Lilya: Are you seriously suggesting that you had his warm body in your bed and yet you couldn’t compete with Western Union telegrams and the occasional letter?
Tatiana: He proposed marriage to me without my permitting him into my bed.
Nora: Boasting as usual. You got him on the rebound, Tanik.
Tatiana: And what, pray tell, was he rebounding from? He had long since stopped sleeping with you, Lilya. America and Elly here were four years behind him, though Elly did turn up in Nice to introduce him to the daughter he had sired. Even that didn’t work for her. As for you, Nora, you weren’t even in the picture when Lilya’s sister, Elsa, introduced me to the Poet in Paris.
Lilya: He was rebounding from a revolution that had gone dreadfully wrong. Iosif Stalin—who took personal slights as evidence of deeper conspiracies—had hounded his only serious rival, Trotsky, into exile. He’d sidelined the darling of the Party, Bukharin, the single comrade in the superstructure who, intellectually speaking, could offer a coherent critique of his rule. And rumor had it that Koba, to employ the nom de guerre Stalin used before the Revolution, was toying with a final solution to the peasant problem—the peasants with their miserable little plots of land and a cow or two were the last capitalists left in Russia—by forcing them all onto collective farms. The idea was for the peasants to work on collectives the way the proletariat worked in factories, which is to say for fixed hours at a fixed salary. Mayakovsky thought that tragedy loomed, that famine in the Ukraine would be the inevitable result if—
Tatiana: You simply cannot accept that the Poet fell head over heels in love with another woman. And it wasn’t a question of bodies meeting bodies, as was your case, but rather of souls meeting souls. He swore we would have become soul mates regardless of the sensual feelings we had or didn’t have for one another, regardless of—
Nora:—regardless of whether you physically consummated your union of souls. Jesus, he said the same Goddamn things to me the night we met. You’d think, being a poet, the prick would have come up with fresh dialogue for each seduction.
Lilya: I swear to God you dumbfound me, Tatiana. You eventually married that patrician French Vicomte of yours, so I assumed you’d shed your innocence along with your virginity. But here you are dredging up this soul meeting soul chestnut. When of course the reality of what pushes men and women to become intimate is far more byzantine.
Elly: Perhaps you’d care to spell that out, Lilya. What in your obviously expert opinion pushes men and women to become intimate?
Lilya: It’s not all that mysterious. The male of the species thinks one becomes intimate in order to have sex. The female thinks one has sex in order to become intimate.
Nora: Another nugget of wisdom from the woman who couldn’t keep the Poet in her stable of lovers.
Lilya: Look who’s being holier than his holiness the Metropolitan Sergius! My dear Nora, all of Moscow witnessed your constant bickering with dear Volodya. You fought in the vestibule of Bolshoi while retrieving your coats. You fought at that Kremlin reception for Le Corbusier where they unveiled his sketches for that new Palace of Soviets. You even fought in the Alma Ata studio where Eisenstein was filming Старое и новое, obliging the director to reshoot one entire scene. The story of your battle royal the night before he commended us to the tender loving care of Comrade Government—with the both of you scribbling insults on scraps of cardboard torn from a box of chocolates, crumpling them into spitballs and flinging them at one another across the table in front of all the supper guests—was the talk of Moscow.
Tatiana: I suppose you were arguing about me?
Nora: We were arguing, among other things, about his infidelity, which I couldn’t abide.
Tatiana: Are you suggesting he was cheating on you?
Nora: Holy shit, when did she arrive from the planet Mars? (turning her scorn on Tatiana) You must tell us, Tanik, when did you arrive from the planet Mars. While he was proposing marriage to you, while he was queuing for a visa to go back to Paris to sweep you off your delicate little feet, he was cheating on you with me! Jesus Christ, all the time he was trying to sweet-talk you into returning with him to Russia as his wedded wife, he was fucking me. You must understand that it wasn’t really his fault. He required the warm body of a woman the way alcoholics need a ration of liquor every hour on the hour. Vlad could fuck three times a day on an off day. He could fuck four times a day if his creative juices were flowing. It irritated me that I was obviously his plan B.… Okay, okay, I admit irritated is too mild—it pissed me off being his fallback plan. If only I had been his Plan A it might have worked out. I might have abandoned my husband and my career for the son of a bitch. I might have become his fucking muse. Ah, that’s a good one, Tanik. You do get it, don’t you? You were his fingertip-touching, back-of-hand-kissing muse. I was his fucking muse. Clearly there was a side to him our innocent Tanik here never visited. There was a side to him her incurable priggishness prevented her from ever experiencing.
