The Stalin Epigram (15 page)

Nadezhda tried to embrace her husband but one of the agents stepped between them. His lips trembling, Osip delivered a line from his
Tristia
cycle.
“I have studied the science of
good-byes . . .”

Nadezhda, deathly pale, completed the stanza.
“. . . The crying of women and the Muses’ song become one.”

Only God knows how I remembered lines from the same poem.
“Everything’s happened before and will happen again, but still the moment of each meeting is sweet.”

Blinded by the flood of tears in my eyes, I never saw Osip leave. When the front door closed behind him, Nadezhda and I fell into each other’s arms.

The collaborator was still sitting there. One of the agents tapped him on the shoulder. “I will take your deposition in the kitchen,” he said, and gestured for Sergei Petrovich to
follow him from the room.

The officer and the other two agents continued ransacking the flat. Going through the shelves book by book, the Raven was quite puzzled by the absence of Marxist classics. “But where do
you keep Marx and Lenin and Stalin?” he asked.

I said, “This is surely the first time you’ve arrested somebody who doesn’t own a copy of Stalin’s
Marxism and the National Question.
”

“Not owning a copy of
Marxism and the National Question
can count against someone during the interrogation,” the Raven retorted. I couldn’t tell whether he was saying
this in jest or not. Probably not.

The search went on until dawn. Through it all Nadezhda and I sat numbly on the sofa watching them. What they were after were handwritten documents—letters, poems, even (as it turned out)
shopping lists—and to this end every book in the library was shaken by its spine. At some point we heard the collaborator Sergei Petrovich let himself out of the flat. Nadezhda called after
him, “Don’t forget the kasha,” but if he heard her, he made no answer. Soon after the agent came in from the kitchen carrying Nadezhda’s spare teapot. Smiling triumphantly,
he lifted off the lid and turned it upside down and the poems Nadezhda had hidden inside, written on scraps of thin paper, fluttered to the floor. Every bit of paper with writing on it was
collected in a satchel marked
State Property
. At one point during the search the youngest of the agents, a pink-cheeked boy with blond hair, came over to offer us rock candy from a small tin
in his pocket. Both of us declined. “They’re not poisoned,” he said with a shrug. By the time the first of the Herzen House residents could be heard rushing through the hallway to
catch the morning trolley to work, Nadezhda was dozing fitfully, her head on my shoulder, her body shuddering with muffled sobs. Near the end of the search an agent emerged from the bedroom
carrying a pile of women’s shoes that had been stuffed with newspaper to keep their shape. Nadezhda came awake and took hold of my elbow. I knew that she had copied many of Osip’s
unpublished poems onto the margins of
Pravda
articles and, crumpling the paper, secreted them in her shoes. Seeing that the shoes were filled with newspaper, the agent tossed them onto the
pile of clothing near the window. Nadezhda and I dared not look at each other for fear the expression on our faces would give us away.

When it came time for the Chekists to depart, the Raven gathered up the satchel, along with a dozen or so volumes of French or Italian poetry he had decided to confiscate. “If you want to
help Mandelstam, mention the arrest to no one,” he advised.

“Is the fact of his arrest a state secret?” I asked.

The Raven glared at me. “Step carefully, Akhmatova—you can be pulled in as an accomplice.”

And with that they were gone.

I went into the kitchen to make tea. Nadezhda, barely breathing, was sitting motionless on the sofa when I returned with two cups and pressed one into her icy hand. “The bastard took the
kasha when he left,” I said, but I don’t think she heard me.

“If they refuse to say where they took Osip,” Nadezhda asked, “how in the world will I find him?”

I sat down next to her. “There is an old trick,” I told her. “You will prepare a small parcel filled with soap and socks and the like and address it to Mandelstam, Osip. I will
accompany you. Together we’ll go from prison to prison and queue at the window where they accept packages for prisoners. They will check the list of inmates at the prison—if he is not
there they will turn you away. The prison that accepts the package is where he’ll be.”

“How do you know such things, Anna?”

