Call me a Kirov made of bronze, burly in my worker’s jacket, broad, smiling and hatted. Elderly women are susceptible to me. My duties are as tedious as Leningrad’s dogs, snow, horses. I wander amidst the booksellers on Nevsky Prospect, making sure that all’s well with our Danube’s gates. Yezhov rings me up on the big black telephone: Send me more little ballerinas! That’s not my job, but I’ll do it. My job’s everything long and low.
Have you been to the neutral countries? Not I. To me there are no neutral countries. That’s why listening to foreign broadcasts in Leningrad will soon be a capital offense.
I turned in my report on Operation Magic Fire and went home. Yezhov’s ballerinas were already whispering to me about Operation Barbarossa, but Case White hadn’t even been opened yet; we still had infinite time. The future doesn’t exist until it happens.
I live alone, and that’s by choice. My one desire is to aggravate the contradictions of capitalist culture.—Are you stupid enough to believe that?—What I really like to do is listen to the Red Orchestra. And whenever they tell me to, I’ll drive over to listen in at Akhmatova’s. I’ll bet that Lidiya Chukovskaya’s over there again tonight. No one’s ever caught them doing it, but I know they’re both lesbians. If it were up to me, they’d both be shot.
The humble secretary on his throne of gold had shut the Danube’s gates. I know what I know, so I didn’t argue. The Red Orchestra said that the King would sign a treaty with us first, so he didn’t have to fight a two-front war. Well, that would be logical.
The King could never get through. We were safe. You-know-who would reign forever on his throne of gold.
Pyotr Alexeev, with whom I sometimes do wet work, told me a funny one yesterday. It seems that a herd of kolkhozniks with fresh manure on their shoes get to Moscow; you know; they’re shock workers; they’ve won the prize! Think of them as Rodchenko’s robotlike abstract paper cutouts painted with dark oil and mounted on circular wooden bases. The guide explains that they are now in the world capital of progress, abundance, freedom, you name it. Eventually one of the farmers comes up timidly and says: Comrade Leader, yesterday I walked all over the city and didn’t see any of those things! The guide has just the right answer. He replies: You should spend less time walking around and more time reading newspapers!
That’s what I tell myself. He’s shut the Danube’s gates, so all’s well. It doesn’t feel that way to me, but I should spend less time walking around and more time reading newspapers. Unfortunately, my job is to walk around.
Tukhachevsky informs Comrade Stalin that the next war will be fought with tanks. Very good—let’s experiment with tanks in Spain. Straightaway sixty of our tanks get captured by the Condor Legion, mostly with the assistance of Moors to whom the Fascists paid five hundred pesetas each. To this provocation, Comrade Stalin has an answer: Shoot Tukhachevsky. Tukhachevsky should have spent more time reading the newspapers. Then he would have known that tanks will never be any threat. And the Condor Legion goosesteps forward.
I lift the big black telephone. All the better to listen in, my dears! Chukovskaya is saying, in that peculiarly arch tone she adopts whenever she’s trying to impress Akhmatova: The streets are so wet and gloomy now…
I’m thinking: Lidiya Korneeva, you don’t know the half of it!
Akhmatova says: One might say that Leningrad is particularly suited to catastrophes…
I’m thinking to myself: What horseshit! It offends me that such a person ever got published.
Akhmatova’s running on: That cold river, those menacing sunsets, that operatic, terrifying moon…
Chukovskaya whispers: The black water with yellow flecks of light…
Under the black water’s where you deserve to be. That’s what I thought. Of course, nobody gives a shit about my opinions.
The Danube’s gates are safely frozen, just as the sleepwalker’s frozen with his left hand on his belt and his right arm up and out, the fingers slightly open, while facing him, Generalmajor Freiherr von Richthofen mirrors him, and the Condor Legion is frozen in its multiple goosestep, one leg up in the air, its hydra-faces grimacing; this is a sailor’s dance. ‣
ELENA’S ROCKETS
The children invented a game for themselves that involved hurling a stocking, which has been tightly packed with dust, through the air like a rocket, and as it falls it creates an entire cloud of dust. The youngsters play this game a lot, although it has been forbidden by the management.
Even then there was something about Elena Konstantinovskaya which rendered her an object of obsessive desire. In the fantasies of Shostakovich, whom she was not to meet for several years yet, she occasionally resembled a certain Rodchenko angel whose long dress was a tipi-like construction of electric-blue slats; atop this triangle, which is to say right at her infinitesimally narrow waist, she outstretched pure white skeleton-arms which resembled picket fences; these blessed the world with their triangular golden hands. (For the sake of completeness I want to tell you that this particular angel also possessed a crimson scapula, not to mention a triangular crimson head whose only feature was a single strawlike white protrusion.) Elena might not have looked much like that to anyone but Shostakovich, and even to him only on certain days, when the music she inspired achieved its extreme limit of formalism. As has been written about the rocket scientist F. Zander, one of the tragedies of this outstanding intellect was that his engineering solutions, however mature, did not correspond to the technical possibilities of his time.
Well, what did Elena really look like? Akhmatova, who met her briefly, compared her to a church—specifically, to one of the forty times forty churches in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems about Moscow.13 Remember that in those days it was unwise even to mention churches; they were getting demolished or converted into museums of atheism all over our Soviet land. Church times church, all those forty times forty, Akhmatova couldn’t stop chanting that nursery rhyme, which certainly cost Tsvetaeva dearly and may have helped bring about Akhmatova’s own punishment later on, but at this point in the story the fact of the untrustworthiness of those three people—Shostakovich, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, I mean—feels less important to me than the fact that they couldn’t stop comparing one thing with another. Rodchenko made avant-garde “constructions”—an act which also seems slightly untrustworthy, now that I come to think of it, but all right; let’s suppose that they were correctly conceived—why did Shostakovich have to distort her into one of them? What was wrong with Elena just being Elena? Why did she have to be a church? One theory I have—this is Comrade Alexandrov speaking—is that Akhmatova had so many women in her life that they might as well have been the forty times forty churches of prerevolutionary Moscow! This gets to the root of what makes intellectuals dangerous. We use them to add newness to life, which is what keeps it bearable, but newness shouldn’t mutate into utter alienation; a woman never ought to become a church. And now I beg your pardon and will get out of the story.
Shostakovich, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva were all, insofar as it was possible to be without getting liquidated (Tsvetaeva liquidated herself), rebels. Elena Konstantinovskaya was more the good girl. I see here that her parents applied on her behalf for membership in the Little Octobrists, but she was a few months too old. In the Young Pioneers (“Carpenter” link, N. K. Krupskaya Brigade) she became a leading force among the other children, thanks to her enthusiasm for making floats and banners. Her excuse for not immediately entering the Komsomol, namely dedication to her schoolwork, strikes me as plausible. When she did join, at age fifteen, her marks continued to be excellent. One of her professors, the widow Liadova, seems to have been responsible for the girl’s decision to take up linguistics. In the course of preparing this summary I have reviewed Elena’s translations of German military documents,for in 1941 I myself had unfortunate occasion to learn that other language; in spite of the adverse report of Lieutenant N. K. Danchenko, which I also happen to have here, I can testify to her literalness and neutrality. Such qualities cannot be taken for granted, particularly in translators of the front echelon, whose perfectionistic quest for exactly the right word sometimes gets corrupted into expression of self.
13
In fact, she is said to have resembled Tsvetaeva, especially around the mouth, although her long, dark hair, which she so often wore in bangs reaching nearly to the eyebrow, also reminded some people of that doomed poet.