The Stalin Epigram (25 page)

“I was promised my life would be spared if I implicated my husband. In a moment of weakness I signed the confession that was put in front of me. The truth is that my husband is completely
innocent. As God is my witness, he was unaware of my counterrevolutionary activities. Isn’t it enough that I admit my guilt? Why do you need to destroy the both of us?”

The lead judge said, “Your life depends on your telling the truth in this matter of the backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik Center.”

The accused Yegorova’s strength gave out before my eyes and she sank to her knees, her chin resting on the low bar. The soldier posted behind her gripped her under the armpits and started
to haul her to her feet. In the process a strap of her dress slipped off one shoulder, exposing a breast for everyone to see. I reached over before the soldier behind me could interfere (he was
half my size and would have been hard put to restrain me if I wasn’t willing to be restrained) and pulled the strap back up on her shoulder.

Comrade Vishinsky, an experienced procurator, was unfazed by the turn of events. “Let the court note that in the face of two signed confessions, her own and that of her husband, the
accused Yegorova has perjured herself to protect her husband; has in fact put loyalty to her traitor husband ahead of loyalty to the Soviet state and the Revolution. The evidence, Your Honors, is
overwhelming. The counterrevolutionary activities of the accused Ignatiev and the accused Red Army commander Yegorov, who will be tried in a separate proceeding when he has recovered from his
self-inflicted head wounds, bear out the conspiracy initiated by Trotsky’s son, Sedov, and transmitted to the Moscow section of the backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik Center by the
accused Yegorova.”

Comrade Vishinsky made his way back to the procurator general’s bar and opened a new folder, and I knew my turn had come at long last. To my delight, he called out my name.

“Fikrit Trofimovich Shotman.”

I saw Agrippina cover her eyes with her hands. I saw the men sitting on either side of her grip her wrists and pull her hands away from her face. I gave her an encouraging smile.
“Present,” I cried in a loud and firm voice, “and eager to admit my guilt as I have come to understand it.” And before comrade procurator general could get his tongue around
a question, I commenced my confession. I described in great detail how I had been recruited in Vienna, Austria in 1932 when I was representing the Soviet Union in the weight-lifting competition at
the All-European games; how I’d been given a cash payment in United States dollars to finance my wrecking activities; how I’d communicated with my handler, an American secret agent
masquerading as a weightlifter, using a secret code buried in the dedication inside the cover of an American fitness magazine; how, carried away by my hatred for the new order, I had even
disfigured Stalin’s face tattooed on my upper arm. To dramatize the point, I flung off the jacket of my new suit, unbuttoned my shirt and bared my arm, angling my left biceps toward the crowd
so they could all see the rope burn across the faded tattoo. In the front row, Agrippina turned her head away and I could make out enormous tears flowing down her beautiful cheeks, but I knew I was
doing the right thing. I had Comrade Interrogator Christophorovich’s word for it. Comrade Vishinsky tried to interrupt as I was buttoning my shirt but I interrupted his interruption.
“There’s more,” I declared, climbing back into my jacket, and I told about the worthless Tsarist loan coupons I kept in my trunk against the day when Trotsky’s
counterrevolution, in which I was a foot soldier, drove the Bolsheviks from power and restored capitalism in Soviet Russia, at which point my Tsarist coupons could be redeemed at their face value.
Comrade procurator general took advantage of me having to come up for air to inquire about the significance of the Eiffel Tower sticker on my steamer trunk. “I’m glad you asked—I
almost forgot about the Eiffel Tower. Let me say, for those of you not familiar with it, that the Eiffel Tower located in Paris, France doesn’t hold a candle to the towers you can find in our
own Soviet Union. True, they may not be as big as the one in Paris, France but every woman knows it’s not size that counts.” Some of the ladies in the courtroom started giggling, but
shut up when one of the judges tapped his wooden gavel on the table. The judge nodded at me to continue, and I did. “When I was recruited into the backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik
Center during the All-Europe games in Vienna, Austria, I was given the Eiffel Tower sticker and ordered to paste it on my steamer trunk as a recognition signal so that other conspirators in the
backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik Center could identify me as a member of this gang.”

