The Stalin Epigram

by Robert Littell

  “Can you explain, dearest Nadezhda, why women like us are attracted to men in the first place? We know next to nothing about what goes on in their silly heads. There are occasions when I look at their bodies and want to gag. Objectively speaking, the penis, dangling limply like the trunk of an elephant between their hairy legs, is the ugliest body part on a male. And yet . . . and yet when I catch sight of the swelling in a man’s trousers, my pulse quickens. I long to touch it, to kiss it, to warm my lips with chamomile tea and accept it—ah, Nadezhda, to welcome it—into my mouth.” She shuddered in my arms. “Only thinking such thoughts could give me an orgasm.”

  “Good thing for you it’s the men, and not the women, who lose a day of their life with each orgasm,” I said jokingly.

  “Good thing,” she agreed seriously. “When all is said, we have it so much better than the male of the species, don’t you agree?”

  “Speaking of tea, I could do with a cup,” I told her.

  “What a rich idea,” she said.

  I threw Mandelstam’s old robe over my shoulders and, walking barefoot, headed for the kitchen to boil water on our small paraffin stove. Mandelstam, wearing the secondhand silk robe I’d gotten him with money I earned for a translation, was so absorbed in the intricacies of composition I don’t think he was aware of my passing. When I returned to the living room carrying a tray with cups and a pot of tea, I found Zinaida, wrapped in a quilt from the bed, one lovely bare ankle jutting from under it, curled up on the sofa. She was watching in bafflement as Mandelstam paced the room, four long strides in one direction, then four long strides back, all the while puffing frenetically on a cigarette. I settled down next to her and filled two chipped cups with tea, and we warmed our hands around them waiting for the boiling water to cool. From time to time a moth flew near Mandelstam’s head—the walls of Herzen House were insulated with felt, which provided a thermal breeding ground for insects. Mandelstam’s concentration was so absolute he was able to backhand the moth away without being aware of its presence. It occurred to me he would not take any notice if one of those new air attack sirens being installed around Moscow, now that Hitler was in power in Germany, began yowling. His lips worked, words and then phrases formed. I could almost hear the poem knocking like a fist on the window.

  And then Mandelstam stopped in midstride and looked over at us as if he had only just discovered we were in the room. He spied the moth near his nose and, emerging from a trance, went after it as if this particular insect was the culprit responsible for the hole he’d recently discovered in his knitted sweater. Clambering over furniture, clapping his hands wildly, the great moth hunter scrambled around the room until, victorious, he held up his right palm to show us the small spot of blood.

  “I think I got it,” he cried.

  “The moth?” Zinaida said.

  “The poem,” Mandelstam said. “The epigram to Stalin.”

  Zinaida, thinking Mandelstam had given in to the many friends who implored him to compose an ode in honor of Stalin, looked relieved. “I know it must have been difficult for you,” she told him, “but I for one think you were wise to do it.”

  I hooked my arm under her elbow. “You don’t understand, darling child. Osya has surely composed a very outspoken poem, one that doesn’t beat about the bush. You and I will be his first readers.”

  She looked puzzled. “But there is only one sort of poem you can compose when the subject is Stalin.”

  Mandelstam’s gaze came to rest on the glass ashtray on the windowsill overflowing with cigarette ends, mostly but not all his. (I wondered if he had spotted the ends from a strong cigarette he himself never smoked when we returned to the flat the previous afternoon.) Shutting his eyes, exposing his pale throat, he raised the palm with the spot of blood on it over his head and began to recite.

  We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

  Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

  All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

  The murderer and peasant-slayer.

  His fingers are fat as grubs

  And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

  His cockroach whiskers leer

  And his boot tops gleam.

  Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders—

  Fawning half-men for him to play with.

  They whinny, purr or whine

  As he prates and points a finger,

  One by one forging his laws, to be flung

  Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

  And every killing is a treat

  For the broad-chested Ossete.