Looking back, I can see now that I was taking out my rage at Osip’s arrest on her. She was agonizing over the imminent execution of a husband, an unfortunately banal situation in this
workers’ paradise of ours. I, on the other hand, stood to lose an irreplaceable poet-brother. “Chalk it up to my having led a less sheltered existence than you,” I said, my tone
more vinegary than it should have been under the circumstances.

“But my life has been anything but sheltered!”

“Your life may have been unconventional sexually, but sheltered from political reality. You don’t understand—they are arresting people for nothing now! We are shuffled like a
pack of cards. Only someone who has no grasp of political reality could have encouraged Osip in this madness.”

“That’s simply not the case. We imagined prison and accepted the risks.”

I could barely credit my ears. “You
imagined
prison!”

Nadezhda started hyperventilating and I had to massage her solar plexus before she could respire normally. “What do I do after I find out where he is?” she asked in a small
voice.

“We must get people to intervene on his behalf,” I said. “I will alert Borisik. He will surely get in touch with Nikolai Bukharin. You must seek an interview with Bukharin and
explain what happened. He has helped you and Osip before. He will help again if he is able to. Whatever you do, don’t mention the Stalin epigram. All you know is that Osip was
arrested.”

“Bukharin has been out of favor since the late twenties—”

“He’s no longer on the Politburo, but Stalin has thrown him a bone, the editorship of
Izvestiya
—he is said to value Bukharin’s judgment.”

I don’t remember how long we sat there in dazed silence, sipping the tea long after it became cold, lost in thought or its absence. The Moscow morning flooded the room with a deathly slate
gray light. I do remember that the poet Tsvetaeva came to mind—I’d known the beautiful Marina when she and Osip had been briefly involved before the Bolsheviks came on the scene. At the
time of Mandelstam’s arrest she was living in exile in Paris, her poetry circulating in her native land in manuscript. One of her poems that had reached me earlier in the year spoke of the
Bolshevik Revolution and
the deadly days of October
. Sitting in the empty room that had once been filled with life and love and laughter and poetry, I suddenly heard Tsvetaeva’s
ominous lines ringing in my ear.

NINE

Osip Emilievich

Thursday, the 17th of May 1934

I
CAN SEE
,
WITH
the benefit of hindsight, that it is a marvelously liberating experience to be arrested—it liberates you
from the terror of being arrested. Being liberated from the terror of arrest has a downside—it obliges you to concentrate on lesser terrors: where your next meal or next cigarette will come
from, what would happen if your muse or your erection go absent without leave, how those dear to you will survive if the state in its infinite wisdom decides they are more useful as next of kin,
what would be the effect on the poet’s literary reputation if it was discovered he was terrified of terror. I was focusing on the lesser terrors when the arresting officer delivered my
perspiring body to the inner prison in Lubyanka and got someone to sign a receipt for me. I never set eyes on the receipt, but I supposed it was something (à la L. Carroll) akin to
Received, one mad hatter twitching from mercury poisoning or fear of being dispatched to the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

For the record, let me say that I’d been jailed before, briefly, in the Crimea during the Civil War, detained by Wrangel’s White Guards rounding up citizens without travel permits or
enough cash to bribe their way out of prison, then freed when the Reds stormed the city and hanged
their
prisoners from trees on the hill above it. Curiously, I’d even set foot inside
the burnt-almond Lubyanka once. It had come about this way. My brother Evgeny had been incarcerated in the Lubyanka Prison in 1922. Desperate to free him, I’d arranged through a mutual friend
to see Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, a rising star in the Bolshevik firmament whom Lenin had anointed as
the darling of the Party
. His Bolshevik credentials notwithstanding, Bukharin was a
cultivated man, inclined to help artists when he could. Meeting Bukharin in his apartment in the Second House of Soviets, in earlier times called the Metropol Hotel, I’d exposed the absolute
innocence of my brother and pleaded with him to intercede. Setting aside the broom he’d been using to swat enormous water bugs, Bukharin had immediately put through a call to the notorious
chief of the Cheka, the Pole Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and arranged an appointment for me. I have a vivid memory of the
iron commissar
, as Dzerzhinsky was called (behind his back, it goes without
saying)—he had a face that looked as if it had been caught in a vise and a stylish goatee that he kept scratching at when he interviewed me in his cavernous office on one of the
Lubyanka’s upper floors. (When I described the meeting to Bukharin, I elicited a laugh from him by suggesting that Dzerzhinsky’s beard may have been infested with lice.) Keen to do
Bukharin a favor, the iron commissar had offered to liberate my brother if I would stand surety for him.
Stand surety for him!
Holy God, someone landing from Mars might have mistaken Russia
for a civilized country. Within hours Evgeny was taken from his cell and freed, and I was back browsing the bookstalls on Kuznetsky Bridge, a few steps from the Lubyanka, gazing at the heavy
granite high-rise that had originally served as the home office of an insurance company, trying to picture what was going on behind the pleats of the large Italian-style curtains that screened the
prison windows.

