How I loved seeing my partner’s wit flare as it did in that letter!
SEVA WASN’T getting the sleep he required. This would begin taking a toll on him, I knew; his nerves had always been worsened more by sleep deprivation than by lack of food.
I could see right away the kind of mind game Kobulov was playing. Seva, being vulnerable, was likely to play along to some extent. For years his self-confidence had been assaulted by reviewers, censors, envious colleagues, and spectators who’d fallen under the sway of the Party’s empty-headed aesthetic notions. He’d managed to fend off his detractors, but there was simply no way he could maintain an unflinching belief in himself while being vilified by Kobulov, who had a formidable gift for pathologizing a person’s motives.
So although it was no joy to hear Seva offering up, as he did during his first couple of interrogations, the names of various political opponents of Stalin’s—men whom his jailers had branded as Trotskyist traitors, and whose names subsequently appeared on a typed confession Seva was supposed to sign—I also figured that this capitulation was in a sense inevitable. I dislike borrowing from the language of psychologists, yet the fact is that Seva had internalized the accusations that had been verbally pounded into him. In his own eyes he’d taken on some of the attributes of a guilty man. Having watched so many of his fellow artists and intellectuals get purged, he now wondered why he’d managed to get off scot-free. Didn’t he, too, deserve a comeuppance? Hadn’t he in fact hung around with the English journalist Fred Gray, now accused of being a foreign agent? Not to mention “anti-Soviet elements in the field of the arts,” including Boris Pasternak and Ilya Ehrenburg? Could he vouch with surety for their patriotism? For his own?
WHEN THE typed piece of paper with his “confession” was shoved in front of him, I set about suggesting to Seva that he complicate matters for his interrogator by not omitting, on the list he’d been asked to prepare citing confederates who’d visited his theater, the names of Comrades Molotov and, yes, Stalin himself. I figured this would help Seva (if not his captors) gain some necessary perspective on his situation. He needed to back away from the precipice of self-recrimination, to reclaim the solid ground of pride and self-confidence. It was time for some unmasking—time to make it clear that his arrest had been a ludicrous mistake.
I’d miscalculated the opposition, however. The addition of Stalin’s and Molotov’s names to the list of Seva’s fellow travelers did not sit well with Kobulov, who brought in a couple of goons for two sessions of what were alluded to as “physical methods”: specifically, the battering of Seva’s feet, legs, and back with a rubber truncheon.
The two goons beat him and then, a few days later, after his bruises had ripened sufficiently, they bashed the bruises, too, as well as his face and head. At the end of his first torture session (which took place on a warm day in July and lasted around eighteen hours), Seva was facedown on the floor. He’d discovered, he later testified in his letter to Molotov, that he had “the capacity to cringe, writhe, and howl like a dog being whipped by its master.” All of these positions would have made superior biomechanical exercises, but Seva lacked the wherewithal for sketching and note taking. He was in the realm of the grotesque, where a person is precipitously switched, as he once put it, “from the plane he has just reached to another, which is totally unseen.”
AS THE weeks wore on, I found it harder to infiltrate Seva’s dreams. He was resistant; fear had become the filter through which his inner life passed. It skimmed off everything sublime or salvific, allowing only terrors to enter and penetrate.
In the fall of 1939, Seva was presented with the text of an indictment in which he was charged with treason. According to his captors, he’d led the theater wing of the “Left Front” group of artists, a group supposedly committed to the overthrow of the Soviet government. This charge was prompted in part by a confession of the writer Isaac Babel, who (under torture of his own, a few days before Seva’s) had named Meyerhold as a Left Front member.
Seva was devastated. He’d already been through two prolonged sessions of “physical methods,” during which (as he later described it) his interrogators fulfilled the twin tasks of beating him and preparing written confessions on his behalf. (“Whenever my imagination became exhausted,” he stated in his appeal, “my interrogators would work in pairs . . . and draft the statements, sometimes rewriting them three or four times.”) Now a final dreadful document had arrived, and he was being told to accept it without reconsideration.
