The Mayakovsky Tapes

by Robert Littell

  Lilya: I take back what I said about your being a shrewd observer of the human condition, Elly. I fear you have been unduly influenced by that Freud fellow’s mischievous interpretation of dreams, where absolutely everything can be explained by Oedipus’s or Electra’s desire to fornicate with one parent and kill the other. Surely things are less complex than Herr Freud’s analysis of Oedipus’s hypothetical complex suggests. Surely there is a simpler explanation for what drove the Poet to load a single bullet into the revolver and spin the cylinder. Russian roulette must be seen, on some significant level, as a demand for love.

  Elly: If it makes you feel that you played a more central role in his existence, think what you like.

  Nora: Personally, ladies, I consider the Poet’s explanation of his Russian roulette episodes—his exultation at having been able to wipe the slate clean—is neither silly nor romantic. I would give my right arm to begin life over again, to wipe my slate clean of any trace of Vladimir Mayakovsky. I can forgive the son of a bitch a great many things. I can forgive him that he had to constantly be reminded to keep his trouser fly front buttoned. But, fuck, there are some things I can never forgive. Commending me to the tender loving care of Comrade Government is at the top of my shit list.

  Elly: The fact of the matter is he was incapable of keeping his trouser fly front buttoned in the presence of a woman he desired.

  Nora: There’s some truth to what you say, Elly. When it came to poetry or revolution—when it came to the Revolution—Mayakovsky was able to give a good imitation of an adult. When it came to the female of the species, he was a man-child stuck in the rut of puberty. He had two brains, one in his skull, one in his prick, and they clashed in guiding his behavior. Holy fuck, I am not telling you anything I didn’t tell him.

  Elly: How did he react?

  Nora: He said something about life being a death sentence and erections providing a stay of execution.

  Elly: That’s sounds like vintage Mayakovsky.

  Tatiana: Well, I never had to remind him to keep his trouser fly front buttoned—I assume you’re speaking metaphorically. But then it is well known that men love different women differently.

  Nora: I have heard it said that the way a man makes love to a woman—or fails to make love to a woman—reveals more about the woman than the man.

  Tatiana: Why do I get the queasy feeling that you are casting aspersions on my obliging Mayakovsky to respect my virginity?

  Nora: If the shoe fits—

  Tatiana: It’s obvious none of you like me. I surmise it’s because the three of you are jealous of me—you’re jealous because I’m the only one here, not counting the young man with his fiendish dictaphone wire recorder, whom the Poet never had his way with.

  Lilya: Listen to her, will you! Never had his way with! Jesus Christ on the Cross, what an antediluvian euphemism. I would have thought it went out of fashion when Ivan the Terrible had his way with Maria Nagaya, the poor creature whose fate it was to become his seventh wife.

  Nora: Our Tanik, who probably wears silk undergarments and frequented Parisian town houses staffed with domestics serving high tea on salvers, is bragging, once again, that Mayakovsky never fucked her.

  Tatiana: Our Nora, who undoubtedly wears coarse cotton undergarments—

  Nora: Like Lilya here, I eschew undergarments, whether silk or cotton, a condition that caught Mayakovsky’s eye the night he invited me back to his studio and casually asked me if I swallowed.

  Lilya: Whether I like you or not, my dear Tatiana, is beside the point. I simply cannot relate to you. I cannot relate to females who use their precious virginity to keep men at arm’s distance. Who derive guilt from pleasure as opposed to deriving pleasure from pleasure. Who lead men on, for pity’s sake.

  Nora: Tanik cannot seem to decide if she’s proud that Mayakovsky never got to fuck her, or she regrets it.

  Litzky: (to Tatiana, in English) Where I come from, which is the borough of Brooklyn, girls like you are called cockteasers.

  Elly: (translating) He is using a vulgar expression to suggest that once Tanik started flirting with the Poet, she was obliged to sleep with him.

  Nora: Is this Brooklyn of his a country?