Tatiana: He kept no secrets from me, he bared his heart—
Nora: Baring his heart was his favored method of seduction. With me, he bared his body so I could get at what passed for his heart. He could be, when all is said, a decent enough poet when he wasn’t writing bullshit propaganda. Those agitprop posters he did for the Bolsheviks, his saccharine ode to Lenin—Lenin is more alive than the living!—Jesus, they made me puke! But he was a talented lover. He was that rare male of the species who appeared to take pleasure from giving pleasure. He invariably asked if you’d had an orgasm and made no effort to conceal his boyish glee if you said yes, which is why one was tempted to say yes whether or not it was true. That’s what you missed out on, my poor Tanik. In the end, your sacrosanct virginity was more important to you than savoring the lust of the Poet.
Elly: I experienced the carnal side of him, if only for the few weeks he was in New York. I was pretty naive when I came to America. I expected the streets would be paved with mahjong ivories or their equivalent. In a metaphorical sense it turned out they were. For me they were paved with the hallowed cobblestones on which Mayakovsky trod. Nora has it right. The Poet was a serial seducer but a lovely lover. True to the promise he made to me on the Brooklyn Bridge, he explored parts of me I hadn’t up to then imagined the existence of.
Nora: Which is another way of saying he introduced you to the female orgasm.
Elly: You have a gift for making the remarkable things in life sound vulgar.
Nora: Vulgarity, if it exists with respect to the female orgasm, is in the ear of the auditor. In this case, you.
Lilya: I dare say I knew the carnal side of him better than any of you. On more than one occasion during our long ménage à deux he fell asleep with his lips pressed to my lips … ah, my precious Tatiana, I can see from the widening of your prune-shaped eyes that you fear you have understood what I’m getting at. What I am getting at—Damn it, I shall piss on decorum and spit it out: The lips his lips were pressed to were not the lips on my face. Ha! Look, all of you. The penny has dropped. Tatiana here is blushing like a beet.
Tatiana: I most certainly am not.
Litzky: (in English) Actually you are.
Tatiana: Damn him, I thought his lips were supposed to be sealed.
Elly: He’s right, of course. She is. You are, Tanik. You’re as red as Lilya’s hair.
Lilya: As for you, dear Nora, you have no cause to be smug. Where you go terribly wrong—where you utterly misjudge him—is in thinking Mayakovsky was only a decent enough poet. He was a wonderfully complex creature, sensitive to injustice with a fierce affinity for the underdog because he’d once been the underdog. He was blessed with an animal intelligence not at all disadvantaged by being instinctive. But all these glorious qualities paled beside the fact—you will have noticed my choice of the word fact!—that he was nothing less than a grandiose poet. You don’t have to take my word for it. Ask my Osip. Ask Pasternak. Ask Akhmatova. Ask Tsvetaeva, for God’s sake—she condemned the
Bolsheviks for murdering the Tsar but praised the poetry of their poet Mayakovsky. Ask Iosif Stalin, who said as much when he jotted a note in the margin of the letter I wrote him. He called Mayakovsky the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Mayakovsky created verse that knifed through the thickest smog, that penetrated the densest skull—
Nora: What talents God gave him he spread too thin. He fashioned lyric poems with his right hand, with his left he made inconsequential films to entertain Osip Brik’s Tongue-Tied intellectuals. And in his spare time he recited his poetry to illiterate factory workers coming off the night shift or produced propaganda posters for the Bolsheviks.
Lilya: Filmmaking wasn’t a pastime for Mayakovsky, Nora. It was an art form worth exploring. He loved writing scripts—his Day Book is filled with treatments for films he hoped to make one day. He loved the excitement of shooting motion pictures. He got a kick out of acting in them.
