The Mayakovsky Tapes

by Robert Littell

  Lilya: Where did you hear about my Red Army general?

  Nora: On the Moscow grapevine. Holy shit, everyone in my repertory company knew the name, rank, and serial number of your Red Army general.

  Lilya: Volodya and I—We—Our hormonal period, as you call it, endured years.…

  Elly: Nora is right, of course. You were never a ménage à trois in the French sense of the expression.

  Nora: You were fucking a lover while your husband pressed his ear to the thin wall insulated with flea-infested felt, undoubtedly jerking off as he listened to your feigned orgasms.

  Lilya: That’s outrageous! What gives you the right? I have never feigned an orgasm in my life—oh, maybe with Osya, once or twice at the very beginning to prime the pump, so to speak. Feigning an orgasm, my precious Nora, has certain things to commend it—alerting the novice for whom female anatomy is unchartered terrain when he has reached the Promised Land, to name one. With Mayakovsky, there was no need to feign anything. He was a pussy cat of a lover.

  Nora: With me he was an alley cat of a lover. He took his pleasure where he could find it. Some nights he found it convenient to take his pleasure with me. Other nights he found it with the first female who fawned over him at a poetry reading. He took his pleasure from women when there was one available. He pleasured himself when there wasn’t. While we’re on the subject—

  Tatiana: Exactly what subject are we on?

  Litzky: (in English) The Poet’s sexuality seems to be the subject du jour.

  Nora: What did he say?

  Elly: He asks if we can speak directly into the microphone when we talk. (to the young man, in English) Obviously you do speak Russian well enough to follow the conversation. But damn it, kindly stick to manipulating your infernal wire-recording contraption. When we feel the need for a male point of view we shall ask for it.

  Litzky: (in English) I got carried away. It won’t happen again.

  Tatiana: I should think we could benefit from Elly’s portrait of the Poet. How did you two meet?

  Elly: Yes, okay. How did we meet…? When your hormonal period with Mayakovsky ended, Lilya Yuryevna, mine began. Nel metzo del cammin—midway through the journey—that’s where I am comfortable starting my portion of the story: at the halfway mark, in this particular instance, anno Domini 1925.

  When I was a child, back in Russia before the dreadful Bolshevik Revolution, at a time when children were still innocent creatures who hadn’t seen decapitated heads of White Russians impaled on Cossack pikes, I used to fold whimsical messages into bottles and seal them with cork and candle wax and throw them into the Baltic Sea.

  No one ever answered.

  When I grew up and crossed the ocean to escape the Bolsheviks, when I washed up on the Atlantic Coast of North America like one of my bottles, I’d take a trolley car across Brooklyn on my one day off a month, and then an omnibus across the wetlands to the Jones Island whaling station to see if any corked bottles had washed up on the tide. Eventually one did. You guessed correctly, it was the Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. He was bedraggled, which is what one might expect of someone who had been traveling for months—by steamer to Veracruz, by train to Mexico City (where he stayed with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo), then by third-class railroad carriage across the United States of North America, via Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia to New York. To me—

  Tatiana: If I can slip a word in: When I met this teddy bear of a Russian poet, he was anything but bedraggled. The rendezvous had been organized by none other than your sister, Lilya (who, needless to say, had ulterior motives; surely we shall come back to this anon). The meeting took place toward the end of what the Americans thought of as the Roaring Twenties in the sanctum of a Parisian tearoom. As usual I was all beads and fur. The Poet was wearing a bespoke frock coat, a silken shirt, his dark trousers had pinstripes and a crease sharp enough to slice through one of those long loaves of bread the French are so fond of. He wore ankle-length hand-stitched boots from Peal in London made of the soft leather one associates with gloves. All things considered, he looked more like a slightly overweight English aristocrat than a Bolshevik poet. We hit it off instantly, possibly because I shared his passion for poesy. As a schoolgirl in Moscow I had memorized hundreds of lines of A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, A. Blok, and V. Mayakovsky. During the great famine of 1921—with thousands upon thousands starving to death in Moscow; when an entire meal more often than not consisted of boiled cocoa pods—I used to recite entire stanzas of the Poet’s Cloud in Trousers on a side street near the Kremlin, the one where they would park all the official ZiS limousines, to Red Army soldiers, who would pay me with the loose kopeks in the pockets of their greatcoats so I could buy bread on the rare occasions when there was bread. When I recounted this to the Poet over tea in Paris, I saw him turn away so I wouldn’t notice the emotion welling in his eyes.

  Nora: Knowing you expected emotion, he turned away so you wouldn’t notice his lack of emotion.

