The Mayakovsky Tapes

by Robert Littell

  Elly: (in English) Lilya asks if you’re a priest.

  Litzky: (in English, laughing) With a name like Litzky? She’s got to be kidding. If I’m anything, I’m an Orthodox rabbi.

  Elly: (in Russian, to Lilya) He’s Jewish.

  Lilya: Well, some of my best lovers have been Jewish. Where was I?

  Nora: You were telling us about being this decrepit geriatric of thirty-three who was still able to seduce a Deputy Commissar.

  Lilya: Yes. Thank you, Nora. What would I do without you, disadvantaged, as I am, by chronic absentmindedness? Alexander: The affair ended abruptly, I’m sorry to say, when the poor man was arrested on trumped-up charges and sentenced to a tenner in a Siberian prison camp. But with Alexander out of the picture and Volodya reinstated in his old room, the birdcage metaphor returned to haunt us. We were growing apart and this … this raw reality—along with the onset of a premature ovarian insufficiency, which I attributed to the tension in our couple—left me ill-tempered. The Poet and my Osya were, as usual, oblivious to my moodiness. The two of them would get up ahead of me, brew coffee, and, as if I didn’t exist, have long whispered literary conversations over breakfast. Before Mayakovsky went off to a meeting with an editor or a poetry reading or a tryst with a new conquest, he would always lean down to plant a kiss on my husband’s head. As it was invariably done in the narrow confines of the hallway, Osya jokingly identified it as a rite of passage. “I kiss your little bald spot in the hope it will make your hair grow,” Mayakovsky would announce teasingly. It was the comedy of repetition—he’d repeated the gesture and the words so many times they had lost any vestige of humor, but the three of us would laugh as if we were hearing it for the first time. Relationships, like tires on an automobile, wear thin when they’ve been on the road too long. Isn’t that your experience, ladies? Oh, we still made love occasionally, the Poet and I, but I could feel his, and my, lust waning. We quarreled more, the quarrels made worse by my no longer being quite so ready to swallow my pride. During one such spat he dredged up a line from an old poem, likening my rouged lips to a monastery hacked from frigid rock. Can you imagine anything more inappropriate? My lips hacked from frigid rock! Obviously the Poet had not mislaid his genius for cutting to the bone even when the incision drew blood. I will confess it is a wound that has not mended, but that’s another story. Where was I? Yes, in 1924, the year of Alexander’s arrest, I wound up spending three months abroad—I visited my sister, Elsa, who had moved to Paris and married a French officer, André Triolet—while Mayakovsky roamed the country reading his verse in drafty factories. I have heard it said of him that he read poetry like a sailor shouting through a megaphone on a windy day. He gave so many shouted recitals—I have a shoebox somewhere filled with postal cards canceled from Novocherkassk, Vinnytsa, Kharkov, Rostov, Tiflis, Kazan, Tula, Voronezh, Yalta, Eupatoria, Vyatka, Ufa—he lost his voice and wound up having semiliterate factory foremen read out his poems for him. Our paths finally crossed in Berlin but it was apparent to both of us that the flame wasn’t burning as brightly as it had. Oh, Lord knows I loved him still, but not with the passion of our first months and years. And it seemed to me that he loved me but with diminished appetite. I suspected he was going through the motions and might well avoid his fits of depression if we saw less of one another. I suppose you could say I gave him an ultimatum. We would remain close friends, the three of us, on condition each would be free to live life as we pleased. To seal the bargain and mark the occasion, he composed his “Jubilee Year,” which pretty much summed up where we were at.

  Where we were at was against a brick wall. Do you know the poem, set out on the page in a way that suggests the Poet spoke the words while descending a ladder?

  Now

  I’m

  free

  of love

  Elly: He may have been free of love but I know from personal experience he wasn’t free of you.

  Lilya: What exactly do you imply?

  Elly: I’m not implying, Lilya Yuryevna. I’m coming right out and saying it: You had your hooks into him, you and Osip. Your museship, as you called it, was still functioning after your love life withered on the vine.

  Lilya: If you’re suggesting that my museship continued to inspire wondrous poetry, I couldn’t agree more.

  Tatiana: Did he take your ultimatum in stride?

  Lilya: —

  Tatiana: Are you all right? Is she all right?

  Lilya: Give me a moment.… Yes, yes, he took my ultimatum as inspiration—

  Tatiana: Inspiration for a poem?