Nora: Say what you want, the films were trivial enterprises that distracted him from where his talent, assuming he had talent, should have taken him: poetry.
Lilya: I starred in three of his trivial films, thank you very much. My personal favorite was the last of the three, the one we called Shackled by Film. Have any of you ladies have seen it? I didn’t think so. Volodya played the role of the married painter who goes to the cinema and falls under the spell of the dancer on the screen. The painter lures the ballerina, played by yours truly, off the silver screen and into his world. (Ha! Yet another example of art imitating life. In many respects the story came too close to home for comfort.) The actors in the film, puzzled by the disappearance of the ballerina from all the movie screens in the city, revolt against the director and eventually bring her back to the screen and the film. Shackled by Film received a standing ovation when it was shown at the Ministry of Culture on Gnezdnikovsky Street, along with several extremely positive notices in newspapers. You have to remember that kinema was a brand-new medium when Mayakovsky got involved. The Poet’s motion pictures were trailblazing experiments in filmmaking and original works of art in their own right. He harnessed the imagination of the spectator to the point where he or she actually becomes a coauthor of the motion picture.
Elly: Look, it’s not for me to say how good a poet or filmmaker he was or wasn’t. In any case, it wasn’t his creative gifts that attracted me. He was, when all is said, a complicated man trying on different versions of himself—as if they were new tailor-made suits—as he modeled these versions for his various lovers. The version of himself that he modeled for me—the version that made me wonder if I hadn’t misjudged the Bolsheviks after all—was his idealistic side, which, when you ruminate on it, surely reflected the idealistic side of the Russian Revolution. I have come around to the idea that all revolutions have two faces. Face number one is the brutal anything-goes face. Look at the way the American revolutionists hounded, and sometimes slaughtered, colonialists who remained loyal to poor demented King George; look at the way the French revolutionists severed the heads of those who wouldn’t agree that anything goes. Face number two is the idealistic face—we’re going to improve the world, we’re going to eradicate poverty, we’re going to eliminate capitalist exploitation and construct a classless Communist society. Before Mayakovsky came into my life, I had only witnessed the brutal face of the Bolsheviks. I’d heard stories about Stalin’s bloodlust when, during the Civil War, he was governor of Tsaritsyn and ordered the execution of hundreds of White Russian loyalists. They were pushed off barges into the Volga River—oh God!—with their hands and feet tightly bound. With my own eyes I’d seen Cossacks parade through Moscow with the heads of White Russians impaled on the steel points of their lances. Which is why I fled across Europe, across the Atlantic, to the United States of North America. Mayakovsky made me see the other face of Bolshevism and, if he had invited me, I swear I would have followed him back to Russia, I would have lived with him, with or without the bonds of holy matrimony, in order to explore this idealistic face of Bolshevism. Yes, even to contribute, however modestly, to the Russian Revolution.
Nora: As much as I hate to admit it, Elly has put her finger on something essential. Mayakovsky and the Revolution he devoted himself to had an idealistic face that was, to be sure, often masked by brutality; starting with Lenin’s Red Terror in 1918 (where the CheKa sorted people by class and slaughtered or deported tens of thousands of potential enemies of the state), starting with the execution in 1921 of Anna Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolai Gumilev. He wasn’t shot because of some phantom conspiracy to bring back the Tsar, as Lilya would have us believe. He was shot for making the sign of the cross in public, for saying aloud what many were thinking: that Lenin’s heir apparent, Iosif Stalin, was an ignorant lout. As for you, Lilya, if I appear to be smug, it’s surely because I grasp Mayakovsky’s sexuality better than all of you. Listen carefully, hang on my every word: There is no such thing as a good lover or a bad lover. It is the woman who transforms the male of the species into a good lover or a bad lover.
Lilya: Oh God, spare me your suffragette witlessness! My precious Nora, you make the mistake the vast majority of males make—you put the onus for the success or failure of any enterprise, whether it be in or out of bed, squarely on the woman. If the male performs inadequately in bed it’s the fault of his wife, if he performs inadequately in life it’s the fault of his mother. In the gospel according to Nora, the poor dear subjugated male of the species is responsible for what exactly?
