“Have you had any news of your husband?” Beskudnikov asked.
She took an inordinate amount of time to answer. “I’ve heard nothing specific,” she said. Her fatigue was palpable. She told them she’d met with Bukharin three times. The third he’d asked what she knew, admitting he knew nothing more. The fourth he’d refused to see her. Someone with connections to the Secret Police asked her the rank of the agent who’d searched their apartment; evidently the higher the rank, the more serious the case. Another had made inquiries on her behalf, then was advised not to get involved. “I wait in line,” she said. “I leave packages daily—I have no idea if they make it into his hands. I have no idea.”
“Of course we want to do something,” said Beskudnikov. He looked at the others, summoning a tone of chairman-like magnanimity. “We’ve discussed a collection—food, perhaps.” He paused to judge her reaction to this. “Or prepared meals might be better. Someone suggested a collection of money.” From a spot around the table came a noise of concern and he added, “Of course, for the needs of the household, et cetera; any monies from the Union couldn’t be used—not that you would engage in illegal activities, but you understand, there can’t be the perception that the Union has funded anything untoward—not that you would consider such things.” He began to repeat himself, his tone weakening. Others in the room seemed to retreat from him as well.
Nadya readied herself to speak. Beskudnikov stared at her lips as though they were perilous things.
“Thank you,” she said evenly.
He seemed to register her lack of loquaciousness as disappointment and his fearfulness shifted again. “Of course, we could do more,” Beskudnikov went on. “We should do more. We could.” He searched the room for agreement.
Clearly they knew nothing about the poem, Bulgakov thought. If they did, such a meeting would have never convened. He was annoyed; there should in fact be two Unions—one for those who were actually writers and another for people who simply placed words on a page. Mandelstam had stepped forward. He’d sacrificed in defense of all of them. Yet they would call it something else. They would assign it a different motivation—discontent, naïveté—to make their lack of action defensible.
“The Union could pen a letter to the editor,” he suggested. “A formal protest—Pravda would be best. It’s read by the world.” Those with their backs to him swung around in their chairs. Beskudnikov appeared to be seized by terror.
“You, of course, would be its author,” Bulgakov went on. “As the Union’s Chair.”
“Only the acting Chair, you understand. Something of this nature should really come from Berlioz, I believe.” He’d gone pale.
“Who knows when he’ll return—that could be too late.”
Too late for what? The gathering seemed to register his words with a kind of belated understanding; several glanced at the door as though thinking to leave.
Poprikhen shook his head with grave significance. “I don’t see how a letter can be fashioned if we don’t know exactly what he’s done. What are we to protest? This all seems quite ill-conceived.” He glared at Bulgakov.
“He wrote poetry,” said Margarita.
“Well, there it is,” retorted Poprikhen nastily.
“I’m not certain your opinion matters here,” Beskudnikov added faintly to Margarita. “It’s not entirely clear why you are here, seeing as you are not a Union member.”
Bulgakov had some vague recollection she wrote for one of the daily newspapers. They had their own union, of course. “She’s with me,” he said quickly.
Nadya’s gaze shifted to him. Her face was impossible to read.
“Regardless,” he went on. He stumbled for a moment. “Regardless—of whatever he did, do we allow even one of our members to be arrested for the act of self-expression? Otherwise we might as well invite monkeys to come in and do our job.”
“I agree,” interjected the dramatist Glukharyov from the corner. “So they don’t like what he writes—they’re allowed not to like it. Censure him, censor his work; but arrest? Are we now back to the practices of the Tsar and his thugs?”
There was a clamor of voices, then Poprikhen’s rose above it. “You know what Mandelstam writes—we’d be fools to align ourselves under that banner.”
“And if you were to be arrested,” said Bulgakov. “The rest of us should sit back and collect canned fruit for your wife and family?”
Beskudnikov began to protest but Poprikhen’s retort pushed him back. “There is precious little chance of my arrest,” he growled. More than one Committee member considered himself the novelist’s patron.
“Indeed, what a grand loss it would be for Soviet literature if you were,” said Bulgakov.
Poprikhen gave a wordless roar and attempted to launch himself toward Bulgakov, though he became entangled with his chair. The din rose until Beskudnikov stretched himself over the beet-faced novelist, essentially sitting on him and preventing the match of words from becoming a fistfight. The secretary continued to write, madly flipping pages and wiping his sweating brow. “Stop it!” cried Beskudnikov, to no one in particular. Eventually the room quieted. Gingerly he dismounted from Poprikhen’s lap and resumed his seat.
“Stop it,” he repeated, though the room was now silent. He adjusted his suit jacket. “There will be a box, placed in the foyer downstairs for the collection of foodstuffs, for the Mandelstams. In the meantime,” and he stretched his neck as though recovering from his recent gymnastics, “Comrade Bulgakov will draft a formal letter with some representative suggestions. This committee will review it in one week’s time.” With that, he stood and fled the room. The secretary remained at the table, still scribbling.