The investigators who confronted him with the confession pushed him to sign it then and there. I signaled him to delay, and finally—after a bout of trembling that had his jailers rolling their eyes, although his shaking was completely involuntary—Seva managed to rally. After agreeing that the essential facts were correct, he asked permission to reread the document in order to make necessary corrections and additions. He was trying to buy himself time so he could read this travesty of a document with his wits more fully about him.
The Investigative Section, however, wasn’t in the business of giving political prisoners a chance to argue their innocence. Although Seva’s jailers did grant him permission to review his indictment, he was given no time to emend it. It was deemed to have been accepted by him as truthful in all its particulars.
In protest Seva wrote a statement in which he retracted any remarks that might’ve seemed to implicate his colleagues—Pasternak, Ehrenburg, Mitya Shostakovich, and others. He also repudiated his admissions concerning any links with the Left Front and foreign intelligence sources. All these statements, he wrote in an appeal to two different procurators, had been made under torture and were worthless untruths.
AT THIS point Seva was a physical as well as emotional wreck. He’d found it impossible to maintain his composure during the session in which his indictment was shown to him. He’d shaken uncontrollably and then, at the end, had suddenly grown still, as if he’d passed out. Tears poured from his eyes. He wasn’t so much crying as leaking: all his energy was draining from him, like water from a broken faucet.
Afterward he sat slumped on his filthy mattress in his cell, looking like a drug addict or a drunken derelict. There was nothing recognizable in his face—none of the hauteur he’d once summoned when confronted with criticism, none of the sparkling intelligence and humor. His hair had grayed and thinned; his skin was slack, potato-colored. He’d lost weight.
I gave him a few days to pull himself back together, and then I urged him to write to Premier Molotov. He did, in January—a two-part letter in which he reiterated that his confessions had been beaten out of him. But he also added, despite my misgivings, two lines that made me wince: “I beg you as Head of Government to save me and return me my freedom. I love my motherland and I will serve it with all my strength in the remaining years of my life.”
Swearing loyalty to Russia would be seen by Molotov as a sign of disingenuousness—I was sure of this. Seva needed to be more subtle. Yet although I tried to implant my sureties in his dreams, he didn’t seem to catch on. He kept insisting that he had to let his jailers know how much he truly supported the construction of a Communist state—a people’s republic that could serve as a beacon to all other nations.
Gradually Seva began to shut down his oneiric life altogether. Whenever one of his dreams started going in some fresh new direction (leading, I hoped, to a renewal of his old sturdy intransigence), he’d wake himself up. Each morning he refused to recall anything I’d introduced to his consciousness the night before.
My only guaranteed access to my partner’s thinking was via his body. Sometimes I was able to remind him, by calling his attention to the hemorrhages on his legs (those multiple bruises, yellow-purple in color), that he was dealing with people for whom his patriotism was irrelevant. All that mattered to them was that he forget about ever having been a master and instead behave like a slave.
I did my best, but my efforts availed little. Meanwhile his physical condition grew increasingly worris
ome. Earlier that autumn, his interrogators had taken him to the prison hospital, where he’d been given a bit of medical treatment and put on a new diet. Yet these measures had been merely palliative, a means of extending his torture. In one of his letters to Molotov, Seva described the results of this “care”: it had helped restore his outward appearance, but his nerves were in the same wretched state. “My interrogators,” he wrote, describing the process by which untruths were wrung out of him, “threatened me constantly: ‘If you refuse to write (meaning “compose”?!), we shall beat you again, leaving your head and right hand untouched but turning the rest of you into a shapeless, bloody mass of mangled flesh.’”
THUS BEGAN the new year, with Seva awaiting word from Molotov. By this time, he was no longer in Lefortovo; they’d stuck him in the Butyrka prison. In his small cell he clung to the hope that the premier would hear his entreaties.
