The Stalin Epigram (8 page)

Borisik announced, “I shall plead madness, in both senses of the word.”

Osip said, “What’s the difference how he pleads—he is clearly guilty as charged. There’s nothing left to do but come up with an appropriately inappropriate
sentence.”

“As we are under no obligation to have the punishment fit the crime,” I said, enjoying the game, “I propose the only rational sentence.” And to Osip’s immense
pleasure, I quoted a line from a gem of a poem he once dedicated to me:
“I’ll find an old beheading axe in the woods.”

“A beheading axe!” Osip exclaimed. “Now we’re getting into the Bolshevik spirit of things.”

“And where th’offense is, let the great axe fall,”
Boris proclaimed in English, quoting, as he told us, a line from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
.

We burst into laughter—my heart aches now as I recall the scene, for it was destined to be the last time the three of us would laugh together. In a manner of speaking, laughter vanished
from our lives on that sun-drenched Thursday in April, anno Domini 1934.

A trolley came churning along the street, sparks flecking from the electric cable overhead, and with a shriek of metal on metal skidded to a stop in front of us. I waved to the motorman to
signal we weren’t getting on. Neither, apparently, was the woman pushing the child in the stroller. The motorman called grumpily through the open door, “Thems that aren’t waiting
for trolleys, comrades, oughtn’t be sitting at trolley stops.” Jerking closed his doors, he headed off down the street.

Borisik groaned. “What is it about us and the new order that we can’t even get trolley etiquette right?”

“It’s the story of my life,” I said. “Do you really think there is a regulation restricting these benches to trolley passengers?”

“Why not?” Osip said irritably. “There are regulations for everything else, including the writing of poetry.”

Borisik said, “According to the article in
Pravda,
Stalin himself spelled out the new regulations during a meeting with writers at Gorky’s villa.”

“Socialist realism,” I said, “makes me want to throw up.”

“It will not have escaped you that none of us was invited to this meeting between Stalin and the so-called
engineers of the human soul
,” Borisik said. “What do you make
of this?”

And then Osip uttered something that astonished us. “Stalin was paying us a great compliment. With his peasant’s instinct for what is genuine and what is ersatz, he doesn’t put
us in the same pigeonhole as his writer-engineers.”

I wasn’t sure whether Osip was speaking tongue-in-cheek. “Do you really think he is capable of distinguishing between art that is genuine and art that isn’t?”

“The Kremlin mountaineer, as I have decided to call him, surely understands the difference between the poet or the dramatist or the composer who is willing to deliver the obligatory monody
to the everlasting glory of Stalin and those who, because of moral or esthetic scruples, are unwilling. If I had to make an educated guess, I would bet Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, to use his
Georgian name, is endowed with enough peasant common sense to realize that the artist who coughs up a monody on command delivers something devoid of artistic value; that the monodies he can’t
get are the ones he must have if his legend is to outlive his body.”

We began walking again. I saw that the woman pushing the child in a stroller was a few paces behind us. “We have company,” I said under my breath.

Borisik glanced back and grinned at the woman and she smiled back. “You’re becoming paranoid,” he told me. “She’s taking the sun like us.”

“Let’s return to
Hamlet,
” I suggested. “Borisik, explain, please, what you see in the play that brings you back to it, year after year.”

Osip didn’t understand Borisik’s fascination with it either. “Tolstoy hit the nail on the head,” he said impatiently. “
Hamlet
is little more than a vulgar
tale of pagan vengeance. The plot is relatively straightforward—a Danish prince seeks more and more proof that his uncle murdered his father because he can’t bring himself to act,
can’t bring himself to take revenge even when he has the proof. It’s a story about someone who is unable to deal with his own cowardice and so takes refuge from it in
madness.”

“No, no, I don’t read it that way at all,” Borisik burst out. “
Hamlet
is not mad; he
feigns
madness to justify his failure to act against his essential
nature.”

And then something happened that, given how things turned out, now seems to me to be best conveyed by saying that I thought the earth had stopped dead in its tracks for the beat of a heart.

I will need a moment to collect my thoughts.

