The Mayakovsky Tapes

by Robert Littell

  I must have spluttered something along the lines of “Of course you understand I was jesting.”

  Mayakovsky was not to be put off. I remember him offering up his most seductive smile, the one that was said to sweep ladies off their feet when it wasn’t melting icebergs. “You may have wanted your theater comrades to assume you were jesting when you announced the reward,” he said. “But admit it, dear Norochka: In your heart of hearts you were hoping against hope I would take you at your word. Hoping against hope that a night of passion with the Poet Mayakovsky would break the chains that restrain you, which cause the day before yesterday to look much like yesterday, yesterday to seem remarkably like today, today to be indistinguishable from tomorrow.” His smile reappeared for a curtain call. “Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong,” he challenged.

  “You’re dead wrong,” I insisted, infusing my tone of voice with as much certitude as I could contrive.

  “No matter,” he must have shot back because I clearly remember him adding, “We shall proceed as if I am right.” And, holding aloft the pair of reading glasses, he exclaimed in the wild tones he used when he recited his lyrical poems at literary soirees, “I, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, being of unsound mind and a body smoldering with desire, hereby lay claim to the aforesaid publicly offered night of passion.”

  The actors in the living room began to chant, “Pay-up-Nor-a, pay-up-Nor-a, pay-up-Nor-a.”

  Elly: And did you? Pay up, I mean.

  Tatiana: Of course she didn’t. Anyone could see it was said in jest.

  Lilya: Of course she did. Surely that must have been the occasion the Poet discovered she eschewed undergarments, be they cotton or silk.

  Nora: It was snowing the night Mayakovsky took me back to the studio he retreated to when he wasn’t living under the same roof as the Briks. The Love Boat, as he’d christened it, turned out to be a single room on the fourth floor of a five-story building in Lubyanskiy Passage, not far from the Lubyanka prison. If I shut my eyes I can actually feel its shabbiness, smell its mustiness. It was frugally furnished. There was a wooden daybed that doubled as a couch, a roll-top desk with a framed photograph of Lenin on it, and an antique telephone set on a stool that served as a coffee table. Off in a corner was the kind of galley you might find in a motorboat, so narrow that two people could only cross if they turned sideways and squeezed past one another. Beyond the galley and its wall closets jam-packed with chipped dishes and tumblers and sardine tins and bottled wine, was a small bathroom with a lidless toilet next to an oval sink stained with tobacco spit and dried tooth powder. All things considered, Mayakovsky’s Love Boat was truly a male’s sanctuary. You reached the studio by a wide iron-railed staircase that reeked of piss. (“Not all the flats have toilets, not all the tenants who have toilets use them,” the Poet explained when he saw me pinching my nostrils.) The falling snow, visible through the jalousie on the studio’s single window, was illuminated by brackish light from the new street lamps the Bolsheviks had recently installed on the principal thoroughfares of Moscow. From time to time we could hear the shriek of friction brakes as trolley cars stopped in Dzerzhinsky Square outside the Lubyanka prison to take on guards coming off their shift. Lying on the daybed later that night, watching the giant flakes drift leisurely past the window, listening to the wind rattling the sooty panes over the Poet’s head, it was easy to imagine we were in one of those fictional space capsules rising up through the snow to dizzying heights where the air is too thin to breathe.

  Elly: What goes up must inevitably come down.

  Nora: Regrettably. I remember wishing out loud that if only we could continue on up until, befuddled with lightheadedness, we had reached the distant shore of the universe beyond the outermost galaxies, we might find asylum in one of the alternate worlds science fiction writers postulate. The Poet loved my hallucination—he copied it into his Day Book, saying he would transform it into a metaphor and use it in a play or film one day. And then he said the strangest thing, given his allegiance to the Bolsheviks and his commitment to their revolution. He said the alternate world was sure to have time-serving apparatchiki not unlike ours who kept one eye on the wall clock when they deigned to speak to you. He said the economy of the alternate world would be organized around an inflexible five-year plan not unlike Stalin’s, with prisoners slaving away to construct colossal dams that produced hydrogen energy from melting glacier water. He said poems read out by the poets in this alternate world would fall on ears grown tone-deaf from the deluge of propaganda. I thought at first he was saying all this in jest. But when I looked into the Poet’s eyes I could detect no humor, only the faint trace of a persuasive depression.

