Usually, however, we went to stay the night with Vasilisa's sister, Natalia, the mother of Vasia. On these occasions Vasia would stay behind with the Shklovskis, and we slept in her mother's room in the apartment in Maryina Roshcha where Victor and Vasilisa had lived before. Another room in this apartment was occupied by Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhievt who was good company for M. in the evenings—they always sat up talking till very late. It was with Khardzhiev that I spent the first few days after M's arrest—and then I stayed with him again after hearing of M.'s death. I just lay in a stupor, but Nikolai Ivanovich, desperately poor though he was, went out to buy food and expensive candies for me, and kept making me eat something. He was the other person who stood by Akhmatova and me at the blackest periods of our life.
I once saw in his room a drawing of Khlebnikov by Tatlin. Tatlin had done it many years after Khlebnikov's death, but it looked just like him, exactly as I remembered him when he used to come and eat kasha with us in our room at Herzen House, after which he would sit in silence, continually moving his lips. When I saw this drawing, it suddenly struck me that one day M. might similarly come to life in
* A suburb of Moscow.
a good portrait by somebody, and the thought made me feel a little better. But I didn't reckon with the fact that all the artists who knew him died before it would have been safe for them to draw his portrait. The drawing by Miklashevski that appeared in the magazine Moskva is a very poor likeness—M. came out astonishingly well in photographs, but no artist was ever able to do justice to him.
M. used to say that Khardzhiev had a perfect ear for poetry, and this is why I insisted that he be put in charge of editing the volume of M.'s verse which was supposed to come out ten years ago in the Poets' Library but still hasn't appeared.
The tumbledown wooden house in Maryina Roshcha seemed like a haven to us, but to get to it was not so simple. When we left the Shklovskis' with Natalia, we first had to run the gauntlet of the various women looking after the building. Out in the street Natalia walked on ahead, got on tramcars first, and waited for us at the transfer stops. We always kept a little way behind, trying not to lose sight of her broad back. Obliged as we were to behave like conspirators, it would not have done for us to walk side by side. If M. had been picked up in the street—we had heard of such cases—Natalia could pretend to be a mere passerby whose papers they wouldn't even bother to check. We would thus avoid calling attention to our connection with the Shklovskis. Our precautions were ridiculous, but we had to take them—this was the penalty of living in our time and place. So we walked behind Natalia, as though hypnotized by her swaying gait. She always seemed quite imperturbable, and if we failed to get on the same tramcar, we knew she would be waiting for us at a transfer stop, or at the terminus.
Although there were other people living in her house, we always managed to slip in without being seen—Natalia went in first and had a look around before beckoning us to follow. But one of her neighbors, a certain Vaks, a member of the Union of Writers, must have known that she had people staying overnight in her room. He was evidently a decent person, however, and never denounced us. In the mornings we could hear him ringing the Union of Writers from the telephone in the passage outside, but his purpose was only to demand building materials and money for repairs to the "hovel" which we regarded as such a haven. M. even wrote some comic verse featuring Vaks—he still occasionally managed to turn out this kind of thing, though his life was now such that real poetry had come to an end. Shklovski for some reason hated humorous verse and dismissed it as a symptom of softening of the brain, if not worse—not because he thought the times were unsuitable for it, but as a matter of principle. Humorous verse is a Petersburg tradition and Moscow recognized only the art of parody—Shklovski had forgotten his youth in Petersburg.
That winter I began shouting in my sleep at night. It was an awful, inhuman cry, as if an animal or a bird were having its neck wrung. Shklovski, who heard it when I slept in their apartment, teased me that while most people shouted "Mama" in their sleep, with me it was "Osia" ["Osip"l. I still frighten people with this terrible cry at night. That same year, much to the alarm of my friends, the palms of my hands started turning bright red at moments of stress—and still do. But M. was as calm and collected as ever, and went on joking to the end.
During our trips to Moscow we sometimes had to stay on a few extra days till we could get money. The number of people able to help us got smaller all the time, and we had to wait until Shklovski was in funds—on such days he would come home with money stuffed in all his pockets. After he had given us some, we set off back to Kalinin, where we spent it on our upkeep in the house of Tatiana Vasilievna.
76 The Accomplice
I
n the fall of 1937 Katayev and Shklovski decided it would be a good idea to arrange for M. to meet Fadeyev, who, though not yet the boss of the Union of Writers, was already very influential. The meeting took place in Katayev's apartment. M. read some of his verse, and Fadeyev was very moved—he tended to be emotional. Apparently sober, he embraced M. tearfully and said something in a suitable vein. I wasn't present, but waited in the Shklovskis' apartment several stories up. When they came in, Victor and M. seemed pleased. They had left early to give Katayev a chance to talk privately with Fadeyev.
Fadeyev did not forget about M.'s poetry. Shortly after this, when he had to go down to Tiflis with Ehrenburg—probably for the Ru- staveli anniversary—he assured Ehrenburg that he would try to get a selection of it published. But nothing came of this. Perhaps it had been hinted to him that it "wouldn't be advisable." If you approached them for permission to do something, our officials had a nice way of saying with a frown: "Of course, go ahead if you see fit." The frown was equivalent to a refusal, but since the word "no" had not actually passed the official's lips, appearances were saved and the refusal to allow something was made to look like "initiative from below" and thus entirely "democratic." Probably no other regime ever went in for such niceties in the art of bureaucratic control— apart from all its other qualities, it was distinguished by unparalleled hypocrisy. But it is even more likely that Fadeyev, fearing to "get mixed up in something," never raised the matter at all. Nevertheless, at the end of the winter in 1938, running into M. in the Writers' Union, he suddenly offered to put in a word for him "up above" and find out "what they think." He said we should come and see him again at the Union in a few days' time, when he would have the answer, or, rather, some information for us.
To our astonishment, Fadeyev actually kept the appointment on the day and at the hour we had agreed on. We left the premises of the Union with him and he invited us into his car so we could talk on the way to another place we had to go to. Fadeyev sat next to his chauffeur, and we got in the back. Turning around to us, he told us he had talked with Andreyev, but that this had produced no results: Andreyev was quite adamant that no work could be found for M. Fadeyev was embarrassed and upset that he had been turned down "point blank" (to use his own words). M. even tried to cheer him up by saying it didn't matter and everything would work out in the end. We had one good reason not to be too much put out by Fadeyev's failure: just before this M. had suddenly been received by Stavski, who suggested that we should go for a time to a rest home while the question of work for M. was being decided. On Stavski's instructions, the Literary Fund had already issued us vouchers to enable us both to spend two months in a rest home at Samatikha, and this unexpected stroke of luck had made us feel very much better. When we mentioned it to Fadeyev, however, he did not sound pleased: "Vouchers? Where to? Who gave them to you? Where is Samatikha? Why not to the Union rest home?" M. explained that the Union of Writers had no rest homes beyond the hundred- kilometer radius. "What about Maleyevka?" Fadeyev asked. We had never heard of this place, but when we asked about it, Fadeyev suddenly became evasive. "Oh, it's a pretty run-down building they've just let the Union have. I suppose it's being done over." M. then said he imagined they would not want to let him go to a Union rest home until the general question of his status had been cleared up. Fadeyev readily accepted this explanation. He was clearly upset and worried about something. Now, looking back on it, I can see that he had suddenly realized what was afoot. It is difficult for even the most hardened person to look at such things calmly—and Fadeyev was an emotional man.