The Stalin Epigram

by Robert Littell

  If there was a downside to life in the Kolma settlement, it had to do with time taking its sweet time. Prisoners with long sentences would tick them off by months. Short-timers would count the weeks or days left. But whether you counted by months or weeks or days, the hours dragged. Here is what I thought—if we owned a clock, like one of the big ones in train stations, the second hand would be turning round the Roman numbers in slow motion. Between Magda and me, we didn’t have a wristwatch or a clock. Magda owned a pretty little sand glass that emptied in three minutes, but we only used it to soft-boil eggs when we had eggs, which was on national holidays like the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution or Stalin’s birthday. Every day at Kolma began with the off-key scream of a bugle when the first spark of sunlight broke through the hills around the settlement. You could hear the men coughing and cursing in the cabins around us. Half an hour later we were all lined up on the flat in front of the shaft entrance and counted off, and the workday began. There was a ten-minute break for lunch, cold goulash ladled out from a wooden bucket into the tin plates we carried in a pouch when we went into the shaft. Since none of the prisoners owned wristwatches (the few that had them traded them off to the guards for cigarettes soon after arriving), and since we were a thousand meters inside the mountainside and the only light came from flickering miner’s lamps, you could only guess at how many hours were left in the workday. And as time crawled, everyone, me included, guessed short. But two weeks into living with Magda, I found out she knew how to make time fly. I am not inventing this. There were other prisoners in the settlement who used Magda’s trick. If the commandant knew about it, he turned a blind eye. The secret was tea. Ordinary kitchen tea with Chinese writing on the cloth satchel. Here’s how it worked. Every prisoner had a ration of two grams of tea per day, which meant Magda and me had four grams a day, which added up to twenty-something grams a week not counting what we could buy with the fifteen-ruble-a-month pocket money we each got. Magda would save up our tea until we had a hundred grams. When the officer with the lisp got tired of reading from Stalin’s books, we would make our way back to Magda’s cabin and I’d get a roaring fire going (wood was there for the taking) under a big pot filled with well water so that the room soon became hot and clammy like one of those Turkish bathhouses in Moscow, and then we’d strip naked and sit on the floor with our backs to the wall rubbing our sweating bodies with straw. While I nibbled on a marinated eel I caught with my bare hands in a shallow reach of the Kolma River, Magda boiled our stash of tea in so little water you’d get no more than two or three small cups. Prisoners had a name for the boiled-down tea, which was loaded with something Magda called tannin. They called it chaifir. If you sipped it slow you’d become high, if you drank two cups you’d go into a trance and time would whiz past your ear at the speed of sunlight stabbing between the Kolma mountains in the morning. High on chaifir, the second hand on the railway station clock in my head would spin so fast it made me dizzy and a four-year sentence’d seem, for the time the high lasted, like it would be behind you when you came back down to earth.

  I guess that more or less covers everything. Except your last question. What was the difference between Agrippina and Magda? First off, it’s hard to compare two ladies when they’re not in the same room. The presence of the one that’s present adds weight to her qualities. The absence of the one that’s absent calls to mind her faults. What I can say is that Magda was a lady of few words, but those words said everything that needed to be said. She was, as the peasant’s put it, the mistress of the world she lived in. And the center of her world was her bed. She took pleasure in giving pleasure. I won’t say more because I don’t want to embarrass you by obliging you to listen to things that are none of your business.

  SEVENTEEN

  Anna Andreyevna

  Tuesday, the 4th of February 1936

  THE TRIP OUT WAS an abomination—forty-nine interminable hours, thirty-six of them in stuffy railway carriages filled with cigarette smoke and Communist bourgeois (apparatchiki going to Voronezh to audit state warehouses or run state farms or, in one case, lecture on Stalin’s colossal contribution to what the state calls scientific Marxism), thirteen hours killing time in decrepit stations waiting for a train to pass going in the right direction. The worst part was the small talk: the recitation by one’s carriage companions of their bodily tribulations, ranging from boils on their backsides to rotting teeth to gynecological problems that shall remain, by me at least, unidentified. There was one couple in the last rows of wooden benches being escorted by three soldiers who had fitted bayonets to their rifles before stacking them on the overhead rack as if they were ski poles. The man, unshaven but decently dressed in a tie and three-piece suit of foreign manufacture and reading a book, had the look of an intellectual—a professor who had probably been overheard repeating an anti-Soviet joke by the student in his class designated to spy for the Cheka. (I say this because I know of one case where the professor’s downfall happened exactly like that.) Passing the couple on the way to the toilet in the vestibule, I established eye contact with the woman, handsome enough but careworn, her hair turned sooty white even though she had obviously not yet reached middle age. My own husband and son had been arrested four months earlier; a glimpse of the misery in the woman’s eyes was enough to make me think I was seeing my reflection in a mirror. I stopped to utter a word of encouragement but the soldiers shooed me away, saying prisoners being escorted into exile were excluded from conversing with free citizens of the Soviet Socialist Republics. The woman, refusing to be cowed, informed the soldier that her husband was the convicted prisoner; that she was a free woman voluntarily accompanying him into exile and she could talk to anyone she pleased. The eldest of the three soldiers, with frayed sergeant stripes peeling off the sleeve of his shapeless tunic, raised his eyebrows in a kind of world-weariness and gave her a sharp slap across the mouth with the back of his hand. He wore a ring on one finger and it scored her cheek, drawing a trickle of blood. The husband looked up from his book and I could see tears seeping from his eyes because he was unable to protect his wife.