  Lilya: Mayakovsky was so often and so deeply depressed as the twenties drew to a close, Osip and I dreaded he would not make it alive into the thirties. Do any of you ladies remember his poem Kike, which so infuriated the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment?

  Nora: I remember hearing Mayakovsky read Kike to Meyerhold one night. (to Elly and Tatiana) The poem was a cri de coeur against anti-Semitism in Soviet-ruled Russia.

  Lilya: Osip and I and Mayakovsky had a good laugh at the time when the Commissar of Enlightenment condemned the poem, though, come to think of it, Mayakovsky’s laughter resonated more with bitterness than hilarity. He was probably thinking about the row he’d had with that Zionist in the Poet’s Café on the Arbat—with Kike, the Poet more or less acknowledged he’d been wrong and the Israelite had been right: Marxist Russia had not pulled the rug from under the Zionists by eliminating the need for a Jewish homeland.

  Elly: His poem Kike, his remark about poems falling on deaf ears in an alternate world were instructive. One can perceive, as Lilya points out, how disenchanted he’d become by the late twenties. I will tell you ladies a secret I haven’t up to now shared with anyone. As the twenties drew to a close I, too, had become disenchanted—I realized, to my chagrin, that the streets of New York were not paved with mahjong ivories. With the crash on Wall Street and the Great Depression, by 1929 the streets were paved with homeless masses queuing at sidewalk soup kitchens; they were paved with the splattered cadavers of industrialists who had lost everything, most especially hope, and leaped from the windows of tall buildings; they were paved with what we called Hoovervilles, shantytowns of tin shacks sheltering the jobless who rooted in garbage cans for crusts of bread. It was widely believed that the capitalist model was broken, widely supposed that America’s Quaker President, H. Hoover, was incapable of repairing it. In this atmosphere it dawned on me that I might as well return to Mother Russia—I might as well raise my little girl in a country where the future held out hope. I even thought I might contribute in some small way to making Soviet Russia a better place—

  Tatiana: Did the Poet know about this?

  Elly: I wrote him a rambling letter telling him how awful things were in America, telling him how moved I’d been by his enthusiasm for the Revolution and the Communist model the Poet and his comrades hoped to create in Soviet Russia. I told him I was toying with the idea of coming back and raising our child in Moscow.

  Lilya: But you didn’t go back!

  Elly: No, I didn’t go back. A telegram reached me in December of 1929. It bore no signature but I knew, because it served as an answer to my letter, that it came from Mayakovsky. It contained five words: Don’t come. We were mistaken.

  Tatiana: Mayakovsky wrote that! He said he’d been mistaken?

  Elly:—(nodding slowly, too emotional to speak)

  Nora: Listen, Mayakovsky wasn’t the only one disenchanted by the late 1920s. Me, also, I’d become disenchanted, not so much with the Bolsheviks—I ignored them in the expectation that ignoring them would encourage them to ignore me—but with men in general and Mayakovsky in particular. The Poet was an especially tough nut to crack. Just when you reckoned you’d gotten to the almond inside the shell, he’d moved on to become someone else. He was, so to speak, always beyond your fingertips, always retreating behind his public
persona, always taking refuge behind poetry. The god-awful truth is I didn’t understand him then and I don’t understand him now—I don’t understand how he could bring himself to treat me so heartlessly. Rasputin, when you transcribe these conversations, kindly change my heartlessly to ruthlessly. Oh, how I wish to Christ I’d never gone back with him to the studio that horrific morning the prick, the cunt commended me and assorted others to the tender loving care of Comrade Government. (producing her reading glasses) Here, look: I purchased them in Paris, on a side street off Place Vendôme, in a shop owned by an old White Russian couple who sold eyeglass and picture frames but has long since gone out of business. The eyeglass frames were advertised as pure tortoiseshell and cost a small fortune. I have kept them all these years, a momento mori of an episode in my life I wish to Christ had never happened.

  Tatiana: A pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses, even ones of French fabrication, are surely far less precious than the reputation of the lady who wears them.… Why is Nora smiling? Did I say something amusing? Why are you smiling?

  Nora: I’m smiling at a remembrance: A messenger on motorcycle showed up at my door late the next afternoon. I’d gotten home around noon and, not bothering to undress, immediately fell into a deep albeit troubled sleep. My husband had to shake me awake. The messenger had delivered a bouquet of wild orchids, the kind that can be found in the woods near Moscow. A note had been tucked into the stems. On it, handwritten in red ink, were the words: Spasibo za mir!

