The Stalin Epigram (17 page)

“It could only have been my prose piece
Conversation About Dante
.”

My interrogator removed his green visor and tried to flatten down an unruly tuft of hair. “What you wrote on Dante was not subversive,” he said.

“You are familiar with my essay on Dante!”

“I’m familiar with your thesis—that for Dante, the inferno is described as if it were a prison.” Moistening the ball of his thumb, Christophorovich leafed through a thick
dossier, found the page he was looking for and began to read lines I had written. “
All our efforts are directed toward the struggle against the density and darkness of the place.
Illuminated shapes cut through it like teeth.
As you will come to understand, I’m familiar with every word you ever wrote. After your wife, after the harlot Akhmatova, I am probably the
leading Mandelstam scholar in the Soviet Union.”

“If it’s not my Dante essay, it must have been a poem that landed me in this inferno.”

He waited. I grasped that silence was one of the tools of his trade.

I attempted to distract him with lines from an old poem.
“In the black velvet of the Soviet night—”

He pulled another page from the dossier. “Vintage 1920, according to my notes. Try again.”

“Whom will you next kill? What lie will you now invent?”

My interrogator clearly enjoyed sparring with me. “That’s from your poem entitled ‘January 1, 1924.’ We’ve known about it since January 2, 1924.”

By then I was breathing with difficulty.
“The wolf-hound century leaps at my throat . . . my mouth has been twisted by lies.”

Through the raw light, I could make out Christophorovich sadly shaking his head. “You’re getting closer in time—that’s from 1931.”

“How I’d love to speak my mind, to play the fool, to spit out truth.”

“You’re stuck in 1931, though the spirit of that particular poem is closer to the one that landed you on our doorstep.”

My heart was pounding in my chest as I racked my brain for lines to throw him.
“As if wearing silent slippers, the starving peasants watch the garden gate but do not touch the
chain.”

“You’re getting warmer, Mandelstam. May 1933, if I’m not mistaken. You called it ‘Old Crimea’ when you recited it to your first readers.”

And then Christophorovich, moving in what appeared to be slow motion, removed a single sheet of paper from the dossier and, angling it to catch the light, began to read:

The faint hope that I might somehow come out of this alive plummeted like a shot bird. Quicksand sucked at my feet. I could see his eyes fixed on me over the sheet of paper. “Do these
lines ring a bell, Mandelstam?”

When I couldn’t bring myself to answer, he flung the juiciest morsels of my epigram in my face:
fingers fat as grubs . . . cockroach whiskers . . . a rabble of thin-necked leaders.
He delivered the last two lines from memory.

Christophorovich came around to the front of the table. “You are said to be skilled at interpreting poems. In your considered opinion, who is this Kremlin mountaineer? Who, the
broad-chested Ossete?”

Clutching my trousers at the waistband with fingers that had gone numb, my laceless shoes planted flat on the quicksand and pushing against it to keep myself from sliding off the stool to
certain suffocation, I looked up at the interrogator looming over me. I had difficulty bringing him into focus. I heard him say, “Calm yourself, Mandelstam. You must have known what you were
getting into when you composed this seditious poem, when you flaunted it to your first readers.”

I think I said something along the lines of “I have gone beyond calm, comrade interrogator, never to return. I am experiencing fear in full measure.”

“Excellent. This will have the advantage of accelerating the often tedious process of interrogation. The trick is to think of us as collaborators. My job is an exhausting one. If you are
questioned all night, bear in mind that I must question you all night. All night, every night until you not only grovel in guilt, but give me the names of those to whom you read the
poem.”

“How is it possible for a cultural criminal like myself to collaborate with a cultural commissar?”

“We can meet on a middle ground.”

“There is no middle ground in an unweeded garden. Stalin himself has decreed that there are only two possibilities—either you are with us or you are against us.” Thinking of
Nadenka, I added: “I am a great believer in middle grounds. If Stalin had left a sliver of middle ground, I would have jumped at the chance to live out the few years left to me on
it.”