What I have recalled up to now is more or less the gist. But when the earth stopped dead, so too did time; things proceeded at the speed of a mountain eroding, so I am able to reconstruct the
moment with absolute accuracy. Osip halted so abruptly the woman pushing the stroller had to swerve to avoid him. Borisik and I looked inquisitively at him, then at each other, then at Osip again.
He appeared to be shrugging off a great burden. His breathing became as calm as the drafts of air you would expect to find in the eye of a hurricane. “So that’s how it is,” he
said, more to himself than to us. And forgetting his decaying teeth, he smiled a genuine smile.

Both Borisik and I were mystified. “What?” I asked.

“But that puts everything into perspective!” Osip declared. “Hamlet feigns
madness
to justify his failure to act. I feign
sanity
to justify
my
failure to
act, since no sane person can be expected to do what I must do.”

Osip couldn’t have missed the look of confusion in my eyes. “What must you do?” I demanded.

Borisik, who had a sixth sense for matters of the spirit, said very quietly, “He has been putting off confronting his Kremlin mountaineer. What he feels he must do compels him to act
against his essential nature, inasmuch as poets don’t dirty their hands in politics.”

And then, as if a dam had given way, a torrent of words spilled from Osip’s lips. “In the beginning, God forgive us, many of us shared Mayakovsky’s optimistic view of the
Revolution—the Bolsheviks seemed to have a moral dimension, a hunger to improve the lot of the masses. But we didn’t reckon on the Kremlin mountaineer climbing over the bodies of his
colleagues and reaching the top of the pyramid ahead of them. Stalin makes Caligula, Cesare Borgia, Ivan the Terrible look like humanitarians.”

I saw Borisik shaking his head in anxious disagreement. “There is no evidence that Stalin knows what’s going on,” he said. “It could be Yagoda who is behind the forced
collectivization and the famine and the mass arrests. The Cheka has always acted as a state within a state.”

“This is not the first time we’ve had this argument,” Osip insisted, clearly exasperated. “What will it take to convince you I’m right, Boris, a photograph of
Stalin on the front page of
Pravda
with a smoking revolver in his fist?
Something is rotten in these Soviet Socialist Republics!
He
knows,
for God’s sake. He’s
behind every arrest, every execution, every deportation to Siberia. Nothing happens without his approval in this
unweeded garden
—your phrase, Boris, taken from the lips of the Hamlet
who feigns madness.
Absolutely nothing!
”

If I shut my eyes and catch my breath, I can still make out Borisik delivering the lines in English: “
’Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
possess it merely.
”

In his eagerness to explain himself, Osip was almost tripping over words now. “Red Terror didn’t start yesterday, it began when that poor creature Fanny Kaplan tried to kill Lenin in
1923—that night the order, countersigned by Stalin, went out to execute White prisoners by the thousands. He’s been at it ever since, killing hope, pushing us deeper and deeper into a
new ice age. He has to be stopped before he runs riot and drowns a hundred and fifty million people in teardrops.” Wincing in agitation, Osip came up with some lines I recognized from one of
his older poems. “. . .
Your spine has been shattered, my splendid derelict, my age
. . . My dear Anna, my dear Boris, I confide in you because you of all people will comprehend me.
I know how to go about destroying him!
It needs only a spark. We have heard physicists speculate about the explosive power locked inside an atom. I am deeply committed to the proposition
that an explosive power resides in the nucleus of a poem, too. I am able to release this power, I can trigger the explosion if I can bring myself to abandon sanity, if I become mad enough, in both
senses of the word, to let the scream of outrage stuck in the back of my throat emerge.” Osip looked hard at me. “Screaming has a lot in common with crying, Anna—once you start
you risk not being able to stop.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You propose to destroy Stalin with a poem!” I said incredulously.

“A poem bursting with truth telling that will reverberate across the land like ripples from a pebble thrown into stagnant water. Something as straightforward as
The king has no
clothes
. The peasants will greet his fall with prayers of thanksgiving. The Party will declare a national holiday. The Komsomol will sing it as they march off to fulfill their quotas. At
congresses in the Bolshoi, from every balcony and box, workers will shout it out. Young people who have grown old before their time with fear will dance in the streets for joy. It will be the end
of Stalin.”

“He will kill you,” Borisik said flatly.

“Executions fill me with fear,” Osip admitted, “especially my own.”