  Litzky: (looking up from his wire recorder, translating into English) Thank you for the world!

  Elly: (in English, ironically) Thank you for that, Rasputin. (in Russian, to Nora) So you obviously did reward him with a night of passion!

  Tatiana: Oh my God, I am going to be ill.

  Lilya: She’d have been a fool not to. It’s what you ought to have done, Tatiana, if you’d had your wits about you.

  Tatiana: None of you grasp it. Volodya and I had days of passion that didn’t require recourse to a vulgar bed. His callused fingers gripping my elbow when we crossed a Parisian street, his enormous palm pressed to my spine, his rough lips chafing the back of my hand—all of these intimacies passed between us as if in a coded telegram. By all means do not restrain your facial muscles, ladies. Smile your smug smiles if it makes you feel superior. You will have experienced coded telegrams when you were still innocent enough to love someone other than yourselves. The candy stick between Lilya’s chapped lips, Nora’s over-the-edge intercourse—these erotic calisthenics left you incapable of deciphering the messages hidden in coded telegrams. The god-awful truth is I pity all of you. (turning to Litzky) If you speak Russian well enough to understand what I’m saying, Rasputin, take heed not to sneer at a young woman’s innocence. Accept it as you would a precious gift.

  Lilya: (applauding, slowly) Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Three cheers for little Miss Innocent, who led the Poet down the garden path and then discarded him for the first French Vicomte to come along. I see now, Tatiana, that you were never a serious threat to my museship. You were the Virgin Queen incarnate, incapable of personifying Eros, which is a poet’s lifeblood.

  Tatiana: You disgust me, Lilya Yuryevna. I suspect, in their heart of hearts, you disgust all the ladies here. You provoke for the sheer pleasure you derive from your victim’s discomfort. You enjoy making your rivals squirm. I may have been Miss Innocent when Mayakovsky courted me in Paris. For better or worse, I no longer am—though I have mixed feelings about membership, I have joined the New York social circle that values above all else sophistication. In my new incarnation, I am able to tell if a woman has vaginal or clitoral orgasms from the way she walks. You appear suddenly flushed, Lilya. Could it be—is it possible—you experienced neither during your tenure as Mayakovsky’s lover?

  Litzky: (in English) Score one for Tatiana.

  Elly: Rasputin!

  Lilya: I shall not dignify Tatiana’s slander with a denial.

  Nora: And I shall not identify the absence of a denial as self-slander.

  Litzky: (in English, to Elly) I’m not sure what Nora just said?

  Elly: (in English) Nor, judging from the expression on her face, is Lilya sure what Nora just said.

  Tatiana: To set the record straight: If I had gone back to Russia with the Poet, it would have been as his wedded wife and not as his concubinary muse. And please get it into your heads that I didn’t discard him. He discarded me. He promised to return to Paris and he didn’t. How long was I supposed to wait? I was twenty-three. A girl has only so many good years.

  Elly: (to Litzky, in English) Why are you applauding?

  Litzky: (in English) I’m applauding Tatiana for standing up to Lilya.

  Elly: (in English) You absolutely must restrain yourself, Rasputin. The ground rules prohibit your taking sides in our spats.

  Tatiana: (turning on Nora) You must have known Mayakovsky was courting me when you took him into your bed. Holy Mother of God, when I think Mayakovsky betrayed me for a night of passion with an actress—

  Nora: Nights, Tanik. Plural. There was no beating about the bush, no small talk, no coded telegrams that required deciphering. Just night after night after night of passionate fucking. We were actors in a film that never ended. The houselights never came up. If those two unambiguous words—The end—turned up on the silver screen, we sent them packing to the distant shore of the universe beyond the outermost galaxies.

  Elly: Do you absolutely need to rub it in?

  Nora: She ought to join the real world. She ought to grow up.

  Tatiana: I think I shall throw up before I grow up. My God, how could this have happened? Mayakovsky was bombarding me with telegrams and letters declaring his undying love and proposing marriage … my dearest darling beloved Tanik, I kiss your hand, I kiss your feet … fate has brought us together, the idea of life without you is intolerable … adjust your heart to my hope … love me absolutely, please … accept the burden of being muse to the Poet Mayakovsky, of permitting him to grow old in your arms.… And all the while he was sleeping with you! I can tell you all now, I was this far away from accepting his repeated proposals of marriage, this far away from abandoning my comfortable life in Paris, from abandoning friendships with Sergei Prokofiev and Marc Chagall, from throwing away a career as a fashion mannequin for the house of Chanel.… If the Poet had managed to return a third time to Paris—if he had come to fetch me as he swore he would, I could not have found the strength to resist him, to resist going back to Soviet Russia as his bride. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, I would have given in to my wildest impulses and wedded him even if it meant returning to a country where I feared for my life.