  Lilya: Inspiration for … for another of those crazy episodes of Russian roulette. He tried again to murder himself, though thank God he had the decency not to do it in front of my eyes like the last time.

  Tatiana: Oh!

  Lilya: He’d been sulking in his room for days, only occasionally coming out to nibble on some cheese and stale bread in the larder. Osip and I were beginning to worry, though neither of us wanted to put our distress into words for fear once we pronounced it, the thing we feared would come to pass. Then, late one night, it did. We were startled by the sound of an explosion coming from Mayakovsky’s room. Osip burst from his alcove. The both of us almost collided as we ran to Mayakovsky’s door. We stood in front of it gawping at each other, Osip and I, in mortal dread of what we would discover inside if we opened it. What was unsaid was the hope against hope that if we didn’t witness it, didn’t witness his body splayed into an awkward position on the wooden floor, legs and arms askew, head off to one side, eyes wide open and sightless, if we didn’t witness thick blood oozing from a dark hole in his white shirt, it had not happened. If nobody is around to witness a tree falling in a forest, it doesn’t make a sound when it strikes the ground, does it? Osip, more courageous than me, finally took it upon himself to push open the door with the tip of his slipper. Mayakovsky was standing in the middle of his room, dressed—as in the previous roulette episode—in an immaculate white shirt, a brand-new cardboard collar, a cravat even, the cannon of a revolver dangling from his trigger finger, a trace of gunpowder smoke seeping from the barrel, a sly smile frozen onto his bloodless lips. Dear God in heaven, he was staring up at the ceiling, at the small hole out of which trickled fine white plaster powder. Drunk on adrenaline secreted by fear, he started ranting at Osip, as if he was responsible for the hole in the ceiling. “Your problem is you suffer from terminal certitude,” he cried. “In the gospel according to Brik, you can dine with the devil as long as you use a long spoon, appetite comes with eating, adversity is the best teacher, every cloud has a silver lining, if the shoe fits Cinderella will find her Prince. I suffer from terminal uncertainty. Everything I know I doubt.” And with tears streaming down his cheeks he began improvising a little ditty.

  What was wrong

  with Cinderella’s feet

  that her Goddamn shoe

  didn’t fit another girl

  in the entire kingdom?

  Tatiana: He never made mention of Russian roulette when I knew him in Paris. But what happened?

  Lilya: To this day I’m not sure. Did he load the revolver and make sure the bullet was under the firing pin and hold it to his heart, only to lose his nerve at the last instant and fire at the ceiling? Or had he simply gone through with the business of Russian roulette, spinning the cylinder and, holding the revolver to his shirtfront, pulled the trigger on an empty chamber and then fired into the ceiling for the pleasure of seeing the terror on our faces when Osip and I burst into the room? Your guess is as good as mine. I’m afraid rage got the best of me and, between my sobs of relief, between my gasps for breath, I blew up. “Blackmailer,” I remember screaming. “Too bad your Goddamn revolver didn’t shoot a bullet into your heartless heart. That would have, at the same instant, put an end to your life and our terror of you ending your life.” Osip tried to restrain me but my furor was not to be denied. “Go ahead, you son of a bitch, load another bullet into it and try again. Your muse can’t commit suicide fo
r you—you have to work up the nerve to do it yourself.”

  Christ almighty, does the young man’s infernal dictaphone pick up my heavy breathing? I’m all right, I’m all right—I just have to catch my breath.

  Elly: (in English, to Litzky) How about we take a short break.

  Lilya: No, no, keep the damn machine of yours running, Litzky. I need to get past this. I need to put it behind me. Where was I? One of the neighbors must have heard the shot and called the militia because two officers turned up asking about a revolver going off in the building. But Mayakovsky was a Soviet celebrity and the last thing they wanted to do was arrest a celebrity. You never knew whom he might know in the superstructure, at which point the ones who would be in trouble would be the arrester, not the arrestee. The Poet, by then so calm you would have thought the militia had intruded on one of our weekly poker games, explained that he’d been cleaning his revolver—for which he produced a permit—without knowing it was loaded, and it had gone off accidentally. The explanation plus a forty new-ruble bill did the trick and the officers left without making a fuss. Osip produced a bottle of Bulgarian cognac and the three of us pulled chairs up to his writing desk, almost as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, to drink ourselves into a stupor. This time it was Osip who put the question. “Why?” he whispered. And Mayakovsky, as if reading from a script he’d written for one of his short films, fastened his eyes on mine and delivered his line of dialogue. “Why not?”

