takovich's new symphony, but we were afraid to miss the last train.
With Varia the conversation was different. She showed us her school textbooks where the portraits of Party leaders had thick pieces of paper pasted over them as one by one they fell into disgrace—this the children had to do on instructions from their teacher. Varia said how much she would like to cover up Semashko —"We'll have to sooner or later, so why not now?" At this time the editors of encyclopedias and reference books were sending subscribers—most such works were bought on subscription—lists of articles that had to be pasted over or cut out. In the Shklovski household this was attended to by Victor himself. With every new arrest, people went through their books and burned the works of disgraced leaders in their stoves. In new apartment buildings, which had central heating instead of stoves, forbidden books, personal diaries, correspondence and other "subversive literature" had to be cut up in pieces with scissors and thrown down the toilet. People were kept very busy. . . .
Nikita, the least talkative of the children, sometimes said things that staggered the grownups. Once, for instance, Victor was telling us that he and Paustovski had been to see a famous bird fancier who trained canaries—he only had to give a sign for one of his birds to come out of its cage, sit on a perch and sing. On another signal from its owner, it obediently went back into its cage again. "Just like a member of the Union of Writers," said Nikita and left the room. After saying something like this, he always disappeared into his own room, where he kept the birds he had caught. But he treated his birds nicely, and didn't believe in training them. He told us that songbirds always learned to sing from certain older birds that were particularly good at it. In the Kursk region, once famous for its nightingales, the best songsters had all been caught, and young birds had no way of learning any more. The Kursk "school" of nightingales was thus destroyed because of the selfish people who had put the best songsters in cages. . . .
When Vasilisa with her smiling light-blue eyes arrived, she at once went into action. She ran a bath for us, gave us a change of underwear and then made us lie down for a rest. Victor was always trying to think of ways of helping M., apart from entertaining him with the latest gossip. In the late autumn he gave him an old coat made of dog skin which the previous winter had been worn by Andronikov, the "one-man orchestra." But since then Andronikov had come up in the world and had got himself a brand-new coat of the kind his status as a member of the Writers' Union entitled him to. Shklovski now solemnly handed the dog-skin coat over to M. and even made a little speech on the occasion: "Let everybody see that you came here riding inside the train, not hanging on the buffers. . . ." Till then M. had worn a yellow coat made of leather—also a gift from somebody. It was in this yellow coat that he went to the camp later on. . . .
Whenever the doorbell rang, they hid us in the kitchen or the children's room before opening the door. If it was a friend, we were at once released from captivity with shouts of joy, but if it was Pavlenko or Lelia Povolotskaya, the woman police spy from next door—the one who had a stroke when they started rehabilitating people—we stayed in our hiding place until they were gone. None of them ever once caught a glimpse of us, and we were very proud of the fact.
The Shklovskis' house was the only place where we felt like human beings again. This was a family that knew how to help lost souls like us. In their kitchen we discussed our problems—where to stay the night, how to get money, and so forth. We avoided staying the night with them, because of the women who looked after the building—the janitress, the door-woman and the one who worked the elevator. It was a time-honored tradition that these down-trodden but good-natured souls worked for the secret police. They got no extra pay for this—it simply counted as part of their normal duties. I don't remember now how we managed it, but we did go to the Shostakovich concert and stayed the night somewhere else. . . . When I later came by myself to the Shklovskis' apartment, after M.'s death, the women at the door asked me where he was, and when I told them he was dead, they sighed. "But we thought you'd be the first to go," said one of them. This remark showed me the extent to which our fate had been written on our faces, and it also made me realize that these wretched women had hearts after all, and that one needn't be so afraid of them. The ones who took pity on me soon died—the poor women didn't last long on their meager rations—but afterward I always got on well with their successors, who never informed the militia that I sometimes spent the night at the Shklovskis'. But in 1937 we were terrified of being reported and tried not to stay at the Shklovskis' for fear of getting them into trouble—instead, we kept on the move all the time, chasing breathlessly from place to place.
Occasionally, when there was no choice, we stayed the night there nevertheless, sleeping on their bedroom floor on a mattress covered with a sheepskin rug. They were on the seventh story, so you couldn't hear cars stopping outside, but if ever we heard the elevator coming up at night, we all four of us raced to the door and listened. "Thank God," we would say, "it's downstairs" or "it's gone past." This business of listening for the elevator happened every night, no matter whether we were there or not. Fortunately, it was not used all that often, since many of the writers with apartments in the building spent most of their time in Peredelkino, or in any case didn't come home late—and their children were still very young. In the years of the terror, there was not a home in the country where people did not sit trembling at night, their ears straining to catch the murmur of passing cars or the sound of the elevator. Even nowadays, whenever I spend the night at the Shklovskis' apartment, I tremble as I hear the elevator go past. The sight of half-dressed people huddling by the door, waiting to hear where the elevator stops, is something one can never forget. One night recently, after a car had stopped outside my house, I had a bad dream in which I thought M. was waking me up and saying: "Get dressed—they've come for you this time." But I refused to budge: "I won't get up— to hell with them!" This was a mental revolt against what is also, after all, a kind of collaboration: they come to cart you off to prison and you just meekly get out of bed and put on your clothes with trembling hands. But never again! If they come for me, they'll have to carry me out on a stretcher or kill me on the spot—I'll never go of my own free will.
Once during the winter of 1937 we decided it was wrong to go on taking advantage of the Shklovskis' kindness We were afraid of compromising them—a single denunciation and they could all land in prison. We were horrified at the thought of bringing disaster on Shklovski and his whole family, and though they begged us not to worry, we stopped going to see them for a while. As a result, we felt more homeless and lonely than ever before. Soon M. could stand it no longer and while we were on a visit to Lev Bruni he phoned the Shklovskis. "Come over at once," said Victor, "Vasilisa misses you terribly." A quarter of an hour later we rang at their door and Vasilisa came out crying tears of joy. I then felt she was the only real person in the whole world—and I still think so. I should mention that I have always felt just as close to Akhmatova, but she was living in Leningrad at that time and was thus far away from us.
75 Maryina Roshcha*
W
e were once sitting at the Shklovskis' when Alexander (Sania) Bernstein called and invited us to stay the night at his apartment. Nobody would have thought that the tall, frail and pampered Sania was a brave man, but he walked along the street with us, whistling as though everything was right with the world and chattering about literature, not the least bit afraid to harbor two such arch-criminals as M. and myself in his apartment. When we got there, his little daughter skipped around us and his placid wife, Niura, gave us tea and gossiped with us. He was just as calm in 1948 when he agreed to take M.'s manuscripts from my brother, Evgeni, and keep them for us. In 1938 his brother Sergei had hidden another "criminal," the linguist Victor Vinogradov, who was then forbidden to live in Moscow because he had been in prison. When Vinogradov eventually got on his feet again, became a member of the Academy of Science and was put in charge of Stalinist linguistics, he forgot this poor family that had once given him refuge and did not even go to the funeral of Sergei's wife, who had been so kind to him.