Tatiana: You wanted to have your cake and eat it.

  Lilya:… Have my cake and eat it! Oh my dears, I do fear we have had a wicked influence on our resident Virgin Queen. How else can one explain her very sexual rendering of an inoffensive cliché?

  Tatiana: I support teasing as well as the next person, Lilya Yuryevna. But holy mother of Christ, enough is enough! I thought we were meeting to draw a portrait of the Poet for posterity, not to slight one another at every opportunity. Each time I open my mouth, you cannot resist distorting what I say—

  Elly: She’s right, you know. You go too far—

  Lilya: In my defense, I had supposed, incorrectly as it turns out, that our precious Tatiana, living as she does in New York, remarried as she is to the Israelite artist Liberman, would ap
preciate conversation spiced with sauce piquant. All right, all right, mea maxima culpa. As my little pleasantry makes her squirm, I retract the insinuation: Having one’s cake and eating it is not a euphemism for fellatio. Obviously I attributed to Tatiana—who wears her virtue on the sleeve of her exquisite Chanel—a sense of humor with which she is not equipped. For the record, then: If by some stretch of the imagination vulgarity can be distilled from the inoffensive cliché, it originates, not in the ear of the auditor, but in the ear of the raconteur. In this case, me. So: Accept my apology, Tatiana Yakovleva, and let us blunder on. Where was I? Yes, yes, I was telling you about my lover Alexander. I dare say he was handsome enough in a roguish sort of way. But he had other things to recommend him. He had a big flat all to himself on the hills overlooking Moscow; until the Revolution a grand duke who was uncle to the Tsar had lived in it. Alexander had a car and a driver and coupons that permitted him to dine in hotel restaurants normally reserved for foreigners. He knew—or pretended to know—how to order French wine and send the bottle back if it tasted of cork. He was a reasonably competent lover and couldn’t thank me sufficiently when I whetted his appetite for the main course with certain erotic hors d’oeuvres that he had up to then only fantasized about. What can I say? He courted me. I love to be courted. Who in this room doesn’t? He made me feel like the bird that had escaped the cage. Unlike Mayakovsky, Alexander didn’t treat me as if I were made of putty—he made no effort to mold me into the submissive female that populates the male fantasy. For my part, I admit to a certain satisfaction at having been able to seduce him—which is to say, at still being, at the ripe age of thirty-three, seductive. It calmed my nerves, which had become exposed and raw in the near past. Dear God, we have managed to transform this hotel room into some sort of confessional! The only thing missing is the Orthodox priest. Perhaps that accounts for R. Litzky’s presence here. Are you by any chance an Orthodox priest, Gospodin Litzky?