In 1933 Dligach also saw a lot of Bezymenski, trying to fix up some of his newspaper business through him. He was always telling M. he should consult Bezymenski about various matters (such as the affair with Amir Sagidzhan and Alexei Tolstoi over which M. was still fuming). Almost on the very eve of his arrest M. was being urged by Dligach to go and see a woman prosecutor, a friend of Bezymenski's, to tell her what had made him slap Tolstoi in the face. I do not know what the purpose of all this fuss was, but I do know that M. had read his poem on Stalin to Dligach.
The morning after M.'s arrest, at a very early hour, we had a phone call from Bezymenski. I told him, of course in the guarded language that everybody understood, what had happened during the night. He whistled through his teeth and hung up. This was the one and only phone call we ever had from Bezymenski. Had Dligach told him about M.? Perhaps he had heard something about the arrest and had just phoned to check? But who could have told him? How could he have known? The warrant had been signed by Yagoda himself, and too little time had gone by—it was only a few hours since M. had been taken away—for any rumors to spread. Why did he call?
The last time I saw Dligach was in the hall of our apartment in Furmanov Street when I returned from the meeting with the interrogator. Dligach went away to get the money I asked him for and never came back. When Dinochka wanted to come and see us in Voronezh, Dligach made a violent scene, forbidding her to do any such thing. Dinochka was indignant and left him. Still in a state of shock, she told us in Voronezh about her boy friend's sudden fit of hysteria and the breaking-off of their relationship, which had apparently lasted several years. After the war I heard that Dligach had hanged himself. He did this out of sheer panic during the campaign against "cosmopolitans." He was not known for his courage.
As I have said, M. was not concerned to try and find who had betrayed him. He said that he had only himself to blame: it was wrong, in our times, to lead people into temptation. Not for nothing had Brodski—the one who sat in the room during M.'s arrest—once asked M. not to read him any dangerous poems, since he would only have to go and report them. When I nagged M. about Dligach, he just said with amazing indifference: "If it wasn't him, it was another." I was very anxious to put all the blame on this insignificant person because the very thought of all the other possibilities was intolerable. It was easier to put it all on the wretched Dligach than to suspect somebody we thought of as a real friend. Yet I am not sure it was Dligach who denounced M. During the interrogation Dligach's name never came up. This may have been to protect him, but it is also possible that the informers who had given the names of our visitors never met Dligach because he generally came in the daytime with Dinochka—she was busy at the theater in the evenings and in any case avoided our friends, preferring to catch us alone. Informers always told the police about the whole circle of one's friends, not just picking out one isolated individual. Christophorovich knew of practically everybody who came to see us regularly.
Was Dligach capable of memorizing sixteen lines after one hearing? I never heard him repeat verse he had heard in these conditions. M. read the poem on Stalin only once in his presence and broke his usual rule by doing so in front of a second person—the artist Т., whose name was not mentioned by the interrogator either. And— most important of all—we could not recollect whether Dligach had heard the poem in the "peasant-slayer" version or not. Probably not. T. was a rare visitor who came to see us not long before M.'s arrest, by which time the first version had been completely discarded. The only person M. had allowed to write the poem down had done so in the first version, but, judging by his whole life, this man is above suspicion. Perhaps someone stole it from him? The suggestion has a certain appeal, but I believe that things always passed from private hands to the secret police in a much more direct fashion.
Dligach's behavior after M.'s arrest could be explained by cowardice, or by the well-known phobia about being taken for a police spy. By his past he was fitted more than anyone else for this role, but the horror was that the same part could be played by people from whom one least expected it. So many informers were eminently respectable ladies, or young men from good families—the very picture of honesty!—or highly intellectual people utterly devoted to scholarship and art who were able to win you over by their refined, elegant, clever conversation. One of these would have fitted the part very much better than the humdrum Dligach. But he scarcely matters. He was just a poor wretch who happened to live in terrible times. Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.
Another puzzle is: when did the poem about Stalin become known to the police? It was written in the autumn of 1933, and the arrest took place in May 1934. Perhaps after he had slapped Tolstoi in the face, the authorities had stepped up their surveillance of M. and learned about the poem only in the course of making inquiries among their agents? Or had they kept it for six months without taking any action? This seems inconceivable. As for Dligach, he appeared on the scene fairly late—in the middle of the winter—and wormed his way into our confidence in the spring.
One final question: was it my fault for not getting rid of all our friends and acquaintances, as did most good wives and mothers at that time? My guilt is lessened only by the fact that M. would in any case have given me the slip and found a way of reading his outrageous poem—and in this country all real poetry is outrageous—to the first person he met. He was not one to put a gag on himself and lead a life of voluntary seclusion.
2 3 On the Nature of the Miracle
V
inaver, who often had to go to the Lubianka, was the first to learn that something odd was going on in connection with M.'s case: "There's a kind of special atmosphere about it, with people fussing and whispering to each other." As we soon learned, the case had been suddenly revised and M.'s sentence commuted to "minus twelve." * All this happened in record time—in no more than a day, or only a few hours. The very pace of events was testimony to their miraculous nature: when the right button was pressed above, the bureaucratic machine functioned with astonishing speed.
The greater the degree of centralization, the more impressive the miracle. We were overjoyed by miracles and accepted them with the innocent credulity of an Oriental mob. They had become part of our life. Which one of us had never written letters to the supreme powers, addressed to the most metallic of names? t And what is such a letter but a plea for a miracle? If they are preserved, these mountains of letters will be a veritable treasure trove for historians: the life of our times is recorded in them far more faithfully than in any other form of writing, since they speak of all the hurts, humiliations, blows, pitfalls and traps of our existence. But to go through them and sift out the tiny grains of real fact will be a Herculean labor. The trouble is that even in these letters we observed the special style of Soviet polite parlance, speaking of our misfortunes in the language of newspaper editorials. But even a cursory look at these letters to the "powers-that-be" would show at once how much we needed miracles—to live without them was impossible. Only one must remember that even if they got their miracles, the writers of such letters were doomed to bitter disappointment. This they were never prepared for, despite the warning of popular wisdom that miracles are never more than a flash in the pan, with no lasting effect. What are people left with in the fairy tales after their three wishes have come true? What becomes, in the morning, of the gold obtained in the night from the lame man? It turns into a slab of clay, or a handful of dust. The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles.