But it would be quite another matter if they had found the poem about Stalin. This was what had been in M.'s mind as he kissed Akhmatova goodbye before they took him away. We none of us doubted that for verse like this he would pay with his life. That was why we had watched the Chekists so closely, trying to see what they were after. The "Wolf" poems were not so bad—they would mean being sent to a camp, at the worst.
How might these potential charges be formulated? It was really all one! It is absurd to apply the standards of Roman law, the Napoleonic Code or any other legal system, to our times. The secret police always knew exactly what they were doing and they went about it systematically. Among their many aims were the destruction of witnesses who might remember certain things, and the creation of the unanimity needed to prepare the way for the millennium. People were picked up wholesale according to category (and sometimes age group)—churchmen, mystics, idealist philosophers, humorists, people who talked too much, people who talked too little, people with their own ideas about law, government and economics; and—
• A resort in the Crimea, popular with writers.
Mandelstam's poem on Stalin (November 19 3 3)1
We live, deaf to the land beneath usy Ten steps away no one hears our speechesy
But where there's so much as half a conversation The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention?
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the wordsy final as lead weights, fall from his lipsy
His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders— fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine As he prates and points a fingery
One by one forging his lawsy to be flung Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested Ossete?
This poem, which Mrs. Mandelstam mentions on page 12 and at many other points, is nowhere quoted in full in the text of her book.
In the first version, which came into the hands of the secret police, these two lines read:
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer, The murderer and peasant-slayer.
"Ossete." There were persistent stories that Stalin had Ossetian blood. Os- setia is to the north of Georgia in the Caucasus. The people, of Iranian stock, are quite different from the Georgians.
once the concept of "sabotage" had been introduced to explain all failures or blunders—engineers, technicians and agricultural specialists. "Don't wear that hat," M. once said to Boris Kuzin, "you mustn't attract attention—or you'll have trouble." And he did have trouble. But fortunately the attitude toward hats changed when it was decreed that Soviet scholars must dress even better than their foppish Western counterparts, and after serving his sentence Boris was appointed to a very good academic post. M.'s remark about the hat may have been a joke, but the nature of the head under it certainly determined its owner's fate.
The members of the exterminating profession had a little saying: "Give us a man, and we'll make a case." We had first heard it in Yalta in 1928 from Furmanov, the brother of the writer. A former official of the Cheka who had switched to film-making, he was still connected with the secret police through his wife, and knew what he was talking about. In the small boardinghouse where we were staying most of the people were ТВ patients, but Furmanov had come to restore his shattered nerves in the sea air. There was also a good-natured Nepman with a sense of humor who quickly got on friendly terms with Furmanov. Together they invented a game of "interrogation" which was so realistic that it gave them both quite a thrill. Furmanov, to illustrate the saying about it being possible to find a case against any man, "interrogated" the trembling Nepman, who always became entangled in the web of ingenious constructions that could be put on his every single word. At that time relatively few people had experienced at first hand the peculiarities of our legal system. The only ones who had so far really been through the mill were those belonging to the categories mentioned above, as well as people who had had their valuables confiscated, and Nepmen—that is, entrepreneurs who took the New Economic Policy* at its face value. That was why nobody, except for M., paid any attention to the cat-and-mouse game being enacted for their own amusement by the former Cheka interrogator and the Nepman. I wouldn't have noticed it either if M. hadn't told me to listen. I believe that M. was always intent on showing me things he wanted me to remember. Furmanov's game gave us a first glimpse of the legal process as it was while the new system was still only taking shape. The new justice was based on the dialectic and the great unchanging principle that "he who is not with us is against us."
Akhmatova, who had carefully watched events from the first, was wiser than I. Sitting together in the ransacked apartment, we went over all the possibilities in our minds and speculated about the future, but we put very little of it into words. "You must keep your strength up," Akhmatova said. By this she meant that I must prepare for a long wait: people were often held for many weeks or months, or even for more than a year, before they were banished or done away with. This was because of the length of time needed to "proc-
# The New Economic Policy (NEP) was launched by Lenin in 1921 to allow the country to recover after the Civil War. Limited private enterprise (including private publishing) was allowed. NEP ended in 1929.
ess" a case. Procedure meant a great deal to our rulers, and the whole farrago of nonsense was always meticulously committed to paper. Did they really think that posterity, going through these records, would believe them just as blindly as their crazed contemporaries? Or perhaps it was just the bureaucratic mind at work, the demon from the ink pot, feeding on legal formalities and consuming tons of paper in the process? If the formalities in question could be called "legal" . . .
For the family of an arrested man the period of waiting was taken up by routine steps (what M. in his "Fourth Prose" calls "imponderable, integral moves") such as obtaining money and standing in line with packages. (From the length of the lines we could see how things stood in our world: in 1934 they were still quite short.) I had to find the strength to tread the path already trodden by other wives. But on that May night I became aware of yet another task, the one for which I have lived ever since. There was nothing I could do to alter M.'s fate, but some of his manuscripts had survived and much more was preserved in my memory. Only I could save it all, and this was why I had to keep up my strength.