79 Gugovna
I
used to have a book on extinct birds and, looking at it, I suddenly had the thought that all my friends and acquaintances were nothing more than the last members of a dying species. I showed M a picture of a couple of extinct parakeets, and he thought they looked very much like us. I later lost the book, but I have never forgotten this instructive analogy. The only thing I did not realize then was how long-lived exotic birds can be, while the more commonplace specimens die off like crows.
The late Dmitri Sergeyevich Usov once said to me that M. was more of an Assyrian than a Jew. "In what way?" I asked in astonishment. In reply he said there was an Assyrian quality about the line "grim heliotrope suns turned full in the face." "That's why he saw through our Assyrian! so easily," he added.
Bearded, short of breath and gone to seed, like M., Usov was also afraid of no one, yet frightened by everything. As he lay dying in a hospital in Tashkent, he called for me, but I did not get there in time. I hope I may be forgiven for this. But I was able to make his last days a little easier by reading M.'s poetry to him—he was devoted to M. When Zenkevich went to the White Sea Canal on behalf of the Union of Writers, Usov was already doing the forced labor there that brought on his heart trouble. He had been arrested in connection with the "dictionary affair" and would have been shot, together with a number of others, if it hadn't been for the intervention of Romain Rolland. Some of them were released during the war, after serving five years in the camps, and came to central Asia to join their wives, who had been exiled there. Now all in their mid- forties, they died off,, one after another, from the heart diseases contracted in the camps—among them my friend Usov. Every case of this kind—like the others involving the historians and the staff at the Ermitage*—was part of the systematic destruction of the country's intellectual and spiritual resources.
Usov's wife, Alisa Gugovna (or just Gugovna for short), buried her giant of a husband in the Tashkent cemetery, marked out a spot for her own grave at his side, and settled down to live out the rest of her days in central Asia, where the climate was deadly for someone in her state of health. She also managed to rescue a former official with a large family from his remote place of exile in Kazakhstan— this she did because he had helped her during her own years of exile in the same place, chopping firewood and drawing water for her. She got a residence permit for this family in her room in a building belonging to the Teachers' Training College—so that after her death this "living-space" obtained by Usov should not go to waste. Having arranged all this, she felt she had done her duty by the world and quietly went to her grave, first giving a little money to the beggars in the cemetery, with instructions to plant a tree over her grave—like the one over her husband's—and water the flowers as long as people remembered to bring any. She was not certain she could rely for this on the people she had put in her room.
As she gradually wasted away, Alisa Gugovna continued to react keenly to all the oddities of the life around us, and to pour scorn in the choicest language on bureaucrats, imbeciles and bogus scholars. She was completely at home in the academic world and knew exactly who was a real scholar and who a police spy, and in whose company it was all right to drink a bottle of the vinegary local wine. It was she who invented the toast which we always drank whenever any of our graduate students—whom we never, of course, dared trust—appeared at one of our modest parties. It was difficult to denounce us if we were the first to rise and propose a toast in honor of
* Museum in Leningrad, formerly a part of the Winter Palace.
those we had to thank for this "happy life" of ours! The police spies among our graduates were quite flummoxed by this.
Despite her lame leg, Alisa Gugovna was always busily moving around her room, rearranging the piles of Usov's books and creating an effect of home comfort, quite extraordinary for us, by improvising things from broken pieces of china and tattered old blankets that must have gone back to the days of serfdom. Usov and she had a favorite drinking mug nicknamed "The Goldfinch" which nobody was allowed to use unless they could recite M.'s poem by heart. Alisa liked to massage her face with her slender fingers, remarking that Akhmatova didn't look after herself at all. She took very good care of her hands—which was important if you had spent years lighting stoves and scrubbing floors with them—and of her long, almost gray braids. She was secretly very worried that if she didn't "keep her looks" Usov might not recognize her in the next world. She had been just as concerned about her looks when she lived in exile in Kazakhstan, waiting for Usov to finish serving his sentence in the forced-labor camp: she wanted to look as beautiful to him as the night they had parted. After his death she was angry with him for a long time because he had been so thoughtless as to abandon her like this—he had, she felt, deserted her, leaving her to cope all alone with the linguistics she had to teach in order to earn her widow's daily bread.
She was one of the last few people to speak with the accent of the old Moscow aristocracy, and Usov always used to say that she could always, in any circumstances, count on being taken for an honorary Jewess rather than a born one. At the same time, account would no doubt be taken of the work she did before she was exiled: the Lenin Library employed her as a consultant to identify people in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits. She knew all the gossip there was to know about the ladies of that period, and there was no greater expert on the genealogy of the families from which the poets of the time came.
This, then, was how the beauties of my generation ended their lives—as the widows of martyrs, consoled in prison or exile only by a secret hoard of verse stored in their memory.
In those days people who read poetry belonged to a breed apart, like members of a dying species of bird. They were invariably the kindest and most honest people in the world—not to speak of their courage. Will the generation of new readers who are appearing now, in the sixties, be able to match their courage, or, rather, strength of mind? Will they face whatever ordeals life has in store for them as Alisa Gugovna did?—though she always maintained that she was just a spoiled and crotchety old woman with a bad temper. Alisa was so spoiled by fate that even in exile she managed to keep her long braids, her wonderful memory for poetry and her savage intolerance for any kind of time-serving or dishonesty.
Once at Tashkent University she was stopped by a young scholar who started asking questions about me and wanted to know whether I was keeping Mandelstam's papers. Alisa answered evasively and immediately afterward came to report to me that the young man had suggested it would be wisest to burn the lot. He was very insistent that she convey this advice to me, and referred to some mysterious source which he did not dare name. "Nonsense," I said, "I would never dream of it. If they come and take it from me, that's one thing—but I shall never destroy it myself." "That's right," said Gugovna, "but there's no point in letting it fall into their hands either. We'll make some copies for them and hide the originals." We sat up the whole of that night preparing a pile of copies. Gugovna took the originals away with her and deposited them in a safe place. We had a rule that I should never know whom the papers were with—this meant that if I was arrested, I should not in any circumstances be able to name the person who was keeping them.
We were always preparing for the worst, and that is perhaps the reason we survived. When we ran into each other at the university, where we both taught, Gugovna would tell me that the "goldfinches" were all right and singing as well as ever. The use of this code even earned her a reputation as a bird-fancier. All this happened at the time when I was being visited by the "private pupil" about whom Larisa had warned me as an employee of her father. It is possible that she was working on her own initiative rather than on direct orders—or so I judge from the fact that when the girl went to Larisa's father and complained about Larisa coming to see me and hence making it difficult for her to "work," he ordered the girl to leave me alone, explaining that M. had been a criminal, not a political offender. As he put it, M. had been "caught in Moscow after disgracing himself in some way, and he had no right to be in the city." He added that I was "in the charge of Moscow." Presumably my file, which followed me from city to city, had a note to this effect. I heard about this from Larisa. After the "private pupil" had disappeared, Gugovna brought my papers back. She did not live till Stalin's death, but, like me, she was an incorrigible optimist and knew that one day he would have to die.