  Mandelstam, transfigured, looked hard at me, an unmistakable gleam of triumph in his eyes and it finally dawned on me what he had meant by Dead but not yet buried. Looking back at this defining moment in our lives, I ask myself: How did I really feel? I suppose I was thrilled and proud and devastated all at the same time: thrilled by his audacity, proud to be an accomplice in an act of pure defiance, devastated that his instinct for survival, his as well as mine, was effectively moribund. As for Zinaida, she jerked her ankle back under the quilt and wilted against my arm. “Murderer and peasant slayer!” she groaned. “But you simply cannot do this to me, Osip. What will happen when they learn I was present when you read this out? Oh my God! There could be a microphone in the wall. They could be recording every word we say right now! Nadezhda, if he isn’t willing to act sanely, you must act sanely for the both of you and talk him out of this folly.”

  The more she protested, the more I supported him. I was, after all, the wife, she was only the occasional mistress. “Get hold of yourself, Zinaida. Osya has paid you the ultimate compliment of making you one of his first readers. Only the chosen few will know of the existence of this epigram. Whatever happens, you can be certain neither he nor I will ever reveal you heard it.”

  Mandelstam sank to his knees before the two of us. “Zinaida, you must not breathe a word about this to anyone. If they find out, it could cost me my life.”

  She nodded miserably.

  “Nadenka will memorize the epigram, as she memorizes all my poems. But I have decided that you should, too. If something happens to us, the poem absolutely must survive.”

  Zinaida tugged the quilt more tightly around her naked body, as if it could somehow shield her from an inconvenient request.

  “Repeat the lines after me, both of you,” Mandelstam said firmly. “We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches . . .”

  “We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches . . .”

  “All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer . . .”

  “All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer . . .”

  Having memorized Mandelstam’s verse for years, I had an instinct for the rhyme and rhythm and layers of multiple meaning buried in a text, for where the slight pause for breath fell. It didn’t take me long to commit the sixteen lines to memory. Zinaida was having a harder time of it. It quickly became apparent that she had no ear for the inner music of a Mandelstam poem. She would get four lines right and then mix up the punctuation, or even the order of the words, when she came back to them. Tears of frustration filled her eyes. “I detest being put on the spot—I can’t memorize this the way you do. I must see it written down so I can picture the words. That’s how I learn my lines for the theater. Even as a child I had to write things down in order to remember them.”

  My husband and I exchanged looks. “What do you think?” he said.

  I shrugged. “As long as we can be sure the paper is destroyed once she has committed it to memory.”

  Zinaida looked relieved. “I swear I’ll burn it,” she said. “Next time I come by I shall recite it without an error.”

  Mandelstam fetched pen and paper. Crouching at the suitcase, using it as a desk, he wrote out the epigram. Zinaida went into the bedroom to get her clothing and emerged dressed
a few minutes later. Mandelstam read over what he’d written to make sure it was exactly as he wanted, then handed the paper to Zinaida. She folded it in half and then in half again and tucked it inside her brassiere.

  “I am grateful you’re willing to do this,” Mandelstam said.

  “I am grateful to be part of your citadel,” Zinaida replied nervously. “I am thrilled to have your trust.”

  “Perhaps you should be on your way before the conversation becomes too syrupy,” I suggested. I remember adding: “Don’t forget to burn the poem.”

  I recall Zinaida’s confident “You can count on me.”

  After she left I dressed and busied myself straightening up the bedroom. Through the open door I could see Mandelstam sitting on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, occasionally clapping his hands together to kill a moth that had wandered within lethal range of him. “Do you think I did the right thing?” he called out to me.

  “Are you talking about the epigram or Zinaida?”

  “Both.”

  I joined him in the living room and sank onto the arm of the sofa. He rested a hand on my ankle and we both smiled at the same memory—the first time we’d been intimate, the night we met at the Junk Shop in Kiev, he began his leisurely exploration of my body with my ankle. It was a joke of long standing between us that he was Russia’s first and foremost ankle fetishist. “Concerning the epigram,” I said, “you have been torturing yourself for months. You needed to get it out of your system. You only must be careful whom you let in on the secret. As for entrusting it to Zinaida, she is a harmless creature who will evolve badly once her body goes. For now, she is enthralled to be the paramour of the poet Mandelstam—”

  Mandelstam brightened. “There is a poet of that name.”