  The young woman with white hair struggled for breath. “Can you describe this?” she asked softly, looking intently at me.

  “I can,” I murmured and made a silent vow I one day would. I stood there glaring at the sergeant, but I didn’t dare protest lest he use his asinine authority to banish me from the train at the next station. Which would leave Osip Emilievich, waiting impatiently for me on the quay of Voronezh, an increment closer to suicide than he would have been if I’d turned up. Nadezhda’s letter begging me to come out had been unambiguous. Despite her Herculean efforts, dear Osip was slipping down the treacherous slope into melancholy and madness. And so I swallowed my pride, along with my words of disgust for the regime, and said nothing. And hated myself a bit more than I had before this incident.

  The train crawled into the Voronezh station moments before noon. I lugged my two satchels—the smaller one with a change of clothing and toilet articles, the larger of the two filled with books and sundry presents for the Mandelstams—down the quay, peering into faces searching for one that seemed familiar. And then I heard a voice behind me call out, Anna Andreyevna! I turned back to gape at an utter stranger.

  It was, of course, the poet Mandelstam.

  My failure to recognize him had clearly frightened him. “Dear Anna, have I changed all that much?” he demanded.

  “Osip?”

  “In the flesh, though the flesh hangs off the bone.”

  I was speechless. Osip was wearing a yellow leather jacket that plunged to his knees and a leather cap with the earflaps tied up. He was unshaven, thin as a toothpick, his right shoulder hunched forward, his right arm hanging stiffly from the shoulder. His teeth were in lamentable condition, his lips blue, his cheeks sunken. Standing there breathing in short gasps, he looked a good twenty years older than his forty-five years.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “There is no mirr
or where we live but I have seen my reflection in storefronts. The first few times this happened I saw someone staring back at me whom I also didn’t recognize.” He thrust a small bouquet of dried forget-me-nots into my hand. “Impossible to find fresh flowers in February. You will have to make do with these.”

  “Dearest Osip,” I cried, and abandoning my satchels on the quay, I flung my arms around his neck. And I remember him saying—dear God in heaven, I can actually hear his voice as I resurrect his words—“Anna, Anna, I am not dead, only dying.”

  Yes. Only dying. I am absolutely certain that’s what he said.

  Fortunately—I say fortunately because it was a struggle for Osip to carry even the lighter of my two satchels—the Mandelstams lived within walking distance of the railway station. We set off at a snail’s pace. Osip had improvised a cane out of a wooden curtain rod with a knob at the end, but he didn’t appear to have the strength in his right arm to lean on it. (Nadezhda had written me about his fall from the second floor of a hospital, about his dislocated shoulder, but as she hadn’t mentioned the matter in more than a year I assumed the injury had healed. How wrong I was.) From time to time Osip stopped to catch his breath. From where we stood I could see the center of Voronezh, flat as a table in a Parisian café. Revolution Avenue ran like an artery through the town. Side streets and alleyways fell sharply off the avenue and trickled downhill into a frozen stream that Osip identified as the Vorona. Needless to say, none of the streets off Revolution Avenue were paved, which was perfectly fine in winter when the ground was rock hard but must have been hellish in summer when rain transformed the pathways into slides of mud. The Mandelstams’ abode (if a warped roof of wooden shingles balanced precariously on four decrepit walls can properly be described as an abode), at number 4 Lineinaya Street, stood at the top of a narrow sloping alley filled with tumbledown weatherboard houses that, to my city eye, looked as if they were slowly sinking into their miniscule gardens. Railway signals were across from the door of the house where they rented a room from a kindly seamstress. As I soon discovered, trains whooshed past the windows every now and then. With surprising agility, Osip would bound from his chair and rush to fling open the door and watch the train, as if each passage was a remarkable event in his waking hours. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Nadezhda, as you can suppose, was elated when I turned up. She bombarded me with questions, barely leaving room between them for answers. What news did I have of my husband and my son, Lev? (None. They’d been summoned by the Chekists and hadn’t been heard from since. My telegrams to the Writers’ Union and the Central Committee had gone unanswered.) How long could I stay? (One week. I was fearful of being away from my communal telephone longer.) What was Pasternak up to these days? (I had torn pages from Izvestiya dated January of this year containing two Pasternak poems in praise of Stalin. I saw Nadezhda and Osip exchange meaningful glances as they passed the poems from one to the other.) Was there any truth to the rumors that Zinoviev and Kamenev were to go on trial in the summer? (How on earth could one know if a rumor was true? On the other hand, newspaper articles reported they had confessed to plotting against Stalin, which would indicate a show trial was likely to be in the works.) Was it possible they had arrested so many people, the trains taking prisoners to detention centers, not to mention the centers themselves, were overloaded and the terror was tapering off? (Certainly not. Compared to the relatively vegetarian year of 1934, when people were more or less arrested for a reason, nowadays anybody could be arrested and for no reason at all. The Cheka didn’t require accusations, evidence, even a denunciation. It was almost as if the very randomness of the arrests was the point the state wanted to get across.)