Borisik came up with another phrase from
Hamlet
, something along the lines of
Safety lies in fear
. Osip shook his head in irritation. “In an unweeded garden, there is no
safety,” he said. “No matter—the object is to save Russia, not me.”

I was beginning to feel alarmed. Turning on Borisik, I grabbed a lapel of his jacket. “Don’t stand there like an idiot, for heaven’s sake. Talk sense to him.”

I have the image engraved in my brain of these two dear men staring into each other’s eyes for an eternity, though it was surely only a fleeting moment. Then Borisik, the consummate
ladies’ man who wasn’t particularly physical with his male friends, did something I’d never seen him do before: moving with exquisite awkwardness, he wrapped his gangling arms
around Osip and pulled him into what can only be described as a lover’s embrace.

“Believe me, I would talk you out of it if I could,” Borisik said in tones usually reserved for funeral orations.

Osip seemed to be in a state of exaltation. His face was flushed, his fingers trembled. “The two of you, along with Nadenka, shall be my first readers,” he promised.

Borisik slipped his arms through Osip’s and mine and the three of us set off walking again. I became aware of a spring to Osip’s step, almost as if the going had given way to the
getting there. Nobody said a word for some time. I remember it was Borisik who broke the silence. “If it were possible, I would set the clock back.”

“Where would you go back to?” I asked.

“I would return to when Osip feigned sanity to justify his failure to act.”

“I would set the clock back still further,” Osip declared passionately. “I would go back to Russian literature before the Bolsheviks twisted its arm and tore it from its
socket.”

I had the sinking feeling he was going to spill more milk. I begged Osip—dear God, when I think of it now my blood runs cold—I begged him to carefully weigh the consequences of his
actions. “The last thing Russia needs,” I told him, “is the death of another poet.”

FIVE

Fikrit Shotman

Tuesday, the 1st of May 1934

T
HROUGH THE PLANKS NAILED
over the slit of a window high in the wall of my cell, I could hear horns and whistles and kettledrums and trombones in the
streets around the Lubyanka. I could picture the mass of workers, some waving banners representing their factory or collective, others carrying small children on their shoulders, flowing in great
rivers toward Red Square to file past Lenin’s Tomb in celebration of the seventeenth May Day since the glorious Bolshevik Revolution put Russia on the road to Communism. Monitors along the
route would keep an eye peeled for those who had drunk too much vodka and could barely walk, and cart them off to dry out in open trucks filled with straw parked in side streets. The workers from
my circus collective—as attendance is obligatory, Agrippina would be among them if she wasn’t in prison like me—would march in the crowd, the hammer-and-sickle ensign serving as a
balancing pole for one of the lady funambulists tightrope-walking on a cable stretched and held taut overhead by the tent men. Oh, how I wished I could join the parade—I would wave wildly at
Comrade Stalin looking down from Lenin’s Tomb in the hope that he would recognize me, would point me out to his Politburo comrades, would clasp his hands together in a sign of approval and
wave his clasped hands for all the world to see he had not forgotten the weight lifter who brought the silver medal home to Moscow from the 1932 All-Europe championship games in Vienna,
Austria.

“Turn down the racket,” my cell mate said through lips caked stiff with dried blood, as if the noise from the street was coming from a loudspeaker. He had been in the cell, crouching
like a wild animal in a corner, his trousers and shirt shredded beyond mending, his bare feet (minus some toenails) planted in a puddle of his own urine, when I arrived something like four weeks
before. He was badly beaten and thrown back into the cell in even worse condition after each interrogation. One shoulder was dislocated, all but one of his front teeth was knocked out, his left
wrist hung limp, judging from the grimaces when he coughed up blood he must have several cracked ribs, where his nose had been there was a swell of bloody tissue that oozed puss. I didn’t for
an instant doubt this prisoner was a dangerous criminal who deserved severe punishment. I resented having to share a cell with such a scoundrel and protested to my interrogator the first time I was
taken for questioning. He slid a pencil and a sheet of paper across the table and instructed me to write down my complaint. I didn’t want to let on I couldn’t read or write so I pushed
the paper back and mumbled something about not wanting to waste his time on a matter so trivial.