  His grip tightened on my ankle and he looked intently at me, expecting confirmation. “There is,” I agreed with conviction. “He is not yet dead.”

  It was almost midday when I got around to emptying the glass ashtray filled with cigarette ends into the bin immediately outside the alley door of Herzen House. And who should I come across there but Boris Pasternak, throwing out kitchen garbage after having spent the morning in another wing of the building with his future ex-wife and their son. Telling him that Mandelstam needed cheering up, I practically dragged him back to our flat. My husband was tucking his shirt into his trousers when he caught sight of Pasternak at the door behind me. He let out a howl of pleasure. “You will stay for lunch,” I ordered. “We have bread and a bit of butter and two eggs—I will scare up a third from someone on our floor.”

  I found the extra egg at the second door I knocked on. When I returned to our flat I discovered Mandelstam standing in the middle of the living room reciting the last lines of his Stalin epigram to Pasternak, who was sitting on the floor, his back against a wall, his face buried in his enormous hands. When Mandelstam reached the end, Boris sat there without moving a muscle.

  “Well?” Mandelstam said impatiently.

  “Well?” I repeated from the doorway.

  Boris looked up, first at me, then at my husband. “Who knows about this?” he demanded.

  “The three of us,” Mandelstam said. “And one friend.”

  “Can you trust the friend?”

  I answered from the door. “Yes.”

  Springing to his feet, Boris went over to the window and pulled the interior shutters closed. Then he turned around to face us. “You’re committing suicide,” he said, his eyes grown so hollow you could barely make out the pupils in them. “When you said you were going to let the scream emerge from the back of your throat, I didn’t dream you would do something this insane.”

  “What Russia needs,” Mandelstam observed, “is more insanity and less sanity.”

  Boris was so caught up in his own anguish I don’t think he heard him. “How could you write such a poem, you, a Jew!” he blurted out.

  “You’re forgetting I converted to Christianity to get into university,” Mandelstam replied angrily.

  “Stalin and the people around him have a lot in common with the ecclesiastical tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition,” Pasternak said. “For the calificadores, a Jew who converted remains a Jew in his heart, in his soul.”

  It was difficult to get a word in, but I managed. “I’ll recite the poem to you again, Boris—you tell me exactly what in it a Jew shouldn’t say.”

  “No, no, I don’t have to hear it a second time to know that Osip has not thought this through. He is either stupid or innocent. I don’t want any part of it.”

  Mandelstam sank onto the back of the sofa. “Poetry is nourished by innocence, not stupidity,” he said, clearly devastated by Pasternak’s reaction. “You yourself took the position that art is risk taking.”

  “I said that? Where?”

  Mandelstam managed a bitter smile as he threw Pasternak’s words back in his face. “One cannot talk of art as if it were a drainpipe or a construction job and so boil the question down to technique. To talk about the technique of writing poetry is to talk about the technique of achieving disaster. One has to remember that one needs to take risks; nothing on earth exists without risk taking.”

  Boris muttered something about having said that in another context. He turned on me furiously. “How can you permit him to do this?”

  Before I could put a word in, Mandelstam said, very quietly, “We have never had a relationship that involved my asking her permission or her asking mine.”

  Boris was beginning to exasperate me. “You are angry,” I burst out, “because you don’t have the guts to do what Osya is doing. You’re not the poet he is.”

  Mandelstam tried to cut me off. “Nadenka, you go too far—”

  I remember saying, “I don’t go far enough. He must understand that Mandelstam has to be true to Mandelstam, not to Pasternak.”

  Boris looked bewildered. “My dear Osip, I don’t recognize you anymore. You have become someone else.”

  “When he becomes someone else,” I informed Boris, taking, I will own up, a certain satisfaction from his evident bewilderment, “I am never far behind.”

  Boris raised a hand to his forehead and kneaded the migraine lurking under his brow. “If you are serious about bringing Stalin down,” he told Osip, “join in the long-term political struggle.”

  “My constitution is incapable of political struggle,” my husband retorted. “I am too impatient for strategy. I only have the temperament for tactics. I am drawn to the gesture. And I believe in the power of poetry to displace mountains, along with the Kremlin mountaineer.”