It was small comfort to think that now I would find out.

Moments after entering Lubyanka, I found myself in a morgue-like room with white tiles on the floor and the walls. “Name, forename, patronymic?” the warden, a bony man with a shaven
head and foul breath, shouted at me.

“Mandelstam, Osip Emilievich,” I shouted back, as if I were responding to a drill sergeant.

“Why are you shouting?”

“I’m shouting because you’re shouting.”

“I am not shouting,” the drill sergeant shouted. “I am talking in my normal voice.”

He checked my name against the arrest warrant, then moistening the nib of a pen on his charged tongue, carefully copied it out in longhand on what looked like a bank ledger.

“Is Mandelstam your real name?”

I nodded. Without looking up, he shouted, “I did not catch the answer to my question. Is Mandelstam your real name or an alias?”

“Real name.”

“Respond in grammatical sentences, not fragments.”

“Fragments are what I shore up against my ruin,” I shouted.

“Say again.”

“Mandelstam is my real name.”

“Occupation?”

“I am a poet.”

“Poet is not a proletarian occupation recognized by Soviet statutes.”

I had an inspiration. “I am an engineer of men’s souls.”

He didn’t seem to recognize the phrase that had been attributed to Stalin in the newspapers. “What services do you render to the state?” he shouted. “Who pays you for
services rendered?”

“I compose poetry, but it’s been years since I’ve been remunerated for this service rendered.”

“Remunerated?”

“Compensated. Paid.”

He scratched the words
Intellectual
and
Parasite
on the register.

“Date of birth?”

“I was born in the night of January the second and third in the unreliable year of eighteen-ninety something, and the centuries surround me with fire,”
I replied, quoting from
a poem I intended to write if I survived.

The warden raised his eyes and effortlessly delivered a stinging slap across my face. “You don’t take your arrest seriously,” he warned.

“I do, I do,” I remember insisting through my tears. “I don’t expect you to understand, but I am actually relieved to be arrested. It gives me one less thing to worry
about.”

“Date of birth?” the warden shouted in precisely the same disinterested tone.

“The third of January 1891,” I whispered.

“Speak up,” he shouted.

“The third of January 1891.”

“Place of residence?”

“Herzen House on Nashchokin Street.”

The warden looked up again. “Number?”

“I don’t remember the number.” I winced in anticipation of another stinging slap.

“Name, relationship of nearest relative to be notified in the likely event of death?”

“Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, wife.”

“Remove your suspenders and shoelaces. Empty your pockets.” He snatched my volume of Pushkin and, holding it by the spine, shook it, then dropped it back on the table. “Strip
to the skin.”

When I was standing naked before him, he added the word
Israelite
to the ledger and rang a small bell. A middle-aged woman wearing thick eyeglasses and a white medical smock entered,
stage left. While the warden examined every stitch of my clothing, looking no doubt for items on the list posted inside the door—razor blades, nail scissors, pencils, letters or other written
material, photographs, medicine of any kind—the medical orderly, if that’s what she was, fitted on surgical gloves and methodically searched through the hair on my head. Then she pushed
aside my organ and threaded her fingers through my pubic hair, after which, deftly deploying a tongue depressor, she visited the principal orifices of my body in the wrong order.