The Mayakovsky Tapes

by Robert Littell

  It was here that the ruffian poet appeared to notice me for the first time. “Futurism works in practice,” he replied, speaking to me directly over the heads of the Tongue-Tied, a mischievous leer moistening his lips. “I leave it to comrade-poet Pasternak to figure out how to make it work in theory.”

  “Count on me!” Pasternak exclaimed. “There is no difference between us on the future of Futurism. Mayakovsky will concentrate on its day-to-day practice, I will tend to the theory.” The two poets, laughing a conspiratorial laugh, embraced in a bear hug of friendship.

  It was well past midnight before Osya managed to pry Mayakovsky loose from the mob of Tongue-Tied at the bar. Gripping his elbow, he steered him toward our corner table. I caught the telltale tap-tap of metal reinforcements on the tips of the Poet’s soles, a clear indication, if one were needed, of his working-class origins. The two stopped mid route to argue about something. It must have had to do with me because they both kept glancing across the room in my direction, Osip tossing his head in cranky satisfaction, the Poet belly-laughing. The conference, if that’s what it was, ended in a handshake. Knowing Mayakovsky’s reputation—he was said to be ready to wager on the turn of a card, on the heads or tails of a coin, on the number of ticks that can be pulled from a dog’s ear on a summer’s day—they had obviously bet on something.

  “You surely know my wife, Lili,” Osya said when they reached my table.

  In my mind’s eye I can still conjure the Poet scrutinizing me with his coal black eyes.

  Tatiana: Excuse me for interrupting, Lilya, but you’re mistaken about the color of his eyes. They were the first thing I remarked when our paths crossed in Paris. How could you get it so wrong! The Poet’s eyes were a deep sea-green, the color of brackish water where a river and the sea meet in an estuary.

  Nora: Holy shit, his eyes were blue. When he was angry, which was most of the time, the pupils turned cerulean.

  Elly: Are we talking about the same person? I made a pastel of his face once—the eyes that I painted were pure gray, the color of ash, the color of lead, the color of sky on an overcast day.

  Lilya: Can we agree that, when it came to his eyes, Mayakovsky was something of a chameleon?

  Nora: The fucker was something of a chameleon with far more than his eyes.

  Lilya: At the risk of interrupting your interruptions, I shall attempt to pick up the thread of my story: The Poet stood before me, his head slightly angled, the faintest trace of a recent smile clinging to his lips. I recall his telling Osip: “Our paths have crossed—I took the red in her hair for a Bolshevik bonfire—but we have never been formally introduced.” (So he had noticed me after all!) The Poet thrust out what could have passed for a paw. “Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he announced.

  I bequeathed my hand into his. “Brik, Lili Yuryevna,” I said. We lingered until the moment turned awkward, the skin of our palms touching in the hollow of our hands, before I managed to slip my fingers free. “I am pleased to finally come face-to-face with you, the Bolshevik who, so legend has it, ate his address book during a police raid so the names of his comrades would not fall into the hands of the Tsar’s secret police,” I said. (Curiously, I found myself addressing the Poet, an utter stranger, using the intimate ty. Osya instantly raised a mischievous eyebrow to salute the slip.)

  I can imagine the Poet reacting with a half-smothered whinny. “That particular legend, unlike the great majority of legends, happens to be factual. They raided our illegal printing press in Gruzini. Investigator Voltanovsky decided, as I didn’t shave yet, I was too young to arrest and let me off with a stinging slap on the wrist from his riding crop and a reprimand.”

  “But it never crossed my mind the legend wasn’t true!”

  I could see the Poet sizing me up. His gaze drifted to my chest. I was dressed as usual in my reform apparel, which consisted of a hip-hugging washed-out rose-streaked ankle-length skirt fabricated from a thick window curtain, along with a black turtleneck sweater that clung to my rib cage and, as I eschewed undergarments, didn’t put undo strain on the male imagination. He didn’t appear to be displeased by what he saw. “Let us together create another legend,” he was saying. “I propose to put to you a particularly intimate question in the expectation that you, a hostage to compunctions, will refuse to answer it.” (Following my lead, the Poet addressed me with the ty, which set the pulse in my forehead to throbbing.) “You will refuse within earshot of a room filled with Moscow intelligentsia who will have nothing better to do than repeat what they overheard. Within hours all of Moscow will know what I asked, all of Moscow will know you told me to fuck off. All of Moscow will know that Osip here is out of pocket forty rubles. So here goes nothing: from time to time do you—”

  “Do I what?”

