Katayev treated us to Spanish wine and fresh oranges—which were now on sale again for the first time since the Revolution. Everything was just like old times! Except that in the old days there were no refrigerators, such as the electric one Katayev had brought with him from America: the little chunks of ice floating in our wine were the last word of modern luxury. Nikulin came in with his new wife, who had just borne him twins. Katayev was quite astonished that such a promiscuous pair could have children. I remembered something that Nikulin had said a long time before, but it no longer seemed so funny: "None of us is a Dostoyevski—all we need is money." He drank Spanish wine and held forth about the Spanish dialects—he had just been to Spain to take a look at the Civil War.
At the time we left Moscow for exile, the writers had not yet become a privileged caste, but now they were putting down roots and figuring out ways of keeping their privileges. Katayev revealed his own plan when he told us: "Nowadays one must write like Walter Scott." This was not the easiest way—it required hard work and talent.
The inhabitants of this building with the labradorite entrance understood the meaning of 1937 better than we did, because they saw both sides of what it entailed. It was like Doomsday, with some being trampled underfoot by demons, and others having their praises sung. Those who had tasted the delights of heaven had no wish to be cast down into the pit. Who can blame them? The decision taken at family councils and in discussion with friends was, therefore, that the only way of dealing with the situation which arose in 1937 was to adapt to it. "Valentin is devoted to Stalin," said Katayev's new wife, Esther, who knew from life in her parents' home what it was to be an outcast. And Katayev himself, chastened by earlier experiences, had long since gone around saying: "I don't want any trouble. The main thing is not to upset the powers-that-be."
"Who remembers Mandelstam nowadays?" Katayev asked us ruefully. "My brother and I always mention him when we talk to the younger people, but that's about all." M. was not offended to be told this, since it was quite true that he had been forgotten—though it was certainly not true that Katayev and his brother would ever dare mention him in conversation with strangers.
The new Moscow was now being built up and adopting the ways of the world—people were opening their first bank accounts, buying furniture and writing novels. Everybody could hope for speedy advancement because every day somebody was plucked from their midst and had to be replaced. Of course, everybody was also a candidate for prison and death, but during the day they did not think about it, giving full rein to their fears only at night. The people who fell by the wayside were immediately forgotten, and their wives—if they had been lucky enough to hang on to part of the accommodation shared with their arrested husbands—found that the doors of all "decent" apartments were now firmly slammed in their faces. Actually, by now few wives survived the arrest of their husbands—in 1937 whole families were being wiped out.
M. thought rather well of Katayev and said that he had a "real bandit's charm." We had first got to know him in Kharkov in 1922. In those days he was a ragamuffin with intelligent, lively eyes and had already been in serious trouble (which he managed to get out of). He was on his way to Moscow, which he intended to take by storm. He later used to come and see us there and tell us jokes he had heard in Mylnikov Street, the old Bohemian quarter of Odessa. Many of these stories we were later to read in The Twelve Chairs— Valentin had made a present of them to his brother, who came to Moscow from Odessa to get a job as a detective, but on his elder brother's advice became a writer instead.
Toward the end of the twenties, after their early successes, all the prose writers I knew in my youth—with the exception of Tynianov and Zoshchenko—began to churn out fiction in a rather sordid way. In the case of Katayev, thanks to his special blend of talent and cynicism, it was particularly blatant. Right at the end of the twenties
I remember going somewhere in a taxi with him. We hadn't seen him for a very long time, because we had been living in Leningrad and the Crimea. The meeting was very friendly, and, sitting on the jump seat in the taxi, he talked incessantly. I had never before heard the like of some of the things he said. He reproached M. for not producing enough or getting his stuff published in large editions: "Suppose you die, what will your collected works be like? How many pages will they make? It won't be enough to send to the binders! Every writer should have twelve volumes with gilt edges." All this had a very familiar ring, not of the "new" era, but of something much older. Everything Katayev wrote could have come out in the fiction supplement to the pre-Revolutionary magazine Niva. His wife played the part of the bourgeois housewife and he was the perfect family despot who stamped his foot at the cook for burning the roast. As a boy he had been through too many terrors and suffered too much hunger, and now he wanted peace and stability, money and women—and the trust of his superiors. For a long time I could not tell when he was just joking and when he was revealing the ugly side of himself under the mask. "They're all the same," M. said to me, "but this one is clever."
I once met Katayev during the war, when I was living as an evacuee in Tashkent. He was very happy because somewhere near Aralsk he had seen a camel and it reminded him of M.: "He held his head back, just like Osip Emilievich." The sight had reminded Katayev of his youth and inspired him to write a poem. This was the whole difference between Katayev and the others—they would not have risked such unwise associations. Fedin, for example, would scarcely have been moved to write verse on seeing a camel that reminded him of Mandelstam. Of all the writers who were allowed to survive and live in comfort, only Katayev did not lose his love of poetry and feeling for literature. Otherwise M. could not have borne to drink Spanish wine with him in Moscow in June 1937. As he showed us out, Katayev said to M.: "Osip Emilievich, perhaps they'll let you settle down and become a good citizen at last. It's high time."
In the period when people were being "rehabilitated" after the Twentieth Congress, Katayev kept wanting to publish some of M.'s verse in Yunost [Youth], but he was too worried about angering the authorities. Unlike others, however, he did at least entertain the thought.
What would have become of Katayev if he hadn't been obliged to "write like Walter Scott"? He is a very talented man, with a lively intelligence and a quick wit, who belongs to the most enlightened wing of the present-day best-selling Soviet writers.
That summer we really wanted nothing more than to settle down and become "good citizens." We made all kinds of plans for the future—thinking how nice it would be, for instance, to get another apartment in a building with an elevator, so we wouldn't have to walk up to the fifth floor. But we figured there was no hurry about this—let Stavski first keep his promise to move Kostyrev out of our present apartment.
M. had a violent argument with my brother Evgeni on a question which seemed most important to us just then: should he take translating work or not? Evgeni said it was absolutely essential for him to do this kind of work for the time being, "and if you can't stand it, then Nadia must take it on." M. replied that he couldn't bear it himself and hated to see me doing it. The argument was decided for us. by Luppol, the editor-in-chief of Goslit,* who said that, as long as it depended on him, Mandelstam would never be given a single line of translation or any other kind of work to do. Luppol was soon arrested and disappeared for good, but nothing changed when his job was taken over by somebody else. People come and go, but "decisions of principle" remain. The one affecting M. is still in force, and there seems to be no power on earth that can change it.