We were roused from our thoughts by the arrival of Lev. Because his mother was staying with us and we hadn't enough room for both, he had been put up for the night by the Ardovs. Knowing that M. was an early riser, he came almost at the crack of dawn to have early- morning tea with us, and we told him the news as he came in through the door.
He was still a boy, but so alive with ideas that wherever he appeared in those years he always caused a stir. People sensed the dynamic strength fermenting in him and knew that he was doomed. Now our house had been stricken by the plague and become a death trap for anyone prone to infection. For this reason I was overcome by horror at the sight of Lev. "Go away," I said, "go away at once. Osip was arrested last night." And he obediently went away. That was the rule among us.
4 The Second Round
M
y brother Evgeni was still asleep when we rang to tell him the news. On the phone, of course, we used none of the taboo words like "arrested," "picked up" or "taken away." We had worked out a code of our own and we understood each other perfectly without having to spell anything out. Both he and Emma Ger- stein quickly came over to the apartment. All four of us then left, one after the other at short intervals, each with a shopping basket in his hand or a wad of manuscripts in his pocket. In this way we managed to save part of M.'s papers. But on the prompting of some sixth sense, we did not remove everything. We even left the pile of stuff on the floor lying where it was. "Don't touch it," Akhmatova had said to me when I had opened the trunk to put back this eloquent heap of papers. I obeyed, not knowing why. It was simply that I trusted her instinct.
That same day, after Akhmatova and I had returned from running errands around the city, there was another knock at the door, but this time a rather delicate one. Once more I admitted an uninvited guest—it was the senior of the three police agents who had come the night before. He glanced with satisfaction at the pile of papers lying on the floor. "Ah, you still haven't tidied up," he said, and started on a second search. This time he worked by himself, and he was interested only in the trunk which contained the manuscripts of M.'s verse. He didn't even bother to look at the manuscripts of prose works.
Hearing about this second search, Evgeni, who was the most reserved and tight-lipped person in the world, frowned and said: "If they come once more, they'll take both of you with them."
What was the explanation of this second search and the removal of further papers? Akhmatova and I exchanged glances—always enough for Soviet citizens to understand each other. Clearly, the official in charge of the case had examined the manuscripts confiscated the night before (none of the poems was very long, and not much time had been needed to read them), but had not found what he was looking for. They had therefore sent this agent to have another look, fearing that some essential document might have been missed in the haste of the search. We could see from this that they wanted some one particular thing and would not rest content with verses such as the "Wolf' poem. But the thing they were looking for wasn't in the trunk—neither M. nor I had ever written it down on paper. This time I didn't offer to help, and Akhmatova and I just sat drinking tea, with an occasional sidelong glance at our visitor.
The agent had appeared exactly fifteen minutes after our arrival. In other words, he must have been informed about it. But who had tipped him off? It could have been a police spy living in the building, one of our neighbors who had been instructed to keep an eye on us, or a "tail" keeping watch in the street. We had not yet learned to identify these people—that was to come with later experience when we saw them all the time in front of Akhmatova's house: they stood there without the least pretense at disguise. Why were they so open about it? Was it just plain clumsiness, or was it their crude way of intimidating us? Perhaps there was an element of both. By their whole behavior they seemed to be saying: You have nowhere to hide, you are always under surveillance, we are always with yom . . . On more than one occasion, good acquaintances whom we had never suspected dropped a casual phrase to let us know who they were and why they had honored us with their friendship. Presumably this kind of openness was calculated to play its part in the whole system of conditioning: such innuendos, with all the vistas they opened up, had the effect of making us quite tongue-tied, and we retreated into our shells even more. Later on, in Tashkent, I was often advised, for example, not to go on carrying around with me the remnants of M.'s manuscripts, to forget the past, and not to try to get back to Moscow—"They approve of your living in Tashkent." There was never any point in asking who approved of it. The question would be met with a smile. Such hints and cryptic phrases spoken with a smile aways produced a furious reaction in me: suppose it was all the idle talk of a despicable wretch who in fact knew nothing, but was just putting on the mannerisms of one close to the rulers of our destiny? There was no end of such people. But this was not all. In Tashkent, again, when I was living there with Akhmatova, we often returned home to find our ashtrays filled with someone's cigarette ends, a book, magazine or newspaper that had not been there before, and once I discovered a lipstick (of a revoltingly loud shade) on the dining table, together with a hand mirror that had been brought in from the next room. In the desk drawers and suitcases there were often traces of a search too conspicuous not to be noticed. Was this in accordance with the instructions given to those who rummaged in our things, or was it simply their idea of amusing themselves? Did they laugh out loud and say: "Let them have a good look"? Both explanations are possible. Why not give them a fright, they must have reasoned, so they don't get too complacent? However, they used this technique against Akhmatova more than against me.
As regards the "tails," I particularly remember one from the period after the war. The weather was very cold and he was trying to keep warm by stamping his feet and swinging his arms very energetically, as the cabbies used to. Several days running, Akhmatova and I went past this dancing "tail" every time we left the house. Then he was replaced by another one who was not quite so lively. Another time we were walking through the courtyard back to the apartment when a flashbulb suddenly went off behind us: they had evidently decided to take a photograph to find out who was visiting Akhmatova. To get into this courtyard one had to go through a lobby in the main building, and the door into it was guarded by a doorman. On this occasion we were held up at the entrance for rather a long time. The excuse was an idiotic one: the doorman had lost the key or something like that. Had the "photo-spy" begun to load his camera only when he was told we had returned? All this happened not long before the Decree on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko,* and these signs of a special interest in her made my flesh creep.
I did not myself receive this kind of attention and was almost never honored with my own individual "tail." I was generally surrounded not by regular agents, but only by common informers. Once, however, in Tashkent I was warned by Larisa Glazunov, whose father was a high official of the secret police, against one of the private pupils sent to me by a woman student in the Physics faculty. This one, the woman student had insisted, didn't want lessons from anyone except me. One day Larisa happened to run into her on my doorstep and told me that the girl worked for her father. I assured Larisa that this had been plain to me for some time already: the girl never came for her lesson at the agreed hour, but always at some odd time, evidently in the hope of catching me unawares, but ostensibly to ask whether she could postpone her lesson because she was so busy. Apart from this, she had the characteristic mannerisms of a minor agent: she could never refrain from watching me out of the corner of her eye as I moved about the room. It was not hard to guess why she wanted these lessons that she was always skipping. She soon stopped coming, and the student who had pressed her on me, a decent girl who had