  Osya, of course, knew what the Poet was asking. “My dear Lili, he wants to know if you swallow.”

  “He is convinced I will not answer.”

  “He has wagered forty rubles you will not answer.”

  There is an old Iraqi proverb that holds you should create your reputation and then live up to it. The Poet was living up to his reputation for pissing on decorum. I thought it would be appropriate to live up to mine for pissing on those who piss on decorum. (I am, after all, the great-great-granddaughter, on my mother’s side, of Genghis Khan’s favorite concubine who was notorious for pissing on decorum.) “What is it you imagine you can get from me?” I asked quietly. “A fellation before drifting off to sleep? A one-night fling, then? Oh, dear, surely not a love affair that will last a lifetime?”

  “What I want from you—What I have wanted from you since that evening I spotted the woman with flaming red hair at Kotov’s execrable Textile Factory listening to me trying to persuade illiterate workers to sack the Tsar—Christ, what I absolutely must have from you, Lili Yuryevna, I do not see myself settling for less, is resuscitation.”

  “And what precisely do you expect me to resuscitate?”

  “Erections. Poetry. Revolution. Though I have not yet worked out their order of importance.”

  Osip, snickering, elaborated. “He needs a new muse, Lili. The previous title holder, that theater actress who lisped when she read Pasternak’s first tentative translation of Shakespeare, has only just emigrated to Berlin.”

  “Judging by your rush to replace her, you must be seriously oversexed,” I remember remarking.

  “I am unquestionably oversexed,” the Poet confessed. And in full view of my husband—in full view of the bedazzled Tongue-Tied gawking from the bar—he permitted the back of his left hand to graze the nipple of my right breast, which set the pulse in my forehead to hammering.

  I blurted out the first words that came into my flustered brain. “Fuck you.”

  “By all means, fuck me,” he agreed instantly.

  The arrogant son of a bitch made it sound as if we had sealed a contract.

  This foreplay—clearly that’s what it was—took place under the long Jewish nose of my lawful wedded husband. But Osya was not offended. He had been down this road with me before. It was widely known that the traditional marriage vows we exchanged that arctic winter in 1912 had, with time and by mutual consent, been redefined in the Chernyshevsky manner—

  Tatiana: Surely you are intending to explain Chernyshevsky manner for those of us who may not be familiar with the term.

  Lilya: Damn it, who’s telling this story, you or I?

  Tatiana: I was led to believe all four of us were telling the story.

  Lilya: I agreed to all four, but each in turn. Thanks to you, I’ve lost the thread of my thoughts. Where was I?

  Nora: Chernyshevsky manner …

  Lilya: Yes. The nineteenth-century Russian political theoretician Chernyshevsky was one of the first to publicly encourage what we have come to call open marriage. Osip and I aspired to be the new people—suppressing jealousy, respecting the sexual freedom and intellectual independence of each member of the tribe—that Chernyshevsky postulated in his novel What
Is to Be Done?

  Tatiana: Am I to understand that sexual fidelity was not a condition of your marriage vow to Osip? What on earth would move one to marry if this were the case?

  Lilya: There are other things beside sexual fidelity to recommend matrimony—

  Elly: Can I assume you will instruct us?

  Nora: Knowing her, you can. She will.

  Lilya: Loyalty, companionship, camaraderie, connivance, intellectual stimulation, friendship. Yes, perhaps above all, friendship. I can say that living as we were in the Chernyshevsky manner, Osip accepted my serial infidelities and I, to show my gratitude, opened my thighs to his occasional fidelity.

  So, with or without your permission I shall forge ahead: Mayakovsky was growing visibly impatient with this foreplay that was going nowhere. “Answer,” he suddenly ordered, his brows arching into the top of his nose, a gesture that I would come to identify with exasperation. “I will be pleased to lose my little bet with your husband,” I recall his adding, his voice reduced to a frog’s croak of a whisper. “My question should be seen as shortcut—when I meet an attractive woman for the first time I try to imagine how she makes love. Does she draw up her knees? Does she lock her ankles around her lover’s thigh? Knowing how someone makes love tells you volumes about the person. It permits you to become intimate without having to kill the better part of an otherwise passionate evening on small talk.”

  “But why this obsession with small talk?”

  “It happens to be one of my pet hates. Life is too short—at least mine will be too short—to waste any of it on small talk. So, Lili Yuryevna Brik, do you or don’t you?”