  Tatiana: Your remark only shows how little you knew him, Nora. Plainly, he was someone who wore his heart on his sleeve, not his anger, as Lilya told us earlier. There is a wonderful Chinese proverb that describes the moment Mayakovsky and I met: yī jiàn rú gù. It means old friends at first sight. I was living in Montmartre at the time with my grandmother, who had sheltered me since I fled Soviet Russia in 1925. After the communal apartment in Moscow, her modest three-bedroom flat with its marble fireplaces and hot water in the bathroom and its own telephone seemed like the Winter Palace to me. When the Poet came by to take me out to La Coupole or La Rotonde, or a concert in the Salle Pleyel, or an after-theater supper in the company of Jean Cocteau, he would deposit a calling card as big as a storefront, with his name in large block letters, in the ceramic bowl on the vestibule table. (Thinking they could be worth a small fortune one day, my grandmother collected them in a scrapbook.) Oh, I do seem to remember his muttering something about swallowing, but as I considered V. Mayakovsky incapable of vulgarity I presumed he was referring to the British-style crumpets set out on the low table alongside the jasmine tea, that or the rumor circulating in the White Russian community concerning Lenin’s dying of syphilis.

  Lilya: Hmmn. When your teddy bear of a poet first turned up in my life he was beyond bedraggled. Hours after moving in with Osip and me we introduced him to the habit of bathing more than once a month, and with hot water. Oh, don’t for a moment think he wasn’t led to the tub kicking and screaming. He claimed that real men had to have some body odor but, being the nose on the receiving end of his body odor, I managed to convince him otherwise. From the start I made it clear that if he expected me to take his penis into my mouth, he had to wash it. I sent him off to an Israelite dentist, his name was something-or-other Rabinovich, to have new teeth put in where his had rotted. Rabinovich made the mistake of repairing cavities for Leon Trotsky before Comrade Stalin expelled his nemesis from Soviet Russia. Being Trotsky’s dentist turned out to be perilous for the doctor’s health; poor Rabinovich was executed halfway through the 1930s as a Trotsky deviationist. But that’s another story. Or is it? I’ve lost the thread. Where was I?

  Nora: You were describing Mayakovsky before he sported a bespoke frock coat.

  Lilya: Yes, yes, I took him in hand—I would joke with him that I’d love to walk barefoot through his tangle of disheveled hair. I personally trimmed it to a civilized length and obliged him to abandon that outrageous yellow jacket and tattered frock coat of his for clean white shirts, clean collars, the now famous bespoke frock coat, trousers with a crease in them. Osip introduced the Poet to the affectation of a walking stick. He actually gave him his father’s, which had an ivory knob that unscrewed to reveal a corked phial filled with cognac. Mayakovsky took to wearing the eighteen-jeweled pocket watch that Osip and I offered him in 1923 on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday—it was made of unstainable steel and had a Soviet locomotive embossed on the back of the case. In my mind’s eye I picture the Poet tugging it out b
y its silver fob at dinner parties to signal he wanted to go home. He’d pull it out at our regular Tuesday literary soirees or our weekly poker games to hint that it was time for the guests to leave. Christ, just thinking about Mayakovsky before he became the well-clad Poet the world came to know makes me shudder. My God, when we first met him he shined his shoes while he wore them, polishing the toes on the back of a trouser leg. It was Osip who gave Mayakovsky his first Italian scissor and showed him how to cut his finger- and toenails.

  Elly: How on earth did he cut them before he had a scissor?

  Lilya: He filed them down on a stone or on a brick wall. It was a habit he’d picked up in prison where scissors were prohibited. Curious how one never imagines cutting fingernails to be a problem for prisoners.

  Nora: Elly’s bedraggled poet, Tatiana’s bespoke frock coat poet, Lilya’s walking stick poet—you all appear to be obsessed with the surface of things. I shall try to delve under the surface—who the fuck cares how he dressed?—by relating a revealing conversation I had with Mayakovsky one night when, as was his habit, he expressed a preference for a particular position, it didn’t faze him that his over-the-edge made me gag. I asked him if he would take a cock into his mouth; I asked if, having taken a cock into his mouth, he would swallow. He became irritated and said he wasn’t homosexual. I persisted: And if you had been born a woman? He turned livid. “Orthodox Jewish men thank God every morning they were not born female. I’m not Jewish but I do the same.” “You’re kidding,” I said. I remember looking into his unblinking eyes. “You’re not kidding!” I whispered. End of discussion.

  Lilya: My God, I’d thought the scorched earth stratagem went out of vogue when our one-eyed General Kutuzov used it to impede Napoléon’s progress toward Moscow. Obviously you will say literally anything to slander the good name of a great poet. I tell you, woman-to-woman, he was as caring a lover as you could find this side of Vladivostok. Many a time he would actually go on strike—that was the endearing expression he used—he would absolutely refuse to ejaculate until I had had an orgasm.

  Nora: I fear the reason he refused to ejaculate had more to do with him than your delinquent orgasms, Lilya. He told me as much late one night when we indulged in some serious postcoital pillow talk. I remember him explaining that, for him, ejaculation brought with it as much disappointment as pleasure. It was the first time I’d heard a man say something like that. Ejaculation put an end to his erection, an end to the penetration, an end to the sex act itself. What the Poet loved most were things that went on forever—or at least for a very, very long time: suppers that started at sunset and continued into the early hours of the morning, discussions that dragged on for days, voyages like the one he made to America that lasted for months, epic poems that avoided a denouement, motion pictures where the film threading through the reel started over again when it reached the end. What I’m trying to tell you is he loved fucking and was loathe to interrupt it by ejaculating—he loved fucking that went on forever. He loved fucking me because it did go on forever—what looked like the end could easily turn into an intermezzo that led to another beginning. It was in this sense—please: this is Mayakovsky speaking, not me—that the Poet’s climax was anticlimactic. It was in this sense that his going on strike should be understood, Lilya. Curious, huh?