  And so, in half sentences and pregnant silences and stifled tears, we brought one another up to date on the ruins of our lives. The Mandelstams had sectioned off the room they rented with a cord strung between two walls and covered with blankets to create a partition screening their narrow bed. They absolutely insisted I sleep in the bed. God only knows where they slept. Perhaps the seamstress let them use the ottoman I spied in the sewing room when I met their landlady. In any case, mornings were a saraband of people passing in the hallway—the three of us, the seamstress and her son, even some neighbors who didn’t have running water—to use the only toilet in the house. Soon after my arrival I gave them the books I’d brought (including a new Italian translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives) and the clothing (long underwear and leather gloves for Osip, a no-nonsense German brassiere and thick thigh-length woolen stockings for Nadezhda), along with the sulfur pills for Osip’s heart palpitation and the thousand rubles (half from Borisik, half from me) I had pinned inside my underwear for safekeeping. I could sense Osip was annoyed to discover there were no cigarettes in what he called his Father Christmas stocking, but Nadezhda had written me warning that the doctor at the clinic had urged him to give up smoking.

  Osip had composed any number of poems in what he called the Voronezh cycle, some of which he’d sent to me in letters, others that he took pleasure in reading aloud now that I was in Voronezh. There were flashes of the old Osip as he thrust himself to his feet and, leaning on the back of a chair, his good hand beating the air, recited bits and pieces from memory.

  Oh, if only once the stir of the air and the heat

  of summer could make me hear

  beyond sleep and death

  the earth’s axis, the earth’s axis

  Nadezhda profited from the first occasion when we were alone to tell me that Osip, who frequently fell into black moods of despair, still entertained the thought of a joint suicide, but when he seemed set to leap, she hung back; when she was ready, he would say, Not yet—let’s wait and see. Apparently the idea of their killing themselves individually was never seriously considered by either of them. They had lived as a couple, Nadezhda said with what can only be described as pride, if it came to it they would die as a couple. On the positive side, Osip exhibited a faint sign that his instinct for survival had not completely withered. He’d been laboring for months, so Nadezhda confided, on a proper Ode to Stalin, one that would expunge the insults he’d flung at the Kremlin mountaineer in his epigram to Stalin and, so he hoped, protect them from arrest when his sentence expired. When I accompanied him to Polyclinic No. 1 on Engels Street to see the laryngologist the following day (Osip’s sinuses were acting up), I raised the subject of the ode and he grudgingly recited chunks of it. I cannot claim to have committed to memory more than a few fragments of this eminently forgettable poem:

  I want to say—not Stalin—I want to name him

  Dzhugashvili . . .

  Artist, cherish the warrior, he is always with you . . .

  He smiles—a smiling reaper . . . Bending from the podium, as if upon a mountain, he

  reaches over mounds of heads . . .

  Another appalling line comes to mind:

  Stalin’s eyes are parting mountains—

  My God, to what had Osip been reduced! Stalin’s eyes parting mountains! Here are two more lines, ending with a play on the nom de guerre Stalin, which as every schoolchild learns, has its origins in stali, or steel:

  No truth is truer than the warrior’s candor:

  For honor and for love, for valor and for steel—

  I remember Osip stopping in his tracks after he had delivered the last line of the Ode. Lost in self-doubt, he gazed downhill at the half-wrecked Cathedral of Saint Mitrofanius, named after the holy seventeenth-century bishop of Voronezh, rising like an ice palace from the café table center of town. The streets around the cathedral, locked in ice, were filled with peasants who, fed up with getting the dregs after the Bolsheviks carted off the harvest to feed the proletarians in the cities, had fled collective farms. One could make out knots of them standing outside stores, stamping their feet on the ground to keep from freezing while they begged for crusts of bread. Osip had surely seen all of this before, but still he grimaced in empathy. I remember his saying that, contrary to what
people claimed, misery didn’t love company—it preferred to be alone. (I surmised he was speaking from personal experience.) And then, in one of the characteristic ellipsis that left his first readers and his friends struggling to bridge the gap in the conversation, he burst out, “Anna, Anna, when I was younger, poetry came easier and it was often quite good. Now that I am older, it comes much more slowly, but at times it is better. When I read aloud some of the poems in the Voronezh cycle, I don’t have to pause for breath so my first readers will know where the lines break or bend or double back. The words speak for themselves. They no longer need the poet. Except for this . . . this Ode to Stalin. These words came up like bile. I feel as if I am babbling. It is beginning to dawn on me that I am in artistic trouble. What have I done?”