  I decided then and there to rise to the occasion that the Poet (as a furtive glance at his trousers confirmed) had already risen to. “You’re curious to know if I swallow. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends on who is attached to the penis.”

  Oh, I confess I took visceral pleasure from looking into the startled deer-eyes of the Poet Mayakovsky. Osip, for his part, was choking on laughter. I turned toward the Tongue-Tied within earshot, who appeared spellbound by our conversation. “The secret, ladies, is to keep a cup of warm water by the bed—a sort of chaser, if you see what I mean. You must absolutely try it if you haven’t already. Men are so grateful when you swallow their sperm. They are like puppies—they eat out of your hand for days.”

  Subscribing, as I do, to the school of repartee that believes once you go hog you are more or less obliged to go whole hog, I couldn’t in good conscience curb my tongue. And so, turning back to Mayakovsky, I rushed recklessly on: “I have never forgotten the tart taste of that first penis between my schoolgirl’s chapped lips. For a neophyte like me, sucking the circumcised penis had a lot in common with licking licorice sticks, sucking the uncircumcised penis felt more like licking licorice with its wrapper still on. Though it soon came off.” By then even Osip was staring at me wide-eyed, which only roused me to riot. “Early on, as my husband and not a few of my lovers will confirm, I insisted on reciprocity—I taught myself to give head so as to get head.”

  Nora: I must accord you your due, Lilya Yuryevna. You are an epicurean at the table of carnal love.

  Lilya: I accept your compliment, Nora.

  Nora: It wasn’t intended as a compliment, only a description.

  Tatiana: Let her get on with her story, for God’s sake! What happened then, Lilya Yuryevna?

  Lilya: What happened was that Osya began pounding the table triumphantly. I remember him announcing, “You owe me forty rubles, Mayakovsky.”

  Laughing under his breath, the Poet reached for his wallet, extracted a crisp new forty-ruble bill and handed it to my husband.

  “I propose we spend the forty rubles on supper and good French wine for three,” Osip declared.

  “Splendid idea,” the Poet said. “I eagerly accept.”

  Both of them turned to me. Knowing me, I will surely have asked myself what did I have to lose. “What do I have to lose?” I hear myself saying. And I hear myself providing the answer to my own question. “Certainly not my innocence, which has long since been lost.”

  With a wave of his paw the Poet cut me off before I could make more of a fool of myself. “Would you find it again if you could?” he demanded.

  “I have no expectation of finding it again.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  Osip gleefully provided the echo. “Respond to the question he asked, Lilya.”

  I can see myself shrugging, which is what I usually do when I feel destiny has trumped free will. “If I could, if it were within the realm of possibility to go back in time, yes, I would find innocence but only to have the exquisite pleasure of losing it again.”

  Mayakovsky nodded as if I had confirmed something he supposed. I nodded back, sealing the contract.

  I can honestly say that that was the moment our lives departed from the beaten pathway: Volodya’s, mine, Osip’s. Do you recall Mayakovsky’s Backbone Flute?

  If I am called to be Tsar—

  On the sunlit gold of my coinage

  I shall order my people

  To mint

  Your face!

  As a young girl I had daydreamed of having my profile on a coin of the realm. Mayakovsky discovered this and his Backbone Flute was a wink in the direction of my childhood fantasy. When I grew up—when I first grasped the power I had over men, when I noticed them disrobing me with their eyes—I distracted myself with another fantasy: I dreamed of being muse to a great poet. Fate had presented me with the opportunity and I am not ashamed to say I was ready to swallow my pride and the Poet’s sperm to seize it. God knows I had consumed both before and survived. Osip, for his part, dreamed of becoming the impresario of a great act. Volodya was certainly a great act. Osip once remarked that Mayakovsky was not a person but an event. Osya and Volodya turned out to be two sides of the coin: Where Osya was understated, subtle, shrewd, sober-minded, painstakingly meticulous, Mayakovsky was overstated, passionate, unashamedly emotional, bursting with creative energy, painstakingly careless. Volodya came to trust Osya’s literary instincts. He would sometimes rework a poem after Osya put it through his analytical meat grinder. As for dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, he moved in with us straight away and never looked back, abandoning the lady with whom he’d been living in Finland, abandoning the books he’d left there, abandoning his clothing at a laundry shop. And so we came to be what the French call a ménage à trois that would last a lifetime, however short life turned out to be. I do not know of friends and comrades who were truer to each other or loved each other more. From that day on, we were pretty much inseparable until he commended me, along with assorted others, to the tender loving care of Comrade Government.