  Elly: In a manner of speaking, yes. On Manhattan Island people have been heard to joke that you need a passport to get into Brooklyn.

  Tatiana: But I thought you told us the young man didn’t understand Russian.…

  Elly: He apparently gets the gist of our conversation, though I doubt whether he understands the sexual jargon.

  Tatiana: (to the young man, in Russian) Remind me of your name again.

  Litzky: (in English) Litzky, initial R.

  Tatiana: (in Russian) And what, pray tell, does the R stand for?

  Litzky: Rasputin.

  Tatiana: (in Russian) For God’s sake, keep your headphones on your ears and your nose out of our conversation, Rasputin, if that’s really your name. The ground rules stipulated that you were to be seen but not heard.

  Litzky: (in English) Henceforward I shall be as dumb as a fly on the wall.

  Elly: (in English) Dumb as in stupid or silent?

  Litzky: (in English) Dumb as in deaf and.

  Elly: (translating) He agrees to remain silent.

  Lilya: Speaking of Rasputin: Once, before the Revolution, I flirted with a monk sitting across from me on the train to Yekaterinburg, the dusty city in the foothills of the Urals where Tsar Nicholas and his family, eh, eventually met their fate. The monk was wearing a soiled black cowl and had a long, ragged black-as-coal beard and naughty ice-blue eyes that teared up when he nibbled on one of the raw scaly onions in his haversack. Only later did I discover that he was the notorious Rasputin. He invited me to spend the night at his monastery and I was ready to accept until Osya, hearing of the invitation when he met my train at the Yekaterinburg station, refused to give me permission.

  Elly: You needed Osip’s permission! I thought you said you were in an open marriage.

  Lilya: We’d only just been wed, Osya and I. We were still confined to the carnal straitjacket of the nuptial vows. Needless to say, that very rapidly evolved.

  Nora: Thanks to Osip you missed what surely would have been an illuminating experience. Rumor had it that Rasputin used his oversized dick to fuck the Tsar’s religious nut of a wife, Alexandra. (to Elly) Is the young man by any chance related?

  Elly: (to Litzky, in English) She is asking if you are related?

  Litzky: (in English) To Rasputin or Alexandra?

  Elly: (in English) Either, or.

  Litzky: (in English) Neither, nor.

  Nora: (to Elly) Much as it discomforts me to find myself agreeing with Tanik, you must really insist that he refrain from commenting. He is here to wire-record. Nothing more.

  Elly: (to Litzky, in English) If you can’t obey the ground rules, we’ll have to find someone else to record our conversation.

  Litzky: (in English) I am in possession of the only wire dictaphone at the university. It may well be the only one in Moscow. For all I know it may be the only one in Russia. If you want to have a record of your conversation, you are stuck with me. But I understand she’s annoyed. Tell her I sit corrected. My lips are sealed.

  Nora: What does he say?

  Elly: He promises, yet again, to restrain himself. He promises that his lips will remain sealed.

  Litzky: (in English) Sorry to interrupt. Hey, I’m not commenting. I’m just informing you that I have to put a new wire into the dictaphone.

  Lilya: What now?

  Elly: He has to replace the wire in the dictaphone.

  Nora: The break comes in the nick of time! I badly need to take a leak.

  THIRD SESSION

  We didn’t so much meet as collide.…

  Elly: (to Lilya) You never told us how you and your Osip came to meet.