Others filed after him. Poprikhen extracted himself from his chair and slammed it under the table. “You are stupid to make enemies,” he said to Bulgakov.
“Better that than to be plain stupid,” said Bulgakov after him. The novelist seemed not to hear.
Nadya and Anna departed and the rest of the room emptied, except for Bulgakov and Margarita. He wondered what he’d been thinking. Perhaps he should follow Beskudnikov down the hall and beg off his assignment. He had edits to complete, a director to satisfy. Margarita considered him with what seemed to be the same skepticism as he felt. He thought to tell her that her suspicions were well founded
“You were right to say what you did earlier,” she said. She appeared almost sympathetic to him. As though she understood his anxiety, his desire to retreat as the others had. As though she could forgive him for this and would offer a parcel of her own faith to feed his courage.
For the first time that evening, perhaps since the arrest, his furtive need to hide lessened.
She didn’t move, studying him. “I’m not with you, though,” she said, strangely gentle, almost amused in her correction of him. “On that point, you are wrong.”
But she could be, he thought. She might be. And with this a different kind of fear overwhelmed him. He felt the night air at his back. The heat of her presence pressed against him like a hand to his chest.
“You’d probably survive the fall,” she observed easily, as if aware of his impulse. Or perhaps at the spark of a thought to dart across her brain: that she herself might push him.
But she turned and left. And for the briefest moment, the evening became infinitely less satisfying because of his survival.
Mandelstam stood in a grey concrete cell in a shallow pool of water tinged with his blood and urine, his hands shackled to a rope that hung from the ceiling, his feet chained to the floor. He’d not slept for what he thought had been several days. A series of guards watching him from a slot in the wall saw to that. Behind him, beyond his view, the door to his cell opened. The chief interrogator, an assistant, and a smallish man carrying a pad and pencil entered. Typically, it was this last one, the stenographer, who would collect the confession; however, this w
as unnecessary. He was there to collect names; already he’d amassed a good number. Mandelstam waited. A rubber mallet sailed up between his legs. His knees buckled; his shoulders seared in pain. He heard screams. Slowly he found his feet again. Beating him had been easy for the interrogators; their fists rose on the updrafts of his words. He had been poetic in his venom for their beloved leader; they were now poetic in their rage.
Vomit and perspiration stained his shirt. The stenographer sat down in the only chair in the room and waited for the crying to subside.
Mandelstam heard a gentle scratching. He couldn’t make sense of the noise. It seemed the room rustled with insects. He wanted to listen, to decipher their language.
Pain exploded again in his genitals. The insects fled screaming.
Then: “Mikhail Bulgakov,” said Mandelstam. The scratching returned.
CHAPTER 4
One of the poems Margarita found at the Mandelstams’ apartment had been written about her. She’d kept it apart from those she’d given to Bulgakov. She recognized the early draft, different from the published one. It was an early version of his love.
Reading it reminded her more sharply of its dissipation.
They’d taken risks in being together. She remembered a midsummer’s party at Nadya’s parents’ farm. She hadn’t planned to attend, but he’d insisted; even if they couldn’t be together he wanted to be able to see her in that landscape. She remembered Nadya pretending not to know; or perhaps fortifying herself against it. And she, likewise pretending. She remembered their embrace, the pressure of the other woman’s arm against the back of her neck. Their speaking of some childhood memory they shared as though they were actually talking about that. Osip approached them then, greeting her, slipping an arm around his wife’s waist. Margarita blushed and he beamed, as though it was his doing. All seemed dangerously transparent. Later, when his visits to her apartment came less frequently, she sensed in him a recalculation of these risks.
She remembered him telling the story of a former lover who’d burned his belongings. He described looking down from his apartment one morning and seeing the clothes he’d left with her, the books, a notebook, a few gifts, aflame in the street. He smiled as one who was mildly perplexed, yet not sufficiently bothered by the mystery to give it more thought.
“I would never do such a thing,” said Margarita.
His expression was of muted skepticism. How could either of them know of what she might be capable under these unexplored circumstances?
“Why did she hate you so much?” she asked.
“I have no idea.” He responded as if the thought itself was exhausting.
How was it that this man who could not commit a lie to the page found it so easy to lie to her?
Several months later, she would ask why he didn’t simply break it off with her. Why not say the words. Say that he didn’t want her anymore.
He ran a finger up the length of her thigh. Of course he wanted her, he said. He looked amused at her misery. Who wouldn’t want this, he said, trying to push his finger through the fabric of her undergarments.
She shoved him away and he got up to leave.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said.
He’d rather invite her hatred; he’d rather she set fire to his possessions. Somehow it was easier this way. Somehow he could go on writing poems about love.