The lead judge spoke up from his high-backed throne on the raised platform. “Let me say it is to the credit of the accused Shotman that he has chosen to make a clean breast of his crimes.
Anyone with a grain of sense can see that he is not attempting to hide, or mitigate, his guilt, and this will certainly be taken into consideration when it comes time to pass sentence.”

I didn’t understand what the judge meant by
mitigate,
but I nodded my thanks to him from my place in the box of the accused.

The lady judge sitting to the right of the lead judge raised a finger. “I would like to ask the accused Shotman precisely what his role was in the backup Trotskyist Paris-based
anti-Bolshevik Center.”

“My role?”

“What were you supposed to do to further the counterrevolution?” the lady judge explained.

I looked over at Christophorovich for a sign of what I might answer—he had never raised this matter with me when I rehearsed my confession—but there was no help to be had from him. I
glanced at Agrippina, but she avoided my eye. I turned to the lady judge. “Why, my role was to wreck. I signed on as a wrecker.”

“Wreck what?” the lady judge persisted.

I shrugged. “Until my knee went bad, I was a champion weight lifter. Until my arrest, I was a circus strongman. Look at me, Your Honors. Look at my hands. Look at my shoulders. I can wreck
whatever I am told needs wrecking.”

Comrade Vishinsky came to my rescue. “It is clear from his confession that the accused Shotman was ready to follow wrecking instructions sent to him by the backup Trotskyist Paris-based
anti-Bolshevik Center. There may have been specific wrecking instructions from Sedov printed inside one of the cigarettes that the accused Yegorova delivered to the accused Ignatiev, but were never
forwarded due to the timely arrest of these two conspirators. The important element to bear in mind is that the accused Shotman was a member of the conspiracy and ready to carry out Sedov’s
wrecking orders when they reached him.”

The lead judge looked over at me. “Does the accused Shotman wish to add anything to his testimony?”

It was here that I came up with the words Christophorovich had drummed into my head. “No matter what my punishment will be, Your Honors, I in advance consider it just.” I looked
intently at the tinted windows at the back of the courtroom. “Let us all go forward behind Comrade Stalin.”

Several in the courtroom—Christophorovich, Islam Issa, the lady who had taken down my confession, some of the lady clerks—began clapping their hands. Others joined them until the
entire room was filled with applause. Flashbulbs went off in my face. I felt Agrippina’s eyes on me and comprehended that, for once, she would not be ashamed of her Fikrit. I turned to the
audience and, my knuckles scraping the floor of the prisoner’s box, bowed from the waist.

The rest of the trial passed in a haze of speeches from defense lawyers (until that moment I didn’t know we had been assigned defense lawyers) demanding the ultimate penalty for my two
codefendants. “These mad dogs of capitalism tried to tear limb from limb the best of our Soviet land. I insist that we do with them what we do with mad dogs, which is to say, we shoot
them.” The lady lawyer assigned to defend me rose and said, “Fikrit Shotman has demonstrated genuine remorse and cooperated fully with the authorities. For him I ask the judges to
impose a lenient sentence of four years hard labor in the Far East.”

There were cries from the crowd of “The mad dogs must be shot” and “Leniency for Shotman” as the three judges left the courtroom to deliberate. They filed back twenty
minutes later. The lead judge read out the verdicts. The accused Ignatiev and Yegorova was condemned to be shot, sentence to be carried out immediately. Me, I pulled four years. In the courtroom,
Agrippina collapsed into the arms of one of the men in dark suits. To my right, the accused Ignatiev blew a kiss to an old lady on crutches at the back of the courtroom before he turned to leave
the box. The accused Yegorova sank to the floor in a dead faint. The two soldiers had trouble raising her. I shouldered them aside and lifted her as if she was a child’s doll and carried her
in my arms back to the holding cell in the basement and, carefully straightening her dress, set her gently out on a bench. The last I saw of her, looking over my shoulder as I headed back to my
cell block, the guards were trying to revive her with smelling salts so they could take her to execution.