  Lilya: Oh dear, I was thirteen at the time and only just becoming aware of an alternate universe filled with boys when Osya sidled into my life. He was that ma
gnificent creature girls identify as an older man, a shy seventeen-year-old replete with acne and an ingrown toenail that obliged him to walk with an adorable limp. He was so gangling in his blue gymnasium uniform and cap I feared he might trip over his own feet as he backed away from me. But back away he did. Teenage girls with budding breasts terrified him. Believe it or not, teenage boys with or without acne terrified me. Oh, I’d set eyes on the male organ by the time I began menstruating: my father’s twice through a keyhole, village boys swimming in a stream near my grandfather’s dacha, the giant statue of David in an art book the girls furtively consulted in the library of the Architectural Institute. Of course my mother had taken me aside and educated me about the birds and the bees. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how one of those limp appendages that wagged from side to side like the trunk of an elephant could penetrate a vagina to deposit its seed and get a girl pregnant. It was Osip who solved the mystery when he introduced me to that masculine appliance called an erection. It happened this way: After that first terrifying encounter, we ran into each other often enough for me to appreciate he was making progress with his residual clumsiness. Any trace of teenage clumsiness vanished entirely when …

  Tatiana: Reminiscing always summons dormant emotions, Lilya. Do continue. When what?

  Lilya:… any trace of clumsiness vanished when you could get him talking about Pushkin or Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Gogol or Lermontov or Turgenev. Or the novel he referred to as his bible, N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, which he read aloud to me the year his croaking teenage voice began to skim the lower reaches of an adult octave. It took another five years for my buds to flower into full-fledged breasts and our love affair to bear fruit. I was living at home with my parents and sister on Petroverignskiy Lane and studying sculpture at the Moscow Architectural Institute, Osya was studying law at Moscow State University. We dated for the better part of a year, attending concerts, poetry readings, even the dissection of a corpse at the university’s medical amphitheater. We discussed the latest books we’d read and listened so often to Enrico Caruso sing “Vesti la giubba” on my father’s wind-up phonograph machine that we wore out several of his precious needles. I have a sepia photograph of the two of us canoeing on the Moscow River—it is dated Summer 1911 and was taken from a bridge as we passed under it. (Mayakovsky particularly loved this snapshot.) I’m dressed in a thin white ankle-length costume with short sleeves and a conspicuously low bodice that revealed more of my bosom than it concealed, Osya is wearing a sailor’s striped jersey and baggy canvas knickerbockers. Both of us appear terrified the canoe might tip and spill us into the river water, notoriously contaminated with sewage. It will have been a week or two later when, out of the blue, over coffee at the Moscow Art Theatre café one afternoon, he told me he’d been expelled from school for spreading revolutionist propaganda and, in the same breath, suggested we move in together and share a flat. What he really wanted, of course, was to consummate our friendship. I was still a virgin and so was he but I figured you never knew when you might die, it could be yesterday or today or tomorrow, and I absolutely didn’t want to die a virgin. I remember it was me who came right out and proposed sex. Osya, trying to act nonchalant, said why not. I asked him if his why not meant yes. He sheepishly confirmed that it did. We slept together that night in a friend’s chambre de bonne. As he had never undressed in front of a girl, he flatly refused to leave the light on. Except for that, for a first time it went, to our mutual relief, surprisingly well—he must have read up on intercourse because he seemed to know what went where, while I, for my part, solved the mystery of the limp elephant’s trunk. Over breakfast the next morning, he suddenly stopped chewing on the inside of his cheek and, contemplating his shoes as if mystified by how they had wound up on his feet, asked me to marry him. He appeared as startled as me by the proposal that had escaped his lips. On the spot I batted his why not back at him. He was quite stunned by what he’d done and it took the better part of the morning for it to sink in that my why not also meant yes. We were married in a private ceremony on March 26, 1912. My parents, bless their hearts, organized a small flat for us in the center of Moscow as a wedding present. On our wedding night my mother, thinking I was still a virgin, set out the traditional sweetmeats and fruit on the bedside table. Osya, more practical than my mother, managed to cadge a bottle of Polish champagne for the occasion.

  Tatiana: What a sweet initiation, Lilya.

  Lilya: It was sweet. Osya and I had an unusual relationship: From day one he was more than a brother though less than a husband, if you see what I mean. We were friends long before we were lovers, we remained friends long after we were no longer lovers.

  Elly: What about you, Nora. You haven’t told us how you met Mayakovsky.