I had by now taken a different and darker view of things, and my hopes were flagging. But each day I tried getting Seva to focus on memories of his directorial successes, and I urged him to indulge in fond reminiscences of his wife. Desperate for something to give him energy—searching for the emotional equivalent of a spoonful of white sugar—I summoned to his nostrils (whose functioning had, alas, become increasingly blunted) the scent of a Coty perfume that Zina had worn nearly every day of their marriage.
Seva warmed a bit to this recollection. He perked up even more when I reintroduced to his nose the perfume Jordan Archer had given Zina in Paris—a new scent by Patou whose name, Que Sais-Je?, amused her. Yet none of these distractions worked for very long. After a little while, Seva would slump back into despondency.
ON THE last day of January, Seva awoke resigned to the fact that the first month of the first year in a new decade had passed without offering him a hint of rescue. He was therefore surprised when a guard came to fetch him, and even more so when he found himself transferred to a holding pen in the cellar of the Military Collegium, located in the center of Moscow, not far from Red Square.
His preliminary meeting (as it was termed) would be presided over, the guard told him, by a judge named Ulrikh. As soon as I heard this name, I blanched inwardly. Ulrikh’s reputation was one of unmatched ugliness. He’d already sentenced thousands of people to death for “crimes against the people.”
Thus I knew we were in for the roughest of rides. What I didn’t expect was that it would also be one of the briefest.
SEVA WAS formally indicted on the day he was transferred, and his trial took place on the next.
The night before the trial, I’d thought it over and come to a conclusion. The only thing that might work would be to transform Seva, in the court’s eyes, from an abject, sniveling prisoner to a man who, though no longer in full possession of his personal and professional powers, remained an actor—not just in the sense of a talented performer but in the deeper sense of a person capable of self-scrutiny and meaningful action, hence returnable to society as a contributing citizen. In other words, Seva would have to show himself to be someone who’d already acknowledged and repaired his flaws.
In Soviet Russia, of course, the notion of contributing citizens lacked any grounding in reality. Yet an appeal to Ulrikh ought, I believed, to be made along pragmatic lines. Seva was still capable of offering his compatriots something of value, and his release would be of use to the state: this, in a nutshell, was what I urged him to emphasize.
I was grasping at straws, of course, though loath to admit it. I didn’t want to see my own failures. I’d gone along with Seva’s enthusiastic support of the Revolution; it wasn’t my job to sort out his political predilections for him. But his stint in Lefortovo had revealed how shortsighted and costly my detachment had been. Now, full of dread, I was scrambling to pull together a rescue plan.
SEVA WANTED to prove his innocence and clear his name in court. What I wanted was simpler: to procure his immediate release from prison.
It seemed obvious that he’d have to strike a delicate balance between subservience and forthrightness—between admitting he’d erred and insisting he was reformable, wasn’t a traitor. And so, the evening before Seva stood to address Ulrikh, I urged him to recognize who he was really dealing with: not an honorable representative of those stalwart Communists who inhabited his imagination, but merely a brute. Ulrikh wanted nothing more than another bucket of blood to slop at Stalin’s feet.
Moreover, I encouraged Seva to think about his stage presence. You’ll be playing a part, remember, so play it as if for a theater audience. Use your body, gesture forcefully as you speak. Deploy not only your hands but your arms, shoulders, and neck. Use your height, let it work for you. Most of all, try to appear both candid and capable. Portray yourself as an asset to Soviet society—a man who sees what can go wrong and how to fix it . . .
Seva swayed slightly, his eyes shut, his mind and body attending. I focused all my powers on penetrating his doubts about the nature of the challenge that lay before him. His real task wasn’t to proclaim his innocence; it was to offer a convincing argument for his freedom. To do this he’d have to create a character, a man named Meyerhold who, as a result of his reeducation in prison, was now ready, able, and entirely willing—no, eager!—to offer his immense talents to his society.
Remember what you used to tell the students in our studio, years ago, in St. Petersburg? A theater is any stage an actor can construct for himself. The courtroom will be your theater!