  Elly: But did the Poet never move beyond his nonsensical why not?

  Lilya: We turned around the subject for weeks before I finally managed to get him to identify the demons that drove him to play Russian roulette. We’d polished off a bottle of Polish vodka one night, Osip had gone off to meet a newly minted female protégé at the Writers’ Union, it had snowed all day, dampening the footfalls of people hurrying home in the street below our window. In the absence of the usual city sounds, the silence was deafening. As nearly as I can remember, Mayakovsky said something along the lines of: “If I blamed it on the malevolent Russian demon Chort, with his pig’s face and bull’s horns, if I tell you he took possession of my brain and my trigger finger, would you believe me?” My despondent grimace will have conveyed my response to what I thought of then as a ridiculous question: No. He snickered. “You know how I love to gamble,” he finally said. “It’s one thing to bet on the turn of a card, on the heads or tails of a coin, on which of our many guests will be the first to arrive at our Tuesday literary soirees. But if you’re betting your own life, the game takes on another dimension. When I pull the trigger and discover that I’m still alive, it wipes the slate clean. Fate has passed up the opportunity to end my life and its attendant tribulations. The things that have haunted me suddenly seem inconsequential. I feel rejuvenated. I feel as if I have been authorized to begin life over again.”

  Elly: Surely you didn’t buy into this silly, not to say adolescent, romanticization of his?

  Lilya: You are a shrewd observer of the human condition, Elly. There was Kronstadt, of course—his Kronstadt and my Kronstadt. There was his melancholy over the difficulty of finding an audience for his poetry amongst the younger generation here in Russia. There was his running skirmish with our malevolent cultural tsars in the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, who—out of envy-inspired spite, surely; how else to explain their venomous hostility?—seemed to take personal pleasure in disparaging his plays and poetry and films. But it seems obvious, to me at least, that one should also see the Russian roulette episodes in the context of the interminable rivalry between him and me; and if I’m right, if it was because of this rivalry, how much of what he did was designed to punish me for my occasional trysts or my affair with Alexander, and how much was attributable to his frustration that I was unable to love him as much as he loved me. He was, to put a fine point on it, brokenhearted and inconsolable. God knows I loved him as much as I could. Naturally, I was flattered to be the Poet’s muse, but there were limits to my museship that irritated him. I remember once he erupted in a lava flow of words. It was a year or two after Alexander’s arrest, we were quarreling bitterly over one of my more inconsequential assignations, this one with the filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. Surely you ladies have heard of Kuleshov—he pretty much invented the art of motion picture editing, but that’s another story. Mayakovsky’s grievance sticks in my mind. He said, as near as I can remember, that he was in love with life but life was not in love with him.

  Elly: How like you, Lilya, to pull the blanket to your side of the bed, to think your failure to love him as much as he supposedly loved you explains temporary insanity. For make no mistake, attempted self-murder, which is what Russian roulette amounts to, must be seen as an instance of temporary insanity. You need to dig deeper than the petering out of your love affair with the Poet, whom you described as being inconsolable. You surely won’t find the truth congenial—

  Lilya: And what truth wouldn’t I find congenial?

  Elly: The truth that he was obviously consolable. I consoled him when he showed up in the United States of North America. Tanik consoled him in Paris. Nora here consoled him in Moscow when he couldn’t get back to the comfortable consolation he found in Paris. Any idiot can see that Mayakovsky’s attempt at self-murder was more complex than your shameless attempt at self-promotion would suggest. He once confessed to me that he had turned to poetry—he had become a poet—to cough up the lump from his throat, which he identified as mortality. He told me something else, something that frightened me at the time: He claimed to be convinced that everyone had a foreordained lifeline. “I am reaching the end of mine,” he insisted. “I feel it in a numbness in my left thumb and a tingling in the big toe of my right foot, in the tastelessness of the cigarettes I smoke and the food I eat, in a dizziness when I look up at tall buildings, at my breathlessness when I climb the four floors to my writing workspace.” Oh, I recall his sudden annoyance when he detected my skepticism, I can hear his words in my ear: “Your smile does you no credit, Elisabeta Petrovna. How can you doubt me when I confide something as important as this. I feel the end of my lifeline in my solar plexus, in my intestines, in my bowels. I would have liked to live long enough to see the Revolution we made spread across the globe.”