  Nora: Holy shit, it’s more difficult than I imagined—this business of excavating the past like some archaeologist delicately brushing dirt from a skull in a Roman burial ground.

  Elly: The Poet once told me the past saturates the present. The very light that enters our eyes at night may come from a star that ceased to exist a million years ago.

  Nora: Yes, yes, the past—incarnated by the Poet V. Mayakovsky—certainly saturates my present. Looking back, I can say that we didn’t so much meet as collide. He bludgeoned his way into my life at an after-theater party in Meyerhold’s flat on Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane in the Arbat district. Vsevolod Meyerhold had directed the winter-long revival of Doctor Chekov’s The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre. I’d been playing the role of the actress Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina. Several reviews had singled me out for praise, I might add. The curtain had come down on the final performance that night and the cast and crew had gathered to celebrate the end of the run. A black cast-iron cauldron filled to the brim with a soup made from herring heads had been set out on Vsevolod’s long oaken table, an endless river of vodka kept materializing from his newfangled icebox, American Negro jazz boomed from one of Mister Victor’s wind-up phonograph machines. Two members of the cast wound up dancing something called the Charleston after one of the states in the United States of North America, so I was told. A stagehand snapped pictures of them with a Kodak camera. In another room an actor recited passages from a typescript samizdat of Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet that was being passed from hand to hand in Moscow theater circles. At one point Vsevolod asked me to read aloud a letter Doctor Chekov had written to his sister Masha before he died, of tuberculosis I think it was, in a German spa in the Black Forest. As I am quite nearsighted, I retrieved my reading glasses for the occasion and read out the several paragraphs in which the maître explained his stream-of-consciousness technique that that Irish storywright Joyce adopted in his Portrait of an Artist. The letter ended with Doctor Chekov’s now-famous Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. Around midnight I started to toy with the idea of going home only to discover I’d misplaced my reading glasses. It was out of the question to leave them behind—without them I’d never have been able to fit my latchkey into the door lock and would have been obliged to awaken my husband if I wanted to spend the night in a bed. Being a bit inebriated myself—

  Lilya: A bit? At midnight? At an after-theater party?

  Nora: All right, being befittingly inebriated, I made the mistake of calling out, “I offer a night of passion to the person who finds my reading glasses.” I was joking, obviously, but the men present pretended to take me seriously and launched into a hilariously frenzied search of Vsevolod’s flat, rolling up carpets, flinging cushions off of couches, unending wastebaskets, pulling open drawers and spilling their contents onto the oaken table, rummaging in the skirt pockets of the ladies in the flat. The search had everyone in stitches of laughter. One of the more intoxicated actors actually began frisking his giggling female companion the way CheKa agents do when they body search a suspect to see if he is armed. Mayakovsky had turned up earlier in the evening with a frizzy peroxide blonde—she was a singer at a small cabaret and plainly flattered to b
e noticed on the arm of the famous poet. Seeing me searching frantically atop the tiled stove and under tables, along windowsills, he deserted his companion and, dancing around the couple dancing the Charleston, edged up to me. “Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he announced.

  “Polonskaya, Veronica Vitoldovna to my comrades in the theater, Nora to my lovers,” I retorted saucily.

  I seem to remember him replying instantly, “Whose ranks I expect to join.” He angled his head, taking in my tight-fitting knitted blouse before raising his eyes to gaze into mine. “You appear to be looking for something,” he remarked, addressing me, without troubling to ask my consent, using the familiar ty.

  “I seem to have misplaced my reading glasses,” I said, and pointedly replying with the more formal vy, added, “you wouldn’t happen to have an idea where they might be?”

  I could see he was smothering a laugh as he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and, with the flourish of a magician producing a rabbit from a top hat, came up with my reading glasses. “I swiped them when you set them down,” he admitted straightaway. “I had every intention of using them to make your acquaintance, but that has all changed now. I will admit that a night of passion with the celebrated actress Polonskaya was beyond my maddest expectations. I claim my reward!”