FIFTEEN

Nadezhda Yakovlevna

Tuesday, the 28th of May 1934

I
DID A GREAT
many things in the days after Mandelstam’s arrest that recommended themselves to me as a way to make an hour or two pass without
agonizing over Mandelstam’s arrest. One day I scrubbed the kitchen pots and the single grill of the paraffin stove with steel wool until my fingers turned raw. Another time I pranced around
the small living room crushing moths between my palms and keeping score with chalk marks on a piece of slate. I spent an entire weekend mending garments with wrong-colored threads. Working by
candlelight one night, I made copies of the poems we’d hidden in my shoes and gave the duplicates to Mandelstam’s brother Alexander for safekeeping. The night of Mandelstam’s
arrest they had searched through all of our books and then flung them back onto the shelves in disorder. On the day in question, I decided to restore them to something resembling the order they had
been in, dusting each book as it came off the shelf, stacking my husband’s in one pile and mine in another before returning them to the shelves. It is a law of nature that one never sorts
books without pausing now and then to skim through the pages, wondering who underlined certain passages, and why, wondering who scribbled illegible notes in the margins with arrows pointing to
other paragraphs. I reread sentences I’d underlined in an excellent Russian translation of Laclos’s eighteenth-century French masterpiece
Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
I came across
another book that I’d thought I’d loaned and lost, Zinovyeva-Annibal’s
Thirty-three Monstrosities,
a novel from the turn of the century that, for the first time in modern
Russian literature, openly described lesbian love. I don’t recall how the book came into my possession, but I do recall when: I was sixteen at the time, with a terrible crush on a Russian
girl I’d met in Paris while traveling with my parents. She had slipped me notes on perfumed paper saying how much she admired my pale eyes and my delicate skin. Curiously, I can’t even
remember the girl’s name now, though this puppy love was as intense as any I’d experienced before Mandelstam mooched that first cigarette from me in the Junk Shop. Perhaps this girl had
given me the
Thirty-three Monstrosities.
On the other hand it could well have been my mother, one of the first females in all of Russia to qualify as a physician—she had a bohemian
disposition and could conceivably have left the book on my night table to impart to her Kiev-bound daughter a patina of sophistication.

I was leafing through
Thirty-three Monstrosities,
lingering over the pages where the corners had been turned down at one time or another, trying (in vain) to read them with the eyes of
the sixteen-year-old daydreamer I once was, when I heard footsteps beating a hasty retreat in the corridor outside the flat. Going into the hallway, I couldn’t help but spot the folded paper
that had been slipped under the door. My heart started pounding in my rib cage when I picked it up. For a moment I was too frightened of what might be in it to unfold the paper and see. Pasternak
had phoned several days before to say that he had learned—he absolutely refused to tell me how—that Stalin himself was taking a personal interest in Mandelstam’s case. Pasternak
interpreted the information as a positive development, but I saw the dark side of this moon: if Stalin was taking a personal interest in Mandelstam, God have mercy on Mandelstam. Curiosity got the
better of me and I unfolded the paper, which turned out to be a printed summons, with my name inked in, to turn up at the Furkassovsky Street door of the Lubyanka at two that same afternoon.

The Lubyanka! Was I, then, being arrested? Or did this have to do with my husband—were they going to hand me a death certificate and his personal effects? I remember that my legs gave way
under me and I sank onto the floor, kneeling before the rose red radiator as if it were a religious artifact and I were praying to it. Dear God in heaven, if he still has a muse and an erection,
arrange things so the sun will simply fail to rise tomorrow morning. Amen. After a time I managed to collect my strength and my thoughts enough to make it to the communal telephone in the corridor
and dial Bukharin’s
Izvestiya
number. I reached his secretary, Korotkova. “Oh, dear,” she said with a despondent sigh, “he has absolutely forbidden me to put through
a call from you, Madam Mandelstam. He won’t see you if you come by. He is furious with you—you apparently placed Nikolai Ivanovich in an awkward position vis-à-vis his friend in
the Kremlin. I am afraid there is nothing I can do for you.”

To say I was shaken would be an understatement. One of the Herzen House neighbors found me sitting on the broken chair next to the telephone, staring numbly at the wall. “Nadezhda, have
you had bad news?” she asked.

I handed her the summons. She read it and said, “God help you, I cannot,” and crushed it back into my fingers as if the paper were contaminated before beating a hasty retreat.