We took a berth for two, walked around the deck and had a bath —just like real tourists. These few days were a turning point for M. I was quite astonished at how little he needed to get over his illness— only three days of peace and quiet. He calmed down, read Pushkin and began to talk in a completely normal way. His auditory hallucinations and paroxysms of fear, agitation and egocentric view of what was going on around him—all this had almost ceased, or at least he had learned to cope with any slight relapse. But it was not over altogether—until the late autumn he still had a tendency to be oversensitive, and he tired easily (this had always been so because his heart was abnormally small and during that summer it became much weaker). I also noticed that, unusually for him, he was very easily hurt and—something unheard of before—he was intellectually listless. He had begun to read again almost at once, but he avoided anything strenuous, scarcely looking even at his Dante.
iong all the ways in which the state could destroy people, M.
It is possible that his recovery was slowed down by a new misfortune: in Voronezh I fell ill, at first with spotted typhus that I must have picked up on some railroad station or pier. National calamities in Russia are always accompanied by spotted typhus, and until very recently it has been endemic. In the hospitals its incidence was concealed by giving it a number instead of calling it by its name—it was either 5 or 6, I don't remember exactly. Even this was made into a state secret, so that the "enemies of socialism" should not know what illnesses afflicted us. After recovering from spotted typhus I made a trip to Moscow and came down afterward with dysentery (which was also disguised under some number or other). I was sent back to the isolation hospital, where the use of germicides was unknown, except for patients belonging to the highest categories. Vishnevski happened to be in the hospital at the same time, and it was from him that I learned of the existence of new drugs which would have helped me recover much more quickly. But even the medicine you get depends on your status. I once complained about this in the presence of a Soviet official who had held high rank before his retirement. I said medicine was something everybody needed. "What do you mean, everybody?" he asked. "Do you expect me to get the same treatment as a cleaning woman?" He was a kind and perfectly decent person, but nobody was unaffected by the "fight against egal- itarianism."
25 Thou Shalt Not Kill
most of all hated the death penalty, or the "highest measure," as we delicately called it. The fact that it was death by shooting which he so much feared in his delirium was not accidental. While he was quite calm about exile, deportation and forced-labor camps ("This we are not afraid of," he would say), he shuddered at the very thought of death by execution. We had often read announcements about the shooting of people, and sometimes notices were posted up in the cities about such things. We read about the execution of Bliumkin (or Konrad) in Armenia—the news was plastered on every wall and post. M. and Boris Sergeyevich [Kuzin] returnedto the hotel shaken, depressed and sick. Neither of them could stomach it. It was probably not only that the death penalty symbolized violence of every kind for them, but that they could also imagine it far too vividly. The rationalist feminine mind is less affected, and for me the idea of instant death seemed less abhorrent than that of mass deportation, prison, forced-labor camps and other such outrages against human dignity. But for M. it was different, and his first clash with the new regime (when it was still very young indeed) arose out of his feelings about capital punishment. The story of his encounter with Bliumkin is known from Georgi Ivanov's inaccurate secondhand account. There is also a mention of the episode in Ehrenburg's memoirs. Ehrenburg was present once when Bliumkin threatened M. with a revolver. Bliumkin was always brandishing his revolver in public places, as I once had occasion to see myself.
This was in Kiev in 1919. M. and I were standing on a balcony on the second floor of the Hotel Continental when we suddenly saw a cavalcade sweeping down the broad Nikolayev Street. It consisted of a horseman in a black cloak surrounded by a mounted escort. As it approached, the horseman in the black cloak looked up and, seeing us, he turned around sharply in the saddle, and the next thing we saw was a hand pointing a revolver at us. M. was about to duck, but instead he bent over the edge of the balcony and waved in greeting to the horseman. When the group drew level with us, the hand which had pointed the revolver was already hidden in the folds of the cloak. All this lasted only a second. It reminded me of a killing I once witnessed in the Caucasus: the driver of a tram leaned out while it was moving down the main street, and shot a bootblack. This was by way of blood revenge. The scene with Bliumkin was just the same, except that he did not actually shoot and bring his vendetta to a conclusion. The cavalcade swept past and turned off toward Lipki, where the Cheka had its headquarters.
The horseman in the cloak was Bliumkin, the man who shot the German Ambassador, Count Mirbach. He was probably on his way to Lipki. We had heard that he had been given very important secret work connected with counter-espionage. The cloak and the cavalcade were simply self-indulgence on the part of this mysterious man. What I fail to understand is how such ostentation could be reconciled with the secrecy demanded by his work.
I had occasion to meet Bliumkin even before I got to know M. I had once lived with his wife in a tiny Ukrainian village where several people wanted by Petliura were hiding among a group of young
artists and journalists. When the Reds took over, Bliumkin's wife suddenly came to see me and gave me a certificate made out in my name, guaranteeing the safety of our house and property. "What's this for?" I asked in astonishment. "We have to protect the intelligentsia," she replied. In the same way, on October 18, 1905, women from the "workers' patrols" had gone disguised as nuns to distribute ikons to Jewish homes. They hoped that the pogrom mob would be misled by this. During the many searches of our house my father never once produced this obviously fake certificate made out to me (I was then only eighteen). It was from this woman, who tried to save the intelligentsia with such methods, that I first heard of Mir- bach's assassin. I also met him several times in person during one of his brief visits—he was always coming and going in mysterious fashion.
The similarity of the balcony incident in Kiev to an act of blood vengeance was not accidental. Bliumkin had sworn to take ven-« geance on M. and had already brandished a revolver at him several times before, but he had never actually fired. M. thought it was all an empty threat and put it down to Bliumkin's love of melodramatic effects: "What's to stop him from shooting me? He could have done it long ago if he wanted." But even so, M. couldn't help ducking every time Bliumkin drew his revolver. The final episode in this Caucasian game was in 1926 when M. was leaving the Crimea and happened to get into the same train compartment as Bliumkin. Seeing his "enemy," Bliumkin demonstratively unhitched his holster, put his revolver in his suitcase and held out his hand. They then talked amicably for the rest of the journey. Not long after this we learned of Bliumkin's execution by shooting. Georgi Ivanov, pandering to the tastes of his least discriminating readers, has given such a highly colored account of the whole story that it becomes meaningless—yet respectable people continue to quote his version, ignoring its logical flaws. This is only possible because we are so cut off from each other.