  Lilya: What’s curious is your undisguised jealousy of the women who shared his bed before you even rumpled his sheets.

  Nora: If someone here is eaten up with jealousy, it’s—

  Tatiana: Ladies, ladies, I am at a loss to apprehend what Nora’s over-the-edge refers to, but surely the two of you are describing the several sides of the same man. I myself never made physical love with him, alas, but I can attest to yet another side. The Mayakovsky I knew was a rain cloud in trousers, which is to say his mood could turn dark when he realized I intended to hold him to his promise to respect my maidenhead. I actually scolded him to his face one afternoon using the epitaph in question. We were sunning ourselves on rented chairs in the Tuileries Garden at the time, watching children in short pants sail toy boats around the shallow basin.

  Elly: Oh, what I wouldn’t have given to be the fly perched on your shoulder when you called him a rain cloud in trousers. You must tell us how he reacted.

  Tatiana: He didn’t appear to appreciate my frankness. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed—but then he stifled the brewing temper tantrum and laughed aloud, as if I had used the phrase in jest. Which only exasperated me more. I can say that his failure to take me seriously resulted in our first real fight, right then and there in the Tuileries Garden, with all the children and their nannies looking on in bewilderment.

  Nora: Fucking lovely! A battle royal in the Tuileries Garden! I’ll bet the nannies still talk about it.

  Tatiana: And well they might! I was quite upset with him and when I am upset I don’t expurgate, I don’t abridge, I don’t water down in order to avoid giving offense. I speak my mind. And in this instance, in the Tuileries Garden, with the nannies in their starched blue uniforms watching us instead of their charges, I gave him a piece of my mind.

  Elly: But what exactly were you arguing about, Tanik?

  Tatiana: About my virginity, if you must know. About my intention of offering it to my husband on our wedding night, and not a moment before. Mayakovsky—it suited him to pretend to be insanely jealous of this husband even though I hadn’t yet selected him—was impatient to seal our friendship, impatient to transform the affection I felt for him into unadulterated love, which is what he needed (so he swore) to survive.

  Elly:—transform your affection into love through sexual intercourse.

  Tatiana: Exactly. Through sexual intercourse. He contended that if he could penetrate me, as a man penetrates a woman, if he could deposit his seed in me, there would be no turning back. He tried to convince me that this first act of intercourse would link us more firmly than any marriage vow. The memory of it, he promised, would linger until death did us part.

  Lilya: Obviously you weren’t persuaded.

  Tatiana: The irony is that I was persuaded, which is to say I was sorely tempted. I still don’t know where I got the stamina to refuse this beautiful man, this whirlwind of a poet. To this day I don’t know if I did the right thing. My God, can you picture the scene? The nannies appeared to be hanging on our quarrel, though as we were arguing in Russian they didn’t understand a word that was said. The children had stopped pushing the little boats with their long bamboo poles and settled onto the basin’s rim to watch the strange grown-ups argue. By and by an older gentleman in a wicker wheelchair, wearing a bow tie and the most beautiful alligator shoes, coughed his way into our row. “If I might,” he said in a voice so feeble we were obliged to strain to catch his words. But when we caught them we realized he was speaking impeccable Russian with the accent of a Petrograd intellectual. Near as I can recollect, he said something along the lines of “Dear Miss, be assured it isn’t every day a suitor speaks to a woman he desires with such ardor. You owe it to yourself, and to him, to think twice before rejecting out of hand the exhilaration and the adventure of a grand amour.” I remember being very disconcerted, to say the least. Here was my Red Russian lover trying to talk me into his bed, and an older and obviously White Russian gentleman arguing that I was a damned fool not to give the Poet what his heart and his body desired.

  Elly: No mystery there, really. The man will instinctively take the male’s side in a quarrel without reference to the arguments on either side.

  Tatiana: Mayakovsky’s anger, which the older gentleman had mistaken for ardor, waned when he glimpsed the absurdity of the situation. I remember that the both of us turned our faces to the sun almost as if we thought it capable of bearing witness to our incongruous situation. The children went back to prodding their sailboats around the basin, the nannies hovering immediately behind them to be sure their charges, in their excitement, didn’t trip into the shallow water. The older gentleman, clucking his dentures in disapproval, motio
ned for his man to push him along the path in the direction of the Palais du Louvre. I seem to remember the Poet groaning mournfully. “Do you love me?” he abruptly demanded.

  I told him the truth: “Not yet.”

  “No matter,” he snapped. “We shall proceed as if you do.”