  Lilya: I obviously blundered when I asked my sister to introduce Volodya to some pretty little thing in Paris. To understand what happened, you need to see this from my perspective. A very depressed Volodya had gone to France in October of ’28. His last words to Osip and me when we saw him off at the Byelorusskiy Station were “Only a big love can save me.” We assumed you were the big love he had in mind, Elly—you’d sent a cablegram informing Mayakovsky you were coming to Nice with his little love child in your baggage. Knowing he’d arranged to meet you and the little girl on the French Riviera, Osip and I feared the worst: feared he would have a change of heart once he set eyes on the daughter he had fathered, feared you would entice him back to New York and his beloved Brooklyn Bridge. We were desperate to distract him and came up with the idea that a flirtation in Paris was just the ticket. There’s a Scottish poem I read in German translation, something about the best laid schemes of men and mice not working out as we thought they would. We soon came to understand that the flirtation with the pretty little thing in Paris—with Tatiana here—had become a greater threat than Elly and the little girl. A forewarning came when Mayakovsky sent me a copy of his poem Letter from Paris on the Nature of Love. For the first time since our lifelines crossed, Volodya had dedicated one of his poems to another female of the species. To you, Tatiana. Imagine my a
nguish when I read

  You

  broke the thread

  to Moscow

  the stalled motor

  of the heart

  has started up

  again

  My sister filled me in on the wretched details long before Volodya got back to Moscow and confirmed them: for five weeks he and the Virgin Queen here spent every waking hour together.

  Nora: How the fuck did he survive Paris if he spent every waking hour with a Virgin Queen locked into a chastity belt?

  Tatiana: I didn’t wear a chastity belt, for pity’s sake. I didn’t need one. The Poet was a perfect gentleman—

  Lilya: He survived, to answer Nora’s pertinent question, because he spent every sleeping hour in one of the Parisian maison close. He courted the Virgin Queen by day, he spent his nights with prostitutes. As usual he couldn’t resist providing me with the juicy particulars. His favorite whorehouse was Aux Belles Poulles on the rue Blondel. There was a long-limbed coryphée there who specialized in making love to women while the client, in this case Mayakovsky, copulated with her from the rear. The evening of the day he met you, Tatiana, I’m told he proposed marriage, and on his Goddamn knees, no less! That same night he proposed coitus a tergo to the whore. On his knees again, only this time his trousers were down around his ankles. Ah, my heart bleeds thinking about how his courtship of you played out. The Poet went back to Paris a second time to talk you into becoming his bride and returning with him to Soviet Russia. Thanks to God, the idea didn’t thrill you. Volodya cabled me that you’d greeted his proposal evasively. He said you were torn between a melancholy homesickness for the Russia you once loved and a loathing for what the country had become under the iron rule of I. Stalin. You didn’t say yes, you didn’t say no. And your failure to say yes or no seemed to imply maybe. A love-sick Mayakovsky had no sooner set foot back in Moscow then he announced plans to return a third time to Paris—that would have been in October of ’29—in the hope of persuading Miss Innocent to marry him. Which is when Osya came up with a brilliant, if somewhat distasteful, scheme. You may not be aware that Osip, who studied law after he and I married, had worked briefly as a legal expert for the CheKa after the Revolution. He still knew people there. One was Yakov Agranov, the broken-nosed Commissar who occasionally turned up at our Tuesday literary soirees. (And even more occasionally turned up in my bed, but that’s another story. Or is it?) I’m not sure exactly what Comrade Yakov did at the CheKa—I was too discreet to ask—but it was clear to us that he occupied an important post. Osya dropped a hint to the comrade in question that Mayakovsky might defect to the West if he were allowed to leave yet again, as he was insanely in love with an anti-Bolshevik Russian émigré living in Paris. Yakov must have passed word to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which processed visa applications. They put him off for as long as they could before refusing the exit visa. The formal rejection notice reached Mayakovsky on the tenth of October 1929, the very day he had planned to board the Moscow-Berlin-Paris Pullman. The Poet’s third expedition to convince the Virgin Queen here to forsake her virginity and become his lawful wedded wife ended before it began.