“What Stalin said was a figure of speech, a slogan designed to rally the troops to class warfare. Here in the sanctuary of the Lubyanka, there is a middle ground on which you and I can
meet, Mandelstam. We Bolsheviks are not brutes bent on destruction for the pleasure of destroying. We are builders. We are attempting what no one has ever before attempted—to construct
Socialism, and once constructed, use it as a cornerstone to construct Communism. War, poverty, inequality, exploitation will vanish from the face of the earth, or at least that part of the earth we
preside over. Are you familiar with the work of the dramatist Nikolai Pogodin? In the early thirties he wrote a brilliant play that sums up who we are and what we’re doing. It was called
My Friend
. Stalin himself has commented favorably on it. The play dramatizes the struggle to build a large factory in a backward peasant country—Pogodin’s characters are ordinary
workers overcoming enormous obstacles, performing heroically to construct Socialism. We are all of us, from Comrade Stalin on down to the humble Chekist interrogating wreckers in the Lubyanka,
ordinary workers performing heroically, trying to create a state that functions for the good of all its citizens and not merely the handful of rich capitalist exploiters who own the means of
production. Surely you can understand that to succeed at this hallowed project, the first order of business is to protect it from wreckers like you.”

Christophorovich hit a small bell with the heel of his hand. The guard who had brought me turned up at the door. “Think about what I have said, Mandelstam. Tomorrow night we will pick up
where we left off. Hopefully we will identify the sliver of middle ground on which we can comfortably collaborate.”

Here is the second interrogation, or at least in my imperfect memory what I think of as the second interrogation. I remember being led again through the long corridors to the door with the
number twenty-three on it. For some reason Christophorovich was not yet at his post behind the table. I stared at the photograph of Stalin on the wall, half convinced that he would personally
interrogate me this time, all the while aware of an animal fear growing inside me like a tumor: fear of poison, of suffocation, of strangulation, of decapitation. I must have fallen asleep on the
stool because the guard kicked the legs out from under it, sending me sprawling across the parquet floor. With an effort I crawled back onto the stool. When I looked up I saw Christophorovich
observing me from behind the table.

“Have you searched out the common ground on which the cultural commissar and the cultural criminal can meet?” he inquired.

In a delirium of terror, I clutched at a straw. “What you have is an early version of the Stalin epigram. The second stanza was revised. There is no mention of
murderer and
peasant-slayer
in the final version.”

Christophorovich pushed a blank sheet across the table, along with a fountain pen. He motioned for me to move my stool closer. “Write out the final version of the poem in your own
hand,” he instructed.

My brain was awash with story lines. Had the people who left cigarette ends in our ashtray planted listening devices in the walls of our flat after all? Had they recorded my reading of the first
version to Nadenka and Zinaida? Had they heard me offer to copy it off for Zinaida so that she could memorize it? Had they arrested her and seized the incriminating evidence before the poor girl
could destroy it? Were Nadenka and Zinaida even now cowering in a cell somewhere in the bowels of the Lubyanka? In the bedlam of thoughts and emotions, one thing seemed crystal clear to me: the
fact that Christophorovich possessed the original epigram meant I could no longer save myself. But I still might be able to save Nadenka and Zinaida, along with the others who had heard the
epigram. Leaning over the table, I wrote out the lines, including the revised second stanza:

Christophorovich snatched the new version from my fingers and read it carefully. He had what can be described as a smug smile on his lips when he finished. “But that changes everything,
Mandelstam. Without the
murderer and peasant-slayer
, the whole thing is much more tepid. Though we still have to deal with the
cockroach whiskers
, not to mention the
every killing
is a treat for the Ossete.
Given this change, there may be a ray of hope for you if—”

He was a delicate interrogator. One couldn’t help but admire his skill as he left the
if
hanging in the air between us.

“If?” I repeated.

He shrugged. “You must absolutely name names. If it is any comfort to you, rest assured we know them already—we know to whom you read the poem, we know their various reactions.
Still, it will count against you if this evidence comes from us, as opposed to your making a clean breast of things. If you desire to make amends, to cleanse your criminal behavior with
collaboration, name names.”

“An individual blessed with a poetic talent has a sacred obligation not to betray that talent,” I said.

Christophorovich only smiled. “A person blessed with a poetic talent has a sacred obligation to remain amongst the living and exercise that talent.”

The interrogation continued on through the night. Christophorovich coaxed and cajoled and wheedled and threatened; at one point he informed me that Nadenka and Zinaida had been arrested as
coconspirators in a plot to overthrow Stalin and were being interrogated in another part of the Lubyanka. He accused me of egoistically putting their lives in jeopardy, as well as compromising all
those to whom I had read the epigram. Exasperated by my refusal to name names, he summoned an enormous Uzbek with a deformed nose, who attached my wrists to irons embedded in the wall. I fainted
straightaway from fear. When I came awake the medical orderly was listening to my heartbeat with a stethoscope and shaking her head. “If you don’t want him to die on you, I suggest you
suspend the questioning and let him sleep a few hours, comrade interrogator.”