CHAPTER 5
The child awoke in the night crying and out of the darkness his mother took him in her arms and chided him. They were only fireworks after all, she told him. She called them “sticks of fire” and he could make no sense of her words and the sounds from the street below their apartment. He breathed in her sour smell. She rocked him, shushing, saying you are not a baby over and over, but the rippling booms were muted by her arms and chest and he thought for that night perhaps he would be a baby and he clung to her and allowed himself to cry a little longer in order to keep her there. She seemed to know this and she kissed him on the head and promised him sweets to eat in the morning.
The next day, the table was set for a party and small cakes decorated with red sugar were distributed among the plates. He was told it was Comrade Stalin’s birthday and he must make a special wish for their leader’s health and happiness. He thought about this as he ate his cake while the grown-ups talked and he kicked the table leg absently until his mother told him to stop. He listened to her speak of his uncle who lived in a distant town called Magnitogorsk. He’d been recently promoted. A sprinkle of sugar fell on his arm and he licked it and his skin was smeared with red. He licked it again and the smear widened.
A photograph of Comrade Stalin hung between the bookcase and the doorway. After the meal, he stood below it and studied it carefully. Their leader’s gaze extended over his head, surveying their room with an expression of concern. Behind him, his own father was telling a joke to some neighbors who’d joined them for their meal. The boy knew the ending well though he didn’t understand its meaning. He pressed his hands together and concentrated on the face on the wall as if he could fix it there.
“I wish you health and happiness,” he whispered, echoing his mother. But deeper, in thoughts he couldn’t shape with words, he wished to be encompassed within the Great Man’s expansive concerns; he wished to be included in his gaze, as his mother’s arms had held him before, and remain therein his child forever.
Letter writing to their nation’s leaders had become a bit of a pastime for the average Soviet citizen. They wrote when they’d been unfairly passed over for a promotion or when the goods store in their district was lacking in a certain item that was apparently in healthy supply in the town where the writer’s cousin lived. They wrote about their lack of living space in comparison to a particular neighbor, usually a person of questionable background (the wife’s brother had been a priest or a kulak or a count at one time), who they suspected was reporting more occupants than who actually lived there. They wrote about the hooligan youths that lived in the alleyway alongside their building and harassed their mother on her way to the markets—there must be a work farm for them somewhere, some canal that required digging. They wrote about the policies their government had most recently applied, providing their own opinions as to their potential workability and success, with suggestions for alternative methods that should be considered. The recipients of these letters varied from deputy heads of various ministries to committee members to the Secretary General himself, and despite the awesome bulk of these communications, citizens were encouraged to write them. It was a means for the government to determine the outlook of the people; and aside from the large and unwieldy network of informants that it used, it was its only means. Indeed, it wasn’t uncommon for a new policy to be launched then shortly revoked following this kind of appraisal of the public sentiment. It was never clear with a new initiative who had been its author until it was found to be unpopular and summarily pulled back—in which case it was nearly always the idea of some mid-ranking bureaucrat who in short order was found to have some blemish on his record explaining his grotesque lack of affinity for the Soviet people and resulting in his disappearance from the political stage.
As for the letter writers themselves, one can only guess what particular satisfaction they took in penning their observations, complaints, concerns, and advisements. It is perhaps notable that the vast majority of the population had only a few years earlier been living in small towns and villages; indeed in the minds of most Soviets, despite massive translocations to urban areas, the world was still small and accessible, and because of that, malleable. They could imagine their leaders collecting their mail from their boxes just as they did; sorting through their letters, coming upon the one they’d penned and reading it straightaway with great interest. The fact that replies were rarely given didn’t matter; they preferred their leaders stay occupied with the administration of the country, yet if a certain policy was dismantled, or a particular pers
on disappeared in the night, our letter writer would pound his chest among his friends and say, yes—that was him, that was his doing.
Bulgakov began to think of it savagely as the Mandelstam letter. He had decided to take a dispassionate approach; cool intellect would have the greater appeal. By no means would he mention the poem. He thought to point out how poorly it served the government to place its writers under lock and key, how free thinking fed creativity, which fueled innovation which would be the engine of Soviet success on the world stage. Which all sounded well and good, he thought, but needed to circle back to the specifics of Mandelstam’s detainment. He went through many drafts, and when he read them with the impassive eye of a Party Leader, the unspoken arguments for keeping the poet incarcerated seemed stronger. He referred to their greater humanity, to their superior compassion, to their modern outlook—old-world leaders might put their writers in front of firing squads; but they—champions of the new age, they would instead allow for dissent, even welcome the discussion, for they were beyond the need for bullets to enforce their way. Indeed, if their way was best, such things were unnecessary.
He’d lost count of the different drafts, holding his head in his hands. He added a final paragraph, in desperation it seemed—Writers by their nature love their country but if their countrymen no longer have affection for them, then perhaps the better answer is to allow them to emigrate.
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