  “At least rework the poem,” Boris said with great emotion, “so that it is veiled, ambiguous, written, say, about a historical figure.”

  “I am through beating about the bush, Boris. A poem needs to be written that spells out the evil of Stalin so that any dense-brained idiot can understand it.” Thinking it would put an end to the argument, Mandelstam coughed up one of his favorite mantras. “If not now, when? If not me, who?”

  Shaking his head in despair, Boris turned to leave. At the door he hesitated. “The very least you can do—if not for your own sake, then for the friends who will hear the epigram—is rewrite the second stanza. The business about murderer and peasant-slayer—it is perilously direct. I ask you, Osip, to do this.”

  My husband looked at me, thinking I would challenge Pasternak. I took a deep breath and held my tongue. Whether a truth teller was still truth telling if he gutted the truth was something only Osya could decide.

  I could see Mandelstam chewing on the inside of his cheek as he considered the matter. Tossing his head in frustration, he said, “The original version had two other lines that I got rid of because they weren’t straightforward enough. If it will make you feel easier, I’ll eliminate the murderer and peasant-slayer and restore the first version.” And he closed his eyes and recited the lines he would substitute:

  But where there’s so much as half a conversation

  The Kremlin mountaineer will get his
mention.

  Boris said, “If you really want to make me feel easier, scrap the entire epigram.”

  Only thinking about what my beloved husband did then makes my heart beat more rapidly. His fingers trembling, he elevated his chin and repeated the words he’d thrown into the faces of Ugor-Zhitkin and his lady friends at the canteen for trolley car workers. “I am the poet Mandelstam.”

  I am afraid I couldn’t resist driving home the spike. “As for me, I am the wife of the poet Mandelstam, and proud to be.”

  Boris shrugged angrily as he turned toward the door.

  “What about those eggs?” I said.

  “At a time like this, how can you think of food!” he growled in annoyance. “With or without those peasant-slayer lines, this matter will end badly. They have treated you miserably in the last years, Osip. If you insist on this epigram, at least you will know why they are treating you miserably. I esteem you as a poet. I love you as a brother. I wish you long life, Osip Emilievich.”

  I remember being struck by how devastated Mandelstam looked—he had been counting on Pasternak’s unstinting support. In my brain, I can still hear his voice calling after the departing poet, “Long life to you, too, Boris Leonidovich.”

  SEVEN

  Zinaida Zaitseva-Antonova

  Monday, the 7th of May 1934

  HOW COULD THE SON of a bitch have done this to me! The way I see it, it’s one thing if you’re fed up with life before death and want to kill yourself. Stop jabbering about it and do it, I say, but you simply don’t have the right to take others down with you. This Stalin poem of Mandelstam’s is unadulterated madness. He’s off his trolley, round the bend, certifiably loony. But it’s his madness, not mine. I’m not even sure it’s a good poem, for Christ’s sake. But that’s not going to stop him from reading it to all those has-been writers hanging around Herzen House. My God, what in the world can he be thinking, reading such a poem to innocent people? He has no moral right to make others accomplices to what is, after all, his crime. We live in an epoch when someone who has knowledge of treason and doesn’t denounce the wrecker becomes a wrecker, subject to the same punishment as the perpetrator. It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going to happen: of the five or ten or twenty who will hear the poem, one or several of them—or all of them except for poor Nadezhda, who is blinded by love—are going to reason like me. Mandelstam has a hell of a nerve putting us in the position where we could be treated as traitors for listening to his shitty little poem. Which means one or several or all of those who hear the poem will protect themselves the only way possible: they will race to the nearest militia post and denounce the author of the poem before someone else does and the Cheka comes sniffing around asking you to explain, please, how come you heard this treacherous poem and didn’t denounce the enemy of the people who composed it. And what would I do? Bat my eyelashes and ask, What poem are you talking about, comrade militiaman? By then they’ll know the contents of the poem down to the last comma and the name and address and internal passport number of all those who heard it. And the ones who failed to alert the Organs will be up shit’s creek, as the saying goes; off to Siberia or, heaven forbid, worse. And for what? I mean, it’s not as if this little poem of Mandelstam’s is going to change anything.