  Elly: In my experience the tender loving care of Comrade Government has a lot in common with the kiss of death.

  Lilya: (whispering urgently) May I remind you, Elly, that the walls in the Hotel Metropol are said to have ears. We would be wise to weigh our words.

  Litzky: (in pidgin Russian, spoken with a Brooklyn accent) I advocate tea break to give me time to change wire on dictaphone.

  Nora: You didn’t say he spoke Russian, Elly.

  Elly: You didn’t ask me.

  Lilya: But I thought you said he was American.

  Elly: He is American. From what I gather, he’s an American Communist studying Russian literature at Moscow State University. I don’t have the impression he speaks it well enough to follow our conversation.

  Tatiana: Thank heaven for small gifts.

  SECOND SESSION

  He turned away so you wouldn’t notice his lack of emotion.…

  Elly: Where did we leave off?

  Tatiana: Lilya was boasting that, from the day their paths crossed at the Poet’s Café, she and Mayakovsky were inseparable—

  Lilya: It’s not a boast, damn it, it’s uncontaminated fact. Until he commended me to the tender loving care of Comrade Government, we were absolutely inseparable—even when we separated we wer
e, in a manner of speaking, inseparable. I may have been leaping ahead of myself with respect to the chronology of our common story (the Comrade Government in question didn’t come into the picture until late in the game) but—

  Nora: What you leap ahead of, Lilya Yuryevna, is not so much the chronology of our common story but unvarnished truth. Holy shit, you haul out the ménage à trois label every time you have an opportunity to rewrite history, as if rewritten history is your ticket to celebrity. Listen, Mayakovsky told me everything—don’t forget I was his last but far from least—before he commended me to the tender loving care of Comrade Government. The three of you shared the six-room apartment on Zhukovsky Street in Petrograd, that much is true, until the Poet got fed up with having to scavenge for cigarettes and vodka and talked you into moving to Moscow, where creature comforts could be found if you had connections in the Party. Your Osip resisted—as the ménage’s resident aesthete, he argued you could safely die without seeing Venice if you had the good fortune to live in Petrograd—but he was outvoted, two to one, and being a democrat, he joined the hegira. In Moscow you rented a series of apartments—the two rooms next to the main post office, the twelve-square meters on Poluektov Lane—before winding up in the flat on Gendrikov Lane that the state put at Mayakovsky’s disposal. It was furnished, so the Poet boasted, according to the principle: nothing superfluous. No beautiful objects, no mahogany furniture, no framed pictures. The old rug over your ottoman, embroidered with a hunting scene made from wool and beads, along with the bust you did of yourself when you were going through your sculptor phase, were the only decorations permitted. You each had your own bedroom. Mayakovsky had the one with the bookshelves and a photograph of you that you gave him on his birthday the year you met, Osip had the curtained off alcove near the great tiled stove in which you burned the wooden sills pried loose outside the windows to heat the flat in winter, you had the room with the front page of Gazeta-Kopeika reporting the disappearance of Count L. N. Tolstoy pasted to the windowpane. Your common room, like most Muscovites, was the cramped kitchen where you gathered round the round table to eat when you could scare up food, to drink when you could afford vodka, to smoke when you could cadge cigarettes, and talk into the early hours of the morning about poetry and revolution on the even days of the month, revolution and poetry on the odd, with you and Osip sitting on the two folding chairs and the Poet astride the orange crate from Uzbekistan set on end. The thing that sold the three of you on the flat was the bathtub, which was so small it was a miracle Mayakovsky, even with his knees jutting, could fit into it. The block on which you lived still had those lovely little wooden houses that have since been torn down to make way for communal apartment buildings. Tuesdays you held open house—Pasternak along with his wife, Yevgenia, Meyerhold and his wife, Zinaida, Eisenstein were regulars; Nadezhda and Osip Mandelshtam, Akhmatova and the man or woman in her life at any given time, Gorky, Malevich, Balanchine, and the prima ballerina Tamara Geva, who happened to be his wife, turned up from time to time. Except for what you call your husband’s occasional act of fidelity, you hadn’t been carnal with Osip for years when you met Mayakovsky—though you’d been carnal enough with half the literati in Petrograd. Like every new couple, you and the Poet had your hormonal period. You were a ménage à deux while the passion lasted. After that you were just three friends living under the same roof when you weren’t off fucking other lovers—that Bolshevik apparatchik who was sent to a Siberian prison camp as an enemy of the people or that Red Army general, to name just two.