Nora: He is responsible for wiping his ass so he doesn’t stink of shit when you go down on him. (to Elly) Fucking Rasputin obviously understands what we say. Look at the bastard—he’s actually blushing.
Tatiana: Me, too, I’m blushing. I am discomfited by you. I am mortified to think you speak for the weaker sex. You are a lewd woman, Nora. Lewd and rude and crude. It’s no wonder Mayakovsky quit you.
Nora: I suppose you might say he quit me. He quit me and Lilya and Elly and you, Tanik, all at the same time. In any case, innocents like you often confuse unvarnished truth with lewdness.
Litzky: (in English) Hey, I’m sorry to break into your conversations, ladies but—
Nora: Don’t tell me it’s that fucking dictaphone of his again! He only just put in a new wire.
Elly: (in English, to Litzky) How long can one of your wires keep recording?
Litzky: (in English) Thirty minutes, if the wire itself isn’t too used. This machine is a prototype. The production model of the Peirce 55B Magnetic Wire Recorder, which went on sale at Macy’s department store after what you Russians call the Great Patriotic War—I heard it sold for $400—came equipped with a wire that recorded a full hour of conversation.
Elly: (in English) How did you wind up with a prototype?
Litzky: (in English) If you’re not just trying to make conversation, I’ll tell you. My mom, Syd Litzky, worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a secretary for a one-star admiral. She and my father were both card-carrying members of the microscopic American Communist Party. They were pretty confident that revolution would come to America but they weren’t sure it would happen in their lifetime, so they bet all their chips on Soviet Russia and Comrade Stalin. Which I suppose is why they encouraged me to apply to Moscow State University. Which is why, when she heard I’d been accepted and was actually going to Russia, my mom swiped the Peirce dictaphone from the admiral’s office. When Syd turned up on the Hudson River pier to see me off on the Royal Mail Ship Mauretania, she brought along a carton for me to take with me to Moscow. My going-away present was covered with Christmas wrapping paper, which was my mom’s way of concealing stolen goods. Her idea was for me to give the dictaphone to the Bolsheviks to replicate so that Soviet Communism wouldn’t fall behind American capitalism when it came to office equipment.
Elly: (in English) And did you?
Litzky: (in English) I definitely tried. I demonstrated my Peirce to the university provost and, again, to the dean of foreign students, as well as the Bolshevik Commissar at the university
. None of them showed the slightest interest in having Soviet Russia manufacture dictaphone machines that might one day replace their very young and very sexy secretaries, whom they were no doubt—excuse the expression—banging.
Elly: (in English) How could you possibly know that, Rasputin?
Litzky: (in English) Hey, it’s what I’d be doing in their shoes! Listen, when Stalin exploded his first Soviet atomic bomb four years ago, my mother joked that American Communists had only managed to steal the blueprint for the bomb that the Russians eventually built, while she’d stolen a genuine Peirce 55B Magnetic Wire Recorder for Comrade Stalin. She wasn’t convinced the esteemed leader of the Communist world appreciated her contribution but she said it didn’t matter. She said she’d do it again if stealing the Peirce Magnetic Wire Recorder could advance the Marxist vision of a classless society where everyone, rich or poor, male or female, white or black, could record their conversations. Consider the possibility, Miss, that my little mom, Syd Litzky from the borough of Brooklyn, New York, maybe’s done more for Communism than all the poems and posters and films of your esteemed poet Mayakovsky.
Elly: (in English, laughing) With all respect to your mother, the American Communists who risked their lives to give Stalin the design of the American atomic bomb—two of them, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, are on death row awaiting execution—as well as Mrs. Litzky, who gave him the Peirce Magnetic Wire Recorder, all contributed, that’s for sure. But the Poet Mayakovsky incarnated the Bolshevik Revolution for millions upon millions of Russians. He gave it a legitimacy that only a great poet can bestow on what in the end is a vulgar political movement.
The Mayakovsky Tapes Page 11