He was taking it all in, but I could tell he wasn’t buying it. He was having, I saw, an eleventh-hour epiphany, an abrupt realization that was throwing into disarray his entire sense of how to proceed. He stood unsteadily in the middle of his small cell, his shoulders stooped, his head bent forward.
How could I have been so blind! he moaned. Then, as he began murmuring aloud, I pieced together what was going on. It had to do with Mayakovsky’s suicide, whose causes Seva was now divining afresh. Volodya’s life-concluding bullet hadn’t been fired in reaction to a failed romance or a harsh theater review. No, no! Those were factors, but they weren’t the basic cause. Everyone had misread Mayakovsky, overlooking what was really at stake. Volodya had plumbed a deeper anguish, and after sounding its depths, he’d decided there was only one way out.
If only I’d listened harder! Pacing his cell, Seva tormented himself. He recalled the final scene in Volodya’s play The Bedbug, when Prisypkin, the little drunkard, is thawed out after five decades of refrigeration. Utterly bewildered, Prisypkin confronts the people who’ve caged him. “Citizens! Brothers!” he cries. “My own people! Darlings! How did you get here? So many of you! When were you unfrozen? Why am I alone in the cage? Darlings, friends, come and join me! Why am I suffering? Citizens! . . .”
The audiences had laughed at Prisypkin’s delirious appeals, but they’d squirmed, too, for behind the play’s satire lay something problematic and unnerving. What exactly, Seva asked himself now, was Volodya’s vision of the future? Had he really believed that a lasting Communist utopia could be established? Had he been as sunnily optimistic and brash as he’d tried to make himself sound in his poems?
No, he hadn’t. He’d foreseen his society stripped, denuded of love, and no amount of satirical frosting could conceal this—the underlying, anticipated darkness.
Pacing more slowly now, coughing, trembling, Seva remembered how he’d talked with his cast about The Bedbug. He’d explained that the play’s purpose was to expose the vices of the current times. But what he hadn’t said—what he hadn’t seen—
was that this was merely the surface, the tight skin of the play’s comedy. The Bedbug actually revealed that love itself was under attack.
Planting the heels of his hands on his forehead, Seva gripped his skull in his long fingers and squeezed. Everything was concatenating now. Hadn’t Volodya spent time in Butyrka—yes, in 1909—for supporting the Bolsheviks? Perhaps he’d even been stuck in the same tiny room Seva had recently vacated . . . And afterward, hadn’t Volodya written a poem in
which he’d claimed he’d learned about love in Butyrka? He’d stared out of the keyhole of his cell, knowing he’d give anything for a bit of sunlight on the wall. Knowing, too, that his heart had grown, that it would keep expanding until it became hefty, heftier, huge.
That bulk is love, he’d written.
For all his egotistical bunglings, Volodya had understood the heart more keenly than anyone else. That bulk is love. Yes, but there was a corollary: that bulk is hate, he’d added in the poem’s next line. That bulk is hate. The heart houses both.
MERCY, SAID Seva at around two in the morning. The cell was silent; he was entirely alone.
There won’t be any, I said.
Then truth, he said.
They don’t know the meaning of the word.
But I do, he said.
So?
So, he said, that’s what I’ll ask for, the truth.
There’s no point.
Exactly, he said. Which is why it’s the only thing to do.
It was then that I realized I’d be losing my partner.
THE TRIAL took almost two hours. It would have been over in the usual fifteen minutes had Seva not made a closing speech that was long and dense enough to give the recording secretary some trouble in capturing his words verbatim. There was a fair bit of stopping and restarting.
In addition to Ulrikh, two military jurists were present. There were no attorneys or witnesses for either the prosecution or the defense. Pleading innocent, Seva repeated his denial of the entire indictment. As he spoke the judge and jurists nodded, their boredom and disdain visible—to me, anyway. I’m not sure what Seva was capable of perceiving. His face was blank as a late-November sky before a snowfall.
Thirty-three Swoons Page 23