  I remember telling him, “I’ll make you a deal—I’ll loan you five years of my lifeline.”

  “You’re not taking this seriously.”

  “You’re the one not taking this seriously.”

  “My God, you really mean it! You would do this for me if you could.”

  “Yes. I would do it. I can do it.”

  “What must I give you in return?”

  “Impregnate me with your child.”

  My offer was whimsical enough to appeal to his fascination for the absurd. “You’re ready to subtract five years from your life if I agree to this bargain?”

  “I’m ready to add five years to yours, yes.” I remember holding out my hand. “Deal?”

  He laughed out loud as he shook it. “Deal.”

  Tatiana: If such a Faustian transaction were possible, would you have gone through with it?

  Elly: A deal is a deal. In my head, I did add five years to his life. You will never convince me otherwise. And I got the child, Tanik. Her name is Yelena Vladimirovna Mayakovskaya.

  Lilya: Mayakovsky wanted more than your five years—he wanted fame that would endure beyond the grave. It’s called immortality. He loved life but, in a strange way, he looked forward to death as long as …

  Tatiana: Finish the thought. As long as?

  Lilya: Oh God, his words are imprinted on my brain: as long as he could be the one to write the script and direct the sequence.

  Tatiana: But how do you explain these Russian roulette episodes, Elly?

  Elly: Listening to our various versions of the Poet, one has to be blind not to see that Mayakovsky’s erotic escapades were a leitmotif in his life, a theme with a great many variations. Four of the variations are present in this room. Bu
t I believe his creativity, and the recognition it occasioned from what the prodigious Osip Mandelshtam called his first readers, was at the heart and gut of the Poet’s being. A failing love affair could dishearten him but a merciless review of his latest poetic effort could draw blood—when one critic accused him in print of being a self-advertiser, Mayakovsky seethed for days. It wasn’t attention he craved, as you suggested earlier, Lilya—it was acclaim. He was, after all, the Georgian peasant who wore metal taps on his shoes—not, as Lilya intimated, to make the soles last longer but rather to be sure his arrival would be remarked. All of which is to say that he came from afar. You’ll remember he began writing poesy in prison. He looked back on those long months in solitary as one would a birth date—like Robespierre at the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution, he counted it as year one. Mayakovsky was locked away in a cell somewhere on the third floor of Butyrka but he was never really alone. Conversations were shouted down corridors and through air vents, essays were passed from cell to cell by the trustees who slid the daily meal through the slot in the door, Marxist tracts were dangled to the floors below on shoe laces strung together. At night there were lectures on Karl Marx’s theory of surplus value and Count Tolstoy as a Christian Anarchist and polyphony in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s prose. There was one prisoner at the end of an airshaft, the Poet never found out his name, who was translating the American poet Whitman into Russian and shouted out his poems, one a night, until he was taken off to be shot or shipped to Siberia—Mayakovsky never discovered which. He once told me that being in prison was like going to university and being freed when you’d served your sentence was the equivalent of graduation. He would joke that he had a bachelor of arts degree from Butyrka University. His prison notebook filled with self-conscious verse was confiscated by the guards the day he was released. And thank goodness—he was the first to admit that publishing these adolescent poems wouldn’t have helped his reputation as a talented and innovative poet. But when he recited the rhymes he knew by heart to his friends, he realized that the mere fact of writing poetry set him apart. He came to understand that in Russia, the poet is ipso facto aristocracy, it hardly mattered that his early verse disintegrated like moon-baked mud bricks when you heard them a second time. Oh, he was, as Lilya told us, sensitive enough to the Kronstadt bloodbath or the inescapable evidence of a revolution going wrong. But the thing that distressed him most when I knew him in New York—the thing that transformed him into a brooding and restless and essentially miserable man—was his difficulty at finding young audiences; to put it another way, the difficulty of young audiences finding him! He longed to be admired, applauded, celebrated. He played the role of the Russian poet-aristocrat to the hilt. He bemoaned the fact that in the autumn of his life—he was only thirty-two at the time, mind you, but he thought of himself as timeworn—his lyric poems seemed to be falling on tone-deaf ears. If I shut my eyes and concentrate, I can still hear him lamenting how easy it was to become a poet in Russia, but how despairingly difficult it was to keep being a poet.