I could make out a rose-gristle dawn bleeding through the window where the Italian curtains didn’t overlap when the guard came to fetch me back to my cell. Passing through the last of the
steel doors, I reached my cell block. The guard left me for the time it took to get fire for his cigarette from the turnkey. Standing with my back against the wall where, improbable as this sounds,
someone had taped up pages from a magazine with portraits of the generals who defeated Napoleon, I thought I heard a woman whimpering—the sound seeped from under the door of a cell two cells
down from my own. And then, dear God, I distinctly heard Nadenka’s voice—she seemed to be trying to comfort another woman. It was a fleeting impression based on intonation more than
actual words. But I’d recognize her voice anywhere. Back in my cell, I knelt beside Fikrit and whispered in his good ear, “Have you heard women whimpering?”

“I have,” he said. “If I press my good ear to the stone of the wall, I hear my Agrippina crying her heart out, I hear her saying over and over,
Fikrit, Fikrit, what have you
gotten us into?
Sergo, when he was still able to talk, warned me about how they play recordings of women’s voices to weaken our will to resist. But I no longer resist and still I hear her
whimpering. It is not a recording. There is no doubt about it—like me, she is a prisoner in the Lubyanka.”

I crept back to my side of the cell and, coiling my body into a fetal position, fell into a sleep so shallow that the guard’s failure to pound on the door woke me every few minutes. I
dreamed I was sleepwalking through walls, but became so frightened I would be trapped in a wall that I forced myself awake, or thought I did. I wasn’t sure whether I was asleep and dreaming I
was awake, or actually awake, when I urinated into the slop jar. The sound of urination, the stench coming from Sergo’s corner of the cell, seemed real enough, which suggested I was awake
after all. Seeing that both Sergo and Fikrit were sound asleep, I checked to make sure the leather flap was over the peephole in the door, then went across to the wall meaning to put my ear to it.
On an impulse I shouldered through the wall into the next cell. Two prisoners, one an old man with fine gray hair falling to his collarbones, the other, a young prematurely bald man with a blanket
draped across his shoulders, were playing chess on the cement floor with tiny pieces molded from scraps of soap. “Check,” the old man declared triumphantly, edging forward a rook with a
fingernail. “Ah,” his opponent said, “I didn’t anticipate that.” I cleared my throat to get their attention. They both raised their eyes. “Excuse me for
interrupting your game,” I said. “If you’re looking for the women,” the young man said, “they’re one cell over,” and he gestured with a thumb that was
missing its nail toward the far wall. I started to thank him, but he had turned back to the game and was concentrating on how to extricate his king.

I watched them for a moment, uncertain how I’d gotten into this cell, uncertain how I would get out. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I walked through the wall he
had indicated and found myself in a smaller cell illuminated by a bulb so weak you could see the yellow filament in it. As my eyes became accustomed to the density of the darkness, two illuminated
shapes cut through it like teeth. Nadenka and Zinaida were slumbering in each other’s arms. Nadenka was wearing the dress she’d had on the night of my arrest, Zinaida was in the
off-white mousseline costume she’d worn when we saw her perform in
Three Sisters
. I sank to my knees next to Nadenka. Sensing a presence, she stirred. Her eyes opened and she gaped at
me in fright. I put a finger to her lips to keep her from crying out. “How in the world did you get here?” she demanded. I heard myself say, “You won’t believe me if I tell
you, so I’d better not tell you lest you take me for a mad hatter. When were you arrested?” “During the search of our flat, they found the poems concealed in the teapot—the
swine Sergei Petrovich must have betrayed the hiding place. When they discovered they were in my handwriting, they arrested me on the spot.” “And Anna Andreyevna?” “Anna was
still in the living room when they took me off. I don’t know her fate.” “When was Zinaida arrested?” “They searched her apartment while she was away at the theater and
found the epigram—the dear girl feels dreadful about not having destroyed it. They turned up at the theater and arrested her between acts. As there was no understudy present, the performance
had to be canceled.” Nadenka took my hand and pressed the back of it against her cheek and I could feel the tears streaming from her eyes. “Oh Osya, what shall we do?” With all
the commotion, Zinaida was stirring now. She, too, came awake. When she saw it was me, she burst into tears. “I will never, ever forgive myself for not destroying the epigram,” she
managed to say between the sobs that racked her body.