The date on the certificate issued by the Registry Office also proves nothing. The dates put on such documents were often arbitrary: vast numbers of deaths, for instance, were postdated to wartime. This was a statistical device to conceal the number of people who died in the camps by blurring the difference between them and the casualties of the war period. When the rehabilitations began in the days after Stalin's death, people were almost automatically put down as having died in 1942 or 1943. How can one possibly take at its face value the date on the death certificate when one thinks of the rumor started for foreign consumption that M. was in a camp in the Voronezh region and was killed there by the Germans? Who launched this story? Clearly, one of our "progressive" writers or a Soviet diplomat, pressed on the matter by some "foreign busybody" (to use Surkov's expression), had put all the blame on the Germans. What could be simpler?
The certificate also stated that M.'s death had been entered in the register of deaths in May 1940. This entry on the certificate is more convincing as evidence that he had died by then. Though even here one cannot be absolutely certain. Imagine, for instance, that Romain Rolland, or somebody else whom Stalin wanted to keep in with, had approached him with a request for M.'s release. There were cases of Stalin releasing people because of some plea from abroad. Stalin might have decided not to listen to the plea, or he might have found that it was impossible to do anything about it because M. had been too badly beaten by the guards in prison. In either case, nothing would have been easier than to declare him officially dead, and to make me the channel for disseminating such a false report. As I have said, nobody in my position was ever given a death certificate, so what was the reason for letting me have one?
Be that as it may, the fact is that if M. really did not die until some time before May 1940—say, in April—it could be that he was indeed the old man seen by Dombrovski.
How reliable is the information given by Kazarnovski and Khazin? Most camp prisoners have only a very hazy idea of the passage of time. In their monotonous existence, dates become blurred. M. could have left the hospital alive after Kazarnovski had been sent somewhere else. Rumors in the camp about M.'s death do not mean very much—the camps lived on rumors. M.'s encounter with the doctor cannot be dated either—they might have met a year or two later. Nobody knew or could ever find out anything for certain in those zones bounded by barbed wire, or in the world outside them, for that matter. No one will ever understand what happened in the terrible shambles of those teeming camps, where the dead with numbered tags on their legs lay side by side with the living.
Nobody has said he actually saw M. dead. Nobody claims to have washed his body or put it in the grave. For those who went through the camps, life was like a delirium in which the sequence of time was lost and fact became mixed with fantasy. What these people have to say is no more reliable than similar accounts of any other calvary. Those few who survived to bear witness, including such people as Dombrovski, had no chance to check their facts at the time, let alone to weigh hypotheses about them.
I can be certain of only one thing: that somewhere M.'s sufferings ended in death. Before his death, he must have lain dying on his bunk, like others around him. Perhaps he was waiting for a parcel—a parcel which never came in time and was sent back to me. For us its return was a sign that he had died. He, on the other hand, may have concluded from its non-arrival that something had happened to us: this because some well-fed official in military uniform, a trained killer, weary of searching through endless, constantly changing lists of prisoners for one unpronounceable name, had simply scrawled on the accompanying form the simplest thing that came into his head: "Addressee Dead"—and I, who had prayed for the merciful release of my husband, received these last, inevitable good tidings from a girl clerk in a Moscow post office.
And after his death—or even before it, perhaps—he lived on in camp legend as a demented old man of seventy who had once written poetry in the outside world and was therefore nicknamed "The Poet." And another old man—or was it the same one?—lived on in the transit camp at Vtoraya Rechka, waiting to be shipped to Kolyma, and was thought by many people to be Osip Mandelstam— which, for all I know, he may have been.
That is all I have been able to find out about the last days, illness and death of Mandelstam. Others know very much less about the death of their dear ones.
83 One Final Account
В
ит there is still a little more to tell. The transport which took M. to Vladivostok left Moscow on September 9, 1938. Another person who was on it is a physicist called L. He does not wish to be identified because, as he says, "things are all right just now, but who knows what may happen later?" During the terror he worked in a Moscow technical college whose staff was completely decimated because one of its members was the son of a man hated by Stalin. L. was taken to join this transport from the Taganka prison. Others were brought from Butyrki, to which they had been transferred from the Lubianka just before the transport was due to leave. As the train was traveling east, L. learned from another prisoner that M. was there, too. The other prisoner had learned this after he had fallen ill and been put in the sick bay, where he had met M. He reported to L. that M. just lay on his bunk all the time, his head covered with a blanket. He still had a little money and the guards sometimes bought bread rolls for him at stations. M. always broke them in two and gave half to another prisoner, but he wouldn't touch his own half until, peeping out from under his blanket, he had seen the other man eat his. Only then would he sit up and eat himself. Terrified of being poisoned, he was starving himself, refusing to touch the soup on which the prisoners were fed.
The train arrived in Vladivostok in the middle of October. The transit camp was terribly overcrowded, and there was no room for the new prisoners, who were ordered to settle down in the open air between two rows of barracks. The weather was dry, and L. was in no hurry to get inside: he had at once noticed the half-naked people sitting near the latrines—one can imagine what they were like!—and getting rid of the lice in their ragged clothes. Spotted typhus had not yet broken out.
A few days later all the new arrivals were seen by a commission consisting of representatives of the Kolyma camp authorities. They badly needed building workers there, but it was not easy to find able- bodied people with the right skills among these hordes of prisoners worn out by nighttime interrogations and the "simplified methods" now in use. Many of them were rejected for work, including the thirty-two-year-old L., who was lame—he had broken his leg as a child. Few people were thus being taken away from the transit camp, but transports continued to arrive with hundreds and hundreds more prisoners. L. was able to make an approximate calculation as to their numbers. As a person with mathematical training, he carefully observed and analyzed everything he saw during his twenty years in the camps. But he will never pass on what he knows: worn out by his life as a prisoner and having no more trust in anything, his only wish is for peace and quiet. The whole of his existence now revolves round his new family: this sick and aging man lives only for his young daughter. He is one of the most brilliant witnesses to the past, but he will never share his knowledge with anyone. He has made an exception only for me—his meeting with M. made a great impression on him. I should have asked him whether the commissions from Kolyma did not soon start taking anybody they could get and just simply work them to death. But I forgot to ask this question.
When the rains started, there were great fights to get places in the barracks. By this time L. had been selected "elder" of a group of sixty men. His only duty had been to distribute the bread ration among them, but when the rains started, they demanded that he find a roof for them. L. suggested they see whether there was still any room in the lofts above the barracks—for the more agile prisoners these lofts were a godsend, since they were much less crowded and the air was less foul. It was not possible to stay in them during winter because of the cold, but nobody thought as far ahead as that—prisoners always take a very short-term view of their interests, and these would have been glad of the few extra weeks of comparative independence which they could gain by clambering up into the lofts at night.